Conventions of War def-3

by Walter Jon Williams

  Time passed. The Orthodox Fleet continued its circuit of Zanshaa’s system, waiting for reinforcements and news of the Naxids. There was suspense concerning whether the enemy would adopt the same strategy the loyalists had used after the fall of the capital, to break up into small groups and raid into loyalist territory. But there was no news of raids, and it became apparent that the Naxids were hunkered down at Magaria, presumably crying for reinforcements of their own.

  For once Martinez was happy for a delay in the fighting. When he advanced on the enemy, Tork would have to detach part of the Orthodox Fleet to guard Zanshaa, which meant he’d need enough new ships both to make up for the detachments and to match any reinforcements the Naxids had procured.

  Disciplinary hearings onIllustrious demonstrated how bored the crew had become. The officers sometimes visited from ship to ship; but the enlisted were stuck with one another, and complaints of fighting, theft, and vandalism occupied an increasing amount of Martinez’s time.

  He knew it wasn’t as if he hadn’t asked for it. He’d assured the crew that they could speak to him at any time, and though most had the good sense to leave him alone, some took full advantage. He not only found himself dealing with disciplinary issues, but advising crew on their investments and on matrimonial issues. He disclaimed any authority on these last, but in the end advised investment in Laredo Shipyards as well as wedlock. Weddings on the ship at least provided an excuse for a party and raised the crew’s spirits-unlike the two cases of genuine madness, crew who were actually raving and had to be subdued and tranquilized by Dr. Xi. One recovered, but the other showed every evidence of remaining a frenzied lunatic to the end of his days. He was shipped home on a courier vessel.

  The days of Terza’s pregnancy slowly drew to their close. When he wrote her letters-or more properly, electronic facsimiles of letters-he found himself filled with a rising tenderness that surprised him. He hadn’t thought of himself as a sentimental person, as the sort of man who would flush with remembered affection for a woman he’d known for only a few days and who carried a child he might never see. He kept viewing Terza’s videos and had the latest playing silently in his desk display when he wasn’t using it for business.

  In his dreams, however, he still burned for Sula. Perhaps the boredom and isolation were getting to him, as well as to the crew.

  The time passed when he had expected to hear of the birth of his son, and he grew fretful. He snapped at Jukes during a meeting over some of the artist’s ideas for decoratingIllustrious, and gave Toutou an angry lecture about some supplies misfiled in the commissary.

  The first bulletin came from his father, a video of Lord Martinez flushed with pride and bouncing in his chair with enthusiasm. “A large, lovely boy!” he boomed. “And named after the both of us-Gareth Marcus! Terza had no trouble at all-it was as if she’s been practicing in secret.” A large fist smacked into a meaty palm. “The Chen heir, born on Laredo, and with our names-I expect they’ll have to make him king, don’t you?”

  Martinez was perfectly willing for his son to be proclaimed Gareth Marcus the First. He called for a bottle of champagne and shared it with Alikhan.

  For once he didn’t dream of Sula. As he woke with a blurry head the next morning, he found a video from Terza waiting for him. She was propped up in bed wearing a lavender-colored nightdress buttoned to the neck. Someone had combed her hair and applied cosmetic. She held the future Lord Chen in her arms, and tilted the round face toward the camera lens. Young Gareth’s eyes were squeezed shut with stubborn determination, as if he had resolved that the outside world should not exist and he refused to contemplate any evidence to the contrary.

  “Well, here he is,” Terza said. Her smile was weary but not without pride. “He’s given no trouble at all. The doctor said it was the easiest delivery he’d ever seen. We both send our love, and we hope to see you soon.”

  Martinez’s heart melted. He watched the video half a dozen times more, then proclaimed a holiday on the ship, the crew excused from normal duties except for watchkeeping. He ordered Toutou to open the spirit locker and share out a drink to the crew. Again he split a bottle of champagne, this time with Michi.

  Myson’s going to be the head of yourclan, he thought.

  A few days later he was invited to a reception on Fleet Commander Kringan’s flagship. The invitation specified undress, so he left the Golden Orb and the white gloves in his cabin. Michi usedDaffodil to ferry all her other captains to Kringan’s flagship, so they arrived a little late. The air aboardJudge Kasapa tasted of Torminel rather than Terrans.Kasapa was a sixty-year-old ship, old enough to have gained the dignity that comes with age-the allegorical bronzes in their niches were polished smooth and bright by the hands of generations, and the geometrical tiles had lost a bit of their original brilliance and faded to a more mellow shade.

  The officers were grouped in the fleetcom’s dining room, from which the long table had been removed to make room. Smaller buffet tables had been set on either end-lest Torminel eating habits spoil anyone’s appetite, the marrow bones and bloody raw meat were across the room from the food intended for other species. Tork, busy planning his next conquest, wasn’t around to spoil the party. Kringan, wearing braid-spangled viridian shorts and a vest over his gray fur, chatted amiably in his adjoining office with a group of senior officers. Martinez got a whisky from one of the orderlies and held a plate with some kind of fritter in the other hand. He was pleased to encounter a Torminel captain he had once commanded in Light Squadron 14, who had been given command of one of the new cruisers, and Martinez chatted for a moment about the new ship and its capabilities.

  And then the grouping of officers shifted and a sudden awareness of Sula crawled across his skin on scuttling insect legs. She stood about five paces away, talking to a Terran elcap Martinez didn’t know. She stood straight and slim in her dark green uniform, and there was a slight smile on her face. Whatever words Martinez was about to offer his former captain died on his lips.

  “Yes, my lord?” the Torminel said.

  From a stiffening of Sula’s spine and the way the smile caught on her face, Martinez knew that she was aware of his presence. He tried to continue his conversation, but his mind was awhirl and his heart lurched in his chest.

  This was impossible. He should at least try to be civil.

  “Excuse me, my lord,” he said, and stepped toward her, awkward with the fritter sitting like an offering on his plate.

  Sula likewise disposed of her companion and turned to face him. She was so lovely that her beauty struck him like a blow. Her hair was a shade more golden than he remembered, and shorter. Her scent was something muskier than the Sandama Twilight he remembered. Her green eyes examined him with something that might be calculation, or malevolence, or contempt.

  “Congratulations on your promotion,” he said.

  “Thank you.” She cocked her head to one side and studied him. “You deserve congratulations as well, my lord,” she said. “I hear your wife has spawned.”

  A blast of furnace anger flashed through his veins, but even in his fury he felt an icy sliver of rationality amid the flame, and he clung to it.

  He could hurt her now. And she had just given him the justification.

  “Yes,” he said. “Terza and I are very happy. And you?”

  Her mouth pressed into a firm line. Her eyes were stone. “I haven’t had the leisure,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” Martinez said. “You seem to have made a wrong choice or two, somewhere in the recent past.”

  He saw a shift in her eyes as the blow struck home.

  “True,” she said. “I made a bad decision when I first met you, for instance.”

  She turned and marched away, heels clicking on the tiles, walking away from him as she had at least twice before; and Martinez felt the tension suddenly drain from him. His knees wavered.

  Honors about even, he thought. But she was the one who fled.

  Again.

&nbs
p; Feeling a need for support, he went to the buffet in order to have something to lean against. There he found Michi gazing at the food without much interest. He offered her his fritter.

  “May I order you something to drink, my lady?” he asked.

  “I’m trying not to drink,” she said. “Torminel toilets don’t agree with me, and it’s a long walk back to the airlock andDaffodil.”

  Martinez could see Sula out of the slant of his eye. She was turned away from him, her back arrow-straight as she spoke to a Lai-own captain.

  He bolted his whisky. Michi raised an eyebrow.

  “I’ll take my chances with the toilets,” he said.

  “Fucking imbecile,” Sula told Lord Sori Orghoder. “Next time try following my instructions.”

  Lord Sori had grown accustomed to this sort of abuse by now, like the rest of Sula’s captains, and his furry Torminel face was resigned.

  “Apologies, my lady. I thought I was-”

  “You’re supposed to be following the hull of a chaotic dynamical system, not driving a runaway tram through a parking lot!”

  Lord Sori’s face gave a tremor, then subsided. “Yes, my lady.”

  Peers, Sula knew, weren’t used to be talked to this way. Her savagery had at first stunned them-and then, perhaps because they had no idea of anything better to do, they had obeyed. Sula’s talent for invective had produced results. Light Squadron 17, under the lash of her tongue, was becoming proficient in Ghost Tactics.

  She would never have dared speak to her army this way. Volunteers could all too easily have walked away. The Peers who commanded her ships were stuck with her, and perhaps they were too wedded to their notions of hierarchy ever to protest a tongue-lashing from a superior.

  Sula worked them hard. She called them idiots and dunces. She criticized their ancestors, their education, and their upbringing. She even censored their correspondence-which was, she learned, remarkably dull.

  Without her, she decided, they were nothing. A bunch of coddled aristocrats without an idea in their collective head. But she was going to be the making of them.

  “We are going to storm the Naxid citadel,” she told them. “And I know we can do it, because I’ve done it before.”

  One of the advantages of not caring about anything, she had decided, was that she could decide to care about any particular thing. She had decided she was going to care about Light Squadron 17. Her command would become immortal in the eyes of the Fleet.

  She was particularly vicious at the moment because of her meeting with Martinez the previous evening. She felt the encounter had shown her at her worst. Not because she’d tried to cut him down, which he thoroughly deserved, but because she’d done it out of anger and surprise. She should have slashed Martinez to ribbons coolly and dispassionately, but instead had blurted out a few feeble insults and then run for it.

  She had shown that she was vulnerable. She had demonstrated that she, who cared about nothing, still cared about him.

  It was her officers who paid for this discovery with their dignity.

  “Have some brain food with your dinner,” she told Lord Sori, “and we’ll try another experiment, starting at eighteen and one.”

  She broke the connection with Sori-and with the other captains who had been watching with properly impassive faces-and then unwebbed herself from her acceleration couch.

  “Secure from general quarters,” she said. “Send the crew to their dinner.”

  “Yes, my lady,” said Lieutenant Giove.

  While Giove made the announcement to the ship’s crew, Sula swung forward to put on her shoes, which she’d kicked off and dropped on the deck. The advantage of the Ghost Tactics experiments-radical tactics performed in a shared virtual environment while her actual ships soared innocently in the close formations Tork demanded-was that she didn’t need to suit up. She disliked vac suits, the suits’ sanitary arrangements, the helmet visors that locked her into a closed, encapsulated, smothering world. In an experiment, she could wear ordinary Fleet coveralls, kick off her shoes, and feel free to try out any outrageous strategem she pleased.

  On the simplest level, each ship could simply follow the formula as she had created it, maneuvering within a series of nested fractal patterns that maximized both its defensive and offensive capabilities, and-significantly-moving in a pattern that would seem completely random to any observer.

  There were more complex levels to the system, as there would be with anything involving fractals, and these had to do with the designated “center of maneuver,” around which the squadron would be navigating, which could be the flagship, a point in space, or an enemy. Choosing the center of maneuver, Sula suspected, was far more an art than a science.

  With all the practice, she thought she was getting very good at her art, and she was beginning to hunger for the day when she could test it against the enemy.

  Martinez realized that Sula must have been charming others as she’d charmed him, because Tork announced a change in the fleet’s order of battle. Light Squadron 17 was shifted into the van as the lead squadron. In the sort of battle that Tork clearly intended to fight, the van squadron would be the first to engage the enemy, and remain in action until the battle was over or until the squadron had been reduced to radiant debris.

  Martinez wondered how exactly Sula made Tork so determined to sacrifice her to the necessities of war. Tork was giving the Naxids every possible chance to kill her along with most of her command.

  “For once Tork’s had a good idea,” Martinez said aloud as he sat at his desk and reviewed the order, and then was annoyed at himself because he felt the comment lacked conviction.

  He looked down at his desk, at the image of Terza holding Young Gareth, which floated at the margins of the display.

  At least, he thought, he’d stopped dreaming about Sula. He could give his family that.

  Bulletins came almost daily from Terza, charting Young Gareth’s progress, and when Terza was busy and no message arrived, Martinez found himself missing the daily contact. He sent letters in return, and a few videos so Young Gareth could hear his voice and practice focusing his eyes on his father.

  Another message, less welcome, arrived from his brother Roland. The video opened with a shot of Roland seated importantly in a hooded armchair upholstered in some kind of scaly leather that might have been Naxid skin. He had the Martinez looks, the big jaw, broad shoulders, big hands, and olive skin. He was also wearing the dark red tunic of the lords convocate.

  “I have good news,” Roland began.

  It seemed to Martinez that Roland was trying too hard not to be smug.

  “Whatever vices Lord Oda might have enjoyed in the past,” Roland continued, “they seem not to have affected his fertility. Vipsania’s pregnant.”

  Martinez’s mental wheels spun a bit before they found traction, and it finally dawned that Roland’s good news-thefirst bit of good news, presumably-concerned their sister, who had been married to the heir of the high-caste Yoshitoshi clan. There had been a cordial sort of blackmail involved, Martinez recalled, Roland having bought the debts that Lord Oda hoped to conceal from his family.

  Not unlike the arm-twisting that had gone into his own marriage. Roland’s social wrestling had paid off twice now, with Martinez babies placed, like cuckoos, in the cradles of two of the High City’s most prominent clans.

  And as the clan heirs, no less.

  “I don’t know whether you’ve heard,” Roland said, “but it seems that PJ Ngeni died heroically in the battle for Zanshaa High City. Walpurga is now an eligible widow, and after a decent interval will find a more suitable spouse. Let me know if you encounter any candidates, will you?”

  Martinez wished there were some way to engage his formidable sister to Lord Tork. That would kill the Supreme Commander faster than anything else.

  “In return for his magnificent hospitality,” Roland continued, “the Convocation has voted to open Chee and Parkhurst to settlement, and under Martinez patron
age. So our centuries-long ambition has finally been fulfilled.”

  Chee and Parkhurst would be the first planets opened in hundreds of years, and both under Martinez patronage. No one could freeze the Martinez family out of the High City now.

  “And of course,” Roland continued, finally getting to the point, “the Convocation voted to co-opt our father into their midst. He declined, with the wish that they’d consider me instead.” He spread his arms, offering a view of his wine-colored tunic. “The Convocation graciously agreed to abide by his wishes. I have volunteered for a committee that will return to Zanshaa ahead of the rest of the Convocation, to make recommendations concerning the organization of the capital. So, soon we may actually be able to communicate without these annoying delays.”

  Roland returned his hands to the arms of his chair.

  “I trust you will continue to massacre Naxids at your normal rate, and by the time I see you in person you’ll have gained more medals and your usual dose of undying fame. I’ll send you a message when I arrive in the Zanshaa system.”

  The orange end-stamp filled the screen. Martinez blanked it in annoyance.

  Roland was up to something, and an early visit to Zanshaa was part of it. Martinez didn’t know what his brother’s plot entailed, but he had little to do but speculate. Roland might be plotting another marriage, his own perhaps; or scouting the High City for the location of a new Martinez Palace grand enough for the city’s newest lord convocate; or working to corner some essential supply coming down from orbit.

  He only hoped that he himself was not an essential element in Roland’s scheme.

  As it turned out, Roland wasn’t the only member of his family leaving Laredo. The next video from Terza informed him that she and Young Gareth were leaving to join her father-the location was a military secret, but it was presumably closer to Zanshaa than was Laredo.

  “It’s time my father saw his grandson,” Terza said. Her expression bore its usual serenity, and at once Martinez felt anxiety begin to gnaw at him. He wondered if Lord Chen had expressed some private disappointment in Young Gareth, and if therefore Terza was rushing the child to her father to reassure him…or, he thought darkly, to confirm his suspicions.