Shan didn’t blink. “Probably at the same time you were going to tell me you were pregnant.”
There was a silence. Lindsay didn’t fill it. Shan paused three beats for effect. I can still bowl ’em, she thought. “Let’s get one thing straight. We’ve got an unarmed ship, not enough personnel to play a game of soccer and basic popgun ordnance. They’ve got an army and they’re playing at home. There is no military solution.”
“You should still have discussed it with me.”
Shan almost found herself explaining that there was no hard evidence that the trace scan was the result of a war, and braked hard. “I don’t need a lecture on procedure from an officer with no personal discipline.” It probably revealed more about her than it did about Lindsay Neville. Enough had been said. “We will be doing things differently from now on.”
Lindsay’s voice cracked a little but her expression was set in neutral. “Bennett said nobody was hurt. Either we hit the craft or we didn’t. You don’t walk away from a direct hit.”
“And either they build to last or we aren’t the crack shots we think we are. Whatever, we’re lucky we’re not a smoking heap right now.” And at least Lindsay hadn’t expressed any curiosity about why the pilot was in one piece. She probably assumed he ejected. She didn’t ask. Shan would have. It was another small but significant difference in the way they saw the world. “I have to see him in the morning. We’re going to have talks, which probably means he’s going to tell me how things are going to be, and I’ll say, certainly, sir, whenever’s convenient for you.”
“At least we’re talking and not firing.”
“The alien—Aras—speaks English better than you or I do. He’s used to humans, but it’s clear we’re not the sort of humans he finds acceptable. Josh has told him why we’re here.”
“It’s probably not the best time to ask him for some latitude on taking samples, then.”
“I’m not even going to think about it. And get me the pillock who primed the defnet.”
“With respect, ma’am, it’s standard procedure in potentially hostile territory. And it was my call.”
“And I told you not to. I asked for the grid to be disabled, and you failed to follow…that—” She was going to say order, but stopped short. She had to stop this battle right here; it was one front too many to fight on. It was going to eat up her time. “Get me that marine.”
Lindsay turned away and mumbled something into her bioscreen. The glow from it was greenish white now, and the thought made Shan shudder. Nobody was ever going to grow one of those damn things in her, that was for sure. The more she saw of them the more they repelled her. She’d stay as she was made.
They waited. They said nothing and busied themselves with the contents of their pockets. A few minutes later, footsteps outside announced the arrival of Marine Jon Becken, a stocky blond kid with a scar across the bridge of his nose. Nobody had to be left with a scar these days. He probably thought it made him look hard. It did.
“What the hell were you thinking of, Becken?” Shan said quietly.
“The defnet interpreted it as a threat, ma’am.”
“I told you to stand down the automated systems. We didn’t need them.”
“Ma’am, with respect, any inorganic object that close, doing that speed, and clearly alien in origin, is a threat.”
“For Chrissakes stand the frigging thing down and keep it that way until I say otherwise. And in the morning you will personally show me how to disable it so I can check it myself.”
If he was unhappy at the bollocking he showed no sign of it. He stood staring at nothing in particular, looking past her at a point on the wall, and waiting. “Okay, dismissed.” She jerked her head in the direction of the hatch and was surprised to get a snappy salute from him.
Lindsay gave her a reproachful look. “If that had been the aliens with a grudge about this place, you might have been grateful for that defnet.”
“But it wasn’t the isenj. And if it had been, we would still have stood a better chance of survival if we hadn’t presented a threat.”
“It buys you time.”
“It buys you dead. Do your sums. When are you going to stop fighting me on this?”
“Very well, ma’am.”
“And let’s be clear about your orders. Unless an alien comes up, whips out a knife and says in English, ‘Hello Earthman, I want to kill you,’ then you do nothing except run, okay? Absolutely nothing. Whatever the provocation. Make that clear to your people. We do not piss off the landlord round here under any circumstances.”
“We’re a little rusty on diplomacy. I apologize. But may we be clear about the matter of orders? I command the marines. Your giving them direct orders undermines me.”
“I have seniority on this mission, and if that cuts across your navy protocol that’s too bad.” You’ve lost her now. But she should have known better. “Let’s exercise common sense. They’re technically advanced and they know where we live. We back off.”
“Understood, ma’am.” Lindsay was attempting a deadpan expression but her anger—or something like it—was reddening her throat. “Is there anything we can do now?”
“No, let’s wait. Don’t tell the payload anything just yet.”
“Shall we recover the wreckage?”
“How would you react if someone shot down one of your craft and then stole the parts?”
“Perhaps we’ll leave it, then.”
“It might also be a good idea if your people leave their rifles in the armory.”
“Is that wise?”
“Now that is an order.”
Lindsay’s lips tightened into a line. “I still feel it’s my duty to advise you that’s foolhardy.”
Shan had never justified an order, but if she was going to save the rapidly deteriorating relationship with her second-in-command this was her last chance to rescue it. She swallowed her anger. “Thank you. Noted.”
“Ma’am, have you ever been in a volatile situation like this?”
Shan clenched her nails into her palms. She felt her scalp tighten. No, this had to stop, and now. “Have I? Let me think.” She rolled up her sleeve and showed Lindsay a puckered and scarred strip of skin from left biceps to wrist. “I have been hit by petrol bombs. I have been shot six times. They had to take a four-inch steel blade out of my leg. I didn’t get any of that writing parking tickets, sweetheart.” She was close enough to Lindsay now to smell coffee on her breath, face far too close to face. “When you’ve faced two hundred rioting scum this close with just a poxy plastic shield and a baton, then you can lecture me on volatile situations. Just because I’m a copper doesn’t mean I’m a fucking idiot.”
Lindsay didn’t step back an inch. “Apologies, ma’am. Perhaps if I’d known more about your service record I could have avoided asking the question.”
A long pause; neither of them moved. Then Lindsay took a pace back, snapped off a salute and walked out. Shan let her shoulders sag and rested her head against the cool relief of the cabin bulkhead. Well, I played a blinder there, I think. It was unfamiliar territory, poorly navigated. She hadn’t had to explain to anyone for a very long time that she was hard enough to kick down hell’s door without a warrant. Most people seemed to spot that without having it spelled out. She felt she had lost something in having to do so.
But she would have to worry about her relationship with Lindsay Neville later. What she did and said in the next few hours would determine if any of them would get out of here alive. No, it was more than that: it would determine the future relationship with at least three civilizations. It was not something she was trained for. The kid did have a point. She’d never dealt with armies. But what were armies other than rioters with a battle plan? And was there anyone at all trained to handle aliens?
It’s a case like any other, Shan told herself. You analyze it, break it down, and sort it piece by piece. And the immediate problem was to stop the situation getting even worse than it already was. Wel
l, that was a bloody laugh. She was in a disputed territory seventy-five years from the nearest support with just seven military, an unreliable ship, a payload of unwelcome scientists, unhappy human hosts, a delicate ecology and a number two who clearly hated her guts. And now they had just nearly killed an alien on whom their lives might depend. It was just a perfect balls-up.
She lay down on her bunk. The waves of colored fractal patterns that danced over her as she looked up at the deckhead were entirely the product of her own optic nerves. Beyond the deckhead porthole the night was black, pitchperfect black. With no focus to orientate her she was suddenly unsure if she was lying down or floating upright, and the brief sensation of falling summed up the whole mission.
But she’d talked to an alien tonight, a real alien who talked back, not algae or bacteria or moss. It was a miracle. The SB tapped her on the shoulder again. The nonhumans hold some of the gene bank. You must make contact.
“I think we just did that, Madame Perault,” Shan muttered at the porthole. “Any further orders?”
As she expected, there was nothing but silence.
13
The colonists keep meticulous if basic records. Excluding infant-mortality figures, which are comparable to latenineteenth-century rates, average life expectancy is 64. The most common factors in death, barring accident, are melanoma, respiratory disease, atherosclerosis or cardiac failure. The few who have agreed to examination exhibit varying degrees of arthritis, no doubt due to the heavy manual labor they choose to carry out. They are an excellent control population to demonstrate the virtues or hazards of hard exercise and a carefully balanced vegan diet. Personally, I would rather die ten years early with a Scotch in my hand.
DR. KRISTINA HUGEL, notes
The next morning Shan took a scoot and went in search of the crash site, not entirely confident that the marines would leave it untouched. There were no tracks to the site suggesting it had been cleared—yet, once there, Shan found no trace of metallic debris, just piles of granular dust that dispersed when she touched them with her boot.
So that was what the alien meant when he said it would take care of itself. Fast-degradable metal. Handy for some corporation, but if they wanted it they would have to ask for the technology openly. Shan thought it might be a bad idea to let anyone else get samples of that dust. She revved up the scoot and let its air ducts scatter the material to the wind. Satisfied that there was nothing visible to attract attention except the shallow gouges in the ground, she headed back to the settlement.
One benefit of the simplicity of Constantine was that she never needed to ask where an important meeting was to be held. If it wasn’t in the church, it was at Josh’s home. Despite the civic importance of the Garrod house, it didn’t appear to be any bigger than its neighbors. Shan rapped the knuckle of her forefinger on the satin-smooth door and waited for an invitation to come in.
There was a subtle scent in the air as she followed Josh’s voice. It reminded her of sandalwood, very rich and soothing, but it was little more than a sensation at the roof of her mouth. When she walked into the central room of the house—kitchen, family room, workroom—the scent was stronger despite the competition from baked bread and garlic. Josh and Aras were sitting at the table.
“Good morning,” Josh said, and Aras simply nodded at her. It was the first time she had seen the alien in daylight, and she could hardly stop herself staring. He dwarfed Josh. His face was all angular planes, like an ancient poster of a Soviet factory hero, as if it had started life as a mythic beast’s and then tried to pass itself off as human. The effect was enough to silence her. The last time she had felt like this was when she had come face-to-face with a live Bengal tiger walking on a lead, one of the very last of its kind, an army regimental mascot taken out on special occasions. There had been something almost unbelievable about the creature. The tiger had three dimensions and it was exactly like its encyclopedia picture, yet nothing like it—a life with an agenda of its own, disengaged from human reference and stunningly real.
Aras looked nothing like a tiger. Shan’s human patternrecognizing brain floundered again, trying dog, cat, bird, and failed to find anything to latch on to. In daylight his hair was chocolate-dark, neatly tied back from that unclassifiable face and braided over the cream cowl neck of his tunic.
He had gloves on, too. Beige gloves. She couldn’t take in the overall picture and settled on grasping the detail.
“Good morning, gentlemen.”
He started abruptly. “Shan Chail, what’s your purpose here?”
Shan Chail. Context told her it was respectful, although he could have been addressing her as arsehole and she would have been none the wiser.
She swallowed. “I was sent to locate the Constantine colony, locate its gene bank and oversee the research activity of a party of people representing corporations and academic bodies.” But surely he knew that; Josh had told him. “We had no idea there were any sentient races already here, let alone three.”
“Two,” Aras corrected. “We don’t tolerate the isenj.”
“Well, however many—we would have made diplomatic contact before attempting to land. I apologize for any offense we’ve caused. And any injury, of course.”
Aras stared intently into her face. The sandalwood scent was noticeably stronger near him. She assumed it was perfume. “Do your people intend to colonize this planet further?”
“I was never aware of any plan to do so.”
“I don’t believe that’s true.”
He was challenging her word. Liar. It seemed almost conversational.
“I was definitely given orders to complete the mission and return. There’s no plan to evaluate this as a habitat.”
“Not true.”
Right then it seemed very important not to break eye contact with him. He was unnaturally still. Josh, clear in her peripheral vision, was sitting calmly but he seemed a mass of fidgets compared to the frozen alien.
“Are you a telepath?” she asked.
“No, but you’re a poor liar, Chail.”
It made her angry. She tried not to react, but his expression had changed. “Call me what you like, but those were not my orders.”
Josh interrupted. “But did you think that might be on the agenda?”
“Yes, of course it crossed my mind. Anyway, we know this planet is spoken for now.”
Aras shifted in his seat, overwhelming it. It must have been uncomfortable for a creature of his size. “And so did the isenj,” he said. And then there was silence, as if all of them suddenly shared the view that disasters only happened because people did things without thinking them through.
“So, where do we go from here?” she said briskly, and hoped whatever she had done had not sparked another misunderstanding. Josh poured tea into three opaque glasses with substantial ruby handles and slid them one at a time across the table, followed by a tray of bread rolls. Not another meal, surely. Everyone seemed to eat continuously here. Maybe it was the result of hard physical labor. Shan offered the tray to Aras, trying to be polite. He froze again, then reached out and took a roll with a deliberate move. He fixed her with that challenging gaze again. Despite his bulk and manner, there was something oddly comforting about him. It was like having a purring cat on your lap, except that this one could turn and take your head off. But there was definitely an infrasonic emanating from him that made her feel almost peaceful.
“I remind you not to take live samples outside the boundary of Constantine. You can observe what you like, of course, if escorted. I will even provide data on the local ecology.”
No, they can’t take the crops here. There was the SB again, or at least a realization that sprang from it. Why? It wouldn’t answer.
With eight payload gagging to get on with their jobs, the prohibition filled her with foreboding. The biotech firms were footing most of the mission’s bill. On the other hand, it would be at least seventy-five years before she had to deal with that issue, and by then, who wo
uld be left back home to worry about it? Who would even remember the mission? Seventy-five years was a damn long time in commercial life, long enough to see whole empires crumble, let alone companies. No, the immediate problem was offending the indigenous population, and containing eight men and women who had come here to explore.
And she had to start talking to this wess’har about the gene bank.
“No specimens or samples,” she agreed.
“Not outside the human habitat. Within it is a matter for Joshua.”
“We won’t be taking crop samples.” Why? No, just trust it. “And the rest is your planet. We understand that.”
“No, it’s the bezeri’s world, among others,” Aras said. “And even though they don’t use the land, what happens there affects them. We agreed to help them prevent the isenj taking this world, and the same applies to you. I have read enough of your history. You don’t have a good record in new worlds.”
If I were you, that’s just what I’d be saying. She was growing to like the wess’har. He came straight to the point and he seemed to share her dim view of humanity. And he smelled wonderful.
“So why did you let the colony land here?”
“They had nowhere to go and they would have died.” He broke the roll into two pieces and ate a fragment. “And with them, many other people would have died.All those different races of people the ship carried in cryogenic suspension.”
“You mean the gene bank. The animals and plants.”
“Yes. That’s held in safekeeping now. Make no mistake about it—without our intervention to create a local biosphere, the colony would not have been able to grow crops in the soil.”
Perault’s voice nagged at her. The gene bank. Secure it.
“You could have wiped them out and saved yourself a lot of trouble.”
“They do no harm. They plan to return to your world one day with those species they’ve preserved and brought with them. They’ve kept their word so far.”