The Sundering (47 page)

After Michi’s message was sent to Ring Command, there was a sudden cold silence in the Flag Officer Station.

“…Failure to obey orders will mean the destruction of the ring…”

The remembered words burned through Martinez’s mind like fire.

The threat had been made. But a threat meant nothing unless there was the will to carry it out.

“Captain Martinez,” Michi said in a new, cold, inflectionless tone, “please plan an attack on the Bai-do ring.”

“Very good, my lady.”

The plan had been made ages ago when Chenforce was still circling Seizho’s sun, and Martinez needed only to update the tactical situation before presenting it to the squadron commander. Michi glanced at her tactical display only briefly. There was a new hardness in the set of her mouth.

“Convey the plan to the squadron, captain,” she said. “Prepare to execute on my command.”

“At once, my lady.” He could not make himself reply with the words, “very good.”

Martinez passed orders to each ship in the squadron. Michi leaned her head back on her couch support and closed her eyes. “The bastards are testing us,” she said in a nearly inaudible voice. “After Koel, the Naxid command has had time to issue orders to the Bai-do ring, and to others as well. They want to find out if we’ll actually carry out our threats.”

“After we destroyed the Zanshaa ring,” Martinez said, “why would they think we’d stick at Bai-do?”

Michi had no answer. Martinez, a sickness chewing at his belly, watched his display, saw the pinnaces standing on tails of flame in mad frenzies of acceleration as they tried to escape the fate that pursued them.

The heavy acceleration was a mercy in a way, because the pilots were almost certainly unconscious when the missiles found them.

Martinez looked for a long, terrible moment at the silent expanding plasma spheres at his display, and then raised his eyes to Michi. There was black anger in her eyes, as well as a horror at the order she was about to give.

“Captain Martinez,” she said. “Destroy the Bai-do ring.”

Martinez found that his lips formed an answer. “Yes, my lady.” He touched the transmit pad and gave the orders.

Missiles lanced out from the squadron. The ring was a big target and so the salvo did not need to be large. There were laser defenses on the station, not intended so much for military purposes as for destroying meteors or small out-of-control spacecraft that might threaten the ring, but these were not capable of coordinating the same sort of defense as a squadron flying in formation, and the ring’s destruction was assured.

Martinez was surprised to see more missile flares from the target, a salvo of a dozen aimed at the squadron. Another dozen followed a few minutes later, and then a third. All were destroyed en route, and he received a message of explanation from Lieutenant Kazakov, who had been analyzing the data sent by the pinnaces before they were destroyed.

“There are partly completed warships on the ring, lord captain,” she told him. “Three heavy cruisers and three frigates or light cruisers. Apparently one of the big cruisers has got a working missile battery.”

The Naxids were going to let the Bai-do ring die in order to defend half a squadron of half-built warships that were lost anyway. Martinez clenched his teeth in frustration and anger.

The enemy frigate fired several more salvos before the end. None of the Naxid missiles proved a threat to Chenforce, and all were destroyed without undue effort. Two-thirds of the loyalists’ missiles were also destroyed, but the plan allowed for that.

Illustrious
was at its closest approach to Bai-do, three light-seconds, when the first missile impacted the ring. There were several more strikes after that, and each vaporized a section of the bright wheel that circled the planet.

A thing as huge as a planetary ring takes a long time to die. The upper level was still moving much faster than the lower, geostationary level, and each upper fragment separated from the lower ring and shot off on its own trajectory, each a curved airless sickle filled with corpses, brilliant in the sun, carried by its greater momentum into a higher orbit.

More horrifying, however, was the larger piece of the ring on the far side of the planet from Chenforce. This piece, nearly half of the ring, was still intact, and its upper ring never had time to completely separate from its lower before the whole mass began to oscillate and fall into the atmosphere. The cables were designed to burn up on reentry, but Bai-do was not so lucky as far as the rest of the structure was concerned. The upper ring contained hundreds of millions of tons of asteroid and lunar material used as radiation shielding. When the colossal structure broke up on contact with the atmosphere, all its great mass came raining down on Bai-do’s blue and green equator.

Martinez watched as Bai-do’s land mass flared from the impacts, as great shimmering golden waves rose from impact sites on the blue ocean. Smoke and dust and water vapor rose high into the atmosphere. Here and there were the distinctive sparkle of antimatter. Enough dust might be blasted into the upper atmosphere to shroud the planet in cold and darkness for years. There would be massive crop failure, and with the ring gone there would be no way to import food.

The ones who died now might well be the lucky ones.

“How many people are living down there?” The question, half-whispered, came from Lady Ida Lee.

Four point six billion
. Martinez happened to know. He’d absorbed the fact when he’d planned the raid. And the population of the ring itself was in the tens of millions.

“Tell the crew to secure from action stations,” Michi said. She looked ten years older.

Martinez locked his displays above his head and rose from his couch. The scent of sour sweat and adrenaline rose from his suit. He felt older than Michi looked.

As he followed his commander from the room he felt a spasm of dread.

How many more times are we going to have to do this?

Sula took the train back to Riverside, carrying a bundle of clothing from the Grandview apartment, where she had emptied her closet and made certain other arrangements as well. She found Spence drowsing with the med injector in her hand. The video wall was repeating the same announcement over and over, and the announcer was a Naxid.

Lady Kushdai, the new governor, had taken up residence in the High City, and Zanshaa would now begin a new reign of peace and prosperity under the Committee to Save the Praxis. A group of anarchists and saboteurs had made an unsuccessful attack on the government’s forces that morning, but all had been killed or captured. Many civilian casualties had occurred as a result of the attackers’ vicious and unreasoned assault.

The next news item was a shock: five hundred and five hostages had been taken, a hundred and one from each species under the Naxid administration, any or all of whom might suffer death if incidents of anarchy and sabotage did not cease.

Sula stared at the video in thoughtful surprise.
Five hundred and five.
And from five species, when only Terrans had been involved in the ambush.

Peace. Prosperity. Hostages.
She wondered if the Naxids realized the message they were sending.

The news hummed in her thoughts as Sula went out onto the street to purchase food from vendors. The people had got the news before she had, and they were furious. Everyone seemed to know that the hostages had been pulled in off the street, at random, and that none of them were anarchists or saboteurs.

The Naxids were not making friends.

For the next three days Macnamara arrived every morning after his rounds to report that no messages were found at either the primary or backup locations. Sula burned off nervous energy by tidying relentlessly and bathing frequently. She looked after Spence, watched the news, and spent a lot of time connected to the Records Office computer. She created new identities for everyone that she knew or suspected had survived the Axtattle Parkway ambush. She didn’t have their pictures, but used images taken from other IDs already in the system, images that resembled the people she had trained with.

A new administrator had been put in charge of the Records Office, someone fresh from Naxas. Everyone in the office, and the government generally, was made to swear allegiance to the Committee to Save the Praxis. Hotels and warehouses were requisitioned, including—as Sula had anticipated—the Great Destiny Hotel.

Contact was not made.

On the fourth morning Macnamara came with a message. “You didn’t pick it up yourself?” Sula asked, with a glance toward the window and the street below. If Macnamara had been followed…

“I did like you told me,” Macnamara said. “When I saw the signal that there was a message at the drop, I paid a vagrant to pick up the message for me. I told him to bring it to the far end of an alley so that I could see if he was followed, and then I performed a series of evasions on the two-wheeler before returning here.”

“Did you see anyone at all?” Sula, nerves humming, still couldn’t resist a glance into the street.

“No. No one.”

Artemus has a new posting.
The message was printed on the inexpensive thin plastic used for newssheets and other disposable forms of communication, and called for a meeting with Hong at the Grandview apartment the following morning at 11:01.

Hong had never called for a meeting at Sula’s apartment before—he had always preferred a meeting in a public place, usually outside a café, where it might be possible to spot any observers.

Sula touched the plastic sheet to her upper lip. It was perhaps unreasonable to think so, but neither the plastic nor the message smelled like Hong.

She gave Macnamara instructions concerning which piece of equipment he’d need for the next day. Sula’s own preparations had been made when she’d last visited the Grandview apartment. She left Riverside and took a taxi past Greyjean’s window, where the rectangle of white newssheet stood plain to see, confirming Sula’s suspicions that the Naxids had been to visit.

The next morning Spence remained in the Riverside apartment on the theory that a limping engineer would only make the team more conspicuous. Sula and Macnamara took cabs past the Grandview apartment separately on their way to a meeting three streets away. The white newssheet was still in the window. There were some large unmarked vehicles that looked innocent enough, but which might contain police.

Certainly Lord Octavius Hong was not observed lurking on a street corner, or arguing with the concierge.

Sula and Macnamara met at precisely 11:01, then walked toward the Grandview apartment on opposite sides of the street. They could see no light through the apartment windows, and no squads of Naxids in yellow-and-black uniforms lurked in alleyways.

Once the apartment was in sight, both hesitated. Sudden doubt swam in Sula’s mind. Her heart throbbed in her chest. She could be misjudging the whole situation.

A sonic boom rattled windows, and Sula almost jumped out of her skin. But the sound had clarified the situation somehow, and she raised a hand to her head and deliberately combed her fingers through her short, black-dyed hair.

Across the street, Macnamara pressed the switch on the detonator in his jacket pocket.

In the Grandview apartment, the explosive that Macnamara’s carpentry had concealed in the furniture went off, blasting ahead of it a storm of steel ball bearings and roofing nails. To minimize casualties in nearby apartments the explosive force had been deliberately directed in a swath from the interior of each room toward the outer wall. The windows blew out in a red blaze of heat and horror, and Sula heard screams as debris rained onto the street below.

Ramps slammed down from two large gray vehicles nearby, and Naxid police charged out, racing for the apartment where flames were now lapping from the windows.

“Ah. Hah,” Sula said.

She turned and walked away. Her feet seemed to sink deep into the pavement, as if it were made of soft rubber.

Hong had been captured, then, in the wake of the Axtattle fiasco, and had been forced or persuaded to give up the procedures by which he contacted his teams. Others teams besides Sula’s would be betrayed. She had to assume that she and her team were now the only members of Action Group Blanche now at large.

She and her team were alone in the city, inhabiting false identities, without allies, few resources, and with no way to contact her superiors.

Caroline, Lady Sula, had limited resources to cope with this situation. What was needed was another person, with a different set of skills.

It’s
my
war now, Gredel thought, and kept walking.

WALTER JON WILLIAMS is a
New York Times
-bestselling author who has been nominated repeatedly for every major SF award, including Hugo and Nebula award nominations for his novel
City on Fire
. His most recent books are
The Praxis, Destiny’s Way
, and
The Rift
. Mr. Williams lives near Albuquerque, New Mexico, with his wife, Kathleen Hedges.

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