Conventions of War (49 page)

After twenty minutes the Naxids tried again in another direction. Again they were sent scurrying back to the hotel.

Sula decided things were going rather well. She liked the Legion's force right where it was, stuck in the Imperial Hotel instead of defending the ministries and the Convocation. She decided it was time to open another front, and the next groups through the Gates of the Exalted were told to report to the Ngeni Palace.

There were certain targets that had to be taken in order for Project Daliang to be considered a success. The Ministry of Wisdom, which headquartered the principal broadcast media. The Office of the Censor, which scanned every message sent on all of Zanshaa for content hostile to the Naxids. The Commandery of the Naxid Fleet, which contained the apparatus that controlled the Naxid military, and the Ministry of Right and Dominion, which supervised the Commandery and the Fleet. The Ministry of Police. The Ministry for the Defense of the Praxis, which controlled the Legion of Diligence.

And of course the Convocation itself, where the Committee to Save the Praxis, the supreme body of the Naxid rebellion, met with its tame legislature.

All these crucial government departments were clumped in one area, beneath the shadow of the Great Refuge and its granite dome. This was the area that Sula determined to seize.

She called for group and team leaders to meet her in the dining room. With a series of questions, she tried to determine the levels of experience available and the state of each group's equipment. The most capable she reserved for her assault on the government departments. Others she sent to seize the Glory of Hygiene Hospital, so her wounded fighters would have medical care. To the least useful she provided addresses, and sent them to scour the homes of high-ranking Naxids and bring as many officials of the rebellion as possible under her control.

“I want them alive, understand?” she said. “They're hostages for the other Naxids' good behavior. We need
them
to keep
us
alive.”

The action teams raced off on their errand of abduction, to which she knew they would very likely add vandalism and pillage. The remaining captains she brought close around her maps on the table, to plan a multipronged attack up each street leading to the Great Refuge.

“I want a line of fighters going up each side of the street,” she said. “Vehicles should lag behind, but should be ready to rush forward and support. Understand? Any questions?”

One young Lai-own raised a hand. “Are you the real Lady Sula?” she asked. “Or a fake, like they say?”

She grinned. “I'm as real as you,” she said. “Are
you
a fake?”

She sent them off and told them to begin their assault at 0826. She would hope that at least one column would do well, and that she could support that attack with reserves. Her army's amateur nature was a severe handicap: the attack on a broad front was necessary because she had no way of scouting the enemy, she could only attack everywhere and hope someone got lucky. And she had to organize the entire assault herself, with communications limited to those who were similarly equipped with headsets, and for those who weren't, to a hand comm. She badly needed a staff, but didn't have one. Spence and Macnamara might have filled that role, but they had vital assignments of their own that she didn't dare trust to anyone else.

While the new assault forces moved into position, she was given a running commentary from Casimir concerning events at the funicular. The Naxid security forces in the Lower Town hotels had finally organized themselves and paged the funicular operator to send the train to pick them up. The operator—an elderly Daimong who had held his job for decades—told the Naxids that he had strict orders to keep the funicular at the upper terminal. The Naxid repeated their demands. The Daimong repeated his explanation.

The Naxids then contacted someone in the Ministry of Works to order the Daimong to lower the funicular. The Daimong refused on the grounds that it was the military who had ordered him to keep the funicular at the terminus. The Naxids then contacted the Commandery, and a senior captain of the Naxid Fleet contacted the terminus and countermanded the order. The Daimong replied that the order hadn't come from the Fleet, so the Fleet couldn't countermand it. The Daimong was asked what service had given the order, and the Daimong said he didn't know.

Successive calls came from the District Patrol, the Motor Patrol, and the Legion of Diligence. In all cases, the Daimong replied that they couldn't countermand his order since it hadn't come from that service.

“What officer gave the order?”
the Naxid finally demanded.

“The one right here,” the Daimong finally said.

“Let me speak to him!”

The Daimong stepped aside to let Casimir step to the comm unit, wearing his Fleet-issue armor and carrying his rifle. The Naxid stared speechlessly while his scales flashed red, unreadable patterns.

“What do
you
want?” Casimir asked.

The Naxid overcame his surprise enough to manage a command. “You must lower the train at once.”

Casimir looked straight into the camera pickup. “Piss on you,” he said. “I work for the White Ghost.”

Sula laughed when she heard this from Casimir. He and the cooperative Daimong operator had kept the Naxids stuck at the lower terminus for over half an hour, during which they couldn't interfere in the battle of the High City.

Now, however, the Naxids came up the railway, a whole swarm marching up the steep track and the maintenance paths on either side. Most of Casimir's teams, in good positions in palaces overlooking the Lower Town, opened fire and sent them tumbling down the slope again. Casimir reported that he was having a hard time getting some of the teams to stop shooting once they'd started and that he was worried about poor fire discipline eating up his ammunition supply.

The Naxids took a few minutes to reorganize, and then Casimir reported that he could hear them all shouting slogans in unison:
Death to anarchists! Long live our leaders! On to the High City!

On they came, better organized this time, with Fleet security forces in the lead in viridian armor, scuttling up the steep slope as fast as their four legs could carry them. Casimir's fighters met them with a blast of fire that cut them down by rows but the Naxids charged on, trampling the wounded and dying. Then the two antimatter cannons began to fire, and the head of the long column faltered and turned back. Those at the rear still drove them forward, however, and the collision sent Naxids flying off the track and tumbling down sheer granite slabs to lie broken at the bottom of the acropolis. The survivors pulled back into cover.

“They're bound to get smarter about this,” Casimir told her.

Sula was concerned that, failing the attack up the funicular, the enemy would try to scale the High City at some other point along its lengthy perimeter. Naxids weren't exactly built for mountaineering, but it could be done, and at the moment there was no one to stop them. She sent action teams as lookouts to various points on the city's cliffside to make certain that no Naxids were turning mountain goat.

Reports came in to her that the Glory of Hygiene Hospital had been taken. It was guarded, but hospital security were private and non-Naxid and stood aside. Some of them had joined the loyalists, which would have been more encouraging had they been armed with anything more effective than sidearms and stun batons.

A growing crackle of fire, heard through the open windows of the dining room, told Sula that the coordinated offensive on the government complex had gone forward on schedule. The firing rose to a tremendous din, died away to a continual crackle, then diminished still further, to what sounded like desultory sniping. Sula was in a near frenzy to contact her units to find out what had gone wrong. It seemed that all groups had run into resistance, gone to cover, and were now awaiting further developments.

“Get your people moving!” she told one group leader over her comm unit. He was a youngish Terran with a receding, unshaven chin and a startled expression, as if he hadn't ever expected to be in this situation.

Perhaps he hadn't. Few of her army had ever been in actual combat before. The teams that had been passing information and copies of
Resistance,
firebombing Naxid homes and vehicles, or sniping at the enemy from a reasonably safe distance were now discovering what a genuine battle was like, one where the enemy fought back.

“Well,” the leader said, “getting the people moving is going to be hard. We were advancing up the road, see, and when the Naxids opened fire, everybody jumped into these offices and shops. They're all kind of scattered out now. I don't know how I'm going to get them all going again or—”

“Just get out there and round them up!” Sula demanded.

“Well, see,” the man said, “I'd have to get out on the street to do that, and they've got machine guns, you know.”

“Bring up the vehicles to give you covering fire!”

“Well,” he answered, “those cars don't want to come any closer, see. They'd get shot up, and they don't have armor or anything.”

“Get those people moving, you cowardly son of a bitch!”
Sula shrieked,
“or I'll come up there and personally shoot you in the fucking head!”

The young man's startled face took on an expression of deep indignation. “If you're going to talk like that,” he said, “I don't see why I should continue this conversation.”

Sula stared open-mouthed as the orange end-stamp filled the screen.
“The bastard!”
she shouted, and cocked her arm to throw her comm unit through the open window. Then she thought better of it and lowered her arm.

She called more units and received promises that they would try to move forward. Firing briefly increased, then died away again. The fierce hammering of machine guns sounded clear in the morning air. She knew that those guns were programmable to fire at any movement detected within a certain defined area. It would be hard to move fighters in against them as long as their ammunition supply held out.

She considered sending in her reserves, but was afraid they would get pinned down as well. There was no one she could trust to scout the enemy who didn't have another vital job. It was a job, she realized, that she was going to have to do herself.

She rolled up her maps and left the palace, passing the Torminel guards at the gate. Several groups of fighters, just arrived, had parked in the street, waiting for orders.

“I need someone to give me a ride,” she said.

A Lai-own rose to open the door of his long violet-colored car, but a familiar voice spoke.

“That would be me, beauteous lady.”

Sula grinned. “One-Step!”

The onetime vagrant of Riverside was dressed in clean coveralls and heavy boots. A Sidney Mark One was slung over his shoulder, and there were strands of cheap glass beads around his neck.

She ran to his truck and gave him a hug. “One-Step hasn't seen you,” he said reproachfully. “The lovely lady's been too busy for One-Step.”

“I'm about to get busier,” Sula said.

“Here.” He took off a strand of beads and put them around Sula's neck. “These will keep you safe.”

She blinked. “Thanks.”
Whatever works,
she thought.

She jumped into the passenger seat of his truck, and One-Step pushed the throttle forward and eased it into the crowded street.

For the next twenty minutes she viewed the areas where the attack had gone in, and saw where wrecked vehicles and scattered bodies signaled the high-water mark of the advance. The long straight streets provided ideal fields of fire for enemy heavy weapons. The Naxids dominated the streets from the far end and were hardening their positions. Something, she thought, would have to break things loose.

As she was finishing her survey, she heard a torrent of fire from somewhere else in the city. She paused and waited for a communication.

“Four-nine-one,” came Casimir's voice in her helmet, “this is Wind. The Naxids are up to something. We're getting a lot of fire from positions in those hotels down there. It's obviously meant to make us keep our heads down. I can hear them starting to shout again, so they'll be charging again fairly soon.”

Sula asked if he thought he was in any trouble.

“We're just fine, lover,” he said. “You do what you need to do, and don't worry about us.”

She asked if he could spare Sidney.

“Sidney? Sure. Where do you want him sent?”

She had him brought to Ashbar Square, where she had collected her reserves. There, amid the scent of blossoming ayaca trees, she unrolled her maps on a marble bench beneath the statue of Enlightenment Bringing Joy to the People. Sidney arrived just as the firing at the funicular grew to a vast roar.

“You live on the High City,” she asked him. “How do we get around those Naxid positions?”

In addition to the long, straight streets in the High City, there were also small pedestrian lanes lined with small shops, and alleys and little squares behind the shops intended for service vehicles. Sula had first entered Sidney's shop through just such an alley. They were marked on her maps, but it was difficult to tell from the maps exactly how to enter the lanes and what could be found there.

Sidney pointed out the byways he knew and explained how to access them. Sula called several of her commanders and gave them instructions.

“Stay off the main roads,” she said. “Leave your vehicles behind and move up through the alleys. We can expect that the Naxids will have guards here, but they won't be in commanding positions, they'll be close, where you can reach them. Keep moving and you'll get behind those heavy gun positions and can take them out.” She looked at Sidney. “You can lead one group, can't you?”