“Which would you prefer?”
The Eqbas could destroy both, of course. It wasn’t remotely funny.
“It would be helpful if the carrier group could be persuaded to go away. Loss of life is always the last resort.”
Shan caught Ade’s eye accidentally, and wasn’t surprised to see his face locked in that blank I’m-not-going-to-react expression. They were talking about blowing his comrades out of the water. He didn’t know them, and they were a century apart in real terms, but the FEU navy was still his tribe.
We’re all way too close to this. But didn’t I realize that it was all heading this way?
“Let’s give them a warning demonstration, then,” Shan said, trying to be helpful. “Now that Pettinato’s telling them Mr. Bari’s not in the driving seat, and they know they’re dealing direct with the Eqbas or not at all, they might react differently.”
“Warnings are only relevant if you want to educate,” said Esganikan.
“Humor me.”
“There will still be many deaths in the coming years.”
“Maybe, but launching missiles at ships upsets me. Eddie would suggest you target the politicians instead.”
“Assassination, or attacking their capital?”
Bari’s face lost all color. Shan was used to wess’har being utterly literal, but now that she was back in a more familiar human context, the idea of killing politicians and erasing problems that contained living people made her uneasy again. She’d done enough serious shit herself over the years, but that didn’t make it right.
Dead’s dead. You always say that. Does it matter if it’s a bullet or if they die of starvation or disease when the Eqbas start culling?
But Earth made everything look different, more complicated. It had been a bad idea to return.
“Look, why don’t I leave you to do the international stuff, and I’ll make a start on locating Prachy.” Shan got up and gave Esganikan no chance to keep her there. “I’ll be in the shuttle. Call me when you need me.”
“Don’t you want to discuss the gene bank?” Bari asked.
“My role in that is finished,” she said. “I got it back here. That’s all I was tasked to do. The rest is up to you, although I’d be pretty upset if any of it got wasted. Maybe we should aim to reset Earth to the climate conditions prevailing when the bank was assembled.”
She didn’t mention the duplicate gene bank back on Wess’ej; that was asking for trouble. Ade and Aras got up to follow her and she found herself trying to remember the way back to the main doors. A member of staff directed her outside and she gulped in hot air as the air-conditioned environment of the building was left behind. She was torn between standing there and going back to the shuttle, and looked up to check for bee cams, but the modern type were much harder to spot than Eddie’s. The crowd was still there on the cordon.
“You knew it was going to degenerate into this very fast,” said Aras. “It’s wise to let Esganikan handle it, because she won’t listen to you unless it suits her.”
“Don’t I know it.”
“So what are you going to do about Prachy?” asked Ade.
“Find her.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“They won’t hand her over, Boss. It’ll be another shooting match, and Esganikan isn’t going to write her off as a bad job.”
“Okay, maybe I need to go and get her, then. I think I can manage to arrest a granny.”
“With Eqbas assistance, perhaps.” The ramp emerged from the shuttle again and Aras stood back to let her enter. It was good footage for somebody, that small glimpse of wess’har technology. “However proficient you are, isan, you’re not experienced at infiltrating what is effectively enemy territory, locating a target, and assassinating her.”
“You’ve not seen Reading, have you?”
“Be serious. This is best left to the Eqbas, or the Skavu.”
“And who said I’d assassinate anyone? Arrest. And fuck the Skavu. I don’t want them on my op, thanks.”
“Isan, they are on your op anyway. You can no more dispense with them than you can Esganikan.”
Ade gave her a weary look as if he was being asked to volunteer. For some reason, the FEU hadn’t worked out that he carried c’naatat too—which meant Rayat hadn’t been able to make contact again after he was seized from Umeh Station—and there were no signs that they might make a grab for Aras. That explained their focus on her.
“Assassination’s easier,” Ade said quietly. “Then all you have to worry about is your own exfil. No struggling body to haul with you.”
“If it’s that or the Eqbas frying half of Belgium, maybe I don’t have a choice.”
“You have a very long life ahead of you,” said Aras. “All of us do. After a few years, your view of what you can cause and influence will alter, believe me.”
Aras lived so much in the moment that it shook her to be reminded of his age, and that, after five hundred years, he saw events in a different context. It was a kind way of reminding her she didn’t run the universe, and she wasn’t responsible for it. For some people that would have been tantamount to being told they didn’t matter, but she grasped at it as an escape from feeling she was to blame for the way events were unfolding.
Shan sat back against a bulkhead and took out her swiss to see which networks she could still access; there was nothing except the ITX, and that was useless for communications on the planet itself. The Eqbas pilot glanced at her, but he was more interested in watching the BBChan feeds displayed in the bulkhead, a spread of five channels that he seemed to be able to watch simultaneously. It was the only window Shan had on how the rest of the planet was reacting.
At the UN, Canada was pledging to support the Pacific Rim States. Closer to the action, the Sinostates had closed its borders and ports to the FEU refugees.
“Where do they think they’re going to go?” Ade asked. “There’s nowhere to run from the Eqbas.”
“Haven’t a clue. People just run.”
“No joy with the swiss?”
“’Course not. Here I am, interstellar fucking traveler, and I can’t get a poxy signal. I’ll have to buy a bloody handheld. Or scrounge one.”
“That means going outside the cordon,” Aras said. “And I think that’s a bad idea.”
Cordon. There was an easier option, or at least a more immediate one.
“Don’t follow me,” she said, wagging finger at both of them, and left the shuttle to crunch across the gravel that they said had once been a splendid lawn. The crowd still waited in that baking heat; even the police were taking turns to slip back into their vehicles to cool off, and it was nearly dusk. Noon must have been intolerable. As Shan got closer to the cordon, some of the media reacted and the police turned around with that oh-shit expression Shan knew she’d worn so many times herself.
“It’s okay,” she said to the inspector who intercepted her. A cloud of tiny bee cams caught her eye, and one of the officers started yelling at the media to get the things back on their side of the line. “I’m not going out there to meet and greet. I need to speak to the Gaia bunch. Grab me one of their reps, will you, mate? And ask them if they can lend me a handheld.”
Surang, Eqbas Vorhi.
Rayat found a surprising lack of interest among the Eqbas about events on Earth. Maybe they’d seen it all before; after a million years, many of them spent imposing the Eqbas environmental will on unenlightened worlds, it was probably a minor news story for them.
One thing he’d learned over the years here was that the majority of the population never left the planet. They respected their galactic policing program, and were happy to contribute to it, but—like so many similar tasks on Earth, he thought—it was something that they neither saw nor took part in, and so it was invisible. The citizen militia philosophy of the Wess’ej wess’har didn’t exist here. They had a professional army, one most of them rarely saw.
He left Shapakti to go back to his labo
ratory and walked the curved pathways of the city, pausing to watch debates in the ideas exchanges and to ponder the problem of getting a call through to Kiir, the Skavu commander. He’d never even spoken to a Skavu, although he knew a little about them and the small, savage war against them in Eqbas colonial history. It helped him to think of the Eqbas in terms of a colonial power; even if they usually left when their adjustments were complete and planets were restored to what they thought of as their proper state, they had all the other trappings of empire.
But they didn’t have embassies. Rayat couldn’t call on his old spook skills and find an unsuspecting diplomat to work on.
I could try Eddie, though.
He hadn’t spoken to the journalist in a long time. He could have told Eddie years ago, but he hadn’t, because things told had a habit of becoming things shared, and that was the last thing he needed, for the FEU—anyone other than Shan, really—to know that there were more c’naatat carriers. It was bad enough with Shan and her menagerie being there. If Eddie could be persuaded to tell Shan, would she believe them? Why would she not believe him? What motive could he have for driving a wedge between her and Esganikan?
Maybe Aras wouldn’t think it was such a good idea, either. But both he and Ade had passed on c’naatat to others for their own reasons, ones that had seemed perfectly noble to them at the time, but now left more messes to be cleared up.
It needed to be a hardliner who heard the news. And that meant Shan, because she could oust Esganikan from command with that jask thing, or Kiir, who at least commanded the shock troops and so had some influence on the situation.
He’d ask Eddie. Somehow, he’d get past this comms blackout and talk to him. If he couldn’t beat the technology, he’d try social engineering.
As he passed another ideas exchange, an Eqbas he recognized beckoned him inside. The Eqbas seemed to spend an extraordinary amount of leisure time in them when they weren’t eating or tending their plants, almost as if they were bars or social clubs.
“Come,” said the Eqbas. Rayat always thought of him as Roger, although his name was Rujalian. “We’re talking about cultural change. We have theories about changing human nature.”
“That’s nice,” said Rayat, edging his way into the packed chamber to avoid physical contact. He was infected again. It really was like a crowded pub, but without the beer. “I suppose you want input from a human, then. I used to be one.”
Wess’har didn’t laugh, but some things did elicit a trill that Rayat always interpreted as amusement. The trill went round the room. “How do we select humans who will live like wess’har?” asked Rujalian. “Or can they be converted, like Skavu?”
Rayat took up a seat in the corner, a little upholstered alcove. Eqbas seemed to like their creature comforts a lot more than their ascetic wess’har cousins, with their rock-hard sleeping ledges and kneeling stools. And as he was c’naatat, he could drink their beverages and eat their snacks with impunity. It was one way to spend an afternoon.
“You’ll find humans can be rabid converts,” he said. “There are also plenty of humans who live low-impact lives. You’d get on fine with some religious sects like Jains, and all kinds of humans. But not most.”
“What makes them different?” asked another Eqbas. “Not genes. If it were, it would be simple to cull the ones who didn’t have the correct genetic profile.”
It was all very matter of fact. They were talking about his species, about exterminating troublesome creatures like him, and yet saw nothing offensive in that. But that wasn’t half so hard as reconciling that fly-swatting attitude with their reverence for all life. It seemed that once you broke the rules and did the exploiting and pillaging, then all bets were off. Where the line lay between collective and individual guilt, Rayat was never sure.
In twenty years, Rayat had merely come to accept wess’har morality.
“Tell me about the Skavu, then,” he said. “Have any of you met one?”
“Not face-to-face,” said Rujalian. “But I have a neighbor who creates the ship updates for them.”
Ah, that was interesting. It was no direct use to Rayat, because the Skavu were light-years away, but it would help him understand their mindset better, perhaps. He grabbed any intelligence he came across and stored it for possible future use. Knowledge was never wasted. Information really was power.
“They use Eqbas ships?”
“We gave them our old vessels, yes. So they require updating from us.”
Rayat was thinking shipyards for a moment, vapor hissing from robotic presses and the smell of hull composite being formed. But that wasn’t how Eqbas built ships. They used nanotech, creating ships that could be grown from templates and whose form and function could be changed dynamically by altering the materials at a molecular level.
“So how do they get updated?” he asked, imagining them limping back to port for a refit of some kind. “And why don’t you just break down the old ones with nanites? You can do that. I know you can. I’ve seen it.”
“Why deconstruct them while they still have use for others?” Rujalian looked as if he was groping for simpler language, probably doubting Rayat’s ability to understand eqbas’u. “We transmit new instructions. The component materials have to be told how to change the way they react and behave. There are limits with the older nanites, of course, but that’s no bad thing with allies like the Skavu, is it?”
There was more trilling and a cacophony of discussion, in their two-toned voices that sounded as chaotic as a birdhouse. “Hang on,” said Rayat, “is that like sending them an updated program? An upgrade made up of instructions?”
“Yes, it is. Are you sure you were a scientist?”
Rayat didn’t know who or how, but something in his head said message vector, and that was something he needed very badly right now. “How often do you do this?”
“Whenever they request it.”
“Do you…ever send updates without their asking?”
“Occasionally.”
“Do you run diagnostic checks?”
Rujalian looked at him with his head cocked so far on one side that it was comical. “We can, but why?”
“Just curious.”
Rayat was curious, that was true. But he was far more interested in working out how he might get a message to the Skavu, in terms they understood, that their mission commander was an abomination, a c’naatat carrier.
He knew he could rely on them to do the right thing. All he had to do was work out how to send an intelligible message.
“Roger, my friend, tell me more about your neighbor,” he said.
Rujalian seemed to find it very funny to be called Roger, and trilled happily. Wess’har were very open if you asked them questions. That was common to both sides of the family. Humans were pretty helpful too, most of the time, but not as unfailingly detailed. Rayat left the ideas exchange armed with the knowledge that once every few weeks—he kept the Gregorian calendar running alongside the Eqbas one even now—a maintenance status check was downloaded to Skavu vessels via the ITX. He also knew who sent it, how they sent it, and what he had to do to add code to it, for want of a better word.
He also knew the Eqbas responsible for it didn’t speak or read English—very few did—and wouldn’t notice if the words YOUR COMMANDER HAS C’NAATAT were embedded in the code, and so the message would end up shunted to the diagnostic display that showed parts of the program that wouldn’t run for some reason. Eqbas, being the efficient bastards that they were, didn’t have many duff lines of code. The Skavu would notice that, he hoped—and they did process English through their translation collars.
“Once again, the lingua franca par excellence comes into its own,” he said aloud as he walked back into Shapakti’s office.
“Latin and French,” said Shapakti. “And you seem smug.”
“I think I have a solution to getting a warning to Earth.”
Shapakti wafted agitated citrus again. “Eddie Michallat may have the best
chance. You could have passed him a message by now.”
“Old habits die hard, Shap. I’ve found a way of getting a warning direct to the Skavu fleet.”
Shapakti filled the room with his anxiety scent now, as pungent as grapefruit peel. “I think that’s a bad idea. Telling Shan Chail is, as you call it, the long screwdriver. She can be relied upon. Telling the Skavu is pulling a pin from a grenade. That’s the phrase, isn’t it? They are volatile.”
Rayat paused to consider what the worst thing that might happen. The Skavu understood c’naatat enough to know that it needed to be destroyed by fragmenting the host. All he wanted was for c’naatat to be taken out of the Eqbas armory before it got out of control.
“I’m going to have to do it, Shap. You know that. Things are going to be bad enough on Earth without adding a plague like that. Have I ever showed you zombie movies? Funny how they never addressed the whole population problem aspect of the not-quite-dead. But zombies don’t go on breeding, of course.”
Shapakti had frozen in that classic wess’har shock pose, and he didn’t ask what zombies were. “I would seek to dissuade you. You may cause a problem where none existed before. There are three other c’naatat hosts on Earth, remember. All four may yet come home without incident.”
“How strongly do you feel about that?”
Shapakti was very still; not quite frozen, but motionless enough for Rayat to gauge his mood.
“I would stop you if I could,” he said. “So don’t ask me to help you.”
“Okay.” Rayat nodded. He liked Shapakti. It wasn’t fair on him to push this further. Rayat preferred to do his intelligence work alone anyway.
It was just like old times.
Rayat spent the rest of the day reading up on ship construction and nanite command codes via the communal library link, an easy task because Eqbas were every bit as open with information as their wess’har cousins. Shan might have been unwise to return to Earth with her parasite, but she wasn’t as big a risk as a wess’har with a hidden agenda. Esganikan wasn’t at all like Nevyan or the wess’har Rayat had known in the past; he couldn’t trust her, and he didn’t know what she’d do next. She might have wanted to explore extended life for all kinds of practical reasons, but now she had plenty of Rayat in her, and Rayat knew how his own mind worked.