Conventions of War

by Walter Jon Williams

  Nor was the present war any different. Planets surrendered to one side or the other under fear of bombardment and destruction. Martinez had told her that the entire Hone Reach had almost gone over to the enemy out of sheer terror, without a shot fired, and that only the arrival of Faqforce—with their own missiles and promised destruction—prevented the defection.

  Five hundred hostages were insignificant against such a history, let alone against the casualties of the war so far.

  Sula continued her essay. She pointed out that the Naxids killed hostages because they couldn’t locate their enemies, whereas the secret government had gone after specific targets and killed them. She promised more and greater retribution to come.

  She went over her text again, making small changes, and wished she were better at debate. Her verbal gifts, as both she and others had cause to regret, were more in the direction of sarcasm, and sarcasm seemed inappropriate as a tribute to five hundred butchered citizens.

  The sad fact was that the Makish assassination might be Team 491’s last operation. The secret government and its operatives amounted only to three people, and if they kept risking themselves, they would be caught.

  She knew that Team 491 had to recruit other operatives, which meant trusting other people, some of whom by their nature would be untrustworthy. Others would be captured and give up everything they knew under torture.

  It might make more sense to cease all activity and wait for the Fleet to drive the Naxids away.

  But Sula didn’t want to quit. Even as she looked at the piece of propaganda designed to take advantage of the deaths of the hostages, her blood simmered with anger against the Naxid executioners.

  She rose from her desk and ordered the video wall to switch on and turn to the channel reserved for punishments. It took a long time to kill five hundred people, and the executions were still ongoing. The Torminel, Terrans, Cree, Daimong, and Lai-own were herded against the blank wall of a prison, followed by the long hammering volleys of automatic weapons, the spray of blood, the fall of bodies.

  The executioners were clear in the video: the grimfaced, helmeted figures behind the tripod-mounted machine guns; the others, in their lawn-green uniforms so much brighter than the somber green of the Fleet, herding the captives with stun batons and placing them against the wall; and before them all, the thin-faced officer who gave the order to fire, a man with the consciousness of high duty blazing from his eyes.

  All the executioners were Terran. The Naxids hadn’t even had to do their own dirty work; they’d found others more than happy to do the job for them.

  The executioners were nervous or blank-faced or merely dutiful, but the officer seemed different. His eyes glittered and his voice was pitched high, with odd hysterical overtones. Sula realized he was in a state of exaltation. This was his defining moment, the chance to commit slaughter in front of a planetwide audience. His eyes betrayed him by occasionally flicking to the camera, as if he was assuring himself that his time of glory was not yet over.

  After the machine guns rattled, the officer walked slowly amid the bodies, finishing off the survivors with his pistol. His chest was inflated as he walked, a self-important spectacle, conscious of his starring role.

  Pervert, Sula thought. The things people would do to get on video.

  The door opened and Spence entered just as the machine guns fired again. She winced and passed through the room with her eyes turned away from the video.

  “You’ve heard about the hostages?” Sula said.

  “Yes. It’s everywhere.”

  “Any trouble getting down from the High City?”

  “No.” She stiffened as the officer shouted out commands to throw the bodies on a truck. Her mouth tightened in a line. “We’re going to get that bastard, aren’t we, my lady?”

  “Yes,” Sula said, her mind made up at that moment.

  Fuck caution.

  A wild sensation of liberation began to sing in her heart. In a lifetime full of risks, this would be the most insane thing she’d ever done.

  She didn’t know the officer’s name or where the executions were taking place. All she knew was that it had to be a prison on the planet of Zanshaa. She focused on the video, watched it intently, and was eventually rewarded with a glimpse, over the prison wall, of the baroque ornamentation of the Apszipar Tower, which would place the action somewhere in the southwest quadrant of Zanshaa City.

  The Records Office computer had the maps that showed the only prison in that part of town, a place called the Blue Hatches, and also a list of personnel assigned to that prison.

  The officer in charge was a Major Commandant Laurajean, and the picture appended to his ID showed that he was the thin-faced officer who, even now, was grinning his intense joy as a crowd of Torminel were killed on his orders. Laurajean, who was forty-six years old, had been married for the last eighteen to a plump, pleasant-looking wife, an elementary school teacher, with whom he’d had three children and lived a middle-class life in a middle-class part of the Lower Town.

  Some people, Sula thought, just needed killing.

  Macnamara entered as Sula—having looked up Laurajean’s address—was calling up the plans of the building, just in case she needed them. He dropped his bag of cheap iarogüt on her desk and looked over her shoulder at the three-dimensional image of Laurajean rotating in a corner of the display, next to the architects’ schematics.

  “He’s our next?” Macnamara asked.

  “Yes.”

  His answer was to the point. “Good.” He picked up the bottles and walked to the kitchen.

  Does the Major Commandant take public transport home? Sula wondered. Or does he have an auto? Waiting at his local tram stop and shooting him as he stepped off would be a prosaic but efficient way to accomplish his demise.

  Laurajean had an auto, the records showed, a mauve-colored Delvin sedan suitable for his entire family. Sula wondered if he drove it to work or left it at home. His wife didn’t have a driving permit, she found, and Laurajean himself had been granted a parking permit for use at the Blue Hatches facility.

  She rose from her desk, stretched her limbs, and walked to the kitchen, where Spence and Macnamara chatted while pouring iarogüt down the sink, flooding the small room with the sinus-stinging herbal scent.

  “We’ll take him today,” she said. “Before they decide to put guards on him.”

  They looked at her in surprise, then Macnamara laughed. There was a wild look in Spence’s eyes. They’d caught Sula’s mad, defiant spirit.

  Fuck caution.

  Because the arrangement had worked the first time, they decided that Sula and Macnamara would be the shooters and Spence the lookout. Macnamara got weapons out of storage and cleaned, assembled, and loaded them, while Spence rented a small, gray six-wheeled cargo van under a backup identity. Sula polished her essay one more time, sent out the third edition of Resistance while public indignation was at its height, then began researching the Blue Hatches prison and its immediate environs, maps of which were in the Records Office computer.

  A problem existed with the rented van, the workings of which contained computers that regularly reported their location to the Office of the Censor. When a crime was reported, any vehicles in the area could be pinpointed.

  When it had originally been equipped, Team 491 was given a Hunhao sedan with the ability to switch this feature off. The Hunhao was an ideal getaway vehicle, and Sula wanted to use it for the escape, not for the assassination itself.

  All put on gloves so as not to leave fingerprints. Spence turned the van over to Macnamara, the best driver, and herself drove the Hunhao down the main artery beneath the Apszipar Tower, where she parked four streets away from the prison. She then jumped into the van—Sula was in the back, with the weapons—and the van headed for the prison secure behind its azure ceramic walls.

  Team 491 had been tense during the Makish killing. Now they were casual almost to the point of mirth. Sula’s fey spirit had spread to t
hem all. Two killings in the period of a day—why not? The first had been overplanned, and now the second wouldn’t be planned at all. They were throwing their months of training to the winds, and the relaxation of discipline was like wine in their veins.

  There was chaos outside the prison, with swarms of grieving next-of-kin milling in a anxious mass, waiting for the chance to claim their relations. Sula noted the big main gate, the large garage attached to the administration block by a ramp. The van edged through the crowd and dropped Spence off at the fringes, where she wouldn’t stand out amid the mourners. Macnamara swung the van through a series of turns and parked so they were ready to intercept Laurajean on his way home. He and Sula sat in the front, the windows open, and waited through the long hot afternoon.

  They were in a Lai-own neighborhood. The tall, long-limbed flightless birds went about their business, too busy or too hot to pay attention to strangers. A pungent scent drifted toward them from a nearby restaurant—the Lai-own protein sauce heated in the great iron pans and ready to cook meat and vegetables.

  A young male Lai-own strolled to the door of an apartment across the street, urinated copiously on the doorjamb, then adjusted his clothing as he walked away.

  “Ah, young love,” Sula said. Macnamara gave a snicker.

  No volleys echoed over the prison’s featureless wall. Sula turned her hand comm to the punishment channel and found that it was showing the executions all over again.

  “This is the fate that the wicked saboteurs and assassins have brought to the people of Zanshaa,” the narrator intoned. Sula snorted. Hadn’t he read the third edition of Resistance?

  Whose bullets struck them down?

  There was a roar from the front of the prison, hundreds of throats together. Spence reported that an announcement had just been made that the first twenty families could enter to identify and claim the bodies of their kin, and the bereaved were crowding together by the gates.

  “It’s him!” Spence said, in sudden surprise. “He’s in his car, with a couple of his pals. Heading your way!”

  Laurajean had taken advantage of the crowd clumped around the main gate to leave unmolested through the garage exit. Macnamara pressed the throttle lever and the van’s electric motors surged, bringing the vehicle silently into traffic. Sula slipped into the cargo compartment, crouched on the black composite floor as she first readied her weapon, then placed Macnamara’s gun on the passenger seat where he could reach it.

  “There he is!” Macnamara called, and Sula knew her luck was in. She’d been right to follow this wild impulse. A feral joy filled her heart at the certainty that nothing could go wrong for her today.

  Just in case, for caution’s sake, she called Spence to ask if there were any sign of another vehicle following, perhaps with guards.

  No. The Naxids had left their killer without protection.

  Sula readied her rifle. “You’ve got to catch him before he gets to the expressway,” she told Macnamara. Vehicles on the expressways were required to surrender control to a centralized computer system, which would never let them get close.

  “Easy,” Macnamara said, and power surged to the motors. “They’ll be on the left side.” His window powered open and he shifted his stubby machine pistol to his lap.

  The van swerved, then swerved again. The motors surged once more, then braked back.

  “Now,” Macnamara said. Sula touched controls, and silent motors rolled the big side door open. Hair whipped across her face in a sudden blast of hot wind. The mauve-colored Delvin was right there, almost close enough to touch.

  There were three Terrans in the car—two women and Laurajean—all in lawn-green uniform tunics. Laurajean was driving. They were laughing at some joke, and Laurajean was gesturing expansively with one slim hand. Exhilaration still radiated from his face.

  He was still rejoicing in his unexpected celebrity, unaware that his starring role on the punishment channel was about to be canceled. He glanced to his right just as Sula put the rifle to her shoulder, and his puzzled squint showed he hadn’t quite worked out what he was seeing when she fired.

  The rifle used caseless ammunition that was nearly recoilless, and cycled it very fast. Sula put over a hundred rounds into the car in less than two seconds. Macnamara, firing through the window, emptied his own smaller magazine.

  There was the sound of a score of hammers beating metal. Parts of Laurajean’s car seemed to dissolve, the glass spraying outward in crystal fountains that glimmered in the sun, the resinous composite body simply disintegrating. The Delvin swerved, and Macnamara quickly dropped his gun into his lap in order to concentrate on his driving. Sula pressed the control that slid the side door shut.

  Peering out the back window, she saw the Delvin slowly cross three lanes of traffic and come to rest on the sidewalk, narrowly missing a startled Daimong pedestrian.

  Macnamara made a few turns, then found a legal place to park. By then, Sula had the weapons broken down and in their cases. The two quietly left the van, walked down a baking street, turned a corner and met Spence, who had paralleled their route in the Hunhao.

  In a few hours they would call the rental company from a suitably anonymous location and tell them where they could pick up their van. If its transponder hadn’t happened to report within a few minutes of the assassination, there would be nothing to connect it to the killing.

  To the team’s strange spirit of impulse and madness was now added another dimension—that of relief. They babbled with frantic good spirits as they left the Apszipar Tower behind. They were as cheerful, Sula realized, as Laurajean had been with his two colleagues. Like children who had gotten away with something naughty.

  “Who ordered them shot?” Sula asked.

  “Lady Sula!” the others chanted.

  “Who fired her weapon?”

  “Lady Sula!”

  “Whose bullets struck them down?”

  “Lady Sula!” they cried, and all three broke into laughter.

  This must stop, she told herself. They couldn’t go on this recklessly.

  But still, it would be good to put out another edition of Resistance, with the heading “Death of a Traitor.”

  Sula bought Team 491 a first-class dinner that evening at Seven Pages, a restaurant with silent, dignified waitrons and a wine list that scrolled along the display hundreds of lines. The meal went on for hours, little plates arriving every ten minutes with some small, ambrosial treat, each displayed with perfection on a plate of near-translucent Vigo hard-paste. Sula could tell that Spence and Macnamara had never been in such a place before.

  Not that she had, or at least not often. Not since she was a girl named Gredel, and the real Lady Sula had paid.

  “Would you care for a sweet?” the waitron asked. “We have everything on our list except the Chocolate Fancy and the Mocha Gyre.”

  “Why not?”

  The waitron shook his glossy shaved head. “I regret there is no cocoa of a suitable quality. May I recommend the Peaches Flambé?”

  “Hm.” Sula looked at Macnamara and Spence, both deeply relaxed after consuming two bottles of wine, and smiled. “I hate life without Chocolate Fancy in it,” she said. “Perhaps we could arrange something.”

  She spoke with the chef before they left and asked how much she would offer for top quality cocoa.

  The chef frowned and tugged at her lower lip. “Business isn’t so good, you know. Not since they came.”

  “Think how much better business would be if you had good chocolate again.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “How good?”

  “Kabila’s. We have sixty-five percent cocoa and eighty percent. Imported from Preowin.”

  The chef tried unsuccessfully to conceal the flare of greed that burned briefly in her eyes. “How much do you have?” she asked.

  “How much do you want?”

  They settled on a price, seven times what Sula had paid for the cocoa when it sat in a warehouse complex on the ring.

  �
��I’ll deliver tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll want payment in cash.”

  The chef acted as if this arrangement weren’t unusual. Perhaps it wasn’t.

  “I wish I knew how you did that,” Spence said as they walked away.

  “Did what?”

  “Change your accent like that. You have the voice you use back in Riverside, and the Lady Sula voice, and you used a completely different voice with the waitron and the chef.”

  Sula cast her mind back to the restaurant. “I don’t remember doing that,” she said. “I was probably just imitating them.” Neither the chef nor the waitron had spoken with the drawling speech of the Peers of the High City, but a comfortably middle-class approximation.

  “Wish I could do that,” Spence said again.

  “You’ve been out having fun,” One-Step said later that night as Sula returned to her apartment. “You’ve been having fun without One-Step.”

  “That’s right,” she said cheerfully. She sprang up the stair and reached for the door, the thin plastic key in her hand.

  One-Step stepped into the light that poured down from one of the first-floor apartments, and Sula paused a moment to bask in the dark light of his liquid black eyes.

  “One-Step could show you a wonderful evening, better than you had tonight,” he said. “You only have to give One-Step a chance.”

  Sula wondered how to explain her position in this matter. I don’t go out with boys who refer to themselves in the third person?

  “Maybe when you get a job,” Sula said. “I’d hate to take your last few zeniths.”

  “I’d spend my last minim to make you happy.”

  She rewarded the use of the personal pronoun with a smile. “So what do you hear?” she asked.

  “Riot at the Blue Hatches, the place where they were shooting people,” One-Step said. “A crowd of mourners got arrested for killing a prison officer.”