Conventions of War (3 page)

And it was all my idea.
It had been Sula who first suggested destroying the ring, as a way of making it hard for the Naxids to rule the planet they had conquered. Somehow the credit for the idea had lodged with someone else, and somehow Sula herself had gotten lodged on the planet with Hong's action group, instead of flying away with the rest of the Fleet.

I should be up
there, she thought as she looked at the stars. In a warship driving deep into enemy territory, bringing the war to the Naxids, instead of living a hunted existence on the surface of the planet, scurrying from one bolt-hole to the next.

She thought of one person she knew was flying among the stars with the Fleet, and a lump formed in her throat.

Martinez,
she thought,
you bastard.

H
e could touch the silk of Sula's pale, perfect skin, feel the warmth and soft weight of her hair on his flesh. Her brilliant emerald eyes gazed at him fondly. He scented the rich fragrance of Sandama Twilight, her perfume. He tasted her lips. He felt the warmth of her breath as she whispered in his ear, and strained to catch the words.

The words remained forever beyond his grasp. Lord Gareth Martinez woke with a cry in the darkness of his cabin, and reached with a hand to catch at the phantom that had already fled.

He heard the steady roar of the cruiser's engines, the engines that were propelling
Illustrious
from the Bai-do system. He heard the whisper of air through the ducts. He heard the tread of a pair of shoes outside the cabin door, and felt sweat drying on the back of his neck.

Martinez undid the elastic web that kept him from floating out of his bed during occasional periods of weightlessness, and put his bare feet on the cool parquet floor. He rose from the bed and passed out of his sleeping cabin and into his office. He sat heavily in his chair and gazed down at his desk, at the images he'd set in its display, images of Lady Terza Chen, his wife.

Terza was beautiful, intelligent, accomplished, cultured, and heir to the Chen clan, a clan of the highest possible social standing. In normal circumstances she would be far beyond the reach of someone like Martinez, who came from an affluent but provincial clan, and who spoke with a barbarous accent he'd been unable to polish away. Terza's father served on the Fleet Control Board that determined Martinez's professional future. Her aunt was Martinez's commander. Their families had arranged their marriage just hours after the argument that had destroyed his relationship with Caroline Sula, and they had spent a bare seven days together before his duty called him away.

During those seven days she had conceived his child.

He gazed down at the images of Terza and knew that he didn't deserve her. He didn't desire her either.

He touched a hand to his lips. He could still taste Caroline Sula.

“Lights,” he said. He blinked in the sudden brightness, then blinked again at the sight of the wall murals, which for some inconceivable reason were of naked, winged children. He called up the navigation plots for the wormhole jump from the Bai-do system to Termaine.

Chenforce, seven ships of war commanded by Terza's aunt Michi Chen, had bypassed the Naxid fleet securing their conquest at Zanshaa, and had now driven deep into enemy-controlled space. They had wiped out a detachment of ten enemy warships at Protipanu, then raced through a series of systems, destroying merchant shipping, wormhole relay stations, and uncompleted warships.

And several billion people. The raid had worked brilliantly until Chenforce had come to Bai-do, where the Naxids in command had refused Michi Chen's orders and launched missiles from the planet's accelerator ring. In response, Squadron Commander Chen had ordered Bai-do's ring destroyed.

Tens of millions of people lived on the ring, and nearly five billion on the planet below. The great mass of the ring dropping onto the planet must have killed millions outright and imperiled the rest. Clouds of dust and debris rising high into the atmosphere from the impact would shroud the sun and smother the food crops. Without the elevators from the ring to the surface, there would be no way to deliver significant amounts of foodstuffs to the planet.

Most of those who had survived the ring's fall would die a slow, cold death from starvation.

One nightmare like Bai-do was bad enough. What was worse was that there could be more.

In a few days Chenforce would jump through one of Baido's wormholes into the Termaine system. Termaine was a wealthy world packed with industry and rich farmland that produced an overabundance of exports. Under normal circumstances Termaine's ring would host a hundred merchant vessels at a time. Naxid warships would probably be found under construction in its shipyards.

And if those warships fired at Chenforce from the ring, as had happened at Bai-do? The ring would be destroyed, along with the billions below it.

Martinez looked down into the depths of the three-dimensional navigation plot, at the little blue sphere, ringed with silver, that represented Termaine. He recalled the sight of the blue sphere of Bai-do as its doomed ring oscillated and then fell with slow, tragic majesty into the atmosphere. He remembered the sight of the impacts, the antimatter sparkling amid the great plumes of steam and dust and ruin.

Let them not call our bluff again,
he thought. Perhaps the Naxid high command thought it worthwhile to find out whether the raiders had the stomach for mass murder. But having found out, surely they would not sacrifice more than one world.

He wanted to reach down into the depths of the desk display, scoop up the little world, and carry it to safety.

A zero-gee warning gonged through the ship. Martinez looked at the chronometer, saw that it was a scheduled course change and there was no need for him to strap himself in. Another warning sounded, the distant roar of the engines ceased, and Martinez floated weightless. He kept one hand clamped on his chair bottom to keep himself from drifting away—the chair itself was intelligent enough to know to adhere to the floor. An eddy in his stomach told him that
Illustrious
was rotating onto its new heading, and then there was another warning for the resumption of gravity followed a few seconds later by the punch of the engines. Martinez dropped into his seat again.

The ship was going through the orderly progress of its day. The heading was changed on schedule, watches came on and off, decks were cleaned, parts were replaced on schedule, drills performed.

The only person not going about his routine was Martinez, who was awake and staring into his desk display when he should be in bed.

He told the navigation plot to go away, and the display darkened for an instant, then filled with images of Terza.

Terza smiling, Terza arranging flowers, Terza playing her harp.

Terza, whose soft voice he could barely remember.

He doused the lights and returned to his bed and his uneasy dreams.

 

T
he High City was half deserted, with overgrown gardens of summer flowers that rioted beneath the blank, boarded-up windows of the great palaces. Even on the grand Boulevard of the Praxis, motor traffic was scarce. Half those pedestrians on the street were Naxids, and most of these were in uniform. Most prominent was the viridian green of the Fleet, along with the gray jackets of the Urban Patrol and the black and yellow of the Motor Patrol.

Businesses were adapting to the conquerors. Restaurants that had served cuisine tailored to Terran or Torminel tastes now advertised Naxid specialties, and the chairs that served their old customers were being replaced by the short, low couches on which centauroid bodies could take their ease. Tailors' window displays featured Naxid dummies in sumptuous military splendor, chameleon-weave jackets automatically flashing Naxid scale patterns. Pulse-stirring Naxid music, created by beating on the tuned, hollow sticks called
aejai,
clattered from the doors of music stores.

Sula saw no military or police who were not Naxids. Their presence wasn't particularly heavy except in the area of the government buildings clustered under the domed Great Refuge, on the east side of the acropolis, where there were checkpoints and armed Naxids on the roofs of at least some of the buildings. Otherwise, small units were posted at important intersections, and there were wandering patrols.

“It's going to be hard getting away,” Sula said. “Harder than doing the thing in the first place.”

She and Macnamara had stationed themselves in the Garden of Scents off the Boulevard of the Praxis, where they could look down the boulevard toward the famous statue of The Great Master Delivering the Praxis to Other Peoples, and in the other direction to the Makish Palace, an ancient structure with five bulbous, ornamented towers, each shaped vaguely like an artichoke.

Two days after their reconnaissance to the funicular terminal, the government had announced the special identification card that would be required for all residents and workers of the High City. Sula looked up the requirements in the Records Office computer, then filled out applications for everyone on her team, approved them in the names of high-ranking administrators, and mailed them to the Riverside address. She made them employees of a fictional firm, at a fictional address, that was owned by Naxids—Naxids who were themselves far from fictional, all close relatives of Lady Kushdai, the governor and highest-ranking Naxid in the capital. Police would be unlikely to inquire too closely into Sula's business once they saw those names.

When the cards arrived in the mail, Sula retroactively altered all records of the mailing address to a fictional street number.

The identity cards worked perfectly when, dressed in laborers' coveralls, boots, and caps, Sula and Macnamara had come up the funicular carrying boxes of tools.

“We should just shoot Makish from here,” Macnamara said. He had been one of the best marksmen in their firearms training course. He tilted his cap onto the back of his head and gazed up at the fragrant lankish trees overhead, all adrip with trailing pink blossoms. “I could do it from one of the trees.”

“That would mean smuggling a rifle into the High City,” Sula said. They didn't have weapons with them at present, not knowing whether they could get them past the detectors at the funicular.

“Maybe a bomb then.” Macnamara was undeterred. “Plant it just inside his gate, detonate it from a distance when he steps in.”

To Sula this seemed a more attractive proposition. “The bomb would make a lot of noise,” she said. “Break a lot of windows. The Naxids could never pretend it didn't happen.”

“Here comes someone, our target maybe.”

Sula tilted her cap brim over her face and busied herself with the contents of her toolbox as she cast covert glances at the three Naxids moving down the broad walk. Two wore the uniforms of the Fleet, the exact color of Zanshaa's viridian sky, with the red cross-belts and armbands of the Military Constabulary. The third was in the brown jacket of the civil service, with badges of high rank and what seemed to be the orange and gold sash of a High Court judge over one shoulder.

“Good of him to walk home,” Sula said.

“It's a nice day, why not?”

“Shall we follow?”

They picked up their tools and strolled out of the Garden of Scents. The Naxids moved rapidly on their four feet—Sula had never seen one move slowly unless he was injured—and they had already sped past by the time she and Macnamara left the park. One of the Constabulary guards looked over her shoulder at them as they came out of the park gate but saw little of interest; she turned back to follow the judge, and her jacket flashed a bead-pattern to her partner.

“I wish I knew what she just said,” Macnamara muttered.

The black beaded scales on a Naxid's torso and long back were capable of a flashing red, and bead-patterns were used as a form of auxiliary communication. The chameleon-weave fabric of the Naxids' uniforms duplicated the patterns on the scales beneath, so even Naxids in uniform were capable of communicating silently in a private language that few non-Naxids could read.

“I doubt she said anything interesting,” Sula said.

“Are you sure that's our judge?” Macnamara asked. “I can't tell them apart, usually.”

“I'm reasonably certain,” Sula said. “I got a glimpse of his face as he went past and it looked right to me.” She offered the world a chill smile. “But even if he's not the judge we're after, he's important enough to rate a couple guards. As far as I'm concerned, that makes him a target.”

The Naxids crossed to the opposite side of the boulevard, where the Makish Palace waited. Sula and Macnamara remained on their own side of the street and watched with what she hoped was an appropriate level of disinterest. The judge passed through an elaborate fence of gleaming silver alloy, then entered the house through the formal garden out front. One guard went into the palace with him, and the other stationed herself in the garden.

Sula's eye had already moved on to the building next to the Makish Palace, another ornate structure, a palace of mellow gold sandstone with an intricate, carved facade of radiating, interlinking lines. The place was obviously shut down, and the garden out front had run riot.

“No obvious security besides the two guards,” Macnamara said.

“Beg pardon?”

Macnamara repeated his statement. Sula looked at the abandoned palace again.

“I've got an idea,” she said.

A gold-accented door opened in front of Sula, the door to a private club. In a whiff of tobacco smoke a well-dressed Terran, braided lapels and fashionably pleated trouser front, stepped out of the club and glanced left and right as he made a minor adjustment to his cuffs.

The door closed behind him. His mouth gaped under its narrow little mustache.
“Lady Sula!”
he gasped.

She stepped forward, took his arm, and steered him down the street. Macnamara, suddenly alert, kept a wary eye behind.

“You're dead!” the man cried.

“For all's sake, PJ,” said Sula, “you don't have to make such a fuss about it.”