Ally (18 page)

“Yeah, thanks, Mum.” Embarrassment was worse than injury and lasted longer. “Are you heading to Umeh?”

“There's some crap going on with Rit and Shomen Eit. He declared war on Wess'ej etcetera etcetera etcetera, daft bastard, Esganikan loaded up for Armageddon, and then Rit said she'd depose him and everything would be hunky-dory.”

“Jesus. From our political correspondent.”

“Didn't you know?”

“No, I didn't, Ade. No bastard tells me anything.”

“Either way, they're banging out of Umeh Station.” Ade dropped his voice as if he was talking to an idiot. “You know they meant
complete
extermination, don't you?”

It had always been an option. Eddie had got used to it. He tried hard to get
un
-used right away. “Hunky-dory means three-quarters of their global population dead, Ade.”

“Northern Assembly—one; every other poor isenj—nil,” said Qureshi.

“I want a lift, then. Got to record this for posterity. And the Skavu.”

“Not my call, mate. Try asking the Boss.”

“Okay, if I give you my spare cam and you run into any Skavu, can you crank out a few shots?” Sod that. A mass evacuation was something News Desk always liked. It made more sense to viewers than dead squid and spiders; they could relate to humans in jeopardy on the extreme frontier of space. “But I'll kiss Shan's arse for a flight out there.”

“That's
my
job.” Ade winked and held his hand out for the camera. He'd done it before: dead bezeri on irradiated beaches, a place where Ade could walk and come to no harm. “Done.”

“Seen images of any Skavu?”

“Yeah.”

“And you didn't grab a file for me?”

“Christ, mate, we're busy.”

“What do they look like, then?”

“Closest I can get is…I dunno. Izzy?”

Qureshi stared into mid-distance for inspiration. “I suppose if you crossed a ussissi with an iguana, you might get close. Two legs. Which is handy.”

Ade seemed animated. A proper mission had really
pepped him up. “The ussissi say they're total gung-ho maniacs. Militant green doesn't even come close. Loathed and feared in the Garav system, which they've gone through like a dose of salts.”

Eddie saw
story
on one hand and
massive threat
on the other. His body, marinated in adrenaline, strained at an imaginary leash and made him forget the
threat
bit. “At least they're on our side.”

Qureshi's bergen looked heavier than she was. She hitched it higher on her back and fiddled with the webbing. “I never assume that much,” she said. “Just that they probably won't be trying to kill us.”

“Where's Shan?”

“She went over to talk to Nevyan.”

“Good.”

“Don't push your luck. She's got one of her stroppy moods on.”

Eddie had noticed. He'd also noted that neither Aras nor Ade were especially chipper either, and he speculated on some marital rift. How they made that kind of setup work he had no idea, and he wasn't about to ask. Ambushing Shan for a favor looked less predatory now, though, because he could stroll into Nevyan's home any time. He lived there, after all. He picked up his pace—carefully this time—and made his way along the terraces, pausing a couple of times to check if he had an ITX link through to Jejeno. There was no connection. He swore and hurried on.

Eddie walked into the passage, whose roughly circular skylights cast columns of early morning sun into the gold flagstones. He still didn't know how the wess'har could route daylight below ground and into tunnels as easily as some fiber optic system. But there was always time to find out, and Jejeno and the Skavu were far more pressing topics. The buzz of voices—in English—were Shan's and Nevyan's.

Eddie stopped and listened, but he wasn't eavesdropping. He just didn't want to interrupt at the wrong time. Two alpha females, each capable of killing without a backwards glance, weren't to be annoyed.

The voices stopped for a moment. Eddie knew an awkward silence when he heard one.

“You would tell me if you wanted me to know,” Nevyan said. “But so far, you haven't.”

“What?” Shan's tone was defensive.

“I can smell it. You know I can. You lost the child.”

Shan's pause was long.
One, two, three, four…

“I couldn't keep it. You know it would have been a disaster for so many reasons.”

This time it was Nevyan's turn at silence. Eddie could imagine her freezing in that lizardlike way that wess'har had, a perfect seahorse statue for a few moments. His mouth was instantly dry and his brain told him he'd misheard.
Child
.

“Knowing
c'naatat
's capabilities, I can barely imagine how you destroyed it.”

“You have a way with words, Nev.”

“I won't judge you.”

“Bloody glad to hear it. I got a queue forming for that.”

Eddie wasn't sure if Nevyan understood. He thought he did. “You must have…suffered greatly.”

“You've still got the
Christopher
archive. Really handy trick that humans have. When we're desperate enough, the pain gets blanked out mostly.”

Eddie put this hand over his mouth and realized his pulse was pounding. It felt exactly like the moment when he'd been musing over a precious cup of coffee back at the
Thetis
camp on Constantine island—when things had seemed much simpler—and felt a blast of cold revelation: Shan Frankland had
c'naatat.

Not everything that had happened since had been a consequence of his pursuit of that story, but too much was.

Jesus H. Christ. Shan hadn't just got herself knocked up, just like Lindsay Neville, whose lack of iron discipline she despised—she'd aborted it herself.

This was a Shan he didn't know. There were too many shouldn't-have-beens for a start—her age, brutal common sense, circumstances—but most of all there was a sense that she wasn't some icon of invincibility after all, but a woman with frailties and trials like anyone.
That
was it: he never
thought of her as a woman. She was Shan Frankland, and she happened to be female. When the world was divided into male and female, rich and poor, old and young, good and bad, or whatever category he chose, there would always be a single slot marked
Shan Frankland,
untouched by any other benchmark.

He was aware of the coolness of the stone through his shirt. His mind darted, thought to thought: Aras's, Ade's, whose kid? He fought prurient curiosity, as he always had, not because he felt he owed Shan better than to speculate on the vagaries of her sex life with two-dicked aliens and chimeras, but because it stopped him thinking about his own lonely celibacy.

“I'm sure they would discuss it with you,” said a voice at waist height.

Eddie was so startled that he let out an involuntary grunt of surprise and jerked upright away from the wall. Giyadas looked up at him with cross-hair pupils that flared instantly into black petals.

“Ah,” he said, utterly ashamed.

“Shan was carrying an
isanket,
but she removed it,” said Giyadas. “And I understand her reasons.”

Shan and Giyadas stepped out into the passage, and Shan's expression was now one of the copper who could—and would—do
anything
to you now that the cell door was locked and nobody could hear you. Primeval panic gripped his gut.

“Hi, Eddie,” said Shan, voice flat, eyes that dreadful dead gray of downtrodden snow. “Haven't seen you in a while.”

“Punch me out now,” he said. “Get it over with.”

“I'll take that as an apology.” She had an extraordinary capacity to switch off, but he'd seen split-second glimpses of the raw psyche buried deep beneath the casing. He still treated her as a human who could be hurt. She glanced back at Nevyan. “Ade's going to Umeh with the detachment now, and Esganikan's committing a section of ship to pick them up. If you want to go, get a move on.”

“Can I come?” asked Giyadas.

Shan's expression was pure pain for a heartbeat and then
vanished. Eddie had an impression of a face looming suddenly under the thick glassy ice of a frozen river, mouth open in screaming panic, and then swept away by the hidden current beneath to leave a lifeless calm behind again.

“When we get the rest of the humans settled in, yes.” Shan was all instant, unexpected patience that made sense now. “Then you can compare the difference in their attitudes.”

Nevyan went back into the main room and Giyadas disappeared after her, evidently satisfied. Shan made for the main door and Eddie followed her at a respectful distance. They emerged onto a terrace dappled with reflections from the nacre covering every flat surface. The air smelled of damp vegetation—not grass, not soil, nothing remotely like Earth, but vividly alive—and the throat-catching spices of someone cooking
rov'la
nearby.

“I'm really sorry,” he said helplessly.

Shan kept walking, but not at her usual brisk march. “Try knocking in future.”

“I meant about—well, the baby.”

“Thanks. Everything's fine now.”

“The hell it is. I should have realized something was wrong. I thought you were upset about Vijissi topping himself.”

“That as well. Any more happy highlights from the last year you'd like to remind me of?”

“If there's anything I can do, ask.”

He meant it. He'd veered between reverence and fear of Shan over the last few years, but sometimes he admitted that he liked her because there was something both admirable and tragic about someone who not only couldn't be bought or intimidated, but who was also prepared to die as often as it took to defend some ideal. She was an obsessive hunter and a vengeful enemy, and the conscience of the world. Consciences were never meant to be comfortable.

“Okay.” She did that displaced punch action, shoving her fists deep in her pockets as if she was stopping herself from using them. “Thanks. I know you mean well.”

She still could say
fuck off
a hundred different ways.

“What's happening with Lin and Rayat?”

“I don't think you want to know, Eddie.”

She was right. It would only plague him. He asked anyway, because it was in the fiber of his being to want to find out. “Try me.”

“I know where Rayat is and you don't need to worry your little hack head about that. Lin—Christ only knows where she is.”

“Who knows about all this?”

“Not the detachment, so keep your mouth shut around them until further notice.”

“Is it a problem? I mean, a
real
problem?”

“Don't worry. Esganikan will sort it if I can't.”

Eddie considered what
sort
meant, and knew. He followed Shan all the way to the end of the terrace to the first flight of treacherously narrow steps cut into the rock that linked the terrace to the levels above and below. From the top, it was a curved cliff face, two hundred meters to the floor of the caldera, filled with curved and irregularly shaped pearl-coated buildings like bubbles in a cup. It was one of those moments when he tried out the feeling of never seeing the city again, and he didn't like that at all.

“So are you going home when
Thetis
shows up?” Shan asked. She looked him in the eye, a slight frown puckering the skin between her brows, and there was no hint of its being a suggestion to piss off. “Or are you waiting for the main task force to swing by?”

“I don't know. Can't wait seventy-five years to get there, so I'll probably catch the later express.”

“Time to make up your mind, then,” said Shan. She looked down into the basin of the city and for a moment he wondered how many of her prisoners had had nasty falls during her police career on Earth. There was always that edge of violence glittering in her, even when she was being humblingly noble. “I know. I'm a bitch today. Sorry. You've been a good mate to me and those two buggers, and I know you've got a job to do. I'll miss you when the time comes.”

Shan turned away from the steps and walked away, arms swinging.
Those two buggers.
Ade and Aras: his mates, the blokes he'd shared a house with when she was dead, the only
friends alive in his universe right now. Everyone else he once worked with, drank with, and argued with was either dead or close to it back on Earth now. Time dilation and chill sleep were a permanent exile, even if you went home in the end.

I'll miss you.

Eddie felt tears sting his eyes, observed that Ade was correct—she did at least have a nice arse on her—and went back to grab his bag.

Funny. He'd shared the house with Ade and Aras after Shan was declared dead, and he thought they were close. He still thought they were close when she was found alive. He was hurt to find they hadn't told him about the baby.

He wondered if they really trusted him at all, or if he was just the tame hack who had his uses.

Eqbas Vorhi ship 886–001–005–6: preparing to debark in Jejeno, Umeh

Esganikan Gai admitted disappointment—to herself—that she wasn't erasing every isenj from the face of their utterly despoiled planet.

She didn't dislike the isenj. She'd just steeled herself to thinking that at least the issue would be resolved, buying her time, and then it was unresolved. There was a chance. Rit's coup had to be tested.

It was the contrast that brought it home to her, the stark comparison between Bezer'ej—wild, unspoiled, rich in life—and Umeh, a planet so destroyed that there was no natural, uncultivated life on the land, just a solid sprawl of buildings and a single
dalf
tree imported from the isenj moon of Tasir Var.