Walter Williams - Conventions of War

If a Naxid demands an oath of loyalty, giveit. An oath extorted under threat of arrest or dismissal is meaningless. You will not be penalized after the war for taking such an oath, so long as you cooperate with the enemy only when you must.

If a Naxid asks you for directions, you are not required toknow the answer.

If a Naxid asks you to identify a friend or a neighbor, youare permitted to feign ignorance.

If a Naxid asks you for information you are known to possess, give the information if you must.Act only according to the letter of your instructions: provide neither more nor less than what is asked for. You are not required to volunteer any additional information that may be in your possession, and if the information contains errors that cannot be traced to you, you cannot be blamed.

If you are asked to inform on a colleague,you are allowed to tell the Naxids that your colleague is their friend. Unless of course heis a Naxid sympathizer, in which case you are allowed to cast suspicion upon his activities.

If you are asked to participate in a roundup or arrestof those believed to work against the Naxids, you can hardly be blamed if your information is incorrect, so that the arrest goes wrong and the victim escapes.

If you are asked to work for the Naxids, youare permitted to make mistakes, particularly if the mistakes can’t be traced to you. Improper maintenance can result in the destruction of machinery or vehicles. Deliveries can be sent to the wrong address, or to the wrong continent. Food can suffer spoilage or contamination. Videos can accidentally be erased. Labels can be confused. Weapons and explosives can vanish from inventory and appear in the hands of loyalist volunteers.

If you are asked to believe the Naxids propaganda, don’t.They say the legitimate government is on the brink of surrender, but it isn’t. They say that the Fleet has suffered one defeat after another, but it hasn’t. They say that the secret government of Zanshaa has been destroyed, but they lie, and you are looking at the proof right now.

Remember that the rebel government will not last. We owe them only our enmity.

Remember that the legitimate government will return. We owe them our trust.

Remember that you can help the enemy fail. Do what you can to undermine the rebel authority.

Remember to circulate this message as widely as you can.

Remember that the secret government is in more places than you know. Know that we are always working against the enemy, and on your behalf.

Remember that our victory is assured.

Sula glanced once more over the text. She bit her lip as she read through some of her more preposterous declarations-“the secret government is in more places than you know”-and she wondered how many lives her words would claim.

Her own misrepresentations aside, she had far less confidence in the legitimate government than her message alleged. So far they had bungled everything, and any success the government could claim was the result of a few individuals lucky enough to be in the right place, and talented enough to be able to act effectively against the enemy. And-come to think of it-those individuals were so few that she knew most of them personally.

Her newsletter was intended to encourage citizens to act against the Naxids, though she suspected that few would. And of these, many would fail, and be arrested or killed. Most of the rest would probably be totally ineffective.

Even so, she thought she had little choice. The secret government and almost all its military had been tortured to death. Her task, assigned by the government in which she had little faith, was to mobilize opposition to the Naxids. She couldn’t mobilize soldiers, and so civilians would have to do.

If they died, they died.Human warmth not my specialty.

Sula turned to Spence, who was looking at the text from over her shoulder. “Can you think of anything we’ve missed?”

Spence shook her head. “I think it’s marvelous. It’s everything we could think of.”

“The newsletter still needs a name.”

Macnamara, who was in the kitchen pouring out bottles of iarogut into the sink, called out, “Our last bulletin wasThe Loyalist. ”

“That title’s bad luck,” Sula said.

“‘The Staunch,’” Spence offered. “‘The Anti-Naxid.’ ‘The Faithful.’”

Macnamara, carrying three reeking bottles in a sack, passed through the room on his way to the front door. “You could just call it ‘What We Owe,’” he said. He tossed a sheet over the bomb to hide it from anyone in the corridor, then opened the front door and placed the empties in the hall for pickup.

Sula’s plan for discouraging the neighbors’ questions was to give them the answer to a question they hadn’t asked: the bottles placed outside the apartment every day marked them as alcoholics unworthy of further curiosity.

“‘The Fighter,’” she said. “‘The Clarion.’”

“‘The Tocsin,’” said Spence.

“That’s good,” Sula said. The last time the population of Zanshaa had heard the sound of the tocsin was when the accelerator ring had been destroyed.

Macnamara closed the door and sat with crossed legs in front of the disassembled bomb that sat on the small table in front of the sofa.

“‘The Bomb,’” he said.

The Saboteur,Sula thought. “‘The Anarchist,’” she said, and laughed. “Why not? That’s what they callus. ”

She looked at the text again, her eyes skimming words in search of inspiration. “Ah,” she said. “Hah.”

At the top of the text she called for a larger font, and added the single word“ Resistance.”

The first copy ofResistance went to Spence, just to see if Sula’s program still worked, and the copy arrived on Spence’s hand comm a half second after Sula touched the icon marked “Send.”

The next ten thousand copies were sent to citizens chosen randomly, by a sorting program Sula had written, from among those who had done business with the Records Office within the last three years. The program rejected the recipient if he lived outside of the Zanshaa metropolitan area or if his species was indicated as Naxid.

Sula sentResistance in mid-afternoon, at the peak of Records Office activity, on the assumption that a slight delay on the broadcast node would less likely to be noticed than if she sent in the dead of night. The entire broadcast took less than twenty-five seconds.

It had occurred to her, as she prepared her message, that if her program removed the code that identified the Records Office broadcast node as the point of origin, she could as easily substitute another code. She’d looked through Rashtag’s correspondence and found a note from a colleague at the Hotel Spartex, a building in the Lower Town, near the funicular, that had been requisitioned by the Naxids to house their constabulary. The code for the hotel’s node was easy to pinch and insert into all ten thousand copies ofResistance as the newsletter’s point of origin.

She smiled as she thought of the Naxid authorities turning the Hotel Spartex upside down in search of the minion of the secret government. Especially as every possible suspect was a Naxid.

Sula rewarded herself with a cup of tea while she monitored Rashtag’s incoming messages. Nothing alerted him to misuse of the broadcast node, and she began to feel a certain impatience. After all her hard work, the actual experience of sendingResistance had been anticlimactic. She wanted the enemy to panicnow.

Ten thousand copies, she mused, wouldn’t go far among Zanshaa’s three and a half million population, not to mention the further three million in the metropolitan area. Perhaps another ten thousand were in order.

She sent fifty thousand copies before her nerve finally gave out. There were no alarms flashing in the Records Office, but she had begun to feel exposed, and she decided that the experiment had run enough risks for the day.