a calculation, necessitating a calculation of risks, whether a breath of fresh summer air was worth the chance of being round up and shot.
Everyone under the Naxids, she thought, was making that calculation now.
Within days Team 491 was making regular deliveries of cocoa, tobacco, and coffee to restaurants and clubs throughout the city. Aside from profit, the deliveries provided opportunities for gossip with the restaurant staff, and the staff overheard a great deal from their customers.
The operation promised enough money so that Sula’s company was able to buy their own delivery vehicle. It was a bubble-shaped truck with chameleon panels on the sides, and since advertising that drew electricity from the grid had been forbidden since the destruction of the ring, she was able to rent out the chameleon panels for advertising and turn even more profit.
Though their chances of overthrowing the Naxid regime seemed remote, Sula supposed that Team 491 could take justified pride in becoming highly successful entrepreneurs.
The team took no more action against the Naxids, though Sula found herself staring narrow-eyed at possible targets from the cab of the truck. We should dosomething, she found herself thinking.
Others acted without her. A group of students at the Grandview Preparatory School staged an unsuccessful ambush of a Naxid Fleet officer returning home on a train. Details were scarce in the official reports, but possibly they intended to beat the officer senseless and steal his firearm. A couple of the attackers were killed outright and the rest captured. Under interrogation, they confessed to being members of an “anarchist cell,” and apparently they named others, both fellow students and teachers, because there were a series of arrests.
The Grandview school was purged. The alleged anarchists were tortured to death on the punishment channel, and the students’ families shot.
Resistancemourned them as martyrs to true government and the Praxis.
A Cree delivering fish to a Grandview restaurant told Sula of a Naxid being killed by a mob, all this supposedly happening in a Torminel neighborhood called the Old Third. The Naxid had been chased down at night by a mob of nocturnal Torminel, and the next morning Naxid police surrounded the area, charged in, and shot down the inhabitants at random. Hundreds, according to the Cree, had been killed.
“Why haven’t I heard of this?” she asked. Sensational news like that should have spread through the city like a storm wind.
“They wouldn’t put it on the news.” The Cree’s musical, burbling accents were far too cheerful for his subject matter.
“Sensational news like that, it should be over the city in hours.”
The Cree turned his light-sensitive patches toward her. Sula could feel her internal organs pulsing to the subsonic throbs of his sonar.
“Perhaps it will be, inquisitive one,” the Cree said, “but the incident occurred only this morning. I heard the killing from my window.”
Heard, not saw. The Cree’s light-patches probably wouldn’t have made much sense of something going on at such a distance, but his broad, tall ears would have given him a clear enough idea of what was happening.
The Old Third was some distance away, on the other side of the city, but the restricted, computer-guided highways managed the distance in less than an hour. The truck approached through the Cree neighborhood adjoining, and there were pockmarks of bullets on the buildings, along with shattered windows and splashes of blood on the pavement. Sula decided it wasn’t a good idea to get any closer.
The rest she learned later, as death certificates were filed in the Records Office computer. The Naxid who had been killed by the mob was a sanitation worker who finished her shift in the wrong neighborhood. The police hadn’t killed hundreds, but around sixty.
The Naxids had next turned their attention to the local hospital, where they shot anyone they found in the emergency wards on the assumption that they’d been wounded in the earlier police action. It was a bad day for anyone to break a leg. Another thirty-eight were killed.
In the next issue ofResistance, Sula provided a partial casualty list—she couldn’t produce a full list without giving away her access to the Records Office. Melodramatic details spilled from her imagination: the parent who died in an unsuccessful attempt to shield her children, the angry shopkeeper holding the police off with a broom until riddled with bullets, the panicked civilians herded into a blind alley and gunned down, the bloody claw marks on the bricks.
She knew the inadequacy of her words even as she wrote them. Whatever pathos she invented for her readers couldn’t equal the horror and tragedy of the reality. The helpless terror of the victims, the rattle of guns, the moans of the dying and shrieks of the wounded…
She remembered all that from the Axtattle fight. Her atrocity fictions were a pleasant fantasy compared to the memories that swam before her gaze.
More death coming,she thought.Human warmth not my specialty.
As usual,she wrote in Resistance, the Naxids were unable to find their true enemies, and settled for killing whoever they could find. She added:
Our chief criticism of the Torminel was that they killed the wrong Naxid. Nearly a hundred deaths in exchange for a sewer worker shows a sad ignorance of mathematics.
Next time, citizens, find an official, a police officer, a warder, a supervisor, a department head or a judge. And make sure the body isn’t found in your neighborhood.
Then, two days later, an elderly retiree—a Torminel—blew herself up in her own apartment with a homemade bomb. It must have been an incendiary, Sula concluded, because half the building went up in flames.
The Naxids tracked down the bomber’s children and shot them.
It was while searching the Records Office death certificates in search of details of the Torminel and her family that Sula discovered that Naxid was killed in a bomb explosion ascribed to “anarchists and saboteurs.” The Naxid, a minor official in the Ministry of Revenue, was likely killed on account of his vulnerability: he wasn’t important enough to rate guards. The bomb was a small one, explosive packed with nails.
The next issue ofResistance mourned the old Torminel as a stern loyalist outraged by the deaths in the Old Third, and made the dead tax officer a villain condemned by secret trial and executed by members of the Octavius Hong wing of the secret loyalist army.
A hundred and one hostages were shot in retaliation; the Naxids, as usual, inflicting death by prime numbers. It was interesting, she thought, that the hostages hadn’t been shot in response to the bombing, but to the public revelations of the bombing. It appeared that the Naxids weren’t killing hostages because they were being attacked, but in retaliation for the loss of face when the attack was revealed to the public. It was something, she thought, that she might be able to use.
Searching death certificates for other revelations, Sula discovered a great many geriatric cases sprinkled with a few bizarre accidents. She wondered if she could use that too, perhaps turn some of those accidents into incidents of sabotage, then wondered if her imagination wasn’t running away with her.
If so, she wasn’t the only one. The Naxid media announced the arrest and execution of the Octavius Hong wing of the loyalist army, along with their families.
But I invented them!Sula protested to herself.
When she checked the Records Office computer, however, she discovered that the death certificates were real.
The streets steamed after a summer shower, and the truck’s wheels splashed water over the walkway as Team 491 drew up to a cafe bar on the Avenue of Commerce, in Zanshaa’s business district. Macnamara touched the lever that opened the cargo hatch, then bounded from behind the controls to the hatch as it rose, rainwater dripping from its lower edge. Sula climbed out to blink in the bright sun and inhale the aroma of the overripe ammat blossoms, fallen in the storm, mingled with the scent of fresh rain.
“I smell money on the air,” she said to Spence.
Spence lifted her pug nose to the wind. “I hope you’re right,” she said.
Inside, Sula collected her cash from the proprietor, a thin man with a turned-down smile and a crisp white
