Ally (13 page)

Shan and Nevyan strolled between irregularly shaped crop bed, carefully designed to harmonize with the wild landscape. They were contained in a nearly invisible biobarrier to maintain an Earthlike growing environment.

“I didn't hear the rest of the joke,” said Nevyan.

Shan shrugged, thinking of Aras. “Just as well.”

“So why did you leave Bezer'ej so soon?”

“There's something I haven't told you.”

Nevyan emitted a faint whiff of acid irritation. “You used to be open with me, my friend.”

Yes, I did.
“Lindsay's infected the bezeri with
c'naatat.
There's something wandering around on land and Shapakti's taken a look at the cells it left. And one of the bezeri seems to have acquired the power of speech.”

Nevyan froze for a moment and Shan found herself a few paces ahead of her. She stopped and turned.

“Speech,” said Nevyan.

“Yes, apparently it told Aras it wasn't sorry for the bezeri's record.”

“This is appalling.”

“Nev, I tried to go after Lin, but I'm dependent on Esganikan for transport, resources, everything.”

Wess'har didn't bother to control their tempers, but Nevyan almost tried. “Dealing with infected isenj on Bezer'ej was hard enough. Now we have to deal with
c'naatat
hosts who could be anywhere on land or sea.”

Deal with.
So Nevyan had defaulted to worst scenario too. The bezeri had fallen from grace in an instant, and it had nothing to do with their shameful past.

“We might not have to eradicate them.”

“You mean kill.
Say
kill.”

Shan had thought it over a thousand times in the last all-too-brief days, searching for the clear line that divided black from white. “Okay, if they don't breed, they're just a tragic anomaly. If they breed or spread
c'naatat,
they're a problem.”

“C'naatat
never spread accidentally among Bezer'ej native species. When non-native life arrived, it spread.”

Large, mobile hosts.
Aras had said that once.
C'naatat
liked them. Like any organism, it sought the best vector for reproduction. Spacefaring aliens were as good as it got.

“It likes difference,” said Shan. That wasn't very scientific, but she took a guess that
c'naatat
assessed potential hosts and latched on to what it didn't recognize as the locals. “It likes novelty. It's a collector of foreign DNA. Look at me, or Aras.”

Shan held out her hands and they rippled with bezeri light. Nevyan reeked of agitation. “I don't care what Esganikan wants. I have to assess this.”

“That means taking a team back to Bezer'ej, and the bezeri don't want you there now.”

“The bezeri may no longer be in the best position to judge,” said Nevyan, “and none of the other life-forms under threat from them can ask us for help as they once did.”

Shan watched the delicate fence between Targassat's philosophy of non-interference and the old Eqbas doctrine of
policing collapsing before her eyes. She searched for her own line, and failed.
And having a choice, must make it.
Targassat had made hers, and Shan would too.

“If they're not breeding now,” said Shan, “there's no telling what changes will occur in the future. I think we have to wipe them out.”

The suggestion of genocide slipped out as easily as any decision she'd ever made. Shan felt it lock into her memory as a moment she would be able to recall in photographic detail for the rest of her life; she was staring almost unseeing at the marines in their dusty lovat green T-shirts and combat trousers, their conversation a murmur on a breeze heady with coconut-scented weeds and pungent onion, and she knew that any of those smells or sights or sounds would trigger this moment in her again. It wouldn't be a happy memory.

Is it because I see the bezeri as animals? Would I do this if I believed they were people? Is this even my thinking at all?

For a woman whose self-awareness was as solid and brutal as a steel bar, genetic memory was a cruelly unsettling trait. But her rational brain said,
Yes, stop it now, stop it before it gets worse than you can imagine.
Aras was thinking it too.

Nevyan held her hands clasped in front of her. “We could ignore this. The bezeri will never trouble us. But others may yet arrive to trouble them, as the
gethes
did.”

Genies like the promise of eternal life didn't get shoved back into bottles that easily. Nevyan was right: it wasn't just the ecology of Bezer'ej. It was the lure and value of
c'naatat
too. There was almost an inevitability that other off-worlders would come after it, just like humans had.

“But if we kill them, I'm still around. So are Aras and Ade. I'm the root cause of all this contagion.”

“And you're my friend,” said Nevyan.

Shan groped for the line again and couldn't find it. She felt nobody expected her to, either, as if spacing herself was so unutterably noble that it relieved her of all future obligation to do the right thing. It didn't. It just showed her how easily it could be done again if she really wanted to.

She didn't.

F'nar was beautiful. The whole planet was magical, and this was her home, and she didn't want to die. The bezeri must have felt the same way. As choices went, it stank, and Shan knew she could no more reconcile the reality of controlling
c'naatat
with the morality of who should have been forced to surrender it than she could reconcile human and wess'har ethics.

“Shit,” she said.

“And Rayat?”

“Word association, eh?” Even now, Nevyan could still make her smile. “Shapakti's using him to find a way of removing
c'naatat
and leaving the host alive.”

“If that could be done, it would relieve us of the burden of destroying the bezeri.”

“And make it a viable weapon. At the moment, it's still carrying a
WARNING: MAY CAUSE GLOBAL DISASTER
sticker.”

“We have no way of knowing if it can be done, and when, and in that time—”

“Are we talking each other into genocide, Nev?”

“That might be your word for it.”

“We've still got some way to go. We have to find them first, then work out how we kill what we find.”

I killed people I felt were a problem to society, and had others kill them. I've been here before. It's only a matter of numbers.

Motive didn't matter. Outcomes, always outcomes. Shan's morality hadn't shifted. She'd just started applying it more widely.

She stood in silence with Nevyan and watched the marines for a while, then turned and walked slowly back towards the pearl city and a late lunch with an increasingly distressed Aras, and an Ade who was definitely—and touchingly—playing the morale-boosting sergeant to him.

Nevyan's sense of burden was tangible. She was still just a kid, not really ready for all this crap. Was anyone?

Shan wondered how things would have turned out if she had told Eugenie Perault to stuff her mission and gone home. She had no way of knowing if anyone else would have made
the situation unfold differently, and she was past the stage of thinking she was the only person fit for the job.

“There's never going to be a return to normal, is there?” she said.

Nevyan dug her hand into the front pocket of her
dhren.
“Life is in constant change, but we rarely notice it.”

She took out her
virin,
the communications device that Shan had never really got the hang of. It was pulsing with color and images that Shan couldn't see clearly from the side angle. But she could certainly smell the agitation and anxiety rolling off Nevyan; the young matriarch held the
virin
in both hands now, moving her fingers over it as if lathering a bar of soap, and suddenly sound emerged from it.

“Nevyan Chail, we have unauthorized ships approaching Bezer'ej.”

Had the isenj more of a fleet than the Eqbas had thought, or had elements of the Eqbas task force turned up ludicrously early? It couldn't be a human fleet. Shan took out her swiss and opened the link to Ade without even thinking. Something in her head said
emergency
and she switched over to autopilot.

“What ships are these?” said Nevyan. “Why are they here?”

“They speak eqbas'u,
chail,
and they say they're Skavu. They've come to back up Esganikan Gai's Umeh mission. They say they are her allies.”

The Exchange of Surplus Things, F'nar

Aras could smell the excitement rolling off the marines—including Ade. He wasn't sure if that was the correct interpretation of it, but they smelled strongly of humans who wanted very badly to go somewhere and do something. They watched the screen set in the wall of the Exchange as if totally oblivious to everyone else in the hall.

“This is a bloody funny way to run a briefing,” said Ismat Qureshi. Eddie Michallat sidled up to her: it had long been obvious that he found the marine attractive but he appeared to do nothing about it. Aras thought that was a wasted life, and humans had such a short span that it saddened him. “Like having your comcen in the supermarket for everyone to gawp at.”

It was more than that. Nevyan was having a heated discussion with Esganikan via a communications link, and with the risk of
jask
removed, they were both expressing their anger fully. The hall smelled of mangoes, and nobody—not even the ussissi packed in between the curious wess'har who had come to watch their leaders argue—could miss the pheromonal signal that Nevyan was the dominant matriarch. The other senior matriarchs of the city—Nevyan's mother Mestin, Chayyas and Fersanye—stood behind her but said nothing. Shan kept her scent locked down and stood beside the marines with her arms folded, jaw muscles clenching and unclenching.

“Who are they?” Nevyan demanded. “Who are the Skavu?”

“They're from Garav, a world we restored several generations ago. It's two months from this system.” Esganikan had the tone of someone who felt she was owed a little gratitude. “They became enthusiastic converts to a balanced way of life.”

“After a war?”

“A war I fought in, yes. They became allies, and I need personnel right now.”

“And I need to know more about
them.
”

“They're dedicated and they're thorough. They don't compromise.”

It sounded like euphemisms a human would use. Aras watched Mart Barencoin close his eyes for a second and mouth something that looked like
Oh shit
. The two engineer-trained marines, Sue Webster and Bulwant Singh Chahal, turned to look at him and their expressions matched his; dread.

Nevyan—a head shorter than most matriarchs, built more like a male—persisted with her onslaught. “Why did you not warn us they were coming? Why allow them to simply arrive in this system unannounced?”

“I was told they were weeks away,” said Esganikan. “And they announced themselves. You want the isenj problem addressed? Then this is how I do it. I accepted their offer of assistance.”

“When? You told me nothing of this.”

“I took the decision a matter of days ago.”

“The Skavu must have embarked many weeks ago to have arrived so soon, long before you accepted their offer, which makes them
overconfident
of their welcome.”

“But they're here, and they have a job to do, and they'll obey my command.”

“How many troops?”

“In this wave, ten thousand.”

Nevyan hesitated. “They can't be billeted here.”

“No, I plan to accommodate them on Bezer'ej.”

“That's impossible. The Temporary City was never designed for those numbers.”

“Nor was it designed for two thousand of my troops,
either, but you made no complaint about that when you summoned us.” Esganikan's face filled the screen, cutting off the top of her bobbing copper-red plume. Aras couldn't argue with her logic, but he shared Nevyan's alarm at a wholly unknown race being pulled in as support in a system where there were already too many tensions. “I'll vouch for the Skavu. I'll keep them under control, and I guarantee they'll do no harm to Bezer'ej. They are
not
your problem. They've come to deal with Umeh, and they won't trouble you.”

The screen went blank. The marines, Shan and Eddie all reacted as if they'd been slapped in the face. They seemed to think the abrupt end of the conversation was rude, but Esganikan had no more to add. Nevyan, however, clearly did. She spun around and beckoned to her ussissi aide, Serrimissani. “Get data on Garav. And see what the other ussissi know. Do the isenj realize these troops are here?”

Most wess'har who'd paused to watch the exchange between the two matriarchs dispersed and went about their business, depositing produce they didn't need so that others could use it, and selecting what they needed from others' bounty. Drama or not, life went on. Some stopped to talk to Nevyan and the other senior matriarchs, then went on their way.

“I'd say the Skavu are a bit too keen,” Shan said. She made an annoyed click with her teeth and examined her thumbnail in a rather un-Shanlike way. “Converts can be a pain in the arse. Can't stand a born-again zealot, even if they're on my side.”

The marines were ominously silent but their bearing and scent said they were, to use Ade's phrase,
up for it
. There was a crisis; and they were bored, and trained precisely for times like these. For men and women who had been dismissed from their jobs, it gave them renewed focus. Ade and Eddie turned to Shan almost at the same time. Aras had begun to dread each day now, waiting for the next escalation or brand-new problem that accompanied it, and recognized the irony in a
c'naatat
worrying about the future.

Ade glanced at him, checking again, and patted his back.
He winked.
It's okay. It'll all be okay.
He'd taken over Shan's role of pretending things would be sorted out, and illusory as it was, Aras still welcomed it.

“How about the isenj?” said Jon Becken. “If I were them, I'd be shitting myself right now.”

Barencoin snorted. “What, more than if the Eqbas had just razed a few of your cities to the ground and were prepping bioweapons? How much more shit can they possibly have left?”

It was none of Aras's business, but the Skavu—whatever they were—would be on Bezer'ej, and centuries of commitment to protecting the planet was impossible to switch off however betrayed he felt. What would the Skavu make of the bezeri—or him? An uneasiness echoed in him and he listened carefully to it, unsure if it was his own fear or an ancient isenj voice embedded in his genetic memory.

“The isenj react badly to the new arrivals,” he said. “As
gethes
would. The fact that they can't be more doomed than they already are has no bearing on their emotions.”

“I can't say I blame them,” said Shan. “Where does this leave Umeh Station?”

“Yeah, I'm feeling nervous about them too, Boss.” Ade's pupils were dilated and he swallowed a couple of times. The rest of the marines were looking at him as if waiting for direction. Whatever the court back on Earth had decided, Ade was still the sergeant, the pack leader, and it was a bond that wasn't easily broken. He had that certain quality, just as Shan did: when things went wrong, he stepped in and provided leadership. “We have to get the civvies out, at least. It's too unstable over there. The station wasn't designed to withstand a war going on outside the front door and if Jejeno's utilities get hit, the dome's systems can't keep up cycling power and water for that many people. It's way over capacity.”

“A direct hit would ruin their entire day too,” Barencoin muttered. “If the Eqbas withdraw their top cover, the dome's a nice big symbolic target.”

“Come on, we've established refugee camps before,” said Webster. “Just get someone to say the word. Let's get them
out. It'd solve a lot more problems than it causes—keep all the Earthbound personnel in one location.”

Aras had expected some of the Umeh Station party to want to stay, given that they'd taken a fifty-year round trip and abandoned everything to come to the Cavanagh system. It was a measure of the precarious situation on Umeh that there had been no argument about withdrawing. Now it was an evacuation.

“Okay, Devil's advocate,” said Shan. “How are we going to support a few hundred extra bodies here when the colony on Mar'an'cas can barely feed itself? We can't ship in supplies. They can't forage or live off the land. It's not like disaster relief on Earth, Sue.”

“Then they ship out with all the supplies they've got,” said Webster, “and if the colonists remember all that Christian guff about helping those in need, we might manage it. If we need to. Nobody's taken that decision yet.”

Shan chewed it over visibly, then swung around looking for Nevyan. She was in a huddle with the matriarchs. “Okay, let me see if Nev will change her mind about having more humans on her turf. Wait one.”

Aras called after her. “We should ask Deborah Garrod's permission too.”

“It's Nevyan's planet,” Shan called back. “And if she says no, Deborah's view doesn't matter.”

Chahal and Webster began sketching out plumbing schematics on a ragged sheet of hemp paper. They were engineers, something Aras regularly overlooked because he saw only commandos. They didn't just kill enemies. They provided humanitarian relief too. Aras had found that an odd combination until Ade explained something called “hearts and minds.” Aras and his troops hadn't been much interested in the hearts or minds of the isenj colony on Bezer'ej, just their eradication.

Now he found himself thinking of eradicating the last of the bezeri, and that thought was getting persistent. It was a human one: he tried to measure it against the wess'har need for balance.

This isn't wess'har. This isn't wess'har at all.

“So, Sarge, is the missus going to let you out to play when we go to Umeh Station?” Barencoin asked. “Or are you grounded?”

“If you go, I'm going.” Ade glanced at Aras. “You up for it too, mate? I know it's Umeh—”

“You should ask Shan.”

Barencoin frowned, his permanent dark stubble making him look what Shan called
a right thug.
“So she's got your balls in her handbag, then. They'll be nice and safe there.”

“It's called manners, Mart. Y'know, consulting your wife.” Ade watched Shan walk back towards them, wistful adoration on his face for a moment. “Well, Boss?”

Shan shrugged. “Nevyan's not ecstatic, but she says yes, if we have to—it's Mar'an'cas.”

“Okay, then I want to take the detachment over to Umeh Station,” Ade said. Shan said nothing, or at least her mouth didn't. She simply stared eloquently. “It's my job, Boss.”

Aras rallied to his house-brother. “I don't doubt the detachment's competence, but I fought the isenj and I want to go too.”

Shan held her swiss in a white knuckled grip. Its status indicators flashed blue and the bioluminescence in her hands mirrored it as if answering. “You've got Esganikan's top cover. You don't need my permission, either.”

“I ask anyway.” Aras glanced at Barencoin, inviting comment if he dared. For a moment, he felt himself back in a larger family again, establishing the pecking order of the males. “You're always concerned for my welfare. I don't want to cause you concern.”

“Aras, do you
seriously
want to go to Umeh?”

Over the years, a mix of curiosity and wanting to face his demons gripped him from time to time, but now he wanted to be with his brother, with Ade, because he was walking into a war. The time was right—inevitable.

“It might help to walk on Umeh among isenj who regard me as a monster.” He didn't have to tell her the rest, but the watching marines needed explanation. He knew they discussed his time as a prisoner of war. “It can't make my memories worse, but it might temper them.”

He was the Beast of Mjat, slaughterer of innocents, war criminal. And a scrap of isenj within him yearned to see home: he'd learned to live with that voice without heeding it. He saw himself as none of those things, and yet he knew they were all him.

“Okay,” Shan said. “Can you spare time to talk to Deborah with me first? I need to sweet-talk her into accommodating the evacuees, and I don't do sweet-talk well.”

“We can secure Umeh Station first,” said Barencoin. “Then you join us.”

“When we're done with the colony, we'll get a shuttle to Jejeno.”

“Shooting might have started, and wess'har craft don't have Eqbas shielding,” said Barencoin.

“I've been shot at on a routine basis, Mart. I know the drill.” Shan glanced at the marine. “What is this, a testosterone epidemic?”

“Just anxious to do our jobs,” Barencoin said. “Might be dim and distant, but we were sent here to provide protection for a civilian mission.”

“I do vaguely recall
Thetis,
yes…” For all her sarcasm, Shan never seemed to lose her patience with the marine, even though he was what Ade called
in your face.
Respect for the detachment gave her a tolerance she rarely showed to others. “Just remember that you can die, and so can Aras and Ade, if the explosion is enough to fragment them.” Her expression was oddly benign. “I came here with six marines, and I want six alive when it's time to go home. Okay?”

“We need transport,” Ade said. “Makes sense if we go in with the Eqbas.
We
being the detachment.”

“I'd better talk to Miss Sunshine about your first-class seats, then,” said Shan. She walked a few paces away and then turned to Aras, hands in pockets. “Are you coming, sweetheart?”

They walked a few paces and then Shan turned round, went up to Ade, and kissed him unselfconsciously. That wasn't typical Shan, and certainly not in front of Ade's comrades.

“In case I'm not around when you have to ship out,” she
said. “Just in case. No swanning off without saying goodbye, never again.”

Ade blushed on cue. The marines looked blank in that studious way that said they didn't think the usual chorus of ribaldry was going to be funny this time. Shan turned around as if she'd suddenly realized where she was, and walked off briskly, eyes fixed ahead. Aras followed her out of the city, through the alleys at the bottom of the caldera's bowl and towards the landing area to collect a shuttle.