Ally (16 page)

She walked out of the stand of trees and onto the open
heath—pale, gray and taupe vegetation dotted with small spindly brown bushes—to look back at the new settlement. If the bezeri went back to the sea tonight, that was fine. They'd be back on land in the morning, she knew it. And then she had to come to terms that this wasn't just colonization, replicating old towns in new lands, but a whole evolution, the transition from aquatic life to terrestrial; then they had to move from paleothic to industrial as soon as they could, so they'd never be anyone's victims again.

They or we? What am
I
now, and what do I have to be to feel at home with them?

She was wondering how much of her resolve was thanks to the legacy of Shan Frankland that
c'naatat
had brought with it, and comforting herself with the thought that it probably was all her own, when the ground beneath her feet felt softer. She thought it was wet and looked down to see mud oozing up between her toes; and then she fell, or so she thought. She was standing, though, still upright but lower, and she realized she was in bog, and sinking. She flailed her arms instinctively for a moment until her survival training took over.

I can't drown. Just have to stay calm.
She was doing well to get that far.
Should have learned from Constantine—should have looked for the firm ground, the mats of vegetation, the organic roads.

There was a routine for this, she knew. She thought of Ade Bennett, once her utterly reliable Royal Marines sergeant, and how he'd rescued Sabine Mesevy from a bog much like this.

Lindsay was still rehearsing the procedure in her mind, remembering to work her way onto her back and spread her arms and legs as if floating, feeling the thick slurry of vegetation sucking at her legs when she tried to lift them, when something as glittering and as glassy as she was caught her eye.

She glanced at it, and realized that
sheven
were more widespread than she imagined. She screamed, wondering why the sound emerged as rippling green light.

Mar'an'cas island, Wess'ej

Shan squinted against the spray flying from the bow of the skimmer and decided that island penal colonies probably looked the same anywhere in the galaxy.

It was a far cry from the bucolic Constantine colony. She recalled landing on Bezer'ej in her biohaz suit, scared of bringing contagion to an isolated world, and marveling at the incredible color and variety of natural life around her. But Mar'an'cas was as gray as the sea on this overcast day, and she knew it would live up to that image when she landed. She'd been here before. She hoped they'd improved the sewage arrangements since then.

Aras steered the skimmer with distracted ease, holding one hand above the control column occasionally to correct the course. Shan knelt at the bow, one hand on the gunwale to keep her balance.

“You're not worried about going back there, are you?” she said.

He glanced at her as if he'd been lost in thought and suddenly realized she was there. “Why should I?”

“No red carpet.”

“They can't harm me. Last time, they seemed less hostile.”

“Doing a bit of forgiving to get them into heaven, no doubt.”

“Forgiveness is hard. I can't criticize them for what I can't do myself.”

Aras never pulled his punches. Not even a century and
more living among humans and a solid dose of human genes had curbed his wess'har frankness. She waited for him to go on, but he didn't.

“What can't you forgive, Aras? Me?”

He jerked his head around sharply. “The bezeri.”

“Because they didn't tell you their ancestors were mass murderers and general arseholes?”

“I shouldn't be influenced by that, because later generations aren't responsible.”

“Welcome to the illogical world of human prejudice.”

Shan had her own bias, she knew. She couldn't remember quite when she'd started disliking the colonists, but she had. It made no sense; they were ecologically responsible, they'd have been totally harmless without Lindsay bloody Neville and that bastard Rayat, and they were taking the gene bank back to Earth after generations of keeping it out of the hands of scumbag corporations. The only thing that made her different from them was their imaginary divine friend.

I know you don't exist, because where I've been, I'd have seen you. I wish you did. A bit of justice, a few thunderbolts and smitings, and we wouldn't be in the shit we're in now. That's what we need God for.

“Are you all right?”

Shan wiped spray from her face. “Fine.”

“Your lips were moving. You're arguing with someone again.”

“It's okay,” she said, embarrassed at the lapse. “Not the first time. Won't be the last.”

Aras ran the skimmer up the shingle beach, passing through the invisible biobarrier that puckered the skin on Shan's arms, and she tried to jump out with Ade's nonchalant ease. Again, she failed and splashed into the shallows, and despite all that she'd endured the discomfort really bothered her.
It's just wet boots. You sucked vacuum for three months, for Chrissakes. You got shot in the head. You cut your own guts open. Get a grip.
She squelched up the beach, wondering for a moment if she'd picked up some genetic contamination and that
c'naatat
had once passed through a bloody whining civilian.

Deborah Garrod, hair flying in the stiff breeze, stood at the top of the shingle bank with a battered padded hemp coat pulled tight around her.

“How are the parrots?” she said.

Deborah—impossibly thin now, a little doll of a woman—was clearly still very taken with Shapakti's blue and gold macaws, the only higher animals he'd resurrected from the gene bank to see if it could be done.

“Squawking in eqbas'u.” Shan smiled as best she could. “I still can't see how he'll ever release them into the wild when the task force reaches Earth.”

“You'd be amazed what's possible.”

Don't say with faith
. “Amaze me with your capacity to find room for between three and four hundred extra bodies, then.”

“Oh.” Deborah only blinked. She held out her hand to Aras and grasped his arm with all the joy of seeing a precious friend again, rather than the man who had decapitated her husband. Shan never ceased to wonder at the gamut of human reactions. “That would be Umeh Station.”

“The situation's getting too risky in Jejeno. We're prepping to evac.”

Shan cast a discreet eye over the temporary camp. It still looked like a holiday resort that had chosen a very bad location but had decided to tough it out. Blue and green jacquard-type fabric tents flapped and snapped in the constant breeze, a comfort provided by the matriarchs of Pajat. She'd had never seen a calm sunny day here.

“How many, exactly?”

“Three hundred and sixty, last count,” said Aras. “An engineer died—a heart attack.”

Shan wondered how the station would deal with the body. It was a pragmatic copper's thought and she was glad to see some of her old self making a comeback.
Do what you can
. “I thought they had three hundred.”

“They didn't include all the service personnel in the tally they gave the isenj.”

“How can you
not
have an accurate head count in a sealed environment?”

“Are you worried by that?” asked Aras.

Deborah was almost forgotten for the moment as they crunched up the pebbles and picked their way through the sharp bristles of airforce blue tufted grass. “I don't like unknowns. I don't like not knowing how many bodies we have over there.”
No, not “we.” Not your problem.
“I'll do my own tally when we get there, then.”

“No matter,” said Deborah. “It's temporary. A few years at most before we go home.”

So it was
home
now. But Deborah had been born on Bezer'ej. So had her mother, and her grandmother, and a few more branches back up the tree if Shan could be arsed to count them. The woman adapted fast: nothing fazed her, not even a twenty-five-year journey to a world she'd never seen—not even being widowed and dumped on this miserable rock. Shan found herself mentally scoring the shit points, comparing Deborah's traumas to her own to see if she was coping as well as the colonist.

And Aras killed her husband, decapitated him in front of a crowd of colonists. Jesus, did Deborah see him do it? I never asked.

Aras walked a little ahead of them through the paths between the carefully aligned rows of tents as if letting the two women have space to talk.

“Nobody's ever returned from extrasolar deployments to Earth except from flight missions and orbitals, and they've only been gone ten years or less,” Shan said. “Nobody's come back from a colony before. Not born off-world, living among aliens, separated for generations. Are you going to be ready for this?”

Deborah actually laughed even though she had nothing much to laugh about. “Of course I'm ready for it,” she said. “We've spent our lives here preparing for this. That was our mission, to keep the gene bank safe and wait until the time was right to return it to Earth and restore the world God gave us.”

She always said that kind of thing with such utter sincerity that the hair on Shan's nape prickled. Deborah was a real frontier woman, the kind who could feed an army with
two dead rats and a cup of flour, the essence of no-nonsense pragmatism: but then she'd go off into this strange realm of the unseen and unproven with such a plausible manner that Shan had to stop hard at the edge of that cliff to avoid plummeting with her.

Motive doesn't matter. Just actions. Don't argue with her.

“Does this feel like the right time to you, Deborah?”

“When the only civilization that could resurrect the species in the bank shows up, and also happens to be able to return us to Earth, and make those events happen, what does that tell you?” She looked at Shan as if she was a slow child who needed extra help to cope with big ideas. “It feels like the only time to me.”

Shan felt her lips part and an involuntary exercise in logic start to form on them when Aras glanced casually over his shoulder and said,
“Bar'hainte, isan.” Don't do it, wife:
shut it, Frankland.

She heeded the warning. The macaws had
really
done the miracle trick for Deborah. Shan, who saw the pearl of F'nar for the insect shit it really was, and found the reassuring but unlovely reality in everything, knew she would never see the miracles that Deborah did, just wretched causality.

“You're probably right there,” Shan said, catching Aras's eye on the next glance. “I never asked, but if the Eqbas provided the means to recreate living specimens from the genetic material, does that mean you didn't have that technology when you embarked?”

“No.”

“That's…unusually optimistic.”

“We knew that it would be available in the future when the time came to return.”

“I see.” Shan bit her lip.
How can people be competent enough to plan a deep space mission, but so completely fucking naive that they gamble on technology turning up out of nowhere?
“Well, that's a bit of luck, then, isn't it?”

Shan reminded herself that Deborah had never locked a door in her life. Yes, she
was
bloody lucky. On a cosmic scale, it was a trillion-to-one shot…no, the gene bank had
caused
the chain of events that eventually brought the Eqbas Vorhi into the game. God didn't shape events like that. If he engineered all those deaths and the intervention of an army that made Genghis Khan look like a day-tripper, instead of just thunderbolting some environmental sense into mankind the Old Testament way, then God was a sick bastard. She couldn't be bothered to believe in a sadist.

The discussion faded into silence. They walked through the camp, and Shan decided she'd have staggered the lines of the tents to stop that bloody wind being funneled through. The site was clean and tidy, but the smell of shit still pervaded the air.

“Is that your composting system?” she asked. “Because if you're having trouble with the latrines, the marines can help you out there.”

“Both,” Deborah said.

On either side of the path there was little activity in the tents, as if the place had been abandoned. There was nobody around to hurl rocks at Aras or call her a heathen murderer anyway, and she realized the copper in her had expected it because she had relegated these colonists to the status of a mob. It was only when she passed beyond the tent city that she could see the colonists busy in the fields.

Fields
was a generous word for the land. It wasn't a fertile place. It was a rock.

Somehow, though, they'd built up soil and enriched it in a matter of months. The transparent composite tunnels rescued from Constantine and the
Thetis
camp were hazy with blurred greenery and shapes of beige-coated people working in them. The visible soil looked respectably clear of stones. It must have taken the colonists most of their waking day to transform this grim rock into something approaching a viable farm is so short a time.

Shan wandered past Aras and picked her way between shallow furrows that were speckled with emerging green leaves. Broad beans: she'd grown them too, and hoed onions on Constantine, and broken up frozen lumps of soil during the brief months when she thought her days would be spent with Aras in exile with a bunch of Christians she liked
but—as a Pagan, lapsed or otherwise—she could never truly identify with.

She stared down. Ade would be annoyed at her for getting mud caked on the boots he'd gone to such lengths to find for her. She hoped it was mud, anyway.

“You're going to wait until the Eqbas fleet shows up in a few years, or are you heading back with
Thetis
?” she asked.

“The sooner we start, the better.” Deborah walked over to Aras and patted him gently on the back. Shan didn't like that familiarity, innocent as it was. “So we wait for the faster ships.”

“So…you're sure you can handle a few hundred extra mouths for a while.”

“Yes, but it would be better if they have dry supplies they can bring too.”

“I bet Ade's got that in hand.” She'd check anyway. She didn't believe in
surely.
“Remember all these people are useful—fit, competent, craft skills too. They built a biodome. They can earn their keep while they're here.”

“I was sold already, Shan. We can't turn away people who need refuge.”

Shan had forgotten the persuasive power of Christian duty. But it seemed a dirty trick to exploit their commandments. Aras just tilted his head and gave her a sad doglike look that could have been anything from adoration to relief that she hadn't started arguing theology with them. His scent, or as much as penetrated the fecal stench of fertilizer, was blandly content but his preoccupied expression said otherwise. She really had got out of the habit of filtering out farming smells in F'nar. Wess'har processed sewage in very different ways.

“Okay, Deborah. Thanks. We'll ship out all the solar kit that we can lift, too.” Shan squatted down to admire the seedlings battling through the dark soil and decided that she'd spend more time with the crops back at home when the situation settled. No: sod it, she'd start as soon as the evacuation was completed. Having endless time was no excuse for wasting it. “It'd be really kind if you could keep the Booties busy here for a while too.”

“Booties…oh yes. Marines. Certainly.”

“They weren't welcome last time, I recall,” said Aras quietly, his tone always the more pointed for being mild. “Which is a pity.”

“I'll make sure they're treated courteously this time if they come.”

Aras walked over to the composite tunnels, squelching mud along the margin of the field. He leaned inside, ducking his head, and then came out again almost immediately.