The Accidental War

by Walter Jon Williams

  Martinez had known that Corona couldn’t compete with the others on the grounds of history, and so he had opted for practicality mixed with spectacle. The furniture wasn’t historic, it was merely well-made, comfortable, and stylish. The kitchen produced fine food, the bars fine vintages. The betting parlor featured a tote and the opportunity for interesting side bets. And water flowed in every public room, sometimes inhabited by rare and interesting fish.

  Flowing water was a challenge on a ship that was required, on occasion, to experience zero gravity, but complex engineering enabled the ship, on receipt of a zero-gee warning, to rapidly swallow the water into its internal tanks, then regurgitate it when gravity was restored. And in case the system failed, Martinez had tried to waterproof as much of the ship as he could.

  At the moment Martinez felt as if he’d been swallowed and regurgitated more than once. His body ached, his bones creaked, and his head felt as if it had been stuffed with cotton rags. He badly wanted everyone to leave so that he could go to bed, but he was the host here, and good form required him to stay with the party till the end.

  “How did you do on the tote?” Vipsania asked him. “Did you lose much?”

  “I don’t bet the tote,” Martinez said. “I make private bets with people from the other clubs, because nobody from that lot of snobs really wants to bet on the Corona Club, and I can get good odds.”

  “So are you up or down?”

  “I’m slightly in the black,” Martinez said. “I bet myself to win, and lost there, but I also bet myself to show in the top three, and there I won. I also bet the Coronas to place two pilots in the top three, and I got good odds there. Wish I’d put more money down.”

  “Who bet on Severin, I wonder?”

  “Whoever they are, they’re very happy.”

  There was a moment of silence, filled only by the sound of water falling and some shrieking laughter from one of the partygoers.

  “Well,” Vipsania said. “I’m for bed.”

  Martinez yawned. “I’m envious.”

  Vipsania shrugged without much sympathy and left in the direction of the trunk elevator that would take her to the living quarters. Martinez looked down at the revelers and saw the Vandrith Challenge Cup standing tall and gold on a table, where Severin had left it. Some energetic attendees were trying to fill it with wine so they could use it as a punch bowl.

  Well, Martinez thought, maybe I’ll win it in six years.

  His eyes turned to the group that was replaying the race. The vast tawny stripes of Vandrith filled the display.

  Foote asked if this reminded me of Sula. The phantom thought strayed into his head from he knew not where.

  Ridiculous, he thought. I haven’t thought of Sula in ages.

  But the pang in his heart told him that his thought was a lie.

  Chapter 3

  The Petty Mount rose partway up the granite cliffs of the High City like a social climber in search of loftier status, trying but failing to rise to the glittering world of palaces and politicians that occupied the great plateau. Instead the Petty Mount made the best of its failed aspirations and rejoiced in its position as a meeting place of high and low. There were restaurants, boutiques, bars, hairdressers, smoking dens, theaters, and a myriad of little stores that sold vintage clothing, old porcelain, reupholstered furniture, antiques, bric-a-brac, books, maps, and anonymous portraits of ancestors that could be sold to anyone who needed a boost to their bloodlines.

  The Petty Mount featured Peers whose ancestors stretched back thousands of years. There were people who slept on the street. There were exquisites who paraded in fashion, inebriates who staggered from bar to bar, musicians who performed in alcoves. Partygoers, party crashers, and certain other sinister parties whose existence was strictly off the record.

  Directly above the Petty Mount was the Couch of Eternity, where the ashes of the Shaa Great Masters were entombed. The Shaa had conquered the other races of the empire and forced them to conform to the unforgiving rule of the Praxis, but the Shaa had died, and now the subject species—and the Praxis—were on their own.

  On its own or not, the Petty Mount found itself overshadowed by the empire’s most celebrated mausoleum.

  The woman called Caroline Sula preferred the Petty Mount’s lack of pretension to the ordered hierarchies of the High City, and she didn’t mind her existence being supervised by a posse of dead aliens. That was restful, if anything.

  Sometimes she thought she had more in common with the dead than with the living.

  Sula had spent the hot spring afternoon at the Commandery, tucked beneath the Great Refuge on the other side of the High City. She was looking for employment. Sula was an officer in the Fleet and had been decorated for her activities in the war. With her record, and the rank of senior captain, she could normally expect command of one of the new cruisers being built to expand the Fleet after the war.

  Instead, for the last six years, there had been nothing. During the war she’d fallen afoul of Lord Tork, the elderly Daimong commander of the Fleet, and she could feel his pale, rotting hand tipping the scales of her life. Sula would have no meaningful job until after Tork died or retired, and at the moment he showed no sign of doing either.

  If she’d had patronage in the Fleet or on the Fleet Control Board, Tork’s baleful influence might have been mitigated. But the closest person she had to a patron, her former squadron commander Michi Chen, had likewise felt Tork’s displeasure. She hadn’t received a promotion since the war and had spent most of the time in command of a dockyard.

  The only consolation Sula could find in this situation was that Tork hated Gareth Martinez, too. So there was some justice in the world.

  In order to pay her courtesy call in the Commandery, she’d worn her medals and her dress uniform, the viridian-green tunic with its two rows of silver buttons. She’d been treated courteously by the staff officers she’d met, who agreed to forward her applications to the Fleet Control Board and to various flag officers.

  She knew beforehand that nothing would come of it. But still she traveled to the Commandery every month or so, just so that one of her applications might pass before Lord Tork, and the sight of her name might bring him just a little pain.

  The war had left her a public figure, and her blond hair, green eyes, and pale skin were too recognizable, especially if she was in uniform. This wasn’t a day when she wanted to be buttonholed by some old comrade who wanted to take her to a club and buy her drinks and reminisce about the battle she’d fought here, in the High City itself, so she rented a car and driver for the trip. The driver was a Cree, with primitive eye-spots, and wore an elaborate apparatus that gave him a sonar picture of the road.

  Sula couldn’t help but appreciate the irony that she had been taken to and from the Commandery, on a pointless mission, by a driver who might as well have been blind.

  The driver returned Sula to the Petty Mount and let her off in front of her apartment, where she was immediately enveloped by the combined scents of hot pavement and meats being cooked on skewers. The Lai-own doorman, dressed in a uniform more elaborate even than that of the Supreme Commander Tork, swung open the door.

  And then she caught movement out of the corner of her eye, and she froze in a cold, stunning flash of recognition.

  It had been thirteen years since she’d seen that gliding walk, but she knew it at once. It was the walk of someone who’d been born lame but who’d had it fixed as soon as he got money, and who’d taught himself to move in a distinctive, elegant, light-footed style, as if he were walking on rice paper and wanted not to tear it.

  Halfway through the lobby door, Sula turned in disbelief, and a second shock of recognition. He had been young when she knew him, but he was a mature man now, with a face and body fuller than she remembered. Too, he dressed in a more mature style, a deep blue coat with gold braid, the blue and gold accented again in a cravat. But no matter how glossy his boots, he retained that gliding, purposeful walk as he ghost
ed toward her along the baking pavement.

  A voice she recognized. And a name she thought she’d drowned years ago.

  “Earthgirl,” he said, and laughed.

  Her first instinct was to run, pelt as fast as she could through the late-afternoon crowds. Her second impulse was to deny she’d ever known him. But neither was possible, or practical.

  He wasn’t quite the man she knew; but she wasn’t the girl she had been either.

  If need be, she could have him killed. The thought comforted her. But in the meantime, she needed to engage.

  “Ah. Hah,” Sula said. “Lamey. I thought you were dead.”

  He smiled. “That would have been the way to bet.”

  His lameness had given him his nickname, and the name stayed even after he’d had his gait fixed. He glided to Sula and stood just a little too close, so that she could sense the heat that radiated from his skin.

  Her heart beat high in her throat. She sensed a yelp, or a shriek, trembling on the edge of release, and she tried to force her voice into its normal register.

  “Did you come to Zanshaa just to see me?”

  “No. I have business here. But I knew you were living on the Petty Mount and I thought . . .” His voice trailed away. He looked her up and down. “By the all, Earthgirl, you look beautiful. But you were always beautiful.” His eyes traveled over her again, absorbing the uniform, the medals, the rows of silver buttons. “Every inch the Peer,” he breathed. “I would never have believed—”

  “Perhaps you should come in,” Sula said quickly. She didn’t want the Lai-own doorman to hear Lamey voice his next thought.

  He smiled again. His teeth were brilliant white.

  “That would be lovely, Earthgirl, thank you.”

  Sula turned and entered the cool lobby with its red-and-yellow tiles and its Devajjo stylings and took off her peaked uniform cap as she crossed the floor and summoned the elevator by flipping the cap toward the sensor. The door rolled open and she entered and turned to face front. Lamey followed like a dutiful staff officer, standing slightly behind her. The door closed in perfect silence. His voice came softly from over her shoulder.

  “I don’t know what to call you. Is it Caroline? Caro? Margaux?” The voice took on a knowing tone. “Gredel?”

  “I’m a Peer,” Sula said. “The correct form of address is ‘my lady.’”

  “Of course.” Agreeably enough. “My lady.”

  The elevator reached the top floor, and Sula’s reception area opened before them. Her heels clacked on parquet, an echo to the urgent knocking of her heart. Niches on the walls held porcelain plates, jars, urns, pots. Sula put her cap on a side table and walked into the living area with its broad curved window that wrapped around a corner of the building—which she owned—and provided a view of the Lower Town.

  In the living area there was more porcelain on display, and irises and hyacinths in celadon vases. Antique books sat in airtight, climate-controlled display cases, and cheap collections of mathematical puzzles were laid neatly on a low table, next to a rank of sharpened pencils.

  Otherwise the furniture and decor were simple, almost spartan. The elaborate furnishings, the precious woods and inlays so common in the High City, did not interest her. She kept everything obsessively tidy, and a faint whiff of lemon polish assured her that someone had tended to the room that day.

  Lamey prowled the room, shook his head at the porcelain. “You like pots?” he said, half in surprise.

  “It’s old porcelain, from Earth. I spent three years there, commanding the ring station.”

  “So Earthgirl actually went to Earth? And went collecting, it seems.”

  “I did a lot of . . . inspecting. It took me all over the planet.”

  Many of her treasures were, frankly, bribes, given in hope of contracts or other favors. She hadn’t wanted to give the impression that she could be bought, so she’d accepted the gifts and then done whatever the hell she wanted.

  Oddly enough, though, the gifts hadn’t stopped coming. Apparently corrupt contractors lived forever in hope.

  Lamey reached out to touch a light blue bowl with a greenish, crackled glaze. He hesitated. Sula smiled.

  “Ru ware,” Sula said. “Song Dynasty. You can touch it if you like—it’s survived thousands of years, so odds are it’ll survive you.”

  Instead of touching the bowl he turned to look at her. “You probably know all about the Song Dynasty, whoever they were. I remember how you used to love history.”

  “The Song chose their officials by competitive examinations instead of by heredity.”

  Lamey’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “How . . . how unlike our own perfect system.”

  They turned at the sound of footsteps. A tall man entered the room. He wore the undress uniform of the Fleet, and his curly hair formed a light brown halo around his head. Lamey seemed surprised to find a man here at all.

  “I heard voices, my lady,” said the newcomer.

  Sula nodded at Lamey. “Macnamara,” she said, “this is an old friend from Spannan.” She looked at Lamey and realized that she couldn’t introduce him by his nickname, and that she didn’t know what name he was using. He had been a young hunted gangster when she’d last seen him, and he might have adopted a new identity.

  After a moment of silence, Lamey seemed to realize her difficulty.

  “Hector Braga,” he said. Which Sula knew to be his birth name, which in turn meant he wasn’t traveling under an alias.

  “Can Macnamara bring you anything?” Sula asked. “A drink?”

  “Kyowan and Spacey,” he said.

  “I’ll have a lemonade,” said Sula.

  “My lady,” said Macnamara. “Sir.”

  He gave Lamey an appraising look from beneath his brows, then left the room. Lamey hadn’t made a good impression with him, or so Sula surmised.

  Constable First Class Macnamara was one of the servants that the Fleet permitted her to take from one posting to the next, and he’d been with her in Action Team 491 during the Naxid War, when he’d helped her kill a great many rebels. But Sula had found he was a little possessive of her, and that he sometimes disapproved of her male friends.

  Usually, it had to be admitted, with good reason.

  Still, it was good to know that Macnamara was in the apartment, in case she had to throw Lamey out.

  Sula looked at her guest. Her panic had faded once she’d brought Lamey onto her home ground, and now she felt as if she could exert a little more control over the situation.

  “Sit down,” she invited. Lamey gracefully flowed onto a sofa, where he carefully left room for her. Sula chose an armchair. He looked at her with appreciation.

  “You’ve really got the manner, you know,” he said. “You’ve really perfected it. You always had the voice, but the rest . . . would have needed polish.”

  “You’re more polished yourself,” Sula said.

  He smiled, tweaked the knees of his braided trousers. “I suppose we’ve both earned our places.”

  Sula gave him a sharp look. “What is your place?” she asked.

  Lamey made an equivocal gesture with his hands. “I’m a lobbyist, I suppose. For Spannan. Ultimately we hope to remove the Distchin family as the planet’s patrons, but we need allies first, so that’s why we’re here.”

  The Distchin clan—high-ranked Torminel Peers—had been the chief patrons of Spannan since it was first settled. They were infamously absentee landlords, living in the High City while running things on Spannan through a series of appointees. Lady Distchin had never been on Spannan in her life, nor had her last two predecessors.

  “You’re awfully candid about your objectives,” Sula said.

  Lamey shrugged. “It’s not as if the Distchins don’t know the delegation is here.”

  “That’s quite a task you’ve set for yourselves. You’ll need a vote in Convocation.”

  “That’s why we need as many convocates on our side as we can find.”

&nbs
p; Macnamara returned with a tray. Ice tinkled in glasses as he handed out drinks and placed coasters and napkins on polished side tables. He straightened.

  “Will there be anything else, my lady?”

  “No, thank you. You can go.”

  Macnamara withdrew, casting another suspicious look at Lamey over his shoulder as he went. He had never managed the imperturbable countenance so desirable in a servant.

  She turned her gaze back to Lamey and found him looking at her with frank calculation.

  “I knew you at once, when I saw that video.” Admiration suddenly flooded his face. “There you were, straight as an arrow in your uniform. Beautiful as a sunrise. And I thought, That’s my Earthgirl!”

  Sula cast a glance after Macnamara to make sure he’d gone into the kitchen and closed the door behind him. The conversation was getting onto dangerous ground.

  “What video was this?” she asked finally.

  “You were getting a decoration, during the war. We didn’t have a lot of heroes then, and you’d destroyed those six Naxid ships at First Magaria.”

  “Five,” she said. She could remember the reek of Lord Tork’s rotting flesh as he leaned close to pin the Nebula Medal on her tunic.

  “Five, then,” Lamey said. “And then of course there was a lot of video of you when you captured the High City with your army. I knew damned well that Caro couldn’t have pulled that off.”

  Again Sula glanced toward the kitchen door to make certain it was still shut. Lamey looked at her with a frown.

  “Whatever happened to Caro, anyway?” he asked.

  His tone was light, but there was a dangerous edge beneath the words, one that sent a chill along her nerves. It occurred to her that he might be an informer, that he might have survived on Spannan by betraying his friends—and that he might be recording this, or broadcasting to a third party.