The Accidental War

by Walter Jon Williams

  Martinez smiled. “Your father will be pleased. No more brass bands.”

  “Brass bands!” Yaling called in disapproval. “Brass bands!”

  Martinez’s smile broadened. “She’s absorbed her grandfather’s opinions.”

  “Brass bands!” Yaling stomped a foot, crushing all brass bands beneath it.

  “Excellent!” Martinez approved. “Down with brass bands!”

  “She’s very vocal today,” Terza said.

  “Our genius has a new picture,” Martinez said.

  “Me when I’m a captain!”

  Terza viewed the picture with harassed amusement and was about to offer praise when Yaling hurled herself bodily upon the paper and tore it from Young Gareth’s hands. “Brass bands!” she shrieked. “Brass bands!” She flopped on top of the picture and began to tear at it with her hands.

  “Mei-mei!” cried Young Gareth. Martinez bent and swept his daughter off the floor, but she retained the picture in one fist until her brother managed to snatch it away. Young Gareth was red with fury. Yaling pointed at him and chortled.

  “Don’t worry,” Terza said to her son. “You can print another copy.”

  “I’m acrimonious!” Young Gareth said. Martinez had been trying to expand his son’s vocabulary and took a brief moment to congratulate himself on his success.

  “Brass bands!” Yaling laughed.

  After a brief interval, order was restored. Young Gareth stalked off to print another copy of his picture, and Yaling’s nurse was summoned and took possession of the child. Martinez and Terza were left alone in the entrance hall.

  “Well”—Martinez offered a laugh—“Yaling’s developed a fine sense of sibling rivalry.”

  Terza untangled the medals on Martinez’s chest that had been disturbed by the squirming toddler. “Didn’t Cosgrove buy Rol-mar bonds?” she said. “If Roland chases him down in time, maybe he can get them cheap.”

  “I seem to remember Cosgrove planned to borrow against them. Besides, what would Roland do with Rol-mar bonds?”

  “Sell them at a profit, I imagine.”

  “It was hard enough to sell them the first time.”

  He turned at the sound of footsteps on the marble floor and saw Doshtra, the Daimong butler. “My lady,” said Doshtra to Terza, “Lord Roland has sent a message to say he is very slightly delayed.” His bell-like voice echoed slightly in the lofty space of the hall.

  “Thank you, Mister Doshtra.”

  Doshtra made his way out, heels clicking, alternately passing through shadow and sunbeam as he moved through columns of light flooding through the clerestory. The palace was in the Devis mode, which featured long, functional, clean lines and interlocking geometrical shapes. In general Martinez found the Devis mode dull, but his own house was something of an exception: the polished scarlet of the carnelian pillars along the walls, with their blushing shades of red, made an interesting contrast to the pale gold marble and echoed both the sunset and the sunrise. Terza had found or commissioned artworks that provided splashes of brightness on the muted color of the walls. She had also provided the brilliantly colored cloisonné vases that filled the air with the scent of their flowers.

  Bullet holes in the walls had been filled with gilded, star-shaped plugs and added a random element to the building’s geometric perfection. Martinez thought of them as the constellation of uncertainty, a reminder that nothing was as solid as it seemed.

  Terza had performed splendidly at creating a home, particularly as she’d started with a building wrecked during the war. Probably, Martinez thought, interior design was one of those things that Chens had been bred to do over countless generations.

  Still, there were only so many long straight lines and right angles that Martinez could bear, and in his own office and study he’d equipped himself with comfortable, overstuffed furniture with barely a straight line to be seen. Above an oval, scalloped desk he’d placed his portrait by Montemar Jukes, who used to be the official artist aboard his cruiser Illustrious. He couldn’t put himself or his ancestors on public display for fear of provoking mirth in well-bred Peers, but at least in private he could contemplate his past glories.

  “You know, Gareth,” Terza said, “I wish you wouldn’t call Chai-chai a genius all the time, particularly when he’s in the room. We don’t want him to get a swelled head.”

  Martinez shrugged. “Well, he is a genius. And besides, I know I’m extremely gifted when it comes to brains, and I don’t have a swelled head.”

  Terza raised an eyebrow. Martinez ignored it.

  “If Gareth doesn’t have a healthy ego,” Martinez said, “he could be crushed. He’s going to be insulted and despised simply for being my son. Just as I’m insulted practically every time I win a yacht race, or lose one, or make a suggestion to one of my social superiors, or for that matter open my mouth. No matter what Gareth does or who he is, his ancestors won’t be good enough.”

  Despising their inferiors, he thought, was yet another thing the high-caste Peers were bred to do. Like interior decoration, like wearing clothes well and knowing the best wines, like retaining traditional pet names for family members, like “Chai-chai” for the eldest son and “Mei-mei” for the youngest daughter, retaining them even though the names were in a language that hadn’t been spoken in thousands of years.

  Like collecting a toll from everyone around them. Like treating their clients with condescension. Like dismissing talented inferiors by calling them “clever,” as if displaying cleverness were a minor social embarrassment.

  Terza’s expression turned cold. “He’s my son as well,” she said.

  Yes, he thought, you’re a Chen, and Chens aren’t despised. But you’re a Chen whose father sold her to a social inferior, and the other Peers might pity, but won’t forget. Or forgive.

  He knew better than to speak these thoughts aloud. Instead, “You know what people are like. They’ll look for weakness to exploit, and my ancestors are Chai-chai’s weakness.”

  “I think you’re too sensitive.”

  “Sensitivity is a family trait,” Martinez said. “It’s from a lifetime of being insulted. And my father being insulted, and my brother and sisters being insulted, sometimes by the same folk who come to us for money.”

  “I had another call from Mister Yao at the academy,” Terza said.

  Nicely done, Martinez thought. Because he’d been feeling the rising tension that signaled the beginning of an argument, and he didn’t want to argue with Terza, not least because she wasn’t the problem.

  “You know,” he said, “perhaps it’s time we considered taking Gareth out of that stuffy old school. Give him a private tutor who can take him along at his own pace.”

  “Mister Yao said that you’d contacted him to dispute one of Gareth’s grades.”

  Martinez waved a hand. “I think that Yao has a limited imagination. I had to explain to him the originality of Chai-chai’s concept.”

  “For all’s sake, Gareth,” Terza said. “It was an exercise about vowel sounds. There aren’t any new ones.”

  “Have you heard Chai-chai’s sounds? They sounded pretty novel to me.”

  Terza gave him a serious look. “We don’t want Gareth to think everything’s going to be easy for him. And we don’t want to raise a conceited child.”

  “He’s the Chen heir—conceited goes with the territory.”

  She looked at him, eyes imperceptibly narrowed. “I’m a Chen heir, too. You think I’m conceited?”

  Careful, Martinez thought. Terza, he reminded himself, was not the problem.

  “I think you do an admirable job of overcoming the disadvantages of your birth,” he said. Turning away the argument, he hoped, with a joke.

  In the pause that followed, a door opened and Khalid Alikhan entered. Alikhan was Martinez’s orderly, one of the four servants allowed him by the Fleet, and wore the uniform of a master weaponer, which he had been before Martinez had snatched him out of his impending retirement. Alikhan
offered Martinez the experience of his thirty years in the weapons bays and had in the past provided a conduit between Martinez and the enlisted personnel under his command. If Martinez ever had a command again, he hoped Alikhan would provide the same service.

  Alikhan cut an erect figure with iron-gray hair, a goatee, and the waxed, curling mustachios favored by senior petty officers. He had a uniform cap under one arm and carried a polished mahogany casket in his gloved hands.

  “Lord Roland’s car is just turning the corner, my lord,” he said. “I brought your Orb.”

  “Thank you, Alikhan.” Martinez drew on his own gloves, then opened the casket and brought out the Golden Orb. When Martinez took the weighty object in his hand, both Terza and Alikhan braced in salute, shoulders back, chins raised to expose the throat.

  “At ease,” Martinez said. For all that it was flattering to see a roomful of important people snap to the salute when he entered, it was more than a little embarrassing to be saluted in this family setting.

  He closed the casket, and Alikhan tucked it away while offering the cap he’d carried under his arm.

  “Your cap, my lord.”

  Martinez took the billed cap and placed it on his head. Alikhan surveyed his uniform critically and apparently found no flaw.

  “Have a pleasant afternoon, my lord,” he said.

  “Hardly.” Martinez sighed, and then Alikhan opened the front door and Martinez and Terza stepped into the sunlight. They walked through the front garden, ablaze with summer flowers, and the front gate just as Roland’s chocolate-brown Hunhao limousine drew up to the curb and the passenger door rose with a smooth electric hum.

  Roland reclined in the back, his convocate’s tunic unbuttoned and a glass of Delta whisky in his hand. “Forgive me for not saluting,” he said. “I’ve decided the only way to cope with the afternoon is with alcohol. Unless you prefer hashish, and I’ve got that, too.”

  “I don’t want to melt down completely,” Martinez said. “I’ll stick with the whisky.”

  “Do you have any wine?” Terza asked.

  Roland gestured toward the liquor cabinet. “I carry a surfeit of delights. There’s also some pastry.”

  Martinez and Terza helped themselves. The door rolled down, and the car pulled away on silent electric wheels.

  Roland lifted his glass. “So we’ll have to endure paeans to the Supreme Commander for the whole afternoon and evening. Do we think we’re up to it?”

  “I’m hoping for a cloudburst,” Martinez said.

  Roland looked up at the clear viridian sky, with barely a wisp of cloud in sight. “I think you’re going to be disappointed.”

  Martinez thought of the day devoted to the wisdom, leadership, and glory of Supreme Commander Tork and sighed.

  “It’s bound to be disappointing either way,” he said.

  “I was thinking,” said Martinez, “of arriving late, during Tork’s address. That way things would come to a standstill while everyone saluted me.”

  “In front of an imperial audience?” Roland said. “People would think you’re very rude.”

  “They think I’m rude anyway.”

  Terza’s comment was incisive. “Best not confirm their suspicions, then.”

  Her husband sighed. “Best not.”

  Today was the seventh anniversary of the Second Battle of Magaria, the action that was viewed both as the pinnacle of Lord Tork’s career and the climax of the Naxid Rebellion. That another battle at Naxas had been necessary before the end, and that Tork had not been present, was an element that had been minimized by Tork’s partisans—according to them it was just a little mopping-up action. But the Battle of Naxas had been a desperate, hard-fought battle by two fleets at the ends of their tethers, and that the official account viewed it as merely a skirmish deeply offended Martinez, who remembered all too well how vicious the fight had been: antimatter blooms flaming in the night, squadrons darting like flights of birds, and the astounding synergy between him and Caroline Sula, maneuvering their squadrons independently but somehow together, as if they were linked by telepathy . . .

  The Shaa conquerors had loved prime numbers, and so the seventh anniversary of the fight was bound to be well observed in any case, but this particular anniversary was grander than it might have been. Tork was putting on the biggest show of his postwar career, an enormous event taking place in Zanshaa’s largest athletic stadium. And that, Martinez thought, was because for the first time since the end of the war he was on the defensive.

  His sister Vipsania’s documentary series War of the Naxid Rebellion had been broadcast to all the empire, and it had been a very thorough work indeed. So far as Martinez could tell, the series revealed as much of the truth as the censors permitted. Martinez had been interviewed, as had Sula, and Lord Chen, his sister Junior Fleet Commander Michi Chen, Lord Saïd, and Tork himself. Even Severin had his moment, explaining his decisions to shift the wormhole at Protipanu and remain behind to spy on the Naxid force. Each political decision had been recalled by those who had made it, with reference—when it existed—to the transcript of the meetings or the appropriate session of the Convocation. Between combat, executions, and suicide, none of the Naxid leaders had survived, but many records had, and the recollections of aides and surviving relatives made their actions comprehensible, if no less vicious.

  Martinez had been on shipboard during much of the war and isolated from the political decisions that had sent him arrowing from one part of the empire to the next, and he found that part of the series fascinating.

  But as interesting as that was, Martinez derived his greatest satisfaction from the beautifully realized combat scenes, in which both sides’ tactics were lucidly drawn and then analyzed by officers and historians. Without explicitly saying so, Tork’s celebrated victory at Second Magaria was shown to be a slugfest akin to a pair of drunken bar fighters windmilling at each other in a dark alley, a brawl redeemed only by Caroline Sula’s disregard of orders to maneuver her own lead squadron brilliantly against the enemy. Tork’s unimaginative performance was shown in contrast to the more innovative tactics used by Martinez at Hone-bar, Kangas at Antopone, and the triumvirate of Martinez, Sula, and Michi Chen during the final battle at Naxas.

  Martinez had been deeply gratified by this, and more than a little surprised that his sister had actually bothered to notice he’d made any contribution at all.

  War of the Naxid Rebellion was a superb work of history and had been watched by tens of billions of the empire’s citizens. It had also brought Martinez and Sula to the public’s attention once again, this time such that Martinez could no longer walk down the street without being stopped by admirers.

  Another result of the series was a delay in the release of the Fleet’s official history, as more and more rewrites were demanded in order to refute the video documentary. Martinez was perfectly confident that the history and rewrites were both doomed, since only a fraction of those who watched the video would read the dry history, and fewer still would be convinced by its arguments.

  But still, Tork’s prestige was enormous, at least among his own caste, and now Zanshaa was required to devote a day to celebrating his achievements, and such was his status that anyone of importance was obliged to attend whether Tork hated them or not. The Commandery would be emptied of Fleet officers, the Convocation was in recess to allow its members to attend, and the ministries were on holiday. After the official celebration, restaurants, theaters, clubs, and High City palaces would be open for a series of receptions.

  As a decorated Fleet officer with the rank of senior captain, Martinez had been invited to the great stadium event and many of the receptions, a whole series of engraved invitations on exquisite creamy stock arriving over a series of weeks, and requiring handwritten replies written on equally well-engraved paper. Fleet and Peer politesse required that he attend, but at least he could spend the dreary day with his friends and family, in Roland’s stadium box.

  But first he had to g
et to the stadium, and since thousands of others were on their way there, the limousine was bogged in traffic almost from the moment it left the High City. During the long delay Martinez found himself drinking more whisky than he intended, and he felt a shimmer of vertigo as he stepped from the vehicle in the convocates’ parking area. Terza took his arm, perhaps to steady him. With only a few minutes before the event was scheduled to begin, the party hurried to a tunnel that led to the exclusive boxes reserved for convocates. Vipsania waited at the tunnel entrance and favored Roland with an impatient glare that would have frozen him in his tracks if a lifetime’s exposure to his sisters hadn’t rendered him immune.

  “You’re late,” Vipsania accused.

  Roland buttoned his red convocate’s jacket. “On the contrary,” he said, “I’m just in time.”

  “Hold on.” Vipsania raised a hand to stop them from entering the tunnel. They watched as she reached into her bag, produced a hand comm, and spoke a few words. Then she gestured them onward. “I’ve arranged a reception,” she said, then gave Roland another glare. “Though you almost spoiled it.”

  Her pale, pearlescent gown shone like a beacon in the dark tunnel, and Vipsania held them to a deliberate pace until they entered the stadium and bright afternoon embraced them. Martinez blinked in the sunlight and found himself on the floor of the arena, surrounded by what—from his perspective—looked like near-vertical walls of seats climbing halfway into the sky, each tier aswarm with a population of bustling, ever-more-distant citizens. The stadium held two hundred thousand people, and it looked as if every seat was filled. Vaguely martial music played on the public address system and echoed with varying degrees of delay from different parts of the looming structure.

  Still following Vipsania, Martinez and Terza walked on the grass past a series of enclosures set up for convocates and their guests, and separated by gated, breast-high wooden pickets. He had forgotten he was carrying the Orb until the convocates around him began leaping to their feet and bracing to attention. He gestured at them by way of giving them permission to sit, but more and more people were jumping to attention, and the stance spread out like a sea of dominoes falling in reverse, each tile picking itself up from a scattered pile and hopping into its assigned place. Only those in government service were required to salute, but others joined anyway.