Especially as the Torminel were a nocturnal species. Terrans would very much stand out in their neighborhoods, both at night when the Torminel were active or in the day when they weren’t.
Sula gave it some thought. “Maybe it’s better if wedon’t contact them,” she said. “They’ve got all the supplies they need to conduct a war right where they are. So do we. If we’re not in touch, we can’t give each other away.”
Macnamara nodded. “So we’re going to keep on fighting then,” he said.
The option to quit had always been there. To stay where they were and do nothing, to wait for the war to end one way or another. No one would blame them, not once their superiors had died.
“Oh yes.” Sula could feel the tension twitching in her jaw muscles. “We’re still at war. And I know just where we’re going to start.”
“Yes?”
“With Lord Makish of the High Court,” Sula said. “The Naxid judge who sentenced our friends to death.”
An expression of satisfaction settled onto Macnamara’s face. “Very well, my lady,” he said.
High Judge Makish lived in the Makish Palace in the High City, and for anyone who wasn’t a mountaineer, there were only two ways onto Zanshaa’s granite acropolis: a funicular railway for pedestrians, and a switchback road for vehicles. Since the seat of the entire government was in the High City, in the midst of a hostile population, Sula supposed the Naxids would be very careful about who got onto the acropolis and who didn’t.
After buying Spence supper from Riverside vendors, Macnamara and Sula went to the lower terminus of the funicular railway at suppertime, when many of the High City’s servants and workers would be returning to the Lower Town. The usual vendors and street performers had been cleared from the broad apron in front of the terminus, and Sula saw Naxid guards on the roof of the Central Station across the street, but otherwise civilian traffic seemed normal, and the line of buses and cabs on the street was reassuring, though fewer than usual.
“See if you can talk to someone at the bus stop,” Sula told Macnamara. “I’ll go inside the terminal.”
“Are you sure?”
Macnamara’s attempts to protect her from danger were endearing in their way, but in the end annoying. Sula said she was sure and walked across the highway.
In the funicular terminus she stood on the far side of the polished onyx rail and tried to act as if she were waiting for someone. Access to the funicular was controlled, she saw, by a squad of Naxids, all carrying rifles and wearing armor over their centauroid, black-beaded bodies. A petty officer with a hand terminal checked some manner of list as his subordinates checked the identification of anyone trying to board.
Only a squad,she thought, but she knew more Naxids were on hand: they had requisitioned a number of hotels and apartments in this vicinity, and these were probably packed with troops.
Nearly half the departing passengers were Naxids, scuttling over the polished floors and dodging between the other commuters. Many wore the brown uniform of the civil service. Apparently, employment prospects had improved for their species.
Sula pretended she’d seen the person she’d come to meet, then joined a complete stranger for the walk to the outside. She found Macnamara waiting for her.
“Right now the Naxids are working off a list of everyone who lives in the High City,” he said. “Workers have to provide documentation from their employers that they’re needed. But the rumor is that special identification will be required soon.”
Sula gave the matter some thought. “That’s good,” she said. “A letter would have to come from areal employer, one already on the list—and they might check. It’ll be easier to get the special badges.”
She had ways of getting false documents out of the Records Office.
Her mind was already abuzz with plans.
That night she checked into the Records Office and found that Lieutenant Rashtag’s word for the day was“Observance!” The newly appointed head of Records Office security was fond of bombastic bulletins, and they always included the single-word exclamation intended to inspire the security staff.
Sula saw that the next day’s bulletin was already on file, and that its inspirational word was“Compliance!” For a moment she was tempted to alter it to“Subversion!” but decided to save that for another day, the day when the loyalist ships appeared above Zanshaa and the Naxid domination was at an end.
She wondered what single-word exclamation Rashtag would utter if he knew that she had free run of the Records Office computers, and with Rashtag’s own passwords. With a combination of luck, carelessness on the part of the previous administration, and one long night of caffeine-fueled programming, Sula had gained mastery of the Records Office system before the Naxids had even arrived. Any password created by the head of security was sent to her automatically, so even if she were detected and the passwords changed, she’d still have complete command of the place.
She was now able to access, alter, or create any personnel record. Birth and death certificates, marriage and divorce decrees, records of education, residence, and employment, primary and special identification…
Identification.Proper credentials were the key to survival in a world occupied by the enemy, and the key was in her hand. For a person’s identification card provided more than just a picture and a serial number. The identification card in Sula’s pocket held medical, employment, clan, and credit history, and tax records. It was used as a driver’s license for anyone with the proper qualifications. It could be used in bank transfers, could carry cash in electronic form, was used for travel on trains and buses.
Incidentally, it was also used as a library card. Even before the Naxid rebellion, the Shaa Empire had always been interested in the sorts of books and videos that people checked out of or downloaded from the library.
The official IDs weren’t foolproof, and there were always forgeries. But it was always possible for the forger to make a mistake, and by far the best and most foolproof of false identity cards were those issued by the government.
Those issued by the Records Office.
Sula had used her command of the Records Office computer to issue her team multiple IDs. At present she carried the identity card of Lucy Daubrac, an unemployed math teacher evacuated from Zanshaa’s ring before its demolition. Macnamara and Spence were Matthew Guerin and Stacy Hakim, a married couple, also from the ring. Being from the ring explained why they were new in the neighborhood.
Sula checked to see if a High City identity badge had been designed, but found that if it had, it wasn’t as yet in the computer.
As long as she was in the computer, she downloaded every file they had on High Judge Makish and his family. He’d had a lackluster career at the bar, apparently, but his status as a Peer of the highest class had eventually got him a judgeship in one of the lower courts. The arrival of the Naxid rebels had resulted in his promotion to the High Court, where his sentencing of the two-hundred-odd loyalists to torture and death had been his first official act.
She pictured Makish lying in his blood on the Boulevard of the Praxis in the High City. She could feel the weight of the gun in her hand.
But who would ever know?she wondered. The Naxids were censoring the news. If she were to shoot Lord Makish, no one would know but a few witnesses. And even if word leaked out, the Naxids could claim that it was an accident, or an unlikely street crime, or hadn’t happened at all…there was no way to tell the population that this was a military act, an action by an officer of the Fleet against a traitor and killer.
Sula could feel the energy draining from her at this thought. The reason for the creation of the secret government and its military arm was to let the civilian population know that the war hadn’t ended with the fall of the capital, that the legitimate government, the Convocation, and its Fleet were still active, would return, and would punish the rebels and those who aided them.
The secret government had distributed its own clandestine newspaper,The Loyalist, sheaves of which Sula and her group had humped up and down the streets of the Lower Town, leaving copies in restaurants, bars, and doorways. Even that primitive form of communication was gone now.
Sula turned as Spence came out of their bedroom, limping only slightly on her wounded leg. She had been shot through the calf during Hong’s ill-advised fight on the Axtattle Parkway, and was lucky—no arteries hit, no infection. The swelling had finally receded, and most of what was left was stiffness. Sula had prescribed Spence a regular routine of stretching exercises, and of walking back and forth in the apartment to keep the wound from stiffening.
She hadn’t let Spence leave the apartment, even though she could have walked through the neighborhood with only a minimum of discomfort. Sula didn’t want Spence seen outside until she could walk normally. A limp attracted attention, struck the eye as awrongness. In fact, she didn’t want anyone on her team to attract attention, not when the situation was so unsettled, not when the attention might come from the Urban Patrol or from an informer.
Why is the stranger limping?That was a question Sulanever wanted her neighbors to ask each other, not when the news broadcasts were full of the Naxid triumph in a pitched battle on the Axtattle Parkway, and even an ordinary person might think of flying bullets and wounds.
She knew that it was perhaps irrational to take these precautions, but she had survived the Naxid occupation so far by taking precautions that others had thought irrational.
“How’s the leg?” Sula asked Spence.
“Better, my la—Lucy.” She made a turn about the room and gave a wistful look at the street beyond the window. “Pity I can’t leave, on a lovely day like this.”
“Work on your walking and your stretching, and you will,” Sula said.
Human warmth is not my specialty,she thought.
“Didn’t you like your squid?”
Sula looked in surprise at her supper, bits of squid grilled on a skewer, which had sat untouched by her elbow for the last hour.
“I forgot to eat,” she said.