“Partly.” Nevyan waited while she inspected all the structures. “They returned to the sea.”
All Shan could think of was that bezeri were harder to track and find underwater than they were on land. With c’naatat, it was academic for bezeri, though. They could go anywhere they liked. They could even glide and fly in air if they felt like it. In the early days, they’d tried it all, taking full advantage of c’naatat ’s ability to reshape their anatomy.
Maybe I could fly, too. What’s the point, though? What does any c’naatat want to be?
“Lin too?”
“No,” said Nevyan. “She’s usually around somewhere.”
“She could go home now. She could have gone home years ago if she’d had the transport.”
“She was given the choice, and she declined both.” Nevyan looked as if she’d had enough of the abandoned village and began walking back towards the shuttle, where her ussissi aide Serrimissani waited, and was probably getting impatient. Age hadn’t tempered Serrimissani’s stroppiness. “Lindsay persuaded the bezeri to be treated, but she thinks not all of them. So we keep an eye on the situation in case the Eqbas return at some time in the future, or even the Skavu. It concerns me.”
Shan felt an answering kick in her gut at the mention of the Skavu. She had her doubts about the Eqbas now that she’d seen that they weren’t as wary of c’naatat as their cousins, but she was even more conscious of the Skavu and their extreme views. Anyone who looked like zealots compared to wess’har was a concern. Esganikan had given her word that the Skavu would never return to this system and take action against c’naatat. But Esganikan was dead, and Shan had no idea what that meant in terms of Eqbas Vorhi’s influence on their homeworld, Garan, which was a little too close for Shan’s paranoia. If nuking Ouzhari hadn’t eradicated c’naatat, she had no idea what Skavu might resort to.
And…Kiir. Okay, he was either monstrous or simply beyond human rules of engagement, but she’d shot him, killed him, and he was not unlike her—a creature from another culture seduced into the ideology of wess’har environmentalism, and used to enforce it. When Giyadas had given her the order to kill Esganikan, she didn’t question it. She went right ahead with the plan, and would have gone through with it if Kiir hadn’t beaten her to it.
Shan shook herself out of that thinking, but mentally filed it under the things that she had to remember to worry about. “So what keeps Lindsay here?”
“She feels she has a duty to the bezeri, as Aras did.”
Shan had never been able to empathize with Lindsay’s motives but she could follow them in a mechanistic kind of way, tracking her from one martyred delusion to the next.
“What are their numbers like?”
“Hundreds now. They bred, or at least some of them did.”
“C’naatat-free.”
“Those we can locate.”
Shan almost said they were back to square one, but they weren’t, and never would be. She’d almost expected Lindsay to be waiting for her. Shan walked away from the settlement, curious—how could the bezeri, the bloody squid supremacists, be talked into giving up their survival advantage?—and went back to the shuttle, Nevyan trailing her.
Paranoia tapped Shan on the shoulder again. It was hard to ignore. “You really think the Eqbas might come back and give you problems?”
“They were angry about Shapakti, but we made it clear that if they wanted the research back they would have to take it by force,” said Nevyan. “It’s academic. The tissue samples are gone.”
“And you ordered me to assassinate one of their commanders. How do you think they’d react if they knew that? Act of war?”
“We wouldn’t care if they found out, of course, but it never happened, and only outcomes matter.”
If only human politics had been that easy. Shan was slipping back into the moral framework of Wess’ej again, a worldview that she now knew was subtly but significantly different from the Eqbas variety. It felt comforting. She wasn’t out of step here.
“Can we swing by Constantine?” she said. “For old time’s sake?”
If Lin had gone to ground anywhere, it’d be there, and Shan could probably pinpoint the area to within a few meters. Serrimissani took the shuttle low over the sea and banked to starboard to give Shan a better view of the ocean. The deck was resolutely opaque; the wess’har here hadn’t made use of the Eqbas technology that Esganikan had left, and Shan now found it oddly frustrating not to be able to see through the hull. But she could see from the viewplate what Serrimissani was trying to locate. Beneath them, there were the telltale lights of a shoal of bezeri near the surface, watching them much as they always had until the shuttle passed.
Constantine was a carpet of amber and blue-gray foliage. Orange cycadlike trees and patches of bog streaked with shifting mats of vegetation gave Shan a jolt of home, familiar, been here. She reached out and tapped a point on the chart that tracked the shuttle’s movement on the console.
“Okay, set us down about here, please.”
Serrimissani’s eyes seemed permanently narrowed in disapproval. “If you’re going looking for Lindsay Neville, she spends her time at the old colony site.”
“Okay,” Shan said. “I’m looking for her.” She turned to Nevyan. “How long has it been like this? Do you stay in touch with her?”
“Ten years. And only occasionally.”
“Do the bezeri still want her around?”
Nevyan had a nervous habit of plucking at the collar of her dhren. The garment shaped itself to the wearer’s needs anyway, but Nevyan always seemed to be giving it a helping hand. “She was your friend, once. Are you going to pursue her again?”
Shan hadn’t got off to the best start with Lindsay when the Thetis mission reached Bezer’ej. There was a brief truce in the middle but then it went back to being as bad as it began. “That’s not enough of a reason. Aras executed Josh, and they were a damn sight closer than Lin and I ever were.”
“She does no harm, Shan.”
Wess’har justice was sometimes a confusing thing even for Shan, who felt she had the measure of it. The bezeri hadn’t killed Lindsay—not that they would have been able to even if they’d tried—but they’d had their opportunity for balance, as wess’har called it, and now the matter seemed to be closed, leaving only the issue of whether Lindsay was a continuing risk. It was a kind of double jeopardy.
She wasn’t going anywhere, and humans couldn’t get access to Bezer’ej. The only risk was the Eqbas, and even if Lindsay wasn’t a host, the organism still lay dormant in the soil on Ouzhari. Not even nuking the place had killed it. There was sod all Shan could do about it.
And nothing I should do about it.
Shan knew the terrain well enough to find the place where they’d buried David Neville. The stained glass headstone was still standing, the top broken off where Lindsay had removed pieces of the floral design as a keepsake. It was hard to tell if it was tended or not, because the ground cover of short barbed grass never grew higher. Shan stood over it for a few minutes, wondering what awareness a baby had of being born into an alien environment, then locked down every thought that would flow from that and turned to walk back towards the remains of the colony.
“Do you want to be alone?” Nevyan asked.
Shan stopped and looked back. “No. Why should I?”
“You seem to be ticking things off a list, as always. Locking up the premises.” It was an odd phrase for a wess’har to use, seeing as they had no locks. “I feel the need to treat you cautiously at the moment.”
“Jesus, do I look that unstable?”
“You bury yourself in activity when you’re upset. I don’t need to smell your scent to know it. You don’t have to suppress your scent, you know. Not now.”
“Habit,” said Shan. “Just habit.”
Shan beckoned Nevyan to follow. It was a pleasant afternoon, overcast but mild, little wind, and the air was fragrant with a wet green scent almost like crushed rue—which
was embedded in her memory as Constantine. Only the coordinates on her swiss told her where she was because all visible traces of the underground colony had been scoured clean by nanites, leaving the place to the reclaim of the wilderness.
The ventilation shafts and skylights hadn’t been filled in; they were hidden by vegetation. She discovered one the hard way. One moment she was on solid ground and the next she was falling, stomach lurching until she hit the ground elbow first, meters below in temporary pitch-blackness. She yelped on impact. C’naatat didn’t stop it hurting like hell. She got her breath back, cradling her arm and managing not to scream. The pain in her elbow was blinding and enough to stop her moving for a while until c’naatat carried out instant repairs.
Who gives a shit? Who am I trying to look hard for here?
But she didn’t scream. She allowed herself a few grunts and a little effing and blinding.
“Shan? Shan!” Nevyan’s voice was overhead. Shan’s eyes adjusted to the darkness—a lot easier for someone with wess’har low-light vision and the infrared inherited from the isenj—and she saw long tangled roots and the suggestion of light at the far end of a passage. “Shan, are you injured?”
“Of course I am, Nev. But I’m healing fine.” She listened for the sounds of falling rock. Once the joists and braces that held up the tunnels had been broken down by the nanites, the excavations were unstable. A rockfall would have been a real problem even if it couldn’t kill her. “Can you bring the shuttle close in, and get a line down to me? I don’t know if the passages are clear enough for me to walk out. I’m not even sure I could find the route.”
“Serrimissani is on her way.”
Shan felt stupid now. The pain was ebbing and she could sit up. Every trace of human habitation had vanished except the outlines of chambers and shafts that were clearly manmade—wess’har made, in fact, because Aras had helped build this colony even before he’d started to change and look more human. He’d wanted to fit in. He hated being alone. She’d seen a picture in the colony archive of a normal wess’har, gold and seahorse-headed, from the first days of Constantine, before she’d finally understood what Aras was and how he survived.
Damn, the things that happened down here. Ade and Mart hunted me down. Bloody well shot me, too. And poor Vijissi. If he hadn’t killed himself, there’d probably be a way of removing c’naatat from him too, now.
Something moved to her left. She flinched, bracing for a cave-in, but reached for her weapon out of habit.
“That’s not going to work,” said Lindsay Neville.
Her voice hadn’t changed. When she moved into the center of the tunnel, she seemed more human than the last time Shan had seen her; less translucent, more clearly bipedal, and wearing some Eqbas working clothes that must have come from Shapakti.
“Don’t tell me you’re living down here,” said Shan.
“Hi, Shan. I’m fine, thanks for asking. How are you?”
Okay, she was going to play it that way. Shan got to her feet. “I’m just terrific. So you got the bezeri to revert.”
“Persuaded some…forced others. Some must still be out there. What brings you here?”
“I needed to see for myself. I’ve been away for a bit. Why didn’t you leave?”
“I have a job to do. There’s no wess’har garrison here and the bezeri need someone.”
“I don’t mean to be a wet blanket,” Shan said, “but not even c’naatat makes you the invincible defender of the planet. Even Aras needed a bit of backup, remember.”
“Maybe so.” Lindsay was a shadow even when she got closer. There was nothing a c’naatat could do to another without explosives, and she didn’t appear to be armed with more than a small crossbow. “But if anything comes this way that seriously threatens the bezeri, I’ve got the ultimate defense for them as long as I’m here, haven’t I?”
It took Shan a few seconds to work out what Lindsay meant. “You’d reinfect them.”
I haven’t really thought this through. Maybe it’s too soon after being thawed out to make decisions. But I didn’t come here for a chat about old times.
“If it’s that or see them nearly wiped out again,” said Lindsay.
Shan slid one hand into the deep pocket inside her jacket, just to remind herself what kit she still had.
I can’t leave you wandering around here. Can I?
“You can’t detonate that,” Lindsay said wearily, knowing Shan’s usual precautions: a grenade, or so she seemed to assume. “It’ll take you too, and you wouldn’t do that now. Not with Ade and Aras still around. They are, aren’t they?”
“They are,” said Shan, and heard the shuttle settling above. The smell of hot metal filled the shaft above her and Lindsay looked up, just that second’s loss of concentration that gave Shan the edge she needed. She brought her fist up square under Lindsay’s jaw—nothing like a hard human jaw, not at all—and sent her reeling, then jumped on her to pin her down, struggling to get a pair of cuffs on her. Lindsay lashed out—she still wasn’t a fighter, poor stupid kid, not even with the c’naatat cocktail of hard bastards she had inside her—and caught Shan in the face, digging her fingers deep into her cheek, but this was just pain, and wounds lasted seconds. Shan had to kneel on her to get one cuff on and then jerk her arm up her back so hard that she heard something crack before she could lock on the other.
“There,” Shan said, getting to her feet and wiping her face. The blood was dry and the gouges were just a vague tingling sensation. It hadn’t been so long ago that Lindsay had hunted her down here, with Ade, Barencoin and Rayat, and left her no option but to space herself. She paused for a moment to be sure that this wasn’t just some kind of neatly iconic revenge. “No offense, girlie, but you’re going home. You did okay, but it’s over.”
“Home to what?” Lindsay demanded. “You’re still the same arrogant bitch you always were. You always—”
“I didn’t nuke Ouzhari. Did I?” Shan hauled Lindsay to her feet. “Earth’s no picnic yet, but they might even need you.”
Shan looked up into the shaft and waited for the line to fall within reach. She could have done with a winch and harness, but she could improvise. She could still tie a bowline. Ade had been impressed that she could do that.
“Nev?” Shan called. “Nev, Lin’s coming up. Mind she doesn’t lash out.”
It took a lot more effort than Shan thought to get Lindsay up to the surface. The line burned her hands but, as always, that didn’t matter in the end. She stood in the cool air, a little breathless, with no trace left of the fight except dried blood on her shirt.
“Lin’s going home,” she said. But she wasn’t a monster, whatever Lin thought. “After we exhume David. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”
Lin, a strange insubstantial mannequin of herself, shimmering with occasional violet lights, might have been dumbfounded, but it was hard to make out an expression on her altered face.
She nodded. “I’m not going without him.”
Shan had stood over quite a few forensics officers while they unearthed bodies. It was easy when you switched off. She could do that just fine, even with the remains of a child. She’d exhume him. “Let’s go, then.”
This island had been Mjat when Aras was a young soldier—a teeming isenj colony, coast to coast, and then he wiped it out as pitilessly as the Eqbas had erased most of Umeh and then large swathes of Earth. This erasure had been going on since before her ancestors were born. She no longer felt wholly responsible for everything that had gone wrong, just a recognition that she had been a part of the chain of events.
And this terrain had been her first introduction to the wess’har. Josh Garrod had pointed out the unspoiled wilderness beyond the shimmering biobarrier that enclosed the colony’s fields. She’d gazed upon nothing, baffled, and she could still hear Josh’s voice.
The wess’har wiped it off the face of the planet. Welcome to the frontline, Superintendent.
No, Earth wasn’t special, or the first,
or the last.
She steered Lindsay Neville towards the shuttle, took a spade from the tool locker in the hold, and went to do a job that was kinder to spare a bereaved mother.
F’nar: later that day.
Shan had that unhappily satisfied look that she reserved for times when people had lived up to her worst expectations and she’d caught them out. There was a grim triumph in it; isan liked to be right. She was still trying to be kind to Ade, treading carefully around him, but Aras could see that part of her had moved on to the next task. Ade had now made contact with Barencoin, Chahal and Webster, and was distracted for the while.
“How are you going to send Lindsay back?” Aras asked. “The Eqbas might not send another mission for years.”
Shan was checking out the cupboards. She’d brought a few small things back from Earth: tea that she didn’t need, some packets of spice, and clothing, all of it utilitarian work clothes except for that black dress. In the intervening years, the food plants scavenged from Umeh Station had been productive and there was fresh avocado oil and preserved banana in jars, jobs carried out anonymously out of wess’har communal responsibility to neighbors. A modest but adequate life beckoned, a far cry from the overwhelming variety of things Aras had glimpsed in Australia.
“We can spare a shuttle,” Shan said. “A bit of Eqbas ship. She’ll be back around the time Thetis gets home, and she doesn’t even have to pilot it, does she? But we have to give her Shapakti’s therapy first.”
Ade sat at the table making little headway with his meal. “You exhumed her kid.”
“More like an archaeological dig.” Shan paused for a moment. “Just bones.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’ve done a lot worse.” She turned to Aras. “And when did you know about Shapakti removing c’naatat from wess’har tissue? Why didn’t you say? You knew, didn’t you?”
“I don’t believe he tested it on a live subject,” said Aras. “It’s still speculative.”
“That’s not an answer, sweetheart.”
“I thought it might distress you for no reason.”