“They’re trying to terrorize us,” Casimir said. He looked at Sula. “Do we feel terrorized?”
Sula didn’t bother to answer. The Naxids had struck at the city’s population of six hundred thousand, and used a missile without the usual tungsten jacket so there was no fireball—the shock wave had caused some damage, but almost all the casualties were from the radiation attack. There were radiation treatments available, but the guards had been ordered to turn people away from the hospitals.
“They’re going to have a depopulated city they can give to their clients,” Julien said. “That’ll buy a lot of friends.”
“I want the ratfucks who did this,” Sula said.
Casimir laced his long pale fingers together. “We all do,” he said. “But they could all be in orbit for all we know.”
Sula’s eyes shifted to a picture on the wall. Behind decades of dirt and cooking grease was a heavily retouched shot of the High City, the sky too brilliant a green for reality, the buildings too bright.
“The Naxid Fleet wouldn’t do this on its own,” she said. “It was their damn committee that ordered this. Andthey’re where we can get them.”
“All of them?” Casimir raised an eyebrow. He reached for a glass of the cheap sorghum wine the landlord had poured for them. “We can get at a few, I suppose. Our contacts in the High City can provide their location. But they’re all well-guarded, and any escape route is going to be—”
“All of them,” Sula said. Her mind had been caught up in the whirlwind of the idea. “And I’m not talking about knocking them off one by one. Let’s make a clean sweep of them. Get some antimatter and blow them right off their rock.”
Julien was amused. “Where are we going to get antimatter?” he asked. Only the military and the power authorities had antimatter, and in each case it was heavily guarded.
“And how are we going to put together a delivery system?” Casimir asked. “This is outside Sidney’s area of expertise.”
So they discussed other possibilities. Truck bombs, if they could get one close enough. Catapults hurling bags of fertilizer explosive. “We could build a cannon,” Sula said at one point. “We won’t need the carriage or anything, just the barrel. We build it on the roof of a building, under a shed or something so it’s not obvious. Then we bore- sight it on the room where their committee meets, and blow them to bits with one shell.”
By then the others had drunk enough sorghum wine to make this seem both plausible and hilarious. They discussed the idea for an hour before breaking up.
By the time Sula and Casimir reached their safe house, her mood had sobered. When he came into the room from the shower—she always made him shower before bed—he found her sitting on a chair holding theju yao pot that she’d rescued from her old apartment. She looked at her dark, distorted reflection in the crackled surface, and her fingers slid blindly over its contours.
Casimir stepped up behind her and put his long hands on her shoulders. She put the pot on a scarred old table, took one of his hands in her own and brushed against the knuckles with her cheek.
“Do we really know what we’re doing?” she said. “Those people in Remba—they died because of whatwe did. Tens of thousands of them. And tonight we met to plan more trouble, and for all we know, another city will be destroyed as a result.”
His fingers clasped hers. “The Fleet will come soon,” he said.
“In that case,” Sula said, “what’s the point of what we’re doing? The war will be decided off the planet.”
“We’re killing Naxids. I thought that’s what you wanted.” One long pale hand caressed her hair. “I never expected to live as long as Sergius,” he said. “I always thought it would be torture and the garotte before I was thirty. If you and I die together in this war, it doesn’t change anything for me. It’s better than dying alone.”
Tears burned her eyes. She rose from the chair and pressed herself against him, inhaling the scent of soap and his wine-scented breath. His arms came around her.
“Don’t be sad,” he said. “The Naxids are afraid of us. That’s why they hit Remba.”
Her hands formed fists behind his back. “I want it to mean something,” she said. “I want to do something the Fleet can’t do even if they bring a million ships to Zanshaa.”
“Build your cannon.” There was laughter in his voice. “We’ll blast their committee and their Convocation halfway to the ring.”
His words brought a rising sense of steadiness to stand against her confusion. She leaned on him as if he were a wall and wiped the tears from her eyes.
Fighting the hot swelling that had lodged in her throat, she said, “The original plan called for an army to hold Zanshaa. The government decided not to build an army, but we’ve built one now. Let’s do something with it. Let’s take the High City.”
Again he seemed vastly amused. “Take the High City? Why not?”
Angered flashed through her at the laughter that danced behind his word. “Don’t condescend,” she said.
“Condescend?” He pulled away, and she saw an answering anger that smoldered in his eyes. “We’ll take the High City. Fine. Or we’ll build a cannon. Fine. Or we’ll do something else. I don’t care. But whatever we do, let’sdo it and stop asking ourselves questions.”
She looked into the dark eyes for a long moment, then pressed her mouth to his.
A strange, unexpected happiness pulsed through her blood. I am home, she thought, home after all this time.
Home amid the war, with its chaos and instability, its danger and terror. Home in this safe house, with its old, dingy furniture. Home in Casimir’s arms.
She tore her lips away from the kiss. Calculations were already spinning through her mind.
“Yes,” she said, “we’ll take the rock, and kill them all.”
TWENTY-SIX
Chenforce flashed through the wormhole to join the Righteous and Orthodox Fleet of Vengeance in their orbit around Chijimo’s star, and were promptly met by a massive flight of missiles, roaring toward them like a hellish blood tide bent on slaughter—and then the missiles reversed, decelerated, and hovered alongside the newcomers like sheep dogs escorting the flock to their pen. Chenforce recovered them all to fill their depleted magazines.
Six days later Chenforce joined the Fleet proper, slotting into the loose formation between the flag squadron and the next astern, and were met by tenders sent out from Chijimo with supplies of fresh food, liquor, and delicacies for the officers. Even the antimatter stores were topped up, though the ships could still run for years on the antihydrogen already in their fuel reservoirs.
With the arrival of Chenforce, the Orthodox Fleet now constituted twenty-eight ships, half of them newly built and crewed. It was the largest collection of loyalist ships since the Home Fleet had launched for Magaria.
After a few hours in which the crew of Chenforce luxuriated in reasonably fresh fruit and vegetables only partially compressed by acceleration, Supreme Commander Tork ordered Michi Chen, all captains, and all first lieutenants, aboard his flagship, theJudge Urhug .
Martinez and the others spangled themselves in dress uniforms and then visited Dr. Xi for spray bottles of a concoction that would deaden their senses of taste and smell—an entire ship crowded with Daimong was a formidable terror to the senses.
The party waited inDaffodil till the last plausible minute before casting off and making their way to the flagship. Martinez noticed that the other Terran and Torminel captains had likewise delayed their arrival.
At the airlock, a Daimong chorus cried out a song of joyous welcome. The sound was both deafening and magnificent, but a disturbing odor of decay was already clawing its way up the back of Martinez’s throat. One of Tork’s staff lieutenants took the new arrivals along corridors strung with wire and conduits to Tork’s suite, where everyone from Tork on down braced to salute Martinez’s Orb.
The table was a clear plastic over a metal framework, and the chairs were plastic too, curved for the comfort of the Daimong anatomy. The metal walls were painted a bilious shade that Martinez could only think of as government green, and ornamented with photos of Tork ancestors, framed degrees and certificates that Tork had been awarded at various points along his career path, and pictures of ships that Tork had commanded.
It was a far cry from the luxurious flagships of the recent past, with their parquet floors, custom artwork commissioned by well-known painters and designers, and exquisite hand-made furniture.Judge Urhug had been built quickly, sprayed with the cheapest paint available, and filled with mass-produced furniture just intelligent enough to hang onto the floor in the event of weightlessness. The urgency of war permitted little else.
