Walter Williams - Conventions of War

It took a Peer to unlock a Peer’s cooperation-and not with a bribe, but with an appeal to legitimacy and class solidarity.

Casimir’s lips were warm, his breath sweet. Macnamara, without a seat, crouched on the floor behind the driver and looked anywhere but at Sula sitting on Casimir’s lap. The cliquemen nudged each other and grinned. Spence watched with frank interest: Peer and criminal was probably a pairing she hadn’t seen on her romantic videos.

The driver kept off the limited-access expressways, taking the smaller streets. Even so, he managed to get stuck in traffic. The van inched forward as the minutes ticked by, and then the driver cursed.

“Damn! Roadblock ahead!”

In an instant Sula was off Casimir’s lap and peering forward. She could see Naxids in the black-and-yellow uniforms of the Motor Patrol. Their four-legged bodies snaked eerily from side to side as they moved up and down the line of vehicles, peering at the drivers. One vehicle was stopped while the patrol rummaged through its cargo compartment. Their van was on a one-way street, its two lanes choked with traffic; it was impossible to turn around.

Her heart was thundering as it never had when confronting Sergius or Lady Mitsuko. Ideas flung themselves at her mind and burst from her lips in not quite complete sentences. “Place to park?” she said urgently. “Garage? Pretend to make a delivery?”

The answer was no. Parking was illegal, there was no garage to turn into, and all the businesses on the street were closed at this hour.

Casimir’s shoulder clashed with hers as he came forward to scan the scene before them. “How many?”

“I can see seven,” Sula said. “My guess is, there are two or three more we can’t see from here. Say ten.” She pointed ahead, to an open-topped vehicle partly on the sidewalk, with a machine gun mounted on the top and a Naxid standing behind it, the sun gleaming off his black-beaded scales.

“Starling,” she said to Macnamara. “That gun’s your target.”

Macnamara had been one of the best shots on the training course, and his task was critical since the gunner had to be taken out first. The Naxid didn’t even have to touch his weapon, just put the reticule of his targeting system on the van and press theGo button: the gun itself would handle the rest, and riddle the vehicle with a couple thousand rounds.

And then the driver of the Naxid vehicle would have to be killed, because he could operate the gun from his own station.

A spare rifle had been brought for Sula, and she reached for it. There was no spare suit of armor, and she suddenly felt the hollow in her chest where bullets would strike.

“We’ve got two police coming down the line toward us. One on either side. You two”-she indicated the driver and the other man in the front of the van-“pop them right at the start. The rest of us will exit the rear of the vehicle-Starling first, to give him time to set up on the gunner. The rest of you keep advancing-you’re as well-armed as the patrol, and you’ve got surprise. If things don’t work out, we’ll split up into small groups-Starling and Ardelion, you’re with me. We’ll hijack vehicles in nearby streets and get out as well as we can.”

Her mouth was dry by the time she finished, and she licked her lips with a sandpaper tongue. Casimir was grinning at her.

“Nice plan,” he said.

Total fuckup,she thought, but gave what she hoped was an encouraging nod. She crouched on the rubberized floor of the van and readied her rifle.

“Better turn the transponder on,” Casimir said, and the driver gave a code phrase to the van’s comm unit.

Every vehicle in the empire was wired to report its location at regular intervals to a central data store. The cliquemen’s van had been altered to make this an option rather than a requirement, and the function had been turned off while the van was on its mission to Green Park. An unresponsive vehicle, however, was bound to be suspicious in the eyes of the patrol.

“Good thought,” Sula breathed.

“Here they come.” Casimir ducked down behind the seat. He gave Sula a glance-his cheeks flushed with color, his eyes glittering like diamonds. His grin was brilliant.

Sula felt her heart surge in response. She answered his grin, but that wasn’t enough, and lunged across the distance between them to kiss him hard.

Live or die,she thought. Whatever came, she was ready.

“They’re pinging us,” the driver growled. One of the patrol had raised a hand comm and activated the transponder.

The van coasted forward, then halted. Sula heard the front windows whining open to make it easier to shoot the police on either side.

The van had a throat-tickling odor of tobacco and terror. From her position on the floor she could see the driver holding a pistol alongside his seat. His knuckles were white on the grip. Her heart sped like a turbine in her chest. Tactical patterns played themselves out in her mind.

She heard the footfalls of one of the patrol, walking close, and kept her eyes on the driver’s pistol. The second it moved, she would act.

Then the driver gave a startled grunt and the van surged forward. The knuckles relaxed on the pistol.

“She waved us through,” the driver said.

There was a moment of disbelieving silence, then the rustle and shift of ten tense, frightened, heavily armed people all relaxing at once.

The van accelerated. Sula’s breath sighed slowly from her lungs and she put her rifle carefully down on the floor of the vehicle. She turned to the others, saw at least six cigarettes being lit, laughed and sat heavily on the floor.

Casimir turned to her, his expression filled with savage wonder. “That was lucky,” he said.

She didn’t answer. She only looked at him, at the pulse throbbing in his neck, the slight glisten of sweat at the base of his throat, the fine mad glitter in his eyes. She had never wanted anything so much.

“Lucky,” he said again.

In Riverside, when the van pulled up outside the Hotel of Many Blessings, she was careful not to touch him as she followed Casimir out of the van-the others would store the weapons-and then went with him to his suite, keeping half a pace apart on the elevator.

He turned to her then, and she reached forward and tore open his shirt so she could lick the burning adrenaline from his skin.

His frenzy equaled hers. Their blood smoked with the excitement of shared danger, and the only way to relieve the heat was to spend it on each other.

They laughed. They shrieked. They snarled. They tumbled over each other like lion cubs, claws only half sheathed. They pressed skin to skin so hard that it seemed they were trying to climb into one another.

The fury spent itself sometime after midnight. Casimir called room service for something to eat. Sula craved chocolate, but there was none to be had. For a moment she considered breaking into her own warehouse to satisfy her hunger.

“For once,” he said, as he cut his omelette with a fork and slid half of it onto Sula’s plate, “for once you didn’t sound like you came from Riverside.”

“Yes?” She raised an eyebrow.

“And you didn’t sound like Lady Sula either. You had some other accent, one I’d never heard before.”

“It’s an accent I’ll use only with you,” she said.

The accent of the Fabs, on Spannan. The voice of Gredel.

Lady Mitsuko signed the transfer order that morning. Transport wasn’t arranged till the afternoon, so Julien and the other eleven prisoners arrived at the Riverside station late in the afternoon, about six.

Sergius Bakshi had a longstanding arrangement with the captain of the Riverside station. Julien’s freedom cost two hundred zeniths. Veronika cost fifty, and the Cree cook a mere fifteen.