Conventions of War (25 page)

The door opened to Casimir's thumbprint. The room was swathed in shiny draperies, and the furniture was low and comfortable. A table was laid with a cold supper, meats and cheeses and flat wroncho bread, pickles, chutneys, elaborate tarts and cakes, and bottles lying in a tray of shaved ice. It had obviously been intended all along that the evening end here.

Sula put together an open-faced sandwich—nice Vigo plates, she noticed, a clean modern design—then began to rehearse her exit. Surely it was not coincidental that a pair of bedrooms were very handy.

I've got to work in the morning.
It certainly sounded more plausible than
I've got to go organize a counterrebellion.

Casimir put his walking stick in a rack that had probably been made for it specially and reached for a pair of small packages, each with glossy wrapping and a brilliant scarlet ribbon. He presented one each to Sula and Veronika. “With thanks for a wonderful evening.”

The gift proved to be perfume, a crystal bottle containing Sengra, made with the musk of the rare and reclusive atauba tree-crawlers of Paycahp. The small vial in her hand might have set Casimir back twenty zeniths or more—probably more, since Sengra was exactly the sort of thing that wouldn't be coming down from orbit for years, not with the ring gone.

Veronika opened her package and popped her eyes open wide—that gesture was going to look silly on her when she was fifty, Sula thought—and gave a squeal of delight. She opted for a more moderate response and kissed Casimir's cheek.

There was the sting of stubble against her lips. He looked at her with calculation. There was a very male scent to him.

She was about to bring up the work she had to do in the morning when there was a chime from Casimir's sleeve display. He gave a scowl of annoyance and answered.

“Casimir,” came a strange voice. “We've got a situation.”

“Wait,” he said, left the room and closed the door behind him. Sula munched a pickle while the others waited in silence.

Casimir returned with the scowl still firm on his face. Without a trace of apology, he looked at Sula and Veronika and said, “Sorry, but the evening's over. Something's come up.”

Veronika pouted and reached for her jacket. Casimir reached for Sula's arm to draw her to the door. She looked at him. “What's just happened?”

He gave her an impatient, insolent look—it was none of her business, after all—then thought better of it and shrugged. “Not what's happened, but what's going to happen in a few hours. The Naxids are declaring food rationing.”

“They're
what
?” Sula's first reaction was outrage. Casimir opened the door for her, and she hesitated there, thinking. He quivered with impatience.

“Congratulations,” she said finally. “The Naxids have just made you very rich.”

“I'll call you,” he said.

“I'll be rich too,” she said. “Ration cards will cost you a hundred apiece.”

“A
hundred
?” For a moment it was Casimir's turn to be outraged.

“Think about it,” Sula said. “Think how much they'll be worth to you.”

They held each other's eyes for a moment, then both broke into laughter. “We'll talk price later,” Casimir said, and hustled her into the vestibule along with Veronika, who showed Sula a five-zenith coin.

“Julien gave it to me for the cab,” she said triumphantly. “And we get to keep the change!”

“You'd better hope the cab
has
change for a fiver,” Sula said, and Veronika thought for a moment.

“We'll get change in the lobby.”

A Daimong night clerk gave them change, and Veronika's nose wrinkled at his corpse scent. On the way to her apartment Sula learned that Veronika was a former model and now an occasional club hostess.

“I'm an unemployed math teacher,” Sula said.

Veronika's eyes went wide again. “Wow,” she said.

After letting Veronika off, Sula had the Torminel driver take her within two streets of the communal Riverside apartment, after which she walked the distance to the building by the light of the stars. Overhead, the broken arcs of the ring were a curved line of black against the faintly glowing sky. Outside the apartment she gazed up for a long moment until she discerned the pale gleam of the white ceramic pot in the front window. It was in the position that meant
Someone is in the apartment and it is safe
.

The lock on the building's front door, the one that read her fingerprint, worked only erratically, but this time she caught it by surprise and the door opened. She went up the stair, then used her key on the apartment lock.

Macnamara was asleep on the couch, with a pair of pistols on the table in front of him, along with a grenade.

“Hi, Dad,” Sula said as he blinked awake. “Junior brought me home safe, just like he said he would.”

Macnamara looked embarrassed. Sula gave him a grin.

“What were you planning on doing with a
grenade
?” she asked.

He didn't reply. Sula took off her jacket and called up the computer that resided in the desk. “I've got work to do,” she said. “You'd better get some sleep, because I've got a job for you first thing in the morning.”

“What's that?” He rose from the couch, scratching his sleep-tousled hair.

“The market opens at 0727, right?”

“Yes.”

Sula sat herself at the desk. “I need you to buy as much food as you can carry. Canned, dried, bottled, freeze-dried. Get the biggest sack of flour they have, and another sack of beans. Condensed milk would be good. Get Spence to help you carry it all.”

“What's going on?” Macnamara was bewildered.

“Food rationing.”

“What?”
Sula could hear the outrage in his voice as she called up a text program.

“Two reasons for it I can think of,” she said. “First, issuing everyone a ration card will be a way of reprocessing every ID on the planet…help them weed out troublemakers and saboteurs. Second…” She held up one hand and made the universal gesture of tossing a coin in her palm. “Artificial scarcities are going to make some Naxids very, very rich.”

“Damn them,” Macnamara breathed.

“
We'll
do very well,” Sula pointed out. “We'll quadruple our prices on everything on the ration—you don't suppose they'd be good enough to ration
tobacco,
would you?—and we'll make a fortune.”

“Damn them,” Macnamara said again.

Sula gave him a pointed look. “Good night,” she said. “Dad.”

He flushed and shambled to bed. Sula turned to her work.

“What if they ration
alcohol
?” she said aloud as the thought struck her. There would be stills in half the bathrooms in Zanshaa, processing potatoes, taswa peels, apple cores, whatever they could find.

In the next few hours she roughed out an essay for
Resistance
denouncing the food ration. Her previous job, before she'd volunteered to get herself killed with partisan forces, had been with the Logistics Consolidation Executive, which had been deeply involved with cataloging and deployment of resources. She knew that, as the Praxis demanded, the planet of Zanshaa was self-sufficient in foodstuffs, and that from the practical point of view of providing food to the population, the ration was nonsense. She quoted numerous statistics from memory, and was able to get the rest out of public data sources.

By the time she finished, dawn was greening in the east. She took a shower to wash the tobacco smell out of her hair and collapsed into bed just as she heard Macnamara's alarm go off.

She rose after noon, the apartment already hot with the brilliant sun of summer. As she rubbed her swollen eyelids and blinked in the sunlight flooding the front room, she began to remember what it was like to be a clique member's girlfriend.

And then she had another thought. Thus far Action Team 491 had been selling her own property out of the back of a truck, a business that was irregular but legal. But once the ration came into effect, selling cocoa and coffee off the ration would be against the law. The team wouldn't just be participating in informal economic activity, they'd be committing a
crime.

People who committed crimes needed protection. Casimir was going to be more necessary than ever.

“
Damn
it,” she said.

M
acnamara failed to procure a large stash of food. Police were already in force at the market, and foodsellers had been told not to sell large quantities to any one person. He wisely decided to avoid attracting attention and bought only quantities that might be considered reasonable for a family of three.

The announcement of rationing had been made while Sula slept and the food marts were packed. Tobacco had not been included, but Sula couldn't hope for everything. Citizens were given twenty days to report to their local police station in order to apply for a ration card. The reason given by the government for the imposition of rationing was the destruction of the ring and the decline in food imports.

The news reports announced that certain well-established Naxid clans, out of pure civic spirit, had agreed to spare the government any expense, and would instead use their own means to manage the planet's food supplies. The Jagirin clan, whose head had been temporary interior minister during the changeover from the old government to the new, the Ummir clan, whose head happened to be the Minister of Police, the Ushgays, the Kulukrafs…people who, even if some of them hadn't been with the rebellion from the beginning, clearly found it in their interest to support it now.

Sula reworked her
Resistance
essay to include a list of the cooperating clans, along with a suggestion that anyone working for the ration authority was a legitimate target of war.

The Naxids, she thought, had just created a whole new class of target.

Naxids were placed in every police station to monitor the process of acquiring ration cards, and the Naxids wore the black uniform of the Legion of Diligence, the organization that investigated crimes against the Praxis. All members of the Legion had been evacuated from Zanshaa before the arrival of the Naxid fleet, so apparently the new government had reformed the Legion, probably with personnel from the Naxid police.

Another
class of target, Sula thought.

She then sent out the usual fifty thousand copies through the Records Office broadcast node. The next few days were spent making deliveries, arguing with restaurant and club managers about her increased prices, and watching resentment build among the city's population. Fury against the Naxids was now quite open, and even solid, prosperous citizens felt free to vent their rage publicly.

She wondered how people like One-Step would fare at acquiring their ration card. What, for instance, would One-Step claim as an occupation?

Sula kept a watch on the death certificates filed in the Records Office and discovered that a minor member of the Ushgay clan had died in a bomb explosion, and a Naxid police officer had been run over by his own car. The death certificate gave no indication how the officer had managed this, but she decided that the next number of
Resistance
would claim the incident as an action of the Lord Richard Li wing of the secret army.

Sula bypassed the local police and the Legion of Diligence and acquired her team's ration cards directly from the Records Office, splicing into the record the signatures and testaments of perfectly legitimate police officers and members of the Legion. She acquired a card for each of the team's many backup identities and had each mailed to the communal Riverside apartment. She later changed the address in the records so it wouldn't seem odd that so many people were sharing the same address.

She also acquired a card in the name of Michael Saltillo, the identity she'd established for Casimir. It might come in handy at some point.

Three days after the announcement about rationing, Sula was making deliveries in the High City, and called Sidney. He said that progress had been made and invited her to visit the shop.

Because she didn't know Sidney well enough to assess whether it was safe, she left Spence and Macnamara in the truck, parked inconspicuously down the street. “If I'm ambushed,” she said, “try to pull me out. But if you can't, make sure one of your bullets finishes me.”

Spence looked as if she weren't listening. In Macnamara she saw horror, then acceptance. He nodded and said nothing.

This time she was able to go in the front door. The shop had been reopened, and the display cases and racks showed only weapons suitable to Naxid anatomy.

Sidney waited behind a tall ceramic desk, his mustachios newly waxed and elaborately curled. “That was fast,” he said in his ruined voice.

“Efficiency is my motto.”

From his desk, Sidney locked the front door and reprogrammed the sign out front to announce that the shop would reopen in an hour. “Come along,” he said, and took her to the back room.

The room was the same model of neatness and regularity it had been a few days earlier, though the smell of hashish was more subdued than on Sula's first visit. On the immaculate surface of a workbench she saw a short rifle. Sidney turned on a lamp, picked it up and held it to the light.

“The Sidney Mark One, if you like,” he said. “I went for a simple firearm—nothing requiring a heavy battery pack or elaborate technology.”

Light gleamed on the rifle's matte-black surfaces. It was obviously crude, with a stock made of pieces of carbon-fiber rod, a barrel that might have originally been a resinous pipe fitting, a receiver of metal, and iron sights.

“That was fast,” Sula said.

“Simple firearms are easy, if you don't want elegance,” Sidney said. “It helped that the gun's completely illegal—I didn't have to add the unlocking code and thumbprint-recognition pad required by law. Computer-assisted lathes did the work. The hard part was the ammunition.”

He reached into a drawer, withdrew a tubelike magazine, and snapped it into place. “I wanted a traditional propellant, one that carries its own oxidant. I wanted it caseless so people wouldn't have to worry about making cartridges.” He rooted around in the drawer and came up with some small yellow cylinders, like cigarette filters. “The propellant wasn't hard,” he said. “It's standard Fleet issue DD6 and will fire on a planet's surface, in the vacuum of space, and underwater. Its ingredients are readily obtainable, and you can mix the stuff on your kitchen table and bake it in an oven.” He handed a few of the cylinders to Sula. They felt dry and grainy. She pictured grandmotherly types turning them out on cookie sheets and smiled.

“You can cast the bullets out of metal or hard plastic, then stick them to the propellant with epoxide,” Sidney said. “Unfortunately, neither bullet type will penetrate standard police armor, but they'll be useful against softer targets.”

Sula examined the propellant cylinders again. “What do you use for a detonator?” she asked.

Sidney gave a grim smile. “I didn't want people messing around with mercury fulminate and the like. Blow their own fingers off.”

“That's the problem we've been having with our bombs.”

“Maybe I can help you with that. DD6, you see, will ignite at high temperature, so I built a standard laser-emitting diode into the breech.” A few competent movements of his hands broke down the weapon and held the part to the light. “This is the most critical piece of the gun, and it can be scavenged from practically every piece of communications equipment made. Comm units, music and video players…there's no way the Naxids can prevent people from acquiring as many of these as they like. It will run off a little micro battery you can acquire anywhere. The operator will have to replace the diode every few hundred rounds, but it's a quick job and you can do it in the field.”

Sidney reassembled the gun. “Breaks down easily,” he said, “and reassembles without fuss. The parts are machined to a fairly low tolerance, which means there's a lot of slop in the movement and parts will wear out quickly, but it'll stand hard handling without jamming. There's no real safety, but you can lock the bolt back—so. This lever”—Flicking it—“switches from single shot to full automatic.”

“May I handle it?”

He smiled. “Of course.”

The gun was clean and cool in Sula's hands. She raised it to her shoulder and felt the balance. The tubular butt was padded against recoil with scraps of foam and shiny tape, and it felt like a toy.

“Want to fire it?” Sidney asked.

Sula looked at him in surprise. “We can do that
here
?”

In answer, Sidney spoke a few words into the air. There was a hum of machinery, and a slab of the floor lifted on hinges as a small elevator rose.

“I use it to move some of the heavier merchandise,” he said. He stepped onto the elevator, and Sula lay the rifle carefully against her shoulder and joined him. Sidney spoke another few words and the elevator descended.

Below the shop there was a darkened room that smelled of must and metal. Sidney turned on lights and Sula saw a storage area—largely empty—and a pair of wide epoxide sewer pipes that ran the length of the shop in the direction of the street, forming a firing range with targets at the far end. Sidney gestured at the far wall, where a target already lay waiting. He reached for a pair of ear protectors from a rack and placed them comfortably on his head. “Be my guest,” he said.

Sula got ear protection, braced the rifle on her hip and flicked the bolt with her thumb to let it slam forward. She put the rifle against her shoulder, gazed through the simple iron sights, took a calming breath, let it out, and squeezed the trigger. The bang was very loud in the small space, and there was very little recoil, which was normal with caseless ammunition. A hole appeared in the filmy plastic surface of the target, a hand's breadth off center.

“Not bad,” Sidney said. “This gun's strong point isn't accuracy.”

Sula fired a few more rounds to get the feel of the weapon, then clicked to full automatic. She half expected the smooth, continuous roar of the weapons she'd trained with, the rifles that could cycle at over a hundred rounds per second, but instead there was a reliable chug-chug-chug action, slow enough so she could keep the weapon on target.

She fired several bursts, and then the magazine was empty. She lowered the rifle, and Sidney reached over her shoulder to press the keypad that would bring the target swaying on its cable to her. She'd riddled the center section.

“Not very slick, is it?” Sidney said. “It won't match police or Fleet weapons in a stand-up fight. But in a surprise attack or an assassination, it should do the job.”

Sula removed the magazine and looked at the weapon. “Show me how to break it down.”

“Certainly. And while I do that, tell me how many other people are in this insurrection of yours.”

She looked at him. “Sorry. Even if I knew, I couldn't tell you.”

His look was somber. “You can't have very many. Otherwise you wouldn't need me to design your weapons for you.” He smiled. “And you
really
wouldn't need PJ Ngeni.”

Sula suppressed a burst of laughter. “Well,” she said, “let's just say that the Naxids cut down our numbers after the Axtattle ambush.”

Sidney's eyes were intent. “Yes. So there's really no secret government to report to, is there?”

Sula hesitated, then said, “I'd appreciate it if you didn't tell anyone that. PJ in particular.”

He flashed another smile. “He
does
enjoy being a secret agent, doesn't he?”

Sula felt a warning tingle run up her spine. “How much does he enjoy it, exactly?”

Sidney caught her meaning at once. “I don't think he's being indiscreet,” he said. “But he comes over here and babbles. I think he's very happy that he finally has someone to talk to about all this.” He shook his head. “And the girl threw him over too, didn't she?”

“Yes. She did.”

He looked down at the floor. “The things people do for love.”

She frowned at him. “Why are
you
doing this?”

He glanced up, and there was a flash of teeth beneath the curling mustachios, a kind of snarl. “Because I hate the bastards, that's why.”

Love and hate, Sula thought. That kept things basic.

She had wondered why she herself was in this fight. The secret government was gone, and Lady Sula was officially dead: she could sit in some quiet part of town, sell chocolate and tobacco, and wait in comfort for the war to end.

And so she could, if it weren't for love and hate. She hated the Naxids, and she loved Martinez and hated him. She hated the whole shambling, sick edifice that was the empire, and a part of her would rejoice in its ruin. She loved the part of a leader, the exhilaration of action, the sweetness of savagery and the satisfaction of a plan wellforged and well-executed. She hated herself but loved the parts she played, the masks she donned, one convincing falsehood after another. She loved the game of it, the way it could take the form of one of her mathematical puzzles, a complex equation with one variable after another, Casimir and the Records Office, deliveries and assassinations,
Resistance
and PJ and the Sidney Mark One rifle…

Sidney had the gun apart, and he was looking at her with frank interest. Sula collected herself, reassembled the rifle, then took it apart again.

He began to clean the weapon. “Can you take it home with you?” he asked.

She looked up at him. “I don't need it—my group's pretty well armed.”

“Yes, but I've got the whole design ready to download, and once you put the data in
Resistance,
I imagine my place will be searched, along with that of anyone who designs guns for a living. I don't want any part of it here.”

“I suppose.”

“You can take it disassembled into the Lower Town easily enough,” Sidney added. “I've noticed they don't search people
leaving
the High City.”

“And they don't search us going up much either,” Sula said. “The guards have got to recognize our truck, and they know we're just delivering food and such.”