Conventions of War

by Walter Jon Williams

  Nobody seemed to be looking for Julien either. There was a warrant out for him, but no one appeared interested in serving it. Perhaps the Legion of Diligence thought he was still in prison somewhere; and Sergius Bakshi’s influence was enough to keep the ordinary police from pursuing any leads.

  Sula’s delivery company quietly expanded, a fleet of anonymous vehicles quietly delivering contraband from one part of the city to another. One-Step was taken on as an assistant driver. Sula began to miss his presence on the pavement in front of her apartment.

  Not that she often saw her apartment. She whirled through the long summer nights with Casimir, a sequence of dark, close rooms filled with dangerous young men, sweaty dance floors, and clean cool sheets. Late at night, tangled with one another in some grand hotel suite, they laid plots against the Naxids, chose targets, deployed fighters, discussed strategy.

  Casimir and Julien had quietly assembled a group of young, deadly cliquemen, along with other volunteers recruited by Patel, the young cliqueman who had first volunteered to fight the Naxids for love. They called themselves the Bogo Boys, after a practically indestructible toy.

  The Bogo Boys were sent against more difficult objectives. Two judges were killed, one of them an Ushgay returning to the city from his country house. A warehouse of Jagirin foodstuffs was burned. Three mid-level executives with the rationing board—a Jagirin and two Kulukrafs—were assassinated along with their bodyguards.

  Sula took part in none of these operations. “You’re a general now,” Casimir reminded her, “it’s not your job to fight in the streets with the troops.” She devoted herself instead to obsessive planning, making certain that escape routes were properly laid and that no one would be left behind.

  When the rebel government finally arrived from Naxas, Sula resisted Julien’s arguments to attack them as they paraded up Axtattle Boulevard to the High City. The enemy would be ready for that; and events proved her right, as thousands of Naxid police brought in from the countryside saturated the area, occupied the roofs of buildings, and lined the boulevard itself.

  Instead she ordered the entire secret army go on the attack in other districts of the city. The targets didn’t matter, she emphasized, so much as explosions and fire. Cars and trucks were blown up, abandoned buildings put to the torch, flammables piled in streets or public parks and set alight. Security was concentrated on the approach route, so there was little force available to stop the attacks. The Committee for the Salvation of the Praxis moved to the High City surrounded by pillars of smoke and with the sound of explosions echoing between the buildings.

  The committee and their pathetic undersized Convocation—the delegates they’d convinced or coerced into representing their home worlds—took their places in the Hall of the Convocation to take their oaths of allegiance to the new government. From that vantage point they could look through the great glass walls to the Lower Town beyond and see the tall rising columns of smoke; like the bars of a prison they had entered of their own free will.

  The Naxids then grew more serious about roadblocks and searches, putting more police on the streets, importing them from other towns and barracking them in local hotels. As far as Sula was concerned, more Naxids on the streets simply meant more targets, though it also meant that attacks and escape routes had to be more carefully arranged.

  Since the “official” objectives were now more difficult, the attackers shifted to softer targets. Any Naxid in the brown uniform of the civil service became a target, and eventually any Naxid at all. As a result, Naxids were a lot more scarce in parks, squares, and public concourses. They stayed in their own neighborhoods except while in transit from home to work and back again.

  The Naxids wandered free only in the High City. Sula hadn’t managed a successful operation there since the assassination of Judge Makish. The security presence was too heavy, the escape routes limited, and there were too few non-Naxids living there. An armored blockhouse now guarded the one road to the summit, and both the road and the funicular railway were under the sights of antiproton guns mounted in the High City.

  She rode regularly to the High City in trucks carrying luxury goods meant for the new ruling caste. From what she could see, the luxuries had become the entire point of Naxid rule. The High City was being transformed into a fortress guarding the wealth that was sticking to Naxid fingers. Her own transport company was constantly moving glittering furniture to the High City, or carpets, or ornaments, or paintings, or statues. More of the old palaces were being confiscated by the new regime and refitted to suit Naxid tastes.

  Even the signs in the High City had begun to reflect the Naxid occupation. Naxid eyes embraced a different spectrum than that of Terrans: they couldn’t see red, but could see into the ultraviolet, and unlike most Terrans, they could distinguish between blue and indigo. Thus, many of the new shops and restaurants in the High City had signs that looked like blobs of gray on other blobs of gray to Sula, or one subtly different shade of blue laid on another. They might as well have read “Naxids Only.”

  Elsewhere, the loyalists were making fifty attacks per day throughout the city. Then seventy. Then eighty. Spence was occupied full-time running a bomb factory in Riverside, custom-building packages that were distributed throughout the city. The Naxid officer who ran the ration card system at the police station in that district was assassinated so often that the ration desk was moved to another station in another neighborhood.

  But the news wasn’t all good. The secret army continued to lose members to arrest, to operations that went wrong, or simply to bad luck. And Naxid reprisals remained savage. Hostages died in droves.

  To respond to the increased attacks upon them, the Naxids set up mobile forces to quickly catch attackers before they could withdraw. The mobile forces caught a number of loyalist units, and some fighters were killed and others captured. Still other fighters had to be hidden, along with their families, before the captured fighters could give them up.

  Sula decided to teach the Naxids a lesson. She chose a conveniently located police station in a Torminel neighborhood, with mostly Torminel police, and killed the Naxid assigned as ration control officer as she arrived for work. The assassins—an entire action group of thirty-nine fighters—didn’t withdraw after the killing, but instead laid siege to the station, firing at it from cover and hitting the parking garage with rockets. The police called for help, and two of the Naxids’ mobile squads raced to the rescue.

  The topography of the city told Sula which roads would be used, and she’d arranged ambushes along each beforehand. Trucks drawn across the road at the last second stopped one mobile squad on a broad street in a business district, and fighters on the surrounding buildings created a kill zone that left the entire Naxid force dead, lying in their yellow and black uniforms on the pavement next to their burning vehicles. Sula was on one of the buildings with Macnamara and Spence, pouring fire down on the trapped enemy and screaming in joyous rage as they died.

  The other route to the beleaguered Torminel neighborhood was on a major highway, and Casimir and the Bogo Boys, driving big trucks in line abreast, managed to occupy all available lanes ahead of the Naxids. The trucks slowed and their rear doors cycled open, revealing tripod-mounted machine guns taken from Team 491’s storage area near the Riverside Crematorium.

  The Naxid vehicles were armored, but not against such a storm of fire. The Bogo Boys sped away, leaving burning wreckage in their wake.

  The action group besieging the Torminel station quietly faded away. The Torminel, sensibly, did not emerge from their station to conduct a pursuit.

  The fury that possessed Sula in the fight did not spend itself till later, when she and Casimir were alone in the Hotel of Many Blessings and they made a kind of war on one another’s flesh. They were young, and fierce, and triumph sang in their veins. Neither expected to live long, but for now the victory was sweet.

  The Daimong clique run by Sagas scored another, if less violent, coup: they managed to
hijack a convoy of foodstuffs from one of the Kulukrafs’ warehouses and drive it into their own neighborhood, where they left the vehicles open for the entire district to plunder over the course of a long night.

  Resistance celebrated these victories, and the heroes and martyrs of the secret army. Though Sula, as usual, transmitted only fifty thousand copies from the Records Office broadcast node, paper likenesses were now nearly ubiquitous: stuck on lampposts, sitting on tables in restaurants, piled in drifts in doorways. People read them openly on trams, at their desks at work, or while eating breakfast in cafés while the official video news nattered away over their heads.

  It didn’t take the Naxids long to realize that cliques were directing operations, and they struck suddenly, intending to decapitate the entire leadership in one coordinated operation. But they hadn’t reckoned with the cliques’ cozy relationship with some of the higher figures in the police and judiciary.

  All clique leaders were warned well in advance, and when the Urban Patrol and the Legion of Diligence smashed down the door of Sergius Bakshi’s shabby little office, they found no one there and all computer data logs zeroed out. In fact, the only person the Naxids managed to arrest was the captain of a Virtue Street crew who had been too drunk to check his messages and didn’t know the Naxids were after him.

  Casimir was flattered when his own arrest warrant was issued—he hadn’t thought he was important enough. He didn’t mind having to shift again into a series of safe houses, but was vexed at having to give up his Chesko clothing and his apricot-colored car. He wasn’t used to being inconspicuous, and he didn’t enjoy it at all.

  Sula, in contrast, had grown used to being inconspicuous, and so was jolted to discover her own face on the wall video as she bought take-out coffee and pastry one morning. She felt the blood burning her face as she ducked her chin into her collar and hustled back to the safe house, casting nervous glances over her shoulder.

  Casimir was barely awake, his arms and legs draped over the edges of the narrow bed when she walked in. She dropped their breakfast on the table and ordered the wall video on, changing channels until she found her face again.

  It was a picture taken from an earlier news item, showing her being decorated after the Battle of Magaria. She was in full dress, standing braced as Fleet Commander Tork put the medal around her neck.

  “A reward of three thousand zeniths,” the news reader said in a chiming Daimong voice, “is offered for the false Lady Sula.”

  Her heart gave a sudden lurch, and she sat down heavily on the bed as her knees gave way.

  The false Lady Sula? she thought. How could they possibly have found out about Caro?

  “False?” came Casimir’s deep voice. He laughed. “They can’t admit they’ve made a mistake, can they?”

  “A mistake?” Sula put a hand over her hammering heart, then felt a flash of anger as Casimir laughed again. She glared at him in rage.

  “They think you’re an imposter!” Casimir explained. “They’ve been saying all along that the real Lady Sula died in an explosion, right? So you’ve got to be a phony!”

  Sula stared at him. Stars flashed in her vision, and she realized she’d forgotten to breathe. She filled her lungs and turned back to the screen, her mind whirling.

  Caro could stay dead, she thought. She hadn’t risen from the Sola River, sediment dripping from her golden hair, to strike her down. The deadly secret of her past would stay locked away.

  Casimir leaned forward and put his arms around her. “Don’t worry,” he said in her ear. “It’s not so bad, living underground. I’ll be able to keep you company.”

  She managed an edgy laugh. “I’ve been living underground,” she said. “I’ve been dodging for months.” If not years…

  She knew she would have to abandon her little apartment. Too many people there knew her. She would have to retrieve the ju yao pot and the various munitions she’d secreted in the furniture…in fact, it would be best to send one of her own trucks, with a false bill of lading, to pick up everything, in case her apartment was already staked out. And a heavily armed extraction team, in the event anyone tried to intervene.

  The communal apartment would have to be abandoned as well, she realized, and she was about to message Macnamara and Spence to tell them they had to leave. Then an idea burst in her mind like a missile flaring in the void.

  “We can’t let them get away with this,” she said, thinking aloud. “We’ve got to respond.”

  Casimir was amused. “What do you want to do? Bomb the broadcast station?”

  “Not a bad idea,” she replied. “But no—I’m thinking of something more public even than that.”

  She had to argue them into it. Macnamara was appalled, but he was her subordinate, someone to whom she could give orders. Casimir needed more work, but eventually Sula managed to appeal to the impish rebel in him, and he began to think her idea a vastly amusing one.

  Thus, two days after the reward money had been put on her head—wearing her undress uniform, with the medals pinned over her heart—Sula walked into the Textile Market in Riverside to distribute the latest edition of Resistance to the startled vendors and their customers. She also brandished a printout of the previous morning’s Salvation, an official government broadsheet that prominently featured her face.

  It was all for the benefit of the video camera carried by Casimir, who walked backward ahead of her, grinning hugely as he captured her morning walk. Carrying the news sheet with her picture put a firm date on the video, showed that even with a price on her head, she could walk safely and openly through a crowded street.

  Though she was unarmed, Casimir’s squad of killers orbited her just outside camera range, walking in grim silence with guns displayed openly to prevent anyone from doing anything foolish to collect their three thousand zenith reward. Still, she had to force herself to walk slowly, to stop and smile at the vendors, to exchange a few words with the shoppers. She bought a vanilla drink from a beverage seller and refused to accept her change. She examined a bolt of silk, or something the vendor claimed was silk. She chucked a baby under the chin.

  At the far end of the market, she turned, waved, and dived into a waiting sedan. She was eight minutes clear before the first of the Naxid squads arrived.

  The next day’s edition of Resistance came with brief video clips, plus a number of stills, that documented Sula’s stroll. The faces of anyone she met or had spoken to were carefully blacked out.

  We own the streets. That was the message Resistance was sending.

  Three days later the Naxids did their best to prove Resistance wrong.

  The antimatter missile struck a little past noon, shortly after people had left work for their midday break. As she passed between buildings, riding behind Macnamara on his two-wheeler, Sula caught the flash, felt a touch of heat on her cheek even through the faceplate of her helmet.

  The sky had turned in an instant to the color of milk. People on the street stood pale over stark black shadows. Sula gave Macnamara an urgent punch in the ribs.

  “Stop! Pull over! Get into one of the buildings!”

  People on the street were staring at the sky. The two-wheeler swerved through stunned, slowing traffic, raced between two parked vehicles, bounced hard over the curb, and weaved between pedestrians. Macnamara pulled to a stop before a pair of bright brass doors. Sula saw the reflection of her own startled face in the polished red marble of the building’s wall.

  She slapped up her faceplate. “Take cover!” she shouted to anyone within earshot. “Take cover now!”

  The two-wheeler’s gyroscopic stabilizers kept it upright as the two passengers sprang for the doors. They found themselves in a quiet haberdashery aimed at the Lai-own trade. Tall, well-dressed avians stared at them as the intruders barged into the showroom, eyes scanning for a place to hide free of flying glass.

  “Take cover!” Sula kept shouting. “Take cover!”

  So many bombs had exploded in the city that by now
the Lai-own had the reflexes of veterans. Regardless of their fine clothing, they were down behind counters or under tables within seconds. Sula and Macnamara crouched on either side of the doors, their backs to the thick walls. Sula slapped her faceplate closed again.

  People came running in from the street, looked wildly for cover, and ran into the store. There was a crash as someone stumbled over the two-wheeler; the two-wheeler remained upright, the pedestrian didn’t. The brilliant light outside had begun to fade.

  Sula heard the shock wave coming, a rising rumble felt through the steel, concrete, and marble pressed against her back. She ducked her head between her knees and clasped her hands over the helmet.

  The blast blew the brass doors open. The sound was a cosmic shout she could feel as a shiver in her bones and a slap of pressure against her ears, followed then by an absence of pressure that sent vertigo shimmering through her skull. Someone stumbled and fell across the doorway. There was a whirl of dust, and clothing on the racks swayed angrily. Objects tumbled from counters to the ground, the sound buried beneath the booming fury of the atmosphere.

  Sula’s ears rang. She blinked up at the room. No glass had broken. There was a strange scent of heat and dust.

  She thought it was over until she sensed something else rushing toward her and braced again. This time the shock came up through the floor, the wave moving through her viscera.

  The slower moving ground wave, she thought.

  The brass doors tried softly to close, but sprang back as they encountered the figure that had sprawled across the doorway. Sula reached for the fallen figure, a male Cree, took him by the arm and helped him crawl out of the doorway and get his back to the wall.

  “Stay in cover!” she called. “There might be another one!”

  The Cree’s big ears turned toward the sound of her voice. Odd little muscles trembled beneath his deep purple skin. But otherwise he remained in position, back against the wall, his breath coming fast.