Ally

  7

  He prayeth well, who loveth well

  Both man and bird and beast.

  Rime of the Ancient Mariner

  SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

  Umeh Station’s geodesic dome had taken more than a few hits on its peak. On closer inspection, Ade saw long seared skid marks on some of the panels where hot debris had rained on them.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” said Becken, and craned his neck to look up. He’d never experienced the liquid technology of an Eqbas warship before, and he’d certainly never strolled into a war zone where he didn’t need armor. “Talk about insulated from reality.”

  “That’s what a million years’ head start on Neanderthals gets you,” said Ade.

  Qureshi feigned a concerned I’m-interviewing-you expression that Ade recognized as Eddie’s, and turned to Barencoin. “How do you feel about that, Mart? As a Neanderthal spokesman?”

  “Piss off.” Barencoin almost suppressed a smile. He liked his knuckle-dragging reputation, and knowing his academic credentials Ade could easily see him as a clever kid who had to act the grunt at school to be accepted. “I discovered fire last week.”

  “Steady on,” said Chahal. “It’ll be the wheel next.”

  “He’ll burn out at this pace. Mark my words.” Qureshi glanced behind her. “Come on, Eddie, keep up. Don’t want any dead embeds on my watch.”

  Eddie, his bee cam hovering at head level, was staring at the city of Jejeno beyond. He must have seen enough bombed cities in his life, but his expression said he still found it distressing. Ade only saw the things he needed to see now—the positions that might still harbor snipers, the booby-trapped buildings, the pieces of your own people that you needed to recover and treat reverently. No, that was other wars and another world. There was nothing like that here.

  Isenj moved amid the rubble, carrying and cleaning up, trying to rebuild, a sea of spike-quilled black eggs tottering on spidery short legs; weird wide mouths and no visible eyes made it harder to think people. Eddie was disturbingly good at snap classification of anything he saw to give it some familiar label. Isenj were spiders with piranha mouths. That worked fine for Ade.

  People.

  You’ve got a bit of them in you. Your people.

  The metallic blue blob of liquid ship that had shuttled the detachment to the surface peeled off the concrete apron surrounding Umeh Station’s geodesic dome, and lifted above it to join a detached section of the main warship. It still cast a huge shadow over the city. Becken watched, hand shielding his eyes against the sun, until he couldn’t tilt his neck any further. Around them, a shimmering haze like a mirage on a hot road marked the boundary of the defense shield that radiated from the ship.

  “Jesus, is this war of the frigging worlds or what, Ade?”

  Mothership. Fuck yes, it’s a mothership. Just like the movies. Ade kept a wary eye on the visible boundary of the shield. The detached vessel that would stay on station above the dome swallowed up the shuttle like coalescing mercury, blue vanishing into the bronze casing like a brief explosion of color from a firework. As the mothership hull moved off, Ade could see the separate shield that the remnant generated over the dome as far as the moatlike service road. The ship was a clean elongated oval again, uniformly bronze from stem to stern, its midline picked out with a pulsing band of red and blue chevrons.

  Eddie’s right again. Upturned glass. Who’s the spider now?

  “Amazing,” said Becken. “Those things are totally brammers. Why do they change color?”

  “No idea.” Ade—c’naatat or not, Eqbas-shielded or not—didn’t like standing around in a hostile zone without cover like a spare prick at a wedding. “Maybe it’s all to do with how they melt or something. Makes you feel primitive, doesn’t it?”

  “It’s not like the OSLO training we had, is it?”

  The old, old slang for an incompetent comrade—Outer Space Liaison Officer—had fresh life in the Extreme Environment Warfare Cadre of the Royal Marines. Ade recalled belting a mouthy infantry pongo who dared address him as OSLO in a bar during one particularly drink-fueled run ashore. Only your oppos, the men and women who earned the right to wear the narrow black strip with discreet silver stars next to the COMMANDO shoulder flash, could call you that. It was fucking sacred; it was not for the mouths of lesser mortals. It meant you could free-fall from orbit and fight in zero-g and do any bloody thing needed to secure a space station or orbital platform.

  Now, coming up forty years old, Ade felt embarrassed for starting that fist-fight. But he’d been seventeen then, full of testosterone and still getting his rage at his father out of his system. It had seemed the right thing to do, and cemented his reputation: a good bloke in a scrap, his mates said, nice and quiet until you pushed him too far. Ade never backed down once he started.

  And here he was, just playing at dicing with death. It was a picnic. Eqbas tech alone meant a Girl Scout could do the evacuation.

  Gutless little bastard, his father’s voice whispered. You need to toughen up.

  “Let’s sort it, then,” said Barencoin. “Do we have to bang on the airlock hatch and give ’em the secret password, or what?” He tapped his palm to activate the bioscreen again, its audio link embedded in his jaw. C’naatat had rejected Ade’s implanted enhancements early in the game as some amateurish attempt at what it could do so much better. “Oi, you lot in there—did you miss that spaceship? Come on. Open up. The Royals are here to add a bit of glamour to your tawdry lives.”

  Umeh Station looked a lot different from the last time Ade had been here a few weeks ago. Shit. I had Shan for the first time in the machinery space below ground. Funny, the way you think of places having meaning. The station had always been a mess, permanently untidy in the way of places that had temporary facilities for too many people and jury-rigged systems squeezed into any available space. Now it had the air of a house being stripped before moving day. It looked raw and broken.

  Crew and civilian contractors seemed overdressed although the place ran hotter than planned. They were wearing and carrying the things they wanted to hang on to in the disruption. They couldn’t take a whole dome with them.

  “Waste of taxpayers’ money,” said Becken. “How many billions to ship this out here? And we just dump it like gash.”

  “The isenj can make use of it,” said Webster. The engineer in her saw utility in everything. “It could be a hothouse for any plants they try to reintroduce. I could stay here and sort that after the evac.”

  “Sue, they’ve got one poxy tree in a bomb crater. That’s today’s wildlife show from Umeh. One tree. Good thing they don’t have any dogs.”

  Ade cut in. The sooner they got working, the sooner they shipped out again. “Mart, Jon, you talk to the navy and get the numbers, loads and other manifest stuff they need to have. Sue, Chaz, you check what hardware they’re planning to ship and make sure it’s the stuff they actually need most on Mar’an’cas, not just commercial shit that the companies want back in one piece. Survival takes priority.”

  “Can we enforce that?”

  “’Course we can. We booked the taxi. Christ, Sue, we’re not even Royal Marines any more, not technically. We’re just heavily armed civilians with an Eqbas army backing us up.”

  “And we’ve been court-martialed already.”

  “Would you argue with us?”

  “Nah.”

  “Shall I go and piss people off?” said Eddie. “I mean, if there’s something I can do, I’ll roll my sleeves up, but if not…”

  “See what you can scrounge, mate.” Ade spread his hands in invitation. “You’re a natural resource investigator. If it looks handy, and it’s not nailed down, take it for a walk.”

  “Organic, inorganic?”

  “Food. Life’s little comforts. That’s the stuff the wess’har can’t provide for us.”

  “You’ll be amazed,” said Eddie, all sinister promise, and wandered off looking deceptively earnest.

  Ade cocked his he
ad at Qureshi to follow him and the detachment split up, disappearing to places they knew better than he did after their stay here. He headed for the cluster of command offices on the north side of the dome. An impressive climbing plant had spread across the stays of the roof and gave the interior a pleasant filtered light that made the place feel like there should have been a coffee bar and a designer fashion store nearby. But the stacks of pallets, the loader bots and the other telltale signs of a research outpost gave the game away.

  There was, of course, still the banana tree.

  Ade paused as he walked past the planter. It was a circular tub, pale blue blown composite, and—as made sense in an environment where everything had to earn its keep—all the oxygen-producing plants it contained were edible. The ridged and polished jade leaves of the dwarf banana veiled a developing hand of fruits; around it, there were dwarf-stock limes, miniature papayas and pineapples. The thought of them was more arresting than sex at that moment. He had to retrieve those bloody things somehow.

  Shit…that’s a fig tree over there.

  Qureshi was almost telepathic. “And I’ll grab the bloody chilies,” she muttered. “We’re going to be here for a few more years until the main Eqbas force shows up, so we might as well enjoy it.” She elbowed him discreetly, nodding in the direction of another planter. “Pomegranates, range fifty meters…”

  “I’m on it.”

  Ade imagined presenting Shan with the spoils. She always put on that I’ll-eat-anything stoicism and she never complained, but he saw how she relished little treats, and he desperately wanted to appease her, even though there was nothing more tangibly wrong between them than an emotionally traumatic event that affected them both.

  I can’t even tell my mates. I can’t share it with them.

  Nobody in the detachment had any secrets. Most of them had lived in each others’ pockets for years: they were the closest he had to family before Shan came on the scene. Every tragedy, annoyance and observation was shared. But not now.

  “You reckon they can make that ship shielding on a small enough scale to be individual armor?” asked Qureshi.

  “You’ve been playing too many kilbot games, Izzy.”

  “Seriously. They must have a power generator. That’ll be the only limiting factor, whether it’s portable or not.”

  “They’re a million years ahead of us. No ‘must have’ about it.”

  “Wouldn’t half make our jobs a lot easier. Stroll up a beachhead, bimble into enemy fire, take no notice…”

  “Won’t be our jobs when we get back to Earth.”

  “You said we.”

  “You. Habit.”

  “We’ll be a century or more out of date. That’s serious skills-fade even if we were still in the Corps.”

  “You’ll be alien specialists. You know how many people in human history have lived with aliens? Stayed in their homes? Eaten with them? Fought alongside them, fought against them? Just us. When the Eqbas show up, that’s going to count for something.”

  Qureshi reached out and rubbed a leaf that filled the air with an intense lemon scent. It was a herb of sorts. “Yeah, but someone will want to sign us up to fight them.”

  “This isn’t about having a paycheck when you get back.”

  “No. You know it isn’t. It never was. It’s about the shame of being kicked out for something we didn’t do.”

  “I told you, Shan said Esganikan would put in a request to set aside the findings.”

  “Yeah, if Commander Neville was still alive, maybe the bitch would have testified.”

  “Her word won’t count for much now.” It was out of his mouth before he could even check himself, and he felt his face burn immediately.

  Qureshi just looked at him as if she’d touched on a sore subject, and continued. “Rayat, too. All the serious witnesses are dead.”

  Ade quit while he was ahead. He was a compulsive blusher, so she’d have taken it as embarrassment. He hated lying. He hated trying to keep his various stories straight, and if anything proved that honesty was the best policy, it was this. Lies destroyed everything.

  He tore his gaze from the plants set to be liberated and pushed open the door to the main office. Lieutenant Sophia Cargill stood with her arms folded, contemplating a white-board on the wall. She reached out and touched the reactive surface, deleting a set of names from one section and dragging them across to another list, then writing a new list with her fingertip. Pigment leapt into life at the change in surface temperature and the words SANITATION DETAIL emerged on the board in a ghostly delayed hand. It was all too biblical for Ade. He paused, almost expecting to see LIAR appear next.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” said Cargill, still preoccupied with the roster she was drawing up. “Fleet got back to us an hour ago. Director of Special Forces wants to talk to you.”

  “Sorry, ma’am?” Shit, he dropped right back into being know-your-place, deferential, reliable Bennett—Adrian J., Sergeant, 37 Commando, 510 Troop EEWC, number 61/4913D. It was his whole adult life in one databurst of a line. “What for?”

  “It’s need to know, and apparently I don’t.” She had that faintly irritated tone of a woman who’d done a bloody hard job that nobody sitting safely on their arse in CINC Fleet Main Building appreciated. “You might hang around until I get a link set up.”

  Qureshi caught his eye and she didn’t even need to raise a brow to convey shitty death.

  “Will do, ma’am.”

  “Don’t have to. I have no jurisdiction over any civilians not on this list. That means you.” Cargill made a circle on the tote board with her finger and dragged another block of scrawled text to another position. She was playing loadmaster, working out the sequence of evacuation and who would be tasked to carry out the jobs on the day of the airlift. “But thank you. You didn’t have to front up, not after what’s happened. You don’t owe the FEU anything.”

  “It’s about the Corps, ma’am, not the government,” Ade said quietly. “We’ll always owe the Corps.” He liked to make the point. “With your permission, we’ll start removing a few essential plants.”

  Cargill’s face creased in a brief smile. “See the duty maintenance manager in block nine alpha and tell him I gave you instructions to do it. Whatever it is.”

  Cargill was all right. Ade and Qureshi went in search of the manager, commandeered tools and empty storage drums, and began digging up fruit trees. It was amazing the kind of things he ended up doing as a Royal Marine. In the general ebb and flow of bodies trying to strip a structure for a fast exit, their pillage of the shrubbery went unnoticed, or at least nobody tried to stop them. Eventually Eddie showed up with Sue Webster. The pockets on Eddie’s vest and his battered messenger bag bulged with promising cartonlike shapes.

  “What you got, Eddie?” asked Qureshi, hardly looking up from the delicate root ball that she was easing out of the soil. “Any good rabbit?”

  Eddie had the glow of satisfaction that must have been familiar to his hunter-gatherer ancestors. “Curry concentrate. Cumin and coriander seeds. Pepper. Saccharin. Rice, ration-prepped and seed grain. Coffee, cocoa powder and oatmeal.”

  He might as well have said he had all the gems of the Orient. “That’s bloody good rabbit, Eddie. All donated?”

  He grinned. “More or less.”

  Ade wrapped the banana’s root ball in composite sheet and secured it before sliding it into one of the small drums. “See how bloody fast we plummet into anarchy.”

  “I’ll stick a pig’s head on a pole later and we can dance around it in primal abandon.”

  “You’re a natural born baron-strangler, mate.”

  “What?”

  “Good at taking advantage of hospitality.”

  “I’m a journo. We do that.”

  “I’m glad you’re on our side.”

  Eddie’s knuckles showed white as he kept a ferocious grip on the straining strap of his bag. “Yeah, I am. Looks like you’re liberating a few assets yourself.”
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  “Doing a bit of jungle training. Identification and utilization of native tropical food plants for survival in the field.”

  “Uhuh…”

  “Nicking the fucking banana tree.”

  “Ah, the endless possibilities of the English language…”

  The next challenge was to find a secure holding area for the plunder while they awaited extraction. Sticking it in a quiet corner with Mart Barencoin was probably the best option to stop some other bastard trying to walk off with it. They were discussing the logistics when the Regulating Branch chief jogged up to them, and they instinctively formed a protective circle around the growing pile of looted items. The man was a “crusher,” the ship’s police.

  “Your Boss is on the ITX, Royal. Cleared the bloody office out too, so make it snappy.”

  Ade found himself reaching without thinking for his beret and slipping it two-handed onto his head. “Come on, Izzy. Let’s see what he’s got to say for himself.”

  “Her,” said the chief. “It’s a her.”

  “Can I watch?” said Eddie.

  “Yeah, why not?” Ade heard a faint alarm bell, the kind that made him a witness who wasn’t in uniform. “Keep your trap shut, that’s all.”

  Qureshi didn’t seem bothered. Eddie was a tame embed as far as she was concerned. Cargill held the office door open with an emphatically blank expression. “Screen’s on standby. Green key, when you’ve got yourself looking all lovely. Call me when you’re done.”

  Ade closed the door behind her and gestured to Qureshi and Eddie to stand out of the range of the cam. He did it without thinking again, but it wasn’t his Royal Marines drill that was driving him—it was Shan’s legacy in his genes, and he knew it as surely as if she’d tapped him on the shoulder. He settled himself at the console, then removed his beret to fold and slide it under the shoulder tab of his shirt.

  This had better be a fucking apology.

  He pressed the green key. The screen switched from the pale blue UN holding portal to a tidy desk dominated by a female brigadier—not a marines officer, but one in army drab. She looked like she could even take on Shan and last a few rounds: spare, cold-eyed, maybe forty, and with short blond curls that weren’t remotely girlie.