Conventions of War

by Walter Jon Williams

  The band fell silent. The dancers’ applause was swallowed in the huge empty room. Casimir took her hand and led her to the table.

  “This next act is just for you,” he said.

  A Terran woman stepped onto the stage in a rustling flounce of skirts, her face and hands powdered white except for round rouged spots high on each cheek. She carried herself like a warrior, her chin high, imperious pride glittering from her eyes.

  A derivoo. Sula’s heart surged, and she pressed Casimir’s hand.

  “Thank you,” she whispered.

  Julien raised an eyebrow. “I hope you realize what a sacrifice the rest of us are making,” he said.

  The derivoo stood in a spotlight, one of the Cree played a single chord, and the derivoo began to sing. The single strong voice rang in the air, proclaiming a passionate love fated to become anguish, a lover once adoring now turned to stone. Each syllable raked Sula’s nerves; each word seared. The singer proclaimed the confrontation of one lone heart with the Void, pure in the knowledge that the victory of the Void was foreordained.

  For the next half hour the lone brave voice faced every horror: sadness, isolation, death, lost love, violence, terror. There was no pity in the world of the derivoo, but neither was there surrender. The derivoo walked proudly into the realm of death, and died with scorn and defiance on her tongue.

  The performance was brilliant. Sula stared in silent rapture throughout, except for the moments when she burned her hands with furious applause.

  It was the most perfect thing she could imagine, to hear these songs just before making a desperate gamble with her own life. It was good to be reminded that her own existence was just a spark in the darkness, so brief that it scarcely mattered whether it ended now or later.

  At the end of her performance, the derivoo held for a moment a pose of pure defiance, then turned and vanished into the darkness. Sula applauded and shouted, but the singer scorned the very idea of an encore.

  Sula turned to Casimir. “That was wonderful,” she breathed.

  “Yes, it was.” He took her hand. “I watched you the whole time. I’ve never seen an expression like that on your face.”

  “Sing like that,” she said, “and you’ll see it again.” She turned to Julien and Veronika. “What did you think?” she asked.

  Veronika’s eyes were wide. “I had no idea,” she said. “I’ve never seen derivoo live before.”

  Julien loosened his collar. “For me, it was a little intense,” he said, “but she’s a terrific performer, I’ll hand you that.”

  The two couples parted. Casimir and Sula returned to the long car with the Torminel bodyguards and followed the vehicles of the extraction team out of the area. When they were alone in the apartment, which still smelled of the lavender bath oil, Sula put her arms around Casimir and gave him a long, grateful kiss.

  “That was the most perfect evening I can imagine,” she said.

  His body was warm against hers. “I wanted to give you one special night to remember,” he said, “before our time together ends.”

  Her nerves gave a leap at his words. She looked at him.

  “What do you mean?”

  There seemed an extra measure of gravel in Casimir’s deep voice, as if there were an obstruction in his throat, but there was perfect logic in his words.

  “Project Daliang will either succeed or not,” he said. “If it fails, we won’t have much to worry about, because it’s likely one or both of us will be dead. But if it succeeds, then you become Lady Sula again, and I stay who I am. Lady Sula lives in a whole different world from me.” He attempted a defiant grin. “But that’s all right. It’s as it should be. I have no right to complain, being what I am.”

  Her mind whirled, but she managed to assemble a protest. “That doesn’t have to be true.”

  Casimir laughed. “What are you going to do?” he said. “Introduce me to your Peer friends? And what will I be to them? An exotic pet.”

  Sula took a step away from him. She felt her face harden into anger. “That is simply not true,” she said.

  There was a touch of scorn in his voice. “Of course it is. I’m a cliqueman. The only way I can get into the High City is to fight my way in with an army.”

  Angry words boiled up from her heart, but she caught them at the last minute. Don’t destroy this, she thought. She had smashed perfect evenings in the past, and she would smash this one if she wasn’t careful.

  “I’m fighting my way in too,” she said.

  “Yes. And I know how much it must have cost you to get where you are now.”

  Her mind staggered under the certainty that Casimir somehow knew about Caro Sula. How could he? she thought wildly.

  “What do you mean?” she said in a whisper.

  “The night that Julien was arrested,” Casimir said. “That performance you put on in my office, showing up naked under your coat. I was completely boggled by what you did that night.” He reached out a cool hand and drew a long finger along her bare shoulder. “You haven’t acted like that since, but then you haven’t had to. You got what you wanted—me clear of Julien’s arrest, which you’d arranged so you could get old Sergius on your side in the war.”

  Her nerves turned to ice. “Who else knows?” she said.

  “I figured it out, but that’s because I was there to see that very impressive show you put on for my benefit. Julien will never guess, but I wouldn’t put it past Sergius to work it out eventually.”

  Sula let out a long breath. Her head swam.

  “Yes,” she said. “I manipulated you at first.” A nervous laugh rasped past her throat. “Why not? I didn’t know you.” She looked at him. “But I know you now. You’re not someone I can simply use any longer.”

  His brows came together. “What accent is that?”

  She could only stare. “What?”

  “You’re speaking in a different accent now. Not Riverside, not High City.”

  Sula cast her thoughts back and reformed the words in her mind. “Spannan,” she said. “The Fabs. Where I was b—I mean, where I grew up.”

  “You were on Spannan long enough to pick up the voice, but you left and became Lady Sula, with the swank accent. And that’s what you’ll do again, once we win the war.” He turned away, his fingers pressed to his forehead. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve upset you. I shouldn’t have brought this up tonight, not before we make our move on the High City. You need to be focused on that, not on anything I say.”

  She watched him, despair rising like a flood to drown her heart. “Look,” she said, “I’m dreadful at being Lady Sula. I’m an absolutely awful Peer.” She followed him, touched his arm. “I’m much better at being Gredel. At being the White Ghost.”

  Casimir looked at her hand on his arm. A bitter smile twisted his lips. “You may hate being Lady Sula, but that’s who you are. That’s who you’ll have to be, if we win. And I’ll still be Casimir Massoud, the cliqueman from Riverside. Where does that leave me, when all the Peers come back to run things?”

  I am not Lady Sula! she thought desperately. But it wasn’t something she could say aloud, and even if she did, it wouldn’t make any difference.

  Sula dropped her hand and straightened, as defiant in her despair as any derivoo.

  “It leaves you Lord Sula,” she said, “if you want to be.”

  His jaw dropped in astonishment and he turned to face her. “You can’t mean it.”

  “Why not?” she said. “You couldn’t be any worse a Peer than I am.”

  A trace of scorn crossed his face. “They’ll laugh,” he said. “I’ll be a freak—a cliqueman in a High City palace. Until someone finds out some of the things I’ve done, and then I’ll be tried and strangled.”

  “Wrong.” Urgency sent the words spilling in a cascade from her lips. “You don’t remember that I’ve promised amnesties. Once you get your amnesty, you don’t have to go back to your old life. You’re an honored businessman, probably with a medal and the t
hanks of the empire.”

  He gave her a skeptical look. “And what happens then? I sit in a palace and rot?”

  “No. You make money.” A hysterical laugh bubbled from deep within her. “You don’t get it, do you? How the Peers made their money? They stole it.” She laughed again. “Only they did it legally! If you have the right connections, if you have the right name, you can wedge yourself into legitimate business and collect your dues forever. It’s not called protection, it’s not called extortion, it’s a patron-client relationship! You just need to learn the right vocabulary!”

  Sula couldn’t stand still any longer. She walked the two paces to the outside wall, then walked back again, then repeated the circuit. “There are two ways to take the High City,” she said as she walked. “One is with guns, and we’ll do that in two days. The other way is with the right name, and Sula is one of the right names. You have no idea how ripe the empire is for plunder. The whole place is tottering, and not just because the Naxids have got greedy. I say we turn pirate and leave the place in smoking ruins. What do you say?”

  She stopped her pacing and grinned up at him. Astonishment and confusion and chagrin and reluctant understanding worked their way across his face, each in its turn.

  “I think you could do it,” he said in a voice of soft surprise.

  “We could do it,” Sula said. “I’d need help. I told you I’m lousy at being a Peer.”

  “Life is such a strange adventure,” Casimir remarked, and shook his head. He held out his arms. “How can I say no to becoming a lord?”

  She stepped into his arms and felt them close tight around her.

  There was a little problem with the Peers’ Gene Bank that she would have to resolve, the drop of blood she was required to contribute if she ever married and which could prove her an imposter. The drop of blood that had come between her and Martinez.

  But the gene bank was in the High City, and if she won her battle in the next few days, the genetic records of the Sula clan could vanish in the aftermath. Any barrier to marriage would vanish with them.

  It wasn’t just the cliquemen, she thought, who were now fighting for love.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The Righteous and Orthodox Fleet of Vengeance grew to thirty ships, then thirty-five, then forty. The Naxids at Magaria were known to have thirty-five ships, and many Fleet officers wanted to launch at once for immediate battle, but Tork continued his orbit of Chijimo and his drills. Martinez had to concede that Tork was probably right—if he was going to use the stodgy old tactics against a fleet that had already won a colossal victory against just those tactics, it was best to have a massive advantage in numbers.

  The Naxids were reinforced to thirty-seven, the Orthodox Fleet to forty-six. Still Tork didn’t move. Still he continued to drill his squadrons and hector his officers with demands for obedience and conformity. Still he bombarded the Convocation with demands for a vast new wave of ship construction, not simply warships, but support vessels, shuttles for landing troops, and the troops to be landed from the shuttles.

  Then intelligence reports indicated that the Naxids numbered forty-two, which—since it happened to be the total number of ships they were absolutely known to possess—conceivably meant that the entire Naxid fleet might be at Zanshaa. The Orthodox Fleet had grown to fifty-two by then. Martinez found himself begin to itch for action. Engage now, he thought, before the Naxids could replace those unfinished ships destroyed at the shipyards by Chenforce and Squadron 14.

  Tork was apparently immune to such itches. The Naxids were reinforced to forty-eight, which meant they had shipyards producing warships in places that neither raiding squadron had reached, probably including Naxas and Magaria. Tork then gained four new frigates and four heavy cruisers of the new Obedience class, Obedience, Conformance, Compliance, and Submission.

  From the tenor of the lineup, Martinez suspected that Tork now had a hand in the naming of ships. “Logically,” Martinez told Michi, “the next in the sequence will be ‘Surrender.’”

  Despite the reinforcements, Tork still declined to launch for Zanshaa. Martinez began to receive hints from Michi Chen—which had apparently originated with her brother—that both the government and the Fleet Control Board had lost patience with Tork and were on the verge of taking action—if, that is, they could make up their minds whether the action would be to replace Tork with Kringan, formerly of the Fourth Fleet and now Tork’s second in command, or simply to order Tork to attack.

  Possibly Tork heard these same hints, because he announced that he would move as soon as he had been reinforced by another three frigates from Laredo, ships that were already on their way. By the time that happened, the Naxids had received five ships, and Tork’s advantage in numbers had fallen from twelve to ten.

  Tork delayed for another four days after the Laredo frigates arrived—long enough, Martinez observed, for a query to be sent to the Control Board on Antopone, and for the return of an adamantine response. At this point Tork finally committed himself. Orders were sent to his squadron commanders, to individual ships, and to other Fleet elements in other systems.

  The Righteous and Orthodox Fleet of Vengeance kindled its mighty antimatter torches, echeloned its squadrons, took a last high-gee swing around Chijimo, and hurled itself for Chijimo Wormhole 1 and the foe that waited at Zanshaa.

  Sula rode the first of several trucks into the High City and took the Ngeni Palace for her headquarters. Maps and equipment were spread out on the dining room table. Portraits of Ngeni ancestors looked down in shock.

  In the palace courtyard, screened by trees and shrubbery and statues of more ancestors, the trucks were repainted in Fleet colors. A pair of earth-moving vehicles with huge plow blades and wheels taller than a Terran already waited on their trailers. Members of Sula’s advance team began fitting sheets of improvised plastic armor around the drivers’ compartments.

  Shawna Spence and a pair of assistants ripped out the interiors of a pair of cars that she would later pack with explosive. An entire truck bomb, her calculations suggested, would be redundant for the jobs intended—the cars would do perfectly well.

  PJ Ngeni wandered around trying to be useful and generally getting in the way.

  Elsewhere in the great city, combat teams were assembling. Or so Sula had to hope.

  The sun sank slowly into a pool of hemoglobin red, signaling the end of a perfect autumn day. The fragments of the Zanshaa ring glowed in the darkening sky. The scents of the city rose on the still air: uncollected trash, dying flowers, cooking. Sula had her people gather on the terrace behind PJ’s cottage and assemble the mountaineering gear, the long lines laid out in coils, the harnesses and ascendors that would carry people and gear up the cliff face.

  Before the escalade began, Sula made a scan in either direction with light-enhancing binoculars. None of the Naxid guards at the Gate of the Exalted seemed interested in anything going on below.

  Her sleeve comm gave a chirp. She looked at the display and saw a text message: WANT TO MEET TOMORROW AT THE BAKERY?

  The party at the foot of the cliff was ready.

  Sula sent a return message—WHAT TIME?—then gave the command to hurl the long ropes over the parapet. Each rope ended in a bundle that included a climbing harness and the end of a safety line that would be belayed by one of the advance team on the terrace.

  The reply was: 1301. Which meant that all three ropes had hit the ground without being hung up on snags or brush. Less than three minutes later Sula heard the soft whine of an electric motor, and a few seconds afterward the first head crested the terrace wall. A white grin split the dark face.

  “Hi, princess,” Patel said, and two of the advance team rushed forward to take him under the arms and lift him onto the terrace flagstones. His harness was efficiently stripped and sent back down under its own power. Patel loosened the strap of the rifle he’d been carrying and lowered his heavy pack. Sula pointed at the Ngeni Palace.

  “Go through the courtyard
to the big house. We have some food there.”

  “Thanks, princess.”

  More electric whines announced the arrival of two more climbers. The high-torque ascendor motors carried them up the rope at a walking pace, which meant the ascent required little skill except for staying in the harness, fending off the cliff with their feet, and hanging onto their gear.

  The first group of thirty-nine were all Bogo Boys, an entire action group. Among them was Casimir, who reached for Sula with one hand and gave her a fierce kiss.

  “Julien’s with the rear guard,” he said. “I think it’s because he just doesn’t want to come up this cliff.”

  “I can see his point,” she said.

  Fuel packs on the ascendors were replaced. The next deliveries sent up the static lines were equipment: weapons, ammunition, explosive, and detonators, all the gear they despaired of getting past the chemical sniffers at the foot of the High City’s one access road. Spence and her engineering team hustled the packs of explosive to her stripped vehicles. A chill wind began to float between the spires of the High City, and Sula shivered in her coverall.

  Casimir faded into the darkness, then returned a few moments later carrying a long coat that he wrapped around her shoulders.

  “From PJ’s closet,” he murmured into her ear.

  “Thank you,” she whispered, and kissed him again.

  She kept peering into the night with her binoculars, particularly at the Naxid installation at the Gate of the Exalted. She saw lookouts there, but their attention seemed occupied mainly with the traffic far below on the switchback road.

  The last of the supplies whined up the static lines, and then the ascendors began delivering Sula’s soldiers once again, the Lord Commander Eshruq Wing of the Secret Army—fighters, mostly Torminel, recruited mainly from the Zanshaa Academy of Design. The undergraduate industrial designers had become ruthless bombers and assassins, perhaps because of their youth and flexibility, or possibly because of their carnivore Torminel heritage. Now they would prove useful on account of their huge night-adapted eyes.