Conventions of War (9 page)

“You wanted something noisy,” Spence pointed out.

“The big boom was the only thing the plan had going for it. The rest was fucking stupid.” She looked at Macnamara. “If you hadn't known exactly what to do at the critical moment, we would have been neck-deep in the shit.”

The flaws in the plan seemed so obvious now: she only wished at least a few of them had occurred to her at the planning stage.

Action Team 491 stood in the shade of an ammat tree on the broad terrace of the Ngeni Palace, looking down the cliff at the Naxid checkpoint at the base of the road that zigzagged up the acropolis to the High City. The Naxids had shut down traffic entirely, and the long line of vehicles on the switchback road hadn't moved in some time.

Probably the funicular wasn't moving either. The High City was being sealed off while the search went on for the assassins.

“Cocktails?” PJ Ngeni said as he arrived with a tray.

Sula took a Citrine Fling from the tray and raised the other hand to lightly fluff the damp hair at the back of her neck. On arrival at the Ngeni Palace, she'd first insisted on a bath and a change of clothes before conducting her debriefing. The tub PJ had offered her was large enough for a troop, and once she'd applied a lavender-scented bath oil to the steaming water, she remained in the tub till her toes wrinkled.

Macnamara and Spence took their cocktails, sipped, and made gratified noises. PJ smiled.

“Any news, my lord?” Spence asked.

“No, Miss Ardelion.” Using the code name. “There hasn't been a word on any of the news channels.”

“They haven't made up their minds how to report it,” Sula said. “They can't deny the explosion, and they can't deny closing all the exits to the High City.”

“What are they going to do?” Spence's dark eyes looked worried. “Search the High City for us?”

“I don't think they've got enough personnel. The High City's big, and they don't have that many people here.” With the ring and its elevators destroyed, the Naxids had been forced to bring their forces to the surface using shuttles propelled by chemical rockets, shuttles of which they had a limited supply. The actual numbers of those brought down from orbit were still fairly small, and the new arrivals depended for order on Naxids already on the planet when they arrived.

“They could bring in Naxid police from outside the city,” Spence said.

Sula looked down at the road with its traffic frozen in place. “We'll see them from here if they do. But I don't think they will.” She sipped her Fling and gave a cold smile. “With all access to the High City cut off, the Naxids are essentially besieging themselves up here. I don't think they can afford to keep it up for long.”

Team 491 and their host had a pleasant cocktail hour on the terrace, after which they adjourned to the sitting room to watch the news and await the arrival of the caterer. The last light of Shaamah gleamed a greenish pink on the window panes when the Naxid announcer said that a truck containing volatile chemicals had overturned on the Boulevard of the Praxis, causing an explosion and the unfortunate death of Lord Makish, Judge of the High Court, and his companion, Junior Fleet Commander Lord Renzak.

Sula broke out in laughter. “They denied it!” she said. “Perfect!”

No mention was made of a platoon of Naxid schoolchildren being wiped out, so Sula assumed they had weathered the bomb without many serious injuries.

With a hand comm, she entered the Records Office computer on Administrator Rashtag's passwords. It took a few minutes to update the text file she had already composed, and with a verbal command she sent it into the world.

Resistance

DEATH OF A TRAITOR

Lord Makish, Judge of the High Court, was executed this afternoon by loyalist forces operating in the High City of Zanshaa. The sentence was imposed on Lord Makish by a tribunal of the secret government after Lord Makish was found guilty of signing the death warrants of Lord Governor Pahn-ko and other loyal citizens.

Executed along with Lord Makish was the traitorous Fleet officer Lord Renzak.

The sentence was carried out by loyal Fleet elements using a bomb. These Fleet personnel have now reached safety and have been debriefed by their superiors.

Though the rebel government claims that the deaths were the result of an accident with a truck carrying a volatile chemical—and whoever heard of such a truck on the Boulevard of the Praxis?—all the thousands of loyal citizens who heard or witnessed the explosion now have proof that loyalist forces operate at will even in the High City.

Those rebels who heard the explosion should know that the tribunals are waiting. Those who murder loyal citizens will be noted, and their victims will be avenged.

Who Are We?

Resistance
is the official newsletter of the loyalist government-in-exile. A loyal friend has suggested that we send this to you…

 

At the end, Sula appended a copy of the first edition of
Resistance,
for any who hadn't seen it.

Because most of the Records Office personnel had gone home at the close of the business day, Sula sent out
Resistance
in smaller packets of a few thousand each so as not to tie up the broadcast node too conspicuously. As before, fifty thousand were sent. As before, they were sent randomly to inhabitants of Zanshaa who were not Naxids.

PJ's comm chimed as these operations were under way. He answered, then reported. “My smoking club. They're going to be closed for a few days, till the damage is repaired.”

“Anyone hurt?” Sula asked.

“Cuts from flying glass, a couple of sprained ankles, and one broken collarbone.”

Sula sent another two thousand copies of
Resistance
on their way. “Did you ask what was happening at the Makish Palace?”

PJ looked stricken. “I didn't think to.” He turned to go back to the comm.

“Don't worry about it,” Sula said quickly. “It's not that important. When they reopen I'm sure you'll get the story.”

The caterer arrived with a glorious meal for four, crisp duck served with a creamy eswod concoction and a tart sauce of taswa fruit. PJ offered the best of the Ngeni clan's cellars to Spence and Macnamara, and afterward produced cigars.

“This reminds me,” Sula said. “What is your club doing for tobacco now that the ring's gone?”

PJ gave an unhappy shrug. “Make do with the local variety, I suppose.”

The climate of Zanshaa, for some reason, did not produce first-rate tobacco. Or cocoa. Or coffee. Sula, as it happens, had used half her inheritance to purchase quantities of the best of each of these before the ring was destroyed, and had them shipped to the surface, where they waited now in warehouses.

“I might be able to help them out,” she said. “But no thank you, I don't smoke.”

Afterward, Action Team 491 reluctantly left the Ngeni Palace for whatever lodgings they could find. They were supposed to be workers caught in the High City when the exits were closed, and it would be logical for them to look for a hostel to stay in—and Sula told her team to make certain they got receipts, in order that their stories be all the more convincing.

Lodgings were indeed hard to find—there were plenty of genuine workers wandering from one place to the next, with their IDs scanned by police patrols every few blocks. Sula finally found a place by paying more than she suspected a worker could afford. There, she enjoyed another bath, to wash away the odor of PJ's cigars, then slept on the broad, faintly scented mattress.

In the middle of the night she heard the creak of a floorboard, then felt the pillow press down hard on her nose and mouth. She gasped for breath, but there was no air. She tried to claw the pillow off her face, but her hands were pinned.

She sat up with a cry half strangled in her throat, her hands clutching at her neck. Her pulse thundered in her ears like a series of gunshots. She stared blindly out into the dark, trying to see the shadow that was her attacker.

“Lights!” she called, and the lights flashed on.

She was alone in her room.

She spent the rest of the night with the lights on and the video wall showing a harmless romantic drama that Spence would probably have adored.

In the morning she rose and found that the road and the funicular had been reopened. Showing her identification and her receipt for a night's lodging, she left the High City for the Lower Town. As she took a cab to Riverside, she saw a few copies of
Resistance
pasted to lampposts, each surrounded by clumps of readers.

Buying breakfast from a vendor near the communal apartment, she learned that the Naxids had ordered their remaining hostages shot, then sent the police out onto the streets to find more.

C
handra walked into Martinez's office in the middle of the afternoon watch and slid the door closed behind her. She looked at the game of hypertourney he was playing on the desktop and said, “Well, I'm free of the bastard at last.”

Martinez looked up at her, his mind still filled with the game's intricacies of velocities and spacial relationships. “Congratulations,” he said.

The color was high on Chandra's cheeks and her eyes burned with fury. She paced back and forth in front of the desk like a tigress whose feeding had arrived half an hour late.

“I finally asked him!” she proclaimed. “I asked him if he'd get me promoted—and he said he wouldn't!”

“I'm sorry,” Martinez said. The words came reluctantly. “Captains can't promote lieutenants,” he added.

“This one can,” Chandra said savagely. “You know how those High City officers stick together. All he'd have to do is trade a favor with one of his cousin's—Fletcher promotes the cousin's cadet nephew in exchange for me getting my step.”

Martinez knew that was true enough—Fletcher could have traded a favor with someone. That was how the high-caste Peers kept everything in their small circle.

“Bastard wants me to stay in my place,” Chandra said fiercely as she paced. “Well, I
won't
. I just
won't.
”

“I didn't understand how you got together with Fletcher in the first place.”

Chandra stopped pacing. Her eyes glared with contempt into time, gazing at her own past. “I'm the only officer on the ship who wasn't Fletcher's choice,” she said. “He had someone else picked for my place but he didn't get to Harzapid before the war happened. When the squadron shipped out, I got sent aboard. I didn't know anyone and—” She shrugged. “I tried to make myself agreeable to my captain.” Her mouth drew up in a sneer. “I'd never met anyone like him. I thought he had an interesting mind.” She barked out a laugh. “
Interesting mind!
He's as dull as a rusty spoon.”

They looked at each other for a few brief seconds. Then Chandra took a half step closer to the desk, her fingertips drifting over the black surface, cutting through the holographic display of the hypertourney game.

“I could really use your help, Gare,” she said.

“I can't promote you either. You know that.”

An intense fire burned in her eyes. “But your relatives can,” she said. “Your father-in-law is on the Fleet Control Board and Michi Chen is his sister. Between the two of them they should be able to work an overdue promotion for a lieutenant.”

“I've told you before,” Martinez said, “I can't do anything out here.”

She looked at him levelly. “Someday,” she said, “you're going to need a friend in the service, and I'm going to
be
that friend. I'm going to be the best and most loyal friend an officer ever had.”

Martinez considered that Chandra's friendship might come at a very high price.

Though, professionally speaking, he could think of no reason why she shouldn't be promoted. Other than her erratic and impulsive behavior, of course, and her chaotic love life.

But how bad was that, really?
he asked himself. Compared with some of the captains he'd known, Chandra was practically a paragon.

Misunderstanding his silence, she leaned forward and took his hand. Her fingers were warm in his palm. The hologram gleamed on her tunic. “Please, Gareth,” she said. “I really need you now.”

“I'll speak to Lady Michi,” Martinez said. “I don't know how much credit I've got with her, but I'll try.”

“Thank you, Gareth.” She rested her hip on the desk and leaned across to kiss his cheek. Her scent flared in his senses. He stood, and dropped her hand.

“That won't be necessary, Lieutenant,” he said.

She looked at him for a moment out of her long eyes, and her look hardened. She straightened. “As you wish, Captain,” she said, her pointed chin held high. “With the captain's permission?”

“You are dismissed,” Martinez said. His mouth was dry.

She went to the door and slid it open. “I meant what I said,” she said, “about being your friend.”

Then she was gone, leaving the door open behind her. Lord Shane Coen, Michi's red-haired signals lieutenant, walked past and cast a curious glance into the room.

Martinez nodded at him in what he hoped was a brisk, military fashion, then sat down at the desk again and hypertourney.

It was a while before he could get his mind on the game.

WHO KILLED THE HOSTAGES?

The Naxids would have you believe that the deaths of over five hundred hostages are an inevitable result of actions by loyalist forces. But who rounded them up? Who ordered them shot? Who fired their weapons? Whose bullets struck them down?

The agents of an illegitimate government!

Sula paused with her stylus poised over her desk. Frustration pounded in her temples. She had the sense that her proper argument was evading her.

Worse, she could imagine Naxid counterarguments. It wasn't as if the legitimate government, as embodied by the Shaa who founded the empire, had hesitated to take hostages. The Shaa had held entire
planets
hostage. And furthermore they hadn't hesitated to act: cities had been bombarded with antimatter weapons, and on one occasion an entire planet was wiped out in retaliation for the conspiracy of only a few people. The only legitimacy the empire had ever known was the threat of massive force.

Nor was the present war any different. Planets surrendered to one side or the other under fear of bombardment and destruction. Martinez had told her that the entire Hone Reach had almost gone over to the enemy out of sheer terror, without a shot fired, and that only the arrival of Faqforce—with their own missiles and promised destruction—prevented the defection.

Five hundred hostages were insignificant against such a history, let alone against the casualties of the war so far.

Sula continued her essay. She pointed out that the Naxids killed hostages because they couldn't locate their enemies, whereas the secret government had gone after specific targets and killed them. She promised more and greater retribution to come.

She went over her text again, making small changes, and wished she were better at debate. Her verbal gifts, as both she and others had cause to regret, were more in the direction of sarcasm, and sarcasm seemed inappropriate as a tribute to five hundred butchered citizens.

The sad fact was that the Makish assassination might be Team 491's last operation. The secret government and its operatives amounted only to three people, and if they kept risking themselves, they would be caught.

She knew that Team 491 had to recruit other operatives, which meant trusting other people, some of whom by their nature would be untrustworthy. Others would be captured and give up everything they knew under torture.

It might make more sense to cease all activity and wait for the Fleet to drive the Naxids away.

But Sula didn't want to quit. Even as she looked at the piece of propaganda designed to take advantage of the deaths of the hostages, her blood simmered with anger against the Naxid executioners.

She rose from her desk and ordered the video wall to switch on and turn to the channel reserved for punishments. It took a long time to kill five hundred people, and the executions were still ongoing. The Torminel, Terrans, Cree, Daimong, and Lai-own were herded against the blank wall of a prison, followed by the long hammering volleys of automatic weapons, the spray of blood, the fall of bodies.

The executioners were clear in the video: the grimfaced, helmeted figures behind the tripod-mounted machine guns; the others, in their lawn-green uniforms so much brighter than the somber green of the Fleet, herding the captives with stun batons and placing them against the wall; and before them all, the thin-faced officer who gave the order to fire, a man with the consciousness of high duty blazing from his eyes.

All the executioners were Terran. The Naxids hadn't even had to do their own dirty work; they'd found others more than happy to do the job for them.

The executioners were nervous or blank-faced or merely dutiful, but the officer seemed different. His eyes glittered and his voice was pitched high, with odd hysterical overtones. Sula realized he was in a state of exaltation. This was his defining moment, the chance to commit slaughter in front of a planetwide audience. His eyes betrayed him by occasionally flicking to the camera, as if he was assuring himself that his time of glory was not yet over.

After the machine guns rattled, the officer walked slowly amid the bodies, finishing off the survivors with his pistol. His chest was inflated as he walked, a self-important spectacle, conscious of his starring role.

Pervert,
Sula thought. The things people would do to get on video.

The door opened and Spence entered just as the machine guns fired again. She winced and passed through the room with her eyes turned away from the video.

“You've heard about the hostages?” Sula said.

“Yes. It's everywhere.”

“Any trouble getting down from the High City?”

“No.” She stiffened as the officer shouted out commands to throw the bodies on a truck. Her mouth tightened in a line. “We're going to get that bastard, aren't we, my lady?”

“Yes,” Sula said, her mind made up at that moment.

Fuck caution.

A wild sensation of liberation began to sing in her heart. In a lifetime full of risks, this would be the most insane thing she'd ever done.

She didn't know the officer's name or where the executions were taking place. All she knew was that it had to be a prison on the planet of Zanshaa. She focused on the video, watched it intently, and was eventually rewarded with a glimpse, over the prison wall, of the baroque ornamentation of the Apszipar Tower, which would place the action somewhere in the southwest quadrant of Zanshaa City.

The Records Office computer had the maps that showed the only prison in that part of town, a place called the Blue Hatches, and also a list of personnel assigned to that prison.

The officer in charge was a Major Commandant Laurajean, and the picture appended to his ID showed that he was the thin-faced officer who, even now, was grinning his intense joy as a crowd of Torminel were killed on his orders. Laurajean, who was forty-six years old, had been married for the last eighteen to a plump, pleasant-looking wife, an elementary school teacher, with whom he'd had three children and lived a middle-class life in a middle-class part of the Lower Town.

Some people, Sula thought, just needed killing.

Macnamara entered as Sula—having looked up Laurajean's address—was calling up the plans of the building, just in case she needed them. He dropped his bag of cheap iarogüt on her desk and looked over her shoulder at the three-dimensional image of Laurajean rotating in a corner of the display, next to the architects' schematics.

“He's our next?” Macnamara asked.

“Yes.”

His answer was to the point. “Good.” He picked up the bottles and walked to the kitchen.

Does the Major Commandant take public transport home?
Sula wondered.
Or does he have an auto?
Waiting at his local tram stop and shooting him as he stepped off would be a prosaic but efficient way to accomplish his demise.

Laurajean had an auto, the records showed, a mauve-colored Delvin sedan suitable for his entire family. Sula wondered if he drove it to work or left it at home. His wife didn't have a driving permit, she found, and Laurajean himself had been granted a parking permit for use at the Blue Hatches facility.

She rose from her desk, stretched her limbs, and walked to the kitchen, where Spence and Macnamara chatted while pouring iarogüt down the sink, flooding the small room with the sinus-stinging herbal scent.

“We'll take him today,” she said. “Before they decide to put guards on him.”

They looked at her in surprise, then Macnamara laughed. There was a wild look in Spence's eyes. They'd caught Sula's mad, defiant spirit.

Fuck caution.

Because the arrangement had worked the first time, they decided that Sula and Macnamara would be the shooters and Spence the lookout. Macnamara got weapons out of storage and cleaned, assembled, and loaded them, while Spence rented a small, gray six-wheeled cargo van under a backup identity. Sula polished her essay one more time, sent out the third edition of
Resistance
while public indignation was at its height, then began researching the Blue Hatches prison and its immediate environs, maps of which were in the Records Office computer.

A problem existed with the rented van, the workings of which contained computers that regularly reported their location to the Office of the Censor. When a crime was reported, any vehicles in the area could be pinpointed.

When it had originally been equipped, Team 491 was given a Hunhao sedan with the ability to switch this feature off. The Hunhao was an ideal getaway vehicle, and Sula wanted to use it for the escape, not for the assassination itself.

All put on gloves so as not to leave fingerprints. Spence turned the van over to Macnamara, the best driver, and herself drove the Hunhao down the main artery beneath the Apszipar Tower, where she parked four streets away from the prison. She then jumped into the van—Sula was in the back, with the weapons—and the van headed for the prison secure behind its azure ceramic walls.

Team 491 had been tense during the Makish killing. Now they were casual almost to the point of mirth. Sula's fey spirit had spread to them all. Two killings in the period of a day—why not? The first had been overplanned, and now the second wouldn't be planned at all. They were throwing their months of training to the winds, and the relaxation of discipline was like wine in their veins.