Walter Williams - Conventions of War

“Julien will be all right. His chef is brilliant.”

He nodded as if this remark made sense and followed her through the club. There were few patrons at this early hour, mostly quiet drinkers at the bar or workers who hadn’t managed to get home in time for dinner.

Sula bounded up the metal stairs leading to Casimir’s office. “How did the judge thing go?” he asked.

She had to search her mind for a moment to recall the story.

“Postponed,” she said.

He let her into his office. “Is that what you need to talk about? Because even though Sergius said I wasn’t supposed to help you, there are a few things I can do that Sergius doesn’t need to know about. Because-Oh, damn.”

They had entered his office, the spotless black-and-white room, and Sula had thrown her bag on a sofa and opened her coat to reveal that she wore nothing underneath it but stockings and her shoes.

“Damn,” Casimir repeated. His eyes traveled over her. “Damn, you’re beautiful.”

“Don’t just stand there,” Sula said.

It was the first time she had set out to please a man so totally and for so long. She moved Casimir over the room from one piece of furniture to the other. She took full advantage of the large, oversoft chairs. She used lips and tongue and fingertips, skin and scent, whispers and laughter. She would never have dared try this with Martinez-with him, she lacked this brand of confidence. There was something whorish about it, she supposed, though her own violent, mercifully brief encounter with whoring had been far more sordid and unpleasant than this.

She kept Casimir busy for an hour and a half, until the chiming of his comm grew far too insistent. He rose from one of the sofas, where he was sprawled with Sula on top of him, and made his way to his desk.

“Audio only,” he told the comm. “Answer. Yes, what is it?”

“Julien’s arrested,” said an unknown voice.

Sula sat up, an expression of concern on her face.

“When?” Casimir barked. “Where?”

“A few minutes ago, at the Two Sticks. He was there with Veronika.”

Calculation burned in Casimir’s gaze. “Was it the police or the Fleet?”

The voice shifted to a higher, more urgent register. “It was theLegion. They tookeverybody.”

Casimir stared intently at the far wall as if it held a puzzle he needed badly to put together. Sula rose and quietly walked to where her large shoulder bag waited. She opened it and began to withdraw clothing.

“Does Sergius know?” Casimir asked.

“He’s not at his office. That’s the only number I have for him.”

“Right. Thanks. I’ll call him myself.”

Casimir knew he couldn’t get away with a video-suppressed call to Sergius Bakshi, so he put on a shirt and combed his hair. He spoke in low tones and Sula heard little of what was said. She finished dressing, took a pistol from her bag and stuck it in her waistband behind her back.

Casimir finished his phone call. He looked at her with somber eyes.

“You’d better make yourself scarce,” Sula said. “They might be going after all of you.”

“That’s what Sergius told me,” he said.

“Or maybe,” Sula’s eyes narrowed, “they’re afteryou, and they went to the Two Sticks thinking you’d be there.”

“Or they might be afteryou, ” Casimir said, “and Julien and I are both incidental.”

“That hadn’t occurred to me,” she said.

Casimir began to draw on his clothing. “This looks bad,” he said. “But maybe you’ll get what you want.”

She looked at him.

“War,” he explained, “between us and the Naxids.”

“Thathad occurred to me,” she said.

It had occurred to her the previous night, in fact, while she gazed at reflections of raindrops in herju yao pot. Which was why, that morning, she’d gone to a public comm unit. She wore a worker’s coveralls and the blond wig and a wide-brimmed hat pulled down over her face, and she’d taken the hat off her head and put it over the unit’s camera before she manually punched in the code that would connect her to the Legion of Diligence informer line.

“I want to give some information,” she said. “An anarchist cell is meeting tonight in a restaurant called the Two Sticks, off Harmony Square. They are planning sabotage. The meeting is set for twenty-four and one, in a private room. Don’t tell the local police, because they’re corrupt and would warn the saboteurs.”

She’d used the Earth accent that had once amused Caro Sula. She walked away from the comm without removing her hat from the camera pickup.

She must have been convincing because Julien was now under arrest.

“How shall I contact you?” Sula asked Casimir.

He adjusted his trousers, then gave her a code.

Sula nodded. “Got it.”

He gave her a quizzical look. “You don’t need to write it down?”

“I compose a mental algorithm that will allow me to remember the number,” she said. “It’s what I do with everyone’s numbers.”

He blinked. “Clever trick,” he said.

She kissed him. “Yes,” she said. “A very clever trick.”

The next day the Naxids went berserk. Someone with a rifle went onto a building overlooking the Axtattle Parkway, the main highway that connected Zanshaa City with the Naxids’ landing field at Wi-hun. The sniper waited for a convoy of Naxid vehicles to go by, then shot the driver of the first vehicle. Because the vehicles were using the automated lanes, the vehicle cruised on under computer control with a dead driver behind the controls. Then the sniper shot the next driver, and the next.

By the time the Naxids got things sorted out, at least eight Naxids were dead, and more wounded. The sniper, who was clearly using a weapon much better than the Sidney Mark One, made a clean getaway.

The Naxids decided to shoot fifty-one hostages for every dead Naxid. Sula had no idea how they decided on fifty-one. It wasn’t even a prime number.

Maybe whoever gave the order didn’t know that.

Casimir, who heard the news before anyone else, called Sula shortly after dawn to tell her to stay off the streets. She called the other members of Team 491 and told them to stay where they were, then stuck her head out the door and told One-Step to make himself scarce.

She spent the morning in her apartment with her book of diplomatic history and her mathematical puzzles. At midday her comm chimed with a message that Rashtag, the head of security for the Records Office, had changed his password for the Records Office computer. The new password was included in the message, so she contacted the Records Office computer and found that the Naxids had worked out howResistance was being distributed.

Rashtag was ordered to change the passwords of everyone in the office and to watch the office’s broadcast node for signs of unusual activity. Neither of these worried Sula: she would always get Rashtag’s new password when he changed it; and when she distributedResistance, she always turned off the logging on the broadcast node, so there would be no record of the node being used. It would require some fairly high-level coordination to detect her, and she saw no sign of that as yet.

It was only a matter of time, however.

Casimir called again after nightfall. “Can we meet?” he asked.

“Is it safe to go out?”

“The police have finished rounding up new hostages to replace the ones they shot today, and they’re back to processing ration cards. But just in case I’ll send a car.”

She told him to pick her up at the local train stop. He gave her a time. The car was a dark Hunhao sedan with one of the Torminel bodyguards at the controls. He took her to a small residential street on the edge of a Cree neighborhood-she saw Cree males on the streets exercising their quadruped females, who bounded about them like large puppies.