Walter Williams - Conventions of War

“Executions will continue as long as the rebels refuse to honor the instrument of surrender signed by Lady Kushdai,” Sula told the camera, and then dismissed the camera crew and took a walk along the terrace. The metal furniture was adapted to the Naxid physique, and the umbrellas were bright against the gray stone of the Great Refuge. The air was crisp and cool, and the sky had turned its usual deep green. Most of the columns of smoke that had been rising from the city the previous afternoon were gone. The city was very still.

Sula put a hand on the smooth, cool surface of the granite terrace wall and looked out over the rooftops. The streets between the buildings were deep, shadowed canyons, and as far as she could see, were absolutely empty. People were keeping their heads down, or watching their video walls for the latest bulletin, or both.

If there were Naxids keeping watch on this part of the cliff, they were hidden.

She knew they had to be down there somewhere. Naxid police were probably arriving by the thousand at the train stations, and sooner or later they were going to think of something more imaginative to do than charge up the funicular.

She considered this and decided that it probably didn’t matter. Her forces and reserves were sufficient to contain any threat to her perimeter. All she had to do was hold out long enough for the Naxid fleet to flee the system, and she suspected the High City contained enough food to keep the army eating for that length of time.

She would have liked to stay on the terrace awhile, perhaps with a sweetened, syrupy tea and a cream-filled brioche, but the Convocation’s food service seemed to have been disrupted. She returned to the Ministry of Wisdom and was told that she’d just had a call from the Commissioner of Kaidabal, who wanted to negotiate his surrender.

“He said that the rebels appointed him to the position against his will,” Macnamara said. “He said he’s a loyal subject of the empire.”

“What did you tell him?” Sula asked.

“We said you’d call him back.”

“Ah. Hah,” she said, and felt a slow smile break out on her face.

She’d won.

Sula had thought fighting a war was hard. She discovered that running a planet was harder.

Worse, she had to be Lady Sula all the time. As Gredel, she’d been able to follow her own instincts, to fall into old patterns. Caroline Sula’s skin was more difficult to inhabit. It was artificial rather than natural, a personality she had deliberately created, an artifice she had to carefully assemble every day.

She wore Lady’s Sula’s uniform. She kept the High City accent on her lips and held her spine straight and military, and she kept her head rigidly erect and looked levelly at others from beneath the brim of her uniform cap.

Lady Sula wasborn to run planets. She kept telling herself that.

She called as many old civil servants to the colors as she could, to staff the ministries and keep services running. Naxid security forces were disarmed and either sent to the barracks or to their homes, if they had any. Naxid police were permitted to patrol their own neighborhoods, though without firearms. The Naxids in the Imperial Hotel surrendered, and about a third were arrested and the rest told to find lodging off the High City and report their whereabouts to the local police.

An advisory council was formed, with people from the ministries, with Macnamara and Spence as representatives of the secret army, and with Julien and Sergius Bakshi to add a dose of grim realism.

She ordered no more arrests, except for a few of the more spectacularly brutal officers of the security services. She wasn’t surprised to hear that most of them didn’t survive the trip to the jails.

Nor was she surprised to hear of a spasm of revenge killings as people settled old scores. She ordered the members of the secret army to have nothing to do with it, but had her doubts about whether the orders were obeyed.

Tork kept urging her to greater bloodshed.

“All who served the enemy deserve death!” he said. “Let their heads be mounted on every street corner!”

Allwho served the enemy? she wondered. Every tram conductor, every sewer worker, every usher in the Convocation?

She settled for tossing a few more bureaucrats off the High City.

The city’s professional interrogators had reported to work after the surrender, the same professionals who for the last months had been flaying and murdering members of the secret army. Now they were set to work on the senior members of the rebel government. Computer passwords were disgorged, and the records of the Naxid administration were laid bare.

Allof them.

Sula discovered the disposition of the Naxid fleet, the five ships at Magaria, the two guarding Naxas, the eighteen under construction in one corner or another of the Naxid dominions. She sent the information to Tork, and received more harassment in return.

“You have failed to conduct the executions that I ordered!” he said. “I want lists of those who cooperated with the Naxids forwarded to my staff, and arrests made at once!”

By then, contact between her office and the Supreme Commander had been regularized. With the passwords to the powerful communications centers of the Commandery, Sula had been able to use the dedicated lasers mounted on the roof to send Tork a code through which they could communicate. It didn’t make his demands any less aggravating.

“I fully intend that those responsible for the rebellion should die for their crimes,” she responded. The Supreme Commander was on the other side of Shaamah at present, and the message wouldn’t reach him for eleven hours or thereabouts. “But I intend in the meantime to serve the empire by extracting every bit of information from the prisoners before throwing them off the rock. I wouldn’t have been able to send you the enemy order of battle unless I had pried it out of their Fleet personnel first.”

She began assembling lists. Lists of Bogo Boys and other cliquemen, so she could grant the amnesties she’d promised; and a list of the secret army, with real names replacing the code names used till now. She wanted to know who had enlisted and who didn’t, because after the war, many would falsely claim to have been on the High City on the day of the battle, and she would have the evidence to refute that. She also wanted to recommend awards and medals to the Fleet and to the Convocation, and for that she needed documentation.

She also demobilized certain elements of the secret army-certainly those who raced up and down the boulevards of the High City in stolen vehicles, firing guns into the air and looting palaces. They were sent home, and as much of their loot confiscated as possible. Julien acted as her enforcer. The rest of the secret army were put on the government payroll.

She slept a few hours each night, but badly.

Her more immediate problem had to do with food rationing. Most of the foodstuffs on the planet was in the hands of the ration authority. The population assumed that rationing would end along with the Naxid occupation. Sula was tempted to simply abolish the authority, but Sergius Bakshi warned her against it.

“You abolish rationing,” he said, “and food will disappear from every market on Zanshaa. The ration authority was run as a private concern, and if you abolish the bureaucracy, that still leaves all the food in the hands of the Naxid clans who were put in charge. They’ll keep food off the market till prices go sky-high-or they’ll sell it to speculators who will do the same thing-and you’ll get the blame.”

He turned his dead-fish eyes to her. “It’s whatI’d do in their place,” he said.

Sula considered this. “Perhaps we could limit prices,” she said.