Conventions of War

by Walter Jon Williams

“The revised logs were delivered this morning,” Martinez said. “I’ve been going over them ever since. Some are even complete.”

  At least the department heads had learned not to yarn the logs: when they didn’t have the information, they admitted it. “Data pending” was the phrase they’d all decided to put in the blank spaces, probably because it looked better than nothing at all.

  “Signaler Nyamugali sent a complete log, didn’t she?” Chandra said.

  “Yes.” Martinez smiled. “Your former division did well.” He signaled to Alikhan for the first course. “Of course I’ll still have to check the log to confirm it hasn’t been yarned.”

  “You won’t find any mistakes,” Chandra said. “I kept the signalers on their toes.”

  “Nyamugali had an easier job than most of the others. Francis is going to have to account for every air pump, ventilation fan, and heat exchange system on the ship.”

  Chandra was skeptical. “You’re feeling sorry for them now?”

  “No, not very.”

  Alikhan arrived with a warm, creamy pumpkin soup, fragrant with the scent of cinnamon. Chandra tasted it and said, “Your cook has it all over the wardroom chef, good as he is.”

  “I’ll tell him you said so.”

  “That was one of the small compensations of being with Fletcher,” Chandra said. “He’d always give me a good meal before boring me to death.”

  Martinez considered this as he sampled the soup, and decided that Chandra could at least pretend to be a little more stricken by the death of an ex-lover.

  “What did he bore you with?” Martinez asked.

  “Other than the sex, you mean?” When Martinez didn’t smile at her joke, she shrugged and went on. “He talked about everything, really. The food we were eating, the wine we were drinking, the exciting personnel reports he’d signed that day. He talked about his art. He had a way of making everything dull.” A mischievous light came into her eyes. “What did you think of what he had hanging in his sleeping cabin? Did it give you sweet dreams?”

  “I got rid of it,” Martinez said. “Jukes found some less depressing stuff.” He looked at her. “Why did Fletcher have Narayanguru there? What did he get out of it?”

  Chandra gave an elaborate sigh. “You’re not going to make me repeat his theories, are you?”

  “Why not?”

  “Well,” she said, “he said that if he ever joined any cult, it would be the Narayanists, because they were the only cult that was truly civilized.”

  “How so?”

  “Let me try to remember. I was trying not to listen by that point.” She pursed her full lips. “I think it was because the Narayanists recognized that all life was suffering. They say that the only real things were perfect and beautiful and eternal and outside our world, and that we could get closer to these real things by contemplating beautiful objects in this world.”

  “Suffering,” Martinez repeated. “Gomberg Fletcher, who was filthy rich and born into most privileged caste of Peers, believed that life was suffering. That his life was suffering.”

  Chandra shook her head. “I didn’t understand that part either. If he ever suffered, he didn’t do it when I was looking.” A curl of disdain touched her lip. “Of course, he felt he was more refined than the rest of us, so he probably thought his suffering was so elevated that the rest of us didn’t understand it.”

  “I can see why the Shaa killed Narayanguru, anyway,” Martinez said. “If you maintain that there’s another world, which you can’t prove exists, where things are somehow better and more real than this world, which we can prove exists, you’re going to run afoul of the Praxis for sure, and the Legion of Diligence is going to have you hanging off a tree before you can spit.”

  “Oh, there was more to it than the invisible world business. Miracles and so on. The dead tree that Narayanguru was hung on was supposed to have burst into flower after they took him down.”

  “I can see where the Legion of Diligence would take a dim view of those stories too.”

  That night, sitting on his bed while he drank his cocoa and looked at the picture of the woman, her child, and the cat, Martinez thought about Fletcher sitting in the same place, contemplating the ghastly figure of Narayanguru and thinking about human suffering. He wondered what Fletcher, a prominent member of two of the hundred most prominent Terran families in the empire, had ever suffered, and what comfort he received by looking at the bloody figure strung on the tree.

  Dr. Xi had said Fletcher found his position a burden, that he worked dutifully to fulfill what was expected of him. He wasn’t an arrogant snob, according to Xi, he was just playing the part of an arrogant snob.

  Fletcher had been empty, Martinez thought, filling his hours with formal ritual and aesthetic pleasure. He hadn’t created anything; he hadn’t ever made a statue or a painting, he just collected them. He hadn’t done anything new or original with his command, he’d just polished his ship’s personnel and routines the same way he might polish a newly acquired silver figurine.

  Yet he had suffered, apparently. Perhaps he had known all along how hollow his life had become.

  Fletcher had sat where he was now sitting, and contemplated objects that other people considered holy.

  Martinez decided he wasn’t going to figure Fletcher out tonight. He put the cocoa aside, brushed his teeth, and rolled beneath the covers.

  FOURTEEN

  Resistance, with instructions on building a partisan cell network, was distributed to the citizens of Zanshaa, and was shortly followed by essays on the manufacture of firebombs and plastic explosives, which was easy, and detonators, which were not.

  “If you’re going to tell people to mess with stuff like picric acid,” Spence warned, “you’re going to have them blowing their fingers off.”

  Sula shrugged. “I’ll tell them to be careful,” she said. It’s not as if she could look over their shoulders and tell them how to do it right.

  She just wished she was enough of an engineer to provide diagrams of how to build firearms.

  The Naxids had published sketches of the two Terrans observed fleeing from the scene of Lord Makish’s assassination. The pictures were composites generated by witnesses, and Sula suspected the Naxid school supervisor as the prime contributor.

  Both images were male. Neither resembled Sula or Macnamara to any degree.

  Sula wondered how badly she ought to be insulted. Her figure was slim but hardly boyish. Even in a worker’s overalls it should be clear enough that she was female.

  She concluded that the Naxids were no better at telling Terrans apart than the Terrans were at distinguishing individual Naxids.

  As she was sending the newsletter out in batches of a few thousand, she heard shouts and a crash on the street outside and stepped to the window. A black-haired Terran man had run through the street vendors in an attempt to evade police, but the police had caught him. They were Terran as well. As the man was marched away, Sula wondered if he was a criminal, a new-made hostage, or a loyalist bound for execution.

  Others on the street watched as well, and as they watched with carefully controlled expressions, Sula could see the same question floating behind their hooded eyes. A new tension had entered the world. An arrest had once been something comparatively simple, and now it was fraught with a thousand new, dangerous implications, particularly if the authorities needed hostages in a hurry.

  People in Riverside, when they weren’t working or sleeping, lived mostly on the streets because their prefabricated apartments were too cramped for themselves and their families. Their normal life had now become a calculation, necessitating a calculation of risks, whether a breath of fresh summer air was worth the chance of being round up and shot.

  Everyone under the Naxids, she thought, was making that calculation now.

  Within days Team 491 was making regular deliveries of cocoa, tobacco, and coffee to restaurants and clubs throughout the city. Aside from profit, the deliveries provided opportunitie
s for gossip with the restaurant staff, and the staff overheard a great deal from their customers.

  The operation promised enough money so that Sula’s company was able to buy their own delivery vehicle. It was a bubble-shaped truck with chameleon panels on the sides, and since advertising that drew electricity from the grid had been forbidden since the destruction of the ring, she was able to rent out the chameleon panels for advertising and turn even more profit.

  Though their chances of overthrowing the Naxid regime seemed remote, Sula supposed that Team 491 could take justified pride in becoming highly successful entrepreneurs.

  The team took no more action against the Naxids, though Sula found herself staring narrow-eyed at possible targets from the cab of the truck. We should do something, she found herself thinking.

  Others acted without her. A group of students at the Grandview Preparatory School staged an unsuccessful ambush of a Naxid Fleet officer returning home on a train. Details were scarce in the official reports, but possibly they intended to beat the officer senseless and steal his firearm. A couple of the attackers were killed outright and the rest captured. Under interrogation, they confessed to being members of an “anarchist cell,” and apparently they named others, both fellow students and teachers, because there were a series of arrests.

  The Grandview school was purged. The alleged anarchists were tortured to death on the punishment channel, and the students’ families shot.

  Resistance mourned them as martyrs to true government and the Praxis.

  A Cree delivering fish to a Grandview restaurant told Sula of a Naxid being killed by a mob, all this supposedly happening in a Torminel neighborhood called the Old Third. The Naxid had been chased down at night by a mob of nocturnal Torminel, and the next morning Naxid police surrounded the area, charged in, and shot down the inhabitants at random. Hundreds, according to the Cree, had been killed.

  “Why haven’t I heard of this?” she asked. Sensational news like that should have spread through the city like a storm wind.

  “They wouldn’t put it on the news.” The Cree’s musical, burbling accents were far too cheerful for his subject matter.

  “Sensational news like that, it should be over the city in hours.”

  The Cree turned his light-sensitive patches toward her. Sula could feel her internal organs pulsing to the subsonic throbs of his sonar.

  “Perhaps it will be, inquisitive one,” the Cree said, “but the incident occurred only this morning. I heard the killing from my window.”

  Heard, not saw. The Cree’s light-patches probably wouldn’t have made much sense of something going on at such a distance, but his broad, tall ears would have given him a clear enough idea of what was happening.

  The Old Third was some distance away, on the other side of the city, but the restricted, computer-guided highways managed the distance in less than an hour. The truck approached through the Cree neighborhood adjoining, and there were pockmarks of bullets on the buildings, along with shattered windows and splashes of blood on the pavement. Sula decided it wasn’t a good idea to get any closer.

  The rest she learned later, as death certificates were filed in the Records Office computer. The Naxid who had been killed by the mob was a sanitation worker who finished her shift in the wrong neighborhood. The police hadn’t killed hundreds, but around sixty.

  The Naxids had next turned their attention to the local hospital, where they shot anyone they found in the emergency wards on the assumption that they’d been wounded in the earlier police action. It was a bad day for anyone to break a leg. Another thirty-eight were killed.

  In the next issue of Resistance, Sula provided a partial casualty list—she couldn’t produce a full list without giving away her access to the Records Office. Melodramatic details spilled from her imagination: the parent who died in an unsuccessful attempt to shield her children, the angry shopkeeper holding the police off with a broom until riddled with bullets, the panicked civilians herded into a blind alley and gunned down, the bloody claw marks on the bricks.

  She knew the inadequacy of her words even as she wrote them. Whatever pathos she invented for her readers couldn’t equal the horror and tragedy of the reality. The helpless terror of the victims, the rattle of guns, the moans of the dying and shrieks of the wounded…

  She remembered all that from the Axtattle fight. Her atrocity fictions were a pleasant fantasy compared to the memories that swam before her gaze.

  More death coming, she thought. Human warmth not my specialty.

  As usual, she wrote in Resistance, the Naxids were unable to find their true enemies, and settled for killing whoever they could find. She added:

  Our chief criticism of the Torminel was that they killed the wrong Naxid. Nearly a hundred deaths in exchange for a sewer worker shows a sad ignorance of mathematics.

  Next time, citizens, find an official, a police officer, a warder, a supervisor, a department head or a judge. And make sure the body isn’t found in your neighborhood.

  Then, two days later, an elderly retiree—a Torminel—blew herself up in her own apartment with a homemade bomb. It must have been an incendiary, Sula concluded, because half the building went up in flames.

  The Naxids tracked down the bomber’s children and shot them.

  It was while searching the Records Office death certificates in search of details of the Torminel and her family that Sula discovered that Naxid was killed in a bomb explosion ascribed to “anarchists and saboteurs.” The Naxid, a minor official in the Ministry of Revenue, was likely killed on account of his vulnerability: he wasn’t important enough to rate guards. The bomb was a small one, explosive packed with nails.

  The next issue of Resistance mourned the old Torminel as a stern loyalist outraged by the deaths in the Old Third, and made the dead tax officer a villain condemned by secret trial and executed by members of the Octavius Hong wing of the secret loyalist army.

  A hundred and one hostages were shot in retaliation; the Naxids, as usual, inflicting death by prime numbers. It was interesting, she thought, that the hostages hadn’t been shot in response to the bombing, but to the public revelations of the bombing. It appeared that the Naxids weren’t killing hostages because they were being attacked, but in retaliation for the loss of face when the attack was revealed to the public. It was something, she thought, that she might be able to use.

  Searching death certificates for other revelations, Sula discovered a great many geriatric cases sprinkled with a few bizarre accidents. She wondered if she could use that too, perhaps turn some of those accidents into incidents of sabotage, then wondered if her imagination wasn’t running away with her.

  If so, she wasn’t the only one. The Naxid media announced the arrest and execution of the Octavius Hong wing of the loyalist army, along with their families.

  But I invented them! Sula protested to herself.

  When she checked the Records Office computer, however, she discovered that the death certificates were real.

  The streets steamed after a summer shower, and the truck’s wheels splashed water over the walkway as Team 491 drew up to a café bar on the Avenue of Commerce, in Zanshaa’s business district. Macnamara touched the lever that opened the cargo hatch, then bounded from behind the controls to the hatch as it rose, rainwater dripping from its lower edge. Sula climbed out to blink in the bright sun and inhale the aroma of the overripe ammat blossoms, fallen in the storm, mingled with the scent of fresh rain.

  “I smell money on the air,” she said to Spence.

  Spence lifted her pug nose to the wind. “I hope you’re right,” she said.

  Inside, Sula collected her cash from the proprietor, a thin man with a turned-down smile and a crisp white apron, then signaled Macnamara to carry in the hermetically sealed crate of Onamaka coffee beans from Harzapid, which he laid with care behind the bar.

  “Thanks,” the proprietor said. He looked critically at Macnamara’s wet footprints on his glossy tile floor. “By the way, a
couple gents want to see you.”

  Sula turned as the two men rose from their small marble-topped table. “Good coffee,” the first said, and Sula’s nerves sang a warning. He was a large man, wearing a jacket bright with flower patterns and trousers pegged nearly to his armpits. The trouser legs belled out around heavy boots. He wore a heavy silver necklace splattered with thumb-sized artificial rubies, and a matching bracelet on one thick wrist.

  “Very good coffee,” his partner agreed. The second man was smaller but had the deep chest and thick arms of a bodybuilder, and hair that was razored into a perfect narcissistic ruff that shadowed his forehead like a cockscomb.

  “The question is,” said the first man, “do you have a permit to be in the coffee business?”

  Sula sensed Macnamara stepping protectively to her shoulder, and she slid one foot back into a balanced stance as Spence, understanding that something was wrong, bustled forward with a worried expression.

  Sula looked narrowly at the first man. “Who are you, exactly?” she asked.

  His hand lashed out, probably a slap intended to rock her on her heels and teach her not to ask imprudent questions. But he was dealing with someone who had been through the Fleet personal combat course. Sula blocked his arm and raked her fist along his radial nerve, pulling him forward and exposing his throat. She hacked at his larynx with the edge of her hand, and as he bent to clutch at his neck, stuck her two thumbs in his eye sockets. After which she simply grabbed his head in her hands and pulled it into a rising knee.

  His nose broke with a satisfying crunch. Since he was bent over, choking, it was easy for her to drop her elbow onto the back of his neck, which put him on the ground.

  Macnamara had already launched himself at the second man, the bodybuilder. Blows and kicks were exchanged, and the two were about even until Spence hurled a pot of hot coffee into the bodybuilder’s face, then broke his knee with a stomping kick launched from the flank.

  After that, all three members of Action Team 491 swarmed the bodybuilder and kicked him till he lay still.