The Sundering (29 page)

Now the solid citizens of the ring were going to come down the skyhooks to the surface of Zanshaa, millions every day, each with a bag of possessions and a built-in requirement for food and shelter. If they weren’t poor and needy now, they would be soon.

The brilliant minds of the Logistics Consolidation Executive were put to work on the problem. “Nearly three million every day for a month!” cried Sula’s Lai-own boss. “Impossible!”

“Perhaps we could just chuck them off the ring and let them get down on their own,” Sula suggested.

The Lai-own glared. “I would prefer
useful
suggestions, if you please,” he chided.

Sula shrugged. She had found that when she began work on the problem that the evacuation actually made things simpler. The only things going up to the ring were critical personnel leaving Zanshaa, these and engineers getting ready to blow the ring apart. Once the ring was stripped of all the useful cargo and supplies, the giant cars that normally contained cargo could be converted to carry personnel. If enough acceleration couches couldn’t be manufactured in time—and it looked as if they couldn’t—the passengers could be sandwiched between narrow, heavily padded partitions.

It wouldn’t be pleasant, and they’d bounce around a bit, but it could be done.

“How are we going to find places for them once they’re here?” the Lai-own cried.

“We’ve got three billion people on the planet as it is,” Sula said. “Eighty million more is just a drop in the bucket.”

She began to work on the problem, buoyed somewhat by this evidence that the administration had adopted her plan for evacuating the government and the Fleet and then blowing the ring to bits. It would have been nice, she thought, if someone in authority had acknowledged her contribution. Another medal would have been welcome. Even “thank you” would have been nice.

No thank-you came. She wondered if Martinez, that bastard, had pinched her share of the credit.

Her self-destructive impulses had not survived the night she’d heard the derivoo. Homicidal impulses were entertained briefly, then dismissed as unworthy.

Nothing important, after all, had changed. A man Sula hated had married a woman she barely knew—and why should that matter to her? Her own position was barely altered: she had the same rank, the same distinctions, and lived with the same knowledge of her own danger as she had a month ago. Nothing fundamental had altered.

All this she argued to herself successfully, and only doubted these truths at night, alone in the giant Sevigny bed, when rage and loneliness and her own desperation stormed through her.

She was thankful for work, and delighted her chief by the long-burning hours she worked on the evacuation. She was even more thankful when a call for volunteers was broadcast through the Fleet. Hazardous duty, the announcement said, and a chance for glory and promotion while upholding the Praxis.

Sula reckoned she knew what the call was for. The plan that Martinez submitted to the Control Board called for an army to hold Zanshaa City against the Naxids. It was getting a little late to raise an army, but she supposed late was better than never.

She considered her situation—she knew that the entire Logistics Consolidation Executive was scheduled for evacuation in ten days. She could spend the rest of the war in her niche, shuttling supplies around, and let others concern themselves with victory.

That would not give Sula patronage, of course—she’d lost that chance with Martinez. She had her medals and her lieutenancy and a degree of celebrity, but that wouldn’t guarantee further promotion.

The best chance of earning her next step would be to hazard her life against the Naxids. It made sense to claw out of the war as many chances for advancement as she could.

The possibility of death was not a significant consideration. She was good at argument, but hadn’t yet managed to construct for herself a convincing reason why her own life was worth preserving.

Or anyone else’s, for that matter.

Besides, ever since she’d heard the news of Martinez’s engagement she’d felt like killing something.

Sula submitted an application, then was called for an interview before a Daimong elcap. Since some of the questions had to do with her experience with firearms and explosives, she decided that her guess as to the nature of the duty was correct. But since her answers to those questions were “basic proficiency” and “none at all,” it wasn’t clear whether she’d be suitable for the duty or not, and she returned to the Logistics Executive, where she was assigned to the problem of feeding and clothing the eighty million refugees from the ring.

It took only a brief glance at the data to assure her that feeding the strays wasn’t going to be a problem. The planet of Zanshaa, in accordance with the dictates of the Praxis, was self-sufficient in basic foodstuffs.

But it wasn’t self-sufficient in
all
foodstuffs. There were climactic and soil conditions, as well as economies of scale, that made Zanshaa less efficient at producing certain crops, and turned it into an importer of some and an exporter of others. Zanshaa’s old, stable, relatively flat continents produced ideal grazing for herd animals, and Zanshaa exported beef, portschen, fristigo, lamb, and dairy products. But its tropical areas lacked certain nutrients in the soil, and this made it a net importer of other foodstuffs.

High-quality cocoa came only from off-planet. So did coffee.

So did tobacco.

Shit in a bucket, Sula thought.
Tobacco.

Sula loathed tobacco, but a determined minority of the human race and even some Torminel and Daimong were devoted to it. Sula remembered from school that there had once been health problems associated with the weed, but medicine had solved those, and now tobacco was merely another minor air pollutant. The Shaa had disapproved of tobacco, just as they’d disapproved of alcohol or betel nut or hashish, but they’d never actually banned any of these substances, just made certain that the products were regulated and taxed and turned to the profit of the government.

She dived into a frenzy of research on commodities pricing, interrupted only when a courier came with her orders. She’d been accepted, with remarkable speed, into the still uncertain duty for which she’d volunteered, and was ordered to report in two days to the Villa Fosca, an establishment near Edernay a couple hours from Zanshaa City by train.

On her noon break Sula raced to her bank. Her previous advisor, Mr. Weckman, had left, gone off to Hy-Oso, and his replacement directed her toward the commodities desk. The prices for off-world cocoa, coffee, and tobacco had risen slightly, but the markets didn’t know that the ring was going to be destroyed and that nothing would be coming cheaply from orbit for years. Sula considered futures contracts, but realized that when the Naxids came, it might be difficult for someone on their Shoot on Sight list to collect on her speculation, and decided it would be better to have the actual products under her control. With a certain amount of amazement at her own daring, she used half her fortune to purchase goods that were still in orbit, on the ring.

Once back at her desk at the Logistics Consolidation Executive, Sula issued orders for those very same cargoes to be sent down the skyhook in the next few days, and to be sent to warehouses in Zanshaa Lower Town.

Having accomplished this, she sat back at her desk with an unfamiliar sense of wonder and pride. She felt more than just a profiteer.

She felt like a Peer.

On her last day in Zanshaa she returned to the High City and the La-gaa and Spacey Auction House. The
Ju-yao
pot was still for sale, nobody having offered the minimum bid of twenty thousand at the auction.

“I’ll give the owner fourteen for it,” Sula told the polite young Terran who greeted her. “But I’m shipping out and I’ve got to have it today.”

Either the woman’s shock was genuine or she was a good actress. “But my lady,” she said, “it’s worth—”

“Fourteen, today,” Sula said. “Less, tomorrow.”

The woman blinked. “I’ll have to contact the owner.”

“By all means.”

Fourteen thousand would clean out Sula’s bank account, but she suspected that her bank account wouldn’t do her much good under a Naxid regime anyway.

The saleswoman returned from her call with a calculating look in her eye. “He’ll want the money today,” she said.

“Right away, if he likes. But I want you to pack that pot in the most secure container you’ve got. I may have to put it through some gravitational stress.”

The woman nodded. “We can produce a foam package for you that will include a pressure-sensitive balloon to support the interior.”

“Very good.”

Sula held the vase for a moment before it was packed away, letting her eyes dwell on the subtle shades of the blue-green glaze while she brushed the crackle with her fingertips. Then, like a nursing mother reluctantly parting with her newborn, she allowed the vase to be taken away and packed.

The next day she reported to the Villa Fosca, a pink stucco palace set amid green rolling farmland, and while cities filled with refugees and her supplies of cocoa and tobacco were sent down the skyhook and began to appreciate in value, Sula was put through a course in communications, weapons, explosives, and hand-to-hand combat by engineers, military constabulary, and members of the Intelligence Section. The tenants of the villa were Terrans only, which implied that volunteers belonging to other species were being trained at other facilities.

Life in the villa was odd. In the mornings the trainees slogged through ditches and waist-high fields of rye in full body armor, afternoons were devoted to class work, and in the evening the enlisted went under tents while the officers wore full dress for supper and behaved as if they were at a summer resort. Almost all the officers were young—even their commander, Lieutenant Captain Hong, was under thirty—and that encouraged a lighthearted style. There was a lot of drink and music and horseplay around the pool, and at night, Sula suspected, a great deal of cohabitation. Sula, who at the formal suppers wore more impressive medals than anyone present, was treated with respect even as she declined offers of alcohol and sex. The others forgave her these eccentricities on the grounds that she was a hero and entitled to her crotchets.

Other officers were scandalized that she didn’t have a servant, and though she protested that she had organized her belongings exactly as she wanted them and that anyone else could only disturb her arrangements, they insisted on procuring an orderly from the ranks. Sula had never in her life interviewed a servant and was intimidated by the prospect, but the others had already organized themselves into an informal committee and carried out the interviews themselves, while Sula sat in their midst and nodded as if this were the sort of thing she did every day. Before long she had an orderly named Macnamara, a tall, curly-haired, clean-cheeked youth who had volunteered from the military constabulary. He was one of the stars of the personal combat courses, and Sula felt a growth in confidence knowing he’d be guarding her back.

Sula gathered that Martinez’s idea of defending Zanshaa with an actual army had been deemed impractical, but the government didn’t want to abandon the capital entirely. Sula was to be part of a stay-behind team intended to gather intelligence and to participate in sabotage and the assassination of traitors.

Near the end of their twenty-day course, the teams were inspected by Senior Captain Ahn-kin of the Intelligence Section, and Ahn-kin paused before Sula—braced at the salute, in immaculate full-dress uniform, with her combat gear laid out on the peristyle before her—and gave her a long stare.

“You are Lieutenant the Lady Sula, are you not?” Ahn-kin asked.

“Yes, my lord.”

Ahn-kin leaned forward intently. “Why are you here, my lady?”

Surprised, Sula stammered out something about wanting to defend the Praxis.

“That isn’t what I mean,” Ahn-kin said. “I meant that you should not be here at all. You are one of the most recognizable Terrans on this planet. How can you hide in an enemy-occupied city and expect not to be recognized?”

For a moment Sula could think of no reply that was not obscene. Her own stupidity, and the imbecility of those running this operation, had just been driven home with the simplest of questions.

Disgust stung her throat like the taste of bile.

We’re just playing soldier out here. For all the good we’re doing, we might as well be playing hopscotch.

“I’ll change my appearance, my lord,” she said finally.

“I hope you will,” Ahn-kin said severely.

The next day she went to a cosmetician in Edernay and had her hair bobbed severely, and dyed a deep jet-black. Recalling that her only civilian clothing consisted of a simple black party dress, she acquired a modest collection of civilian clothes, and wore some of these on her return to the villa. The consensus of opinion was that her pale complexion, contrasting with the black hair, made her even more striking than before.

“But do I look like
me
?” she demanded.

There was a collective hesitation. “Perhaps you could do something with the eyes.”

Cosmetic contact lenses were easy enough to procure. And carotene supplements would darken her complexion, at least if she didn’t overdo them and turn bright orange. Sula made a note to procure a supply of these items.

After the twenty-two days of the course were run, the group was assembled by their commander, Lieutenant Captain Lord Octavius Hong. He was a young man with hair that had gone prematurely gray, and he projected the vigor and clean enjoyment of the sportsman. Clearly he had volunteered for the job because he thought it would be a way to leapfrog over the heads of the many elcaps senior to him, a fast route to promotion and distinction.

Hong stood on the veranda and addressed the trainees ranked on the lawn below. He spoke quickly, incisively, and without notes, while making vigorous gestures with his black-gloved hands. Sula had to admit that whoever had taught Hong rhetoric and public speaking had done a good job.