Walter Williams - Conventions of War

A whiff of dead flesh preceded the return of the Daimong doctor. He had an oversized datapad with a digitalized cross section of Casimir’s insides.

“I understand the problem now,” he said. “The young gentleman was hit by shrapnel from a rocket. The case was straightforward. All the scanners were in use, but with shrapnel we might as well use X ray, so that’s what we did. I located every bit of shrapnel and removed it.”

He showed Sula the display. Garish false color swam before her eyes.

“The problem is, the gentleman was wearing armor when he was wounded. A piece of the armor was driven into his body, and the armor is some kind of hard plastic that happens to be radiolucent, so the X rays didn’t see it. A full-body scan revealed the fragment, however, and here it is.”

Sula could make no sense of the display. She forced sound past the fist that had clamped on her throat.

“Tell me what’s happening,” she said.

The chiming Daimong voice took on a sonorous, practiced note of sympathy.

“The fragment of armor is in his liver. We can’t put fluids into him fast enough to counteract the bleeding. I’ll be operating as soon as the gentleman is prepped, but it’s bound to be a mess.”

She looked at him. “Get him fixed,” she said.

Superiority rang in the doctor’s voice. “I’ll do what’s possible, but please consider how hard it is to reassemble a Terran liver once it’s been cut up.”

The doctor floated out of the room, leaving Sula with the unsettling image in her mind. She knew it would be a while before she heard anything of Casimir, and she didn’t want to wait while acid chewed on her insides, so she made an impromptu inspection of the hospital, followed in silence by One-Step and Casimir’s Torminel bodyguard. Progress was being made, but the place was still in chaos, and more qualified personnel were clearly needed. She called Macnamara to tell him to have all broadcast stations put out a call for medical personnel and volunteers to report to the Glory of Hygeine Hospital.

“Immediately, my lady,” Macnamara said. There was a pause while he gave orders, after which Sula asked him for a report.

“The Naxids made another try at the funicular,” Macnamara said, “and it didn’t go any better than last time. Other than that, I’ve just been trying to get an idea of where our units actuallyare. A lot of them seem to have just disappeared.” There was a pause, and then he added, “It’s lunchtime. Maybe they’ll report when they’ve eaten.”

Sula told him to start putting together a staff.

“Butwho?”

A lot of what he needed was communication, and the Ministry of Wisdom was full of communications specialists. Then he needed runners to make certain that units were doing what he’d told them to, and someone to keep track of supplies. Sula suggested starting with Sidney.

“I’ll do what I can, my lady,” Macnamara said.

She needed to be there, she thought, in her headquarters, building a staff herself, but found she couldn’t tear herself away. She walked back to Casimir’s ward, stopping every so often to talk to the casualties who were still lying in the corridors. Most were lightly wounded, in good spirits, and inclined to blame the Naxids for their trouble. Sula began to feel a faint stirring of optimism.

A Terran waited in Casimir’s ward, clad in the sterile robes of a surgical assistant, with the muffler lowered only partly from her face. Sula saw her, saw the concern and sympathy in her eyes, and felt her hope die.

“I’m sorry,” the woman said. “He died before we could finish prepping him. The doctor did his best for the next half hour but by that point there was really no chance.”

“Where’s the doctor?” Sula said. She wanted to hear it directly, from the motionless chiming lips.

“Still in surgery. He went on to the next patient.”

Bitter laughter rang in her mind. No point in interrupting the doctor before he had the chance to kill another wounded man.

“His name was Massoud,” Sula said. “Casimir Massoud. Make a note of that.”

“Yes, my lady.”

“I’d like to see him.”

Because all pallets and stretchers were required for the wounded, Casimir lay in the morgue on cold floor tiles. He wore only the bandages from his first operation and the twisted blue pastel sheet. The small holes on the right side, where the doctor’s equipment went in, had been neatly sealed by circles of pink plastic that looked like a child’s toy suction cups.

One-Step’s beads were wrapped around his hand.

Sula knelt by the body and looked down at the heavy-lidded eyes fallen shut for the last time. A vast storm of sheer feeling boiled through her, emotions rising strong and unbounded to the surface only to fall again before she could identify them.

I would have made you a lord, she thought. We would have gone through the High City like an angry wind, and if you had died then, it would have been because everyone was afraid of you, and of me.

I don’t know if I have the strength to do it on my own.

I don’t know if I’ll want to.

She bent to kiss the cold lips and to breathe his scent for the last time, but Casimir didn’t smell like himself anymore. It was this that brought the tears to her eyes.

Sula rose abruptly and turned to the surgeon’s assistant. “I’ll claim the body later,” she said. “Right now I have a war to direct.”

“Yes, my lady.”

One way or another she would be with Casimir again. Either she would come for the body and bring it to a glorious funeral-a cliqueman’s extravagance with a greenhouse’s worth of flowers and a Daimong chorus and a hearse drawn by white horses-or she would lie bloodless with him here on the cold tiles.

At the moment she didn’t care which.

One-Step and the Torminel bodyguard followed her out of the morgue. She turned to the Torminel.

“What’s your name?”

“Turgal, my lady.”

“You’re working for me now, Turgal.”

“Yes, my lady.”

“Where’s your partner?”

“Dead, my lady.”

Sula hesitated. “Sorry,” she said.

“My lady,” the Torminel said, “I have Mr. Massoud’s will.”

She made the adjustment to her sleeve display. “I’m set to receive,” she said.

You’re going to need the money,he’d said, knowing he was dying. He wanted her to cut a figure in the High City once the war was over.

Maybe she would. Or maybe she’d convert it all to precious stones and hurl them off the High City to the people below.

Macnamara’s voice came to her headset as she was walking down the steps at the front of the hospital.

“My lady.” There was a strange urgency in his voice. “I know you want to be at the hospital, but I really think you should head for the Commandery.”

Sula told him that she was on her way, and asked him why.

“We didn’t have the expertise to handle the equipment in the Commandery once the Naxids were gone,” Macnamara explained. “But some of the techs from the ministry have been over there, and it looks as if there’s something going on. Something in space.

“It looks as if the Fleet is coming.”

The Battle of Zanshaa was preceded by skirmishes on a number of fronts. On seizing Zanshaa, the Naxids had also occupied all eight of its wormhole relay stations. They then hopped armed teams through the wormholes to seize the stations on the other side, giving them a view of all systems, friendly and enemy, that surrounded Zanshaa.

Since possession of these stations would also give them a splendid view of the Righteous and Orthodox Fleet as it burned toward Zanshaa, and allow them to estimate its course, velocity, numbers, wormhole through which it would pass, and its approximate arrival time, Supreme Commander Tork decided to take the wormhole stations back before they could supply information to the enemy.