The Sundering (44 page)

“My lady?” he said. “Shall we send crew mail and dispatches with
Lord May
?”

Michi agreed, and the crew’s messages home, plus a brief message from Michi to the effect that they’d entered Aspa Darla after a journey from Protipanu free of incident, were coded and sent to friendly territory courtesy of Captain Hansen. Included was Martinez’s long serial letter to Terza, plus briefer messages to other members of his family, all save Roland, to whom he had very little to say.

Martinez had, some time ago, asked Michi to censor his mail personally on the grounds that it might contain Chen family business, and Michi had agreed with perfect amiability. There was no Chen family business in the messages, not unless Martinez’s speculation about the development of the Chen heir counted as business, but Michi did not complain, and Martinez was pleased that Fletcher wasn’t reading his messages.

At Martinez’s request Hansen sent recent news to
Illustrious
. The Naxid news videos trumpeted the fact that Zanshaa had fallen without a fight, though they lamented that “pirates in the employ of the renegade government” had destroyed its ring. Civil government was in the process of being established on Zanshaa, and would be throughout the empire as soon as the renegade government was hunted down and received their just desserts. The Naxids admitted to a hard-fought action at Hone-bar, but did not mention its results. Martinez found the omission annoying. Anyone used to living under the censorship would find it obvious enough that Hone-bar had been a Naxid defeat, simply from the fact no victory was mentioned.

They might at least have mentioned my name.

We are continually involved in attacking the enemy’s ability to make war,
Martinez began in a new letter to Terza.
There is little or no danger to ourselves, but great harm to the enemy’s economy.

I think of you constantly, and hope you are well.

Sparing
Lord May
was the only deviation from the plan that Martinez had devised for the Aspa Darla raid. The Naxid administrators of the two planets’ rings, with no force to stand between them and the oncoming loyalists, obeyed Lady Michi’s orders. All ships on the ring were jettisoned; the repair and construction bays were all opened, and ships under construction shoveled out into the vacuum. Antimatter missiles found all these targets as well as the ships moving in or out of the system, and by the end of the raid a hundred and three ships were destroyed. A few managed to accelerate through Wormhole 2 to Bai-do before loyalist missiles could find them, but Chenforce would catch them there.

Two pinnaces passed close to each ring, cameras trained on the open construction bays to make certain that Michi Chen’s stern orders had been obeyed. The pinnaces were recovered without incident at the far end of the system.

As Chenforce flashed past, another order was given to the Naxids. “You will broadcast the following message on all communications channels every hour until we leave the system. We will be monitoring your communications to assure compliance.”

The message featured Squadron Commander Chen sitting in her office, wearing her viridian dress uniform and gazing at the camera with solemn eyes.

“This is Squadron Commander Chen,” she said. “Loyalist forces operating under the authority of the Convocation and the Praxis have returned to your system. Do not believe rebel propaganda claiming the war is over. Loyalist forces are advancing into rebel areas and have already destroyed two rebel fleets at Hone-bar and Protipanu.

“We will be leaving your system soon in order to fight the rebels elsewhere, but please believe that we will soon return. Those who cooperate with the rebel government or military will be judged and punished. Those who remain faithful to the Convocation and the Praxis will be rewarded. Until the return of lawful government, good citizens will not cooperate with rebels and other enemies of the empire.”

The message was still being broadcast five days later, when Chenforce left the system.

C
ousin Marcia gave birth to a boy two days after Sula’s meeting with Hong. Weight was not mentioned. Sula already knew the Naxids were landing, because she’d heard the sonic booms rattle the windows as the shuttles came in, and had been counting.

The Naxids were coming down in groups of eight. If the shuttles were standard military type, each would carry eighty Naxids plus their gear, and the total would not land an armed force very quickly. They had probably brought in just enough shuttles to secure the ground termini of the space elevators so that they could send their main force down from the ring. Without the ring, this deployment was going to take quite a while.

After four trips, the sonic booms ceased. The former government had ordered the destruction of all suitable fuel stocks, and the Naxids presumably returned to orbit to refuel. Sula wished she knew how much fuel the enemy fleet brought with them.

She knew from her readings in Terran history that things such as ground-to-air missiles had once existed, and she longed for a battery of them. But the Fleet did not have such things, because the Fleet did not fight from the ground. And the police didn’t have them, either, because they didn’t need missiles to arrest criminals—and if there was civil disorder, well, either the police crushed the riot with their small arms or they called in the Fleet to turn the rioters into a cloud of raging plasma.

Team 491 sat in the small apartment at Riverside, the video a constant murmur in the background; news when it wasn’t Macnamara watching sports. The Naxids had decreed a full schedule of summer sports, diversion for a population suffering from spot shortages and the electricity ration, and Andiron was on top of the ratings and delighting its fans. Macnamara watched the games obsessively, crosslegged before a spread oilcloth on which he disassembled and cleaned the team’s weapons.

Spence stayed in the bedroom she shared with Sula and used the wall video to watch a long succession of romantic dramas. Sula tried to avoid overhearing any of the dialogue. She figured she knew pretty well how those romances turned out in real life.

Sonic booms rattled the windows again, sixteen landings altogether, and then the booms stopped. The Naxids had probably run out of whatever fuel they’d scavenged. Sula pictured Naxid constabulary pouring into some chemical refinery and demanding they alter their output.

Sula worked her way through three volumes of mathematical puzzles and a volume of history—
Europe in the Age of Kings
—before her comm chirped with a text message from Blanche for a breakfast meeting at 05:01 at the Allergy-Free Restaurant in Smallbridge, a district of the Lower Town. Sula looked at the message and felt her skin prickle hot with a sudden rush of blood. Trying to control the sudden urge to pant for breath, she rose from her seat and walked with care toward where her team waited, their eyes on her. Sula’s feet seemed to sink into the floorboards beneath her feet, as if she were walking on pillows.

“It’s tomorrow morning,” she said. “Nine hours from now.”

Mr. and Madame Guei held hands as they sat on the sofa, their eyes wide as they watched Action Team 491 turn their pleasant apartment into an ambush site. Their infant son dozed on his father’s lap, and their nine-year-old daughter, having rapidly grown bored with the three heavily armed soldiers who had appeared in their quarters before sunrise, played games on the video wall.

Sula had told the Gueis that they were allowed to do nothing else with the video wall, or any other form of communication in the house. They were particularly urged not to call the police. The action team was there to fight Naxid rebels, not to interfere with their lives, but their lives
would
be interfered with if necessary.

The Gueis complied quietly. They seemed to comprehend easily enough that no one had given them a vote in whether their apartment was going to be turned into a battlefield.

The drive to the Axtattle Parkway was accomplished in the dead of night and without trouble. Due to the electricity rationing, there was very little activity on the streets at that hour. Somewhat to Sula’s surprise, they even found a legal parking space half a block from their destination.

Another team had arrived before them, had awakened the building manager, shown him their warrants, and had him surrender his passkeys. They now held the manager and his family incommunicado in one of the other apartments. One of the advance team let Group 491 into the building, and their team leader let them into the Gueis’ apartment, where they quietly woke the family, got them dressed, and assembled them in their front room.

Normally the teams might have taken positions on the roof, but the gabled mansard roofs common in the district did not permit such a thing. Not only was there no place to hide on the roofs, but a misstep would have pitched them all into the street below.

Once in the Gueis’ apartment, Team 491 opened their duffels and began their transformation into soldiers. On Sula’s head was a helmet with a transparent faceplate onto which combat displays could be projected, and she wore on her torso a midnight-colored carapace that would protect her against small-arms fire and shrapnel. Over it all was a cape that projected active camouflage: it was like a giant video screen that showed whatever was on the reverse side. The image wasn’t perfect, and tended to waver with the folds of the cape, but if she stayed still it would fool the eye even at close ranges, and there was a hood she could pull over her head.

Each team member carried a pistol that fired silent, subsonic ammunition, a rifle, three grenades, and a combat knife. Each carried a gas mask in case the Naxids threw gas at them, and Macnamara assembled a large, tripod-mounted machine gun on the dining table that had been shoved under the apartment’s main window, one that would blast vehicles below with a torrent of fire from the quaint gable that slightly overhung the walk below. Macnamara didn’t even have to expose himself to accomplish this: he could control the gun with a remote pad, or even command it to shoot at anything that moved in a given area.

Below, as the eastern horizon began to glow with a pale jasper light, Sula looked over the ammat trees and watched the traffic move up and down the parkway, mostly heavy trucks bringing goods to the predawn city. The bridge over Highway 16 had sculpted iron railings ornamented in a bright alloy with a lobed, scalloped design that Sula recognized as Torminel in origin. The eleven Action Teams of Group Blanche were hidden in four of the buildings overlooking the ambush site, ready to pump death down on the stunned survivors of the bombing.

Sula’s nerves gave a warning tingle as she saw a truck come into view directly across the parkway from her on Highway 16, a twelve-wheeler that crept slowly down the road as it dipped beneath the broad bridge, and then didn’t come out the other side.

Across Highway 16 from her position, Sula knew, Lieutenant Captain Hong was standing over a command detonator. A drop of sweat trickled slowly down her face. Suddenly she wanted to tear the helmet off her head and take several long, cool breaths.

Sula saw signal lights flashing out of the corner of her eye, and she turned to see several trucks lined up by one of the parkway’s exits. She looked left and right, and saw that the parkway was nearly empty, the few remaining vehicles pulling off. The traffic control computers were clearing the road.

This was worth a message to Hong, Sula thought. She triggered her helmet mic and said, “Comm: to Blanche. Blanche, they’re clearing the parkway. I think we’ll have company soon. Comm: send.” As soon as the last word left her lips, her communicator coded the signal, compressed it, and sent it in a burst transmission to Hong across the parkway.

The response was just a click, no words to be overheard or decoded.

More lights flashed on the parkway, toward the city center, multicolored emergency flashers. Sula pressed her helmet to the window to see a swarm of police vehicles coming in a dense swarm down the parkway, moving in a compact mass in all six lanes. She thought about making another transmission but decided that Hong couldn’t help but see this for himself.

Sula drew back from the window as a river of black-and-yellow police cars poured past, some of them falling out, parking every few hundred paces on either side of the parkway. Sula’s nerves began an unpleasant little crawl as Naxid police emerged from the parked vehicles, their scuttling, centauroid bodies unmistakable in the growing light. They wore helmets and body armor covered with chameleon-weave that duplicated their flash-patterns, the red flashes of their beaded black scales that served as a silent, auxiliary form of language. Each carried a rifle in its forelimbs. They were flashing continually at each other, one pattern after another displayed on their chests and backs, and Sula wished she could read their patterns.

Well, she thought, that’s it. The truck bomb might still work, but surely the rest of the operation couldn’t continue. She could count more police directly below than there were members of Group Blanche, and within minutes many more could arrive, racing down the parkway from right and left. Any second now, she should hear the order for everyone but the team with the detonator to withdraw while they still could.

The order didn’t come. Sula pulled off her helmet and ran a gloved hand through her hair to comb out the sweat.

She wondered if she should transmit to Hong suggesting withdrawal, and then a picture rose in her mind, Hong’s expression of deep concern, his question,
Are you all right about this?

Sula would wait. She took several deep breaths, and then she waited some more.

She turned to scan the room. Macnamara was silent and stoic, his hands flexing as if eager to grasp his machine gun; and Spence was pale, looking as if she wished she were in one of those romantic videos of hers, the ones that guaranteed a happy ending.

It occurred to Sula that she had never led other people in combat. Everything she had done against the Naxids had been done entirely on her own, strapped in her pinnace while it shepherded a volley of missiles toward the enemy. The missiles had not possessed beating hearts or bodies of flesh, not like Spence or Macnamara or the Gueis, whose daughter was still gazing at her video game with intent eyes that might soon be called on to witness a massacre…

Sula realized that she would much rather be alone in this. Her own life was nothing, a breath in the wind, of no value to anyone. Responsibility for others was by far the greater burden.

More flashing lights. Sula peered out of the window and saw a pair of police vehicles moving slowly down Highway 16, then disappearing beneath the bridge where the bomb truck waited. The driver of the truck, code name 257, was still in the truck, having feigned a breakdown. He might be arrested, or decide to do something dramatic.

Shit-shit-shit
…The word drummed its way through Sula’s brain. She picked up her rifle from where it waited against the wall, and held it in her gloved hands. Taking this as a signal, Macnamara stepped to where the machine gun waited and put a hand on its stock. Sula waved him back.

“Use the control pad,” she said. “Mark out everything in the street or on the sidewalk as a target.”

Macnamara nodded to himself, then stepped back to perform this task. Once he triggered the gun, it would fire automatically at anything in the target area until told to stop or until its considerable ammunition reserve was exhausted. It was ideal for covering a withdrawal by the rest of the team.

The rifles held by Sula and Spence were less convenient, insofar as they needed a person to point them at the enemy and squeeze the trigger. But the view through their sights could be projected on the helmet faceplates of the operators, which meant that neither Sula nor Spence actually had to flaunt their heads in the way of enemy fire. Only their hands and forearms need be exposed, with the trigger permanently depressed so that the gun would fire automatically at anything designated a target.

She could feel her pulse beating high in her throat. She wondered if she should step back from the window if everything was about to blow up right this instant.

Sula gave an involuntary start as her hand comm chirped. She reached for it, encountered instead her camouflage shroud, and then groped inside its folds, all the while wondering why someone had called her hand comm instead of using the far safer burst transmissions of the radio.

By the time she opened the comm and pressed it to her ear, it had stopped chirping. Voices were already engaged in a dialogue.

“What’s the situation, then?” Hong’s voice.

“The police tell me I’ve got to move the truck or get myself arrested.” The other voice was two-five-seven’s. “I a-told them we’ve got a tow on the way. I a-told them this here is a valuable piece of property and that I ain’t a-going ta take the responsibility of running a twelve-wheeler on just one fuel cell, but they sez I got ta. So I told a-them what I’d do, I’d like call my supervisor like.”

Sula winced. Two-five-seven was a team leader and a Peer—a highly educated and cultivated young man—and he was doing his best to speak in some manner of working-class accent, and failing miserably.

If the Naxids didn’t hear something wrong in this, then they were deaf to all nuance.

Two-five-seven had done something reasonably clever, though. He’d rung a number that would contact all the teams at once, so that all would know what was going on and none would panic and try something desperate.

“Right,” Hong said. “You might as well pull out, the people we want won’t be here for a while. Take the first left on top of the ramp, and I’ll meet you there. Four-nine-nine, are you there?”

“Yes, Blanche.” Another voice.

“I need you to send me your car with a driver. Have him meet me at the truck, and have him bring all his gear.”

Meaning his weapons, presumably.

“The rest of you,” Hong said, “sit tight, and stick with the plan.”

Sula returned her hand comm to her trouser pocket, her mind spinning with the effort of trying to work out what Hong now intended. Surely he couldn’t retrieve the ambush now.