Walter Williams - Conventions of War

“As long as they don’t called him Junior,” Martinez found himself saying aloud, but he felt a warm surge of pride flush through his blood.

Terza drew back a chair from the battered old desk, rearranged her gown again, and sat. The camera, which was not without its own intelligence, followed her.

“As you can see,” she said, “I’m still on Laredo. Your parents and Roland”-the brother Martinez wasn’t speaking to, at least not when he could help it-“are dealing with, ah, a great many important guests, who are going to be feted and celebrated and generally fussed over until they give Roland and your father what they want.”

The very important guests, Martinez knew, were the members of the Convocation, which had fled Zanshaa for a world as far away from the Naxids as they could find. Their location was a state secret-though presumably everyone on Laredo knew-and Terza couldn’t mention them by name without triggering one of the algorithms at the Office of the Censor, which might have stopped the correspondence dead.

In any case, the Convocation was now completely in the hands of Lord Martinez, Roland, and the rest of the family. If their incompetence hadn’t caused the war in the first place, Martinez would have felt sorry for them.

“I’ve been playing my part as a kind of auxiliary hostess,” Terza said, “which is less tiresome than you’d think, and gives me something to do other than languish in the nursery. I’ve known many of these guests all my life. And since my father isn’t here, I’m handling Chen business as well as representingyou, though it’s hard to say at this point how any of that’s going.”

Martinez paused the video and wondered why Lord Chen wasn’t present along with the rest of the Convocation. Terza wasn’t in mourning, and she didn’t seem sorrowful when she spoke of him, so he wasn’t dead or somehow disgraced.

Perhaps he was on a mission of some sort.

Probably that information was on one of the communiques he’d skipped. Martinez triggered the video again.

Terza gave him a significant look. “I obviously can’t go into details,” she continued, “but I’ve been around some important people, and I’ve seen some interesting reports. The material side of the war is encouraging, and time is not on the Naxids’ side.”

She raised a hand. “I hope you’re raising a lot of mischief but otherwise staying out of trouble. Come back to me and young Gareth as soon as you can.”

The orange end-stamp appeared on the screen. Martinez stared at it, his mind swimming.

She had decided to name their son after him. Perhaps that meant she was thinking of remaining in the marriage even after her father and his enterprises ceased to require a massive Martinez subsidy.

Perhaps the woman his family had bought for him, and with whom he’d spent all of seven days before being parted by the war, had decided to remain a fixture in his life.

His sleeve comm chimed. He answered, and saw the chameleon weave on his sleeve resolve into Michi’s image.

“Yes, my lady?”

“I thought I’d let you know that we’ve just received orders to head for Chijimo. That’s where we were told to rendezvous with the Home Fleet in our original orders.”

“Things can’t have changed much in our absence then,” Martinez said.

Michi hesitated. “I’m not sure. Our orders were signed by Senior Fleet Commander Tork, Supreme Commander of something called the Righteous and Orthodox Fleet of Vengeance.”

Martinez took a moment to absorb this. “Tork?” he said. “Not Kangas?”

“No, not Kangas. And I don’t know what that means either.”

“Tork hates me,” Martinez said. “You told me so yourself.”

She raised her eyebrows and said nothing. After a while Martinez sighed.

“Terza sends her love,” he said, speaking on the assumption that love would be sent somewhere in Terza’s messages, even if it hadn’t been on the one video he’d had a chance to view so far.

“How is she?”

“Doing very well, apparently. Maintaining Chen interests on Laredo in the absence of her father.”

“Maurice isn’t on Laredo?” It was Michi’s turn to be surprised.

“Maybe he’s with Kangas.”

“I have letters from Maurice that I haven’t had a chance to view,” Michi said. “Perhaps he’ll enlighten me.”

“Let me know if-” He realized he might be trespassing on Chen family business. “-if it’s relevant to our situation,” he finished.

“Comm,” Michi said, “end transmission.”

The orange end-stamp appeared in Martinez’s sleeve display. He blanked it, then looked at the long list of mail that waited for him.

He decided to go to the top of the list and work his way right through to the end.

And then he would review the highlights.

A son,he thought, and smiled.

And then he thought,Tork hates me. And now he’s something called the Supreme Commander.

Once Sergius Bakshi allied himself with the secret government, everything began to fall into place. Groups who had been fighting Naxids, or who wanted to fight Naxids, or who were merely thinking about fighting Naxids, were brought into contact, and-at least theoretically-placed under Sula’s orders. A table of organization, if anyone had been unwise enough to assemble one, would have been much less neat than the ideal assembly of three-person cells arrayed in tiers. Whole gangs of friends joined at once, and even if organized into cells, knew each other’s identities. The result could be a security catastrophe, but Sula did her best to make sure such groups were as isolated from the rest of her army as possible.

Messages began to move along the clandestine communication network already employed by the cliquemen. The cliquemen, hardened to violence and death, provided a stiffening that the secret army otherwise would have lacked, a stoic, practical approach to killing that the new recruits would have taken months to learn, if ever. The cliquemen might not have earned love, but they were certainly earning respect.

Sergius killed the ten Naxids that Sula had demanded of him, and did it with remarkable efficiency, and all outside his own territory. Each assassination provoked retaliation by the Naxids, and each hostage shot created more potential recruits, and tension between the Naxids and the local cliquemen.

The high sun of summer blazed down on shootings, on bombings, on hijackings, on secret deliveries. Much of the action was directed against the ration authority, both the most visible and the most vulnerable symbol of the Naxid regime. The Naxid police who came into local police stations to oversee distribution of the ration cards were favorite targets. After five were killed and three more wounded, they began traveling in armored vehicles with guards. Since this was about the time that Sidney developed a rocket launcher, the Naxid precautions only let the assassins bag more enemy at once. More cliques were drawn into the war to profit from control of food-as Sula had suggested, the cliques dared not surrender control of the market to anyone else, which included Naxid clans that aimed at controlling the legitimate market.

Sidney was going through a period of remarkable creativity. From his workshop came designs for small, concealable pistols, for snipers’ rifles far more accurate than the Mark One, for bombs, and for his crude but surprisingly effective rockets. All plans were distributed in issues ofResistance. All, in time, were put to use.

Sula traveled continuously through the city, for the most part coordinating groups of cliquemen, or talking them into joining the cause, or judging disputes over bits of profitable territory. The visit to Green Park had shown the folly of traveling with an armed group of guards, and so often as not she went riding behind Macnamara on his two-wheeler, a vehicle agile enough to avoid roadblocks or other inconveniences. Sometimes she went alone, or with Casimir in his apricot-colored car. She was expected to appear as Lady Sula, and over the course of the long summer the blond wig grew hot and unpleasant. Her own hair grew out somewhat, and finally she had it cut into her old style and turned more or less her own shade again. The enemy weren’t looking for Lady Sula anyway.