Impersonations

by Walter Jon Williams

  Sula asked if Colti was on Terra.

  “I don’t think so. He turned me over to someone else, a female Torminel who called herself Sori. Also posh, also young. I’ve only met her a couple times.”

  “What did she wear?”

  Spendlove gave the question some thought. “Casual clothes—shorts and short-sleeve shirts so she wouldn’t overheat. Top of the line, though. Roote & Orghoder is expensive.”

  “Where did you meet?”

  “On the ring, shortly after I arrived. And then once in Rome, a little over a month ago.”

  “Could you identify her or Colti?”

  “If I met them in person. If I was asked to identify from photographs, I couldn’t be sure.” She frowned. “Torminel are covered in fur. I have a hard time telling them apart.”

  “Any distinguishing characteristic you can recall?”

  Spendlove passed a hand over her red-rimmed eyes. “Sori had very blue eyes. That’s not common.”

  Cold triumph whispered quietly through Sula’s blood. “No,” she said, “it’s not.”

  * * *

  Eleven hours later, on a morning dark with cloud and ashfall, the volcano was still in full eruption, but southwesterly winds had blown the lithic storm out to sea. Sula and her party were in a police van, with intact windows but otherwise identical to their last vehicle, following a road plow carving out a path to Tambu. Clearing the roads was a priority, since the falling ash would turn to concrete if it rained.

  Spendlove had been left behind in the Tinombala jail. Sula didn’t want her in Tambu, not until certain matters there were dealt with.

  The plow and the police van climbed over Sulawesi’s narrow spine. The tropical forest had been nearly shattered: limbs torn from trees, leaves stripped, treetops bowed down under tons of ash and rock. The air had an acid reek that burned the back of Sula’s throat. Towns and villages were strewn with homes collapsed under ash or buried in drifts of pumice. Emergency vehicles were clustered near large public buildings, which seemed to have fared better.

  Sulawesi’s communications network was robust, and Sula experienced little difficulty in performing her researches. Fortunately, Peers were proud of their genealogies and made sure the information was widely available. It was easy to work out who Colti was, and of course Sori was obvious. And a look at the genealogy told her who Sula was supposed to have killed.

  Macnamara and Spence slumped in the back seats, trying to sleep, while Sula thought long into the morning, planning what she had to do next.

  The plow led Sula’s party right to the elevator terminal and beneath the sweeping portico that so far had stood up well to so many extra tons of ash. Sula thanked the drivers of the van and the plow, and walked in to a scene of ongoing chaos.

  Each refugee had staked out a piece of floor large enough for a sleeping mat or blanket, with a little extra room for a bundle of belongings. Children of all species were running over the giant concourse while parents did their best to organize or distract them. There were food smells, none of them appetizing, and the stench of urine warred with that of disinfectant.

  Sula headed for the rear of the concourse, where she guessed she could find the administrative offices. She was back in uniform again, a Fleet fatigue overall in viridian green, with her firearm buckled to her belt. Macnamara and Spence followed with the baggage, which had been rescued from the wrecked police van in Tinombala.

  Sula had released her other guard, the one who had met her at the waterfront the previous evening. “There are more important jobs for you than guarding me,” she’d told him, and he’d seemed relieved to hear it.

  And of course, she didn’t want him around for what she planned to do.

  She passed the lounge where she’d met Goojie just a few days before and saw it was filled with refugees, some of whom were lucky enough to be able to sleep on plush sofas. She encountered Lieutenant-Captain Koridun on the way to the lifts to the offices, and Koridun rushed to her.

  “Captain Sula! Where have you been? We expected you last night!” She braced and waited for the reply.

  “I was in Tinombala. I was called there to deal with a problem at the Power Authority—you didn’t get the message?”

  Koridun seemed startled. “No, my lady. I—”

  “It doesn’t matter. By the time I got there, all the people I needed to talk to had evacuated, and the eruption trapped me there till now.”

  Koridun seemed eager to help. “If you’ll give me their names, I’ll put you in contact—”

  “It doesn’t matter now. Can you show me a place to put my gear, and give me a report?”

  “Of course, my lady!”

  She gave a look to Spence and Macnamara. “I sent you two constables,” she said. “Are they with you?”

  “One was injured in Tinombala and is in the clinic there. I sent the other back to his unit—I hardly think anyone’s going to try to kill me in the middle of this mess.”

  Koridun reserved judgment on this last and took Sula to the manager’s suite on the top floor of the giant building, and put Sula and her bags in the manager’s private study. She looked at Spence and Macnamara. “The enlisted are bunking in Departure Lounge One.”

  “They’ll stay with me,” Sula said. Koridun made no comment but instead took Sula into the manager’s office, where she met the manager herself, a Daimong engineer in coveralls and heavy boots, with her helmet resting on her desktop. The view from the office was impressive, a glass wall looking out over a bay filled with wrecked, half-sunken boats and floating islands of pumice. The buildings on the slopes below all seemed to have suffered damage, but the elevator terminal survived well, glass wall and all.

  “It was designed for this, my lady,” the manager said. “The area is subject to volcanism and earthquake, and the architects overbuilt everything.”

  “Lucky for us,” Sula said.

  Koridun gave her report quickly and without hesitation—not surprising, since she was an ambitious officer, well organized, and had been granted an extra night to practice her delivery.

  Neither the elevator cables nor the building had suffered significant damage. Employees had been set to work aiding the refugees, and Fleet personnel were keeping order and helping the local police.

  As for the eruption, it was the largest on Terra in several thousand years. Particulates and sulfuric acid had been hurled nearly to the border of space and would remain in the atmosphere for years, sealing out the sunshine. There would be severe danger of crop failure, and Lord Governor Ngeni had appealed to the Convocation for emergency food supplies to be sent at once. He had also mobilized relief workers from all over the planet, but they couldn’t land any closer than South Sulawesi until the eruption died away. So, the workers and supplies would jam ports far to the south and have to head for Tambu on roads and rail lines covered with deep drifts of ash.

  “My compliments, Captain Koridun,” Sula said. “Very concise. You’ve done well.”

  Koridun practically glittered with pride. “Thank you, Lady Sula.”

  Sula asked if there was anything she could do in regard to readying more aid from the dockyards, but Koridun said that she and Parku between them had done everything possible. Plenty of assistance, food, and aid could come down the elevators as soon as it was safe to bring it all down.

  In the meantime, all they had to do was endure.

  “I’ll just stand by here, then,” Sula said. “You’ve been doing well, and I don’t want to interrupt if I’m not needed. If I have a suggestion, I’ll offer it, but otherwise it’s your show; you may as well continue.”

  So, for the next few hours Sula watched Koridun at her job, coordinating her efforts with the manager of the elevator complex, and through the communications net with the local lady governor, the lord mayor, the lord police commissioner, and Parku up on the ring. All day, small shocks rattled the items on her desk. The plows were clearing the streets, and trapped refugees were being brought aid or being brought
to where aid waited for them.

  As the afternoon waned, even the active, ever-buoyant Koridun began to show signs of fatigue, and Sula recollected that she’d been engaged in this nonstop for more than a day. So, she sent Koridun for some rest and raw meat, if she could find any of the latter, and took command of the Fleet effort herself.

  When she had a moment to herself, she filed charges against the crew of the Power Authority submarine for cowardice and dereliction of duty. I’ll avalanche them, she thought.

  Koridun returned after midnight, and Sula retired with Macnamara and Spence to the manager’s study, with its screens showing views of the ring and the stars. The room was scented with sandalwood. Sula placed Spence right across the door, to foil the next assassin, and then lay on the leather cushions of a sofa and fell instantly to sleep.

  Sula woke to the largest single sound she’d ever heard, her fingers clutching at the frame of the couch to keep her from being thrown out as a vast shock seemed to snap the tower like a whip. From somewhere there was a cry, and then a crash as something tipped over.

  The building groaned as it settled. Sula stuck her feet in her boots, tightened her Fleet coverall, and charged out to the manager’s office, leaping over Spence’s startled form.

  Through the glass wall—not broken—she could see that it wasn’t yet dawn. Koridun and the Daimong manager were seated at their desks, staring at each other.

  “Ground wave coming,” Sula predicted, and then the building rocked again. Its metal skeleton keened for a long, desperate moment, and then the sound went away, replaced by a series of smaller shocks that set Sula’s head aspin.

  Sula contacted Parku, on the assumption that observatories on the ring would have a much better idea of what was going on than local authorities. He confirmed that there had been another large explosion on Karangetang, probably the largest so far, but that was all he knew.

  “Tell everyone on the streets to get under cover,” Sula told Koridun. “There may be van-sized chunks of basalt coming down.”

  Basalt boulders didn’t rain on Tambu, but practically everything else did—blocks of stone the size of fists, razor-edged shards of glass, ash, pumice finer than sand. The westerly wind that had earlier blown the ejecta away was overwhelmed, or perhaps silenced by the great shock wave, because all the debris came down freely. There was nothing to do but watch it fall and hear the constant rattle of stones piling up on the roof. The smell of ash penetrated the room despite its controlled climate.

  There was no dawn, only a black sky pouring debris. At midmorning, there was an emergency call. “Building collapse—some kind of public school annex that was being used to house refugees,” Koridun reported. “There’s a call for transport to evacuate the survivors, and ambulances for casualties.”

  This was more or less what Sula had been waiting for. She composed her face into a thoughtful expression. “Let’s go, then. But we’re going to need a plow to carve a path for us.”

  Koridun gave her a surprised look. “You want to go yourself?”

  “I want us both to go,” Sula said. “We need to evaluate the rescue efforts firsthand. And we should inspect as much as we can so that we can transmit proper reports to the ring and to Lord Governor Ngeni and other officials here on Terra.” Sula smiled. “It’s my proactive policy.”

  The governor’s name, and with it the possibility that her own name might be mentioned favorably in a report, was more than enough to galvanize Koridun’s ambition. She arranged to borrow a plow from the local authority, and a vehicle for themselves. Sula and the party were equipped with helmets, cuirasses, and flashlights.

  The plow was waiting when they came out into the tropical heat beneath the portico, got into a six-wheeled vehicle meant for primitive or nonexistent roads, and followed the plow out into the hard black rain. Rocks began banging off the six-wheeler’s roof the second they left the shelter of the portico.

  Black ash, black roads, black crumpled buildings. The beams of the headlights were swallowed up by darkness, and falling rocks carved divots out of the windscreen. There was so much ejecta on the roads that there was really no place to put it: the plow carved only a narrow strip between tall shoals of debris.

  Claustrophobia climbed into the passenger compartment. Macnamara’s fists clenched on the controls.

  The fallen school annex was less than ten minutes away, even at the reduced speed of the convoy. Emergency vehicles were already clustered around the building, lights flashing off the crumbling walls. The building was large and situated on a tongue of land between ravines. The plow performed a wide sweep through the flat area in front of the building, carving out as large a debris-free zone as possible, and following it Sula saw a small shed-like outbuilding on a corner of the property. Macnamara drew up as close to the rescue effort as he could, while the plow continued to clear as much of the area as possible.

  Sula rolled up her door and jumped out of the vehicle, only to be greeted by a bang on her helmet as a lava bomb struck and bounded off. The acid stench of the ash clawed at the back of her throat. Sula saw refugees clustered near a door, their possessions on their heads, and stepped through the crowd and the rattling stone into the building, her flashlight darting over the area.

  The annex was a broad, flat-roofed structure, with offices on one end and a warehouse on the other, and only the warehouse part had collapsed. There had been plenty of warning that the roof was giving way, and there were no casualties save for the crushed boxes of athletic equipment stored there. The remaining roofbeams groaned ominously, and Sula looked up and felt a cold warning hand brush her spine. Whoever had called for the evacuation hadn’t been wrong.

  The first of the buses came up, and refugees were packed aboard with the clearly impossible instruction to keep away from the windows, some of which had already shattered. More buses arrived, and more refugees made the dash from their shelter. The emergency personnel on hand were a mixture of Fleet security, local police, and aid workers, and they all acted with practiced efficiency. They’d been evacuating people all day.

  Finally, the last refugee was helped aboard the final bus, and the convoy began to leave, plows clearing the way. Sula complimented the Naxid in charge of the relief party, and then she and her group returned to their vehicle, cleared ash from the windscreen, and piled aboard. Macnamara took the controls.

  “Wait,” Sula said. “Does anyone remember that other building?”

  “My lady?” Koridun said. She was panting behind her faceplate and suffering in the tropical heat, her fur blackened with streaks of ash. Her cooling units weren’t keeping up with the climate.

  Sula pointed. “Back there. We should check. There could be refugee families in there.”

  Macnamara swung the vehicle around and ground over cinders until the outbuilding appeared in the lights. The structure hadn’t collapsed, probably because the pitched shed roof tipped debris into the ravine just beyond. “Come on,” Sula said, rolled up the door, and jumped out of the vehicle. A block of lava landed close by and exploded, sending out shrapnel that stung Sula’s legs. Beyond where the plow had swept the area clear, the ejecta came nearly to her waist, and she had to climb over the stuff to get to the door. She banged on the door, heard no response, tried the handle, and found that it opened.

  Ash spilled into the room as Sula half-slid into the shed. Stones rattled off the metal roof overhead. There was a musty chemical scent in the room, and large barrels of lubricant and paint, volatile materials probably unwelcome in the larger building.

  No refugees, which Sula had more or less assumed.

  Koridun slid into the building next, followed by Spence and Macnamara. They clustered near the door, prepared to head back to the vehicle, but Sula seized the moment by raising her faceplate and looking at Koridun. Koridun raised her own faceplate.

  “Lady Sula?”

  “I wanted to tell you again how impressed I am with you. It’s been a difficult situation and you’ve done very well.�
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  Koridun’s blue eyes glowed with pride. “Thank you, my lady.”

  Sula eased the strap on her sidearm’s holster. “But there’s something we should talk about,” she said, “and that’s your Aunt Trani.”

  There was a moment of silence, and then the glow in Koridun’s blue eyes turned glacial. “You killed her,” she said.

  “I didn’t.”

  “Your army did. You don’t expect me to believe that happened without your permission.”

  Well, no, Sula thought, I don’t.

  A look at Koridun’s family tree had easily uncovered the relationship with the obscure Peer clan of the Creels, one of which had been lucky enough to marry a Koridun two generations back. Trani Creel, assassinated a few days after being appointed governor of Zanshaa, had been Koridun’s aunt.

  Spence and Macnamara exchanged glances and sidled away from Koridun. Both were reaching for their sidearms.

  “Aunt Trani was a wonderful person!” Koridun said. Her diction was slipping, and the words hissed through her fangs. “My brother and I were raised with her after my mother went to the hospital—she was like a big sister! She told us stories! She sang us to sleep at night! We loved her, and you killed her!”

  You might have noticed she was an idiot, Sula thought.

  Not that she’d been very bright herself. If she’d only paid better attention to Koridun’s service record, she would have been suspicious the instant she’d learned that Koridun had volunteered for service on Terra.

  Nobody volunteered for Terra. It was a one-way ticket to oblivion. Anyone volunteering for Terra clearly had an agenda other than career advancement.

  Koridun raised a pointing finger. “You’ll pay for it! We won’t rest until you do!”

  That’s what I’m afraid of, Sula thought. She cleared ash from her throat, spat, and turned back to Koridun. “You should know that Costanza Vole—or Anna Spendlove, or Tamlin Sage, whatever name you prefer—has been arrested and is cooperating with police. She’s identified you as a member of the plot to discredit me.”