Ally (20 page)

“If you did that, what would follow? Tasir Var—”

“We would need to eradicate all isenj on Tasir Var, too.”

This would take generations. Esganikan looked down, found herself standing on an opaque deck, and passed her hand in front of the controls to make it transparent so she could truly look at what she was eradicating. A dying world: then she was doing it a kindness, putting it out of its misery as a catastrophic meteor strike might. A living world, full of talented beings whose desire to expand made them inven
tive: then they would expand too far, as they already had, and she was prolonging the agony of others.

The chatter continued while she waited.

Ralassi finally responded. “Minister Rit says her sons are on Tasir Var.”

“Then she has a good reason to ensure this is managed efficiently.”

“Minister Rit agrees and says she'll speak to the nation after the transfer of power has taken place.”

“Then we'll land troops immediately and secure the government building. The minister can identify her chambers to us so we can put a defensive shield around that too, assuming she won't operate from this ship.”

Consultation took place. “She says she must be seen to stand here,” said Ralassi.

Esganikan glanced at the chronometer displays in the bulkhead. It was to focus on the time the operation began locally, but she could also see the time—and date—for Surang, nearly five light-years away, and it hit her hard to be reminded how much time had passed since she left. She was a veteran spacefarer; she still had that feeling of hurtling towards the end of her life, rootless and with nothing truly to show for it except restored planets in which she had no personal stake. She wanted her
time
back, time to make her choices and live a life where she could afford to be
late
and days could be wasted.

Shan didn't have to worry about such things now, and for a moment Esganikan envied her again.

“Then we begin,” she said. “Deploy the shield. Landing party, stand to.”

Chad Island, Bezer'ej

Lindsay reassured herself with the knowledge that she couldn't die—not easily, anyway—and kept as still as she could.

And she fell back on her naval training, which had taught her that she would get out of this okay as long as she did
what she was trained to do, and booked a day for panicking later.

Shit shit shit shit shit…

The
sheven
floated like a tall iceberg breaking the surface of the bog, almost totally transparent with a fine lace of fibers shot through its mantle. It was shapeless, a sheet of glass-clear stomach tissue, ready to plunge down upon anything in its path to envelop and digest it. It was motionless except for a faint rhythmic shiver.

Maybe movement triggered it: vibrations in the fluid of the bog, changes in light levels firing visual cells, sound waves pressing on its skin, whatever it took to locate prey. Lindsay's eyes, adapted by the heritage of previous
c'naatat
hosts in ways she didn't yet fully understand, saw the variations in its density as echoes: yes,
sounds,
but silent ones that pressed on some place within her jaw.

There might have been seven-eighths of the creature below the surface if the iceberg analogy held true. With two meters of flesh rearing above the bog, that would make it immense. She opened her mouth slightly out of some alien instinct and got a return sensation of a single, almost uniform concentration of density beneath the surface where the
sheven
sat. It felt like a smooth granular paste in her mouth.
Am I echolocating? What am I using here?
Whatever it was, it told her that there was little if anything of the
sheven
hidden from her visual spectrum.

It was still a six-footer. Just two meters of stomach, and a means to move it around and make more
shevens.

C'naatat
or not, she didn't need to deal with that right now.
C'naatat
didn't mean immortal, either. Aras Sar Iussan was the last of the
c'naatat
troops. That meant the others had been killed by fragmentation. Maybe other things worked too—not the vacuum of space, because she'd seen that trick fail, and not drowning or shooting or crushing, because she'd seen those fail too. But digestion could be another matter.

Still. Very still.

“Leeeeenz…”

Saib's vibrating breath of a voice carried from the direc
tion of the clearing behind her. She didn't dare turn to look and take her eyes off the
sheven.

“Sssshhhhh…”

“Leeeeeeeenz…”

“Shut…
up…
“He didn't understand
hush.
She kept her gaze fixed on the
sheven,
a bizarre heraldic beast frozen rampant on a vert field, watching the pulse-like shudder that shook its whole body, wondering how the hell she could move if it came for her. The cold wet slime of the bog held her and there was nothing rigid to push against to get clear in a hurry even if the viscosity wasn't holding her.

“Leeeenz…”

The
sheven
wasn't reacting to sound. Saib was loud now, enough to trigger it to attack if that was its method of location.

Body heat? Light, movement, vibration? Scent?

Saib was a big creature, three or four meters, and as he swung between his front tentacles in that crutch-walk, the saturated ground shook each time he landed. The
sheven
had to be able to sense that. Lindsay, focused on picking up every detail and thinking her way out of this, could no longer feel fear or work out how long all this was taking. At each swinging stride, the
sheven
started to flinch rhythmically.

Maybe it's confused—prey signals coming from one direction, vibrations from another…

“Leeeenzzzzz…”

“Stop.
Don't move.
” She whispered as loudly as she could, then slowly raised her hand and signaled in light:
it's dangerous, it's a predator.

Saib, still defaulting to his bezeri core in crisis, heeded the lights and stopped. She couldn't see him. She only heard more distant thuds and rustling, and then what she could only describe as wet noises as a sensation built up in her throat and jaw that said
large, near, moving this way.

The
sheven
reacted. It stretched higher, rearing into a glass column, and held that position for a few seconds. At that moment Lindsay's body thought for her. She rolled sideways just as something shot over her head and punched hard into the
sheven
, sending it flying into the air in a wet panicky flapping of membrane. Then all hell broke loose.

Lindsay knew the bezeri's hunting past, but she'd never seen them in action.

Saib, Keet and Carf landed in the bog like depth charges, tentacles whipping, and she was plunged down into the bitter, dark slurry of sodden vegetation by thrashing bodies. The light went out and she inhaled mud, churning roiling cold gritty paste that tasted sour and dead. Not even drowning could have prepared her for the terrifying sensation of solid material clogging her mouth and nose.

She struggled, forgetting all the drill about bogs and quicksand. Somehow her clawing fingers grabbed what felt like a root. She hauled herself up with an effort driven by pure animal panic, and suddenly her head was in air again and she went into convulsive coughing. Around her, the wrestling, struggling bodies registered as fluctuating spaces deep in her jaw. Then they stopped. The noise of churning water faded.

As she wiped the stinging mud from one eye, she saw Keet and Carf sliding across the surface of the bog, pulling a transparent sheet between them. It was the
sheven,
and—dear God, it was much,
much
bigger than she thought.

Six or seven meters of clear film stretched between them. The two bezeri clutched the eagles in their tentacles as if they were holding a blanket under a tree to catch fallen apples. Was it dead? It was more of a flat sheet than an iceberg now and there were opaque patches scattered across it. When Keet slumped onto the relatively solid mat of grass at the edge of the bog, he twisted the
sheven
slightly as he moved, and she could see it was slashed and scored clean through in places.

Carf eased out of the bog after Keet, still gripping one edge of the
sheven
.

“Good struggle,” he rasped. “Good, good struggle!”

He rippled with a spectacular full-spectrum light display that ran in concentric pulsing rings from purple through to scarlet. Ecstatic joy: Lindsay had never seen that before. Only the bezeri instincts that
c'naatat
had scavenged and cultivated within her told her that was the meaning, because they'd had no delight to express since she'd known them.

Carf let go of the
sheven
and it flopped to the ground with a slap, not moving. Keet hung on to his section. Lindsay, still struggling to get purchase on solid ground, felt a rough leathery grip on her arm that snaked around her shoulder and waist and yanked her bodily out of the mire with a loud squelch that would have been comic in other circumstances. Saib dumped her unceremoniously on the ground. The other two bezeri were inspecting the dead
sheven,
batting at it with the tips of their tentacles like curious cats.

Then it twitched.

Saib
pounced
on it. There was no other word for it. He arched into a fluid shape and pinned it down with a stabbing tentacle. Keet and Carf reacted like crazed sharks. In seconds the bezeri were ripping the
sheven
apart with tentacles and tearing into it with their beaks.

Lindsay watched, stunned.

Why? Why does this surprise you? They're predatory cephalopods. Like Humboldt squid.

The image of gently graceful creatures shimmering with magical, ethereal light, victims of profligate isenj and rapacious man, had vanished forever. These were hunters, killers, highly intelligent carnivores. And they
liked
hunting.

Maipay appeared from behind her and loped across the ground to join them: “I see from the high! I see from high tree!” He'd watched the attack. They were now a pack. They were transformed.

They were
eating
the bloody
sheven
. She thought of boiled tripe, the nearest example she had to an animal that was one giant stomach, and felt queasy.

C'naatat
meant you could eat anything. She'd develop a taste for vegetation, she decided.

Carf stopped in mid-rip, ribbons of transparent gel in his maw. “Stronger, much stronger! Like we were young! So
fast
! Again, young! See size of food!”

Lindsay got the idea. They were elderly bezeri given an astonishing new vigor by
c'naatat.
They could hunt like younger ones. And this was exactly what they cherished: large prey, the kind of size that they hadn't seen in generations and that was immortalized in their azin shell records
and maps, exquisite sand-art in vivid colors sandwiched between two paper-thin transparent sheets of shell. They recorded the large aquatic animals that they'd hunted to extinction. They lived on ever smaller animals and mobile anemone-like creatures.

Lindsay wandered away, treading with renewed care, and found a stream to rinse off the caked mud. When she came back, the four bezeri were leaping around the surface of the bog, which stretched further than she had thought, splashing and rummaging in the pooled water like demented raccoons. They were flushing out
sheven.

“Thanks for hauling me out,” she said, but it was to herself. They were oblivious to her again.

The pack spent the afternoon hunting in a blaze of rainbow lights and fantastically athletic leaps, throwing
sheven
clear of the bogs and standing water like an orca tossing a seal from the sea to make its kill. They were pure savage joy, glorying in a rediscovered primeval heritage. Occasionally one let out a burbling sound almost like a growl, but for the most part they were silent and the only sound was the splashing of water that drowned out the clicking, whirring background of Chad's native and unseen wildlife.

“You eat?” called Maipay. He held out a shredded skein of
sheven
flesh. “Chewy.”

“I'll bet,” said Lindsay. “No thanks.”

Damn, they were happy. They were the last of their kind, and now also the first—and they were
happy.

They must have eaten their fill, or grown tired, because they finally came to a halt and swung up into a nearby tree to drape themselves over the branches like misshapen Venetian glass leopards watching the ground beneath.

Saib had taken on a distinctly peacock blue cast to his mantle. Lindsay got up and walked beneath the branches. She looked up.

“Time to get on with more construction,” she said. “Will you bring the rest of your people ashore now? Do you think they'll see the benefits? The need?”

Saib looked down at her, idly swinging one tentacle. It was a bizarre spectacle.

I'm a amphibious gel-woman and they're glass arboreal squids that hunt like big cats. What will we be tomorrow?

“Yesssss…” It was an exhalation of air but she could have sworn it was also a sigh of contentment. “Here we can be what we were and are. Hunters and builders.”

The bezeri were assimilating the comprehension of English faster than the spoken language. But they were talking, and she was talking with them. She noticed that her light signals continued involuntarily now, a kind of punctuation to the spoken word…no, she
knew
what this was. This was the wess'har element in them, the genes from Aras that had passed to Shan and then to Ade and to her and finally to the bezeri. This parallel use of bioluminescence and sound was an analog of the wess'har overtone voice, the stream of two different sounds like khoomei singing that formed wess'har speech.