Conventions of War

by Walter Jon Williams

  A more candid report went to Tork via the more secure method of a relativistic missile, with another missile going to the Fleet Control Board. These reports featured a complete record of the fighting as well as a statement concerning the perilous state of the ammunition supply.

  Because there were two reports, Michi received two replies. The first, which arrived fifty-odd hours after she flashed off the original brief report, featured equally brief congratulations. The message was in text, signed by a staff officer.

  The second message, which flashed into the system on the back of a relativistic missile, was a video from Tork himself. Michi called off the squadron’s acceleration, then summoned Martinez to her office to view it.

  Ligaments creaking in the reduced gravity, Martinez came to her office and braced. Michi sagged wearily in her chair, a cup of coffee before her. The half-nude bronze statues towered over her. The strain of days of high gee lined her face, and there was something else as well, sadness and a kind of defeat.

  “This concerns you,” Michi said, “and in a burst of cowardice I decided that you’d better get the news from Tork and not from me.”

  “You’ve seen it?”

  “Yes. Sit down.”

  Michi’s servant Vandervalk was already pouring coffee. Martinez thanked her, sat, and took the cup. The coffee’s sharp scent bit the back of his throat.

  A pall enshrouded his mind. This wasn’t going to be good.

  Michi ordered the video wall to show Tork’s message. The Supreme Commander appeared at once. He looked more healthy than Martinez had recently seen him—his skin was a healthier shade of gray, and no strips of dead flesh hung from his face. He was out of his body cast and dressed in a viridian dress uniform covered with more silver braid than Martinez had ever seen. Around Tork’s narrow throat was a ribbon on which hung a simple gold disk.

  “They gave him the Orb?” Martinez blurted.

  Tork gazed from the wall without expression. “To Squadron Commander Chen, greetings,” he said in bell-like tones. “Your full report has been received, along with your request for additional missiles. I can spare no missiles here, but will order as many as I can from elsewhere in the empire and inform your command when you may expect their arrival.”

  Can spare no missiles, Martinez thought. Who was Tork planning on shooting his damned missiles at?

  “As you can see,” Tork continued, “the Convocation has awarded me the Golden Orb for the recapture of Zanshaa and the victory at Magaria, and they have also honored me by making permanent my rank as Supreme Commander.”

  Which explained where all the braid came from. Martinez suppressed an urge to spit on the floor, and sipped his coffee instead.

  “As one of my first acts,” Tork said, “I will establish a Committee of Inquiry to analyze the tactical lessons of the war and to prepare a series of recommendations for the Fleet. This committee will be chaired by Fleet Commander Pezzini and will be headquartered at the Commandery in Zanshaa.”

  That figured, Martinez thought. Pezzini was a retired fleetcom, a Control Board member who had never seen a missile fired in anger.

  Tork continued. His voice was a melodious chime.

  “I therefore order Captain Sula, Captain Martinez, and Squadron Commander Chen to report at once to Zanshaa and place themselves at the disposal of the committee. Illustrious and Confidence will go into dock at Zanshaa for routine refit. Lady Michi’s command will remain at Naxas under Captain Carmody, who is promoted Acting Squadron Leader. You will find the text of these orders in an attached file.”

  Martinez stared at Tork’s image in shock. He’s taking my ship away?

  Ships that went into refit were turned over to dock superintendents and lost their officers and crew.

  The harmonies of Tork’s voice were implacable. “Because it would be premature to release any information regarding the battles, or the tactics employed, prior to the report of the committee, I must classify all this information as Highly Sequestered. Any publication or discussion of these matters will be deemed a violation of the Imperial Sequestration Edict and subject to prosecution.

  “You will acknowledge receipt of these orders and proceed at once to Zanshaa.”

  There was a highlight to Tork’s chiming voice that Martinez suspected was Daimong triumph.

  It was all going to be hidden away, Martinez thought. The conclusions of the committee were foreordained. Innovations were a wrong path, and the orthodox tactics with which Tork had captured Magaria were going to be enshrined. Michi’s victories would be explained away or forgotten.

  He could imagine already what the committee would say about Naxas. It wasn’t a real battle, it was fought against patched-together converted traders and warships heavily damaged at Magaria. Of course it was one-sided. Under the circumstances, Michi Chen was criminally negligent for losing as many as four ships.

  He turned to Michi. “What do we do?” he asked.

  Michi’s look was matter-of-fact. “We obey orders.”

  “And then?”

  Michi considered the question for a half a second or so, then said, “We wait for Tork to die.”

  “You could talk to Lord Chen. He’s on the Fleet Control Board.”

  She nodded. “I’ll talk to Maurice, of course. But in order for him to reverse an order by the Supreme Commander, he’d need a majority of votes on the board, and I don’t think he’ll get them. Anything he attempts on our behalf will just look like special pleading on behalf of his relatives.” She pushed a plate toward him. “Almond cookie?”

  Furious anger raged in Martinez. He put down his coffee cup before he crushed it in his hand.

  “We can demand a court-martial,” he said.

  “On what grounds?” Michi drummed her fingertips on the desk. “We’re not being sent to jail or ordered to cut our throats. We’re not being punished or reprimanded. That would cause a public outcry, and Tork doesn’t want that. All that’s happening is that we’re being sent to Zanshaa in order to testify before an elite commission.”

  “I’m losing my ship,” Martinez pointed out.

  “A routine refit.”

  Martinez waved an arm. “There’s nothing routine about it! There are dozens of ships damaged in battle that should go into dock before Illustrious! And we’re ordered to dock in Zanshaa—the Zanshaa ring is a wreck. We blew it up! It will be years before the ship gets out of dock.”

  Michi looked down at the black, mirrored surface of her desk. “But there will be other ships. Many, many more. The Fleet’s building program won’t end with the war—Maurice told me that in a few years the Fleet will be nearly twice its size at the start of the war.”

  Martinez rubbed his chin and felt the bristles that had grown while he was webbed to his acceleration couch. “There will be plenty of ships,” he said. “Fine. But will Tork give us command of any of them?”

  Irony touched the corners of Michi’s lips. “At least we’ll have seniority over those he favors.”

  Martinez looked up at the bronze woman who was gazing down at him with eerie composure. He wanted to rise from his chair and punch the perfect, serene face.

  “Have you told Captain Sula?” he asked.

  “No. Though she may have intercepted the message and decoded it herself. Why?”

  “Because,” Martinez said, “once she hears Tork’s orders, I wouldn’t want to put her in the same solar system with Tork and a missile.”

  Sula’s reaction to Tork’s orders was far from violent. She had known that Tork would retaliate for her defiance at Second Magaria, and she was surprised only at Tork’s moderation. He hadn’t ordered her throat cut; he hadn’t issued so much as a reprimand. She decided this was a measure of how weak Tork felt his own position to be.

  If there was one thing she understood, it was the calculations of survival. Tork had killed forty or so enemy ships while losing forty ships of his own. Chenforce had killed nearly forty and lost only four.

  Were the facts mad
e available, Tork’s ability would be called into question. In order to justify his Golden Orb and his new permanent rank, the inconvenient data had to be suppressed.

  The only surprise was the ingenuity of Tork’s response. He was a more subtle manipulator of the machinery of the Fleet than she’d thought.

  After viewing his message, Sula took advantage of the break in deceleration to shower. As the water hammered her sore, gravity-torn muscles, and as the tiny metal-walled shower cabinet filled with the sandalwood scent of the translucent soap, she considered her future.

  She had captain’s rank, and captain was higher than she had ever expected to rise. She had her medals. She had a modest fortune.

  She didn’t have an army any longer. And very soon she would not have a ship.

  She possessed fame, but didn’t particularly want it. Increased fame could lead to increased scrutiny, and someone with her past couldn’t afford that. Perhaps a few years in an obscure posting would be the safest alternative.

  On the whole, she had little to complain about.

  She had defied Lord Tork not out of a desire for glory, but out of pride. Her accomplishments were genuine. Her pride had not been compromised. Her pride was still alive. Tork could do nothing to take it away.

  She had done well enough out of the war.

  Then she paused in her scrubbing, thought of Martinez, and smiled. He was not the sort of person who would take Tork’s orders quietly.

  He must be going crazy.

  “You may not say that we won. You may not say that we destroyed the enemy at a ratio of ten to one. You may not say that we deployed superior tactics, or that any superior tactics even exist. These facts are to be forgotten until Pezzini’s report is released—if it’s ever released. And you must tell your crew that they may not speak of these things either. We don’t want any of them to get in trouble.”

  Martinez looked at his officers and saw their surprise at his vehemence. He forced a smile.

  “I want to assure you that the Supreme Commander is very serious about this. The Investigative Service will look into anyone found to be careless with this information.” He gave them all a solemn look. “Careers may be at stake. I don’t want to jeopardize any of your advancement through my failure to emphasize the absolute nature of Lord Tork’s orders.”

  He picked up his fork. “Now that I’ve got these unpleasant preliminaries out of the way, let’s enjoy our meal. I believe that Perry has done something brilliant with this tenderloin.”

  The others ate thoughtfully as they sat beneath the murals of roistering ancients. Martinez had given them plenty to think about.

  And to talk about. He knew there was no better advertisement for a subject than forbidding it to be mentioned. Lord Tork’s orders—at least as interpreted by him—would naturally offend the pride of every member of Chenforce. When Illustrious and Courage discharged their crews, and officers and enlisted made their way to new postings, they would take their offended pride with them.

  It was ridiculous to command them not to talk about their accomplishments. They would talk in wardrooms over dinner, in drawing rooms over cocktails, and drunkenly in bars. They would boast of their time with Chenforce, of their service under Michi Chen and Martinez, of their own prowess.

  They would not let the memory of Chenforce die.

  Martinez had also made a point of giving his lecture while the servants were still putting plates on the tables, thus ensuring that the enlisted would also carry their full measure of indignation throughout the Fleet.

  There were certain things that Tork could not do. He could not put a number of Peers of the empire under surveillance to make sure they weren’t speaking of their wartime experience, nor punish them when they did. He couldn’t follow the hundreds of enlisted as they moved through the expanded Fleet, or prosecute them en masse, or even discharge them. They too would carry the legend of Chenforce wherever they went.

  Sometimes, Martinez reflected, the best way to sabotage a superior was to follow his orders in the most perfectly literal way.

  Martinez’s dinner with his officers was the first of several social events after the long, brutal deceleration finally ended, with Chenforce diving through the rings of a gas giant gorgeous with velvet-soft clouds of purple and green, then shaping a new course at a far more moderate deceleration. Illustrious and Confidence wouldn’t have to part from the rest of Chenforce for three more days, and during that time there was constant visitation back and forth. Michi played host to a reception for the captains during which, through heroic effort, Martinez and Sula managed not to exchange a single word. Sula invited Michi to a dinner in her honor, and since Martinez hadn’t been invited to accompany, he in turn invited his former captains from Squadron 31. He gave them much the same speech he had given his lieutenants, and with much the same effect.

  The final day, Michi gave a farewell dinner for the captains of Cruiser Squadron 9, in which she thanked them for their loyalty, their courage, and their friendship, and raised a glass to their next meeting. Martinez, who sat at the far end of the table quivering with the barely suppressed impulse to deliver another tirade on the subject of Tork’s order, thought he saw a tear glimmering in her eye.

  Illustrious and Confidence set a new course and began their acceleration toward Naxas Wormhole 1 en route to Magaria and Zanshaa. Martinez braced for the inevitable, which came two days later when Michi invited him and Sula to supper.

  Michi and Martinez met Sula at the airlock, where a guard of honor rendered the proper formalities as Sula stepped onto Illustrious. She wore full dress, the dark green of the tunic a subdued reflection of the emerald green of her eyes. The sight took Martinez’s breath away.

  Sula faced the squadcom and braced; Michi shook her hand and welcomed her aboard. A tall, bushy-haired orderly hovered behind her right shoulder, a young man Martinez would have been inclined to dismiss if it weren’t for the ribbon of the Medal of Valor on his breast. He was taken off to be a guest of the petty officers’ mess, and Martinez and Sula followed Michi up a companionway to her quarters.

  “Interesting decor,” Sula said, eyeing one of the trompe l’oeil archways in the corridor.

  “All installed by Captain Fletcher,” Martinez said. “The artist is still aboard.”

  He figured she wouldn’t rip his head off if he stuck to the facts.

  “That was a Vigo vase in that still life,” Sula remarked.

  Michi glanced over her shoulder. “Are you interested in porcelain, Lady Sula?”

  Which led to a discourse that took them to the dining room and into the first cocktail. Sula had a mixture of fruit juices, and the others Kyowan and Spacey. Martinez, standing with tingling tongue and feigned nonchalance by the drinks cart, felt Sula’s clinical glance burn like ice on his skin.

  Michi turned to Sula. “Lady Sula, I was wondering if I could review the moment in the battle when you moved your squadron to engage the enemy heavies. I have some questions about how you knew which of the enemy to choose as your particular target.”

  Sula explained. Illustration would make the explanation more comprehensible, so the party moved to Michi’s office, where they could use the holographic display built into her desk. The tension drawn between Martinez and Sula began to ebb as they reexperienced the fantastic degree of coordination they had felt in the battle, the balance of movement and fire, subtlety and force. Sula’s pale skin glowed. Her eyes danced. She looked at him and smiled. Martinez returned the gaze and found that his laughter matched hers.

  The party moved back to the dining room and continued the battle while plates, bottles, and napkins were deployed on the table like ships of war. Michi and Martinez described the Battle of Protipanu, and Martinez talked about Hone-bar. Diagrams were drawn in gravy. Sula recounted her adventures on the ground in Zanshaa.

  “Weren’t you afraid of dealing with the cliquemen?” Michi asked.

  Sula seemed to calculate her answer for a half second or so. “Not really
. I’d known people like them on Spannan, where I grew up, and—” There was another moment of calculation. “Well,” she said, “it’s like with everyone else. You have to calculate your common interests.”

  Michi seemed dubious. “Weren’t you afraid that they’d betray you and…well, just take everything?”

  Sula calculated again, then grinned. “Unlike good Peers like Lord Tork?”

  Martinez burst into laughter. Michi’s laughter was more strained.

  Still, Martinez thought, Sula wasn’t being completely candid about something. He wondered what it was.

  The scent of coffee floated through the room. The conversation went on well past the tail end of dinner, well into the second pot of coffee. During the long course of the conversation, and with Sula’s agreement, Martinez told her honor guard to stand down—she could leave the ship informally, with no inconvenience. When she thanked Michi, rose, and collected her hat and gloves from Vandervalk, Martinez offered to accompany her to the airlock.

  “If you’ll page Macnamara to meet me there.”

  Martinez did so. He walked with Sula into the corridor. It was late and nearly deserted; most crew were asleep. Their heels rapped on Fletcher’s polychrome tiles.

  Suddenly Martinez was afraid to speak. He was possessed of the certainty that if he opened his mouth, he’d spoil everything, all the intimacy that he and Sula had just rediscovered, and then the two would have no choice but to be enemies forever.

  Sula was less shy. She gazed straightforward as she spoke, her eyes not meeting his. “I’ve decided to forgive you,” she said.

  “Forgive me?” Martinez couldn’t help himself. “It was you who dumped me, remember?”

  Her voice was flat. “You should have had more persistence.”

  She came to the companion and dropped quickly down the stair to the deck below. Martinez followed, his heart throbbing.