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.
TWENTY-FIVE
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.
Nobody seemed to be looking for Julien either. There was a warrant out for him, but no one appeared interested in serving it. Perhaps the Legion of Diligence thought he was still in prison somewhere; and Sergius Bakshi’s influence was enough to keep the ordinary police from pursuing any leads.
Sula’s delivery company quietly expanded, a fleet of anonymous vehicles quietly delivering contraband from one part of the city to another. One-Step was taken on as an assistant driver. Sula began to miss his presence on the pavement in front of her apartment.
Not that she often saw her apartment. She whirled through the long summer nights with Casimir, a sequence of dark, close rooms filled with dangerous young men, sweaty dance floors, and clean cool sheets. Late at night, tangled with one another in some grand hotel suite, they laid plots against the Naxids, chose targets, deployed fighters, discussed strategy.
Casimir and Julien had quietly assembled a group of young, deadly cliquemen, along with other volunteers recruited by Patel, the young cliqueman who had first volunteered to fight the Naxids for love. They called themselves the Bogo Boys, after a practically indestructible toy.
The Bogo Boys were sent against more difficult objectives. Two judges were killed, one of them an Ushgay returning to the city from his country house. A warehouse of Jagirin foodstuffs was burned. Three mid-level executives with the rationing board—a Jagirin and two Kulukrafs—were assassinated along with their bodyguards.
Sula took part in none of these operations. “You’re a general now,” Casimir reminded her, “it’s not your job to fight in the streets with the troops.” She devoted herself instead to obsessive planning, making certain that escape routes were properly laid and that no one would be left behind.
When the rebel government finally arrived from Naxas, Sula resisted Julien’s arguments to attack them as they paraded up Axtattle Boulevard to the High City. The enemy would be ready for that; and events proved her right, as thousands of Naxid police brought in from the countryside saturated the area, occupied the roofs of buildings, and lined the boulevard itself.
Instead she ordered the entire secret army go on the attack in other districts of the city. The targets didn’t matter, she emphasized, so much as explosions and fire. Cars and trucks were blown up, abandoned buildings put to the torch, flammables piled in streets or public parks and set alight. Security was concentrated on the approach route, so there was little force available to stop the attacks. The Committee for the Salvation of the Praxis moved to the High City surrounded by pillars of smoke and with the sound of explosions echoing between the buildings.
The committee and their pathetic undersized Convocation—the delegates they’d convinced or coerced into representing their home worlds—took their places in the Hall of the Convocation to take their oaths of allegiance to the new government. From that vantage point they could look through the great glass walls to the Lower Town beyond and see the tall rising columns of smoke; like the bars of a prison they had entered of their own free will.
The Naxids then grew more serious about roadblocks and searches, putting more police on the streets,
