Ally

  “Six hundred thousand years,” he said.

  “Shit,” said Eddie. The footage didn’t do it justice. The bee cam couldn’t record boggling time scales or this is all from memory, folks or any of the things that made this a feat of astonishing, unimaginable, utterly alien recall.

  A bizarre landscape unfolded beneath a canopy of purple cups and spheres. A dark shape gripped the primordial rhubarb trunks with smaller, lighter creatures clinging to it. Growths that looked like vines snaked up some of the trunks and disappeared into the canopy where patches of blue sky contrasted sharply with the amethyst cups.

  “Does she miss this?” said Eddie. “Does she want to see all this back again?”

  The ussissi and the isenj chattered. “She says it would be nice but as she has it stored in her memory, it isn’t necessary.” Ralassi looked at the image and blinked slowly. Eddie almost expected him to slump to the ground in slow motion and doze like a meerkat, but the interpreter was just considering the art. “They are very attached to their natural world, you know. That’s why you see the images on the buildings and the road surfaces. They revere it.”

  “But not enough to preserve it, eh? They love the idea but the reality can go hang.”

  “You wish me to express that to Helol Chep?”

  “That would be rather rude, wouldn’t it?”

  “Indeed.” Ralassi didn’t seem as quick to snap at him as the female ussissi. He wasn’t such good company, either. Eddie decided he had a weakness for awkward customers. “And Serrimissani tells me there are many kinds of human who behave the same way, loving the abstract ideal while abusing and destroying the living object.”

  “If you say cuddly animal toy to me, I’ll scream.”

  “Why?”

  “Not literally.” Jesus, haven’t I learned by now? “Just that the wess’har say that to me too.”

  “I say it,” Aras interrupted. “Pandas—why you kept the toy and let the real animal become extinct.”

  “Okay, what he said. And let’s not get started on cuddly rabbits.”

  “If I knew what rabbits were, I would avoid mentioning them.” It was hard to tell if Ralassi was being sarcastic or literal. “But I understand the irony of loving what you have destroyed.”

  “And destroying what you love,” said Aras, offering no explanation. Eddie decided not to pursue it.

  Chep completed her illustration and tottered backwards to consider it. Eddie gazed on a landscape that hadn’t been seen for more than half a million years.

  “Now ask her for the archive from Asht,” said Aras. “From Bezer’ej.”

  Ralassi hesitated, and Eddie wondered if it was a sign that Aras was pushing his luck. “Come on, Ralassi. Let’s get it over with.”

  “Very well.”

  What could they possibly have that Aras could want, that he didn’t already have in his own memory? Chep went to a shelf and pulled out a wad of drawing sheets and laid them on the desk, carefully arranged in a sequence. Eddie automatically leaned over to look, but Aras simply pushed him aside, gently but firmly enough to leave Eddie in no doubt that this was not his business.

  The images were equally photorealist scenes of a town in a recognizably isenj style, but not like Jejeno. This was a mass of low-rise, wider streets. Eddie expected a burst of citrus scent from Aras, but he simply looked at the images one by one, head cocked on one side, and stood in contemplation with one gloved hand braced on the desk.

  “Interesting,” said Aras.

  Of course: Aras had been flying a fighter on Bezer’ej, seeing only an aerial view.

  “Never seen it from the ground level, have you?”

  As soon as he said it, Eddie realized how crass that sounded, even if wess’har were utterly tactless themselves and wouldn’t have noticed.

  “Oh, I have,” Aras said, apparently unconcerned. His tone was completely casual. “I have the memories of a survivor of Mjat, remember. I know what it looks like from street level, at the height of the bombing, balls of flame rolling down the street. It’s very vivid, as is the hatred he had for me, which he later expressed physically as my captor.”

  Eddie swallowed hard. Helol Chep said nothing. If she had responded, he wasn’t sure if Ralassi would have passed on her sentiments anyway. No: he would. Only humans, and to a lesser extent isenj, pulled their punches out here. Eddie tried hard not to substitute human equivalents in this indirect conversation between destroyer and destroyed, and knew things he didn’t feel: that Aras, on Earth, would also be a war criminal, and yet Eddie knew he was a compassionate being and someone he trusted, respected, and truly cared for.

  Shan must have been through that ambiguity and conflict too. She’d come down firmly on Aras’s side from the start. Ade also saw him with the acceptance of a man who had to make decisions the average civilian never faced. If Eddie had wanted a few more hard and fast lines to help him navigate through his own maze of ethics about his influence as a journalist here, he hadn’t found any. He’d even lost a few.

  “Better be getting back,” said Eddie. “Shan will be wondering where we are.”

  “I’ve seen all I want to see,” said Aras.

  He inclined his head to Chep with unexpected politeness—if the isenj understood that at all—and walked. Eddie stole a moment and grabbed Ralassi by the beaded belt slung across one shoulder.

  “I want to ask Chep a question.”

  “Very well.”

  “Ask her what she thinks now that she’s met the Beast of Mjat.”

  Ussissi had no human expression, but Eddie could have sworn the look on Ralassi’s face said cheap hack.

  “I shall.” He exchanged chittering sounds and Eddie waited for some explosion of ancient racial hatred. “She says she finds it hard to understand how he can walk among isenj and not try to kill more of them.”

  “Ask her if she hates him.”

  “She says she doesn’t know, and that troubles her.”

  “Does she hate wess’har generally?”

  “She fears them now they’ve come to Umeh. She wants to know if Aras has been sent to finish the extermination he started, using the Skavu.”

  Ouch. “Tell her he only came here to meet isenj and understand them.” It wasn’t a total lie. “He’s not like that.”

  Chep listened patiently to Ralassi but made no reply. Then she turned back to her records and began stacking them, returning her world of memories to normal. She’d have her work cut out remembering a single brick of Jejeno if Esganikan got down to business. She was the one most likely to finish the job started on Bezer’ej.

  The silence finally weighed too heavily. “Thank her for me,” said Eddie. “That was very helpful.”

  He went to catch up with Aras, wondering how many excuses he might have made for Pol Pot, and yet still unable to see Aras—a man who rescued drowning insects, a man who gave rats the same funeral rites as he would have given Shan, a man who enjoyed dull domesticity and doted on his wife—as any kind of beast at all.

  Umeh Station, Jejeno

  Ade walked through the airlock doors of Umeh Station and handed a sword to Shan, hilt first.

  “You might as well make the most of being court-martialed and binned, that’s what I say.” He didn’t do his usual please-don’t-be-angry grin. “I’ve ballsed it up. Sorry, Boss.”

  Shan looked down the blade and tried not to think about what an edge like that did. She’d managed to shake her dread of what might lie behind mundane doors, but sharp objects of any kind still conjured up the inventive variety of violence that she’d seen daily as a police officer. This blade had sliced Ade’s forearm muscles to the bone. Someone would pay for that.

  “I’m proud of you,” she said quietly. “Don’t you ever think I’m not.”

  He rummaged in his breast pocket and handed her a rectangle of white plastic: Eddie’s backup cam.

  “They’re bastards,” he said quietly. “The isenj don’t deserve that.”

  But he’d put a dying
isenj out of its misery. Ade had his inexplicable lines, just like her. “You told him you’d kill him?”

  “Yes, Boss.”

  “That’s my boy.”

  “I know it’s daft to get in a ruck over shooting a few isenj when we’ve just killed millions, but I did.”

  Shan handed back the sword. It looked nobly martial in Ade’s grasp, but she just looked like a psycho with it. Besides, there was always the chance she might use it. Crew and contractors stared at Ade, because news traveled fast.

  “Thank God there’s only ten thousand Skavu,” she said. “I still haven’t met one.”

  “You will.”

  “This footage is going to seriously piss me off, isn’t it?”

  “Oh yeah.” Ade looked longingly past her. “I need a pee, and a coffee, in that order.”

  “You sure you’re okay?” She steered him towards the heads. “Just tell me.”

  “No, Boss, I haven’t infected anyone else. I checked.”

  “I really was just asking if you were all right.”

  “I’m fine. It wasn’t a stroll in vacuum.” He handed her the sword again and opened the door to the lavatory. “You can hold that, or hold something else for me.”

  “You’re not okay, are you?”

  “I am. It was just very…cathartic. That’s the right word, isn’t it? Flushes out all kinds of crap.”

  Ade’s awkwardness was utterly disarming. “Spot on,” she said. “You can tell me all about it.”

  Shan waited outside the door, not quite knowing how to look relaxed with a meter-long sword. She ended up leaning on its hilt like a cane. Across the sea of human heads in the dome’s central plaza, she saw a bright copper-red plume advancing like a galleon and just the top of a tufted gold mane. Esganikan and Nevyan were heading her way, and Shan braced for another round of loss of temper containment. Ade came out of the lavatory adjusting his pants, and let out a sigh.

  “’S’okay, Boss, I’ll take what’s coming.”

  “No, I’m dealing.”

  Nevyan reached her a few paces ahead of Esganikan, exuding acid. Nev was pissed off. She was reining it in, not a very wess’har thing to do with emotion unless you were a dominant matriarch who didn’t want to get in a ruck with another isan and end up spraying jask all over the place—and inheriting a task force. Good call, Nev. The stakes were high.

  “Ade says the Skavu weren’t overjoyed to work with him.” Shan found her arms had folded across her chest of their own accord. “I hope we’re not going to have any trouble with them.”

  “They’ve never encountered c’naatat before and they find it troubling,” Esganikan said.

  “No shit,” said Shan. “It troubles us all, matey.”

  Ade interrupted deferentially. “The word they used was dangerous.”

  Nevyan lined up right on cue. “I need to know my neighbors can be trusted.”

  “It’s temporary,” said Esganikan. “They won’t bother you.”

  Nevyan didn’t back down. “They’ll be on Umeh for decades. You know that.”

  “Do they have to do this death-squad thing?” asked Shan. First things first: she took out the cam and held it up like a trump card. “I want to go and watch this footage somewhere quiet. I’d like you to see it too.”

  Finding somewhere quiet in Umeh Station these days was a challenge, but Shan walked into Cargill’s office and put on her you-really-want-to help-me-with-my-enquiries look, patience frayed but not worn out. Cargill glanced up from the inventories on her desk and looked resigned.

  “You do need my office, don’t you?” It took a harassed officer to know one. Cargill looked past Shan at Ade. “Trust Royal to play the hero.”

  “He shot the isenj anyway,” said Ade. “I didn’t save it. And I don’t know what I’d have been saving it for, anyway.”

  In the end, Cargill stayed and they watched the recording in grim silence. Shan was used to seeing dead bodies and pretty well every perversion and act of violence on the statute books, but it was still unpleasant, with the added twist of seeing the sword slice into Ade’s arm from a horribly close angle. Everyone was quiet for a few moments afterwards. Cargill left.

  “So, is that boyish high spirits, Commander?” Shan asked. “I know we’ve got body count of a few hundred million on our consciences already, and I’m the first to say that dead’s dead, but I want to be sure we haven’t imported a new problem.”

  Esganikan did some head tilting. “The Skavu are the aftermath of the war. It means the newly awake. Their conversion has been fanatical.”

  “Ah, the road to Damascus,” said Shan. “I know it well. Straight on, and turn right to Hell in a handbasket. Great. Fucking eco-jihad.”

  “This is for Umeh. You don’t think they need rigorous adjustment here?”

  “I don’t know what they need, except to stay on their poxy planet and leave Wess’ej and Bezer’ej alone.”

  “The Skavu will ensure that, believe me.”

  “You said they weren’t colonial, so they’ll have to weed out every isenj who doesn’t believe in solar power and reusing envelopes before they can walk away and leave them to it.”

  “Is that an unreasonable solution?”

  “I don’t know. I would like to see the Skavu, though.”

  “Do you still plan to accommodate them on Bezer’ej?” Nevyan asked.

  “They need a base, and Umeh will be unsuitable for large numbers of them.”

  “Then,” said Nevyan, “you’ll have to warn them of the presence of c’naatat contamination. What will they do then?”

  Esganikan paused, looking at Ade. Shan wondered what she was mulling over. “I think they will obey my orders,” she said. “So I will be explicit about where they can venture.”

  “Ma’am,” said Ade, “a technical point. The former Eqbas ships that they fly. They’re old, but that still makes them a hell of a lot punchier than the fleet that Wess’ej can assemble. I’m a bit nervous about…well, introducing a new superpower to the Cavanagh system.”

  “There are ten thousand troops with recirculated Eqbas vessels and equipment. How is that a superpower?”

  “Because as far as their weapons and fleet are concerned, they are, aren’t they?” Ade was doing his simple-soldier routine. The tell was the little frown that creased the skin horizontally across the bridge of his nose. “They could cream Wess’ej if they wanted to. The kit we’ve got in F’nar might be on a nanite repair cycle, but the basic design template is ten thousand years old. And that capability gap scares me.”

  “Superpowers, as you call them, want power. Skavu don’t.”

  “I don’t think the isenj noticed the difference, actually, ma’am.”

  Shan had to bite the inside of her cheek. Ade Bennett, you’re perfect. She was so damn proud of him.

  “You’d better be able to guarantee their behavior, then,” Shan said. “Because you’ve dumped a well-armed army of psychopaths on us, and if they get out of hand, we might be the ones rotting in the streets.”

  “I know they’re extreme,” Esganikan said quietly. “My commanding officer and a third of my crewmates were butchered by them in the adjustment war, and you’ve seen their blades at close quarters. They were the only option I was given for Umeh. I made a mistake by agreeing to help the isenj, and I should have found another way to confine them and let them carry on their path of self-destruction…but I didn’t.”

  Shan tried not to lose sight of the 200 million isenj dead. It wasn’t that she liked isenj, but if she failed to find that shocking at any time, she was lost.

  “Guarantee they’ll leave the Cavanagh system as soon as Umeh is in a secure state,” she said.

  “That’s the agreement anyway.”

  “I mean by force—your force—if need be. Because I’m not sure we have the assets to make sure they go.”

  “I’ll have to speak to Surang about that,” said Esganikan. “I may still be on Earth when that point is reached.”

 
“I want to talk to the Skavu command anyway,” Nevyan said. “So that we understand each other exactly.”

  Esganikan did a quick head-jiggle of annoyance. “I’ll arrange a meeting, but remember that their culture is not one of compromise and consensus. It may not achieve results.”

  “Maybe not,” said Nevyan, “but I’ll know more about them.”

  Esganikan left. Shan now liked the fact that wess’har just got up and left a room when they were done with talking, with no attempt at valedictory bullshit. The three of them sat in silence for a few minutes.

  “They’re bad news,” Ade said. “Sorry that’s not a very tactical assessment, but I know shit on a collision course with the fan when I see it.”

  “They did restore their own ecology, though.” Nevyan stood up and smoothed her dhren, which never needed smoothing. It was her nervous tic when agitated. “The archive that Serrimissani found for me is impressive. As long as they don’t carry out genocide, the planet they take on benefits greatly.”

  Ade actually laughed. He didn’t sound amused, poor sod, but nearing the end of his tether. She put her hand on his and he gripped it hard. “Genocide. It’s one of those things you just have to keep an eye on.”

  At least the evacuation had been a good precaution. In a week, Umeh Station would be empty. Its crew would miss its comforts on that miserable cold dog-turd of an island, Mar’an’cas, but it was better than living next door to the Skavu.

  “Come on,” said Shan. “Let’s see what else we can liberate from this station.”

  She eased herself out of the seat using the Skavu sword as a cane. It actually wasn’t that much fun as a novelty: she had a random fleeting thought about who else it had been used on. There was no telling its age. It might even have killed one of Esganikan’s comrades.

  “Want me to take that, Boss?” Ade asked.

  He took it out of her hand with slow care. He looked like he could handle a sword.

  He also looked as if, one day, he might want to use it.

  Chad Island, Bezer’ej

  Saib and the other male bezeri swaggered back up the shore of Chad in the late afternoon like a rowdy rugby team, flashing light and making a strange array of sounds that weren’t English but more like satisfied grumbling.