Once the Naxid officials had been located, Sula sent out units to take them prisoner and add them to the growing collection of enemies in the courtyard of the Convocation. A few escaped capture, but when confronted, none resisted.
Far-eyn also managed to locate the official who had been ordering the suicidal assaults up the funicular. He was the assistant commander general of the police, and he was holed up in the Imperial Hotel.
“Let’s not cut his communications,” Sula said. “Ilike the orders he’s giving.”
Macnamara returned to report that he’d succeeded in swapping out the remaining antimatter guns. Two were now mounted on trucks, to use as a reserve, and two were emplaced in palaces overlooking the funicular and the Gates of the Exalted.
“I’ve hidden them well, my lady,” he reported. “The Naxids shouldn’t be able to see them the way they can spot the turrets.”
Which didn’t mean they couldn’t be destroyed, just that the Naxids would have to go to greater effort.
“Is the coleopter still scouting us?” Sula asked.
“It flew away.”
“If it comes back, try to knock it down with the antimatter guns.”
“My lady!” One of the staff, a young Torminel with sharp, fierce fangs, looked up from the comm display in the room’s large table. “It’s the Commandery! They say the Naxid fleet has begun to accelerate!”
The Naxids, Sula found, were piling on the gees, heading for Zanshaa at a bruising speed. Since they didn’t need to change velocity in order to fire missiles at Zanshaa, Sula suspected they were in fact fleeing the system.
“That’s what we’ll tell the world, anyway,” she decided.
The announcement was duly made on every video and audio network. Sula wondered how many of the announcements were getting through to the outside world, how many relays the Naxids had succeeded in shutting down. It might be that only the city of Zanshaa was receiving the broadcasts by now.
She didn’t sleep that night, instead making inspections of her units and shuffling reserves around. A good thing, she thought. Any sleep would be filled with Casimir and Caro and blood.
Lord Tork’s reply to her greeting arrived two hours before dawn, and Sula considered the Supreme Commander’s terse order to execute her prisoners. The hostages were her only guarantee of good Naxid behavior—not that it seemed to be working—and she’d hoped to interrogate them, a task for which up till now she had no time, and for that matter no interrogators but her own amateur army.
“Right,” she said. “Pick three minor functionaries out of that pack and chuck them off the rock at first light. Make sure it gets video coverage. We’ll point out on the broadcast that if the Naxids are naughty, more members of their government are going to get a chance to find out whether or not they can fly.”
First light, however, provided other distractions. The Naxids had been planning another major attack up the funicular, the plans for which were overheard by Far-eyn in the Office of the Censor; and this attack was supposed to be preceded by an attack by the “air element.” Sula alerted her reserves and moved the two mobile antimatter guns to cover the funicular.
The air element arrived first, cargo craft with machine guns mounted in the cargo doors. These made slow passes over the south cliff of the acropolis, the guns hammering the area around the funicular. After a number of misses, antimatter guns shot down two of the craft and the rest withdrew.
The attack itself was the usual bloody failure.
After the firing died away, Sula summoned a camera crew and walked to the Convocation, where two Naxid convocates and a captain of the Naxid fleet, previously chosen by Macnamara, were bound and thrown over the terrace to shatter on the stones below.
“Executions will continue as long as the rebels refuse to honor the instrument of surrender signed by Lady Kushdai,” Sula told the camera, and then dismissed the camera crew and took a walk along the terrace. The metal furniture was adapted to the Naxid physique, and the umbrellas were bright against the gray stone of the Great Refuge. The air was crisp and cool, and the sky had turned its usual deep green. Most of the columns of smoke that had been rising from the city the previous afternoon were gone. The city was very still.
Sula put a hand on the smooth, cool surface of the granite terrace wall and looked out over the rooftops. The streets between the buildings were deep, shadowed canyons, and as far as she could see, were absolutely empty. People were keeping their heads down, or watching their video walls for the latest bulletin, or both.
If there were Naxids keeping watch on this part of the cliff, they were hidden.
She knew they had to be down there somewhere. Naxid police were probably arriving by the thousand at the train stations, and sooner or later they were going to think of something more imaginative to do than charge up the funicular.
She considered this and decided that it probably didn’t matter. Her forces and reserves were sufficient to contain any threat to her perimeter. All she had to do was hold out long enough for the Naxid fleet to flee the system, and she suspected the High City contained enough food to keep the army eating for that length of time.
She would have liked to stay on the terrace awhile, perhaps with a sweetened, syrupy tea and a cream-filled brioche, but the Convocation’s food service seemed to have been disrupted. She returned to the Ministry of Wisdom and was told that she’d just had a call from the Commissioner of Kaidabal, who wanted to negotiate his surrender.
“He said that the rebels appointed him to the position against his will,” Macnamara said. “He said he’s a loyal subject of the empire.”
“What did you tell him?” Sula asked.
“We said you’d call him back.”
“Ah. Hah,” she said, and felt a slow smile break out on her face.
She’d won.
THIRTY
Sula had thought fighting a war was hard. She discovered that running a planet was harder.
Worse, she had to be Lady Sula all the time. As Gredel, she’d been able to follow her own instincts, to fall into old patterns. Caroline Sula’s skin was more difficult to inhabit. It was artificial rather than natural, a personality she had deliberately created, an artifice she had to carefully assemble every day.
She wore Lady’s Sula’s uniform. She kept the High City accent on her lips and held her spine straight and military, and she kept her head rigidly erect and looked levelly at others from beneath the brim of her uniform cap.
Lady Sula wasborn to run planets. She kept telling herself that.
She called as many old civil servants to the colors as she could, to staff the ministries and keep services running. Naxid security forces were disarmed and either sent to the barracks or to their homes, if they had any. Naxid police were permitted to patrol their own neighborhoods, though without firearms. The Naxids in the Imperial Hotel surrendered, and about a third were arrested and the rest told to find lodging off the High City and report their whereabouts to the local police.
An advisory council was formed, with people from the ministries, with Macnamara and Spence as representatives of the secret army, and with Julien and Sergius Bakshi to add a dose of grim realism.
She ordered no more arrests, except for a few of the more spectacularly brutal officers of the security services. She wasn’t surprised to hear that most of them didn’t survive the trip to the jails.
Nor was she surprised to hear of a spasm of revenge killings as people settled old scores. She ordered the members of the secret army to have nothing to do with it, but had her doubts about whether the orders were obeyed.