Ally

  “Ade, that’s not a pardon. Everyone knows the court-martial was a diplomatic trick to appease the wess’har for what happened on Ouzhari. It didn’t work. When the Eqbas reach Earth, they’ll be able to get the FEU and all their shitty minions to do anything they tell them, so let the detachment know it’ll be put right, with or without Rayat.”

  She meant it. If this was fear for their futures, the marines didn’t have to worry about that. Earth wasn’t only going to be a much-changed place for them when they returned: it was going to change out of all recognition for everyone. And if this was about reputation and honor—she understood that, she certainly did—then she’d get Eddie to write them a new history. He could do that just fine.

  Ade was silent for a moment. There was no time delay on this ITX router.

  “You still there, Ade?”

  “Okay, Boss, I’ll tell them that.”

  “Sit tight. Tell you what, I’ll come over for the evacuation. I’ll talk to them.”

  “I’ll do it. I’m still their NCO. Even if I’m not exactly their most trusted buddy at the moment.”

  “Tell them I made you keep it quiet. I did, remember? They ought to understand that. Orders.”

  “I’d never lied to them before.”

  It was a forlorn little boy’s comment. As always, it pushed the button that made her want to defend him and punch the shit out of anyone who so much as looked at him the wrong way. She was millions of miles from him. Impotent protective anger blinded her for a moment.

  “It’s Mart Barencoin, isn’t it? Give him a message. Tell him I’ll be there, and I want a chat with him.”

  “Boss—”

  “Tell him, Ade.”

  “Okay. You can’t always make things right for me, you know that?”

  I’ll die trying. “I’ll see you soon. Don’t take any shit, okay?”

  Shan shut down the link and dropped the swiss into her breast pocket. Nevyan was still watching, head tilted, clearly baffled by the exchange.

  “Honor is a curious concept,” she said, and began walking briskly towards the steps that led up the terraces. “This is part of your problem with lies. Would you come to eat with us tonight? You and Aras?”

  Shan followed her, now able to deal with the rapid changes of topic and the twin-track nature of wess’har conversation. She was even capable of it herself now. “That would be very nice, Nev. Why lies?”

  “Because humans destroy reality by willingly sharing an invented universe. What wess’har know, what is, remains unchanged. But because gethes lie so much, your world is unreal. You have no basis for anything you think, because you alter facts.”

  Wess’har logic was always a cold bucket of water over the head, even now, even though she had their blood in her veins. “Worse than theft.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “A mate of mine used to say that you could lock things away from a thief, but you could never protect yourself against a liar.”

  “Indeed. Some of you understand, then. Lies are dangerous. Of course, the situation is made worse by the nature of human perception, which is so malleable and limited anyway. The marines’ actions exist and can’t be changed by opinion.”

  It was a nice clean-cut view of the world, and smacked of the nobility enshrined in the Rochefoucauld maxim Eddie had once sent her by way of a half-arsed apology for suspecting her motives.

  Perfect courage is to do without witnesses what one would be capable of doing with the world looking on.

  Yeah, that was about right. If you answered only to God or your own standards, then it was great. Eddie, of course, tried to swim against the current in the illusory river of smear, spin and stupid audiences, and had become fixated on telling the truth—whatever that was.

  “I cared about my reputation once.” Shan thought of Op Green Rage, and yogurt-knitting terrorist Helen Marchant, who she had an overwhelming urge to contact and call every fucking cow under the sun, although they’d parted as friends and the object of Shan’s anger was her long-dead two-faced politician of a sister, Eugenie Perault. “I turned from an antiterrorist officer to pretty well being one of them. Turning a blind eye. Leaks. Letting Marchant’s people get away. I lost my good name, all right. I was busted for negligence.”

  “But you could just as easily have been busted for deliberately helping them.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you chose incompetence, which I doubt anyone believed for one moment.”

  “No, but they couldn’t pin a damn thing on me. I’m good at covering my tracks. Believe me, I’m good.”

  “And there is your pride, Shan.”

  Her own motives and attitude to that loss of honor still troubled her. “I know. And that’s why I decided to play dumb rather than do the whole anti-hero act. You know all that.”

  “I know, but you raise the matter again, and so I wonder if you yet know why you did it.”

  “Because I needed to know that I did it because it was right, not because it’d make me look heroically principled. That’s why.”

  “If you had admitted your complicity, would that have jeopardized Marchant and her activities?”

  Shan paused. She usually thought through every last angle in a situation. But she’d never considered fully confessing, and if it would have made any difference to Marchant’s people. If she kept her mouth shut about one thing, she could have put her hands up to being the leak and nothing else. A prison sentence—no joke for a copper—and disgrace, versus a demotion for incompetence, and disgrace. Jesus, was I just too scared to go to jail? I don’t remember thinking that way.

  “It would have given them the legal opening to try to get a lot more information out of me,” she said at last. “But in the end, it made no difference at all.”

  “Motives are irrelevant. You achieved the best outcome, so your anxiety about purity of intent doesn’t matter.”

  “I’m not that wess’har, Nev. I still have to live in my own head.”

  “And can you?”

  “As long as I don’t let anyone make me Saint Shan of the Tree Huggers, yes.”

  “You have no control over that. You never did.”

  Shan had reached the stage where she had no automatic reaction to wess’har brusqueness, because it was never unkind, merely factual. They were right. Anything that wasn’t true—including tact—eroded reality.

  But she still wanted the last word with Marchant. “What’s for dinner, then?”

  “Not rov’la. I know it isn’t to human taste. Eddie said it hurt.”

  “Yeah…hurt is an interesting flavor. We’ll eat what’s put in front of us.”

  “If you go to Jejeno, then I must too.” Esganikan had promised to involve Nevyan and Shan in the talks, but it hadn’t happened, and Shan expected meltdown; she’d have belted her one if she’d been Nevyan. But maybe that was part of wess’har tactlessness too, that both matriarchs knew they weren’t playing mind games. “I need to know who my neighbor really is now. Esganikan can do as she pleases and then put a galaxy between herself and Umeh, but we remain, and she promised us we would meet the Northern Assembly to discuss bioweapons.”

  “We’ll go in mob-handed, then, Nev. Show them how F’nar isan’ve do the business.”

  “We will discuss it when we eat.”

  There was never a time set for dinner, and Wess’har had no sense of territory and privacy like humans, something Shan still struggled to accept. They now knew to avoid just walking into her home unannounced, and that the interior rooms had doors—especially the lavatory and washroom—and that humans didn’t regard the sex act as an appropriate public display of affection.

  But the rest of Wess’ej still had no etiquette set for knocking on doors or agreeing times for appointments. There was now, and there was when you felt like it. Shan wondered how the Eqbas, the original wess’har from the World Before that Nevyan’s forebears had split from ten thousand years ago, had ever developed astonishing technology with such a di
sregard for rule books and precise time.

  The realization hit her. I don’t just like these people. I love them. They’re my tribe now. I never had one before, other than coppers, other than my old mates.

  It was warmly comforting. Earth seemed like a debt she’d now paid, something to be filed and forgotten, but perhaps kept for a requisite number of years in case some record-keeper needed it for audit and examination, after which it could be erased.

  But there was still the specter of Helen Marchant, and her sister, and Shan didn’t like anyone thinking they’d outsmarted her. Even dead people.

  Perault was long gone, and now she had either had her I-told-you-so moment by going to the blissful eternity God had promised her, or she had rotted and returned to the carbon cycle like everything else. She’d cheated Shan of a confrontation.

  But her sister was still alive, and still keen to speak to good old Shan, the eco-warrior’s best friend.

  Shan liked lists. Ticking things off them kept the fearful chaos at bay. Her list was now down to Rayat, Neville…and Marchant. Saving Earth’s ecology was done, or at least as done as any one person could achieve

  Marchant—no, you have nothing to say to her. Perault was the one who shanghaied her here, and what Marchant had caused her to do she’d do again tomorrow, and gladly, and so nothing needed resolving or avenging.

  The best revenge on Perault had been to follow her bogus mission to the letter, and recover the gene bank for Earth.

  Done and dusted. Shan concentrated on dinner.

  Beser’ej: Chad Island

  More of the bezeri had now been persuaded to accept c’naatat and come ashore. For a place they now called Where We Do Not Wish To be, they seemed to be thriving and—yes, they were enjoying life.

  Lindsay told herself that she was supervising, but the construction of the wattle-and-daub tree houses was gathering pace without her guidance. A cluster of remarkably well-shaped globes were strung in the trees between efte ropes like bubbles of chocolate blown into a sieve. Bezeri were master plasterers, shaping the mud over the basketlike frameworks with impressive speed and control. It was the kind of craft skill you could excel at if you had multiple arms.

  The females were still reluctant to stay in the new environment at night, but the males had taken to climbing the trees with easy grace and spending their time in the bubble-nests, sometimes sitting with tentacles draped from the opening and shimmering with light. It was only a matter of time before the whole remnant was ashore and forging a new existence.

  But the sport of sheven hunting was definitely the most powerful draw for them. Right now she could hear splashing and thuds as one of the bezeri pursued a sheven in the network of streams that fed the bogland. The silence that followed said he had either caught it and was eating his kill, or he’d found something interesting to distract him. Their curiosity and enthusiasm was as intense as a kitten’s.

  Pili, the female who had once armed Lindsay with a stone hammer to drive off persistent irsi—the only aquatic animal bezeri didn’t care to eat—bounced across the clearing. Her mantle was a mix of rainbow-spectrum lights and dark patches that seemed to respond to the background vegetation. For the first time in ages, Lindsay found it genuinely funny. With her collection of tools and her relentless enthusiasm for building things, Pili reminded her of Marine Sue Webster. It was easy to forget the bezeri weren’t cartoon characters but hunters and—she had to accept this—capable of exterminating a rival race without too many moral qualms.

  This is not your culture. It’s not your ethics. And you had no qualms about detonating the bombs that wiped out most of Pili’s people, so…get off that moral high ground.

  It sounded like Rayat’s voice in her head. But it was definitely her own.

  “You look like you’re wearing chameleon camo,” said Lindsay.

  “Camo,” said Pili. “Explain.”

  “Disguise. Soldiers use it so they can’t be seen.”

  “I need not hide,” Pili said, and swung off. Lindsay watched her go, and realized the old girl was actually using a tentacle as a rear stabilizer and spring. Damn, she was almost using the thing like a kangaroo’s tail.

  This is evolution, fast forward.

  It was the wrong terrain for a jumping animal—too many obstacles, not much open land—but Lindsay expected to see her bouncing along like a ’roo in the next day or so. She walked over to the growing tree-village and found Saib, who she still regarded as the patriarch, the Boss Fella, even if Keet did appear to be the one who was overseeing the building work. Saib was the strategist, Keet the implementer. Now they had come ashore, Lindsay was better able to see the team dynamics at work in a framework she understood.

  She finally accepted she wasn’t a natural leader like Shan Frankland, and never would be. The bezeri weren’t looking to her for direction and inspiration anyway. If Shan had been doing this…no, it hardly bore thinking about. She’d have made them hide the houses and stop killing the shevens.

  Saib turned to watch her approach, lounging like a Buddha in the shade of a tree. She could see his eyes now, definite squidlike eyes with pupils and irises, pigmented and noticeable. Eyes kept evolving the same way even here, shaped by the laws of optics.

  “The wess’har have left,” he said.

  “What?”

  “No patrols,” he said. “We see no rafts. We see no wess’har.”

  The Eqbas couldn’t have pulled out. They didn’t think that way: they were cleaning up the nuclear contamination on Ouzhari, for a start. That wasn’t finished yet. Lindsay suddenly realized how far out of the loop she was, and it was all down to technology. She was now literally a stone-age woman in a high-tech theater of war. She needed communications and IT. She had no way of knowing what was happening around the planet other than by seeing it or hearing it.

  The bezeri needed to cover a lot of ground, a full human history of ground, before they could say they were masters of Bezer’ej and able to defend the planet themselves. They needed industry and technology.

  “I have to check that out some time,” she said. It was a long journey to the Temporary City on the mainland, a little further than Constantine at the top of the island chain. And it meant using a podship under water. She’d done both before. “If the isenj return—no, the wess’har would never allow that. But you need to be in a position never to need the wess’har again. Which is why living on land is important.”

  Saib didn’t seem worried. “We live now. We have time we did not have before.”

  If that was a thank-you, she almost missed it. Lindsay reminded herself that she’d come to the bezeri to be executed for her role in their destruction, become their servant thanks to a strange reprieve via Ade Bennett, and now had come full circle to…a savior of a kind. Or maybe she was deluding herself because she wanted so badly to atone.

  A little scared scrap of her still recalled praying with Deborah Garrod while she waited for her sentence, and she wasn’t sure if that prayer was for her own life or for a wider forgiveness. Now that she had other people’s memories in her, she could no longer be sure what her prayer was really asking, but she had an answer to it, if she chose to see it that way.

  “That’s good,” she said. “You can take control of what happens to you now.”

  Saib considered the idea, slowly scratching his mantle with several tentacles. Perhaps he didn’t yet understand the dual-tone language of English and light signals as well as she thought he did.

  “The human who sees the fire all the time, the one from where the see-nah-tat comes,” Saib said. “I know many of her thoughts now. I know her need to kill wrong-doers.”

  That was Shan, all right. “You can identify that?”

  “I see all of her.”

  C’naatat never pulled the same trick twice. It seemed to have focused Saib on Shan’s genetic memory to the exclusion of all others, and for a species needing a fanatical will to survive, it might have been a good choice. Lindsay was suddenly awar
e she was thinking in terms of the parasite making conscious decisions. She was glad Rayat wasn’t here to lecture her on sloppy unscientific thinking.

  “She had her good points,” Lindsay said carefully.

  “The terrible black,” Saib said. “I see the terrible black and the pain now. Is the black like the Dry Above was to us once?”

  Lindsay had to think about what the terrible black might be for a few seconds. “You mean space. There’s no air, nothing. And as cold as cold gets.”

  “Her enduring is wonderful and also frightening.”

  That’s right, get some inspiration from her. “If you want tough, Shan’s tough.”

  “She promised to protect us from harm. This way, she has.”

  It took a few moments for Lindsay to realize that Saib was ascribing the gift of time we did not have to Shan Frankland. The thought hit her like a body blow. So soon after clutching at redemption and answered prayers, Lindsay was suddenly cast back into Shan’s shadow, the also-ran, the Frankland-Lite who never quite made full iconic status. Those were Shan’s last words to her before she stepped from the airlock to thwart Rayat and the FEU in as spectacular and horrifying way as anyone ever could: Now this is how you do it, girlie. Next time you lose your bottle and you can’t pull that pin, think of me. Because you’d give anything to be just like me, wouldn’t you?

  Lindsay could recall every word, every pause, and the fact that Shan didn’t blink once all the time she was looking into her face. That told her how deeply that taunt had carved into her self-esteem. Even seeing a haggard, weakened Shan after she had been recovered alive from space—from space, and that still felt impossible—hadn’t stopped Lindsay thinking of those words as the ones that would be carved in eternity as her epitaph. The bitch had scarred her. She’d scarred her because it had been true.

  It’s not true now. It really isn’t.

  Lindsay didn’t know if she was saying that to herself or to an absent, judgmental mother who metamorphosed into a boss that she never quite convinced of her worth.

  “I suppose she has protected you,” said Lindsay. “This came from…the wess’har that the isenj call the Beast of Mjat, the one your people knew as Aras and who wiped out the isenj here. And then it passed through Shan Frankland, and then to a human soldier, and then to me.”