Pride sang in their voices when they spoke their names.
She made her assignments, then gave orders to the rest of the reserves. They were to fill their vehicles with fighters and charge up the streets behind the dozen of the advance group. They weren’t to stop and take cover until all the advance group were stopped dead or until their own vehicles were hit.
“Move when you hear the horn blasts,” Sula said. “Now go!”
She turned to One-Step. “I need you to go back to the Ngeni Palace,” she said, “and bring all the groups waiting there to the square.”
She knew she might have to repeat this trick more than once, with fresh cannon fodder.
Firing began at the funicular once more as she waited on the Boulevard of the Praxis while her army got into position. Casimir reported that it was the same Naxid tactic as before—covering fire for an attack that hadn’t started yet.
“Do you suppose all that shouting is meant to draw our attention away from something else?” he wondered.
She’d been thinking much the same thing. She tried to contact the teams she’d placed around the perimeter, but they reported nothing. Then she put on her headset and tried Macnamara.
“Nothing’s happening here, my lady,” he said. “There’s no sign of the Naxids at all. A few action groups are still coming up the road. We’ve blocked the gate with trucks and won’t let them pass until they identify themselves, and then we send them on to the Ngeni Palace as you ordered.”
She told Macnamara to send them to Ashbar Square instead.
“Very good, my lady.”
“What is the status of the antimatter guns?” she asked. “Can you remove them from the emplacements?”
“Yes, my lady,” he replied. “They’re the same guns we trained on, and we can take them out of the turrets. We’ll have to remove and then reattach the big antiradiation shield, but all it will take is time.”
“Good. Pull one out and put it on the back of a truck. Let me know when you’re ready,” she concluded.
She had been worried about the antiproton guns—they were an invincible weapon right up to the moment when the Naxids brought up antiproton guns of their own and blew them to radioactive dust. Getting the weapons out of the conspicuous turrets and putting them in a more camouflaged location might be the best way of preserving them.
There was a sudden burst of fire up ahead. Sula couldn’t see where it was coming from, and had to assume that one of the groups she’d sent into the lanes and alleys had run into the enemy. She didn’t want the Naxids to think of sending reinforcements there, so she decided it was time to launch her next attack.
“Blow your horns!” she shouted. “Let’s go!”
The cars, vans, and trucks began honking their horns, each producing anything from a saucy little blip to a bass organ roar. Her suicide squads rolled ahead, driving very large vehicles in reverse. Even in reverse they managed a good pace, though some were clearly better drivers than others. She hoped the swerving would help keep them alive.
When the advance wave hit the Naxid guns’ preprogrammed defense area, the air suddenly filled with hammering that began to shred the trucks. The driving grew more erratic as pieces flew off and clattered in the street.
There were at least three machine guns, she thought, because at least three of the trucks were getting hit at once.
The rest of the reserves followed in a dense swarm, firearms thrusting out the windows, some spraying the buildings ahead. Sula followed at a run, dashing up one of the walks until she encountered the first scattered bodies, then she ducked into a shop where bullets had marred the neat window displays.
Five Torminel looked at her in surprise from amid a collection of pens and stationery. “Move up!” she shouted. “We need your unit to move ahead and leapfrog the forces I’ve just sent in!”
The Torminel seemed to see the point of this, and they ran out of the shop, beating on doors and windows as they advanced and calling out to their comrades to join them.
Ahead, the street was noisy chaos. The smell of burning caught at the back of her throat. Bullets cracked overhead. Sula sprinted across the boulevard and jumped over a dead body that lay sprawled in the doorway of a vegetable market.
Something about the body made her stop before she entered the store. She braced her back against the solid doorway and saw that it was PJ Ngeni.
He had been hit in the chest and had fallen backward to the pavement. His elaborate hunting rifle lay across his body. His face bore an expression of wistful surprise.
Sula felt as if a soft pillow were pressed on her face, and she forced herself to breathe.
She had liked PJ. She had liked his amiable goodwill, and his foolish bravery, and the accuracy of his social sense. He had been everything that was fond and silly in the old order, and everything that the war had doomed.
A bullet glanced off the pavement nearby. She opened the door and stepped into the vegetable store.
Three Terrans looked at her. One was the surprised-looking man with the receding chin who had refused her orders to advance. Another was a young woman with greasy hair, and a third a teenage boy with bad skin, his lips stained with berry juice. Apparently they’d been having a feast of food gathered off the ration.
“Get your people together,” Sula told them. “Get up the street. You’re going to leapfrog the units that just went in.”
“Well,” the man said, “that’s going to be hard because—”
“I don’t care how hard it is!” Sula said. “Just get out there and do it.”
“Well,” the young man said, “we were supposed to be attacking a prison. I don’t even know what we’re doing up here on the hill.”
Rage flared in Sula’s veins. “What we’re doing,” she said, “is winning the war, you incompetent fuck! Now get out there!”
He nodded, as if acknowledging a minor rhetorical point. “You know,” he said, “I don’t think this thing is very well thought out, because—”
Sula remembered that she’d left her rifle behind at the Ngeni Palace. She reached for her pistol, pulled it out of the holster, touched the activation stud and pointed it at the group leader.
“Brave soldiers are dying for every second you hide in here,” she said. “Now are you going to show some leadership, or am I going to shoot you like I promised in our last conversation?”
The woman and the boy gaped at the sight of the pistol. A stubborn expression crossed the leader’s face. “Not till I have my say,” he said, “because—”
Sula shot him in the head. The woman gave a little shriek as blood and brains spattered her. The boy took a step back and knocked over a crate of pomegranates. The little purple-red fruits bounced as they rolled along the floor.
Sula saw Caro Sula lying dead on the cart, her translucent skin paper-white. She saw Caro vanish into the river, her hair a flash of gold.
For a moment, as she looked down at the body, she saw Caro Sula’s face staring back at her.
The coppery smell of blood swamped her senses and she clamped down hard as her stomach tried to quease its way past her throat. The pistol swayed in her hand. “Get out onto the street!” she told the other two. “And do it now! And if you head anywhere but toward the battle, I’ll shoot the both of you, I swear.”
They edged around her, their weapons held in their hands as if they’d never seen them before. “Get up the road!” Sula shouted. The two reached the doorway, stepped gingerly over PJ Ngeni, and broke into a trot as they jogged up the street, toward the fighting.
Sula followed. She picked up PJ’s rifle and looked at its display. It hadn’t fired a single shot.
She slung it over her shoulder and moved up the street, pounding on doors and windows as she went.
“Come out of there,” she called, “you cowardly sacks of shit! Get moving! Move, you useless ass-wipes!”
Fighters emerged from their hiding places, and she sent them into the firestorm ahead. All of the vehicles h
ad pulled off the road or been destroyed. Gunfire was roaring nonstop.
Having dug out as many fighters as she could, she trudged back to Ashbar Square, where new units were beginning to arrive. If the current attack failed, she decided, she’d pull the trick with the suicide trucks again.
It wasn’t necessary. Sidney and the other infiltrators had worked their way through the maze of lanes and alleys and gotten behind the Naxid positions. They attacked seized some of the heavy weapons positions and turned the weapons on the other hardened positions. The fighters trying to move up the street suddenly surged forward as the Naxid defense disintegrated.
The Naxids had no reserves to speak of, and their positions had no depth. Once their line was breached, they had to pull back everywhere to avoid being cut off. Most were overrun before they could retreat. Sula’s fighters seized the Ministry of Right and Dominion, the Ministry of Police, the Ministry for the Defense of the Praxis, and the High Court with its admirable view of the surrounding terrain.
Mad triumph raged in her veins. She called Casimir.
“We’ve thrown down another attack,” Julien replied. “We’re just slaughtering them. I don’t know why they keep on coming.”
“Julien?” Sula said in surprise. “Where’s Casimir?” Then she remembered communications protocols and repeated the question using the proper form.
“He’s gone to sort out some of the units with poor fire control,” Julien said. “They keep wasting ammunition. He gave me his comm protocols while he’s running his errand.”
Sula sagged with relief. “Comm: to Wind,” she said. “Tell him that I love him madly. Tell him that it looks like we’re taking all the government buildings on this end. Comm: send.”
“We figured you would,” came the answer.
She spoke too soon. When the army tried to move on to the Commandery, they ran into serious trouble.
“They’ve installed one of those units they’ve been using against snipers,” Sula was told. “Fire one bullet across their perimeter, and a whole series of automated weapons blast the hell out of you.”
Fortunately, Macnamara reported that he’d pulled an antiproton gun out of its turret and mounted it on the back of a truck. Sula ordered it to the Commandery.
The automated defense system could pinpoint any bullet or rocket aimed in its direction. But it wasn’t capable of spotting a minute charge of antiprotons traveling along an electron beam at one-third the speed of light.
Macnamara demolished the Commandery’s defenses with ten minutes of careful fire. The loyalists charged forward with a great roar, chasing the remaining guards through the maze of corridors and capturing the entire Naxid Fleet staff in the situation room.
The Ministry of Wisdom was taken without a fight. The Naxid security forces tried to make a stand in the courtyard of the Hall of the Convocation but were swarmed from all sides and massacred.
Forty of the rebels’ tame Convocation were captured hiding in various parts of the building. Lady Kushdai, who chaired the Committee for the Salvation of the Praxis, was captured in the quarters formerly belonging to the Lord Senior of the Convocation.
Sula had launched the only ground battle fought in the empire’s history, and won it.
Zanshaa High City was now hers, and so was the government.
TWENTY-EIGHT
The technicians at the Ministry of Wisdom were mostly non-Naxids, and happy to cooperate with the forces that had stormed their workplace. Thus it was that an expressionless Daimong news reader, droning through the statistics of the northern hemisphere’s most recent spelt harvest, interrupted his recital to announce a special proclamation.
The image then switched to Sula, who had occupied a desk in the next studio. She was still wearing her cuirass, and despite the last minute attention of a cosmetician on the department staff, her hair was stringy and still bore the impressions of her helmet liner. One-Step’s necklace hung over her armor plate. Her helmet and PJ’s rifle lay on the desk in front of her.
The image went out on every video channel on the planet. Audio channels carried it as well.
Sula looked at the nearest camera and lifted her chin. She tried to remember how she had acted and spoken when she first met Sergius Bakshi, how Lady Sula had looked down her nose at the assembled cliquemen and demanded their allegiance.
“I am Caroline, Lady Sula,” she said in her best High City accent. “I serve the empire as Military Governor of Zanshaa and commander of the secret army. This morning forces under my command took the High City of Zanshaa and captured the rebel Naxid government. Lady Kushdai surrendered to me shortly thereafter, on behalf of the Committee for the Salvation of the Praxis.”
She paused for dramatic effect, and let an arrogant curve develop along her upper lip. “As Lady Governor,” she said, “I decree the following:
“All hostages and political prisoners taken by the rebel government are to be released immediately.
“All Naxids in the military and police forces are to surrender their weapons at once to units of the secret army, or to any captain of the Urban Patrol or Motor Patrol provided that he is not a Naxid. Naxid forces will then return to their barracks and await further orders. Those with families on the planet may return home.
“All promotions in the civil service, judiciary, and military made since the arrival of the Naxid rebels are canceled. Those placed in positions of authority by the previous administration may return to work at their old jobs and at their old rates of pay.
“All units of the secret army are ordered to cease offensive action against any rebel force that is in obedience to my instructions. Those who disobey may still be attacked. Units of the secret army are to hold themselves ready for further orders.”
She paused again, and tried to glare into the cameras as if it were an enemy.
“Disobedience of my orders will be met with the highest possible penalty. The cooperation of all citizens in the restoration of legitimate and orderly government will be required. Further announcements will be made as necessary.
“This is Caroline, Lady Sula. This announcement is at an end.”
We now return you to spelt prices, she thought, and had a hard time containing a sudden eruption of laughter until one of the techs signaled her that they’d cut back to the Daimong announcer.
Presumably, Naxids on other parts of the planet would be acting to cut off the broadcasts in their own areas, so Sula and her crew acted to get as much information into the hands of the public while it was still possible.
The announcers and staff at the ministry were ordered to repeat her announcement regularly, along with any news or analysis they cared to add that was favorable to the point of view of the loyalists. They were professionals, and had spent their careers cleaving to one ideological line or another, and they all understood their instructions. Camera crews were sent out to take pictures of the fighters standing around the various public buildings and monuments and wandering through the Convocation and the Commandery.
Sula realized that her claim that Lady Kushdai had surrendered to her would be considerably bolstered if Lady Kushdai actually did surrender to her, so she had the elderly Naxid brought from the bloodstained courtyard of the Convocation, where prisoners were being held, into the hall itself and onto the speaker’s platform. Behind Sula was the huge glass wall that looked out onto the Lower Town, where towers of rising smoke marked the acts of sabotage that she had called for in that morning’s edition of Resistance.
Lady Kushdai was escorted to the platform and presented with the formal articles of surrender, written by Sula herself a few minutes earlier.
“No flashing your scales, now,” Sula said. The red flashes could be used to send messages to other Naxids, messages that other species found it difficult to translate. Kushdai obeyed, and scratched her signature onto the sheet of paper that Sula had cribbed from one of the convocates’ desks.
She looked up at Sula from her black-on-red eyes. “I hope you will provi
de me with the means to kill myself,” she said.
“I don’t think so,” Sula replied. “You’re too valuable to throw away.”
The circumstances of her death, Sula suspected, would be a good deal more imaginative than any official act Lady Kushdai had attempted during her term on Zanshaa.
She picked up a pen and signed, just the single title “Sula.”
A camera crew from the Ministry of Wisdom recorded the event, and the recording was broadcast immediately on all video stations, along with the text of the surrender message, calling for all Naxid forces throughout the empire to surrender unconditionally.
It occurred to Sula that she was pressing her luck with such a demand, but she thought it wouldn’t hurt to ask.
She decided to make the Ministry of Wisdom her headquarters. Unlike the Commandery, where all the comm techs had been Naxids, now dead or imprisoned, the ministry was stuffed with communications equipment, and with techs who knew how to use it. She walked across the road to the ministry just as another burst of fire broke out to the west.
Spence at the Imperial Hotel and Julien at the funicular told her what was happening. The Naxids had made an attempt to break out of the Imperial Hotel in the direction of the funicular, an attack coordinated with another charge from the base of the incline railway. Sula sent some groups to the area as reinforcements, but they weren’t needed. Though both attacks were pressed with great determination, they were driven back with slaughter.
She wondered why the Naxids were so persistent in their hopeless attacks up the funicular. Possibly, she thought, they were responding to orders: their superiors were trapped in the Imperial, were demanding immediate rescue, and weren’t willing to tolerate delay or excuses.
She supposed she should be grateful that the Naxid officers weren’t giving their subordinates time to come up with anything clever.
“To: Wind. Where’s Casimir?” she asked Julien after the fighting had died down. “Is he still trying to kick some discipline into those fighters? Comm: send.”
Conventions of War Page 46
