Ally (3 page)

She was damned if he was heading back home with his prize.
C'naatat
wasn't for sale.

“Can't your clean-up teams trace Lindsay?” she asked.

Shapakti picked up the imaging device that Shan thought of simply as the glass tea-tray and stared into its layers like a haruspex seeking meaning in entrails. He had been annoyed—as annoyed as he could be, anyway—that he couldn't remove
c'naatat
from human cells as he once had. The damn thing was learning to thwart him. He made little noises in his throat that reminded her of an otter and she wondered if he was avoiding the issue in a very un-wess'har way.

But he wasn't. He was just preoccupied. “They've lost track of the bezeri. They seem to have vanished.”

Shan tipped the glob of gel into a container and put it in her pocket. “I'd better find Aras and Ade, then. It's like having a couple of naughty little boys to look after.”

It was a joke but she meant more than half of it, because the two of them had become a double act. The housebrother bond was as powerful for Ade as it was for any wess'har, more than just the exchange of DNA between the three of them and the biochemical bonding: Ade craved comradeship, and so did Aras. Species and trillions of miles of space might have separated them, but they had a lot in common apart from her—two soldiers, expendable and expended, who dreaded loneliness.

“If you find Lindsay,” said Shapakti, “will you let me take samples from her?”

“Dead or alive?”

“Alive is always better.”

“I'll see what I can do.”

Shan walked out of the maze of corridors and chambers that formed the Temporary City, passing knots of ussissi displaced from Umeh by the fighting—not almost-appealing meerkats now, but irritable, anxious, pack-fighting animals. There was also the Eqbas crew working on the decontamination of Ouzhari island, around a hundred of them in this former wess'har garrison. The rest of the 2,000-strong force was split between Umeh and the surrounding camp, and they were marking time on those du
ties until the rest of the Eqbas task force joined them for the journey to Earth.

Shan found a sheltered spot on the shingle beach and sat in the lee of a twenty-meter long mat of some tufted lavender-gray succulents. This was where Ade and Aras would land the boat. She'd see them coming.

Umeh is
not
your problem. Leave it alone.

But Umeh was tearing itself apart. The Eqbas were giving them a hand in making a bang-up thorough job of it, too.

None of this is your problem. Stop looking for more fights to keep yourself occupied.

From the beach she could see the first island in the chain that ran south, about six kilometers across the channel. She realized she didn't actually know the local name for it; to her, it had always been Constantine. That was the name of the religious colony that had lived there for nearly two centuries, and so in the proprietorial way of foreign empires the island's identity had been subsumed by it. The chain of islands ran south, decreasing in size like a bunch of stylized grapes—Catherine, Charity, Clare, Chad, and Christopher, named for saints who hadn't been on hand here to perform any miracles when they were really needed.

Christopher had a local name:
Ouzhari.
Shan wondered if it would go down in history like Hiroshima or Istanbul, an icon of destruction. It had been idyllic white sand and black grass set in a vivid blue sea, but the grass was gone, and only
c'naatat
survived in the soil of the irradiated wasteland.

So the bezeri were as rotten and profligate as humans. They'd wiped out a rival race long before the wess'har came to the Cavanagh system, and—according to Rayat—they didn't feel the least bit guilty, and they didn't deny it. They seemed bullish: proud, even. Shan realized she'd been hoping that the unifying principle of non-human life across the galaxy would be compassion, and that
Homo sapiens
was the bad apple in the galactic barrel. Deep down, though, her rational self had long suspected that gang-banging dolphins and murdering chimps were just evidence that all life was brutal and opportunistic in its way, and that people by the
wess'har definition of sentience—human or cephalopod, in-sectoid or un-cute meerkat—were equal, both in their right to life and their complete disregard for it.

But she
liked
the wess'har. They killed too, but she understood their rules: vegan, cooperative, frugal, and utterly remorseless. They didn't pick on the small and the weak. They swaggered up to the biggest bully in the playground, tapped them on the shoulder, and punched them out. That was how she did things too. She fitted in fine with the local wess'har. She also fitted in with the Eqbas wess'har, up to a point, and that was the part that worried her, because the cultural and ethical rift between the two branches was big. She watched it growing bigger each day.

They all think it's perfectly okay for me to betray my duty and help eco-terrorists, though. Normal, decent, wess'har thing to do.

If only she embraced the Wess'ej Targassati philosophy of non-intervention as well, she might have been a lot happier. But her gut still told her to do as the Eqbas branch of the family did; wade into trouble to sort things out, unasked and uninvited.

Across the channel, a pinpoint of reflection wreathed in a bow wave of white foam was heading her way. As she watched, it resolved into a rigid inflatable. Two figures sat forward, leaning on the gunwales, one the dark and heavily muscled shape of a once wess'har rendered almost unrecognizable by the changes
c'naatat
had made to him, the other a smaller blur of lovat green combats, a human male.

How will we ever get back to normal after all this?

Normal was relative; other people's normal had never been hers anyway, but the last few years had shifted it much further along the spectrum. Now she wondered if she was actually irreparably damaged by accepting that you could suck hard vacuum or cut your guts open and still carry on as if you were human. The only reference point of sanity that she had was two lovers who were as altered as she was, and probably about as well adjusted. Their shared purdah seemed a powerful bond. Now, after the abortion, it seemed fragile.

Yeah, maybe a bit of discussion beforehand would have been a good idea. But what if you'd talked me into keeping it?

It could never be.
It
was a girl, but Shan hung on to the neuter, the nameless, and made damn sure she didn't start sentimentalizing. It wouldn't change a thing. As she focused on Ade, she also made sure she didn't wonder if the kid would have looked like him. That was the path to becoming a fucking lunatic like Lindsay.

By the time the inflatable slowed down in the shallows Shan could see that neither Ade nor Aras were happy. If the wind had been in the right direction, she was sure she could have smelled them. Ade jumped out of the boat as it ran up onto the beach, and lifted its outboard clear to haul up the pebbles for Aras to step out.

Now Shan could see why. Aras was cradling something in his arms. It was a makeshift container of folded plastic, full of vegetation and soil.

He's rescued something. He's found some animal. He's so bloody soft.

Wess'har generally expressed their strict vegan outlook by unsentimental avoidance of other species, but Aras had insisted on looking after the lab rat colony he'd liberated from Rayat before surrendering them to Shapakti. He found their little paws fascinatingly like human hands. Shan got to her feet and walked towards him, expecting to see something helpless and rare in the container, something Aras wanted to nurture.

She peered in. It was just wet earth and vegetation coated in what looked like raw albumen.

“Where is it?” she said. “Come to that,
what
is it?”

Ade had that studied lack of expression that said he had bad news, but his acid scent of anxiety conveyed the real message just fine. “I think we need to get Shapakti to take a look.”

“Why?”

Aras—far from the seahorse-like elegant wess'har he had been, now more a heraldic beast overlaid on a man, magical and tragic—still had that tendency to tilt his head to indicate
intense interest. “I believe there are trace cells on this piece of riverbank that are from a bezeri.”

Shan heard
riverbank
and
bezeri
. She was no biologist, but bezeri were ocean dwellers, saltwater animals. “What's driven them inshore? Are they beaching themselves?”

She expected more bad news about their numbers. They were down to the last forty or so individuals of a population that had already declined to tens of thousands before the cobalt-salted neutron devices scoured Ouzhari and contaminated the sea round it. They would never recover.

Aras tilted the container. Shan reached out automatically and the lights in her fingertips sparkled in a complex pattern of blue and amber pinpricks. The display distracted her briefly from the wet mess in the plastic box.

“What's in there?” she asked.

“Traces of mucus from the mantle of a bezeri,” said Aras. “From the banks of the estuary.”

Another dead one.
They beached themselves in their thousands after the fallout hit them. “The body's still there, then.”

“No.” Ade folded his arms and stared down at the pebbles for a few moments. He looked up, eyes wide and wary. “It ran off.”

Northern Assembly, Ebj continent, Umeh, Cavanagh's Star system: near the Maritime Fringe border

Minister Rit picked her way between rubble on the construction site and wondered when the Maritime Fringe forces would pour across the border again.

The Eqbas had withdrawn their ship and she didn't know if they'd be back. They'd agreed to help Umeh restore its ecology: her husband, Par Paral Ual, had lost his life for asking them to intervene, and she expected that sacrifice not to be wasted. Once invited, Eqbas didn't walk away, but they seemed to have walked away now, as if Umeh was so far beyond their help that they'd lost interest in reshaping it.

It was still Rit's duty to see that her husband's wishes were honored. She didn't know how to cope if they weren't.

“I expect them to come back to discuss the bioweapons,” said Rit.

Ralassi, her ussissi aide, half closed his eyes in faint disapproval. “They always keep their word.”

“Meanwhile, then, we rebuild.” Humans, her late husband used to tell her, were prone to descend into anarchy in wartime. They abandoned their sense of community. “Are your people going to return?”

“Perhaps.” Ralassi trotted on, inspecting the progress. He was one of the few ussissi who seemed not to run with the pack. “But they seem to be settling into life on Wess'ej. Whatever happens, that's home. We evolved with the wess'har, regardless of what other partnerships we might form. Never forget that.”

Buildings along the route of the Maritime Fringe's abortive advance stood smashed to the first and second floors, their colored fascias blackened and peeling. Most of the fallen masonry had been cleared, at least the length of the road ahead. The dead had been taken away and cremated long before. Joists and scaffold crisscrossed Rit's field of view like a web.

Nothing in her genetic memory, no voice or recollection of her many ancestors, could tell her what move to make now. Isenj rarely fought among themselves. It had taken an external threat—the wess'har and their cousins from Eqbas Vorhi—to tip them into brief, destructive skirmishes, and then—then they paused, bewildered, and looked around at what they had done, and tried to repair it.

“We still have a tree,” said Ralassi.

Yes, they still had a tree. In the crater gouged by an explosion, a
dalf
was growing in the exposed soil, soil that hadn't seen the light of day for centuries until the brief battle—if the rout of the Fringe armored column could be called that—ripped foundations out of the ground. Long feathery projections, translucent gold in the hazy sun, had unfurled from three slim stalks at the tree's head.

Esganikan Gai said it was important that the utter sterility
of Umeh should be broken by a living tree planted in that rarest of things, a patch of bare soil. She insisted on it.

The humans called it a park, except parks had more trees and a variety of other plants. The
dalf
would have been better off staying on Tasir Var, where it came from; but Esganikan, in that wess'har way of hers, carried on regardless and imposed a park upon the Northern Assembly.

Rit remembered trees, or at least her ancestors did; that meant they were significant memories. Rit's ancestral memory also recalled a time when the wess'har were simply newcomers to the system, settlers with impossibly advanced technology who were happy to settle on Asht's uninhabited twin planet and trouble nobody.

“How did we live in peace with wess'har for more than nine thousand years,” said Rit, “and then end up fighting so bitterly?”

“Because the bezeri asked them to intervene to throw you off Bezer'ej.” Ralassi dodged a loader sagging under the weight of chunks of shattered rubble. “Had they been
Eqbas
wess'har, they would have stopped you colonizing Asht to begin with.”

This was the concept that gave Rit the most trouble, this idea that wess'har felt obligated to render aid—and carry on rendering it even when they were no longer wanted. She searched her inherited memories and found no hint that any of her forebears had understood that. All they had known was that wess'har didn't attack Umeh. That had left Umeh unprepared for the aggressively interventionist Eqbas Vorhi.

“How do humans cope?” she asked Ralassi.

The ussissi aide reached out and touched the
dalf
's fronds carefully as if expecting pain from them. “With parks?”