“Thank you, Gareth.” She rested her hip on the desk and leaned across to kiss his cheek. Her scent flared in his senses. He stood, and dropped her hand.
“That won’t be necessary, Lieutenant,” he said.
She looked at him for a moment out of her long eyes, and her look hardened. She straightened. “As you wish, Captain,” she said, her pointed chin held high. “With the captain’s permission?”
“You are dismissed,” Martinez said. His mouth was dry.
She went to the door and slid it open. “I meant what I said,” she said, “about being your friend.”
Then she was gone, leaving the door open behind her. Lord Shane Coen, Michi’s red-haired signals lieutenant, walked past and cast a curious glance into the room.
Martinez nodded at him in what he hoped was a brisk, military fashion, then sat down at the desk again and hypertourney.
It was a while before he could get his mind on the game.
WHO KILLED THE HOSTAGES?
The Naxids would have you believe that the deaths of over five hundred hostages are an inevitable result of actions by loyalist forces. But who rounded them up? Who ordered them shot? Who fired their weapons? Whose bullets struck them down?
The agents of an illegitimate government!
Sula paused with her stylus poised over her desk. Frustration pounded in her temples. She had the sense that her proper argument was evading her.
Worse, she could imagine Naxid counterarguments. It wasn’t as if the legitimate government, as embodied by the Shaa who founded the empire, had hesitated to take hostages. The Shaa had held entireplanets hostage. And furthermore they hadn’t hesitated to act: cities had been bombarded with antimatter weapons, and on one occasion an entire planet was wiped out in retaliation for the conspiracy of only a few people. The only legitimacy the empire had ever known was the threat of massive force.
Nor was the present war any different. Planets surrendered to one side or the other under fear of bombardment and destruction. Martinez had told her that the entire Hone Reach had almost gone over to the enemy out of sheer terror, without a shot fired, and that only the arrival of Faqforce—with their own missiles and promised destruction—prevented the defection.
Five hundred hostages were insignificant against such a history, let alone against the casualties of the war so far.
Sula continued her essay. She pointed out that the Naxids killed hostages because they couldn’t locate their enemies, whereas the secret government had gone after specific targets and killed them. She promised more and greater retribution to come.
She went over her text again, making small changes, and wished she were better at debate. Her verbal gifts, as both she and others had cause to regret, were more in the direction of sarcasm, and sarcasm seemed inappropriate as a tribute to five hundred butchered citizens.
The sad fact was that the Makish assassination might be Team 491’s last operation. The secret government and its operatives amounted only to three people, and if they kept risking themselves, they would be caught.
She knew that Team 491 had to recruit other operatives, which meant trusting other people, some of whom by their nature would be untrustworthy. Others would be captured and give up everything they knew under torture.
It might make more sense to cease all activity and wait for the Fleet to drive the Naxids away.
But Sula didn’t want to quit. Even as she looked at the piece of propaganda designed to take advantage of the deaths of the hostages, her blood simmered with anger against the Naxid executioners.
She rose from her desk and ordered the video wall to switch on and turn to the channel reserved for punishments. It took a long time to kill five hundred people, and the executions were still ongoing. The Torminel, Terrans, Cree, Daimong, and Lai-own were herded against the blank wall of a prison, followed by the long hammering volleys of automatic weapons, the spray of blood, the fall of bodies.
The executioners were clear in the video: the grimfaced, helmeted figures behind the tripod-mounted machine guns; the others, in their lawn-green uniforms so much brighter than the somber green of the Fleet, herding the captives with stun batons and placing them against the wall; and before them all, the thin-faced officer who gave the order to fire, a man with the consciousness of high duty blazing from his eyes.
All the executioners were Terran. The Naxids hadn’t even had to do their own dirty work; they’d found others more than happy to do the job for them.
The executioners were nervous or blank-faced or merely dutiful, but the officer seemed different. His eyes glittered and his voice was pitched high, with odd hysterical overtones. Sula realized he was in a state of exaltation. This was his defining moment, the chance to commit slaughter in front of a planetwide audience. His eyes betrayed him by occasionally flicking to the camera, as if he was assuring himself that his time of glory was not yet over.
After the machine guns rattled, the officer walked slowly amid the bodies, finishing off the survivors with his pistol. His chest was inflated as he walked, a self-important spectacle, conscious of his starring role.
Pervert,Sula thought. The things people would do to get on video.
The door opened and Spence entered just as the machine guns fired again. She winced and passed through the room with her eyes turned away from the video.
“You’ve heard about the hostages?” Sula said.
“Yes. It’s everywhere.”
“Any trouble getting down from the High City?”
“No.” She stiffened as the officer shouted out commands to throw the bodies on a truck. Her mouth tightened in a line. “We’re going to get that bastard, aren’t we, my lady?”
“Yes,” Sula said, her mind made up at that moment.
Fuck caution.
A wild sensation of liberation began to sing in her heart. In a lifetime full of risks, this would be the most insane thing she’d ever done.
She didn’t know the officer’s name or where the executions were taking place. All she knew was that it had to be a prison on the planet of Zanshaa. She focused on the video, watched it intently, and was eventually rewarded with a glimpse, over the prison wall, of the baroque ornamentation of the Apszipar Tower, which would place the action somewhere in the southwest quadrant of Zanshaa City.
The Records Office computer had the maps that showed the only prison in that part of town, a place called the Blue Hatches, and also a list of personnel assigned to that prison.
The officer in charge was a Major Commandant Laurajean, and the picture appended to his ID showed that he was the thin-faced officer who, even now, was grinning his intense joy as a crowd of Torminel were killed on his orders. Laurajean, who was forty-six years old, had been married for the last eighteen to a plump, pleasant-looking wife, an elementary school teacher, with whom he’d had three children and lived a middle-class life in a middle-class part of the Lower Town.
Some people, Sula thought, just needed killing.
Macnamara entered as Sula—having looked up Laurajean’s address—was calling up the plans of the building, just in case she needed them. He dropped his bag of cheap iarogüt on her desk and looked over her shoulder at the three-dimensional image of Laurajean rotating in a corner of the display, next to the architects’ schematics.
“He’s our next?” Macnamara asked.
“Yes.”
His answer was to the point. “Good.” He picked up the bottles and walked to the kitchen.
Does the Major Commandant take public transport home?Sula wondered.Or does he have an auto? Waiting at his local tram stop and shooting him as he stepped off would be a prosaic but efficient way to accomplish his demise.