The Mammoth Book of SF Wars (38 page)

Sula heard Julien curse as they drew even. Then they were in another turn, metal wheels sliding, and Julien’s carriage loomed close as it skidded towards them. Their driver was forced into a wider turn to avoid collision, and Julien pulled ahead.

“Damn!” Casimir jumped from his seat and leaped to join the driver on the box. One pale hand dug in a pocket. “Twenty zeniths if you beat him!” he called, and slapped a coin down on the box. Twenty zeniths would buy the coach, the pai-car, and the driver twice over.

The driver responded with a frantic hiss. The pai-car seemed to have caught the fey mood of the passengers and gave a determined cry as it accelerated.

The road narrowed as it crossed a canal, and Casimir’s coach was on the heels of Julien’s as they crossed the bridge. Sula caught a whiff of sour canal water, heard the startled exclamation of someone on the quay, and then the coach hit a bump and Sula was tossed in the car like a pea in a bottle. Then they were in another turn, and Sula was pressed to one side, the leather bending slightly under her weight.

She gave a laugh at the realization that her whole life’s adventure could end here, that she could die in a ridiculous carriage accident or find herself under arrest, that her work – the war against the Naxids, her team, her many identities – all could be destroyed in reckless, demented instant …

Serve me right, she thought.

The laboured breathing of the pai-car echoed between the buildings. “Twenty more!” Casimir slapped another coin on the box.

The carriage swayed alongside that of Julien. He was standing in the car, urging his driver on, but his pai-car looked dead in its harness. Then there was a sudden glare of headlights, the clatter of a vehicle collision alarm, and Julien’s driver gave an urgent tug on the reins, cutting his bird’s speed and swerving behind Casimir’s carriage to avoid collision with a taxi taking home a singing chorus of Cree.

Sula heard Julien’s yelp of protest. Casimir laughed in triumph as the singers disappeared in their wake.

They had passed through the silent business district and into a more lively area of Grandview. Sula saw people on the street, cabs parked by the kerb waiting for customers. Ahead she saw an intersection, a traffic signal flashing a command to stop.

“Keep going!” Casimir cried, and slapped down another coin. The driver gave Casimir a wild, gold-eyed stare, but obeyed.

Sula heard a rumble ahead, saw a white light. The traffic signal blazed in the darkness. Her heart leaped into her throat.

The carriage dashed into the intersection. Casimir’s laughter rang in her ears. There was a brilliant white light, a blaring collision alarm, the wail of tyres. Sula threw her arms protectively over her head as the pai-car gave a wail of terror.

The edge of the carriage bit Sula’s ribs as the vehicle was slammed sideways. A side-lamp exploded into bits of flying crystal. One large silver wheel went bounding down the road ahead of the truck that had torn it away, and the carriage fell heavily onto the torn axle. Sparks arced in the night as the panicked bird tried to drag the tilted carriage from the scene.

The axle grated near Sula’s ear. She blinked into the night just in time to see Casimir lose his balance on the box and fall towards her, arms thrashing in air. She made a desperate lunge for the high side of the coach and managed to avoid being crushed as he fell heavily onto the seat.

Clinging to the high side of the coach, she turned to him. Casimir was helpless with laughter, a deep base sound that echoed the grinding of the axle on pavement. Sula allowed herself to slide down the seat onto him, wrapped him in her arms, and stopped his laughter with a kiss.

The panting pai-car came to a halt. Sula heard its snarls of frustration as it turned in the traces and tried to savage the driver with its razor teeth, then heard the driver expertly divert its striking head with slaps. She could hear the truck reversing, the other pai-car padding to a halt, the sound of footsteps as people ran to the scene.

She could hear Casimir’s heart pounding in his chest.

“I conceive that no one is injured,” said the burbling voice of a Cree.

This time it was Sula who was helpless with laughter. She and Casimir crawled from the wreckage of the carriage just as the apricot-coloured limousine rolled silently to a stop, the Torminel guards appearing in time to prevent a very angry Daimong truck driver from bludgeoning someone. Julien and Casimir passed around enough money to leave everyone happy, the carriage drivers in particular, and then the party piled into the limousine for the ride to the Hotel of Many Blessings.

Sula sat in Casimir’s lap and kissed him for the entire ride.

Sula insisted on taking a shower before joining him in bed. Then she insisted that he take a shower, too.

“We could have showered
together
,” Casimir grumbled.

“You could use a shave, too,” Sula pointed out.

He returned to bed, showered and shaved and scented with taswa-blossom soap.

“Hey!” he said in surprise. “You’re really a blonde!”

She gave a slow laugh. “That’s the least of my mysteries.”

An hour or so later, Sula decided to play a card or two, and told the room light to go on. Casimir gave a start and shielded his eyes. Sula crawled out of bed and looked for the package that held the clothing she’d worn at the beginning of the evening.

“Gredel, what are you
doing
?” Casimir complained.

“I have something to show you.” Sula dug in an inner pocket and removed the item she’d taken from the storage locker earlier in the evening. She opened the slim plastic case and showed Casimir her Fleet ID.

“I’m Caroline, Lady Sula,” she said. “I’m here fighting the Naxids.”

There was a moment of silence. Casimir squeezed his eyes shut for a long moment, as if in disbelief, and then opened them. “Shit,” he said.

Sula smiled at him. “I guess you know me well enough to buy me a new wardrobe,” she said. “If you still want to.”

The meeting with Julien’s father, Sergius Bakshi, occurred three days after the madcap carriage race, on an afternoon dark with racing clouds. Sula dressed for the meeting with care. In order that she look more like the person in the Fleet ID, she left off her contact lenses and bought a shoulder-length wig in her natural shade of blonde. She wore a military-style jacket in a tone of green that wasn’t quite the viridian of a Fleet uniform, but which she hoped suggested it. She brought Macnamara as an aide, or perhaps a body-guard, and bought him a similar jacket. She reminded herself to walk with the straight-backed, braced posture of the Fleet officer and not the less formal slouch she’d adopted as Gredel.

She wore a pistol stuck down her waistband in back. Macnamara had a sidearm in a shoulder holster.

These were less for defence than to shoot themselves, or each other, in the event things went wrong.

There was a lot of shooting going on these days. The Naxids had shot sixty-odd people in retaliation for the firebombing of a Motor Patrol vehicle in the Old Third, and then they’d gone into the Old Third and shot about a dozen people at random.

The meeting took place in a private club called Silk Winds on the second floor of an office building in a Lai-own neighbourhood. Casimir met her on the pavement out front, dressed in his long coat and carrying his walking stick. His eyes went wide as he saw her, and then he grinned and gave one of his elaborate bows. From his bent position he looked up at her.

“You still don’t look much like a maths teacher,” he said.

“Good thing then,” she said, in her drawling Peer voice. His eyebrows lifted in surprise, and he straightened.

“Now
that’s
not the voice I heard in bed the other night.”

From over her shoulder Sula heard Macnamara’s intake of breath. Great, Sula thought, now she’d have a scandalized and sulking team member.

“Don’t be vulgar,” she admonished, still in her Peer voice.

Casimir bowed again. “Apologies, my lady.”

He led her into the building. The lobby was cavernous, brilliant with polished copper, and featured a twice-life-size bronze statue of a Lai-own holding, for some allegorical reason beyond Sula’s comprehension, a large tetrahedron. Uniformed Lai-own security guards in blue jackets and tall pointed shakos gave them searching looks, but did not approach. A moving stair took Sula to the second floor and to the polished copper door of the club, on which had been placed a card informing them that the club had been closed for a private function.

Casimir swung the door open and led Sula and Macnamara into the shadow-filled club. Faint sunlight from the darkened sky gleamed fitfully off copper fittings and polished wood. Lai-own security – this time without the silly hats – appeared from the gloom and checked everyone very thoroughly for listening devices. They found the sidearms but didn’t touch them. Apparently they discounted the possibility that Sula and her party might be assassins.

Casimir, adjusting his long coat after the search, led them to a back room. He knocked on a nondescript door.

Sula smoothed the lapel of her jacket and straightened her shoulders and reminded herself to act like a senior Fleet commander inspecting a motley group of dock workers. She couldn’t give orders to these people: she had to use a different kind of authority. Being a Peer and a Fleet officer were the only cards she had left to play. She had to be the embodiment of the Fleet and the legitimate government and the whole body of Peers, and she would have to carry them all along through sheer weight of her own expectation.

Julien opened the door, and his eyes went wide when he saw Sula. Suddenly nervous, he backed hastily from the door.

Sula walked into the room, her spine straight, hands clasped behind her. I
own
this room, she told herself, but then she saw the eyes of her audience and her heart gave a lurch.

Two Terrans, a Lai-own, and a Daimong sat in the shadowy, dark-panelled room, facing her from behind a table that looked like a slab of pavement torn from the street. Nature had made the Daimong expressionless but the others were so blank-faced that they might have all been carved from the same block of granite.

She heard Macnamara stamp to a halt behind her right shoulder, a welcome support. Casimir stepped around them and stood to one side of the room.

“Gentlemen,” he said, and again made his elaborate bow. “May I present Lieutenant the Lady Sula.”

“I’m Sergius Bakshi,” said one of the Terrans. He looked nothing like his son Julien: he had an oval face and a razor-cut moustache and the round, unfeeling eyes of a great predator fish. He turned to the Lai-own. “This is Am Tan-dau, who has very kindly arranged for us to meet here.”

Tan-dau did not look kindly. He slumped in the padded chair that cradled his keel-like breastbone, his bright, fashionable clothes wrinkled on him as they might on a sack of feathers. His skin was dull, and nictating membranes were half-deployed across his eyes. He looked a hundred years old, but Sula could tell from the dark feathery hair on each side of his head that he was still young.

Bakshi continued. “These are friends who may be interested in any proposition you may have for us.” He nodded at the Terran. “This is Mr Patel.” A young man with glossy hair that curled over the back of his collar, Patel didn’t even blink in response when Sula offered him a small nod.

The Daimong’s name was Sagas.

Sula knew, through Casimir, that the four were a kind of informal commission that regulated illegal activities on this end of Zanshaa City. Bakshi’s word carried the most weight, if only because he’d managed to reach middle age without being killed.

“Gentlemen,” Sula drawled in her Peer voice. “May I present my aide, Mr Macnamara.”

Four pairs of eyes flicked to Macnamara, then back to Sula. Her throat was suddenly dry, and she resisted the impulse to clear her throat.

Bakshi folded large, doughy hands on the table in front of him and spoke. “What may we do for you, Lady Sula?”

Sula’s answer was swift. “Help me kill Naxids.”

Even that request, which Sula hoped might startle them a little, failed to provoke a reaction.

Bakshi deliberately folded his hands on the table before him. His eyes never left hers. “Assuming for the sake of argument that this is remotely possible,” he said, “why should we agree to attack a group so formidable that even the Fleet has failed to defeat them?”

Sula looked down at him. If he wanted a staring contest, she thought, then she’d give him one. “The Fleet isn’t done with the Naxids,” she said. “Not by a long shot. I don’t know whether you have the means to verify this or not, but I know that even now the Fleet is raiding deep into Naxid territory. The Fleet is ripping the guts out of the rebellion while the Naxid force is stuck here guarding the capital.”

Bakshi gave a subtle movement of his shoulders that might have been a strangled shrug. “Possibly,” he said. “But that doesn’t alter the fact that the Naxids are
here.
”

“How do we know.” Tan-dau’s voice was a mumble. “How do we know that she is not sent by the Naxids to provoke us?”

It was difficult to be certain to whom Tan-dau addressed the question, but Sula decided to intercept it. “I killed a couple thousand Naxids at Magaria,” Sula said. “You may remember that I received a decoration for it. I don’t think they’d let me switch sides even if I wanted to.”

“Lady Sula is supposed to be dead,” Tan-dau said, to no one in particular.

“Well.” Sula permitted herself a slight smile. “You know how accurate the Naxids have been about everything else.”

“How do we know she is the real …” Tan-dau’s sentence drifted away before he could finish it. Sula waited until it was clear that no more words were coming, and then answered.

“You can’t know,” Sula said. She brought her Fleet ID out of her jacket. “You’re welcome to examine my identification, but of course the Naxids could have faked it. But I think you know—” she gazed at them all in turn “—if the Naxids wanted to target you, they wouldn’t need me. They’ve declared martial law; they’d just send their people after you, and no one would ever see you alive again.”