The Sundering def-2

by Walter Jon Williams

  Martinez sprang to his feet, dodged around his desk and dashed into the corridor, only to find Captain Fletcher ahead of him, moving at a saunter. Martinez tried not to tread on Fletcher’s heels in his impatience as he followed the captain to Michi Chen’s office.

  “I’ve just received a flash from Zanshaa,” she said, as they braced for salute. “Wormhole stations report the flares of forty-three ships leaving Magaria and accelerating toward Zanshaa. Considering the length of time it took the message to reach us, the Naxids should reach Zanshaa wormhole Three in about two and a half days. At ease, by the way.”

  Martinez relaxed only slightly. “Forty-three,” he said. “That leaves a few unaccounted for.”

  “We can hope the others are guarding Magaria and Naxas,” Lady Michi said. “And if not, and if we encounter them”—she shrugged, and Martinez saw a surprising, superior smile touch her lips—“we’ll fight and we’ll win. I have every confidence in our crews.”

  “Thank you, my lady,” Fletcher said, as if he’d been personally responsible for all the crews in question.

  Michi looked at the map she’d called onto the surface of her desk. “I’ll want everyone suited up for the change of course to Protipanu,” she continued, and then looked up. “Captain Martinez, there will be time for a squadron drill between now and then. Let’s sharpen our sword one last time, shall we?”

  “Yes, my lady.”

  The squadron commander looked over her shoulder and called into the next room. “Vandervalk?”

  Michi’s orderly came in with three small glasses on a silver tray. Golden fluid shone through a sheen of condensation on the glasses. Michi, Fletcher, and Martinez each took one. Martinez passed the glass under his nose and scented Kailas, a buttery-sweet dessert wine.

  Michi raised her glass. “To our hunt, my lords.”

  Martinez felt the pull of a feral smile on his lips. On the back of his neck he felt the cold fingers of some primal ancestor, some forebear who crouched over his prey and raised stained hands to the sky in a celebration of blood and death.

  “To our hunt,” he said, and raised his glass.

  Less than half an hour later, the ships of Chenforce swung onto a new heading and fired their engines. Gee forces began to build.

  Martinez felt a growing exultation even as he felt the weight piling on his ribs.

  Our hunt.The Martinez Plan was under way.

  THIRTEEN

  As Goddess of the Records Office, Sula worked to cover her every track that she could find. Her primary identity, the Jill Durmanov who inhabited the cozy apartment in Grandview, had been so thoroughly compromised by the Military Constabulary that Sula decided to make Jill Durmanov less substantial. Durmanov was the proprietor of the company that owned crates of cocoa and coffee, and Sula altered the records to make the proprietor Lucy Daubrac, the woman who lived in the communal apartment in Riverside. Sula made the change retroactive: Lucy hadalways owned the company, and Sula backdated the company itself, changing the record to indicate that it had been in existence for twelve years.

  While she was at it, she had the Records Office send password updates to Lucy’s hand comm, not to Jill’s.

  Change the key, change the lock. And write on the lock the words “This hasalways been the lock.”

  The next night she was back in the Records Office computer. She had realized that if another intrusion into the executive file were detected, or something else went amiss with the file, it would be reloaded from a backup and she’d have to act fast so as not to lose her access. Lady Arkat’s passwords gave her access to the backup file, and Sula—using the same tricks she’d used with the primary file—successfully wrote her own executive file over the backup.

  Summer grew warm and the heat rose in waves from the pavement. Flowers trailed in red and orange cascades from window boxes, and the streets remained crowded well into the night. The Naxids declined to invade. Sula wondered if they’d lost their nerve.

  With no enemy to fight, she and her team wandered over the Lower Town, listening. They entered cafés and bars and markets and spoke to whoever would speak to them. Sula wanted to learn what she could about the people around her.

  The results were not encouraging. Most people thought that the flight of the Convocation, and the departure of the Fleet, marked the end of the war. They didn’t find the prospect of domination by the Naxids particularly threatening. In any case they were willing to give the Naxids the benefit of the doubt. “You think they could be worse than the Shaa, beauteous lady?” as One-Step remarked.

  “There are a lot more Naxids than there ever were Shaa,” Sula answered him. “Billions. They’re going to get all the top jobs—and the best middle jobs, too.”

  One-Step shrugged. “You got to have a job for any of that to matter, lovely one.”

  As the summer wore on the most popular song was “Season of Hope,” by the Cree performer Polee Ponyabi, a song about giving up one’s cares and anxieties and returning to a simple life of love and joy. Sula heard the soulful but catchy melody from windows, from vehicles, from clubs. The inhabitants of Zanshaa seemed willing to follow Ponyabi’s advice: the restaurants and clubs were jammed, lines waited outside theaters for tickets, and the war seemed very far away.

  Thus it was that when the enemy came, they seemed to come from the depths of some half-remembered dream. While taking a siesta on a hot afternoon, the windows open to bring a drift of sultry air over her skin, Sula felt the atmosphere throb with the deep basso rumble of the tocsin, the automatic horns that were normally blown only in case of flood or extreme weather. Sula jumped from her bed and told the video wall to turn itself on.

  A grave announcer informed the population that news had flashed along the chain of wormhole relay stations, and it was now known that the Naxid fleet was coming. It would be another day before they arrived in the Zanshaa system, and the public was urged to remain calm. All clubs and theaters were ordered closed until further notice, and all other businesses were ordered closed after noon on the following day.

  Just enough time for some fine scenes of panic in the food stores, Sula thought, and so it proved. The local Covered Market was open well into the night, and closed only because every item had been sold.

  Her own supplies had already been laid by. Thoughtfully she stroked the finish of a bookcase that Macnamara had made for her, then touched the trigger that opened the secret compartment and revealed the butt of a pistol. She drew the pistol out and felt its firm solidity in her hand.

  No, not a dream.The Season of Hope was about to come to an end.

  A short while later she found herself in the communal apartment, where Spence already waited as the video wall repeated the same news over and over. Macnamara drifted in shortly thereafter. It was as if they all wanted each other’s comfort as the world turned to night.

  The next afternoon they moved onto the roof, which had an unobstructed view of the Zanshaa ring. Sula kept her hand comm on, tuned to a news channel. There were a few people there already, sitting in chairs with drinks in their hands, and the numbers grew as the day waned until it seemed the entire population of the city had become refugees, taking shelter on the roofs from an advancing flood. Sula saw even the building’s Daimong janitor on the roof, pale-skinned and sinister among the drifting tide of Terrans.

  The tocsin moaned out again in the late afternoon as the Naxid fleet flashed into the system, drowning out Sula’s hand comm and the words of Governor Pahn-ko, who broadcast an assurance to the invaders that neither the ring nor the planet of Zanshaa would offer resistance.

  The same was not promised of the horde of decoy missiles that still orbited the system, and as night cloaked the city Sula could see bright flashes amid the early stars that marked the decoys’ annihilation. The scent of hashish drifted from one roof to the next. The crowds criedaah andooh as if they were watching a fireworks display. With intoxication and night and the crowds, the roofs began to take on a kind of party atmosphere. A few
young people began dancing to music.

  It was then that Governor Pahn-ko came onto Sula’s comm, and hers was one of many voices that call for silence.

  “Naxid missiles have been fired in the Zanshaa system,” the governor reported. He was an elderly Lai-own, his head nearly bald over his orange eyes, his muzzle bright with implant replacement teeth. He wore the deep red uniform of a convocate, with the ribbon of his office across his keel-like breastbone.

  “We have reason to fear for the Zanshaa ring,” Pahn-ko said. “I ask all citizens to remain calm in the event that the ring is attacked. In the event that the ring is in danger of destruction, I have ordered engineers to demolish it in such a way as to prevent any danger to the inhabitants of the planet.”

  “Brilliant,” Sula breathed into the sudden fearful silence of the stricken crowd. Without actually saying so, the lord governor had implied that if the ring were to be destroyed, it would be the Naxids who were at fault.

  “I thank you for your loyalty in the past,” Pahn-ko went on, “and I have every trust that you will remain loyal in the future. Remember that the Convocation will return, and any who cooperate with the criminal Naxid government will be brought to account.”

  And how many believethat? Sula wondered.

  About twenty minutes later the tocsin sounded for the third time, and the Zanshaa ring was destroyed, mourned by the groaning horns seemed to rumble from deep in the protesting bones of the earth. Bright flashes illuminated the night along the great arc of the ring; strobe-light painted the upturned faces of the population with silver. Sula heard a scream, and sobs, and she watched in fascination as the last-ditch plans of the old, long-dead engineers came to fruition, and the broken remnants of the ring began slowly to separate.

  She had not actually believed they would destroy the ring, not until she saw it happen.

  The upper ring must have been braked and locked down, because its remains didn’t separate and fly away. What happened instead was that the ring fragments rose in slow, stately silence into the night, so slowly that the fragments’ separation wasn’t apparent for some time. The fragments wouldn’t leave Zanshaa altogether, Sula knew, they didn’t have nearly enough energy; but they would rise to a higher orbit, dragging their cables behind them. Much of the fragments’ mass, eventually, could be scavenged in the event the ring was rebuilt.

  The tocsin fell silent, and the crowd watched, sickened and suddenly sober, as the great symbol of Zanshaa’s prosperity and dominion floated from their reach.

  When the Zanshaa ring had been built, the human race had been divided into primitive nation-states whose populations were happily engaged in bashing each other over the head with lengths of iron. Now that great monument of civilization and peace was no more.

  Zanshaa was on its own.

  Lights began to go out over the city. Much of the planet’s electricity was generated from matter-antimatter reactions on the ring and sent to Zanshaa on the cables, or beamed by microwave to great rectenna fields in deserted corners of the world. Sula, as an employee for the Logistics Consolidation Executive, had arranged for large quantities of antimatter to be taken to the surface for power generation, but no more antimatter was coming, perhaps for years, and electricity rationing was an inevitability.

  People began to drift away in the pale glow of the few remaining emergency lights. Sula remained, gazing upward, catching out of the corners of her eyes the bright flashes as more decoys were destroyed.

  And then the deep awe she felt in her soul began to be replaced by swelling satisfaction.

  Her plan.They had carried outher plan.

  What can the Naxids be thinking now? she wondered.

  FOURTEEN

  The day after the ring was destroyed Sula took theJu-yao pot out of storage and carried it to her little apartment. She placed it on the bookshelf in the alcove by the window, where the northern light could illuminate the fine crackle of the glaze with fine threads of silver.

  This place was her home, she thought, the first she’d ever had. The apartment in the High City didn’t count: she’d acquired that place not for herself, but for Martinez. This little room, in contrast, was all her own.

  She sat crosslegged on her mattress and gazed at the pot, the little ancient survivor brought to live in this incongruous, raucous neighborhood. Cooking smells floated through the window from the stalls outside, mixing with the scent of paint and varnish.

  The scent of home.Home. The small, fresh-scented room she shared with the old pot, the venerable survivor of fallen dynasties.

  She hoped that was an omen.

  “Oh, I forgot. You don’t drink. Four-nine-one, shall I have Ellroy make you some tea?”

  “No thanks, Blanche,” Sula said. “I’m perfectly all right.”

  “Well. If you’re sure, then.”

  “Blanche”—Lieutenant Captain Hong—took a small glass of mig brandy from the tray that his servant was passing around the company.

  Hong was scrupulous in his use of code names, but at the moment this seemed unnecessary. He was meeting with his eleven team leaders in his own apartment, a spacious penthouse with a terrace and garden, and of course they had all trained together and knew one another’s names perfectly well.

  “My lords and ladies,” Hong offered, “I drink to the Convocation.”

  “The Convocation,” the others murmured, and sipped their brandy. Sula, who hadn’t realized a toast was coming, offered a smile as the others drank.

  “What I called you together to discuss,” Hong said, “was the matter of taking action against the Naxids when they first arrive on Zanshaa. Now that the ring’s gone, they’re going to have to come down on large landing strips, using shuttles with chemical rockets.”

  The chemical rockets were a necessity: antimatter engines would sterilize rather too much ground.

  “There are only two airfields of sufficient size near the capital,” Hong went on, “and only one of these has suitable facilities for maintenance of ground-to-orbit craft, and that’s Wi-hun. We can be reasonably certain that’s where the Naxids will land.” He smiled. “They won’t know that the spacecraft maintenance facilities will have been dismantled before they arrive.”

  He called up the wall display, and a map appeared of the area between central Zanshaa and the landing field at Wi-hun.

  “Once the Naxids secure Wi-hun,” Hong said, “we expect they’ll advance on Zanshaa and occupy the seat of government in the High City. There are three plausible routes.” These flashed on the map in green. “Our Action Group has been assigned the Axtattle Parkway. When the Naxids begin to load up, we’ll receive the word from our sources, assemble, and strike the enemy as they enter Zanshaa. We’ll then retreat to the city and lie low till the next action.”

  One team leader raised a hand. “How about a truck bomb?” she said.

  “Very good,” said Hong. “We can park it along the boulevard and wait till the Naxids are adjacent before setting it off. From vantage points in the buildings alongside, we can open fire, shoot down as many of the surviving Naxids as we can, and then fade away in the confusion.”

  The planning began. Hong was meticulous and assigned several of the officers to examine possible sites for the ambush. Another was told to requisition a truck from the Fleet motor pool. Sula was ordered to work out escape routes once the actual ambush site had been decided.

  “We’ll meet tomorrow to receive reports and make our final plans,” Hong said. “Please leave one by one so you don’t attract attention.”

  That afternoon Sula took a stroll along the Axtattle Parkway. The road was broad, six lanes wide, and lined on either side by rows of ammat trees that shaded the pedestrian walks with their long, spear-shaped leaves. The neighborhoods on either side of the road were Terran, which explained why Action Group Blanche had been assigned this particular corridor. Along the road were medium-sized businesses or apartments, the buildings old but well maintained, with gables and mansard roofs. The dist
rict had a prosperous air.

  Axtattle Parkway was a high-speed artery feeding Zanshaa’s heart; the roadbed was elevated above other roads, and access to the highway limited. Only a few major roads connected with the parkway—the smaller streets in the residential areas led away, not toward, the ambush site. The pursuers would be stuck on the limited-access highway, with no way into the neighborhoods except on foot, a fact that would make escape easier.

  Sula smiled. Blanche would be pleased.

  FIFTEEN

  Warrant Officer Shushanik Severin thought of the cooking oil in the lifeboat’s galley. There were several kinds, each in its own high-gee-resistant resinous container, and each type was one hundred percent fat.

  He thought about lifting a container of cooking oil to his lips and drinking the contents like the finest wine.

  Fat. Fat was good.Fat makes warmth.

  Severin was visualizing the sensual pleasure of licking the cooking oil from his lips when the alarm rang, and he bounded from his rack to the door of his sleeping quarters, and pushed off for the control room, flying easily in the microgravity of Asteroid 302948745AF.

  With his hand he scrubbed frost from the displays and gaped.Engine flares. After all these months, warships had finally come through the torus-shaped Protipanu Wormhole 2. And they had come in hot, because the radar detector was chirping out the message that the lifeboat was repeatedly being hammered by blue-shifted radars. They were looking for an enemy.

  What they didn’t know was that the enemy was about to give them more than they were ready for.

  There were crashes and flailings of arms and legs as the rest of his crew of six arrived in the control room. Severin batted away a floating thermal blanket that had come adrift from someone’s shoulders, and said, “Take your places.”