Conventions of War

TWENTY-SEVEN

The Righteous and Orthodox Fleet of Vengeance grew to thirty ships, then thirty-five, then forty. The Naxids at Magaria were known to have thirty-five ships, and many Fleet officers wanted to launch at once for immediate battle, but Tork continued his orbit of Chijimo and his drills. Martinez had to concede that Tork was probably right-if he was going to use the stodgy old tactics against a fleet that had already won a colossal victory against just those tactics, it was best to have a massive advantage in numbers.

The Naxids were reinforced to thirty-seven, the Orthodox Fleet to forty-six. Still Tork didn’t move. Still he continued to drill his squadrons and hector his officers with demands for obedience and conformity. Still he bombarded the Convocation with demands for a vast new wave of ship construction, not simply warships, but support vessels, shuttles for landing troops, and the troops to be landed from the shuttles.

Then intelligence reports indicated that the Naxids numbered forty-two, which-since it happened to be the total number of ships they were absolutely known to possess-conceivably meant that the entire Naxid fleet might be at Zanshaa. The Orthodox Fleet had grown to fifty-two by then. Martinez found himself begin to itch for action. Engagenow, he thought, before the Naxids could replace those unfinished ships destroyed at the shipyards by Chenforce and Squadron 14.

Tork was apparently immune to such itches. The Naxids were reinforced to forty-eight, which meant they had shipyards producing warships in places that neither raiding squadron had reached, probably including Naxas and Magaria. Tork then gained four new frigates and four heavy cruisers of the newObedience class,Obedience, Conformance, Compliance, andSubmission.

From the tenor of the lineup, Martinez suspected that Tork now had a hand in the naming of ships. “Logically,” Martinez told Michi, “the next in the sequence will be ‘Surrender.’”

Despite the reinforcements, Tork still declined to launch for Zanshaa. Martinez began to receive hints from Michi Chen-which had apparently originated with her brother-that both the government and the Fleet Control Board had lost patience with Tork and were on the verge of taking action-if, that is, they could make up their minds whether the action would be to replace Tork with Kringan, formerly of the Fourth Fleet and now Tork’s second in command, or simply to order Tork to attack.

Possibly Tork heard these same hints, because he announced that he would move as soon as he had been reinforced by another three frigates from Laredo, ships that were already on their way. By the time that happened, the Naxids had received five ships, and Tork’s advantage in numbers had fallen from twelve to ten.

Tork delayed for another four days after the Laredo frigates arrived-long enough, Martinez observed, for a query to be sent to the Control Board on Antopone, and for the return of an adamantine response. At this point Tork finally committed himself. Orders were sent to his squadron commanders, to individual ships, and to other Fleet elements in other systems.

The Righteous and Orthodox Fleet of Vengeance kindled its mighty antimatter torches, echeloned its squadrons, took a last high-gee swing around Chijimo, and hurled itself for Chijimo Wormhole 1 and the foe that waited at Zanshaa.

Sula rode the first of several trucks into the High City and took the Ngeni Palace for her headquarters. Maps and equipment were spread out on the dining room table. Portraits of Ngeni ancestors looked down in shock.

In the palace courtyard, screened by trees and shrubbery and statues of more ancestors, the trucks were repainted in Fleet colors. A pair of earth-moving vehicles with huge plow blades and wheels taller than a Terran already waited on their trailers. Members of Sula’s advance team began fitting sheets of improvised plastic armor around the drivers’ compartments.

Shawna Spence and a pair of assistants ripped out the interiors of a pair of cars that she would later pack with explosive. An entire truck bomb, her calculations suggested, would be redundant for the jobs intended-the cars would do perfectly well.

PJ Ngeni wandered around trying to be useful and generally getting in the way.

Elsewhere in the great city, combat teams were assembling. Or so Sula had to hope.

The sun sank slowly into a pool of hemoglobin red, signaling the end of a perfect autumn day. The fragments of the Zanshaa ring glowed in the darkening sky. The scents of the city rose on the still air: uncollected trash, dying flowers, cooking. Sula had her people gather on the terrace behind PJ’s cottage and assemble the mountaineering gear, the long lines laid out in coils, the harnesses and ascendors that would carry people and gear up the cliff face.

Before the escalade began, Sula made a scan in either direction with light-enhancing binoculars. None of the Naxid guards at the Gate of the Exalted seemed interested in anything going on below.

Her sleeve comm gave a chirp. She looked at the display and saw a text message: WANT TO MEET TOMORROW AT THE BAKERY?

The party at the foot of the cliff was ready.

Sula sent a return message-WHAT TIME? — then gave the command to hurl the long ropes over the parapet. Each rope ended in a bundle that included a climbing harness and the end of a safety line that would be belayed by one of the advance team on the terrace.

The reply was: 1301. Which meant that all three ropes had hit the ground without being hung up on snags or brush. Less than three minutes later Sula heard the soft whine of an electric motor, and a few seconds afterward the first head crested the terrace wall. A white grin split the dark face.

“Hi, princess,” Patel said, and two of the advance team rushed forward to take him under the arms and lift him onto the terrace flagstones. His harness was efficiently stripped and sent back down under its own power. Patel loosened the strap of the rifle he’d been carrying and lowered his heavy pack. Sula pointed at the Ngeni Palace.

“Go through the courtyard to the big house. We have some food there.”

“Thanks, princess.”

More electric whines announced the arrival of two more climbers. The high-torque ascendor motors carried them up the rope at a walking pace, which meant the ascent required little skill except for staying in the harness, fending off the cliff with their feet, and hanging onto their gear.

The first group of thirty-nine were all Bogo Boys, an entire action group. Among them was Casimir, who reached for Sula with one hand and gave her a fierce kiss.

“Julien’s with the rear guard,” he said. “I think it’s because he just doesn’t want to come up this cliff.”

“I can see his point,” she said.

Fuel packs on the ascendors were replaced. The next deliveries sent up the static lines were equipment: weapons, ammunition, explosive, and detonators, all the gear they despaired of getting past the chemical sniffers at the foot of the High City’s one access road. Spence and her engineering team hustled the packs of explosive to her stripped vehicles. A chill wind began to float between the spires of the High City, and Sula shivered in her coverall.

Casimir faded into the darkness, then returned a few moments later carrying a long coat that he wrapped around her shoulders.

“From PJ’s closet,” he murmured into her ear.

“Thank you,” she whispered, and kissed him again.

She kept peering into the night with her binoculars, particularly at the Naxid installation at the Gate of the Exalted. She saw lookouts there, but their attention seemed occupied mainly with the traffic far below on the switchback road.

The last of the supplies whined up the static lines, and then the ascendors began delivering Sula’s soldiers once again, the Lord Commander Eshruq Wing of the Secret Army-fighters, mostly Torminel, recruited mainly from the Zanshaa Academy of Design. The undergraduate industrial designers had become ruthless bombers and assassins, perhaps because of their youth and flexibility, or possibly because of their carnivore Torminel heritage. Now they would prove useful on account of their huge night-adapted eyes.

After the Eshruq Wing came another group of Bogo Boys, followed at last by Julien. He required three assistants to haul him, pale and shivering, over the parapet. With trembling hands he lit a cigarette, then shook his head and said, “I’m never getting in one of those harnesses again. Never again.”

“If this goes right,” Sula said, “you won’t have to.”

She made a brief inspection of her army, most of whom were lying on the beds, tables, and carpets of the Ngeni Palace that hadn’t yet been taken to storage. Many were ritually cleaning and readying their weapons. Some were gambling. Sidney sat in an antique hooded armchair, the hood filled with a cloud of hashish smoke. Fer Tuga, the Axtattle sniper, limped from room to room, looking at the fighters in apparent surprise. He had fought all his battles alone till now, and the number of his allies on this mission was a revelation to him.

Sula found PJ in his drawing room, looking far from the stylish Peer. He wore durable baggy trousers with a leather seat, as she’d sometimes see horsemen wear, and a ragged brown pullover. He had two weapons disassembled on the glossy Dwell-period table in front of him, a long hunting rifle with a butt inlaid with ivory and chased with silver, and a small pistol. He was cleaning the weapons with care and great fussiness, and he didn’t look up as she paused in the doorway.

She wanted to tell PJ to leave the guns and get into bed and wait for the war to be over, so he could dress in one of his lovely tailored suits and drift down the road to one of his clubs. She wanted to tell him that he had proved his worth a thousand ways, that dying in a street fight wasn’t going to make Sempronia Martinez love him. She wanted to tell him to head down the funicular to some bar or restaurant in the Lower Town, find some pliable girl, and fuck Sempronia out of his mind.

She wanted to say these things, but didn’t. She just looked at him for a moment and walked on without speaking.

Nothing she said would have made any difference anyway.

Sula lay for a few hours in Casimir’s arms, the both of them fully clothed and stretched on an old sofa in one of the cottage’s upstairs room. She supposed she might have slept. She was up before dawn, however, to make certain that the action groups received a meal, to conduct a last minute inspection of the vehicles, and to see that the group and team leaders understood what they were expected to do.

She went onto the terrace as dawn broke over the capital, the sun rising into the green sky out of a pool of bloodred that mirrored the one it had fallen behind the night before. Her binoculars were turned on the Naxid installation. Nothing seemed to have changed since the previous evening.

The Naxids shift changed at 0736, with most of the Fleet personnel coming up the funicular to join their officers who barracked in hotels in the High City. Sula wanted to keep any newcomers off the acropolis, and so had scheduled her attack to begin at 0701, half an hour before shift change and a little more than twenty minutes after sunrise.

The High City was slowly coming to life, and she could hear the calls of morning birds and an occasional vehicle on the road outside. The Lower Town remained largely in darkness, though many lit vehicles moved on the streets, ghosting through the gaps between buildings. She passed among the waiting fighters and gave the command to move onto the vehicles.

The action groups climbed in silence onto their transport. Sula watched Casimir march up the ramp of one of the trucks, awkward in the armor with which he’d never had a chance to familiarize himself, and he turned, a half-wistful, half-ironic smile rising onto his face as he saw her. He raised a hand and gave her a mocking salute, fingers flicking at his forehead, then stepped into the truck and sat with a group of Bogo Boys.

Sula wanted to hurl herself onto the truck with the others, but she didn’t move. She was a general, not a soldier. As she watched the ramp rise, she felt a fist clamp on her throat.

Fortune attend you,she thought uselessly. Ultimately, luck was all she had to count on.

Electric motors provided traction to the big wheels, and the vehicles slid away on their various errands. She wondered what anyone on the road outside might think, seeing the Ngeni Palace service gate disgorging Fleet military transport, a few civilian sedans, and the two earth-moving machines on their trailers.

The vehicle gate closed with a whir. Torminel guards armed with Sidneys stood behind the gate out of sight, while others quietly fortified the Ngeni Palace against any attack. His balding head bowed, PJ marched with his rifle at port arms in the shadow of the palace, awaiting his moment of glory.

In the cottage, Sula donned her cuirass and helmet, not because she expected to be shot at, but because it held her secure communications equipment and battery packs. She opened the visor, took her binoculars, and left the cottage for the shadow of one of the trees, where she could watch the Naxid guards without giving herself away.

Eskatars, scaly four-legged birds from Naxas, rained down angry cries from above her head, as if warning their distant kin of mischief afoot. Dead leaves and twigs pattered down on her shoulders.

The teams maintained radio silence on the approach. Then Sula heard a pair of signals.

“Four-nine-one, Thunder ready.” Spence’s voice, a little loud, a little excited.

“Four-nine-one, Rain ready.” Macnamara’s voice.

“Four-nine-one, Wind ready.” Sula’s heart gave a lurch at the sound of Casimir’s grating tones.

Her mouth was dry. She summoned saliva to moisten her sandpaper tongue and gave the orders.

“Comm: to Rain. Launch Rain. Comm: send.

“Comm: to Wind. Launch Wind. Comm: send.”

Rain and Wind, the seizure of the two entrances to the High City. Sula’s words were coded, compressed into microsecond bursts, and fired into the city at the speed of light. Brief acknowledgments sang in her headphones.

There was a moment of stillness, and she could swear that, in the morning stillness, even with the headphones and the helmet over her head, she could hear the distant sound of a pair of trucks pulling around a corner and heading toward the Naxids at the Gate of the Exalted.

Her pulse sang in her veins. Her forehead ached where the padded rim of the binoculars were pressed against it.

These were trucks painted in the viridian green of the Fleet, the same model of Sun Ray the Fleet used, and they would arrive just ahead of the time the Naxids would expect a pair of trucks bringing their relief. The Naxids moved casually toward the vehicles as they rolled onto the broad terrace, expecting to see their own emerge as the rear ramps began to come down and the side doors to roll up.

What emerged were a swarm of Bogo Boys spitting bullets and hurling grenades. Though surprised, the Naxids managed to fight back, and they were well-armored and tenacious, but were badly placed and in the end simply mowed down. Any Naxids that come near the open doors of the antiproton gun turrets were killed by Fer Tuga, the Axtattle sniper, who had crept up on the Naxid position in a chameleon-weave cape capable of projecting active camouflage, rendering him nearly invisible against his background.

The snap of rifles stunned the Eskatars into silence. It was as if they knew their side had just lost.

“Rain has secured its objective,” Macnamara said. His voice was a little breathless.

“Comm: to Rain. Can you use the antimatter guns? Comm: send.”

“I’m checking that now.”

The distant sound of fire reached Sula’s ears. The fight over the funicular terminal was still going on. Casimir was leading that fight, with Sidney as the group’s sniper.

There was the far-off crack of a grenade, and then the fading echoes of the explosion reverberating off the buildings of the High City and the great sprawl below. Then silence. Then, finally, Casimir’s deep voice.

“This is Wind. We’ve taken the funicular. We’re having the operator move the train to the High City terminus, and we’ll lock it here.”

A flood of joy filled Sula’s heart. She wanted to send Casimir a torrent of love, but instead made a brief acknowledgment and ran to the parapet as she sent another message.

“Launch Thunder. Repeat, launch Thunder.”

Thunder was the attack on the Great Destiny and the Imperial hotels. At Sula’s command, Spence launched the two big plows off their trailers, to hurl themselves with lowered blades to knock away the barriers placed around the buildings.

Sula turned her binoculars to the scene at the foot of the granite acropolis, where the Naxids stationed at the two blockhouses guarding the switchback road were reacting to the firefight overhead. It was clear they heard the shots, but it seemed they weren’t sure where the sound had come from. Some were crouching with raised weapons, others had stopped all traffic approaching the High City. Probably the rest were in their bunkers.

While Sula gazed down at the Naxids, she heard a breathless commentary from Spence, little excited bursts of prose that she sent when she remembered to, and when she had nothing more important to do.

“The plow’s hit the barrier! Wa-Did youhear that? The first barrier just went down!..Nothing left but bits of concrete and twisted rebar…Backing up to start again…heard a crash from the second plow…guards reacting…Keep those guards pinned down!”

Sula turned her binoculars on the Gate of the Exalted once more. Macnamara’s action group was taking up positions in the buildings behind the gate, ready to repel any counterattack aimed at retaking the position from behind. Spence’s one-sided comments continued, her voice a shout over the rattling sound of fire.

“The second barrier’s down! The guards are running!..Send in the carnow!..Go! Go!..She’sin! She’s got the carright in the lobby of the hotel! …I’m hearing shooting from the Imperial. It’s hard to see what’s happening there…Suppressive fire! Suppressive fire!..The driver’s away, she’s gotten out! She’s jumped up behind the plow blade and she’s using it for cover…Stand by, everybody! Fall back!..”

Sula lowered her binoculars and wondered if she should take cover herself, if, as far as she was from the Great Destiny Hotel, she was in any danger, standing on the open terrace.

The explosion came in three stages, a very fast one-two-three, first a massive bang that seemed to stun the world into brief silence, then a great percussion that Sula felt as a blast of wind against her face, then the great shivering roar that came up from the High City’s granite heart. A huge plume of debris and dust jetted high above the acropolis, glittering as it rose into the brilliant dawn.

Wellthat should wake the Naxids up, she thought.

“Success!” Spence’s excited voice was faint against the continuous noise that still dinned Sula’s ears. “We’ve taken out the Great Destiny Hotel!”

And with it some six hundred mid-level Naxids, Sula knew. Naxid fleet officers, police officials, officers in the Legion of Diligence, bureaucratic functionaries in the government ministries…

When planning the operation, she and Casimir had joked that the Naxid government might well run more efficiently once their mid-level bureaucrats were eliminated, but she knew that the middle layer were exactly those with the technical skills to keep the Naxid government running. Many of their superiors had been promoted on the basis of family or political connections, and the middle layers were the people who actually kept things functioning.

“Comm: to Thunder. Good work! What’s happening at the Imperial Hotel?”

“I’m not sure,” came the reply. “We’re in a huge dust cloud. So are they, probably. The reports I got were confusing, and I can’t seem to contact the plow operator.”

Gradually reports came in. The other half of Thunder wasn’t going well. The plow had got hung up on a barrier, and while trying to maneuver clear, the operator had apparently been shot. At any rate, he wasn’t replying and had ceased to maneuver the plow. Spence sent the Great Destiny plow to provide backup, but the huge machine had to detour around the vast pile of rubble that was the wrecked hotel and got lost in the dust cloud. The explosive car following the plow had been badly shot up by the hotel’s guards, and when the dust cloud rolled up from the Great Destiny Hotel, the driver had taken the opportunity to abandon the vehicle and run for it.

In the end Spence had her crews take cover and detonated the car anyway. The explosion itself was spectacular, but the damage to the Imperial was superficial. The building was scarred and all the windows were blown out, but there were presumed to be relatively few enemy casualties. The debris cloud paled before the magnificent pall of the Great Destiny Hotel.

Sula ordered Spence to keep the hotel under fire. It might at least keep the Naxids pinned down and unable to take up their posts in the emergency.

“Four-nine-one, this is Rain.” Macnamara’s voice came calmly into Sula’s stunned ears. “I found both antiproton guns already activated. The ammunition was locked, but I opened the boxes with the officers’ keys, and now antiproton bottles have been loaded into both guns. We’re ready to fire.”

“Brilliant!” Sula told him. “Let’s open the floodgates.”

She trained her binoculars downward again, at the blockhouses guarding the foot of the switchback road, and saw the guards all staring upward at the huge, brilliant dust cloud that had been their comrades. Then there was a loudbang, and part of the nearest blockhouse disintegrated in a sizzling flash, hurling the nearby guards to the ground.

Sula remembered that there were lots of very fast neutrons and gamma particles involved, and she faded back from the parapet and only heard the follow-up shots that Macnamara placed around the installation, turning it and the Naxid guards to subatomic particles and blazing hot slag. A wild triumph filled her heart as she realized the last barrier to the success of Project Daliang had just fallen.

“Comm: to all units,” she called. “Launch Flood! Launch Flood! Repeat, launch Flood! Comm: send.”

She stepped back to the parapet again, and had only a few minutes to wait before a convoy of trucks and automobiles rolled out of the Lower Town and toward the wrecked roadblock, bringing the first of the combat teams who had been briefed to prepare for storming prisons and were carefully assembled and guided during the night to locations beneath the High City. Now the guides told the drivers their true destination, and the convoys were heading up the long narrow trail toward the Gates of the Exalted.

Sula watched the first few convoys climbing the acropolis, each marked by brilliant headlight beams, and then ran back to the cottage to send out a message to the world.

Resistance

This is a message from the White Ghost.

Today is the day we retake our city!

For months we have been waiting for the inevitable return of the Fleet to Zanshaa, to drive away the Naxid invaders and restore proper government to our world.

Though that day will still come, there is no longer any need to wait. For months we have been building our strength, gathering weapons, and training in secret. We no longer need the Fleet. We can do the job ourselves.

All action teams, all cells, and all groups are now called to the fight. Strike the rebels wherever you can find them! Attack their officials, strike down their guards, sabotage their equipment!

If you have ever contemplated action against the rebels, the time for action is now. If you have a gun, use it! If you can wreck a piece of enemy equipment, wreck it! If you have a rock, throw it! The city of Zanshaa can be ours in only a few hours!

If you are a member of the security services, we have this note of caution for you. Be careful how you behave this day. Note will be taken of which side you join. Make certain that it’s the right one.

Maximum chaos,Sula thought. Not every enemy of the Naxids belonged to the secret army, or were under her control, or had quite dared to volunteer. She wanted them all to cut loose at once. The more emergencies buzzing around the Naxids’ ears, the better.

And if anyone was actually unwise enough to follow her advice and throw rocks at Naxids, the bullets the Naxids fired in retaliation at least were bullets that weren’t being fired at her and her comrades.

They needed all the help they could get. She figured there were between six and seven thousand loyalists in the secret army, and there were slightly in excess of 800 million Naxids on the planet. Whatever extra forces she could bring were desperately needed, if only to prevent the odds from looking more absurd than necessary.

Instead of her usual fifty thousand copies, she sent a million through the Records Office node. She suspected that anyone on duty in the Records Office now had many more urgent things to do than to keep a close watch on what the broadcast node was doing.

And as usual she’d turned off the node’s logging, so there would be no record of her messages having been sent. And as usual she’d appended the address of a false node as the message’s point of origin.

The false node was that of the Great Refuge, the massive domed structure at one end of the High City from which the Shaa had ruled their empire.

It was as if the Shaa themselves had returned from the dead to denounce the Naxids.

She had now added the Great Masters to the bewildering array of identities that she’d inhabited the last few months: Lady Sula, the White Ghost, Lucy Daubrac, Jill Durmanov, Gredel, and the team leader known only as 491. It was useless to ask which of these was the real personality.

The point was that all of them killed Naxids.

When it was time to stop killing, perhaps she’d ask herself who she really was.

She waited as PJ’s desk console confirmed thatResistance had been sent, then logged out of the Records Office computer and returned to the terrace. The cloud of dust and debris was dispersing on the light morning breeze. A stream of vehicles was climbing up the switchback road, each filled with fighters preparing to seize the High City.

She went to the dining room of the Ngeni Palace, where her maps had been set out on the table. The groups coming up the switchback road were arriving in no particular order. The first groups were ordered to help secure the two bridgeheads at the funicular and the Gates of the Exalted. The next groups went to reinforce Spence’s force, who were still laying a very precarious siege to the Imperial Hotel and the Naxid officials trapped inside, Naxids who outnumbered their attackers twenty to one.

The reinforcements were just in time. Spence’s position had gone critical very fast. Whoever was in charge of the Naxid security forces on the acropolis must have been receiving a lot of confusing information, but one thing was clear: the hundreds of Naxids at the Imperial Hotel were calling for help, and they were calling with one voice.

Help was duly sent, in the form of two companies of Legion of Diligence paramilitaries, wearing black armor over their black uniforms, driving their special black vehicles, and carrying matte-black weapons. These were reinforced by whatever Motor and District Patrol were available. They punched easily through Spence’s thinly held lines and reached the hotel, where they commenced organizing an evacuation.

Fortunately, this occurred just as Sula had reinforcements available. They were put into place around the hotel, hardening Spence’s defenses just as the Naxid commander on the scene realized that he was facing a dilemma.

The Naxids didn’t have enough transport to get everyone in the hotel away, and under the circumstances, they could hardly call for a city bus. They decided to open a corridor leading to the far end of the High City, beneath the dome of the Great Refuge where the government ministries were clustered. It wasn’t clear whether they then intended to shuttle their charges out on their vehicles or march them briskly to safety, because the Naxid plan failed at the outset. When the feared Legion of Diligence rolled out of the hotel, they were met by a blistering fire from every building along their path. Grenades, rockets, and bombs rained down on their vehicles. Their retreat was much faster and more confused than their onset, and they left three vehicles behind, burning in the street.

After twenty minutes the Naxids tried again in another direction. Again they were sent scurrying back to the hotel.

Sula decided things were going rather well. She liked the Legion’s force right where it was, stuck in the Imperial Hotel instead of defending the ministries and the Convocation. She decided it was time to open another front, and the next groups through the Gates of the Exalted were told to report to the Ngeni Palace.

There were certain targets that had to be taken in order for Project Daliang to be considered a success. The Ministry of Wisdom, which headquartered the principal broadcast media. The Office of the Censor, which scanned every message sent on all of Zanshaa for content hostile to the Naxids. The Commandery of the Naxid Fleet, which contained the apparatus that controlled the Naxid military, and the Ministry of Right and Dominion, which supervised the Commandery and the Fleet. The Ministry of Police. The Ministry for the Defense of the Praxis, which controlled the Legion of Diligence.

And of course the Convocation itself, where the Committee to Save the Praxis, the supreme body of the Naxid rebellion, met with its tame legislature.

All these crucial government departments were clumped in one area, beneath the shadow of the Great Refuge and its granite dome. This was the area that Sula determined to seize.

She called for group and team leaders to meet her in the dining room. With a series of questions, she tried to determine the levels of experience available and the state of each group’s equipment. The most capable she reserved for her assault on the government departments. Others she sent to seize the Glory of Hygiene Hospital, so her wounded fighters would have medical care. To the least useful she provided addresses, and sent them to scour the homes of high-ranking Naxids and bring as many officials of the rebellion as possible under her control.

“I want them alive, understand?” she said. “They’re hostages for the other Naxids’ good behavior. We needthem to keepus alive.”

The action teams raced off on their errand of abduction, to which she knew they would very likely add vandalism and pillage. The remaining captains she brought close around her maps on the table, to plan a multipronged attack up each street leading to the Great Refuge.

“I want a line of fighters going up each side of the street,” she said. “Vehicles should lag behind, but should be ready to rush forward and support. Understand? Any questions?”

One young Lai-own raised a hand. “Are you the real Lady Sula?” she asked. “Or a fake, like they say?”

She grinned. “I’m as real as you,” she said. “Areyou a fake?”

She sent them off and told them to begin their assault at 0826. She would hope that at least one column would do well, and that she could support that attack with reserves. Her army’s amateur nature was a severe handicap: the attack on a broad front was necessary because she had no way of scouting the enemy, she could only attack everywhere and hope someone got lucky. And she had to organize the entire assault herself, with communications limited to those who were similarly equipped with headsets, and for those who weren’t, to a hand comm. She badly needed a staff, but didn’t have one. Spence and Macnamara might have filled that role, but they had vital assignments of their own that she didn’t dare trust to anyone else.

While the new assault forces moved into position, she was given a running commentary from Casimir concerning events at the funicular. The Naxid security forces in the Lower Town hotels had finally organized themselves and paged the funicular operator to send the train to pick them up. The operator-an elderly Daimong who had held his job for decades-told the Naxids that he had strict orders to keep the funicular at the upper terminal. The Naxid repeated their demands. The Daimong repeated his explanation.

The Naxids then contacted someone in the Ministry of Works to order the Daimong to lower the funicular. The Daimong refused on the grounds that it was the military who had ordered him to keep the funicular at the terminus. The Naxids then contacted the Commandery, and a senior captain of the Naxid Fleet contacted the terminus and countermanded the order. The Daimong replied that the order hadn’t come from the Fleet, so the Fleet couldn’t countermand it. The Daimong was asked what service had given the order, and the Daimong said he didn’t know.

Successive calls came from the District Patrol, the Motor Patrol, and the Legion of Diligence. In all cases, the Daimong replied that they couldn’t countermand his order since it hadn’t come from that service.

“What officer gave the order?”the Naxid finally demanded.

“The one right here,” the Daimong finally said.

“Let me speak to him!”

The Daimong stepped aside to let Casimir step to the comm unit, wearing his Fleet-issue armor and carrying his rifle. The Naxid stared speechlessly while his scales flashed red, unreadable patterns.

“What doyou want?” Casimir asked.

The Naxid overcame his surprise enough to manage a command. “You must lower the train at once.”

Casimir looked straight into the camera pickup. “Piss on you,” he said. “I work for the White Ghost.”

Sula laughed when she heard this from Casimir. He and the cooperative Daimong operator had kept the Naxids stuck at the lower terminus for over half an hour, during which they couldn’t interfere in the battle of the High City.

Now, however, the Naxids came up the railway, a whole swarm marching up the steep track and the maintenance paths on either side. Most of Casimir’s teams, in good positions in palaces overlooking the Lower Town, opened fire and sent them tumbling down the slope again. Casimir reported that he was having a hard time getting some of the teams to stop shooting once they’d started and that he was worried about poor fire discipline eating up his ammunition supply.

The Naxids took a few minutes to reorganize, and then Casimir reported that he could hear them all shouting slogans in unison: Death to anarchists! Long live our leaders! On to the High City!

On they came, better organized this time, with Fleet security forces in the lead in viridian armor, scuttling up the steep slope as fast as their four legs could carry them. Casimir’s fighters met them with a blast of fire that cut them down by rows but the Naxids charged on, trampling the wounded and dying. Then the two antimatter cannons began to fire, and the head of the long column faltered and turned back. Those at the rear still drove them forward, however, and the collision sent Naxids flying off the track and tumbling down sheer granite slabs to lie broken at the bottom of the acropolis. The survivors pulled back into cover.

“They’re bound to get smarter about this,” Casimir told her.

Sula was concerned that, failing the attack up the funicular, the enemy would try to scale the High City at some other point along its lengthy perimeter. Naxids weren’t exactly built for mountaineering, but it could be done, and at the moment there was no one to stop them. She sent action teams as lookouts to various points on the city’s cliffside to make certain that no Naxids were turning mountain goat.

Reports came in to her that the Glory of Hygiene Hospital had been taken. It was guarded, but hospital security were private and non-Naxid and stood aside. Some of them had joined the loyalists, which would have been more encouraging had they been armed with anything more effective than sidearms and stun batons.

A growing crackle of fire, heard through the open windows of the dining room, told Sula that the coordinated offensive on the government complex had gone forward on schedule. The firing rose to a tremendous din, died away to a continual crackle, then diminished still further, to what sounded like desultory sniping. Sula was in a near frenzy to contact her units to find out what had gone wrong. It seemed that all groups had run into resistance, gone to cover, and were now awaiting further developments.

“Get your people moving!” she told one group leader over her comm unit. He was a youngish Terran with a receding, unshaven chin and a startled expression, as if he hadn’t ever expected to be in this situation.

Perhaps he hadn’t. Few of her army had ever been in actual combat before. The teams that had been passing information and copies ofResistance, firebombing Naxid homes and vehicles, or sniping at the enemy from a reasonably safe distance were now discovering what a genuine battle was like, one where the enemy fought back.

“Well,” the leader said, “getting the people moving is going to be hard. We were advancing up the road, see, and when the Naxids opened fire, everybody jumped into these offices and shops. They’re all kind of scattered out now. I don’t know how I’m going to get them all going again or-”

“Just get out there and round them up!” Sula demanded.

“Well, see,” the man said, “I’d have to get out on the street to do that, and they’ve got machine guns, you know.”

“Bring up the vehicles to give you covering fire!”

“Well,” he answered, “those cars don’t want to come any closer, see. They’d get shot up, and they don’t have armor or anything.”

“Get those people moving, you cowardly son of a bitch!”Sula shrieked,“or I’ll come up there and personally shoot you in the fucking head!”

The young man’s startled face took on an expression of deep indignation. “If you’re going to talk like that,” he said, “I don’t see why I should continue this conversation.”

Sula stared open-mouthed as the orange end-stamp filled the screen.“The bastard!” she shouted, and cocked her arm to throw her comm unit through the open window. Then she thought better of it and lowered her arm.

She called more units and received promises that they would try to move forward. Firing briefly increased, then died away again. The fierce hammering of machine guns sounded clear in the morning air. She knew that those guns were programmable to fire at any movement detected within a certain defined area. It would be hard to move fighters in against them as long as their ammunition supply held out.

She considered sending in her reserves, but was afraid they would get pinned down as well. There was no one she could trust to scout the enemy who didn’t have another vital job. It was a job, she realized, that she was going to have to do herself.

She rolled up her maps and left the palace, passing the Torminel guards at the gate. Several groups of fighters, just arrived, had parked in the street, waiting for orders.

“I need someone to give me a ride,” she said.

A Lai-own rose to open the door of his long violet-colored car, but a familiar voice spoke.

“That would be me, beauteous lady.”

Sula grinned. “One-Step!”

The onetime vagrant of Riverside was dressed in clean coveralls and heavy boots. A Sidney Mark One was slung over his shoulder, and there were strands of cheap glass beads around his neck.

She ran to his truck and gave him a hug. “One-Step hasn’t seen you,” he said reproachfully. “The lovely lady’s been too busy for One-Step.”

“I’m about to get busier,” Sula said.

“Here.” He took off a strand of beads and put them around Sula’s neck. “These will keep you safe.”

She blinked. “Thanks.”Whatever works, she thought.

She jumped into the passenger seat of his truck, and One-Step pushed the throttle forward and eased it into the crowded street.

For the next twenty minutes she viewed the areas where the attack had gone in, and saw where wrecked vehicles and scattered bodies signaled the high-water mark of the advance. The long straight streets provided ideal fields of fire for enemy heavy weapons. The Naxids dominated the streets from the far end and were hardening their positions. Something, she thought, would have to break things loose.

As she was finishing her survey, she heard a torrent of fire from somewhere else in the city. She paused and waited for a communication.

“Four-nine-one,” came Casimir’s voice in her helmet, “this is Wind. The Naxids are up to something. We’re getting a lot of fire from positions in those hotels down there. It’s obviously meant to make us keep our heads down. I can hear them starting to shout again, so they’ll be charging again fairly soon.”

Sula asked if he thought he was in any trouble.

“We’re just fine, lover,” he said. “You do what you need to do, and don’t worry about us.”

She asked if he could spare Sidney.

“Sidney? Sure. Where do you want him sent?”

She had him brought to Ashbar Square, where she had collected her reserves. There, amid the scent of blossoming ayaca trees, she unrolled her maps on a marble bench beneath the statue of Enlightenment Bringing Joy to the People. Sidney arrived just as the firing at the funicular grew to a vast roar.

“You live on the High City,” she asked him. “How do we get around those Naxid positions?”

In addition to the long, straight streets in the High City, there were also small pedestrian lanes lined with small shops, and alleys and little squares behind the shops intended for service vehicles. Sula had first entered Sidney’s shop through just such an alley. They were marked on her maps, but it was difficult to tell from the maps exactly how to enter the lanes and what could be found there.

Sidney pointed out the byways he knew and explained how to access them. Sula called several of her commanders and gave them instructions.

“Stay off the main roads,” she said. “Leave your vehicles behind and move up through the alleys. We can expect that the Naxids will have guards here, but they won’t be in commanding positions, they’ll be close, where you can reach them. Keep moving and you’ll get behind those heavy gun positions and can take them out.” She looked at Sidney. “You can lead one group, can’t you?”

“Of course, my lady.”

She sent them on their way and turned to the reserve units that were clustered around the square. The din at the funicular was dying away.

“Those were police in the lead this time,” Casimir reported. “Urban Patrol. I think they’re running out of Fleet landing groups.” He gave a laugh that sounded like shale sliding down a slope. “It may be the Motor Patrol charging next.”

Cheered, Sula left the fountain, went to an area where a number of vehicles were parked and jumped onto the flat bed of a truck. “Gather around!” she called, and took off her helmet. She shook out her blond hair and gazed out over her fighters. There were three or four hundred, and she had never laid eyes on most of them before. They included the tall Lai-own with their feathery hair, the shorter Torminel with their large nocturnal eyes shaded by goggles or dark glasses, the pale expressionless Daimong with their gaping mouths and round, hollow, startled-looking eyes, the Cree with their huge ears and dark purple flesh, and the Terrans, who looked more like curious schoolchildren than determined soldiers.

Sula took a long, drawn-out breath, the air sweet with the scent of morning blossoms, and then shouted out into the morning.

“Which of you is the bravest?”

There was a moment of surprise, and then a half-articulate shout went up and she saw a sudden forest of pumping fists and waving rifles.

“Right,” she said, and began to point. “You,andyou, and you there…” Then she looked down at the man with the beads dangling around his neck. “Not you, One-Step,” she said. “I’ve got other plans for you.”

When she had her dozen chosen, she brought them up to the hydraulic tailgate of the truck: five Torminel, two Daimong, three Terrans, and a pair of Lai-own so nearly identical that they might have been twins.

“I need the bravest,” she said, “because I need you to drive like hell right up the Boulevard of the Praxis and the Street of Righteous Peace. I need you to drive until your vehicles are so shot up they can’t move any longer.”

The Naxids’ computer-controlled heavy weapons were programmed to fire at movement, and would shoot at the nearest targets first. Her plan was to provide targets that would suck up all those enemy rounds, targets behind which the rest of her force could advance.

“You’ll all be in trucks,” she told her dozen. “And you’ll be charging in reverse, so that the rear of the trucks will take most of the damage and you won’t be committing suicide.”At least not so blatantly.

Sula activated the record function on her sleeve display. “I want your names,” she said, “so that when they write the histories of this battle, you’ll be in them.”

Pride sang in their voices when they spoke their names.

She made her assignments, then gave orders to the rest of the reserves. They were to fill their vehicles with fighters and charge up the streets behind the dozen of the advance group. They weren’t to stop and take cover until all the advance group were stopped dead or until their own vehicles were hit.

“Move when you hear the horn blasts,” Sula said. “Now go!”

She turned to One-Step. “I need you to go back to the Ngeni Palace,” she said, “and bring all the groups waiting there to the square.”

She knew she might have to repeat this trick more than once, with fresh cannon fodder.

Firing began at the funicular once more as she waited on the Boulevard of the Praxis while her army got into position. Casimir reported that it was the same Naxid tactic as before-covering fire for an attack that hadn’t started yet.

“Do you suppose all that shouting is meant to draw our attention away from something else?” he wondered.

She’d been thinking much the same thing. She tried to contact the teams she’d placed around the perimeter, but they reported nothing. Then she put on her headset and tried Macnamara.

“Nothing’s happening here, my lady,” he said. “There’s no sign of the Naxids at all. A few action groups are still coming up the road. We’ve blocked the gate with trucks and won’t let them pass until they identify themselves, and then we send them on to the Ngeni Palace as you ordered.”

She told Macnamara to send them to Ashbar Square instead.

“Very good, my lady.”

“What is the status of the antimatter guns?” she asked. “Can you remove them from the emplacements?”

“Yes, my lady,” he replied. “They’re the same guns we trained on, and we can take them out of the turrets. We’ll have to remove and then reattach the big antiradiation shield, but all it will take is time.”

“Good. Pull one out and put it on the back of a truck. Let me know when you’re ready,” she concluded.

She had been worried about the antiproton guns-they were an invincible weapon right up to the moment when the Naxids brought up antiproton guns of their own and blew them to radioactive dust. Getting the weapons out of the conspicuous turrets and putting them in a more camouflaged location might be the best way of preserving them.

There was a sudden burst of fire up ahead. Sula couldn’t see where it was coming from, and had to assume that one of the groups she’d sent into the lanes and alleys had run into the enemy. She didn’t want the Naxids to think of sending reinforcements there, so she decided it was time to launch her next attack.

“Blow your horns!” she shouted. “Let’s go!”

The cars, vans, and trucks began honking their horns, each producing anything from a saucy little blip to a bass organ roar. Her suicide squads rolled ahead, driving very large vehicles in reverse. Even in reverse they managed a good pace, though some were clearly better drivers than others. She hoped the swerving would help keep them alive.

When the advance wave hit the Naxid guns’ preprogrammed defense area, the air suddenly filled with hammering that began to shred the trucks. The driving grew more erratic as pieces flew off and clattered in the street.

There were at least three machine guns, she thought, because at least three of the trucks were getting hit at once.

The rest of the reserves followed in a dense swarm, firearms thrusting out the windows, some spraying the buildings ahead. Sula followed at a run, dashing up one of the walks until she encountered the first scattered bodies, then she ducked into a shop where bullets had marred the neat window displays.

Five Torminel looked at her in surprise from amid a collection of pens and stationery. “Move up!” she shouted. “We need your unit to move ahead and leapfrog the forces I’ve just sent in!”

The Torminel seemed to see the point of this, and they ran out of the shop, beating on doors and windows as they advanced and calling out to their comrades to join them.

Ahead, the street was noisy chaos. The smell of burning caught at the back of her throat. Bullets cracked overhead. Sula sprinted across the boulevard and jumped over a dead body that lay sprawled in the doorway of a vegetable market.

Something about the body made her stop before she entered the store. She braced her back against the solid doorway and saw that it was PJ Ngeni.

He had been hit in the chest and had fallen backward to the pavement. His elaborate hunting rifle lay across his body. His face bore an expression of wistful surprise.

Sula felt as if a soft pillow were pressed on her face, and she forced herself to breathe.

She had liked PJ. She had liked his amiable goodwill, and his foolish bravery, and the accuracy of his social sense. He had been everything that was fond and silly in the old order, and everything that the war had doomed.

A bullet glanced off the pavement nearby. She opened the door and stepped into the vegetable store.

Three Terrans looked at her. One was the surprised-looking man with the receding chin who had refused her orders to advance. Another was a young woman with greasy hair, and a third a teenage boy with bad skin, his lips stained with berry juice. Apparently they’d been having a feast of food gathered off the ration.

“Get your people together,” Sula told them. “Get up the street. You’re going to leapfrog the units that just went in.”

“Well,” the man said, “that’s going to be hard because-”

“I don’tcare how hard it is!” Sula said. “Just get out there anddo it.”

“Well,” the young man said, “we weresupposed to be attacking a prison. I don’t even know what we’redoing up here on the hill.”

Rage flared in Sula’s veins. “What we’redoing, ” she said, “is winning the war, you incompetent fuck! Now getout there!”

He nodded, as if acknowledging a minor rhetorical point. “You know,” he said, “I don’t think this thing is very well thought out, because-”

Sula remembered that she’d left her rifle behind at the Ngeni Palace. She reached for her pistol, pulled it out of the holster, touched the activation stud and pointed it at the group leader.

“Brave soldiers are dying for every second you hide in here,” she said. “Now are you going to show some leadership, or am I going to shoot you like I promised in ourlast conversation?”

The woman and the boy gaped at the sight of the pistol. A stubborn expression crossed the leader’s face. “Not till I have my say,” he said, “because-”

Sula shot him in the head. The woman gave a little shriek as blood and brains spattered her. The boy took a step back and knocked over a crate of pomegranates. The little purple-red fruits bounced as they rolled along the floor.

Sula saw Caro Sula lying dead on the cart, her translucent skin paper-white. She saw Caro vanish into the river, her hair a flash of gold.

For a moment, as she looked down at the body, she saw Caro Sula’s face staring back at her.

The coppery smell of blood swamped her senses and she clamped down hard as her stomach tried to quease its way past her throat. The pistol swayed in her hand. “Get out onto the street!” she told the other two. “And do itnow! And if you head anywhere but toward the battle, I’ll shoot the both of you, I swear.”

They edged around her, their weapons held in their hands as if they’d never seen them before. “Get up the road!” Sula shouted. The two reached the doorway, stepped gingerly over PJ Ngeni, and broke into a trot as they jogged up the street, toward the fighting.

Sula followed. She picked up PJ’s rifle and looked at its display. It hadn’t fired a single shot.

She slung it over her shoulder and moved up the street, pounding on doors and windows as she went.

“Come out of there,” she called, “you cowardly sacks of shit! Get moving! Move, you useless ass-wipes!”

Fighters emerged from their hiding places, and she sent them into the firestorm ahead. All of the vehicles had pulled off the road or been destroyed. Gunfire was roaring nonstop.

Having dug out as many fighters as she could, she trudged back to Ashbar Square, where new units were beginning to arrive. If the current attack failed, she decided, she’d pull the trick with the suicide trucks again.

It wasn’t necessary. Sidney and the other infiltrators had worked their way through the maze of lanes and alleys and gotten behind the Naxid positions. They attacked seized some of the heavy weapons positions and turned the weapons on the other hardened positions. The fighters trying to move up the street suddenly surged forward as the Naxid defense disintegrated.

The Naxids had no reserves to speak of, and their positions had no depth. Once their line was breached, they had to pull back everywhere to avoid being cut off. Most were overrun before they could retreat. Sula’s fighters seized the Ministry of Right and Dominion, the Ministry of Police, the Ministry for the Defense of the Praxis, and the High Court with its admirable view of the surrounding terrain.

Mad triumph raged in her veins. She called Casimir.

“We’ve thrown down another attack,” Julien replied. “We’re just slaughtering them. I don’t know why they keep on coming.”

“Julien?” Sula said in surprise. “Where’s Casimir?” Then she remembered communications protocols and repeated the question using the proper form.

“He’s gone to sort out some of the units with poor fire control,” Julien said. “They keep wasting ammunition. He gave me his comm protocols while he’s running his errand.”

Sula sagged with relief. “Comm: to Wind,” she said. “Tell him that I love him madly. Tell him that it looks like we’re taking all the government buildings on this end. Comm: send.”

“We figured you would,” came the answer.

She spoke too soon. When the army tried to move on to the Commandery, they ran into serious trouble.

“They’ve installed one of those units they’ve been using against snipers,” Sula was told. “Fire one bullet across their perimeter, and a whole series of automated weapons blast the hell out of you.”

Fortunately, Macnamara reported that he’d pulled an antiproton gun out of its turret and mounted it on the back of a truck. Sula ordered it to the Commandery.

The automated defense system could pinpoint any bullet or rocket aimed in its direction. But it wasn’t capable of spotting a minute charge of antiprotons traveling along an electron beam at one-third the speed of light.

Macnamara demolished the Commandery’s defenses with ten minutes of careful fire. The loyalists charged forward with a great roar, chasing the remaining guards through the maze of corridors and capturing the entire Naxid Fleet staff in the situation room.

The Ministry of Wisdom was taken without a fight. The Naxid security forces tried to make a stand in the courtyard of the Hall of the Convocation but were swarmed from all sides and massacred.

Forty of the rebels’ tame Convocation were captured hiding in various parts of the building. Lady Kushdai, who chaired the Committee for the Salvation of the Praxis, was captured in the quarters formerly belonging to the Lord Senior of the Convocation.

Sula had launched the only ground battle fought in the empire’s history, and won it.

Zanshaa High City was now hers, and so was the government.