Walter Williams - Conventions of War

Even so, she used evasion procedures to make certain she wasn’t followed home.

Casimir called after midnight. Sula groped her way from her bed to where she’d hung her blouse and told the sleeve to answer.

The chameleon fabric showed him with a slapdash grin pasted to his face. There was blaring music in the background and the sound of laughter.

“Hey Gredel!” he said. “Come have some fun!”

Sula swiped sleep from her eyes. “I’m asleep. Call me tomorrow.”

“Wake up! It’s still early!”

“I work for a living! Call me tomorrow!”

As she told the sleeve to end her transmission and made her way back to the bed, she reflected that she’d done a good job setting the hook.

Sula had some morning deliveries on the High City and thought she might as well collect some club gossip from PJ while she was on the acropolis. Having some idea of his indolent habits, she waited till the sun was high in Zanshaa’s viridian sky before she called him on a public terminal. Since she trusted his intentions but not his intelligence, she’d made certain that he had no way to contact her, nothing he could betray to the enemy-he would have to wait forher to initiate contact.

“Yes?” he mumbled as he answered. His eyes were blurry, his thinning hair awry-either she’d awakened him or he was just out of bed.

“Hi, PJ!” she called brightly. “How’s the lad this morning?”

Recognizing her voice, his eyes came into sudden bright focus as he stared at her image on the comm display. “Oh!” he said. “Oh! Things are, ah, excellent. Just excellent.”

If he’d saidfirst-rate instead ofexcellent, that would have meant the Naxids had nabbed him and she should ignore everything he said, particularly any attempt to set up a meeting.

“I say,” PJ said, “Lady-I mean, miss-there’s someone I need you to meet. Right away.”

“Half an hour from now?”

“Yes! Yes!” He made a strange, thoughtful face, pulling at his jaw. “If you’ll come by the palace, we’ll go to his…place of business.”

“Be cautious about, ah…”About my being the secret government.

“Of course.” He gave a wink. “No problem there. He doesn’t even know we’re coming.”

Oh dear, Sula thought as she broke the connection. PJ had contracted an enthusiasm.

She hoped he wasn’t planning on blowing anything up without her advice.

Team 491 delivered its last cargo of cigars and vacuum-packed coffee beans, collected some inconsequential information from club workers, then drove to the Ngeni Palace, where PJ had already opened the service drive gate. He waited before the massive root systems of the ancient banyan tree that overshadowed his cottage, standing with his usual languid ease in the shade while he smoked a cigarette.

“Miss Ardelion! Mr. Starling!” He greeted Spence and Macnamara with great energy, then turned to Sula. “Lady, ah, Miss Lucy.”

“What’s up?” Sula asked.

He brightened. “Wait till you see what Sidney’s got in his shop! You’ll jump for joy!”

He stubbed out his cigarette, led them back down the drive, coding shut the gate behind them, then on a roughly diagonal course across the High City. PJ was practically skipping in his excitement. The streets were half empty, and vehicles full of military constables were parked at some of the intersections. As their dark Naxid eyes swept over her, Sula looked away, exceptionally conscious of the pistol tucked into her waistband under her jacket. Then she thought she shouldn’t have looked away, she was acting suspiciously. But then she thought no, probablyno one looks at them. Everyone was suspicious equally.

She walked past the Naxids and they made no move to stop her.

The sound of theaejai seemed to echo from half the shops in the city. There wasn’t a hint of a breeze to cool the burning day, and they were all glossy with sweat by the time they arrived at their destination, a narrow shop in a pedestrian lane lined with other specialty shops, offering antiques or quality meats, tailored uniforms or Daimong delicacies, or…

SIDNEY’S SUPERIOR FIREARMS,said the sign. And across the door was a banner: CLOSED BY ORDER OF LORD UMMIR, MINISTER OF POLICE.

Sula felt an electric hum in her nerves. Brilliant, she thought.

She would try to remember to give PJ something very nice on his birthday.

“I found out at the club that Sidney was closing,” PJ said as he took them down an alley behind the building. “I stopped by yesterday to chat with Sidney and reconnoiter, and since then I’ve been waiting for you.”

PJ stopped by a door of greenish metal and banged on it. Sula stood for a moment in the hot silence and gazed at the fragrant corpse of a kanamid, probably killed by a cat, that lay between two gray resin waste bins with its six limbs pointing crookedly to the sky.

The metal door rolled open with a subdued electric hum. She shaded her sun-dazzled eyes to see the man standing in shadow on the far side of the door: he was white-haired and thin and had a goatee with a waxed, curled mustache, much like those worn by petty officers of the Fleet. Sula tasted a smoky scent that drifted from the open door.

“My lord,” the man said. His voice was grainy. “These are your friends?”

“Yes, Mr. Sidney.” PJ’s tone was a little smug. “This is Miss Lucy, Miss Ardelion, and Mr. Starling.”

The man’s eyes, pupils broad as the barrels of a shotgun, scanned Sula and her companions. “Come in then,” he said, and stood back.

The back of the shop was a marvelously compact workroom, computer-guided lathes, tools gleaming in their racks, magnifiers and manipulators on shelves, racks of exotic, cured woods and ivories, gun barrels gleaming on shelves. Sula’s heart warmed to the meticulous orderliness of it all.

The heavy scent of hashish, however, made her less certain, as did the curl of smoke from a gleaming metal pipe that Sidney picked up from one of the workbenches as he passed.

“Let me take you up front,” he said. They passed through a door into the shop’s narrow front. Weapons gleamed softly in the racks on the walls, in polished wood cabinets. Sidney stopped before a coal-black metal carrying case that held a long-barreled hunting weapon. He picked it up, held it in the air. The barrel was a damascened concoction of contrasting metals beautifully wrought together, silver and black chasing each other down its length like serpents. The stock was a deep red wood polished and inlaid with a floral pattern in ebony. There was a magnifying scope with a deep amber display that would prove easy on the eye at night, and iron sights for the classically inclined.

“I built this for Lord Richard Li,” he said, speaking around the pipe clenched between his teeth.

Sula gave a start at the name. Lord Richard had been her captain, killed bringing hisDauntless into action at Magaria. He had been engaged to Terza Chen, the woman-no, theconniving bitch — who had married Martinez.

She fought her way back through the curtain of memory that had draped across her mind. “The Naxids have shut you down?” she asked.

Not the brightest thing she could have said, admittedly, but at least she’d gotten the words out.

“I’m surprised it’s taken them this long,” Sidney said. “I suppose they’ve had other things to think about, being a new government. I wouldn’t know.” He replaced the rifle in its case and took a meditative sip on his pipe. “I could apply to reopen the business if I agreed to sell exclusively to Naxids, but I don’t want to think about those bastards using one of my guns to kill hostages, and all the weapons configured for other species are still unsellable no matter what I do.”