Ally (39 page)

“How it's achieved is irrelevant,” said Esganikan. “With the forces Eqbas Vorhi can commit to Earth, the terrorists as you call them are another asset. The planet will be for humans who can live responsibly upon it. Do you disapprove?”

“That'd make me a hypocrite, wouldn't it? I used them myself when the law wasn't sufficient.”

“Do you have useful advice on those groups?”

“Nearly eighty years later? I've told you I haven't. Just be aware they range from highly organized and professional to the frankly insane.”

“Do I need to distinguish between them to get the job done?”

Shan looked taken aback for a split second. Sometimes Esganikan sounded a lot like her. Ade got the feeling she looked at the Eqbas and had a sense of going there but for the grace of God.

“Probably,” said Shan. “Or you'll get something worse than the Skavu. At least they look like they can take orders.”

“And when will the Skavu find Wess'ej wanting?” asked Nevyan. Wess'har didn't ask rhetorical questions. She wanted an answer. “When will
we
be a threat to the balance?”

Esganikan jiggled her head side to side, annoyed. “They think you are now. They're absolutists. The technique of handling Skavu is to know what orders will moderate that into pragmatism. They lose sight of outcomes.”

Ade understood perfectly. Earth was riddled with ideological wars fueled by crazed zealots, and he'd lost too many good mates in them. He walked along behind the boss women on the route back to F'nar and wondered what life would be like in Baral, where it was so bloody cold that most
wess'har wouldn't live there, just Aras's people. Ade was an arctic survival specialist. He'd fit in fine, and Shan would be a long way from the distractions of F'nar, and Aras would be home. He liked the sound of that. A bit of peace and quiet.

Shan and Esganikan were still locked in an argument about relying on radical greens to prepare Earth for adjustment when they got into F'nar. “We'll leave you to it, then,” said Ade.

Nevyan looked forlorn and the women headed off towards her home to continue wrangling. Shan turned around and walked backwards for a few paces. “I'll be back for dinner, I promise,” she called. “If I'm not, come and get me.”

Ade and Aras ambled in the opposite direction. F'nar was staggeringly pretty in any weather, any light. You couldn't go wrong with iridescence. Ade wondered if there was a variety of
tem
fly that laid down abalone-colored nacre, all the rich blues and greens. There were apparently lots of cities coated in pearl shit all along the migration route of the drab brown flies. It was a bloody shame F'nar didn't encourage tourism.

“I know where the bezeri are,” said Aras.

He always had a knack of dropping bombshells. “What? Who says?”

“Shapakti sent me a message. They're living on Chad Island.”

“On
it. Ashore?”

“Yes.”

“With Lindsay?”

“Yes.”

“I know wess'har aren't secretive, but I don't think they've told Shan, then. And
you
haven't, have you?”

It was obvious why: Esganikan didn't trust Shan not to go after Lindsay Neville, and neither did Aras.

“Ade, if it was just Lindsay, I would leave Shan to do what she felt was necessary. But the problem is wider now, and not one that can be solved piecemeal.”

“I don't get that. What are you on about?”

“It's not her job to take responsibility for the bezeri. It's mine. If anyone has to kill them, it should be me.”

Ade stopped dead and grabbed Aras's arm to bring him to a halt. “Whoa, mate. That means you're going head on with Esganikan.”

“Perhaps. I want to see for myself. I want to assess them.”

“They told you to sod off.”

“That's irrelevant. I've seen Bezer'ej nearly fall to
c'naatat
once. Nobody else has.” Aras started walking again and Ade speeded up to match his pace. “I plan to see them.”

“Are you asking me to come?”

“No. Shan will be angry enough with me. We promised her no more
half-arsed missions
without telling her.”

“You
tell
her, or I will.”

“She'll do it herself. She might not get it right.”

“You
tell
her.”

Aras lapsed into silence and walked so fast that Ade had to break into an jog from time to time to keep up. He wasn't sure if he'd disappointed or angered Aras, but he wasn't happy. When they reached the house, Aras started making dinner with that fixed concentration that said he was wrestling with an idea. Wess'har didn't sulk.

“Okay,” said Ade, chopping sweet potatoes and
evem
into bright orange and gold cubes that looked color-coordinated. “If we all went, then Shan would be placated, and nobody has to hide it from her.”

“I'm going alone,” said Aras. “And I'll tell her when she gets back.”

“Better get on her good side with the bananas, then.” The haul from Umeh Station yielded two ripe bananas, and the dwarf tree was sitting on the terrace awaiting transfer to the tropical habitat chamber that Shapakti had originally created for the macaws. “That's the good thing about hardship. Puts the basic joys of life in perspective.”

The fruit took some stretching with more sweet potato and a syrup flavored with local spices. There was a blissful hour that evening when the scent of the spice and baking bananas filled the house while Ade stretched out on the sofa, arms folded over his eyes, and managed to blank out a world where the rules of morality were now incomprehensible to
him most days. Aras seemed to be satisfied too, because he made his
urrring
noises while he cooked. Maybe it was having a plan again that cheered him up.

There was always a warning of Shan's approach, the thud of the riggers' boots Ade had found for her. The door eased open and she took an audible breath.

“Oh, that smells divine,” she said. “I don't care what it is. Just slap it on a plate.”

Aras looked up from the flatbread dough he was dropping in lumps onto the hot range and peeling off in puffed skeins. Ade braced. Aras had his earnest expression on, the one that said he was prepping to blurt out something.

“They've found the bezeri,” he said. “I'm going to see them.”

Shan had a way of nodding once that said she wanted to shout at someone but thought better of it. “Lovely. Are you expecting the fight about this before or after dinner?”

“I have to do this.”

Shan looked at Ade for support, spread her arms, and shrugged. “Okay,” she said. “This isn't some daft sacrificial shit like last time, is it?”

“Of course not.”

“Okay, then, go. Just tell me where they are.”

“Ashore, on one of the islands.”

“With Lin. Land-dwelling?”

“Yes.”

“And what do you plan to do?”

“Assess the risk, because I have to know for myself.”

Shan considered him with an unreadable expression and then half smiled. “Okay, but the deal is that you tell me what you find. Now feed me.”

“I'll report back,” Aras said, not asking what she'd do by way of the deal if he didn't.

The banana bake was strange but wonderful. Ade's taste buds remembered they were human and for a while the intensity of the flavor was enough to distract him. They talked about crazy Skavu, and how Nevyan had taken a strong dislike to them, and how Esganikan seemed torn between force and persuasion to sort out Earth.

“Funny to talk about it that dispassionately,” said Ade. “Like we never came from there.”

“We'll always feel the draw,” said Shan. “That's why I can't get too angry with you, Aras. I'd react the same.” She reached out and ruffled his hair, then tapped her glass fork against the bowl of banana mix. “This is delicious.”

There were always blessings to count, even if you weren't Deborah Garrod. Ade counted himself lucky for having a family, and not being an isenj, or Eddie Michallat, or Lindsay Neville.

Shan hadn't raged about her. The placatory effect of bananas after long abstinence was stronger than he thought.

F'nar: tropical habitat, underground storage area

Shan straightened up from the tub of soil and wiped her hands on her pants before answering her swiss.

“I've given Minister Rit permission to land,” said Nevyan's voice. No greeting, no identification, no preamble: she was firmly back in wess'har matriarch mode, all veneer of human compromise shed for the moment. “She's come to ask for a treaty.”

“Bit late for that.” Shan didn't get it at all. She laid the swiss carefully on a crate to free both hands and went on transplanting the dwarf banana. “But we're not involved.”

“We are now.”

Wess'har weren't good at surprises. They were good at blurting out shock news, Shan thought, but dramatic concealment was irrelevant to them. “What can she offer anyone now?”

“Nothing,” said Nevyan, “except a common goal. I need your help.”

“Advice?”

“Help. To remove the Skavu.”

That got Shan's vote. She bedded in the tree with her heel and rinsed her hands clean under the irrigation spigot. “As long as it doesn't involve fighting them. Hasn't she had enough?”

“She doesn't seem to be asking for military aid.”

“Okay, I'll clean up and come straight over.”

It was a measure of the pace and frequency of events that Shan took this in her stride. Only months earlier, the arrival of Minister Ual was a sensation, or at least as much as wess'har could manage; the enemy had come to talk at last, to ask for aid. In the end they got destruction. Shan rinsed her face in the running water and tried hard to feel the shock she knew she ought to experience at the carnage on Umeh. It wouldn't come. It was a grim dark weight in her chest that wouldn't reveal itself. She needed to know that she could feel for the lives of piranha-faced spiders as much as she did for any species. It scared her that, after all these years, she was starting to show signs of anthropocentric bias.

Or maybe a failsafe had tripped in her mind to protect her from the full impact of the deaths of millions.

Could I have averted that? Should I have died myself?

Shan rapped on Nevyan's door. She didn't like giving anyone a surprise either, or getting one when she walked in unannounced. The air outside was growing thick with
tem
flies, who were shitting away happily on every smooth warm surface and making fairy-tale magic from their crap, if only all of life progressed in that direction, and didn't move from beauty to shit.

The door opened and she shot inside to avoid letting the flies get a pearly foothold in the house.

Livaor, Nevyan's most technically adept husband, ushered her down the passage into the main room. “Do you want food? Good.” He didn't wait for her answer. “
Netun jay.
Go in,
Chail.
They're waiting.”

And there she was. Perched on a large cushion with Ralassi at her side, talking to Nevyan in a strange mix of occasional English gasped out through air holes and that nail-scraping isenj language, was Minister Rit.

Giyadas knelt beside her mother, watching, absorbing every lesson. She was going to be formidable when she grew up, and Shan felt inappropriately and maternally proud of her.

Nevyan looked up. “I believe we have an agreement.”

“That was fast.”
Why do you need me, then?
“Talk me through it.”

Ralassi—rather too like poor dead Vijissi for her comfort—motioned her to sit. “Minister Rit is asking for a permanent agreement with Wess'ej that isenj will give up all claims to Bezer'ej, and agree peace with wess'har in exchange for calling off the Skavu deployment and helping restore Umeh.”

Shan had an immediate response and it ended in
off,
but this wasn't her decision. She filtered her comments through a fine sieve. “That sounds like a heavy commitment from Wess'ej in exchange for…nothing. Because Bezer'ej is already beyond isenj reach.”

“I won't have the Skavu remaining in this system, Shan,” said Nevyan. “Our long-term interests are about stability everywhere.”

“I still don't see a fully mutual benefit here.”

“Esganikan's universal pathogen.”

“F'nar developed that anyway.”

“And Esganikan turned it into a much
better
weapon.”

Shan felt bad about raining on Nevyan's peace parade, but there had to be more than this. She'd invited Shan here, so that meant she'd invited her opinion and involvement too. “Okay, Ralassi, ask Rit what happens with no troops on Umeh, because Wess'ej sure as hell can't conjure up the ground forces needed to do that. The Northern Assembly will be overrun when the other continental states get their fleet and air arm built again.”

Rit and Ralassi chittered. “She says she has the targeted pathogens.”

“In know, but she's got no bloody air force. She's reliant on Eqbas or Skavu to deliver the pathogen. So Esganikan still has control of it in the end.”

“I'm prepared to commit wess'har pilots,” said Nevyan.

“You said no military action.”

“Pre-emptive.”

“Jesus, Nev, you're going to do a bit of freelance genocide to shore up a coup? Because that's what it is.”

“The problem of isenj expansion will always be there.” Nevyan gave her a look that said Shan didn't understand the stakes. “And one day we may not be able to deal with it, and we don't want to have to call in Eqbas Vorhi again. I want the Skavu gone, and I want the Eqbas gone.”

Shan perched her backside on the edge of the table. Livaor, utterly unimpressed by the ladies gossiping over mass slaughter and long-term foreign policy, placed exquisite lavender glass plates of syrup-filled cakes by her. Shan had to step outside herself for a moment: this wasn't her little funny alien pal. This was Nevyan Tan Mestin, a warlord, drafted leader of a city-state that might have been bucolic and primitive to the city-slicker Eqbas, but that was still enough to reduce human armies to a greasy smear. She wasn't human. Her logic wasn't human. She wasn't even wrong. She was doing what made perfect sense in the context of the survival of her species and many others; she was being responsible and…humane.