Ally (23 page)

Sometimes there wasn't much difference between being surgically loaded with battlefield data systems and having an alien symbiont. Either way, it separated you from those who didn't have it.

The detachment was holed up in a storeroom. Chahal was making a careful examination of the bagged plants, pressing his finger into the soil and trickling water into the drums from his ration bottle.

“So, Rayat's arse for our honor,” said Barencoin. He sat on a cupboard, swinging his legs idly. “Shame the fucker's dead. Why didn't you tell them that?”

“Because we need to discuss this,” said Ade.

“Nobody will remember us anyway by the time we get back to Earth. It's what we do to survive when we get home that matters.”

Sue Webster—solidly unflappable, rosy-cheeked, endlessly cheerful, and very adept at silent kills with her fighting knife—swatted him across the knee as she edged past him. “Mart, what difference is your employment history going to make when the Eqbas show up on Earth, eh? Think about it.”

“The adventure ends one day, mate,” said Barencoin. “We've all got maybe sixty or seventy years to fill when we get back. But we're from another age. Earth's an alien world to us now. You've got this illusion that we're still part of it because we can watch the fucking telly and check our bank accounts when we can get a link out. But we won't fit back in. We never will.”

Sue shook her head in mild exasperation. “You saw what was happening to this planet when we dropped below the cloud cover. It's doomsday. All change. New order. Might be paradise, might be hell. Won't be the same as it is now, though. Job prospects on Earth are going to be the last of your worries.”

“So if we found Rayat's decaying remains and waved them in front of the ITX cam,” said Becken, “then the Boss Spook says that's nice, thank you very much, we just wanted to know what happened to him out of curiosity so we can update our pension mailing list, and you're now back in business, no hard feelings. Yeah? Is that the size of it?”

Ade glanced at Qureshi. She was silent, sitting on a table with her arms around her knees. He could almost see the replay in her brain, the way she was reliving the conversation
from the time he shut the door and started taking to Harrison. Maybe it was his guilt, which was always willing to stand a double watch, that made him think she was slowly working it out.

Chahal joined in the involuntary head-shaking. “Whatever they say now, in twenty-five or thirty years' time, none of those promises are going to mean shit.”

Becken snorted. “That's one thing we
can
bank on.”

Ade wanted clarity. He got it with Shan and now he expected it from everyone. “So what do you want me to do? Use the lever we have, such as it is, or tell them to fuck off?”

“We don't know what they want.”

“Find Rayat.”

“Well, he's in the Cavanagh system. He can't be anywhere else. Job done. And that takes us where, exactly?”

It bought Ade some time. He could
seek clarification
, a nice Shan-type phrase that didn't translate into calling Harrison a spook-puppet.

“Do you want the finding of guilt overturned, or do you also want to continue serving?”

There was a pause. The marines all looked at one another. Ade could guess: they knew what they really wanted—for life to go on as if the last couple of years had never happened—but they didn't understand the price, or if the bargain would be kept.

Qureshi found her voice at last. “Let's find out
exactly
what they want us to do. Because they know something that we don't. Rayat had something they want, or he did something they need to check on, or whatever, but they need him.”

Ade teetered on the edge of doing the right thing, the decent thing, because if he couldn't trust special forces troops with this information—if he couldn't trust comrades—then he couldn't rely on anyone, and he didn't want to have that same cold mistrustful core growing in him that he'd felt at the root of Shan's memories.

“He's not dead.” Ade blurted it out. “And they
can't
possibly know if he's dead or not.”

“Aw, shit…” Barencoin was instant anger. “You fucking
liar,
Ade. You told us he was dead. And Neville too. You said you handed them both over to the bezeri.”

“I did.” No point dragging Aras into it. It wasn't the poor sod's fault there were two extra
c'naatat
on staff. “He's not dead, and neither is Lin.”

“But Bezer'ej is loaded with human-specific pathogens. The wess'har answer to asset denial. And the sea's a bit damp, yeah? Am I understanding you right?”

Sometimes Barencoin's chain of logic was so like Shan's it was painful, right down to the language. “You got it.”

“So either the pathogen is bullshit, or those bastards have got
c'naatat.
”

I should have just said I lied and that I'd chickened out of killing them. I could have done a good job of that. Really convincing
. “It's a cock-up all round.”

“This just gets better with every passing day, doesn't it?” Barencoin slid off the cupboard and strode slowly around the room, rubbing his face with both hands. He was one of those very dark blokes with pale skin that showed permanent five-o'clock shadow, and combined with his aggressive body language it made him look like a bad-tempered pirate on his day off. “Eddie, I notice you didn't call your news desk to hold the front page or whatever shit it is you do. You knew?”

“Yeah.” Eddie sounded utterly unmoved. Ade realized that he'd probably come up against some real bastards in his career and an angry Barencoin wasn't going to make him back down. He didn't even give in to Aras when he was throttling the life out of him. “But if you've seen one
c'naatat,
you've seen 'em all. Old news.”

“It's not fucking funny.”

“Since when did you become the environmental conscience of the FEU?”

“It's another layer of shit we don't need. You bloody
sure
they don't know he's got a dose?”

Ade had now had enough. “No, they don't. So shut it. And they don't know about Lin either. Rayat's just dropped off their radar and they want to know why. And now you know that if the next thing they want is for us to bring him
home in exchange for clearing us, the answer's no can do.”

“Christ.”

Chahal and Webster just stood up and got on with packing the food and plants into crates they could lift between them, and everyone seemed to have run out of things to say. Eddie patted Ade's back and bent down to give Qureshi a hand wrapping plants.

You've done it now. And Shan's going to go ballistic.

Ade knew that as soon as he left the room, they'd start arguing, and saying what a shit their sergeant had turned out to be, and how they'd trusted him. Right then Ade didn't give a toss about the Corps, or his honor on some record at HQ, but that he'd fallen from grace with people who weren't just friends or co-workers or any of that civilian shit, but were brothers and sisters in a way that maybe even Aras wasn't.

That
was his honor: the respect and trust of his mates.
Sorry
didn't begin to cover it. He felt desperately alone and wondered what had happened to his solid dull common sense.

And it still wasn't over. Now he had to face Shan again. He'd lost too much ground with her already and she'd tear him up for arse-paper for letting anyone know about Rayat and Lin.

“I'm going to wander around and see what else I can lift,” he said, and as Eddie went to follow him he held up his hand to indicate he didn't want company.

“You going to ask Harrison a bit more?” said Becken. “Work out what their game really is? Because if they know he's got a dose, or that they can get it anytime from Ouzhari, then there'll always be some bastard trying to get out here to grab it. Shan said that, didn't she?”

Becken didn't have to add that Shan took the airlock option rather than hand the parasite over to Rayat and his spookmasters. It was one of those ironies so huge that it had almost lost all meaning.

“I'll wait a few days.” Ade shut the store door behind him and wished that
c'naatat
hadn't given him any more useful extras, because his hearing was acute now, as acute some
times as Aras's. Before he moved out of range, the last words he caught were Ismat Qureshi's.

“…whatever happened to good old Ade?”

Good question. He didn't know either.

He hadn't even told them that the bezeri had a shabby history of genocide, and that at least one of them now carried
c'naatat.
There was only so much of his own inadequacy and bad judgment he could dump on them in a day.

Call me back, Shan,
he thought. He'd face the consequences of his own actions, but reassurance from someone who believed in him would have been good right then.
Jesus, woman, I need to hear your voice.

Private apartments of Minister Rit, Jejeno

“They'll come for you,” said Ralassi. The ussissi's tone was weary and matter-of-fact. “They'll kill you.”

“I haven't revealed my intentions.” Rit checked her communications logs to see that the message to her sons had been received at the Tasir Var relay. She wanted to reassure them that she was safe if they heard more reports of fighting in the capital. “Shomen Eit has no idea what involvement I have with the Eqbas. I plotted with nobody.”

“That also means you have no allies either, Minister.”

“Winners always have allies after the fact,” Rit said. “And fortunately I have no need of them before it.”

“But how will you hold a government together in the aftermath of this? The Eqbas can't be at your side forever. At some point after they withdraw, the army will turn on you.”

Rit's apartments were the top section of a tower to the northwest of the Northern Assembly parliament building. Her privilege gave her that most sought-after of things, an open terrace set in the asymmetric roof that sliced across the top of the tower at an angle. At this height she felt safe enough to open the doors onto the roof and take a few steps outside to get a better view of the cityscape. In her private home, she had no access to the monitoring network that would have shown her the movements of troops and the sta
tus of utilities and traffic across the country. She had to rely on what she could see, hear and smell from this high tower, and the height of the surrounding buildings meant she had almost no view of ground level.

A dozen distant palls of gray smoke rose up from the forest of towers and canyon-sided multistory blocks; muffled booms punctuated the ever-present murmur of city sounds that reminded her of the ocean on Tasir Var. Umeh's moon was a world with a few remaining forests and open land where no buildings had ever stood. It was the reason she had her children educated there, and why she was happier leaving them in the school than bringing them to Jejeno.

If that wasn't an admission of the need for drastic change on Umeh, then nothing was. Umeh wasn't a place she wanted to raise her sons. Ministers and the wealthy from all four continents sent their children there if they could, and saw no irony in the fact that the world they shaped and created wasn't good enough for their own offspring.

I see it now. Ual saw it long before me.

Now she understood her husband's willingness to risk everything to break the cycle of profligacy before it was too late.

I never understood it. I never supported you. I took on your legacy grudgingly. But I know better now.

Rit felt a pang of curious envy for the hybrid humans who could absorb each other's memories through the parasite they carried. Ironic that it was an isenj characteristic, and even more ironic that it had entered its first wess'har host, the Beast of Mjat, when he was wiping out isenj communities on Asht.

“Minister, come inside,” said Ralassi. “The shelling is random. There's no point testing the law of probability.”

“I can't see the Eqbas ship.”

“It's probably too far south. And there's no telling what it looks like at the moment—it could be broken up into hundreds of smaller vessels. Fighters, landing craft, whatever they require at that moment to carry out the task.”

“How do they do that?”

“I'm not an engineer, Minister. But wess'har have had re
sponsive material technology for tens of thousands of years. Their ability to reshape matter is unrivaled.”

“And not only inorganic matter. Genetic material too.”

“Combine the two, and there's little over which they don't have control.”

At that moment, those were the most reassuring words Rit could hear rather than the most alarming. She took one last look at the glittering facets of the city skyline and imagined what might be happening in the Maritime Fringe. Five hours ago, Esganikan Gai's ship—or ships—had started dispersing the pathogen that would attack only isenj with certain genetic markers. By now, the first effects would be noticed.

“Minister…”

“Very well.” She closed the terrace doors but left the shutters parted. When the Eqbas ship came back to Jejeno, she wanted to see it. At times like this, she wanted something that Earth had and Umeh didn't: a universal broadcast network. She'd seen it. She knew that Eddie and his kind provided information that anyone could see and hear. If she'd had this now, she could have observed what was happening across the planet, without any need to know government contacts in other nations.

She picked up one of the small gray data cubes that stored network information and dropped it into its slot in the communications console, a child's puzzle with smooth shapes that fitted into only one hole. The image that emerged on the screen was one of a list of terminals she could reach. Each showed its own onward connections, red lines connecting to symbols.