Judge

  “I’ll apologize in advance for this,” Ade said. He kept his eyes on the deck, possibly to avoid meeting Kiir’s gaze. The Skavu commander sat silent in the aft section of the shuttle, his sheathed saber flat across his knees. “I’m going to be upset when we get there. Don’t be embarrassed.”

  “’It’s okay,” Shan said. She had an eye on Kiir, though. “You do whatever you need to.”

  The shuttle’s deck became transparent. Ade knelt down to watch the eastern seaboard of Australia streaking beneath them, and as they passed over the coast they could see patrol vessels leaving brilliant white wakes as they moved south.

  But it was beyond Australian airspace where the reality of the Eqbas visit became suddenly visible. Their days of peaceful isolation had been an illusion. Now Aras could see exactly how the world was reacting to the arrival of the Eqbas and the tension with the FEU, in the shape of a Sinostates carrier battle group on station to the north.

  “Is that for us?” Shan asked.

  “I doubt it,” Ade said. There wasn’t a lot a carrier could do against Eqbas air power, and everyone must have known that by now. “I think it’s to block off more refugee movement when things start to go pear-shaped.”

  The bulkhead displays were showing clusters of yellow lights on the long-range chart, the point where the FEU, African Assembl, and Sinostates borders met; they’d have company in Ankara. Aras hoped the FEU had the sense simply to look, and not try to touch.

  They reached Turkish airspace at 0925 local time. The first of the fighters picked up the shuttle fifty kilometers out from the coast, and stayed with it across a country that seemed to be either dense cities or arid wasteland.

  “It’s time I took over the helm,” Aitassi said. “This is no time to practice your skills.”

  “Ussissi never fly combat roles,” said Aras “Your neutrality is important to you.”

  “This,” said Aitassi, showing a hint of teeth, “is not configured as a fighter, and ussissi can certainly defend themselves.”

  “I think that subtle point might be lost on our buddy up there.” Shan pointed up through the deckhead, now set to transparency. A wedge-shaped craft trailing an occasional ring of vapor was keeping pace with them. “He’s probably just observing. I bloody well hope so.”

  When Esganikan magnified the image, Aras could see the FEU roundel on its undercarriage. The tracking display showed twelve more were within a ten-kilometer radius of the shuttle.

  “Not a Turkish squadron,” Ade said. “Central European. Off their usual turf today.”

  “You worry about nothing,” said Esganikan. “They can do you no harm, and observing an act of mourning is hardly going to provide intelligence for them. Aitassi, connect me to their traffic control. I warned them we were coming, and I want no interference.”

  Ade didn’t seem comforted. He was often consumed by guilt; Aras knew he would feel it now, and would blame himself for everything that happened from this point. Some humans absolved everyone around them of responsibility, and Ade was one of them, still punishing himself for not saving his mother from his monstrous father. Aras didn’t understand why a child felt he had to be more adult than his own parents.

  “I don’t want to start anything,” Ade said. “Not today, and not here. Please.”

  “Do you want to turn back?” Esganikan asked.

  “If this is going to cause a—”

  Aras interrupted. “No. This is important for Ade. He has to do this.”

  Aras understood. Wess’har didn’t bury their dead or create memorials, but he remembered how he had clutched helplessly at the soil on Ouzhari, on Bezer’ej—two hundred years ago, yes, just after the gethes sent their first unmanned mission—and mourned for his comrade Cimesiat. There was no body to leave for the scavengers, for the rockvelvets or srebils, because Cimesiat carried c’naatat: so he had finally ended his own life by fragmentation.

  Everyone should be returned to the cycle of life. Everyone needs somewhere to mourn.

  “You know who’s flying those fighters, Aras?” Ade asked. “Ordinary blokes like me. They’re the ones who get hurt, not the tossers in Brussels who start this shit. I know a lot of them are going to die sooner or later—but not today, and not because of me.”

  Esganikan waited with unusual patience for contact with the Turkish air controllers. “I have no intention of firing on them unless they attack on us.”

  “You don’t have to return fire at all,” Shan said. “You don’t need to. You’ve got shielding.”

  “If I don’t, then how will they learn that we mean what we say?” The shuttle was well inside FEU airspace now with its fighter escort. “They must be able to see where we’re heading. Perhaps they think a small vessel is also a vulnerable one.”

  Ade glanced up through the deckhead a few times but his attention was on the ground. Finding a specific location on Earth was simple; Aitassi turned for the cemetery with a burst of speed and left the FEU fighters struggling to catch up.

  It wasn’t hard to spot from the air.

  Aras was used to two kinds of artificial landscape; the near unspoiled, like F’nar, making as little visual impact as possible, or the wholly urbanized, like Umeh had been. What he’d never seen before was manufactured emptiness. The cemetery covered a vast area of land south of Ankara, nowhere near the city itself; hectares of arid, empty land covered with perfectly precisely spaced white objects that threw shadows. Magnification showed him what they were: headstones. This wasn’t a wess’har custom, but he knew what headstones were because he’d made a stained glass one for Lindsay Neville’s dead baby. What was new and shocking to him was the sheer number and the space they occupied.

  Why should this shock you? You were responsible for the deaths of many more isenj than this.

  He tried to work out if the distress was from his own sorrow for lost comrades or the influence of Ade’s memories. The shuttle hung motionless above the cemetery. There had to be thousands of headstones down there. It shook him to his core despite his rationalizations.

  Shan had now switched her attention to the scene below, all scent suppressed, and she took Ade’s hand without looking at him.

  Aras turned to him. “You knew all those people?”

  “No,” said Ade. “I only knew my mates.”

  “How will you find the right grave?”

  Ade tapped his pocket. “I got the coordinates from the public register. The rows have numbers and directions. It’s like a city.”

  “Tell Aitassi where to go,” Esganikan said. “She’ll maintain a shield over the area so you can do what you need to without interruption.”

  Unlike Shan, Ade couldn’t shut down his scent signals. Even normal humans gave off scents that a wess’har could detect and use to gauge their mood, but Ade had an extra dimension of wess’har genes and so communicated his feelings much more clearly. He was scared and angry. Aras watched him carefully while the shuttle took up position over the section where Dave Pharoah was buried, ready to offer some comfort if Shan’s tight grip on Ade’s hand wasn’t enough.

  Is he reliving the battle? Or is he reacting to the moment?

  Turkish air-traffic control responded at last. Esganikan seemed more interested in the graves.

  “Eqbas vessel, this is ATC Ankara. You’ve entered FEU airspace—”

  Esganikan’s tone was subdued. “I informed you we wished to visit.”

  “You have no formal permission to land. But the cemetery has now been closed to the public for the duration.”

  “Are you a soldier?”

  “Eqbas warship, say again?”

  “You. Are you a soldier?”

  “This is a military traffic center, yes.”

  “I have one of your former comrades on board, a man who fought for the FEU many years ago. All he wants to do is to visit the grave of his friend, and then we’ll withdraw. Do you understand his need? If it were your friend, would you not want to do the same?”

  “Eqbas w
arship, I don’t have authorization to respond to that.”

  Shan cut in quietly. “Esganikan, I don’t think you understand what’s being said. He’s not actually stopping you. He’s not giving you permission, because that might compromise his government, but he’s not stopping you. Get it?”

  Esganikan played along as best a wess’har could. “Very well, then tell those who do, and by the time they decide how to deal with me, we’ll have left your territory. We won’t fire on your vessels.”

  Esganikan closed the link. This wasn’t the commander who laid down her rules of engagement and applied them without concession on Umeh. Aras caught Shan’s eye.

  Yes, you think that’s unusual too, don’t you?

  “Are you going soft?” Shan asked, treading on thinner ice. Aras willed her not to confront Esganikan now.

  “I see no point in engaging in conflict that won’t achieve anything,” Esganikan said. “My curiosity will be satisfied and Ade will have more positive memories of a day that has great significance for him.”

  “You’ve pulled, Ade,” Shan muttered. “Get your coat.”

  Aras could work that one out from her expression. Esganikan certainly liked Ade just as the rest of the Eqbas crew seemed to, but wess’har weren’t swayed by appearance anywhere near as much as humans, and Ade now emitted wess’har male scent. Wess’har females were never attracted to males already bonded to an isan, though. Sexual jealousy was a human trait. Aras hoped that Shan was indulging in a bitter joke to postpone that inevitable confrontation with Esganikan. It was hard to tell—even for her, sometimes.

  “He has a very long life ahead of him,” Esganikan said, with the slightest hint of annoyance. “Being burdened with a painful memory is that much worse for c’naatat hosts, is it not?”

  Ade did his usual trick of defusing the situation. “Thanks, ma’am,” he said. “I appreciate it.”

  The graves looked identical, but Ade knew where he needed to go. Aitassi waited in the shuttle overhead while the rest of them descended to the ground. Within the defense shield projected by the ship, the air was still; beyond its heat-haze boundaries, the breeze whipped dust from the finely chipped pink-tinged stone that covered the ground between the gravestones. Aras couldn’t see a single living plant. This was either a wasteland, or meticulously maintained. Around them, all the headstones were carved with the same globe emblem that Ade had worn on his beret; these were all men and women from 37 Commando Royal Marines. It said so on the headstones, along with their name, rank, age and date of death.

  Aras felt a sense of complete desolation. He had no ghosts here, no real memories, but the seemingly endless ranks of uniform white slabs left his stomach feeling scraped hollow.

  “Give me a minute, will you?” said Ade. “I need a bit of time on my own.”

  He meant Shan too. He set off at a slow pace, pausing at each stone to read the inscription, and finally stopped at one in particular before squatting down on his heels, elbows braced on knees, hands clasped.

  Shan seemed to be focused entirely on him, frowning slightly. Esganikan, distracted by the sound of two rotary-winged aircraft overhead, looked up into the sky.

  Aras forgot Ade. All he could see in his field of vision were ranks of white stone that appeared to be moving slowly away from him, and the moment when he and his comrades, a tiny wess’har army faced by millions of isenj, had decided in desperation that whatever resistance he’d developed on Bezer’ej while in isenj captivity was worth trying for its healing properties.

  We didn’t know then what it really did.

  But later…later I knew all too well. And I still infected Shan against her will because I couldn’t bear to see her die.

  Aras knew how easy it was to fall to c’naatat ’s temptation. He also knew the consequences better than Esganikan ever could. Looking at the stones, he tried hard to remember his brothers—not comrades, not brothers in arms as Ade sometimes called them, but his first house-brothers. He’d been the youngest, the smallest, and hadn’t had time or chance to father a child when the bezeri begged for help to remove the isenj colonies from Bezer’ej. He was a brilliant soldier and pilot. His isan was proud of his precocious talent.

  A hard war to win. But I lost. I lost everything.

  Self-pity was an ugly thing, and he rarely fell prey to it. The seemingly endless ranks of graves had triggered the thoughts.

  Shan turned. She was seldom an emotional woman, but her eyes were glazed with unshed tears.

  “Sad, isn’t it?” she said. “War graves always do this to me. When you see them all together…you can see just how many lives and families were ripped apart. I hope the bastards who sent them had a fucking good reason they didn’t share with the rest of us. Either that, or I hope there’s a hell for them to rot in.”

  Ade had never passed an opinion on that. He was still squatting by the grave that mattered most to him. Shan walked over to kneel down beside him and rub his back reassuringly with one hand, then reached out and placed a pebble on the ledge at the foot of the headstone. Humans seemed to do that as some kind of personal act of memorial. Eventually they both stood up and walked slowly along the rows, Ade pointing at some of the stones and stopping, shaking his head sadly.

  It took some time. Kiir stood behind Esganikan like a statue, hands clasped and resting on his rifle rather like a human honor guard—and Aras wondered if, for all his very vocal and violent dislike of c’naatat, he felt for Ade as a fellow soldier.

  Ade and Shan walked back towards them, stopping to touch Dave Pharoah’s headstone again. Ade, who found it much easier to express his emotions than Shan, wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and let her put her arms around him.

  No hurry, Ade. We all need time to say goodbye, and it’ll be a long time before you see this again, if ever.

  Eventually Ade seemed to have had enough. He walked briskly to the shuttle and almost ran up the ramp. Aras followed and settled down next to him, Shan on his other side.

  “I always find goodbyes hard,” he said. “I didn’t get chance the first time.”

  Shan squeezed his shoulders. “I think he’d appreciate the gesture. A hundred and fifty trillion miles is a hell of a long way to come to say goodbye.”

  “Bit of a downer for you, Boss.”

  “No, I’m honored that you let me come along.” Shan pressed her temple against his. “It’s right. It’s very right.”

  It was a moment of complete and exclusive intimacy, just a second or two where the rest of the world—including Aras—vanished for them. He never minded, but he wondered why he didn’t experience the memories of Dave Pharoah’s death as vividly Shan did. It was an oddly lonely feeling that passed as soon as it began.

  The shuttle lifted, and Aras moved forward to the cockpit to sit next to Aitassi and learn more about the Eqbas navigation system.

  “We have our escort again,” she said. “Look.”

  Four fighters appeared on the bulkhead display, two above and two below. Aras didn’t know the capabilities of FEU aircraft, but he was a pilot, and he knew that they were far too close.

  Kiir said nothing but gestured to Aitassi to let him have the controls. She slipped off of the seat and let him move into it.

  “So they know we’re Eqbas,” Shan said quietly, “but have they worked out who’s on board?”

  “FEU knows exactly who you are and can recognize you from aerial surveillance,” Aras said. “So I think this will be an unpleasant episode.”

  “Sorry, Boss,” said Ade. “My fault.”

  “No, it’s the pilots’ choice to harass us or not, Sergeant Bennett,” Esganikan said. She turned the hull to transparency. “As it’s also their choice to withdraw. We’ve done no harm here.”

  The fighters stuck with them across country, keeping a constant distance but swapping positions from time to time. The coast came into view. Aras suspected that they didn’t want an incident in Turkish airspace. It was a country that could easily slip from the FEU t
o the African Assembly if provoked, Barencoin had told him. An incident like that might tip it.

  “I could simply outrun them,” said Kiir. “But I anticipate they’ll attempt to intercept.”

  Esganikan watched impassively. “As long as they don’t try to force us down, continue.”

  Kiir accelerated south, climbing a few hundred meters. One of the fighters streaked ahead of him, dipping down and blocking his path. It was clear to Aras that they still didn’t know what an Eqbas ship could do; they seemed to think they could force it to deviate by threatening a collision. Kiir carried on, building speed, and now there were two fighters ahead of them and two on their tail. The transparent bulkheads with their full visibility were an advantage in a combat situation. It was only when he glanced over his shoulder and saw Shan and Ade looking alarmed—quiet and calm, but definitely alarmed—that he realized how vulnerable an invisible hull made them feel.

  One of the fighters dipped its wing and cut across the shuttle’s nose. Kiir didn’t seem bothered; he could have simply increased speed and left the fighter behind, but he seemed to be assessing it.

  “He’s telling you to follow him and land,” Ade said.

  “He’s trying to capture us?”

  “Stupid idea, but yes.”

  “Slow to learn,” said Kiir. “Too slow.”

  The ITX link burst into life. It was probably the only band that the FEU was certain it could use to get the attention of Eqbas ships.

  “Eqbas vessel, change course and follow us to—”

  “FEU craft—withdraw before I fire on you.”

  The nearest land was Sinostates or African territory, neither of which appeared to be supporting the FEU at the moment. If the fighters were trying to force the Eqbas ship to ditch, then they probably knew that any c’naatat hosts would survive and so it didn’t matter who was killed with them.