Ally

  “Commander Neville,” said Aras, glancing over his shoulder, head cocked on one side. “Why did you give c’naatat to the bezeri?”

  “Because it was their only hope of survival. Rayat must have told you that the survivors couldn’t breed.”

  “He did.” Aras caught his braid with one hand and centered it down his back, unselfconscious. “Perhaps it was the element of me in c’naatat that drove you to do such a foolish thing. My mission to protect the bezeri, and my inability to resist using c’naatat to save a life that mattered to me more than the balance of planets.”

  He said it as if it was just a speculative thought. It probably was: wess’har, according to Shan, weren’t spiteful or devious. They either killed you or they didn’t. They spoke their minds, unfiltered and unedited.

  But motives didn’t matter to them either, and the idea still punched Lindsay in the face, a fresh pain. Her mind and her motives were not her own. She had no way of knowing if it was her idea or an echo of Aras in her genetic memory that made her take that final step of infecting one bezeri.

  Was that him?

  She wondered how much longer she could hang on to the core of Commander Lindsay Neville, naval officer, bereaved mother, pilot, raised in a dale that the Vikings once invaded. No sense of self still mattered. Loss of that was real death.

  Aras walked on and she followed him automatically. Saib went to follow too, but Lindsay turned and shoved him as hard as she could, bezeri-style.

  “No, you stay where you are, Saib. You leave this to me.”

  “But I am the patriarch.”

  “And I’m the boss when it comes to dealing with things you don’t understand.” Maybe he did understand, though. If Shan’s memories and impulses were in him, Aras’s might surface too. “Just stay clear of him.”

  She trailed a few paces behind Aras, enough to maintain an appearance of being on hand to answer questions rather than stalking him. It reminded her of following a captain through her ship during a dreaded inspection. The sense of impending doom for the discovery of something neglected was as strong as ever.

  “Tell me about the Skavu,” she said. “I’m guessing that you regard them as a threat.”

  “I do. They reacted very badly when they realized what c’naatat does.”

  “Have they met Shan?”

  “Yes. Quite emphatically.”

  “Ah, I get it. Our problem is your problem. They don’t just think we’re a risk, they think you are as well.”

  Aras never seemed to be troubled by comments that would put a human on the defensive. “Yes. They do.”

  “It occurs to me that you might be looking for an ally, then. They can die. We can’t.”

  “We.”

  “Don’t deny it.”

  “I hadn’t considered it. I have now.”

  Suddenly Lindsay felt a lot better about life; she understood. Aras lapsed back into silence and she let him set the pace, following him patiently while he inspected the ground they’d cleared and the structures they’d built. He shielded his eyes against the sun as he looked up into the trees.

  “They were always very skilled architects,” he said. “And now they climb trees.”

  “They glide, too.”

  Aras did that instant freeze, more still than a human could ever be, but it was gone in a moment. He examined plants and peered in the undergrowth, pausing from time to time to cock his head and stare at something. He froze, riveted by something unknown, for a full five seconds at one point. But it was the tree nests that kept drawing his eye.

  “I find it interesting that they embrace so much change when many of their ideas are so utterly fixed.”

  Lindsay smiled, but he probably couldn’t tell. “Sounds like humans.”

  “You went back to Constantine, then.”

  “Rayat’s obviously been very communicative.”

  “I saw David’s grave, actually. You took some of the glass.”

  Ah. The memory felt cushioned now, not quite as raw, more a flat dull ache. “Yes. Do you understand human grief?”

  “You think we don’t feel it? Shan may be back from the dead, but I lost the most precious thing in my existence, and I had no idea how to face the next moment in each day without her.”

  It was as good a description of grief as any. “How’s the detachment?”

  “Your marines are well. Hungry much of the time, bitter about being dismissed, anxious about their future on Earth. But they find things to be happy about, and they stay busy. They have an end in sight.”

  Lindsay understood that perfectly. Goals kept her going and erased all distraction, all unhappiness. This was as close to friendly conversation as she’d ever come with Aras. They were in the wetland north of the settlement now, still within sight of the nests and huts but looking out onto levels dotted with islands of vegetation and hills rising in the distance. Aras skirted the edges, apparently able to see the boggier ground.

  Then he jerked his head up. “Listen.”

  She heard it now. The noise had become so much a part of the backdrop of her world that she hadn’t noticed it, but there it was: the sporadic splashing of something in the bog.

  She hoped, for once, that it was a sheven: but it wasn’t. As she picked her way across the saturated ground, she moved clear of bushlike vegetation clinging to a solid patch and saw Pili plunging into the bog, easing herself out again and diving back in.

  Aras grabbed her arm. “Be careful. You can’t have forgotten there are sheven on these islands.”

  Pili pulled out of the bog with a loud liquid slop and shook herself, sending mud and scraps of vegetation flying. Then she spotted Lindsay. “Leenz!” she called. “Who is that?”

  Oh God. Pili was hunting. No sheven had been found for a while, but she wasn’t giving up.

  “The wess’har who looked after you all these years,” Lindsay called back. Shut up, Pili, shut up… “It’s Aras. Go back to the camp. Saib will explain.”

  “I found nothing. No sheven. They’re gone.”

  “It’s okay. Go home.”

  Pili took it as a rebuke. “I only look for them. I promise not to eat this time.”

  However much her body had changed, Lindsay could still feel her stomach churn. Pili splashed onto more solid ground and made her way out of the bog, pausing to look at Aras before making a loud thwap of air and bounding kangaroo-style towards the settlement, jinking between bushes.

  Aras hung his head for a moment. It was an incongruously human gesture. “So this is why you don’t fear the sheven any longer.”

  “I’m sorry, Aras.”

  “The bezeri said they were gone.”

  What could she say? Could you even lie to a wess’har, who seemed to see every twitch of muscle, every dilating vessel, every change of temperature? Yeah, the bezeri reverted right back to type and wiped out the native sheven here. They didn’t learn a damn thing, Aras. You’re right to blame them.

  “They found they could hunt them,” Lindsay said at last. “Bezeri are compulsive hunters.”

  “I know that now. And sheven are the top of the food chain in the wetlands. They’re predators. No natural enemies, until now.”

  “I’ve stopped them, Aras.”

  “What about the other islands? Clare, for instance?” He was getting angry now and she could see it in his human body language of tensed muscles and braced shoulders. She could also smell something that warned her at a primeval level, some scrap of wess’har in her that recognized his sharp acid scent as a warning. “You have to confine them. How many sheven are left? No, you would have no idea. You don’t have the means to monitor them.”

  Aras turned on his heel and headed back to the settlement with alarming speed, zigzagging from one patch of firm ground to the next, then almost breaking into a run when he hit hard earth. Lindsay chased after him. He was bent on retribution: she had to stop him. “Aras!” she yelled. “Aras, don’t do this.”

  She couldn’t match his pace. He wa
s nearly two meters tall, with a prodigious stride, and she couldn’t keep up with him. He reached the settlement, but instead of going into the clearing and wreaking the havoc she feared, he carried straight on.

  He was heading for the shore.

  “Aras!”

  He slowed and then stopped to turn around. “This is your duty now, Lindsay Neville. You created them. Do you want to resolve this yourself, or do you want to leave it to me? Or the Skavu?”

  “What’s to resolve? Are you asking me to kill them? I can’t. I don’t have the means. Even if I wanted to.”

  He raised his hand and stabbed his forefinger at her in a gesture of accusation that was pure Ade Bennett. “That,” he said, “was something that you should have thought about before you infected them.”

  She stood exhausted by realization. Aras disappeared into the distance, no doubt rushing back to Shan to tell her she was right—that Lindsay Neville was a useless and dangerous idiot, just as she always said.

  Aras had looked like an ally. Now he’d almost certainly turned into an enemy. He had a weapon, though, and he knew exactly what it took to kill c’naatat, so either he had something else in mind or the next visit would be from these Skavu.

  We can retreat to the sea.

  It’s only because of me that the bezeri are on land anyway.

  And maybe I can salvage something.

  She ran into the clearing at the center of the settlement. “Keet, Saib, get the others back from Clare. Now.”

  “Things did not go well,” Saib observed.

  “No, and they’ll go a lot worse if you don’t get everyone back here now. No more hunting. No more killing sheven, anyway. You heard me—go.”

  Saib was a patriarch, used to giving orders, not taking them. He stood his ground for several long moments and then made an imperious flick of a tentacle at Keet, sending him on his mission.

  “We should have stayed in the sea.”

  Lindsay wondered if he’d been right all along.

  Outside the Temporary City, Bezerej: Esganikan Gai’s cabin

  “I thought you might want to see this,” said Eddie Michallat. “The Australian premier is taking some flak about the gene bank.”

  Eddie’s face had lost something of its animation. Esganikan couldn’t pin it down, but the image in the bulkhead was a different Eddie, a man with some of the light gone out of him. She had no other way of describing it; there was a light in Rayat, and Shan, and even in the marines, but Eddie’s had vanished. He was tired, perhaps, and he’d lost a source of stories. Earth didn’t care about Umeh now the humans had been evacuated. Nobody cared how many isenj died.

  “I haven’t spoken to him recently,” she said.

  “Here you go.” Eddie looked down, his hands working outside the frame, and a text panel appeared to one side of his image. “That’s the BBChan 547 summary of what he’s been saying to the media. If it helps, I can put you in touch with the BBChan bureau in Kamberra.”

  “Why?”

  “He might give you a perspective that the government won’t.”

  “I meant why can’t you tell me what’s going on.” Eddie guarded his contacts carefully. Esganikan knew this was his sole source of motivation, the one thing that mattered to him: he was the only journalist here, and, as humans prized the control of information, that gave him status and power. “But if you insist I speak to this bureau, then I will. I thought you wanted to keep this contact to yourself.”

  Eddie looked down for a second and licked his lips quickly, a barely perceptible flick of the tongue. “I’m flattered that you trust me.” His voice had changed subtly, a different tone to one he used with the marines or the voice he adopted for his reports. This was altogether more breathy, as if he was talking to himself. “I’m glad someone does.”

  “I would like to know what’s happening in Australia that the premier isn’t telling me. Anything that would indicate that his country—or his region generally—isn’t fully in support of his invitation, or might resist us.”

  Eddie’s eyes widened slightly and he became more alert again. “I’ll assemble a digest for you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Might I talk to you about your planning for the Earth mission?”

  “I’m awaiting Shan and Nevyan at the moment.”

  “Okay.” Eddie nodded to himself, listening to some inner voice. She could see it on his face. “Later, then.”

  Esganikan shut the link. She was used to Eddie now, and knew his way of filtering and changing information. She also wanted his skills. When he went back to Earth, he’d be ordinary again, and he would want to keep what had made him special; his alien contacts. And he knew how to do something that she couldn’t: he could make humans listen and shape how they thought, all with words. Shan might have been best at advising on how to deal with humans, but Eddie could make them want to listen.

  There was no point using military resources if a man’s words could do the same job. Esganikan knelt pondering the extraordinary power of a willingly shared illusion, her cabin’s bulkheads set to opaque, until the hatch opened and Aitassi peered through.

  “Nevyan is here, Commander. With Shan Frankland.”

  Esganikan could smell the jask from here. They were coming to lay down the law, as Eddie put it. She felt annoyance and was instantly ready.

  “Are the Skavu confined to their camp?”

  “I ensured that they were,” said Aitassi. “The patrols back from Umeh are sufficiently tired not to want to argue environmental policy with your visitors.”

  Esganikan could guess what Nevyan wanted: reassurance that the Skavu would stay clear of Wess’ej, and Shan’s household. These Targassati were isolationist. They lost their nerve when the military support they begged for got its hands dirty. Esganikan turned, composed but ready, and faced them as they came into her cabin. Shan folded her arms and stood a little behind Nevyan, as if she was making sure her fists didn’t let her down again. Esganikan wondered if she’d always been prone to instant retribution or if her wess’har genes had made her more liable to attack. Nevyan’s daughter stood close at her mother’s side. Did the child get formal instruction? Wess’ej appeared to have no education system. Everything their ancestors had known on Eqbas Vorhi seemed to have been abandoned. They’d reverted to a more primitive age.

  “I realize we’re now troublesome guests,” Esganikan said. “And you seem to have a problem.”

  Nevyan was wearing the dhren, the white robe the F’nar matriarchs treated almost as a uniform. Esganikan’s lasting memory of her brief time in F’nar would be the isan’ve in white robes shot with faint and shifting colors set against the pearl wall of the city.

  “I have a treaty with Minister Rit that I can enforce,” said Nevyan. “It means you can remove the Skavu from Umeh.”

  “I knew you might want that,” Esganikan said wearily. “What are the terms?”

  “If isenj confine themselves to Umeh and Tasir Var, and drop their claim on Bezer’ej, Wess’ej will provide the delivery systems for the targeted pathogens, and if and when Minister Rit chooses to deploy them, our pilots will aid her. If you leave us with the universal pathogen, we’ll use that if the treaty doesn’t hold.”

  “You’ll end up wiping the planet clean of them. Was that all you wanted? I would have given you that anyway.”

  “No,” said Nevyan. “It means there’s no need for the Skavu to remain in this system. Wess’ej will provide the restoration support.”

  “You don’t have the technology on that scale.”

  “We restored this planet.”

  Shan said nothing. She simply stood there, watching Esganikan, and unfolded her arms to place a gloved hand on the child’s head. She seemed to take no chances with her parasite, even if it took body fluids to transmit it.

  “And you would put aside your principles that you would never attack the isenj on their home territory,” said Esganikan.

  “To see the Skavu gone, yes.”

>   “All to ensure they don’t turn on your c’naatat friends and the infected creatures here?” Esganikan had underestimated the bond between Shan and Nevyan, then. “This is a massive commitment for your world.”

  “The Skavu,” said Nevyan, “regard us as lacking their rigorous standards, and I fear that it’s only a matter of time before they would want to interfere with us once you were no longer here to control them.”

  Shan scratched her neck thoughtfully. “Judging by the reaction to me, your supposed grip on their discipline seemed less than absolute.”

  Esganikan could taste the jask at the back of her throat. It even seemed to be emanating in some small way from the little isanket. She felt less inclined to stand her ground—Wess’ej would be sorely stretched, she knew—but Nevyan seemed adamant she would resort to total destruction of the isenj if the treaty collapsed.

  Shan Frankland certainly would. She might have found warfare distasteful, an odd thing for such a violent individual, but her instant reaction to a threat was proven. Threat is now. Shan seemed to have taken that wess’har attitude to heart.

  It seemed sensible.

  Esganikan felt no further desire to argue: the outcome from this course of action was balance, so if the wess’har here could make it happen, she had no dispute with them. She felt herself relaxing and the taste of released jask in her mouth was oddly pleasant and reassuring.

  “So I’ll stand down the Skavu,” she said. “We’ll arrange a handover period between my crew on Umeh and yourselves. Is that all?”

  “I think so.”

  Shan looked slightly baffled. Humans—even her, even this chimera, this strange isan—had a habit of parting their lips when surprised. Perhaps they inhaled scent to assess the situation: perhaps they were frozen on the edge of a question that they couldn’t frame. And perhaps they were taken aback to see matters resolved quickly and without violence.