Conventions of War (2 page)

She had ways of getting false documents out of the Records Office.

Her mind was already abuzz with plans.

 

T
hat night she checked into the Records Office and found that Lieutenant Rashtag's word for the day was
“Observance!”
The newly appointed head of Records Office security was fond of bombastic bulletins, and they always included the single-word exclamation intended to inspire the security staff.

Sula saw that the next day's bulletin was already on file, and that its inspirational word was
“Compliance!”
For a moment she was tempted to alter it to
“Subversion!”
but decided to save that for another day, the day when the loyalist ships appeared above Zanshaa and the Naxid domination was at an end.

She wondered what single-word exclamation Rashtag would utter if he knew that she had free run of the Records Office computers, and with Rashtag's own passwords. With a combination of luck, carelessness on the part of the previous administration, and one long night of caffeine-fueled programming, Sula had gained mastery of the Records Office system before the Naxids had even arrived. Any password created by the head of security was sent to her automatically, so even if she were detected and the passwords changed, she'd still have complete command of the place.

She was now able to access, alter, or create any personnel record. Birth and death certificates, marriage and divorce decrees, records of education, residence, and employment, primary and special identification…

Identification.
Proper credentials were the key to survival in a world occupied by the enemy, and the key was in her hand. For a person's identification card provided more than just a picture and a serial number. The identification card in Sula's pocket held medical, employment, clan, and credit history, and tax records. It was used as a driver's license for anyone with the proper qualifications. It could be used in bank transfers, could carry cash in electronic form, was used for travel on trains and buses.

Incidentally, it was also used as a library card. Even before the Naxid rebellion, the Shaa Empire had always been interested in the sorts of books and videos that people checked out of or downloaded from the library.

The official IDs weren't foolproof, and there were always forgeries. But it was always possible for the forger to make a mistake, and by far the best and most foolproof of false identity cards were those issued by the government.

Those issued by the Records Office.

Sula had used her command of the Records Office computer to issue her team multiple IDs. At present she carried the identity card of Lucy Daubrac, an unemployed math teacher evacuated from Zanshaa's ring before its demolition. Macnamara and Spence were Matthew Guerin and Stacy Hakim, a married couple, also from the ring. Being from the ring explained why they were new in the neighborhood.

Sula checked to see if a High City identity badge had been designed, but found that if it had, it wasn't as yet in the computer.

As long as she was in the computer, she downloaded every file they had on High Judge Makish and his family. He'd had a lackluster career at the bar, apparently, but his status as a Peer of the highest class had eventually got him a judgeship in one of the lower courts. The arrival of the Naxid rebels had resulted in his promotion to the High Court, where his sentencing of the two-hundred-odd loyalists to torture and death had been his first official act.

She pictured Makish lying in his blood on the Boulevard of the Praxis in the High City. She could feel the weight of the gun in her hand.

But who would ever know?
she wondered. The Naxids were censoring the news. If she were to shoot Lord Makish, no one would know but a few witnesses. And even if word leaked out, the Naxids could claim that it was an accident, or an unlikely street crime, or hadn't happened at all…there was no way to tell the population that this was a military act, an action by an officer of the Fleet against a traitor and killer.

Sula could feel the energy draining from her at this thought. The reason for the creation of the secret government and its military arm was to let the civilian population know that the war hadn't ended with the fall of the capital, that the legitimate government, the Convocation, and its Fleet were still active, would return, and would punish the rebels and those who aided them.

The secret government had distributed its own clandestine newspaper,
The Loyalist,
sheaves of which Sula and her group had humped up and down the streets of the Lower Town, leaving copies in restaurants, bars, and doorways. Even that primitive form of communication was gone now.

Sula turned as Spence came out of their bedroom, limping only slightly on her wounded leg. She had been shot through the calf during Hong's ill-advised fight on the Axtattle Parkway, and was lucky—no arteries hit, no infection. The swelling had finally receded, and most of what was left was stiffness. Sula had prescribed Spence a regular routine of stretching exercises, and of walking back and forth in the apartment to keep the wound from stiffening.

She hadn't let Spence leave the apartment, even though she could have walked through the neighborhood with only a minimum of discomfort. Sula didn't want Spence seen outside until she could walk normally. A limp attracted attention, struck the eye as a
wrongness.
In fact, she didn't want anyone on her team to attract attention, not when the situation was so unsettled, not when the attention might come from the Urban Patrol or from an informer.

Why is the stranger limping?
That was a question Sula
never
wanted her neighbors to ask each other, not when the news broadcasts were full of the Naxid triumph in a pitched battle on the Axtattle Parkway, and even an ordinary person might think of flying bullets and wounds.

She knew that it was perhaps irrational to take these precautions, but she had survived the Naxid occupation so far by taking precautions that others had thought irrational.

“How's the leg?” Sula asked Spence.

“Better, my la—Lucy.” She made a turn about the room and gave a wistful look at the street beyond the window. “Pity I can't leave, on a lovely day like this.”

“Work on your walking and your stretching, and you will,” Sula said.

Human warmth is not my specialty,
she thought.

“Didn't you like your squid?”

Sula looked in surprise at her supper, bits of squid grilled on a skewer, which had sat untouched by her elbow for the last hour.

“I forgot to eat,” she said.

“Let me warm it,” Spence said, and took the skewer—and the other skewer with mushrooms and vegetables—to the kitchen.

Sula heard the hum of the convection oven as Spence returned to take another turn around the floor.

“You must be working hard on something,” Spence said.

“I'd be a lot happier if I
could
work on it,” Sula said. She looked down at the displays on the glossy surface of her desk and touched the pad to disconnect her desk from the Records Office computer. “I was trying to think of a way to communicate with people in the city, let them know it's not all over. Replace
The Loyalist
somehow.”

Spence considered this, her pug nose wrinkled in thought, then shook her straw-colored hair. “I don't see how. It took all of us several days to distribute those papers last time.” An idea struck her. “But Lucy, you've got access to the Records Office computer. Can't you use that to send electronic copies?”

“Only if I want the security forces to go through every line of programming on that computer until they find me,” Sula said. “There are invisible tags on every piece of mail that tells you where it came from—and of course a duplicate of every mail goes to the Office of the Censor, and you can imagine what would happen if ten thousand copies of
The Loyalist
turned up in their buffer.”

Spence paused in her pacing, a thoughtful frown twitching at her lips. “Lucy,” she said, “you've got high access. Couldn't you just tell the computer to lie about all that?”

Sula opened her lips to make a scornful reply, then hesitated. A subtle chime came from the kitchen, and Spence limped there to take Sula's supper from the oven. When she returned, Sula had turned to her desk and was connecting once more to the Records Office computer.

“Eat your supper,” Spence said as she dropped the plate on Sula's desk, over the flashing symbols that were appearing in its glowing depths. Juices sizzled faintly in Sula's ear. She picked up the nearest skewer and ate a piece of squid. Reheating had turned the cuttlefish rubbery, but its texture, or for that matter its taste, were by now of little interest. She pushed the plate to one side as the Records Office directory appeared onscreen.

“Make good use of the help files,” Spence advised.

As Sula ate her supper, and later drank the sweetened coffee that Spence provided, she discovered that all the Records Office mail—minus the interoffice communications, which remained within the department—went through the same broadcast node, a heavy duty model fully capable of handling the thousands of requests for information delivered to the office every day. The node tagged every mail with its own code before sending the original to its destination, and automatically copied every mail to the Office of the Censor, where it would be subjected to a series of highly secret algorithms to determine any subversive content.

But how easy was it to program the broadcast node? She followed Spence's advice and checked the help files.

Very easy indeed.
She was surprised. For someone with the proper user status, the programming features of the node could be turned on or off nearly as easily as flipping a switch.

Her eyes burned from hours of staring at the display. Sula went to the bathroom and removed the brown contact lenses she wore to disguise her green eyes. She looked at herself in the darkened old mirror above the rust-stained sink, checked her hair roots, then touched her skin. Her efforts at disguise extended to dying her blond hair black and giving herself carotene supplements to darken her pale complexion. She was going to have to use the hair dye again soon, she saw.

Her nerves gave a leap as the outer door opened and she realized she was far from the nearest weapon. She tried to calm herself with the thought that it was probably Macnamara returning, and so it proved to be.

Got to keep a gun in the bathroom,
she thought as she returned to the front room.

“Shall I sleep here tonight?” Macnamara asked. “Or shall I use my own place?”

Originally, the Riverside apartment had been acquired only for meetings of the team, with the members actually sleeping in their own individual apartments, but the necessity of caring for a wounded team member had changed that.

“You can go home,” Sula said. “I'll look after Spence tonight.”

Macnamara glanced at the symbols glowing in the depths of the desk. “Working on something?” he asked.

“Yes. A way to communicate with the population.”

Macnamara considered this. “I hope it's less work than the last one.”

After checking her work several times, Sula produced a program that would do a number of jobs in sequence.

Turn off the broadcast node's logging, so there would be no record of what followed.

Turn off the function that appended an identification tag to the message.

Turn off the function that copied the message to the censor.

Broadcast a message.

Turn on the function that copied messages to the censor.

Turn on the identification function.

And turn on the logging again.

After which the program would remove itself from the node.

She tested her program by sending herself a message—“The information you requested is not available at this department”—and found that it worked. No record of her message, or any of the other tasks she had triggered, appeared in any of the Department logs.

She could send a message now, if she could only work out who to send it to and what the message was.

Before Sula cut the connection and turned off the computer, she checked Rashtag's message for the next day and found that his word was
“Expedite!”

Exactly, she thought.

Spence had long ago gone to bed, but Sula had drunk too much coffee to sleep. She leaned out the window and took a deep breath of warm midsummer air.

The traffic was gone, the stalls and pushcarts carried away. Energy restrictions had turned off all signs and illuminated only every third streetlight. Under the nearest, a street away, she could see a few figures engaged in intense conversation, their arms gesturing broadly.

She grinned. It was so late that the hustlers could hustle only each other.

Sula left the apartment through the rear door off the kitchen, onto the building's back stair, and climbed to the roof. The roof access had been wedged open for the benefit of some tenant's cat, and she stepped soundlessly onto the flat roof, her shoes silent on the epoxide roofing material. Normally the city's glare permitted only a few stars to be seen, but now the city's subdued glow revealed a blazing spray of brilliants strewn across the night's velvet canopy.

Across the sky gleamed a series of silver arcs, each separated from the next by the starry darkness. These were the silent, empty remains of the accelerator ring that had once circled the planet, that had created the antimatter that fueled its economy, that had berthed its ships, warehoused its goods, and supported the lives of eighty million people. When it had been clear that the Naxids were going to capture Zanshaa, the ring was evacuated and then destroyed, its fragments separating as they rose to a higher orbit.

The ring had circled the planet for over ten thousand years, the greatest and most glorious technical achievement of the Shaa Empire, and it had survived the death of the last Shaa by less than a year. The fragments hanging in the sky, visible from all quarters of the planet, were a silent, reproachful reminder of the fragility of civilization, and of the uncertainty and violence of war.