Ally

  Aras turned a complete circle to take a long, slow look at them all, turning on his heel, as much out of curiosity as defiance. But there was nobody left to defy. This was their world and their prison, fouled beyond repair. He thought he might find some hate or contempt swirling in the part of him that had absorbed the worse human tendencies, but there was just the echo of a tormented, desperate young wess’har commander who wanted the agony to stop and for his people to rescue him.

  They didn’t plan to, but they found him anyway, and the odd fever that left him invulnerable seemed what he later learned to call a miracle. C’naatat troops drove out the remaining bezeri and the cordon was thrown around Bezer’ej.

  It was all so long ago. He wondered why he hadn’t put it behind him before: now he’d seen their world, he knew he’d done what was necessary.

  “It’s all so different,” he said.

  “What, mate?” Ade closed the gap between them and stood with his arms folded across his chest. He seemed to have accepted that the Eqbas shield was sniper-proof. Barencoin, always the wary and hostile one in the detachment, still had his rifle slung on its strap and his hand on its grip, checking around him in a way that seemed to be utterly automatic.

  “This world,” said Aras. “The buildings. The way the roofs slope at a chord. I remember them being lower and less ornate.”

  “Shit,” said Ade. “Never rang any bells with me.”

  Shan gave Barencoin a friendly pat on the back. Aras thought it was commendable that she never held it against him for shooting her. Shit happened, as she was fond of saying: he was just following Lindsay’s orders. She had no forgiveness in her heart whatsoever for Lindsay Neville, and it was nothing to do with her role in her decision to space herself. Lindsay was simply not Shan, and didn’t make the decisions Shan would make, and so she was an emotional, weak creature to be distrusted.

  “Are we going to present targets here all day, then?” said Barencoin. “We’ve made our point. There’s sod all they can do to Aras. They know that.”

  Ade caught Shan’s hand and squeezed it for a moment before letting go. “It’s not for their benefit, Mart. Not at all.”

  Aras kept his eyes fixed on the airlock doors. He had a few meters to go, and then he could begin to make sense of what he’d just experienced. The doors parted: he stepped through.

  He knew what had troubled him now, and what he’d feared most.

  He remembered what it was like—exactly what it was like—to be an ordinary young wess’har male, and he remembered the joy of simply being who he was, long before he knew that bezeri destroyed, and gethes slaughtered, and that he would never be a father.

  10

  What is c’naatat, Commander Esganikan? Your word and advice is law to us, as you know, because you brought hope to our world when we had failed to see it ourselves. All we ask is that you tell us all we need to know.

  KIIR, Fourth To Die, Skavu Fleet

  Umeh Station, Jejeno: machinery space, maintenance level

  “So how many dead?” asked Mick, the duty news editor, not even looking up from his snack noodles.

  Eddie had hung the smartfabric screen that displayed his ITX link on a convenient bulkhead in the quiet bowels of Umeh Station. He finally had News Desk’s attention again, but it was an ephemeral thing, as fleeting as the bloody transmission window he clung to jealously, and it had to compete with a harassed editor’s noodles.

  “Try two hundred million.”

  The transmission delay added the illusion of a poignant lack of reaction. “Say again.”

  One, two three… “Two. Hundred. Million. And rising.”

  “Holy shit, Eddie, what are they? Insects? Who can kill on that kind of scale?”

  “Once upon a time, there was a place called Eqbas Vorhi. And the Eqbas were very clever aliens, and they had frigging amazing weapons, and they were ever so good at biological warfare, persistent pathogens—”

  “Okay, stow the sarcasm. And these are our tourists in a few years’ time.”

  “I love to hear a penny drop.”

  “Will we understand why they’re having this war?”

  “Because some of the isenj don’t want the Eqbas to clean up their ecology—it involves reducing the population.”

  “I can see how that might not be as popular as recycling.”

  An awful impulse from the demon that sat on one shoulder tempted him to use the footage of Ade dispatching the dying isenj; the angel on the other one reminded him there were things his audience wouldn’t ever understand, and didn’t need to know.

  “Three minute piece, Mick?”

  “Two, max.”

  “Can you get me a line to a green politico called Helen Marchant?” The devil had switched topics and caught him off guard. “I want to do some real journalism. Not just local color.”

  “Steady, Eddie. Don’t burn out.”

  “See what you can do. I’ve got questions for her that none of your hobby-hacks can manage.”

  “Such as?”

  “I remember what she got up to a century or so ago, before they froze her down.” Eddie suddenly found himself surrendering to the impulse that made ordinary people rant impotently at news screens that couldn’t hear them. Shan’s cover was partially blown: Marchant knew she was alive, but she didn’t know how. “What do you use for researchers these days?”

  “You’re gagging to drop a bombshell on me.”

  “She was a terrorist.”

  “You’re a hundred and fifty trillion miles away from the lawsuit, so you’ll forgive me if I ask you to stand that up.”

  Eddie had no idea why he did it, other than that he could, and because people had a right to know exactly who was urging them to action in political life.

  “She’s the sister of Eugenie Perault, who was FEU foreign secretary when I left Earth in 2299. You know the name Shan Frankland. She was the anti-terrorism unit officer in command of Operation Green Rage. Marchant was a green terrorist—arson, explosives, the whole shebang.”

  “Shame that Frankland isn’t alive to stand that up.”

  The thin ice beneath Eddie cracked but didn’t break. The impulse to flourish the final piece in the puzzle and show the true picture was almost overwhelming—impartial, evidential, cold reality. His duty. He overwhelmed it anyway. His relationship with truth-at-any-cost had become more complex as he crossed back and forth between the worlds of human and wess’har.

  “I’d still like to interview Marchant.”

  “Okay. I’ll get one of the researchers to line her up for an ITX window when we can.”

  “I’m obliged, M’Lud.” Only months ago, a conversation like this had been monitored by FEU Intelligence, subject to sudden interdiction and a race to transmit before e-junctions flew across networks to silence them. The urgency seemed to have passed. “No more censor trouble from Brussels?”

  “Nah. Too late. The shit hit the fan and they can’t get it all back in the bucket now.” Mick slurped up a whole noodle in one breath with a smack of his lips. “But it’s nice that they still boost the audience stats. Hi, guys.”

  “Hey, I might have new aliens to show you, too.” It was always, always stupid to tell a news editor what you might have lined up, because they all had a genetic cognitive malfunction that heard might, sometime as will definitely, and right away. Eddie would regret that, he knew. “Skavu.”

  “Is this something I need to tag for Natural History and Wildlife, or International?”

  “Dunno. But they have spaceships.”

  “Do we have them on file?”

  “No. The Eqbas have drafted foreign troops.” Ah. He’d just dumped the discovery of a new alien race on News Desk. He was just getting too blasé about biodiversity. “Got work to do on that.”

  Eddie braced for a bollocking. But Mick didn’t react. “I don’t think viewers can keep up with this bloody zoo.”

  So Eddie wasn’t the only one suffering from alien overload. “I’ll save it for la
ter, then.”

  He grabbed the hiatus gratefully and logged off to hunt coffee or what passed for it in the short-supply days leading up to an evacuation.

  “Up top,” on the ground-level of Umeh Station. It now felt as if time had rewound, and the place looked as if it was at the stage of part completion it had reached when he first saw it, not long after Actaeon had arrived in the system with a closed habitat intended for Bezer’ej. The station hadn’t been welcome on Bezer’ej, but the isenj had wanted an alliance with humans so badly that they made room for its construction here. He’d always wondered what happened to the isenj who’d been displaced by the construction.

  The place was a monument to bad decisions; the isenj had picked the wrong ally, and humans had picked the wrong fight. Actaeon—Barry Yung, Malcolm Okurt, all the FEU navy officers he’d known and liked, all dead. That galled him. They’d died because someone in the FEU had sent Actaeon to the wrong place at the wrong time to do the wrong thing. Eddie was reminded with brilliant clarity that it was his holy calling to pursue politicians for buying personal power with the lives of ordinary men and women.

  “You bet,” he said aloud, and wandered the plaza.

  The trappings of home comfort—images from home, plants, fabrics—were all disappearing and gradually exposing the bare bones of a closed world that held Earth within in it and kept an alien galaxy at bay. He hoped the marines had secured their stash of plants and other “rabbit” they’d pilfered to ease the food situation back on Wess’ej, not that he rated anyone’s chances of nicking something from a bunch of Booties. As he ambled around, bee cam drifting lazily on his right wing, he noted what bounty was still hanging around and not nailed down. He wasn’t above a little alternative procurement himself.

  Maybe Mick would set up a conference call with Marchant tomorrow. She could call for military action against the logging nations as much as she wanted, as long as she stood on the front line to take a bullet. He was okay with that. Maybe she’d even answer him if he asked how many people she’d killed in her eco-terror days, and how.

  He realized what he’d be doing to Shan, too, and wondered if this was a line—professionally or morally—that he could walk and know exactly where he was, and why he ventured there. Around him, the milling bodies in orange and navy blue and gray were a temporary blur while his mind was on matters that were far less clear-cut than deadlines. Lack of time was a good thing: focusing, clarifying, stripping away, getting to the heart of who you were. The more time he had to think, the less he knew himself. He wondered how Shan would cope with apparently infinite time now to second-guess herself. She was one of a handful of people he’d ever known who’d spend the time doing it.

  Then he was aware of a break in the blurred crowd.

  Giyadas was holding court, surrounded by a small group of utterly bemused civilian contractors and a few ratings from Actaeon. Eddie’s first thought was what the hell was she doing here, and what was Nevyan thinking to let a tiny child out on her own. He’d thought that about her wandering the alleys of F’nar, too, but wess’har weren’t humans, and they never harmed each other as adults, let alone kids.

  But this was a human tribe, a dangerous foreign land, and his paternal instincts welled up out of nowhere.

  “What are you doing out, doll?” He pushed through the crowd in an I’m-just-being-careless-not-aggressive way that parted bodies. “Where’s your mother?”

  “She argues,” said Giyadas. “She and Shan and Esganikan and Minister Rit.”

  She looked up at him with those extraordinary yellow gems of eyes, and he saw not an exotic and astonishing alien but a little girl he doted on, and who he’d protect with his life like any father would. The intensity of it reminded him what he didn’t have to protect.

  Eddie squatted down to bring himself to eye-level with her. The dome crew were still standing around, watching her with utter fascination. They rarely saw wess’har, and never a juvenile one who spoke eloquent English with Eddie’s accent and a fluting double-tone.

  “Arguing, doll? About what?”

  “The bioweapons. Casualties.”

  Eddie wondered who was losing their nerve. Maybe Esganikan wanted to purge the lot of them. Maybe Rit did. He held out his hand to Giyadas and she took it, still with that baffled cocking of the head, because only humans seemed to hold kids’ hands. He led her away from her dumbstruck audience.

  “Come on, doll,” he said. Let’s go and find them.”

  One of the Actaeon crew grinned at her. “She’s amazing,” he said.

  Eddie paused. “I hope you didn’t say anything daft to her. She’ll be matriarch of F’nar one day, with her own army. She might blow your home town off the map.”

  “Only if it’s Reading,” Giyadas said. “Shan says Reading is a shithole, and needs nuking.”

  At some point, Giyadas might have discovered sly humor. Eddie would never know. She cocked her head and trotted a little way ahead of him, nearly dragging his arm out of his socket because even a little wess’har was a fearsome physical reality for a soft human, and even young females, little matriarchs to be, were used to having males trailing behind them.

  Eddie knew his place, and fell in obediently.

  Umeh Station, service perimeter

  “You wanted to meet the Skavu command,” said Esganikan. “Now is a good time.”

  Ade followed her across the apron of concrete, Qureshi and Chahal either side of him. It wasn’t a good time, because the best time to have met them would have been when they deployed, so he could see what they were made of. The pathogen had done most of their work for them. He’d missed anything that might help him evaluate them as soldiers.

  “How far have they advanced into the Fringe, then, ma’am?” Ade asked. In front of him, a small ship, like an Eqbas vessel but a slightly darker bronze, sat on the apron. It was the classic cigar minus the nightclub lights. “We’re not exactly getting a lot of information here.”

  “You had other tasks,” Esganikan said, like a slap. “They’ve almost cut through to the coast in places.”

  “Much resistance?”

  “No. A great many bodies. It makes transit difficult.”

  Ade had to keep shifting gear to take it in. Bodies blocked roads. Qureshi puffed out her cheeks in a silent breath and mouthed shit at him.

  “Are there any survivors?”

  “Skavu patrols report pockets of isenj who appear to have a different genome.” Esganikan stopped short of the ship and a hatch formed in the side. Ade was almost too distracted by what might emerge and he had to concentrate on what she was saying, because Esganikan didn’t take kindly to repeating herself. “We estimate five percent survival rate.”

  Ade’s lips began to form the question what about them and then a figure stepped out of the hatch and silenced him.

  “Yeah, they do look like iguanas,” Qureshi said.

  A ramp in the port bulkhead was disgorging a squad of tall bipedal creatures with a slash for a mouth and small eyes set in folds of dark gray skin. Ade still couldn’t see the iguana resemblance, apart from the loose skin at the throat. They wore loose coveralls in a dull sage green strung with webbing. What he thought was a flap of tissue across their tapered faces turned out to be a breather mask like the kind humans needed on Umeh.

  Esganikan simply held up her hand and the squad came to a halt and stood waiting. Ade noted that they had sidearms like Esganikan’s—a metal oval with fingergrips—and two long instruments across their backs, one almost certainly a flat sword.

  Ade had only ever seen a sword once, a ceremonial one at a fancy Corps dinner, and the owner wasn’t heading into the sergeants’ mess. He groped for common ground to evaluate them.

  “Seals,” Ade muttered at Qureshi. “With wrinkles.”

  “Turtle,” said Chahal.

  It was a shame Shan has missed them. So had Eddie, but Ade decided now wasn’t the time to grab a few shots for him.

  They didn’t look much like fanatic
al shock troops. That was the trouble with matching aliens to animals; the associations were all wrong, and deceptively harmless. Ten thousand of these had just helped kill 95 percent of a country’s population, millions upon millions, and even with a replicating pathogen like the Eqbas could engineer mopping up most, they had still held a line to defend Jejeno for the first day while the pathogen was taking effect. Ade didn’t have reports, but he knew how many millions of isenj there had been south of him, and they hadn’t advanced further.

  Skavu didn’t look hard. He had a feeling that wasn’t any guide to their performance.

  “They don’t work well with other troops, and I decided to keep them separate from you and the wess’har,” Esganikan said slowly, as if Ade didn’t quite get it. “They’re all male for most practical intents and purposes, but the species is in fact hermaphroditic. They are rigidly disciplined and intolerant of deviation. Are you absolutely sure you want to go on a patrol with them?”

  “I like to know who’s in my neighborhood, ma’am.” Well, he’d done joint ops with worse. They needed to know a bit about him, too, for their own safety. “Have you told them exactly what c’naatat is?”

  Esganikan cocked her head, plume bobbing, and wandered slowly forward, hands clasped in what looked like prayer but was just a casually comfortable position for wess’har of either world.

  “I have,” she said. “Don’t worry. They don’t covet it, I can assure you. They’re troubled by c’naatat.” She indicated one soldier standing in the middle of the five-man group. “Skavi, come here.”

  He approached as if she was going to give him a good thrashing, head slightly lowered, but Esganikan had that effect on people.

  “Kiir, Fourth To Die,” he said. His voice seemed out of sync with his mouth movement, and it took a moment for Ade to realize that the voice was a transcast; he looked for the receiver and eventually spotted a thin white metal band around the collar of Kiir’s blouson that vibrated almost imperceptibly when he spoke. “Esganikan Gai, this is our privilege.” He seemed more interested in her than in acknowledging Ade. “We will do for this terrible world what you did for us.”