The Accidental War

by Walter Jon Williams

  Maurice, Lord Chen sat in a quiet corner of the Convocation’s lounge, finished his second glass of mig brandy, and considered ordering a third. It was the day before Solstice Recess, and for Lord Chen the adjournment couldn’t come soon enough. He was heartily sick of his fellow convocates and the revolting turmoil they were creating. Accusations, counteraccusations, conspiracies, venom and shouting, all to the drumbeat of the rising and apparently unstoppable violence in the Lower Town—unstoppable, because whenever the police intervened, the violence increased rather than diminished. Bullets and executions didn’t seem to be a solution.

  Worse, the conflict in the Convocation pitted him against members of his own class. Lady Gruum’s ancestors were as distinguished as Lord Chen’s own, and her faction included some of the most distinguished members of the Convocation. Lord Chen, on the other hand, was being driven closer to the Martinez family as they helped to organize support for the Lord Senior and the government.

  And last, his own affairs demanded more and more of his attention. His fortune was dependent on shipping, particularly in the Hone Reach, and if Lady Tu-hon achieved her goal of shifting the tax burden back to the merchants, the business he’d spent the last eight years rescuing could be again in jeopardy. He’d already had to halt a number of shipbuilding projects, all cargo carriers, and had instead concentrated on building enormous passenger ships intended to carry emigrants to the newly opened worlds. But with Rol-mar in a state of mutiny, even that business now seemed risky.

  He decided to order a third brandy. He signaled the waitron, and then he saw a young Terran in Fleet uniform approaching him. The man had a lieutenant’s rank, dark brown skin, hair shorn close to the scalp, and the red triangular collar tabs of the staff officer.

  “My apologies, Lord Convocate,” he said with a bow. “I’m to convey Lord Ivan Snow’s compliments and tell you that he hopes he may see you directly.”

  “Does he?” Lord Chen murmured in surprise. Lord Ivan Snow was the Inspector General of the Fleet, and the head of its military police as well as the Investigative Service that pursued criminals within the military. He had held the office since before the Naxid War and had seemed one of those officers so thoroughly lodged in his position as to be immovable. Like Lord Tork, he would hold his office as long as he wanted, or till death claimed him.

  But however immovable Lord Ivan might be, Chen had never had, or required, a private meeting with him. The Lord Inspector had reported to the Fleet Control Board every so often, and that had been that.

  “Now, if you please, my lord,” said the young man.

  Brandy seethed along with surprise in Lord Chen’s brain. “Yes,” he decided. “Yes, I will oblige his lordship.” However inconvenient the summons, at least it would delay his return to the wrangling on the Convocation.

  He rose from his booth just as the waitron arrived with his third brandy balanced on a stained-glass salver. Lord Chen paused for a moment, then picked up the brandy and swallowed it. Fumes stung his sinuses. “Lead on,” he said, his voice husky, his throat half aflame.

  To his surprise the staff officer led Lord Chen clean out of the Convocation and to a waiting automobile. The door rolled up, and the staff officer stood by to respectfully help Lord Chen into the vehicle.

  Lord Chen paused with his hand on the doorframe. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know your name.”

  “Ratna, my lord.”

  “You aren’t coming along, Lieutenant Ratna?”

  “I have another errand, my lord.”

  Lord Chen nodded and seated himself. The scent of the aesa-leather seats suffused his senses. The door rolled down and the car sped off down the Boulevard of the Praxis, traveling in silence on electric motors. There was scarcely any vibration. The driver was behind an opaqued screen and Lord Chen could see only a Terran silhouette in the typical brimless flat cap worn by chauffeurs. Just short of the Garden of Scents, the car turned onto a side street and drew to a stop in front of the Nicotiana Smoking Club, a venerable institution that required, for membership, at least one grandparent having been admitted as a member. Two of Lord Chen’s grandparents had belonged, but Chen had never developed much of a taste for tobacco, let alone hashish, and had never applied for membership, though he’d been present now and again as a guest.

  The door rolled up, and a young Terran man appeared to help Lord Chen from the car. He wore civilian clothes, but there was something unmistakably military about his carriage, and he led Lord Chen through the green coppered doors into the club. It was a comfortable place, brass and dark wood, with alcoves and small rooms for the sake of privacy. Wooden locker doors lined the walls, each holding a humidor or a pipe belonging to a member. The porter, an elderly Terran with a fringe of hair straggling around his bald head, nodded as Lord Chen entered, but did not ask him to sign the guest book.

  The club had a deep ingrained tobacco scent, loam and hay and saddle leather all blended together. Chen’s guide led him to a room in back, knocked quietly on a recessed door, then opened it without waiting for a reply.

  In the room Lord Inspector Snow reclined on a divan, his hawklike face coldly majestic in the illumination of a globular overhead light. He wore a rich purple velvet smoking jacket with a monogram and the club badge on the breast pocket. Before him on a low table was a hookah with two mouthpieces, its reservoir made of beautifully colored blown glass and its marble bowl carved in the shape of a lotus flower.

  “Thank you for coming, Lord Chen,” he said in a sandpaper voice. “Please have a seat, and join me if you like.”

  “Thank you, no, I’m not much of a smoker.” Lord Chen unbuttoned his wine-red jacket and sat on another divan across from the Lord Inspector. Alcohol fumes whirled in his head. He wished he hadn’t ordered the third brandy.

  Lord Ivan reached out to touch the bowl, and electronics gently ignited the tobacco. He took one of the amber mouthpieces in his hand. “Did anyone see you leave?” he asked.

  “Lots of people saw me,” said Lord Chen. “I doubt I raised anyone’s curiosity.”

  “Very good, then.”

  The Lord Inspector smoked. The pipe bubbled pleasantly and then released into the room an improbably sweet, cloying floral scent. Something like burnt molasses seemed to grip the back of Chen’s throat, and he tried not to sneeze. He found the divan uncomfortable and he wished he were back in the Convocation lounge drinking his third brandy in peace. Or maybe his fourth.

  “How can I help you, Lord Fleetcom?” he said finally.

  Lord Ivan lowered the mouthpiece and blew out an impressively large cloud of sweet smoke, then fixed Lord Chen with a calculating gaze. “Were you aware of the meeting of the Fleet Control Board this morning?” he asked.

  Lord Chen blinked. “I knew of no such meeting.” He had been a member of the Fleet Control Board since the war, and he would naturally have been informed if the board met.

  Lord Ivan nodded. “You and Fleet Commander Pezzini were both excluded,” he said.

  Lord Chen was puzzled. He and Pezzini were hardly allies, since Pezzini was one of those who loathed Gareth Martinez with a passion and supported the Supreme Commander in practically everything.

  “Why?” he began, and then realization dawned. “Oh.”

  “Oh, indeed,” said the Lord Inspector. He seemed bitterly amused. “The two Terran members of the board were kept away. The other seven met privately.”

  The brandy fumes cleared from Lord Chen’s mind as if blown away by an arctic breeze. “This was Lord Tork’s decision?” he asked.

  “Of course.”

  “What is he planning?”

  “The Supreme Commander was alarmed by Captain Severin’s actions at Rol-mar. He fears that Terran officers of the Fleet may imitate the Naxid revolt and stage a mutiny.”

  Lord Chen gave a laugh of derision, and then another, more alarming thought intruded. “Does he have any evidence?”

  Lord Ivan’s smile was savage. “Beyond one of his cruisers
being blown up along with two hundred members of his own species? No.”

  “What did the meeting decide?”

  “At some convenient date, all Terran ships are to be occupied and disarmed. When Lord Tork decides the danger has passed, the Terran crews will be allowed back aboard their ships.”

  Lord Chen absorbed this with his full attention. Relays seemed to be opening and closing in his mind, click clack clack, leading from one irretrievable conclusion to the next.

  “Is there a tentative date?”

  “Lord Tork is working with his staff to berth as many Terran squadrons as possible at bases where they can be taken. Once Tork has made his dispositions, the Terran ships will be at his mercy.”

  Chen felt his heart lurch against his ribs. “And then what? Detentions, interrogations?”

  “I think those are inevitable.”

  “And if the interrogations produce false confessions?”

  “They may be designed to do exactly that.”

  Lord Chen pondered this, the relays in his mind still going clack clack clack, while Ivan Snow, his hawklike face opaque, picked up the mouthpiece of the hookah and inhaled. The hookah bubbled, Lord Ivan exhaled. Sweet tobacco haze clouded the air.

  “How do you know this?” Lord Chen asked finally.

  “An informer. I have a partial transcript of the meeting, should you care to see it.”

  “Your informer is not a Terran?”

  Snow offered a tight-lipped smile. “No Terrans were at the meeting.”

  So that meant at least one non-Terran was outraged by the board’s attempt to seize—seize what? Supreme power? Because they had to carry this scheme out without the knowledge of the government, or at least the Lord Senior.

  “What should I do?” he asked. “Inform the Lord Senior? Raise the issue in Convocation?”

  “Not yet,” said Ivan Snow. “We don’t know the date, no orders have been sent, and at present Lord Tork and his friends can simply deny everything.”

  “And you’ll know when the orders are sent?”

  “I have friends in the Commandery who work in Operations Command. The orders would be transmitted through Operations, and I will know the hour the message is sent and have a decoded transcription within minutes.” He inhaled tobacco, exhaled a sweet cloud, coughed. “But we should send our own messages, yes?”

  “I have no access to Operations Command, my lord. I can send no messages to the Fleet.”

  Snow pointed at Lord Chen with the amber mouthpiece of his pipe. “You should not send messages. You can’t do it safely. You should take messages, in person to a safe location, and deliver them verbally. I suggest you start by passing a message to your son-in-law.”

  “Gareth?” Lord Chen blinked. “He has no command. What can he do?”

  “Flee,” said Ivan Snow. “He should flee to your sister at Harzapid. And he should take as many officers with him as he can.”

  Lord Chen considered this, then nodded. “Michi doesn’t command the Fourth Fleet, just the base and dockyards.”

  Snow’s gaze was cold. “She can take command of the Fourth Fleet,” he said. “She will have to. And once she does, she will need experienced officers.”

  Chen looked at the Lord Inspector and felt his heart begin to founder. “You don’t think we can stop this.”

  “I don’t absolutely know that we can. So we need another plan. We can’t leave the human race absolutely without a defense.”

  “Civil war.”

  “Civil war again.” Ivan Snow sighed, then drew in more tobacco. “I can send messages to your sister that should be safe. In the meantime, I suggest you speak to Captain Martinez as soon as you can. Harzapid is three months away, and much can happen in that time.”

  Chapter 15

  The sound of Terza’s harp floated through the palace from the music room. Martinez walked toward the sound blindly, his mind aswim in something like a storming sea. Part of his brain saw nothing but horrors, the Corona Club filling with bodies, the stairs running with blood, friends fighting and dying while Martinez himself stood helpless, unable to prevent the slaughter. Another part of his brain was making lists—lists of routes, of officers, of supplies. A third was working on a more abstract level, conceptualizing fleet tactics to be employed when heavily outnumbered. That last process was going on entirely on its own, and he was aware of it only when some small insight bubbled to the surface of the crashing waves that seemed to fill his head.

  He walked into the music room and saw Terza with her harp, her long black hair pinned back, her agile fingers plucking at the strings, and he realized that now she lived in a different world than he, a world in which war and treachery and annihilation were far, far away, and not looming right on the doorstep.

  Martinez walked into the music room and sat heavily on a couch. Terza remained focused on her music, though he knew by a slight shift in the angle of her eyebrows that she was aware of his presence. The music flowed on, glissandos alternating with fingernail attacks. Singing chords echoed from the geometric Devis-style roof beams. Terza was an expert harpist and often played in a chamber ensemble made up of her friends.

  It’s starting again, he thought.

  Except that it was worse this time. During the Naxid War the majority of Naxids remained loyal, and when the ringleaders were killed or committed suicide, Naxids were ejected from the Fleet and some of the security agencies, but otherwise permitted to go about their lives unmolested.

  But now it seemed that all Terrans were being judged guilty of crimes that no one had so much as defined. Perhaps, Martinez thought, the Convocation shouldn’t have been so eager to congratulate Lord Mehrang on his bloody suppression of the Yormak Rebellion. The Yormaks had been reduced to a few refugees penned up on reserves, and no one knew if they would survive as a species.

  Annihilating an entire species, Martinez thought, might have set entirely the wrong precedent. Particularly since his own species might be the next to be eliminated.

  The piece came to an end in a great swash of glimmering sound. Terza paused to let the last echoes fade, then looked up.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Martinez only blinked at her.

  “Is it Lieutenant Kelly? Has something happened to her?”

  “No.”

  Good, Martinez thought. He had managed to utter a single syllable. He could only improve from here.

  He gave the words all his concentration, and spoke. “I just had a meeting with your father. It’s very bad news.”

  Terza turned off her harp, shifted it from her shoulder, rose, and joined Martinez on the couch, landing with a swirl of silk skirts and the heart notes of vetiver. Intelligent concern shone in her dark eyes. She took his hand.

  “In your own time,” she said.

  In his own time he told her, stumbling a bit here and there. “So Maurice thinks we should become refugees,” he concluded, “then mutineers.”

  “It’s that bad?”

  “Apparently.” Martinez took a breath. “I’m one of the Terran criminals, after all. I shouldn’t be caught here when things come apart.”

  In silence, her eyes inward, Terza pondered for a moment. “Who else knows?” she said finally.

  “I’m the only one Maurice has told.”

  “Does your brother know?”

  Martinez considered the question. “I don’t think so. Certainly he hasn’t told me anything.”

  “He’s a Terran criminal as well. So are your sisters. If you’re going to run, they should come as well.”

  “I’m supposed to take officers with me to Harzapid, to crew Michi’s ships. I’ve been . . . making a list.”

  Her warm hand shifted in his. “I hope I’m on that list. Along with the children.”

  His breath caught in his throat. A surge of pure inchoate emotion prickled the hairs on Martinez’s arms.

  He looked at her. When he could manage words, he said, “Are you positive you want to do this?”

 
She had been in mourning for her fiancé, Richard Li, when Roland had strong-armed her father into agreeing to let her marry Martinez. Martinez himself had been in shock after the shattering of his relationship with Sula. The development had been so sudden that there were still white mourning threads in Terza’s hair during the public announcement of their engagement.

  He had sworn to himself that he would treat her with all the courtesy and regard that a husband owed his wife, and for the most part he had succeeded. If his thoughts sometimes strayed to Sula, to her golden hair and emerald-green eyes and the pale skin that could flush so easily with passion, it was not his fault. He behaved toward Terza as if his own passion had been directed always toward her.

  But he could not help but wonder if she, too, had made a similar resolution. If each of them was playing a part, then what was the marriage but a fragile structure like Young Gareth’s cardboard castle, knocked flat by the first careless blunder?

  “Last time,” she said, “you were off on a warship, and I was pregnant, and I couldn’t be with you even though I wanted to. But now we’re going to be refugees, and if that’s going to happen we should be refugees together.”

  The words had stopped up his throat again, so Martinez took Terza in his arms and held her against him. Her vetiver perfume whirled in his head.

  “I’m glad we’ll be together,” he managed finally.

  We should be refugees together. It was the strongest possible affirmation of Terza’s commitment to their marriage.

  How can I possibly deserve this? he asked himself.

  But then he knew immediately that he didn’t deserve it at all and drew back. Terza took his hand again.

  “Roland has the family yacht docked on the ring,” Terza said. “Do you know how many passengers can fit aboard?”

  “A dozen or so in comfort.” He offered a faint smile. “The junior officers can sleep on the floor and on the tables.”

  “Lots of playmates for Chai-chai.”

  And then a thought struck him, and he laughed.

  “We don’t need Roland’s boat!” he said. “We’ve got Corona!” He laughed again at the thought of the yacht carrier flying his refugees to Harzapid in complete luxury. “We can put a hundred passengers on board if we need to.”