Conventions of War Read Free

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