Conventions of War (55 page)

“The High City lacks the necessary open spaces for a mass execution in that style,” Sula said. “Besides, the custom is for the victim to be alive when he's tipped over the side.”

“Blast,” Trani said. “Well, see that it's done as quickly as possible.”

“Yes, my lady,” Sula said.

Her reluctance to kill the Naxid prisoners had nothing to do with compassion. They had killed tens of thousands, and she wished them nothing but years of torment. She just didn't want them to die until their last brain cell had been stripped of any useful content.

Lady Trani paused to light a cigarette, which she placed in a holder that clipped to one of her fangs, allowing her to talk and smoke without using her hands. Sula wondered idly if the cigarette was one that, at some point, she'd had in one of her warehouses.

Trani looked at the others. “Smoke if you please, my lor—I mean, ladies and gentlemen.”

Julien reached in a pocket for a cigarette. Sergius, seated next to him, stared expressionlessly at the lady governor, his thoughts well hidden behind his dead eyes.

“Another item,” Lady Trani said, “concerns the matter of awards and decorations. I shall personally review any recommendations to make certain they are appropriate.

“And the third,” she said, looking up, “concerns the matter of amnesties promised by Lady Sula for offenses committed prior to the war. I will review these on a case-by-case basis. The Supreme Commander sees no reason why doing one's duty in fighting the enemy should excuse criminal activity in the past.”

Julien snickered behind his cloud of cigarette smoke. Sergius Bakshi maintained his expressionless stare. Sula gave a cough as a whiff of tobacco hit the back of her throat.

“Lady Commissioner…” Lady Trani spoke to the senior police officer present. “I would appreciate your assistance in locating police files.”

“Yes, my lady.”

Julien snickered again. The Lai-own commissioner was a friend of the Bakshis, and had a long, financially profitable relationship with them. It was likely that quite a number of files would turn up missing.

Trani received reports on antimatter and power supplies, on economic and security matters. Sula made notes on the data screen set into the table in front of her.

Certain of the notes were sent to a desk at the Ministry of Wisdom. While Lady Trani received the reports of the council, the ministry broadcast the news of Sula's supercession, along with capsule biographies of Sula and the new lady governor. It was made clear that Trani had spent the Naxid occupation in hiding.

It also mentioned that amnesties were being questioned, and that the army was going to have its medals taken away by someone who had spent the war skulking in Kaidabal.

Nothing could have served to make the new governor less popular with her citizens.

That would be a useful lesson, Sula thought. If she had the time and energy, she could teach Lady Trani quite a lot with lessons like these, and very possibly Trani would find herself seeing Sula's point of view.

But she didn't have the time, and she certainly didn't have the energy. The lesson, therefore, would have to be for the benefit of someone else.

As the meeting broke up, Sula found herself walking next to Julien. “You'll take care of this, won't you?” she said.

Julien gave her a cold little smile. “Leave it to me,” he said.

 

“M
y lord,” Sula sent to Tork, “your new governor lasted all of two days before she got herself killed in a riot. Exactly what happened is a little vague at this point, but it appears that during the course of a public address, she saw fit to threaten the crowd—told them that if any of them had ever cooperated with Naxids, they were going to be punished. It was the wrong sort of crowd to threaten, I'm afraid.”

She looked into the camera pickup and suppressed her instinct to shrug.

“I will of course launch a thorough investigation. The official video record of the proceedings seems to have been destroyed, but maybe something will turn up.”

She had returned to the office of the commander of the Home Fleet, with its magnificent view of the Lower Town. Techs were in the process of changing the passwords to all the computer files. The
ju yao
pot was back in its place on her desk.

“I have been reviewing your correspondence with Lady Trani,” Sula said, “and I have come to agree with you that the task of military governor is unsuitable to someone with the permanent rank of lieutenant.”

She couldn't quite hide the smile that she felt twitching at the corners of her mouth.

“I believe I should like to be promoted Captain, at least,” she said. “I'm going to need all the advantages of rank in dealing with this situation. The people here have overthrown two governments that didn't suit them, and I don't want them to get into the habit.”

Not unless it suits
me
as well,
she thought.

After concluding her message, with the little threat at the tail like the sting of a scorpion, Sula reached for the cup of tea that waited on the desk and turned her swivel chair to view the Lower Town below. The scent of cardamom rose from the tea, and she'd sweetened it with condensed milk, just as she liked it.

Not caring helps, she thought. She could bet everything on a single throw of the dice because the results didn't matter to her.

Perhaps she'd be accused of conspiring to murder Lady Trani.

Perhaps Lady Trani was but the first governor of Zanshaa she'd have to kill.

Perhaps she'd even be promoted to Captain. She was open to that sort of surprise.

 

T
ork showed that he'd learned Sula's lesson, and promoted her to Captain, though he couldn't bring himself to do it in person—the message came from a staff officer. Sula sent to her tailor for new uniforms.

Her mastery of the Records Office computers proved a bonus. Fictional killers were created, their names proclaimed to the public at large, and police sent after them.

She decided to keep the back door into the Records Office after her term as governor ended. It was proving too useful.

She now was surprised to discover the existence of another loyalist force that had remained behind, one that she'd never guessed at.

There were small stay-behind intelligence teams in the fragments of Zanshaa's demolished ring, floating weightless for months, listening to electronic communications and forwarding it to the Convocation and the Fleet, relaying it through stealthy, uncharted satellites placed on the far sides of the wormholes. Sula surmised that they must have been providing Lord Tork with very detailed knowledge of the Naxid Fleet throughout the enemy occupation of Zanshaa.

The teams asked Sula for relief. She wanted to oblige—particularly since the highest-ranking of them was a warrant officer and there was no danger of them trying to supplant her—but the only way she had of relieving them was to pick them up with shuttles, and since the only shuttles she had on the planet were configured for Naxid crews, she had to tell them to wait.

Perhaps, she thought, she'd overestimated Lady Trani. She hadn't been reporting behind her back to Lord Tork, it had been the intelligence teams on the ring.

Two days after Lady Trani's death, as frozen sleet pounded the High City, regular communication was opened between the empire and Zanshaa. Another wave of Tork's commandos had been launched at the relay stations, and this time there was no Naxid fleet to vaporize them.

After months of silence, massive amounts of information began to flood into Zanshaa. Messages, held in some remote electronic buffers for ages, now poured into the private files of Zanshaa's citizens: information about relatives and loved ones, births and deaths, money and markets. The capital went mad with rejoicing.

Sula received very little personal mail. A kind note from Lord Durward Li, a former client of the Sula clan whose son, Sula's captain, had died at Magaria. A formal change of address notice from Morgen, who had been the senior surviving lieutenant of the
Delhi,
and who had been promoted to Lieutenant Captain.

Two queries from Lady Terza Chen, Martinez's wife, asking where she was and how she was faring. Terza also happened to mention that she was pregnant with Martinez's child.

Hatred exploded in Sula's breast. She erased the messages and hoped that, through some kind of sympathetic magic, Terza would be erased along with them.

Among the news items was the information that the Convocation had appointed a new governor of Zanshaa, Lord Eldey, who had been in transit from Laredo to Zanshaa for nearly two months and would arrive in something like twenty days. Sula checked the capital's copious data banks and found that the head of the Eldey clan was a sixty-one-year-old Torminel and had chaired the Power, Antimatter, and Ring Committee in the Convocation. Between that connection to extraplanetary matters and a nephew who was a captain in the Fleet, perhaps he would have a more sympathetic view of an upstart young officer than someone like Tork.

It seemed worth a try anyway. Sula sent him a complete report of the state of Zanshaa, along with a brief history of her activities and those of the secret army. She also enclosed advice on how to treat the army and the various interests that it represented.

The report, minus the advice, also went to the Convocation and to the Fleet Control Board. She wanted them to see her own words and her own achievements without being filtered through Tork.

To her immense surprise, a reply came from Eldey two days later. The camera showed him in an elaborate acceleration couch, brown leather and silver mountings, and he was dressed informally, in the simple vest that Torminel often wore to keep from overheating in their fur. His voice was very soft, with a bit of a hesitation. His fur was thinning with age. He looked like a slightly worn, much beloved stuffed toy.

“I take your point in regard to the army,” he said, “and I quite agree with your solutions. I will confirm all amnesties and awards under my own authority. I think you have done an extraordinary thing, and I will recommend to the Fleet Control Board that you be decorated. I can't help but think you have a remarkable career ahead of you.”

This might have been flattery mixed with a careful politician's appreciation of the possibilities for his own survival—perhaps he meant none of it at all—but at least the words were the right ones. Sula began to think the Convocation might have made a good choice.

If she'd known a few days earlier that someone like Eldey was on his way, perhaps Lady Trani wouldn't have died. Perhaps the planet could have endured Trani's presence for twenty-odd days.

On the scale of Sula's regrets, however, Trani's fate didn't rate very high.

Since it appeared she wasn't about to be killed on orders of higher authority, she began to consider her own future. She went to a pharmacy, donated a drop of blood, and had her genetic code read. Then, with the nonchalance she was developing as an absolute ruler, she marched into the Peers' Gene Bank, an ornate building of brown stone squeezed between two government offices, and asked for a tour. A flustered Lai-own clerk showed her how the genetic records of every Peer on Zanshaa were collected when that Peer applied for a marriage license, and how these were recorded in the gene banks that went back to the founding of the empire. She showed Sula how the scanned genetic material would be compared for points of coincidence to determine ancestry, if there were ever a question about a given person's genetic heritage.

“Is there a backup?” Sula asked.

“Yes. In the safe downstairs.”

Sula tried to suppress her amusement. The priceless genetic record of the Peerage and its only copy were kept in the same building, and could be subjected to the same accidents, a fact that revealed a confidence that the High City, and the empire, would stand forever.

“Let me see the backup,” Sula said.

The clerk took her to a room in the basement and opened the safe. Sula had pictured a small, perhaps antique safe, but in fact the safe was huge and magnificent, all gleaming, polished metal. She watched her distorted reflection ooze across the door as it swung open. She and the clerk stepped inside. The interior of the safe smelled faintly of lubricating oil.

The data store, and its operation, were identical to those of the primary computer on the ground floor.

“Show me how it works,” Sula said.

The clerk obeyed.

“Very good,” Sula said. “Now clear out.”

The clerk stared at her with wide golden eyes. “My lady?”

“Leave. Take an early lunch, and take everyone else with you. I need to extract genetic information on some wanted Naxid fugitives, murderous officials who are escaping punishment for their crimes.”

The clerk's muzzle dropped open in shock. “My lady. We can do that for you.”

“No, you can't. I can't allow you to know their names. It's a military secret.”

“But my lady—”

“You know,” Sula said, “I could save a lot of money for the administration just by shutting this place down. It's not like any Peers have been getting married lately.”

There was a scurrying for overcoats and hats, and the clerks fled into the slate-gray winter day. Sula locked the front door and sat at the control station. After a pause to savor the moment, she deleted all Caro Sula's ancestors going back some 3,500 years, replaced them all with herself, then shut down the terminal.

She did the same for the backup.

Perhaps, she thought, that would finally put Caro to rest.

 

S
ula and Lord Eldey developed a cordial relationship in the days that followed their first exchange. He confirmed all her appointments, her amnesties, and recommended to the Fleet Control Board that they confirm the awards she had given to the army. She told him of the shortages Zanshaa was experiencing in antimatter for power generation, and he told her that the shortage had been anticipated and shipments of antihydrogen were on the way. She told him of the various conflicts that were appearing between loyalist factions that had stepped into power in various cities, and Eldey offered suggestions for handling them.