Conventions of War

by Walter Jon Williams

  The silence that followed was long enough that cold dread began to seep into the pit of her stomach.

  “I’m sorry, Gredel,” the answer finally came. “He made me promise not to tell you till we’d won the battle. I guess we’ve won now, haven’t we?”

  There was another silence in which Sula felt a scream building deep in her chest, a howl of pain and rage that she bottled inside only because she couldn’t yet be sure that Julien’s next words would be what she feared.

  “Casimir was wounded earlier this morning,” he said. “It was the suppressive fire from those hotels down below. He’s been sent to the hospital. He was awake and talking when we sent him away, and like I said, he made me promise not to tell…He didn’t want you distracted when you had a battle to fight.”

  “I need a car!” Sula shouted to the people around her. “I need a car now!” People began to bustle.

  And then she used proper communications protocols to respond to Julien.

  “Comm: to Rain. Where in the hospital is he? Have you heard from him? Comm: send.”

  “I sent two of the boys with him,” Julien replied. “One came back and said he was getting treatment and that it looked as if he’d be all right. The other’s still with him. I’ll call him and get right back to you with as much information as I can.”

  Sula left Macnamara in charge of the headquarters and referred all immediate problems to him. One-Step shuttled her and a pair of walking wounded to the hospital. The wheels threw up clouds of choking dust, the drifting remains of the New Destiny Hotel. By the time she arrived, Sula knew which hospital ward Casimir was in and learned that he’d been through an operation and was still alive. The wounds were minor, the report said, and he was resting peacefully in his bed.

  The hospital was a nightmare. Beneath the barrel-vaulted ceilings, with their mosaics of medical personnel flying to the aid of gracefully injured citizens, hundreds of wounded jammed the corridors, most of them High City residents caught in a cross fire. They were waiting for treatment because the secret army’s wounded, who had guns, demanded to be treated first. There was a small pile of dead Naxids in front of the building, mostly security forces who had come for treatment and then been dealt summary justice by the loyalist army. Some of the dead were medical personnel who had displeased the fighters one way or another. Others were civilians who had simply been in the wrong place.

  The very fact that she had to observe any of this while she was on an urgent errand drove Sula into fury. She was barking angry orders as soon as she stepped out of One-Step’s truck, demanding that all group and team leaders meet her in Casimir’s ward.

  The place smelled of blood, panic, and despair. The corridors were tracked with the rust-brown debris of the New Destiny Hotel that no one had time to clear. Fighters swaggered along the corridors brandishing weapons, and insolently supervised the work of the medical personnel. The wounded moaned, screamed, or cried for help as Sula passed. She pictured Casimir lying on the floor in some dingy, blood-soaked ward and hurried onward.

  Her heart surged with relief as she saw him lying, as the report had indicated, on a bed in one of the wards. His eyes were open and she could hear the deep croak of his voice even over the continuous murmur of the other wounded in the ward.

  She rushed toward him. His chest and one shoulder were bandaged and a pastel blue sheet was drawn up to his waist. An intravenous tube ran from a plastic bag on a rack to one arm. The ward was crowded, and the bed had been shoved in among a group of injured, many of whom did not have beds, only cushions and thin mattresses. Casimir’s guard—one of his Torminel—stood by the head of the bed, rifle propped on his hip and a stolid expression on his furry face.

  Casimir’s dark eyes turned to her as she approached, and his face lit with surprise and weary delight. She pressed herself to him and kissed his cheek. His flesh was cold. She drew back and touched his cheek, feeling the stubble against her fingertips.

  His eyes were somber, though there remained the shadow of a smile on his face. “I thought I wouldn’t see you again,” he rumbled. “I’ve been making my will.”

  “Wh-What?” she said, the word stumbling across her tongue.

  “I’m leaving everything to you. I’m trying to remember the passwords to the hidden safes.”

  She touched his chest, his arm. He was bloodless and cold. She looked at the Torminel. “Why’s he saying that?”

  Uncertainty edged the Torminel’s voice. “The doctor said he’d be all right. He said the wounds weren’t serious and that he got all the shrapnel out. But the boss has this idea he’s dying, and so I’m recording his will on my sleeve display.” He gave an indifferent flip of one hand. “I mean, why not? He’ll laugh over it later.”

  Casimir’s eyelids drooped over his solemn eyes. “Something went wrong. I can feel it.”

  Sula looked at the bed displays and saw that none of them were lit. “Why isn’t the bed working?” she asked.

  The Torminel looked at the displays as if seeing them for the first time. “The bed?” he said.

  The bed wasn’t connected to the power supply, apparently because there were too many beds in the room. Someone else’s bed had to be disconnected before Casimir’s could be jacked into a wall socket. Casimir watched without interest as the displays over his head brightened as Sula told the bed that its contents was a male Terran.

  Alarms began chirping immediately. Casimir’s blood pressure was dangerously low.

  “I told you something was wrong,” he said. He spoke without apparent interest.

  “Get a doctor!” Sula shouted at the Torminel. He raced for the door.

  Sula turned back to Casimir and took his hand. He squeezed her fingers. His grip was still powerful.

  “You’re going to need the money, after this,” he said. “I’m sorry I won’t be Lord Sula and help you loot the High City.”

  His attitude outraged her. She had known him angry, known him convulsed with laughter, known him shocked and surprised. She had known his charm, known him filled with murderous fury. She had known him as a lover, boyish and a little greedy. She had known him cunning, planning the death of Naxids. She had known the way he tried to dominate almost every situation in which he found himself.

  She had never before seen this passivity. It made her furious.

  “You are not going to die!” she commanded. “You are going to be Lord Sula.”

  He looked at her through half-closed lids, and his lips quirked in a rueful smile. “I hope so,” he said, and then his eyes rolled back and he passed out. The bed chirped its alarm.

  Casimir recovered somewhat as orderlies dashed to his bed. His eyes opened slightly and he surveyed without emotion the fuss going on around him. Then his eyes lighted on Sula, and he smiled again, his strong hand tightening on her fingers.

  With her free hand Sula took from around her neck the beads One-Step had given her and put them in his hand.

  “These will keep you safe,” she said.

  His hand closed on the beads, and behind his heavy eyelids was a glow of pleasure.

  A Daimong doctor arrived, dignified in sterile robes colored an elegant mauve, and he stared at the bed display for a long moment.

  “I got every bit of shrapnel,” he said, as if offended by Casimir’s obstinate refusal to be well. “I don’t understand what’s wrong.”

  Sula wanted to shriek at him, but instead caught a whiff of his dying flesh and felt her insides give a lurch.

  Casimir passed out again. The doctor ordered the bed wheeled away for further tests. Sula tried to follow, but the doctor was strict.

  “You’ll only be in the way,” he said. His unwinking eyes looked her up and down. “And you aren’t sterile.” Sula glanced down at herself, saw the spatters of blood and decided that the doctor was right.

  Besides, the team and group leaders she’d ordered here were beginning to arrive.

  “This place is a mess,” she told them after Casimir and the doctor had l
eft. “You need to get it under control, and you need to get your people under control too.”

  She assigned two of the groups to guard duty: Torminel and Lai-own, to alternate night and day. The rest she assigned to cleanup.

  “From this point on,” she said, “and unless you’re needed for fighting, all your people are to be considered auxiliaries to the medical personnel. If an orderly asks one of your people for help, you’ll provide it. If a corridor needs cleaning, your people will clean it—and they’ll ask damn politely for the cleaning supplies too.

  “And I want that pile of bodies at the entrance taken away. We want to keep this place sanitary, for all’s sake. If the morgue won’t hold the corpses, put them on a truck and take them to someplace that will.”

  Something in her manner—possibly the rage and the spatters of blood—convinced them to obey without comment. At any rate, she didn’t have to shoot any more of her own command. It was only a few moments later that she saw some Terran fighters march past the door with their weapons slung over their backs and their hands busy with mops and buckets.

  A whiff of dead flesh preceded the return of the Daimong doctor. He had an oversized datapad with a digitalized cross section of Casimir’s insides.

  “I understand the problem now,” he said. “The young gentleman was hit by shrapnel from a rocket. The case was straightforward. All the scanners were in use, but with shrapnel we might as well use X ray, so that’s what we did. I located every bit of shrapnel and removed it.”

  He showed Sula the display. Garish false color swam before her eyes.

  “The problem is, the gentleman was wearing armor when he was wounded. A piece of the armor was driven into his body, and the armor is some kind of hard plastic that happens to be radiolucent, so the X rays didn’t see it. A full-body scan revealed the fragment, however, and here it is.”

  Sula could make no sense of the display. She forced sound past the fist that had clamped on her throat.

  “Tell me what’s happening,” she said.

  The chiming Daimong voice took on a sonorous, practiced note of sympathy.

  “The fragment of armor is in his liver. We can’t put fluids into him fast enough to counteract the bleeding. I’ll be operating as soon as the gentleman is prepped, but it’s bound to be a mess.”

  She looked at him. “Get him fixed,” she said.

  Superiority rang in the doctor’s voice. “I’ll do what’s possible, but please consider how hard it is to reassemble a Terran liver once it’s been cut up.”

  The doctor floated out of the room, leaving Sula with the unsettling image in her mind. She knew it would be a while before she heard anything of Casimir, and she didn’t want to wait while acid chewed on her insides, so she made an impromptu inspection of the hospital, followed in silence by One-Step and Casimir’s Torminel bodyguard. Progress was being made, but the place was still in chaos, and more qualified personnel were clearly needed. She called Macnamara to tell him to have all broadcast stations put out a call for medical personnel and volunteers to report to the Glory of Hygeine Hospital.

  “Immediately, my lady,” Macnamara said. There was a pause while he gave orders, after which Sula asked him for a report.

  “The Naxids made another try at the funicular,” Macnamara said, “and it didn’t go any better than last time. Other than that, I’ve just been trying to get an idea of where our units actually are. A lot of them seem to have just disappeared.” There was a pause, and then he added, “It’s lunchtime. Maybe they’ll report when they’ve eaten.”

  Sula told him to start putting together a staff.

  “But who?”

  A lot of what he needed was communication, and the Ministry of Wisdom was full of communications specialists. Then he needed runners to make certain that units were doing what he’d told them to, and someone to keep track of supplies. Sula suggested starting with Sidney.

  “I’ll do what I can, my lady,” Macnamara said.

  She needed to be there, she thought, in her headquarters, building a staff herself, but found she couldn’t tear herself away. She walked back to Casimir’s ward, stopping every so often to talk to the casualties who were still lying in the corridors. Most were lightly wounded, in good spirits, and inclined to blame the Naxids for their trouble. Sula began to feel a faint stirring of optimism.

  A Terran waited in Casimir’s ward, clad in the sterile robes of a surgical assistant, with the muffler lowered only partly from her face. Sula saw her, saw the concern and sympathy in her eyes, and felt her hope die.

  “I’m sorry,” the woman said. “He died before we could finish prepping him. The doctor did his best for the next half hour but by that point there was really no chance.”

  “Where’s the doctor?” Sula said. She wanted to hear it directly, from the motionless chiming lips.

  “Still in surgery. He went on to the next patient.”

  Bitter laughter rang in her mind. No point in interrupting the doctor before he had the chance to kill another wounded man.

  “His name was Massoud,” Sula said. “Casimir Massoud. Make a note of that.”

  “Yes, my lady.”

  “I’d like to see him.”

  Because all pallets and stretchers were required for the wounded, Casimir lay in the morgue on cold floor tiles. He wore only the bandages from his first operation and the twisted blue pastel sheet. The small holes on the right side, where the doctor’s equipment went in, had been neatly sealed by circles of pink plastic that looked like a child’s toy suction cups.

  One-Step’s beads were wrapped around his hand.

  Sula knelt by the body and looked down at the heavy-lidded eyes fallen shut for the last time. A vast storm of sheer feeling boiled through her, emotions rising strong and unbounded to the surface only to fall again before she could identify them.

  I would have made you a lord, she thought. We would have gone through the High City like an angry wind, and if you had died then, it would have been because everyone was afraid of you, and of me.

  I don’t know if I have the strength to do it on my own.

  I don’t know if I’ll want to.

  She bent to kiss the cold lips and to breathe his scent for the last time, but Casimir didn’t smell like himself anymore. It was this that brought the tears to her eyes.

  Sula rose abruptly and turned to the surgeon’s assistant. “I’ll claim the body later,” she said. “Right now I have a war to direct.”

  “Yes, my lady.”

  One way or another she would be with Casimir again. Either she would come for the body and bring it to a glorious funeral—a cliqueman’s extravagance with a greenhouse’s worth of flowers and a Daimong chorus and a hearse drawn by white horses—or she would lie bloodless with him here on the cold tiles.

  At the moment she didn’t care which.

  One-Step and the Torminel bodyguard followed her out of the morgue. She turned to the Torminel.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Turgal, my lady.”

  “You’re working for me now, Turgal.”

  “Yes, my lady.”

  “Where’s your partner?”

  “Dead, my lady.”

  Sula hesitated. “Sorry,” she said.

  “My lady,” the Torminel said, “I have Mr. Massoud’s will.”

  She made the adjustment to her sleeve display. “I’m set to receive,” she said.

  You’re going to need the money, he’d said, knowing he was dying. He wanted her to cut a figure in the High City once the war was over.

  Maybe she would. Or maybe she’d convert it all to precious stones and hurl them off the High City to the people below.

  Macnamara’s voice came to her headset as she was walking down the steps at the front of the hospital.

  “My lady.” There was a strange urgency in his voice. “I know you want to be at the hospital, but I really think you should head for the Commandery.”

  Sula told him that she was on her way, an
d asked him why.

  “We didn’t have the expertise to handle the equipment in the Commandery once the Naxids were gone,” Macnamara explained. “But some of the techs from the ministry have been over there, and it looks as if there’s something going on. Something in space.

  “It looks as if the Fleet is coming.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  The Battle of Zanshaa was preceded by skirmishes on a number of fronts. On seizing Zanshaa, the Naxids had also occupied all eight of its wormhole relay stations. They then hopped armed teams through the wormholes to seize the stations on the other side, giving them a view of all systems, friendly and enemy, that surrounded Zanshaa.

  Since possession of these stations would also give them a splendid view of the Righteous and Orthodox Fleet as it burned toward Zanshaa, and allow them to estimate its course, velocity, numbers, wormhole through which it would pass, and its approximate arrival time, Supreme Commander Tork decided to take the wormhole stations back before they could supply information to the enemy.

  Accordingly, before the Orthodox Fleet had even left Chijimo’s system, attack craft carrying highly trained and motivated assault teams launched for the five wormhole stations leading into systems still loyal to the Convocation. The teams were intended not simply to capture the relay stations on the friendly side of the wormholes, but to move through them and capture the stations on the Zanshaa side, thus providing Tork and the Orthodox Fleet with fresh intelligence concerning the numbers and location of the Naxid enemy.

  The assault teams were equipped with the latest in zero-gravity weaponry designed to minimize damage to the stations—plastic bullets that would deform before punching through station walls, projectors to flood an area with fast-hardening foam to trap any enemy and render him immobile and incapable of resistance and flèchettes to penetrate gaps in body armor and inject a neurotoxin fatal to Naxids but somewhat less lethal to other species. The teams wore heavily armored vacuum suits with maneuvering rigs for maximum tactical advantage in a zero-gravity environment. They flew assault craft with specially designed airlock access doors that would override any internal airlock control, or could burn through station walls to create a new airlock if necessary.