The World Before

  “My life was fucked long before you nutted me.”

  “Your dad?”

  “Yeah, the shit-house.”

  “I think I’ve picked up your memory of him.”

  “Handy with his fists. He’d have a go at me and my brother and my mum too, except she normally fought back and took a good hiding for us when he was really tanked up. And I did sod all to save her.” Ade gave her an awkward nudge, the sort he usually reserved for Barencoin or Becken. “You’re a lot like her.”

  Ah well. Now she knew the psychology of his devotion. “I’m sorry I lashed out at you. You don’t need any more violence.”

  “It’s why I find it hard when women need help. I think that’s why I crapped myself when I had to rescue Mesevy.”

  She’d almost forgotten the incident. Sabine Mesevy, drowning in the bottomless bog outside Constantine, sinking into slime populated by transparent sheven that would engulf you and digest you. Ade had gone in without hesitation. He’d thrown up and also lost control of his bowels afterwards, but only afterwards.

  “I’d have let her go under,” said Shan. “Like it or not, it was heroic.”

  “I should have done more for my mum. I was the bloke.”

  “You were a child and your mother was an adult. She chose to stay with a violent man.” The silly cow, being that emotionally dependent on a man. “Just drop the guilt. You’ve got enough on your plate now without beating yourself up about the past.”

  Shan had once thought of Ade as a medium type of man; mid-build, mid-brown hair, mid-brown eyes, the sort of bloke you wouldn’t notice unless your business was noticing people. But she had learned he was simply good at avoiding attention, a useful survival trait in both a brutalized child and a professional soldier. There was nothing mediocre about him at all. She thought of the time she had very nearly weakened and succumbed to a quick and unromantic fuck on Bezer’ej, and she realized she had spotted what he truly was from their first encounter on board Thetis. He was courageous, a real man by her exacting definition, and not because he was fearless but because he knew exactly what fear was.

  She tried again. “Are you getting on okay with Aras?”

  “He’s a pro.” It was almost his highest accolade, one degree short of fucking hero. There was definitely a precise hierarchy of personal worth, climbing up from the pits of shit-house through tourist, sound and pro to heroic status. “A good mate.”

  “You’ve got a lot in common. I know that you and Eddie kept him together. I owe you for that.”

  “Least I could do.”

  “You know what the isenj did to him, don’t you?”

  “He never said exactly.” Ade had that look—a compression of the lips as if stifling profanity and a fixed gaze into middle distance—that said he didn’t need to be told. “C’naatat filled in the gaps for me.”

  Shan thought of something warm and gel-like hitting her cheek. Maybe it wasn’t the time to ask. “I keep recalling your being hit in the face by something wet.”

  Ade looked blank, gazing ahead of him as he walked, and then he screwed his eyes shut for a second. “Yeah,” he said. He didn’t expand and she didn’t press him, so she waited a few moments and changed the subject.

  “We need to talk about the domestic arrangements.” She couldn’t bring herself to say it. She had to. “Aras is afraid I’ll prefer you to him.”

  “Oh.” Pebbles crunched under Ade’s boots. The S word had still not intruded in the conversation. “I didn’t think wess’har were jealous.”

  “Polyandry’s natural for them. He’s just worried about being alone again.”

  Ade nodded, eyes fixed straight ahead. “That’s all a bit exotic for me.”

  He knew what she meant, then. “Okay, I read you wrong.”

  Ade swallowed audibly. “No. You didn’t.”

  “Changed your mind?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. When you’re up for it, just ask.”

  Ade slowed to an ambling pace. He was blushing again. “You ever fallen in love?”

  “No. Loved eventually, but never fallen.”

  “I didn’t think so.” He walked on.

  This was why Shan felt comfortable with wess’har. There was nothing you could say that sounded gauche or clinical to them. Just the facts, ma’am: either something was so, or it wasn’t, and nobody got embarrassed. But Ade did.

  And so did she. “Sorry. This comes from never having to beat men off with a shitty stick. I never learned to do this right.”

  “It’s okay. You’re just like a bloke, really.” He bit his lip, his face a caricature of instant regret. “I didn’t mean it like that. I meant that I don’t have to guess your mood or explain what my job’s like… shit, I’m really fucking this up, aren’t I?”

  “Yes. You can stop digging that hole now.”

  He put his hands over his eyes in mock exhaustion. “Jesus, I wish I was good with words. Please don’t laugh at me. I know I’m not clever.”

  She dug her nails into her palm to stop a smile crossing her face because he wouldn’t have understood that she found him touchingly innocent rather than ignorant. “I’m not laughing. And you’re not stupid.”

  “It was Dave Pharoah.”

  It was an almost wess’har non sequitur, a sudden leap from one subject to another just as Aras did. “What was?”

  “The splash on your face. Corporal Dave Pharoah. My oppo. He was a daft sod, Dave. I got my tattoos on a tat run with him when we were completely hand-carted on rough cider. He bet me I wouldn’t have a tattoo done in a really painful place.” Ade managed a rueful smile. Then it faded. “He got shot standing right next to me at Ankara and his brains went all over my face. I didn’t realize what it was at first. I thought it was bird shit.”

  Shan wanted to say she understood but she knew she didn’t. For all the violence in her job, she had gone home at the end of a shift, selected a menu from the catering service, and cleaned her 9mm. She had never been under fire for days or weeks and she had never wiped a comrade’s brain tissue off her face. When you thought you were well hard, to use Eddie’s phrase, it was always sobering to realize there was someone who had experienced far worse things than you had.

  She patted his back slowly. “Sorry I brought it up.”

  “It goes with the job. You know what you’re in for when you sign up.”

  No, you don’t. You couldn’t possibly. “I’m still sorry.”

  “Anyway, I had the tattoo done and it hurt all right.” Ade kicked a pebble into the air and caught it in one hand, apparently unaware of how impressive that seemed to her. “If I miss people now, what’s it going to be like when I outlive everyone?”

  “I think we’ll both find out around the same time,” said Shan, happy to be counted as one of the boys again.

  14

  You’ve dragged the rest of the world into this and we’re going to have aliens landing here in thirty years. Plenty of time to come up with a solution? No. The population is going to panic now, and they’re going to blame us. I’m going to make the Eqbas an offer, because I’m not entirely convinced that they’re the enemy. I think the enemy is standing right in front of me.

  CANH PHO

  Prime Minister of the Australasian Republic

  in a private conversation with Birsen Ertegun

  The island of Ouzhari, Bezer’ej.

  Shan walked along the shoreline of Ouzhari, suitless and bewildered.

  She had never seen the island in its unspoiled state and maybe that was just as well. Many crime scenes during her career had made her punching mad, and a few had even reduced her to private tears, but the scene of desolation notched up a new category: she was numbed.

  Esganikan and Shapakti walked at a discreet distance to her right, in environment suits that were soft and flowing like translucent shrouds. She could see them in her peripheral vision. Maybe it had been a bad idea to forgo the suit, but she didn’t need one. It crossed her mind that it emphasized to t
he Eqbas that she was a freak to be controlled at all costs.

  She squatted on the sand, elbows braced on her knees and hands clasped. What did you say? What could you even think? She tapped her thumbnails against her front teeth, pondering the enormity of the blast.

  “Are you praying?” asked Shapakti.

  She could hear him well enough, suit or not. “No. And if I thought there was a deity listening I wouldn’t exactly be praying, either.”

  She stood up and walked further along the shore, stepping carefully over unidentifiable patches of decayed matter that might once have been bodies. She hadn’t even expected bacteria here. But something had already returned to profit from the carnage.

  They’re bezeri. They’re people.

  She was ashamed that she had to remind herself of that, only feeling the revulsion on an intellectual level rather than an instinctive one. There were nonhuman animals she reacted to instantly at a gut level and those that she had to think about. It doesn’t matter. It’s what you do, not what you feel that counts.

  Esganikan said little. She kept an eye on the survey teams, one of them busy carrying out test bores into the soil and the other on a bizarre floating platform that looked for all the world like a glass raft. Shan had no idea why it wasn’t swamped by the waves. It had no gunwales that she could see, and large shallow containers didn’t remain stable once they took on a little water and it started slopping around. But the Eqbas team of four stood calmly on the transparent platform as if it was solid ground, with their hands clasped against their chests and looking down at something. As bizarre as it looked, it was simply the wess’har equivalent of standing with hands on hips, a comfortably relaxed pose.

  Then they all stepped back in one synchronized movement. A column of dull glass rose from the deck of the raft. For a moment Shan thought it was part of the steerage or even the head of a drilling mechanism, but it wasn’t. It really was water, seawater, somehow lifted intact from the ocean beneath.

  One of the Eqbas—a male, by the smaller build—inserted a thin rod like a stylus into the column at waist height and studied it. His head tilted sharply. Then he with drew the rod and reinserted it near the base of the column. There was more vigorous head-tilting and the column rose higher, an impossible tower of water with no visible support rearing above a raft that shouldn’t have been floating. Shan was transfixed.

  The column was at least five meters high now, and the whole team was indulging in that head-tilting that said something had completely engrossed them, something they weren’t expecting.

  “What are they doing?” she asked.

  Esganikan stood beside her. When Shan turned, the Eqbas matriarch was staring at her and not at the bizarre spectacle on the glass raft.

  “They’re testing the sea at different depths to assess contamination and biological activity.”

  Esganikan was standing so close that Shan felt an urge to shove her in the chest and nick her for looking at her funny as Rob McEvoy called it. Rob, her bagman, had been a young inspector who she was grooming as a successor. Rob. Is he still alive? She’d never returned his message. She’d forgotten him. It appalled her. She’d make that a priority.

  Esganikan stepped back one pace. Shan could taste her own scent of dominance, enough to keep the Eqbas commander in her place. Esganikan could obviously smell it too, even in her suit.

  “Did you acquire your jask with your wess’har genes or have you always been this way?” she asked.

  “I’ll show you my file,” said Shan, and didn’t budge an inch.

  “I know who you are and what your task was.”

  “Is.” Shan was distracted by the raft again. It was moving away. “I haven’t finished it yet.”

  The raft was moving fast, and not like a vessel trailing spray or dipping and rising through the waves. It was simply moving, level and utterly unnatural. There was no sign of wind whipping the crew’s loose suits and for a moment Shan’s brain told her she was watching a camera shot, a zoom out from a static scene.

  “They’re in a hurry.”

  “They have detected something.” Esganikan paused as if listening. “It may be another false reading. They found something that looks like the waste products of bezeri in minute dilution.”

  “Survivors?”

  “Or more recently dead.”

  Shan looked round and watched the land team for a while. They were simply taking core samples with a tube that looked much like the one used by Olivier Champciaux, the geologist who’d been part of the Thetis team. He was another person she hadn’t thought of in a while: all the remaining payload, as the marines had called the mission’s scientists, were at Umeh Station. All except the dead ones, anyway. And Rayat. “What were you doing when they diverted you here?”

  “We were returning from a patrol at Harsa. I believe Shapakti’s crew was assessing environmental imbalance on Nem Ijot. Neither of us are ideal for this situation, but we could reach you far more quickly than those with more specific experience.”

  “You sound experienced enough to me. Did you want to go home?”

  “I did. But this was a vital mission.”

  “Ironic. That’s how I ended up here, too.”

  Esganikan might have understood or she might not, but now she kept a respectful distance from Shan—still too close for a human’s comfort, but distant by wess’har standards—and walked with her to where Shapakti stood with one of the core sampling teams.

  “Can you decontaminate the area?” Shan asked.

  Shapakti had a handful of soil cupped in his palms. “Yes. A season, perhaps two.”

  “That’s impressive.”

  “It is routine work. But we had hoped there might be biological material we could use as a template for reconstruction.”

  “The grass.” Shan used the English word. She didn’t have the wess’u for it. “Black grass.”

  “What?”

  “There was black grass here. A plant that covers the ground. Aras talked about it. He restored the island after the isenj were driven off it.”

  Shapakti rubbed the soil between the palms of his gloves. “He had material to work from.”

  “At least it’s just Ouzhari.” Yeah, that’s clever, you stupid cow. It’s just Antarctica. It’s just the Galapagos. It’s just the bezeri. “I meant that the damage is localized. It could have been worse.”

  “Not for the bezeri.”

  The bore team stood around their drill, waiting, and then Shan realized their rig was nothing like Champciaux’s after all. What she had thought was a solid shaft was a column of soil easing out of the ground in the same way as the inexplicable column of seawater. One of the group took a flat sheet of transparent material about the size of a drinks tray and passed it through the column, which somehow remained intact.

  “Does he whip off a tablecloth and leave the plates in place for an encore?” Shan asked, but she had slipped back into vernacular English that defeated Shapakti. “What’s he doing?”

  “They are examining the soil under great magnification.”

  “With that thing?”

  Shan had a nodding acquaintance with laboratory equipment and no more. She nicked the polluters, the dealers in banned biomaterials, the companies who crunched one gene sequence too many: it was up to the boffins to sort out the detail. The Eqbas held the sheet in his hands and studied it as if panning for gold. When she walked up behind him to look, it was suddenly obvious what the sheet was.

  She was looking at an image that could have come straight off an electron microscope, and it might have been grains of soil or bacteria. The magnified image covered the entire surface of the sheet. “Now that’s serious kit,” she said. “Whatever it is.”

  The scientist holding the sheet touched his glove against the surface and isolated a single shape that made her think of a radial hairbrush. The transparent sheet was busy overlaying it with different images at a breakneck speed, blurring its outline.

  “Pollen?” she sai
d. She didn’t even know if grass here produced pollen. It was too easy to see familiar shapes and assume that meant familiar biology.

  “I don’t know,” said Shapakti. “We have never seen this before. It bears no resemblance to anything from our databases. May I take a sample from you?”

  Shan rolled back her sleeve and held out her arm, which was now showing muscle, although nowhere near at her normal levels. He wants to rule out contamination by my cells, she thought. It was basic forensic procedure, and she felt a sudden nostalgic kinship with another investigator.

  Shapakti pressed a gloved finger against the skin of her forearm and studied the tip, then dabbed it on the glass tray. Shan had no idea how he could separate a specific sample from the general contamination he picked up on his gloves, but it seemed that he could, because images began moving again on the surface of the tray. It was dauntingly advanced technology. Shan thought she might sit quietly in a corner with a flint and a few bits of straw and try to discover fire.

  Shapakti shuffled his boots and pointed at the tray. “See. What you have within you is the same as this.”

  The hairbrush images shuffled, distorted and lined up. Then symbols that she didn’t understand arranged themselves in a cluster at the top left of the sheet.

  So this was c’naatat. Shan studied it, not really knowing what she was looking at but transfixed by it nonetheless, and suddenly alarmed that he could obtain a sample from unbroken skin. “Can you enlarge it?”

  Each bristle of the brush resolved into more brushes, complex and never-ending as a fractal. This was the organism that had remade her—once, twice, three times at least. It had decided she needed claws, and changed its mind: then bioluminescence, but that satisfied it. And it had taken a fancy to the ability to see shades of blue that only wess’har could see, and the dubious gift of isenj genetic memory, and scent communication, and things she couldn’t even begin to guess at because they hadn’t made themselves known to her yet.

  And it had kept her alive in space.

  “Poor little sod,” she said to herself, even though she didn’t like to think of it as being conscious of its actions. Maybe it was. For now, it was a virus, or a bacterium, or an ultra-benign disease; anything but a decision-making creature. “You don’t look like any trouble at all.”