Ally

  “Where are Lindsay and Dr. Rayat now?” Deborah asked. Shan flinched: it was an inevitable question but the timing felt like telepathy. “We do still pray for them.”

  “Lin has…changed a lot. And living with the bezeri, we assume. Rayat turned himself in. Wasn’t cut out for being a valued member of squid society.”

  “What are you going to do about him?”

  Shan wished she knew. He should have been fragmented into hamburger by now. She’d never had problems about killing in the past, not like normal coppers, and she was sure she didn’t have any now, not when she could still taste the pulsing rage rising in her throat when she’d set about kicking the shit out of Rayat on a cell floor. She’d have killed him then, all right, shit yes. Something had diverted her. Something had dulled both her motive and her anger.

  It was always about justice.

  “He says he now believes c’naatat has to be kept out of human hands,” she said. “But as he’s a pathological frigging liar, who knows? Esganikan’s left him with Shapakti to play with. I hope he shoves a few probes up his arse while I’m away.”

  Deborah looked down at her feet for a second, and Shan remembered she’d never sworn in front of the Garrods. “Apart from your views on deception, you’re more alike than you think.”

  Perhaps I’m hoping Shapakti really will do some useful research on removing c’naatat.

  “He’s certainly persistent,” said Shan.

  “He believes he’s serving his state.”

  So he ended up nearly exterminating a genocidal race. If I was Deborah, I’d see a bit of divine intervention there, too.

  “Everyone in a war does,” said Shan. “Still doesn’t mean there aren’t two sides of the story.”

  If Deborah said forgiveness next, Shan resolved to swing for her, even if the woman was half her weight and a lot shorter. That was fine for her. She could tell herself any lies she wanted about days of reckoning and turning cheeks and all that shit, but Shan looked at the here and now, and at Aras. At that moment, he erased everything around her: he held his head tilted slightly on one side in that wess’har gesture of curiosity, dark braid coiled into his collar, so alien and lonely and guileless that she wanted to forget the bloody colonists and the Umeh crew and, yes, even the gene bank, and protect him—ferociously, totally, without reservation. It was a powerful and ambushing emotion. It was as strong as anger. Nothing had ever trumped her rage before.

  I forgot you. I forgot who you were. I forgot you were the last thought I had as I died.

  But she wasn’t dead, and Aras had his own anguish. She walked the few meters to the crop tunnel and slipped her arm through his, pulling him away as discreetly as she could. He looked puzzled, head tilting further, but followed her.

  “’Bye, Deborah,” Shan said. “I’ll be in touch, but expect the evacuees any time.”

  “Can I ask for a favor?” That was unusual for Deborah. “Is there any chance of an ITX link? I’d like to make contact with the churches back home.”

  Normally Shan would have automatically heard the ringing of unspecific alarms, but Esganikan was right: it made no difference now what humans said to Earth.

  “Certainly.” I’m going soft. “Can’t promise you’ll get through the queue for the portal at the Earth end, but I’ll get you the kit.”

  “Giyadas would enjoy showing you how to use it,” said Aras. “The matriarch’s child.”

  Shan had promised her a visit to Mar’an’cas to see the gethes in their unnatural habitat. Good old Deborah: she’d keep the marines busy and amuse Giyadas. That was worth paying for with an ITX link.

  Deborah left them to walk back through the camp on their own, as if confident that none of the colonists they might run into would embarrass her by being overtly hostile. There were no baleful stares this time, and few people out and about to deliver them. The sound of running feet behind her made Shan spin around and her hand was already reaching down the back of her belt for her 9mm when she checked herself on seeing someone she recognized.

  “Shan!” A woman called Sabine Mesevy—Dr. Mesevy, botanist Mesevy, former payload Mesevy—came pounding up to her with a package in her hand. “Shan, wait.”

  Shan dropped her arms to her side, wondering why c’naatat didn’t override that reflex to draw a gun. “It’s been a long time, Doctor.”

  Mesevy, hair scraped back and pinned, rough brown working clothes showing signs of fraying, thrust the package in Shan’s direction. She’d found God back on Bezer’ej, a more likely location for a Pauline revelation than Reading Metro.

  “Here,” she said. “I never did it. I never thanked Ade for saving my life. This is for him. Pickles.”

  “I’m sure he’ll love that. Thanks.”

  “I’ll never forget him.”

  But she’d done a pretty good job at the time. Ade had ignored his own fear—fear enough to make him shit himself and throw up—to haul her out of bog with a sheven on the hunt. Maybe time spent in quiet prayer made you realize why you were still breathing and who you owed your life to.

  “It was quite a feat,” said Shan. It was the moment she found she wanted a modest, earnest, slightly awkward marine sergeant called Adrian Bennett, and was embarrassed by her own human weakness. “But those blokes free-fall from high orbit, so all in a day’s work, eh?”

  “Thank him for me.”

  “Will do.”

  Shan wasn’t managing gracious today. She could do it with a following wind but these days the impatient, tactless wess’har component of her was ganging up with her own lack of diplomacy to vent her frustration about things she couldn’t even name. She shoved the hemp-wrapped jar in her pocket and strode on towards the shore with Aras at her heels.

  He went to push the skimmer back into the water, offering no comment as she took out the jar and examined the carefully tied bow of efte twine.

  “I find Deborah’s attitude to you totally—unnatural,” she said at last.

  “Why?”

  “Because if anyone harmed you, I’d kill them. That’s all there is to it.” She stepped into the shallow draft vessel and settled down in the stern. Don’t upset the trim. “Just imagine faith that strong.”

  “Strong enough to take you twenty-five light-years from home without consciously knowing why?”

  Aras could never quite manage a human smile, but when he was amused or pleased it was obvious. He beamed, for want of a better word, radiating satisfaction for a moment. Maybe it was the relaxation in his facial muscles and some infrasonics she’d ceased to notice consciously. The skimmer moved astern at his touch and then came about to head out of the rocky cover and into open water.

  “I knew why I took a one-way ticket,” she said. “Suppressed Briefings are conscious, whatever people think. The drug stopped me recalling the information until I came across the right trigger, but it’s not like having no intellectual proof of something.”

  “Do you still resent Eugenie Perault for sending you on this mission under false pretenses?”

  “They were only false for her, sweetheart. I found the gene bank and it’s going home. Well, part is. I wouldn’t sleep well if we didn’t have a duplicate.”

  Aras paused. “I miss Josh.”

  He was suddenly back to his unsettled self of recent weeks. It hadn’t been a good idea to bring him here; and that didn’t bode well for a trip to Umeh. It was heartbreaking to hear him say it.

  “Don’t start beating yourself up,” said Shan. “Whatever we know now doesn’t change the fact that he played an active role in detonating nuclear devices. There’s no way I can color that innocent.”

  “My pain is that I’d do the same again even though I also regret it. And you?”

  “And me…what?”

  “Would you step out the airlock again?”

  It was the kind of grand gesture that beatified you and didn’t require an encore. She was conscious of the grenade in her jacket pocket. But the fact that she could finish herself off pro
perly gave her a whole new layer of moral dilemmas that almost no other human would ever experience.

  Her job was to keep it that way. It always would be.

  “It’s easier to do that than to shove someone else out into space.” She edged up to the bow and stood to put her arm around his waist. Sod the trim. The skimmer rocked briefly: they couldn’t drown, so it didn’t matter. “And that tells me that I care more about you than solving the c’naatat problem once and for all.”

  “The soil-dwelling c’naatat organisms survived the bombing, and now the bezeri are infected. Killing me and Ade would solve nothing.”

  “I was actually saying that I love you two and I’d rather take my own life than yours, uncharacteristically mushy as that might seem.”

  “I realize you find it hard to express emotions.”

  “I’m fine with anger and being pissed off.”

  “It was an act of kindness to allow the colony an ITX link, too.”

  She hadn’t asked Nevyan. She ought to, she knew. “No reason to refuse. I’m buying goodwill.”

  The colony’s homebound transmissions were no different from Eddie’s broadcasts, and she didn’t vet those any more. She hadn’t any idea of the full content that he filed to BBChan daily except that if it was controversial, he’d show her first.

  Eddie had always understood the catalytic nature of reporting, that it shaped and changed as much as it stood back and observed. In some ways, he had a harder job than she did. Her purpose was usually effortlessly clear. In a world of gray areas, she had always been able to find black and white, until she came to the Cavanagh system.

  “The colonists are harmless,” Aras said. “If all humans lived carefully because they were afraid of eternal damnation, then Earth would have no problems.”

  “You must have some God-bothering genes in you, sweetheart.”

  “God, real or not, drives many humans, so I take it into account.”

  Shan wondered if God drove Helen Marchant, whose family link to devout Eugenie Perault she didn’t know about until Eddie told her. Helen, whose arse she covered and whose terror operation she shielded because—copper or not—she thought it was moral.

  And I still do.

  Yes, maybe it was time she returned her message.

  And thank you for Helen.

  That bitch Perault hadn’t slipped that into her Suppressed Briefing. Shan always had the feeling that there was still more data to be triggered and unleashed, an itch at the back of her mind that she couldn’t scratch, but it was probably her wounded pride at being stiffed for once by a politician.

  “Bastard,” she said, and meant pretty well everyone.

  F’nar: Nevyan Tan Mestin’s home

  There was a fleet of new aliens in the system and nobody would ship Eddie Michallat out to see them.

  He was furious. He wasn’t sure why it aggravated him, because nobody else was going to get the story either: he was the only journalist in 150 trillion miles.

  He went in search of Shan or anyone he could cajole into taking him to see the Skavu. The insistent inner voice that told him that News Desk would rip him a new one if he didn’t get the story had suddenly emerged again, long after he’d been certain that he didn’t give a shit. What were they going to do, fire him?

  From this terrace level, he could see Ade and Qureshi heading towards the Exchange. They were prepping to evacuate Umeh Station: the Skavu would be deployed on Umeh. His journo logistics connected the dots and he set off after them. Where there were marines, there was the promise of transport.

  “Ade!” he called. “Ade! Hang on, mate!”

  F’nar’s acoustics made his voice echo around the bowl of the caldera. For some reason it embarrassed him, even though the wess’har were as unselfconscious about noise as they were about venting their unedited thoughts or copulating. Ade and Qureshi stopped dead and turned to look at him.

  Eddie took the narrow steps down the terraces a little faster than was sensible and stumbled, missing the next step and suddenly seeing a hundred-meter drop looming as he grabbed a pearl-coated post to stop his fall. His gut rolled. It was a bloody long way down, and wess’har didn’t have balustrades on the walkways.

  Qureshi cupped her hands in front of her mouth to shout back at him. “Take it one step at a time, Eddie…”

  “Ha fucking ha.”

  Ade looked unamused when Eddie caught up with them, his heart still hammering.

  “You don’t bounce like I do, Eddie. Remember that.”

  “Yeah, thanks, Mum.” Embarrassment was worse than injury and lasted longer. “Are you heading to Umeh?”

  “There’s some crap going on with Rit and Shomen Eit. He declared war on Wess’ej etcetera etcetera etcetera, daft bastard, Esganikan loaded up for Armageddon, and then Rit said she’d depose him and everything would be hunky-dory.”

  “Jesus. From our political correspondent.”

  “Didn’t you know?”

  “No, I didn’t, Ade. No bastard tells me anything.”

  “Either way, they’re banging out of Umeh Station.” Ade dropped his voice as if he was talking to an idiot. “You know they meant complete extermination, don’t you?”

  It had always been an option. Eddie had got used to it. He tried hard to get un-used right away. “Hunky-dory means three-quarters of their global population dead, Ade.”

  “Northern Assembly—one; every other poor isenj—nil,” said Qureshi.

  “I want a lift, then. Got to record this for posterity. And the Skavu.”

  “Not my call, mate. Try asking the Boss.”

  “Okay, if I give you my spare cam and you run into any Skavu, can you crank out a few shots?” Sod that. A mass evacuation was something News Desk always liked. It made more sense to viewers than dead squid and spiders; they could relate to humans in jeopardy on the extreme frontier of space. “But I’ll kiss Shan’s arse for a flight out there.”

  “That’s my job.” Ade winked and held his hand out for the camera. He’d done it before: dead bezeri on irradiated beaches, a place where Ade could walk and come to no harm. “Done.”

  “Seen images of any Skavu?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you didn’t grab a file for me?”

  “Christ, mate, we’re busy.”

  “What do they look like, then?”

  “Closest I can get is…I dunno. Izzy?”

  Qureshi stared into mid-distance for inspiration. “I suppose if you crossed a ussissi with an iguana, you might get close. Two legs. Which is handy.”

  Ade seemed animated. A proper mission had really pepped him up. “The ussissi say they’re total gung-ho maniacs. Militant green doesn’t even come close. Loathed and feared in the Garav system, which they’ve gone through like a dose of salts.”

  Eddie saw story on one hand and massive threat on the other. His body, marinated in adrenaline, strained at an imaginary leash and made him forget the threat bit. “At least they’re on our side.”

  Qureshi’s bergen looked heavier than she was. She hitched it higher on her back and fiddled with the webbing. “I never assume that much,” she said. “Just that they probably won’t be trying to kill us.”

  “Where’s Shan?”

  “She went over to talk to Nevyan.”

  “Good.”

  “Don’t push your luck. She’s got one of her stroppy moods on.”

  Eddie had noticed. He’d also noted that neither Aras nor Ade were especially chipper either, and he speculated on some marital rift. How they made that kind of setup work he had no idea, and he wasn’t about to ask. Ambushing Shan for a favor looked less predatory now, though, because he could stroll into Nevyan’s home any time. He lived there, after all. He picked up his pace—carefully this time—and made his way along the terraces, pausing a couple of times to check if he had an ITX link through to Jejeno. There was no connection. He swore and hurried on.

  Eddie walked into the passage, whose roughly circular skylights cast columns of
early morning sun into the gold flagstones. He still didn’t know how the wess’har could route daylight below ground and into tunnels as easily as some fiber optic system. But there was always time to find out, and Jejeno and the Skavu were far more pressing topics. The buzz of voices—in English—were Shan’s and Nevyan’s.

  Eddie stopped and listened, but he wasn’t eavesdropping. He just didn’t want to interrupt at the wrong time. Two alpha females, each capable of killing without a backwards glance, weren’t to be annoyed.

  The voices stopped for a moment. Eddie knew an awkward silence when he heard one.

  “You would tell me if you wanted me to know,” Nevyan said. “But so far, you haven’t.”

  “What?” Shan’s tone was defensive.

  “I can smell it. You know I can. You lost the child.”

  Shan’s pause was long. One, two, three, four…

  “I couldn’t keep it. You know it would have been a disaster for so many reasons.”

  This time it was Nevyan’s turn at silence. Eddie could imagine her freezing in that lizardlike way that wess’har had, a perfect seahorse statue for a few moments. His mouth was instantly dry and his brain told him he’d misheard. Child.

  “Knowing c’naatat’s capabilities, I can barely imagine how you destroyed it.”

  “You have a way with words, Nev.”

  “I won’t judge you.”

  “Bloody glad to hear it. I got a queue forming for that.”

  Eddie wasn’t sure if Nevyan understood. He thought he did. “You must have…suffered greatly.”

  “You’ve still got the Christopher archive. Really handy trick that humans have. When we’re desperate enough, the pain gets blanked out mostly.”

  Eddie put this hand over his mouth and realized his pulse was pounding. It felt exactly like the moment when he’d been musing over a precious cup of coffee back at the Thetis camp on Constantine island—when things had seemed much simpler—and felt a blast of cold revelation: Shan Frankland had c’naatat.

  Not everything that had happened since had been a consequence of his pursuit of that story, but too much was.