Ally (12 page)

She tried hard to stay in her own head and not slip into the external view, perhaps the combined views of the others known and unknown within her that she was finding all too easy now. A gel woman, bioluminescent and amphibious, chatting to walking, talking squid. That was her reality. She fought down panic. Shan wouldn't panic. Shan would
organize
them. She'd give them tasks. She'd galvanize them.

“You start here,” said Lindsay. “It's as good a place as any to build a town.”

She was asking an aquatic civilization to move to a new environment and start over again from the hunter-gatherer level.

It was that or hide in the sea and hope nobody else invaded. There was only one way to defend the planet against off-worlders, and that was on land. You couldn't build weapons underwater. You had to engage a terrestrial enemy on their own terms.

Defend the planet.
Whose thoughts were those?

“We call this place the Unwanted Dry Above,” said Saib.

“Nothing like a positive approach, is there?”

“We will ask if others want to make the journey.” Saib understood sarcasm well enough, but he also knew how to ignore it. “If others want this disease.”

“I'll ask them.” It was harder to contaminate someone than she'd thought. Blood, or whatever passed for it in her circulation now, was hard to extract when you healed almost instantly, so she'd steeled herself to slicing more chunks out of her skin and pressing it into cuts in their mantles. “Can you contaminate each other? You can spread it by copulation. It would be easier.”

Saib and Keet never said a word or flashed a signal. But they were staring at her, as much as a cephalopod could.

It struck her that Shan would never have said that.

“If any of you are partners, that is,” she added.

If you're going to live among them forever, you have to treat them the way you treat humans. You're still thinking of them as animals.

“We lay eggs, when young,” Saib said at last. “We spawn—when young.”

“Okay,” Lindsay said. “We'll do it the hard way, then.”

It paid not to think what an insane situation she was in. She wondered where Rayat was now. If he'd run into the Eqbas, they'd have filleted him already. But it was probably better than falling into Shan's hands.

She hated to admit it, but she missed his encyclopedic knowledge, and—spy or not, arrogant bastard or not—she missed
him,
because she was still human at her core. If there was anything else to hang on to, she hadn't identified it yet—but without another human around, she would
have
to.

Saib stretched out a marbled brown tentacle and it lightened into shades of clear amber pinpricked with gold lights. He seemed to be marveling at it.

“Too late to save my child,” he said.

“Too late to save mine, too,” said Lindsay.

Jejeno: cabinet rooms, now the crisis center for the Northern Assembly government

“If the Eqbas crippled the Maritime Fringe, then they didn't cripple them enough.” Minister Shomen Eit held
court in the cabinet room, silhouetted against the long window with palls of black smoke beyond him, a portal into another world. The artillery barrage was getting closer. “Are you quite well, colleague?”

Rit, still shaken and battered from the blast, was determined she would be
quite well
even if it killed her. She knew what she had to do now. Minister Nir Bedoi was the only other cabinet member who had managed to get to the offices. The city was in chaos. It took very little to disrupt and paralyze a city as impossibly crowded as Jejeno, and the Maritime Fringe and its allies had launched ground-to-air missiles that had struck at least seven of the tallest residential towers in the heart of the city. There was nowhere to run. The emergency relief teams were finding it impossible to move around.

“I'm bruised.” Rit's broken quill shafts gave her an odd crawling sensation in her skin. Ralassi, close to her side, watched Shomen Eit with baleful concentration. “I'll survive.”

“Where are your sons?” asked Eit.

“On Tasir Var. I left them there for safety and I'm glad I did.”

Eit missed them: Luot and Shimev, all she had of her late husband. They had his genetic memories, and she didn't, so now their lives became more important than hers because what mattered, what defined isenj, was the continuation of the memory line, and they had both hers and Ual's.

She wanted a radically different future for them from the moment she'd stood studying the
dalf,
the tree that should never have been. It triggered truly ancient memories. Remembering was a complex act for isenj, layer upon layer of events arranged in a hierarchy of importance coexisting with the day-to-day recall stored in the secondary brain. She recalled what mattered most to her bloodline, across millennia. Memory defined a people.

And now she recalled trees.

“The Fringe clearly managed to salvage a great deal of armament,” said Shomen Eit. “The Eqbas aren't thorough.”

“They destroyed enough to stop the rest of Umeh threat
ening Wess'ej, colleague,” said Rit. “The Eqbas will finish what they started.”

And finish you.

Bedoi, who had been watching the aftermath of the missile strikes in the city from the window, turned sharply and set his beads rattling. “They've abandoned us. And three-quarters of our defense forces have deserted or joined the Fringe. Now we're at the mercy of any nation that wants to overrun us.”

“Who is ‘us'?” Eit moved from screen to screen in the crisis center and from his ever-so-slightly raised quills he looked like a leader who feared defeat. “This isn't our nation at war. This is its government utterly isolated and its population divided while invaders swarm across out borders, and are even welcomed. This is anarchy.”

Rit's memory had suddenly become not just recalled images but also emotions. She was in a comblike grid of chambers, moving towards a brilliant white light and then tumbling down a steep incline and righting herself before rushing with many others towards a tapering column of packed earth, deep brown and peppered with small openings. She was enraged. She wanted resolution. She wanted destruction. Whatever was in that mound was a threat to everything she valued.

In her memory, she rushed to overrun and wipe out a rival colony of proto-isenj in a world of open spaces and vibrant plant life.

In the here and now, she resolved to act to protect her young. Even knowing that this was a primeval swarming reflex to defend the colony at times of crisis, she allowed it to steer her, just as it steered the troops attacking Jejeno and the civilians who turned their backs on their government to side with an enemy.

Survival advantage. That was all it was, the usually orderly and formal isenj tipping suddenly into violent chaos to reestablish an equilibrium.

“I think we should negotiate a settlement,” said Bedoi.

“If they want one.” Shomen Eit wouldn't stay away from the window. It was a strange, impotent display of anxiety
when the most important data on the state of the city was on screens around him in tidy collated displays, not in the vista beyond. “We allowed the Eqbas to land, and so there's nothing to negotiate.”

“We can still negotiate,” said Bedoi. “Agree we made a mistake. Offer to help rebuild a credible fleet.” He had always been torn between total war on the wess'har and accepting their assistance, Ual had told Rit. It was visible now. “If our way of life needs a drastic change, maybe it's to deal with the wess'har once and for all, by concentrating on regaining the military power we once had.”

Rit said nothing. If you were a minister whose office came from exploiting an ancient law that let you take your husband's duties, nobody expected glittering strategic debate from you anyway.

Shomen Eit considered Bedoi for a few moments and seemed suddenly impatient with him. “The only target they have is those of us in government, colleague, because the population that survives will join them anyway. Then they'll embark on a noble, suicidal and very,
very
short war against the wess'har and Eqbas—after they've rebuilt a few fighters. No, this requires something more intelligent. But I agree that the radical change is needed—we should have followed our instincts. Let's see what we have to offer them in terms of matériel.”

“That means diverting resources from environmental management. It'll cost health—lives.”

“So will allowing the Eqbas to remodel our world the way they see fit.”

“You're the one who asked them for targeted biological weapons.”

“Perhaps that's another capacity we need to develop for ourselves.”

Rit felt the push from her ancestor, the rattling quills unheard for eons urging her to protect the colony. The transition from dutiful wife to politician with her own agenda was effortless and immediate.

“Ralassi,” she said. “I can't do anything more here. See if we can find a route back to my chambers.”

Shomen Eit turned on her sharply, beads rattling and shimmering. “You're walking out when you should be coordinating the defense of this nation?”

“I can do nothing here.”
But I can do plenty elsewhere.

“Your
husband
had a sense of duty.”

“It killed him, too.” Rit resisted the bait. “And it's a poor excuse for an argument to remind me that I'm a widow and that I only hold his office through a loophole in the law.”

She gestured to Ralassi and moved towards the door, imbued with a confidence that had nothing to do with her own life's experience and everything to do with an ancestral memory of an alpha warrior in a primitive colony mound who knew what had to be done to save the future.

The street-by-street fighting had now spilled over the Northern Assembly border. Slow going, hand-to-hand fighting in a shattered, tight-packed maze of streets: she had time. She had to act now.

“You betray this government by abandoning your position,” said Eit.

Rit wondered if he was going to attempt to bar her way, but he didn't. Ralassi must have thought so too, because his lips were pulled back in that precursor to a serious threat she'd seen once or twice before. Like isenj, ussissi had a capacity for suddenly snapping in extreme situations and plunging into violence.

They said ussissi always became one united creature, a superbly coordinated mob when they attacked, but Rit had never seen it, and her memory told her that none of her ancestors had seen it either.

The doors closed behind her. In the long stone-lined corridor outside, shellfire seemed distant. The clerical staff were still at their posts, collating information being sent back from utilities and hospitals, and they didn't need a cabinet minister to implement a disaster plan. Isenj were orderly. They were planners and engineers. They could always stave off a crisis.

And that is our weakness. Sometimes, the crisis has to happen to restore sanity. Sometimes, we have to start over.

“What are you planning?” asked Ralassi. He was the last ussissi left in the building as far as she could tell.

“Call Esganikan Gai.”

“Without consulting your cabinet colleagues?”

“Yes. And without consulting them again, I'm also asking her to invade Umeh.”

Ralassi's beaded belts, strung over one shoulder, slapped and cracked as he walked. Rit wondered if the ussissi penchant for beading had come from contact with isenj culture. If it was, it was the only element they'd borrowed. He said nothing for a few paces and then slowed to a halt.

“You remind me so much of Minister Ual,” he said. “But be sure you've thought this through, and not simply continuing a flawed plan out of love and duty.”

“I have,” she said, and thought of her sons and what she had to do. “Now find me a quiet and secure place where I can call Esganikan Gai.”

Ralassi made no comment, neutral and unjudgmental again, and trotted off down the passage with his claws skittering on the polished pale blue stone. There was no stone like this left for quarrying, just the composite recovered from endless rebuilding over millennia. In Rit's ancestral memory—now painfully raw and fresh, kicked into higher conscious levels of her recall by the crisis—she was suddenly aware of how fast, how
geometrically
overcrowding had accelerated so that one year Jejeno seemed a busy city and the next it was noticeably oppressive. It was long before she was born.

I know what I think. This isn't my instinct to kill to protect food sources for my young. This is rational, this is seeking a new solution because none of the others work.

Rit made her way down the passage to a chamber where staff were coordinating rescue teams. They acknowledged her with clicks and whistles and went straight back to their tasks.

She approached one of them sitting at a desk with a planning map in front of him that covered the whole desk.

“I have a request for you,” she said quietly.

“Yes, Minister?”

Rit reached out to the schematic of the south side of the city and tapped it until the scale changed and the southern
border with the Maritime Fringe appeared. Then she focused on the junction of roads that had been obliterated by an explosion in a previous attack, and that was now a park.

“Speak to the emergency authority in this area,” she said. “And make sure they protect the
dalf
tree there.”

“A tree…”

“A tree,” she said. “And one dearly bought.”

F'nar, Wess'ej: agricultural zone

“…and the general asks him what his ambition is, and the squaddie says, ‘To get the brush before those other two bastards, sir.'”

Jon Becken straightened up from his spade to receive his applause, one arm held wide and a silly grin on his face. The Royal Marines' detachment—five of them, if Shan didn't count Ade—roared with laughter and went on hoeing the soil between the rows of onions. If they didn't grow it, they didn't eat it; life here was uncomplicated, but the marines were trained to live off the land, so vegetable gardening represented an easier break.