Conventions of War (10 page)

There was chaos outside the prison, with swarms of grieving next-of-kin milling in a anxious mass, waiting for the chance to claim their relations. Sula noted the big main gate, the large garage attached to the administration block by a ramp. The van edged through the crowd and dropped Spence off at the fringes, where she wouldn't stand out amid the mourners. Macnamara swung the van through a series of turns and parked so they were ready to intercept Laurajean on his way home. He and Sula sat in the front, the windows open, and waited through the long hot afternoon.

They were in a Lai-own neighborhood. The tall, long-limbed flightless birds went about their business, too busy or too hot to pay attention to strangers. A pungent scent drifted toward them from a nearby restaurant—the Lai-own protein sauce heated in the great iron pans and ready to cook meat and vegetables.

A young male Lai-own strolled to the door of an apartment across the street, urinated copiously on the doorjamb, then adjusted his clothing as he walked away.

“Ah, young love,” Sula said. Macnamara gave a snicker.

No volleys echoed over the prison's featureless wall. Sula turned her hand comm to the punishment channel and found that it was showing the executions all over again.

“This is the fate that the wicked saboteurs and assassins have brought to the people of Zanshaa,” the narrator intoned. Sula snorted. Hadn't he read the third edition of
Resistance
?

Whose bullets struck them down?

There was a roar from the front of the prison, hundreds of throats together. Spence reported that an announcement had just been made that the first twenty families could enter to identify and claim the bodies of their kin, and the bereaved were crowding together by the gates.

“It's him!”
Spence said, in sudden surprise. “He's in his car, with a couple of his pals. Heading your way!”

Laurajean had taken advantage of the crowd clumped around the main gate to leave unmolested through the garage exit. Macnamara pressed the throttle lever and the van's electric motors surged, bringing the vehicle silently into traffic. Sula slipped into the cargo compartment, crouched on the black composite floor as she first readied her weapon, then placed Macnamara's gun on the passenger seat where he could reach it.

“There he is!” Macnamara called, and Sula knew her luck was in. She'd been
right
to follow this wild impulse. A feral joy filled her heart at the certainty that nothing could go wrong for her today.

Just in case, for caution's sake, she called Spence to ask if there were any sign of another vehicle following, perhaps with guards.

No. The Naxids had left their killer without protection.

Sula readied her rifle. “You've got to catch him before he gets to the expressway,” she told Macnamara. Vehicles on the expressways were required to surrender control to a centralized computer system, which would never let them get close.

“Easy,” Macnamara said, and power surged to the motors. “They'll be on the left side.” His window powered open and he shifted his stubby machine pistol to his lap.

The van swerved, then swerved again. The motors surged once more, then braked back.

“Now,”
Macnamara said. Sula touched controls, and silent motors rolled the big side door open. Hair whipped across her face in a sudden blast of hot wind. The mauve-colored Delvin was right there, almost close enough to touch.

There were three Terrans in the car—two women and Laurajean—all in lawn-green uniform tunics. Laurajean was driving. They were laughing at some joke, and Laurajean was gesturing expansively with one slim hand. Exhilaration still radiated from his face.

He was still rejoicing in his unexpected celebrity, unaware that his starring role on the punishment channel was about to be canceled. He glanced to his right just as Sula put the rifle to her shoulder, and his puzzled squint showed he hadn't quite worked out what he was seeing when she fired.

The rifle used caseless ammunition that was nearly recoilless, and cycled it very fast. Sula put over a hundred rounds into the car in less than two seconds. Macnamara, firing through the window, emptied his own smaller magazine.

There was the sound of a score of hammers beating metal. Parts of Laurajean's car seemed to dissolve, the glass spraying outward in crystal fountains that glimmered in the sun, the resinous composite body simply disintegrating. The Delvin swerved, and Macnamara quickly dropped his gun into his lap in order to concentrate on his driving. Sula pressed the control that slid the side door shut.

Peering out the back window, she saw the Delvin slowly cross three lanes of traffic and come to rest on the sidewalk, narrowly missing a startled Daimong pedestrian.

Macnamara made a few turns, then found a legal place to park. By then, Sula had the weapons broken down and in their cases. The two quietly left the van, walked down a baking street, turned a corner and met Spence, who had paralleled their route in the Hunhao.

In a few hours they would call the rental company from a suitably anonymous location and tell them where they could pick up their van. If its transponder hadn't happened to report within a few minutes of the assassination, there would be nothing to connect it to the killing.

To the team's strange spirit of impulse and madness was now added another dimension—that of relief. They babbled with frantic good spirits as they left the Apszipar Tower behind. They were as cheerful, Sula realized, as Laurajean had been with his two colleagues. Like children who had gotten away with something naughty.

“Who ordered them shot?” Sula asked.

“Lady Sula!”
the others chanted.

“Who fired her weapon?”

“Lady Sula!”

“Whose bullets struck them down?”

“Lady Sula!”
they cried, and all three broke into laughter.

This must stop,
she told herself. They couldn't go on this recklessly.

But still, it would be good to put out another edition of
Resistance,
with the heading “Death of a Traitor.”

 

S
ula bought Team 491 a first-class dinner that evening at Seven Pages, a restaurant with silent, dignified waitrons and a wine list that scrolled along the display hundreds of lines. The meal went on for hours, little plates arriving every ten minutes with some small, ambrosial treat, each displayed with perfection on a plate of near-translucent Vigo hard-paste. Sula could tell that Spence and Macnamara had never been in such a place before.

Not that she had, or at least not often. Not since she was a girl named Gredel, and the real Lady Sula had paid.

“Would you care for a sweet?” the waitron asked. “We have everything on our list except the Chocolate Fancy and the Mocha Gyre.”

“Why not?”

The waitron shook his glossy shaved head. “I regret there is no cocoa of a suitable quality. May I recommend the Peaches Flambé?”

“Hm.” Sula looked at Macnamara and Spence, both deeply relaxed after consuming two bottles of wine, and smiled. “I hate life without Chocolate Fancy in it,” she said. “Perhaps we could arrange something.”

She spoke with the chef before they left and asked how much she would offer for top quality cocoa.

The chef frowned and tugged at her lower lip. “Business isn't so good, you know. Not since
they
came.”

“Think how much better business would be if you had good chocolate again.”

Her eyes narrowed. “How good?”

“Kabila's. We have sixty-five percent cocoa and eighty percent. Imported from Preowin.”

The chef tried unsuccessfully to conceal the flare of greed that burned briefly in her eyes. “How much do you have?” she asked.

“How much do you want?”

They settled on a price, seven times what Sula had paid for the cocoa when it sat in a warehouse complex on the ring.

“I'll deliver tomorrow,” she said. “I'll want payment in cash.”

The chef acted as if this arrangement weren't unusual. Perhaps it wasn't.

“I wish I knew how you did that,” Spence said as they walked away.

“Did what?”

“Change your accent like that. You have the voice you use back in Riverside, and the Lady Sula voice, and you used a completely different voice with the waitron and the chef.”

Sula cast her mind back to the restaurant. “I don't remember doing that,” she said. “I was probably just imitating them.” Neither the chef nor the waitron had spoken with the drawling speech of the Peers of the High City, but a comfortably middle-class approximation.

“Wish I could do that,” Spence said again.

“You've been out having fun,” One-Step said later that night as Sula returned to her apartment. “You've been having fun without One-Step.”

“That's right,” she said cheerfully. She sprang up the stair and reached for the door, the thin plastic key in her hand.

One-Step stepped into the light that poured down from one of the first-floor apartments, and Sula paused a moment to bask in the dark light of his liquid black eyes.

“One-Step could show you a wonderful evening, better than you had tonight,” he said. “You only have to give One-Step a chance.”

Sula wondered how to explain her position in this matter.
I don't go out with boys who refer to themselves in the third person?

“Maybe when you get a job,” Sula said. “I'd hate to take your last few zeniths.”

“I'd spend my last minim to make you happy.”

She rewarded the use of the personal pronoun with a smile. “So what do you hear?” she asked.

“Riot at the Blue Hatches, the place where they were shooting people,” One-Step said. “A crowd of mourners got arrested for killing a prison officer.”

Sula paused a moment, thinking. “Was it on the news?”

“No. One-Step heard it from a…colleague.”

Street rumor would spread fast, Sula knew, though what it gained in speed it lost in accuracy.

“Anyone killed?” she asked.

“My friend didn't know. Probably there were deaths, though. There's a lot of killing going around.”

He stepped forward and held out something that shone yellow-white in the light that spilled from the apartment window.
Resistance.

“I've seen it.”

The plastic flimsy vanished. “You be careful,” One-Step said. There was a surprising earnest quality in his voice. “You step out into the street, you look for police first. Look for police at the train, at the market. Always make sure you have an escape route.”

Sula looked at him. “Do
you
have an escape route, One-Step?”

His black eyes shone in the light as again he silently held out the pale sheet of plastic.

Resistance.

Sula turned. “Good night, One-Step.” She slid her key into the door lock, and alloy bolts drew back.

“Good night, miss. Keep well.”

He's going to die,
she thought as she walked slowly up the stair.
They'll be shooting at me, but they'll hit him.

Plenty of bullets had been aimed at her earlier in the day, after all, but killed nearly five hundred other people instead.

T
hree watches ticked by with nothing for Martinez to do but spend his time at hypertourney, check the tactical display to see if anything had changed, and stare at Terza's picture in the surface of his desk. No one invited him to dine. He considered having the lieutenants to an evening in
Daffodil
—the ex-civilian yacht that had brought him to
Illustrious,
and which he had turned into kind of an informal club, an alternative to the full-dress dinners Fletcher had imposed on the cruiser—but then he reflected that he'd have to invite Chandra and decided against it.

No one was in a mood for amusement anyway. Not with Termaine coming closer and closer, and the memory of Bai-do fresh in everyone's mind.

After breakfast the next morning, Martinez occupied himself with the list of Authorized Names. When the Shaa made a conquest, they produced lists with names authorized for children. Names with subversive content—Freedom, Prince—were forbidden, along with names relating to superstition or other irrational beliefs contrary to the Praxis.

Since the conquest thousands of years ago, humanity had changed in countless ways, but the names had stayed the same.

Not that this was a particular hardship: there were still thousands of names to choose from, all sanitized by higher authority. Martinez liked the long list, because he could spend hours at it, and he could think about his unborn child the entire time.

Perhaps his child could be called Pandora, “All Gifts.” Or Roderick, “Renowned Ruler.” Or Esmé, “Beloved.”

If male, he could be named after Terza's father, Maurice, or his own, Marcus, except that he didn't quite understand what the names meant. “Moor” and “Of Mars,” all right, but what were Moors and Mars?

If she were a girl, she would surely be beautiful, and therefore could be named Kyla, or Linette, or Damalis.

Pity that he couldn't simply name his child “Genius,” because surely that would apply better than anything.

Martinez glanced up at the sound of purposeful footsteps, and looked up to see Captain Lord Gomberg Fletcher standing in the door of his office. Fletcher wore his full dress uniform, with white gloves and the ceremonial sickle-shaped knife at his waist.

Martinez jumped to his feet and braced. “Lord Captain!” he said.

Fletcher looked at him from his deep-set eyes. “I'd be obliged if you'd join me, Captain Martinez.”

“Certainly, my lord.” Martinez began to walk around the desk, then hesitated. “Should I change into full dress, my lord?”

“That won't be necessary, Lord Captain. Come along, if you please.”

Martinez left his office and joined the captain, who was accompanied also by Lord Sabir Mersenne, the fourth lieutenant, and Marsden, the captain's short, bald secretary, both also in full dress. Without another word, Fletcher turned and began walking down the corridor, the others following. Martinez wondered if he should have worn full dress when eating breakfast by himself, or at least should be embarrassed that he hadn't.

Fletcher's silver-embossed scabbard clanked faintly on the end of its chain. Martinez had never seen the captain wear his knife, not even at his very formal dinners.

The party went down two decks, leaving behind officers' country and the haunts of the enlisted. The captain marched to a hatch and knocked with a gloved hand.

The hatch was opened by Master Engineer Thuc, whose towering figure nearly filled the doorway before he stepped back to reveal the engine control room. Beneath panels showing strong-thewed characters working with huge levers and winches on some impossibly antique machinery, the control room crew were lined up, braced, and spotlessly turned out.

Apparently Captain Fletcher was conducting him on one of his frequent inspections. The captain was a demon for inspections and musters, and usually inspected some part of the ship every day that
Illustrious
wasn't engaged in some other crucial business. Today was the engine division's turn, but Martinez could not imagine why he had been invited along. He wasn't a line officer, but staff, and not in Fletcher's chain of command—the state of
Illustrious
's engines was none of his business.

So while he watched Fletcher and his two subordinates crawl over the engine control room, passing white-gloved fingers over the glossy surfaces, Martinez wondered why he had been summoned to observe this ritual, and paranoia soon began to scuttle through his mind on chitinous insect legs. Surely this had to do with Chandra Prasad. Surely Fletcher suspected him of being her lover, and the inspection was part of an elaborate revenge plot.

The captain found flaws—a suspicious creak in an acceleration cage that indicated a worn part, a scratch on the transparent cover of a gauge, an emergency radiation suit carelessly stowed—and then the party went on to look at the engine department's storage lockers, at the heavily shielded antihydrogen compartments, and—after donning ear protection—at the massive reactor that powered the ship and the huge turbopumps that operated the thermal exchange system.

Martinez knew that in the reactor room the noise was hellish, but his earphones automatically pulsed out sound waves that canceled that of the pumps, and all he heard in his ears was a distant white noise. But his
body
reacted to the sound: he could feel the vibration in his bones and in his soft organs, and when he touched a wall or pipe.

Fletcher stroked the pumps with white-gloved fingers, found them clean, and then returned to the engine control room so that his questions might be heard. Thuc followed the captain in docile silence, his muscular body looming over Fletcher's shoulder except when he darted forward to open a hatch or a locker door.

“You've changed the filters on the main pump recently?”

“Just after Protipanu, my lord,” Thuc said. “We aren't due for another change for two months.”

“Very good. And the pump itself?”

“We'll swap it out in another…” Thuc considered his answer, his eyes focused somewhere above the captain's left shoulder. “…thirty-eight days, my lord.”

“Very well.” The captain tugged his white gloves over his wrists and smoothed the fine kidskin over his fingers. “I'll just inspect your crew then.”

He marched down the line of engine crew, stopping to make an occasional comment about dress or deportment. At the end of the line he encountered Thuc again, marched about him, then nodded.

“Very good, Thuc,” he said. “Excellent marks, as always.”

“Thank you, Lord Captain.” A hint of a smile touched his lips.

When Fletcher moved, he was so fast that Martinez failed to see it properly and could only reconstruct the action later, out of fragments of memory. The sickle-shaped blade sang from the sheath, whistled through the air, and buried itself in Thuc's throat. A crescent of arterial blood splattered the mural behind Thuc's head.

Thuc was too large a man to fall all at once. First his shoulders dropped, and then his knees gave way. His barrel chest sank, his stomach sagged, and then—as Fletcher's knife cleared his throat—Thuc's head lolled down. It was only then that he fell like a tower of wooden blocks kicked by a careless child.

Martinez's heart began to beat again, roaring in his ears. He looked at Fletcher in shock.

Fletcher looked expressionlessly at the body with his ice-blue eyes, and took a step away from the spreading pool of red. He flicked scarlet from his blade with a movement of his wrist.

The smell of blood hit Martinez's senses, and he bit down hard on the stomach that was trying to quease its way past his throat.

“Marsden,” Fletcher said, “call the doctor to examine the body, and have him bring a stretcher party to carry it away. Cho,” to a staring petty officer, “you are now in charge of the engineering department. Once the doctor is done, call the off-duty watch to help you police this…untidiness. In the meantime, I'd appreciate a cleaning cloth.”

Cho nearly ran to one of the storage lockers, returned with a cloth, and handed it with bloodless fingers to the captain. Fletcher used it to clean the knife blade and mop some of the red off his tunic, then threw the cloth to the deck.

A pale-faced young recruit swayed, then toppled to the floor in a dead faint. Fletcher ignored him and turned again to Cho.

“Cho,” he said, “I trust you will maintain Engineer Thuc's high standards.” He nodded to the control room crew, then turned and made his way out.

Martinez followed, his nerves leaping. He wanted to flee Fletcher's company, to barricade himself in his quarters with a pistol and several bottles of brandy, the first for protection and the second for comfort.

He looked left and right at Marsden and Mersenne, and saw their expressions mirroring his own thoughts.

“Captain Martinez,” Fletcher said. The words made Martinez start.

“Yes, Lord Captain?” He was moderately surprised that he managed three whole words without stumbling, screaming, or falling into dumb silence.

Fletcher reached the companionway that led to the deck above and turned to Martinez.

“Do you know why I invited you along this morning?”

“No, my lord.”

He had managed another three words. He was making real progress. Soon he might be walking on his own and tying his own shoelaces.

Martinez found himself very aware of the captain's right hand, the hand that would reach across his body to draw the knife. He found his own hands ready to lurch forward and seize Fletcher's forearm if the hand approached the hilt.

He hoped that Fletcher did not see that he was so aware of his right hand. He tried not to stare at it.

“I asked you along so that you could report to Squadron Commander Chen,” Fletcher said, “and tell her exactly what just occurred.”

“Yes, Lord Captain.”

“I don't want her hearing a rumor, or getting a distorted version.”

Distorted version.
As if there was a version that would make this at all understandable.

Martinez searched his numbed mind and found a question, but the question required more than three words and he took a second or two to organize his thoughts.

“My lord,” he asked, “do you wish me to give Lady Michi the reason for your…your action?”

The captain straightened slightly. A superior smile touched his lips.

“Only that it was my privilege,” he said.

A chill shimmered up Martinez's spine.

“Very good, Lord Captain,” he said.

Fletcher turned and led up the companionway. At the top he met the ship's doctor, Lord Yuntai Xi, who was going down, followed by his assistant carrying his bag.

“The engine control room, Lord Doctor,” Fletcher said. “A fatality.”

The doctor gave him a curious look and nodded.

“Thank you, Lord Captain. Can you tell me—”

“Best you see for yourself, Lord Doctor. I won't detain you.”

Xi stroked his little white beard, then nodded and began his descent. Fletcher led the party up three decks, to the deck he shared with the squadron commander, then turned to face the two lieutenants. “Thank you, my lords,” he said. “I won't be needing you any further.” He turned to his secretary. “Marsden, I'll need you to enter the death in the log.”

Martinez walked with Mersenne to the squadcom's door. He felt a tingling in his back, as if he were expecting the captain to draw his knife and lunge at him. He didn't quite dare look at the lieutenant, and he had a feeling that Mersenne wasn't looking at him either.

He came to the squadcom's door, and without saying anything to Lord Mersenne, stopped and knocked.

Lady Michi's orderly, Vandervalk, opened the door, and Martinez asked to see the squadcom. Vandervalk said she'd check and left him waiting, then returned a few minutes later to say that the lady squadcom would meet Martinez in her office.

Lady Michi arrived a few minutes later, carrying her morning tea in a gold-rimmed cup with the Chen family crest. Martinez jumped from his chair and braced. The breath of air on his exposed throat gave him a sudden shiver.

“As you were,” Michi said. Her tone was abstracted, her gaze focused on papers that waited on her desk. She sat in her straight-backed chair.

“How can I help you, Captain?”

“Lord Captain Fletcher—” Martinez began, and then his voice failed him. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Lord Captain Fletcher asked that I inform you that he's just executed Master Engineer Thuc.”

Suddenly he had the squadcom's full attention. She placed her cup very carefully on a felt coaster, then looked up. “Executed? How?”

“With his top-trimmer. During an inspection. It was…very sudden.”

He realized now that Fletcher must have rehearsed the move. You couldn't cut a throat that efficiently unless you practiced.

He imagined Fletcher alone in his cabin, drawing the knife over and over as he slashed an imaginary throat, the cold blue eyes glittering, the superior smile on his lips.

Michi's gaze intensified. Her fingers drummed thoughtfully on the desktop. “Did Captain Fletcher give a reason?”

“No, my lady. He said only that it was his privilege.”

Michi softly drew in her breath. “I see,” she said.

Fletcher was technically correct: any officer had the authority to execute any subordinate at any time, for any reason. There were practical reasons why this didn't happen very often, including lawsuits in civil court from the victim's patron clan; and usually when such a thing happened, the officer produced an elaborate justification.

Fletcher very simply stood on his privilege. That had to be very, very rare.

Michi turned her eyes deliberately away and took a deliberate sip of her tea. “Do you have anything to add?” she said.

“Just that the captain planned it in advance. He wanted me there to witness it and to report to you.”