Ally

  Saib shimmered with a twin spectrum of ambers and blues. “This is apt. This is right.”

  She didn’t quite understand that. There was certainly irony in that sequence, and if bezeri understood sarcasm then they probably understood irony as well. But she had to ask, and she knew she would have to live with the answer.

  “I know I did a terrible thing to your people, Saib, and nothing can undo that.” He should have known her bitter shame from the memories of her c’naatat, but Shan seemed to have elbowed them out of the way too. “But I need to know what you think of me now.”

  “You have given us back real hunting. Maybe quality is better than numbers. This is good.” Numbers? She tried to make sense of that. “Now we hunt!”

  Before she could press further, he reared up and made for the bog, and she wondered how many shevens there were, and how long it would be before there were none at all.

  Umeh Station, Jejeno: Eight hours after dispersal of bioagent

  “Oh God…”

  It was a woman engineer who spotted it first. She was leaning against the straight section of transparent composite that formed the base section of the dome, and then she jerked upright as if something had hit her in the back.

  “Oh God, what’s wrong with it?”

  Eddie had been watching her for no reason other than that she was nice-looking, and that erased conscious analysis. She had a small crowd around her now. They were all looking in the direction of whatever had caught her attention. Eddie’s other animal instinct, the one that sent him running towards trouble out of sheer curiosity and fear of missing something, took his bee cam from his pocket and flicked it into the air. You never knew until you got there if something was worth filming, and by then you might have missed it. He went prepared.

  “It’s sick,” said the woman. The name tag on her orange coveralls said MORANZ. Eddie peered over the cluster of heads and saw an isenj on the service road. “What’s it doing here?”

  The bee cam was pressed to the composite like a nosey neighbor, and Eddie decided against slipping it outside to get a better look.

  The isenj was clearly in trouble. Slumped on its side and making futile efforts to crawl towards the dome, it was losing fluid from its mouth, the same thin yellow plasma that had sprayed over him when Minister Ual was shot standing right next to him.

  It was blood. The isenj was sick, all right.

  “What’s it doing here? I’ve never seen them come close to the dome.”

  “It’s dying,” said Eddie. Rit had been warned. Genomes didn’t follow borders and some of her own people might die when the pathogen was released.

  “Can we do something?” The woman looked around her, as if there’d be a xenobiologist handy. “We can’t just leave it there. It’s trying to get help.”

  The crowd was growing. Eddie thought it odd that a dying isenj would head for the dome and not its own medical facilities, but people in extremis—and isenj were people—did inexplicable things. Perhaps it already knew there was nothing an isenj medic could do for it, and hoped the fur-things in the dome might have a remedy. There were isenj going about their business just fifty meters away. Each watched the struggling creature for a moment before continuing on their way. It might have been an odd reaction to personnel in Umeh Station, who were mostly trained to react to emergencies, but Eddie had seen humans walk by the injured and dying far too many times in his life to pass judgment on another species’ unwillingness to get involved.

  “I know what this is,” said Eddie. “Don’t go outside, and don’t touch it.”

  “What?” said the woman. He could see she was thinking it was a health hazard to humans, and that was fine if it kept her from getting involved. “Maybe it’s been wounded.”

  “It’s collateral damage,” said Eddie. “Somebody get Lieutenant Cargill and let her know, but for Chrissakes don’t go out there.”

  “Eddie, what exactly is this?”

  He didn’t know the man who was speaking to him, but everyone knew Eddie because he was the BBChan man, one they saw not only in the flesh but also on screen from time to time, albeit with decreasing frequency now. News Desk wasn’t hot for downbeat alien disaster stories at the moment.

  “Don’t worry, it only affects isenj.” There was no point not telling them: the isenj would know soon enough, and they were the only ones it mattered to. “It’s a biological weapon. It’s tailored to the genome, and it was aimed at the isenj south of here who’ve got certain genes in common. But the pathogen drifts with prevailing winds.”

  They all looked at him in a moment of accusing silence. “Haven’t seen that on the news, Eddie,” said one.

  “Hard to get viewers interested in wars between spiders twenty-five light-years away when the shit hits the fan at home every day.” God, that sounded callous. Eddie had just validated an ancient stereotype. All he needed now was a cigarette dangling from his lip and a press pass shoved in his hat and he’d be Cynical Old Hack, the glib bastard with no heart, intruding on grief to kill time before the bar opened. “Trust me, I’ve tried.”

  The isenj’s struggles were pitiful. The death throes of any creature were hard to watch, but humans always managed it okay: they were managing it now. It was a misshapen ball of spines, more like a porcupine than anything, and its spindly legs kicked as if trying to get purchase on a slippery surface. Eddie wasn’t sure how the pathogen worked, but if it was bleeding from the mouth, then it was probably hemorrhaging internally. That was a bad way to go.

  “You sure this isn’t a risk to humans?” said the engineer.

  “I’m sure,” said Eddie. “They’ve already made that particular cocktail for Bezer’ej. The wess’har know what they’re doing with bioagents.”

  “Jesus Christ, is this their war?”

  “No, but they gave the isenj here the weapons they asked for. Just like we would.”

  Ade appeared beside him and watched for a few moments. His distress was instant and visible. He waded into the sightseers.

  “For Chrissake, don’t stand there gawping,” he snapped. “Would you want to be a spectator sport if that was you out there? Get back to work, the lot of you. Give the poor bloody thing its dignity.”

  The female engineer looked lost. “Won’t the isenj send someone to help it?”

  “Well, I don’t see any ambulances screeching to a halt, so, no, I reckon not. Now move it.”

  A voice behind Eddie made him jump. “Come on folks, you heard the sergeant. Get back to work.” Barencoin’s voice boomed over their heads and they all swung around. “It’s not nice to stare.”

  The rest of the marines joined him, spread out and looking like they meant it. The crowd broke up and went its various ways, although the woman engineer kept looking back for as long as she could. Eddie wondered how much of the marines’ talent for showing up when one of them needed backup was a natural vigilance and how much was their linked bioscreens, but Ade didn’t have one. Even if they were angry with him for not telling them about Rayat, they still functioned as a team, and they watched each other’s backs. It took more than a spat like that to really split them. Eddie was glad. They were a small oasis of unshakable common sense in an insane situation. Webster commandeered a small forklift loader and took up position by the airlock doors.

  Ade stared at the isenj, then slid the safety catch off his rifle. “Shit, is that the first sick one you’ve seen?”

  “Yeah. You okay?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “What you going to do?”

  “Well, it’s not going to make a miraculous recovery, is it? You know what that stuff does.”

  “Jesus, Ade, you’re not going to shoot it, are you?”

  “It’s that, or watch how many hours a bioagent takes to kill it. Shan reckons the human version took a few days. She found that family in the church, remember. You think that’s right? Let the poor bastard suffer?”

  Eddie had always said he wanted someone to shoot him if he was ever in a
bad way with no hope of recovery. It took a cold splash of reality, watching someone actually making that decision and loading a rifle, to show him he hadn’t thought it through at all.

  Ade seemed to be assessing line of sight. He looked over his shoulder a couple of times. “Bugger, I wish this wasn’t in full view. Mart, see if you can grab a few blankets, will you?”

  Isenj had helped build Umeh Station. Maybe this one was a former worker, and that was why it had headed this way in its final hours, as if its own kind had abandoned it and the fur-things were its last hope.

  Barencoin jogged off. Ade watched for a few more moments, muttered, “Sod it,” and strode to the airlock. The next thing Eddie knew, Ade was outside and standing over the stricken isenj. He stood with his back to the dome and fired three quick shots, silenced by the dome’s seals, into its head. It twitched and lay still. The whole thing had taken a matter of seconds and nobody in the dome appeared to have noticed.

  Ade waited for a few moments—and how did you check an isenj was dead?—then gestured at Webster. She pushed the loader out onto the service area. With silent efficiency. They hauled the body onto the flatbed and moved it out of sight of the dome’s occupants behind an opaque panel in the wall.

  Webster exchanged words with Ade and left the loader outside. Ade sat down it, rifle laid across his knees. Eddie caught Webster as she came back inside.

  “Is he okay, Sue?”

  “Yeah.” Barencoin passed them with a couple of dark blue blankets under one arm. “He says he’ll wait in case any more show up. He thinks they might.” She looked at her hands with an expression of wonder on her face. “They’re soft. The quills are soft. Springy.”

  Eddie thought they were be rigid. Maybe they lost their stiffness on death. “You’re not still pissed off with Ade about the Rayat thing, are you?”

  “I’m never pissed off,” said Webster. “That’s Mart’s job.”

  Eddie stood with his hands in his pockets watching Ade for a few minutes and realized the bee cam was still nestled against the window, recording. He snatched it back and considered going out to sit with Ade. He expected outrage or at least protest from crew who’d worked out that the isenj had been put down like an animal, but the personnel inside the dome seemed totally preoccupied with evacuation. What if Ade had put a human out of their misery in the same circumstances? But an isenj was probably like a dog to them, something intelligent and capable of being friendly that you might miss or even mourn, but not as significant as a human.

  No, it better to leave Ade alone. Eddie knew him well enough by now. Even so, he hovered around the airlock for the next hour. It was getting dark and Ade couldn’t sit out there all night. Eventually he relented, got Becken to scrounge two coffees for him, and took them out to sit with Ade.

  He nudged the marine along the flatbed of the loader without a word and put a cup in his hand.

  Ade slurped a mouthful. “Never nudge a bloke with a loaded rifle, mate.”

  “Safety’s on. I’ve learned that much. You sure you’re okay?”

  “I’m more okay than that poor bastard under that blanket.”

  “We got through worse than this when Shan was gone.”

  “I’ll live.”

  “Yeah. You certainly will.” Ade had defaulted to piss-take mode. “Are you worried about what Her Indoors will say when she finds out you told the rest of them about Rayat?”

  “I told her. She’s fine about it.”

  “Oh. Really? Good.” Eddie was relieved, and slightly surprised. Shan seemed able to forgive Ade anything, as if she’d saved up all the tolerance she should have used getting along with people in general and lavished it all on a ferocious, indulgent concentrate for Ade and Aras. He suspected they had to forgive a lot with her, too. “Mart and the others will come around as well. What are you going to tell Harrison?”

  “She won’t be serving in twenty-odd years’ time, so I don’t have to tell her anything. Shan says she’ll hand over a body if she likes.”

  “She hasn’t fragged him, has she?”

  “Not yet.”

  “She’s slipping.”

  Eddie meant it as a joke, but he did wonder.

  It was completely quiet by Jejeno standards. Eddie hadn’t heard any artillery activity in the city for a while. The two men nursed their cups of coffee in silence, and overhead the detached Eqbas ship was a dark shape against the light-polluted night sky, its chevrons a disembodied belt of neon. The chevrons were reprised at a distance. Eddie thought it was a reflection caused somehow by the defense shield until he realized it was the mothership moving slowly across the skyline.

  A sudden flare of silent white light just to the north caught Eddie’s eye and he stood up to look, although it was a pointless move in a city that was all towers.

  Ade nudged him. “It’s from the ship,” he said. A second pulse of light was gone in a second. “That’s the government offices. This is probably when everyone works out what Rit’s done and has a major sense of humor failure.”

  “I can’t imagine how she’s going to hold this together. I know isenj aren’t like us, but I don’t see this administration lasting the week.”

  “Either it lasts,” said Ade, “or Umeh goes back to the drawing board. Year zero. Now they’re starting to see what an engineered pathogen can do, I think it might change enough minds.”

  Eddie did a mental edit and substituted the word Earth.

  It did the trick. It certainly changed his.

  9

  I have to do this.

  I have them in my head, and I’ve slaughtered them in their thousands, and even millions. I am what I am because of them. They still hate me five centuries later, and I confess that I think I still hate them. The only isenj I ever met beyond the context of killing or being killed was Par Paral Ual, and he died trying to change his world. I can’t die, so the least I can do is lay all our myths and dreads to rest, and visit Umeh for the first time.

  I just wish I could feel the same about the bezeri.

  ARAS SAR IUSSAN

  in a message to Eddie Michallat in Jejeno

  Jejeno: Government of the Northern Assembly

  The isenj troops manning the barricade in front of the government center in Jejeno weren’t prepared for an enemy that used portable shields.

  They also seemed surprised to see Minister Rit with an Eqbas escort. They shrilled and chirped wildly. Rit shrilled back.

  “They want to know what’s happening,” said Aitassi. “And Rit has told them she plans to take over the government.”

  There was no room for misunderstanding. Isenj were far easier to deal with in many ways than the gethes that Esganikan had spoken with on Earth.

  “Surrender,” she said, keeping it simple. Aitassi, safe within the shield area, translated even though it was obvious that surrender was a sensible choice. “Let us through, or you’ll die.”

  Isenj used projectile weapons. There was nothing wrong with proven technology, but it often met its superior, equally proven. They looked at the Eqbas troops, and then at Minister Rit, but they still opened fire.

  The first volley of shots hit the generated field in a brief burst of light, dropping short of their target. One round made it as far as the first of Esganikan’s twenty troops and bounced against his body armor like a tossed pebble.

  Esganikan hadn’t learned to fully read emotion in an isenj and knew she never would, but their immediate reaction of frozen shock looked very like a wess’har’s. Then they broke ranks, scattered across the street and back into the building, and the Eqbas assault team picked them off. It took less than a minute to clear the way into the Northern Assembly seat of government. Esganikan wondered how much of the army had deserted as she ran after her squad down the wide corridors of polished stone. The place seemed almost deserted.

  Aitassi stayed close behind for her own safety, but there were few isenj around, just clerks at desks and monitoring screens. They paused to stare at the coup unfoldin
g in front of them.

  “What are they doing?”

  Aitassi cornered an isenj as if herding it and they exchanged high-pitched chatter.

  “They’re crisis management clerks,” she said. “This is the overnight watch—everyone else has gone home for the evening.”

  Extraordinary: they were such creatures of habit that they stuck to their schedules even now. With every contact, Esganikan found they were far weaker than they appeared: their air assets globally were no more than a single large nation’s, and had been wiped out on the ground in a brief series of preemptive strikes. Now even the clerks had gone home. They seemed equipped only to wage war on each other. They weren’t a credible enemy; they were an irritant.

  “I feel this will become a saying among troops,” Esganikan, sidearm in hand, carried on down the passage. “Plan for Garav, hope for Umeh.”

  A gethes would have felt dishonored for trouncing such a weak enemy, but she was a pragmatist. She fought as a means to an end, not as a tribal ritual, seizing the advantage and feeling only vague sorrow for a once-powerful civilization still putting faith in solid but obsolete technology.

  But isenj still had numbers. And unless she destroyed every dissident isenj—most of the planet, it seemed—then at some point she had to walk away and leave Minister Rit to hold back chaos with a Skavu army. She strode into the main cabinet room where she had once been an invited guest and stared at seven isenj ministers distinguishable only by the colors of the decorative beads threaded on the tips of their quills.

  It was Rit’s turn now. “Your former colleague wishes to address you, Ministers.” Esganikan stepped back and gestured to Aitassi for a translation. Shomen Eit and Nir Bedoi spoke English but none of the others did. The gethes had brought one thing of use to Ceret, to Cavanagh’s Star, to Nir: and that was a common language that could be learned, simple and flexible enough in its components to be adapted by isenj and wess’har for mutual use. Apart from that, all they’d contributed was chaos.