Ally (46 page)

“You have a few weeks. We can spend time together.”

“You must hate me at least a little for leaving when you've got Umeh to worry about.”

“Shan, had this been Earth, and Wess'ej had faced what Earth faces, I'd have done the same. And you're coming back, although I won't hold you to that, because not even you can look that far ahead and know what's coming.”

“ITX. We can talk. Every day.”

“It's indeed a valuable thing, and now I know why.”

“I swear to God I'm coming back.”

“You don't believe in a God.”

“I swear to you, then, because I do believe in you.” It was too much for Shan this time, and she allowed herself the luxury of hugging Nevyan fiercely. “You came to find me when everyone thought I was dead, mate, and if you thought I was worth bringing home, then it's worth my coming home when the job's done.”

“Go keep your males happy,” Nevyan said, without a trace of irony. “And make sure we spend some time together each day from now on.”

Shan didn't go straight back to the house. She stopped halfway along the terrace and soaked up the early evening glow of the city reflecting a sunset. There were other pearl cities, and she'd live long enough to come back and see them and a thousand like them.

But people didn't hang around that long. In the end, the pain was leaving Nevyan and Giyadas. By the time she got back, more than fifty years would have elapsed for them. For her, it would be just months.

On Mara'na'cas, the colony was grabbing what it could and leaving the rest for the few who chose to wait for the return of
Thetis
in a few months, with all the added time-exile of a journey that would take three times as long. At least the Umeh Station personnel had hardly unpacked from the evacuation. But today Shan didn't give a damn about anyone's pain but her own, and allowed herself the rare luxury of feeling it.

She took the swiss out and recorded the cityscape until the dusk finally swallowed the pink pearl and the terraces were dotted with pinpoints and pools of soft yellow light, and the night air was full of sounds that had once been alien and now were just the background noise of her city.

Shan knew she'd play that recording a lot to get to sleep in the years to come. In the sky above her, Bezer'ej was a crescent moon. She wondered if it was possible to spot vessels taking off and landing from here. She'd never wondered about that before.

Her swiss
eeped
and she turned it over to look at the message.

CALL RAYAT URGENT AGAIN

He was persistent, she'd give him that.

“Bon voyage, arsehole,” she said, and hit the delete key.

Nazel, also known as Chad Island: Bezer'ej

Pili still raged.

The bezeri crashed around the island, smashing through undergrowth, and apart from the sound of snapping branches
and the occasional thudding when she came close enough to the village to be heard, she was oddly silent.

A human might have interpreted this rampage as an animal looking in vain for its lost young. But Pili knew her eggs had been destroyed. She was simply expressing impotent grief and anger, destroying anything in her path, and unable to settle.

Yeah, I know that stage. Been there, Pili.

Lindsay was still enough of a human to expect to hear sobbing and screaming. But then Pili was doing just that. Her lights flared green, sometimes bright, sometimes just a faint flickering. Then she'd settle into a deep lobelia blue that was hard to distinguish from black in some light conditions. She grieved.

“Your fault!” she said to Lindsay. “You bring them here, and they kill us
again
. Everyone kills us.”

“But you can have more eggs, sometime in the future.” Lindsay hated herself for trotting out that line. It was what truly stupid and well-meaning people said to those who'd lost babies, as if they were easily replaceable as long as you filed the right insurance claim, not unique individuals who'd been lost forever. “I know it's hard, but one thing you all have that no other bezeri has ever had is
time
. Lots of it.”

It was hard to give something they never expected to have and then snatch it away from them again. It was a double bereavement in a way, and Lindsay knew how Pili felt despite the gulf that still existed between their original species. Shan might have been able to pass through the loss of a child unscathed except for laying down an extra layer of titanium plating, but normal mothers grieved. But then Shan was less human than any of these bloody squid. She evaluated. She took decisions. She implemented. She never wept or loved. And if that meant aborting her own kid because it was a potential threat to the balance of ecology, she'd do it. She
had
.

Lindsay had more in common with this alien cephalopod than she ever had with Shan Frankland.

“If you have babies before the Eqbas have found a way of removing
c'naatat
, and….” Lindsay tried to find a way of saying
overbreed
without sounding insulting, but the se
mantics were probably lost on Pili anyway. “If there become too many of you, then the Eqbas will come back and destroy you all. They're very near. You might not know what five light years means yet, but it's close. Far closer than Earth. Close enough to come here and wipe you all out, if Nevyan calls them in again.”

Pili seemed to lapse into a quiet sulk. “How will they know? We will be many before they even see us.”

“They'll know,” Lindsay said.

She didn't understand Eqbas technology or even what the wess'har had left in place by way of satellite monitoring. Whatever it was, she had no way of countering it even if she knew every last component. She was a stone-age woman overseen by space-faring aliens. She couldn't even contact them unless they decided to visit. This was as helpless and as one-way as it got.

She walked along the shoreline, wondering how she would hold this community together now. The violent intrusion had made the bezeri restless and wary. She couldn't find Guurs and Essil, or their two daughters.

“They went back to the sea,” Saib said. “They fear for their young ones.”

They'd been the last to be persuaded ashore. Lindsay could understand their anxieties and knew there was no point assuring them they were safe. She couldn't guarantee a damn thing.

“And you, Saib? Are you going to give up and go back below?”

He ambled beside her, swinging between what was now a pair of forelegs. “This is my domain. I will not hide.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“I can wait. I have patience. I can wait until we can hold this world ourselves.”

The next day, Pili had gone. So had Loc, her mate, and a dozen of the other bezeri. Lindsay assumed they'd gone hunting, and expected them to come back at sunset for what was now the regular communal meal. But they didn't.

She waited on the shore, looking for their lights. But they didn't return.

Their evolution had progressed at an impossibly breakneck speed, and now so had their political and social development. In short weeks, Lindsay had turned victims into captors into some kind of friends, and now they'd moved on to create a schism and become what she feared might be enemies.

There were now two camps of bezeri. Maybe Pili and her comrades would come back when she'd done her grieving, but Saib seemed to think they'd gone their separate ways, back beneath the sea.

“We search,” he said. “But they are in none of the places we once were.”

There were now two bezeri nations, in a way. It wasn't what Lindsay had in mind when she planned to save them and unite them against invaders.

She was glad Shan wasn't here to say that she'd told her so.

F'nar

“I'm glad you decided to come,” said Esganikan.

Shan simply listened to the audio on her swiss. She wasn't keen to see Esganikan's face, nor for hers to be seen. This wasn't how she'd planned to go back to Earth. She hadn't planned to go back at all.

She sat on her terrace with Nevyan, cramming in every available moment to gaze at F'nar's beautiful pearl terraces and store up memories and motivation. It wasn't as if she'd be aware of the fifty-year separation, but she'd know the real distance between her and home—this home, her Wess'ej home—and she could guess how strong the pull of her former homeworld would be. She could predict what her gut would do when she saw that blue and white disc again. But she was going to ignore it.

I'm coming back here, as soon as it's under control on Earth. I must.

“I swore I'd never let
c'naatat
anywhere near Earth,” Shan said. “But you leave me no choice. I can't just sit back and watch while your Skavu berserkers fuck my planet.”

“As long as you abide by the contamination procedures, and stay with the task force,
c'naatat
can be as
secure there as it is here,” Esganikan said, a faint peevishness in her tone. “Any contamination would have to be deliberate.”

Oh yeah. Don't I know it.
“We've got a few weeks left. I'll talk to the Australians for you. Maybe even some of the sensible greens. Shit, they know I'm alive now. Nothing to lose.”

Shan closed the link and found herself rubbing her face with one hand, realizing that all she could do was maybe talk Esganikan out of certain actions. That was all. She had no power beyond influence over the greens, and sod all sway with the governments of the day, whoever they turned out to be in the fullness of time.

“Ah, sod it.” She'd have plenty of time to talk to Esganikan. But she had precious little left to spend with Nevyan, and that hurt more with every day that she counted down. The two matriarchs sipped tea, and Aras kept the cups topped up. “Push comes to shove…”

“You're going to use
jask
, aren't you?” said Nevyan.

It had certainly crossed Shan's mind. “If things get out of hand and there's something I feel I absolutely need to stop her doing, then I'm pretty sure I can outscent her, yes.”

Nevyan simply cocked her head and said nothing.

We're both acting way out of character. She's discovered tact, and I've discovered that I can get attached to people. Who'd have thought it?

Aras seemed remarkably chipper about it all. Shan thought that perhaps a life that spanned centuries gave him a different perspective to her, someone who was still in double figures. It was just another trip to him. What mattered and what constituted home for him was going on that same journey—her and Ade.

“I won't see Giyadas grow up,” said Shan.

“You'll see her
grown
up,” said Aras.

The hardest thing Shan had to do was simply to turn her back in a few weeks' time and let a silent liquid-metal hatch close behind her. It was an act of separation that would take a second.

Like stepping out of the airlock, it was something she would simply tell herself to do. And she would.

F'nar

Eddie sat on the wall outside the Exchange of Surplus Things and finally held a perfect double-voiced note. Giyadas applauded. There was a bitter irony to achieving it now he was close to going home.

“Now, all I have to do is keep that up all day, plus learn an alien language that my brain is hopelessly unsuited to handle,” he said. “And I'll be talking wess'u like a native.”

“We know ordinary humans can't manage this,” Giyadas said. “So we'll speak your languages instead.”

Maybe it was easy not to be fiercely nationalistic when you knew you could zap the shit out of humans any time. Speaking English was a small concession for the wess'har. All they cared about was getting a job done.

“I won't have any wess'har to talk to,” he said.

“There's Aras. And there's the ITX.”

That wasn't what he meant, he realized. “Not the same.”

“You want to go home, don't you?”

“One day, yes.”

But this was too soon. Desperately lonely as he could be, desperate for simple sex and a glass of decent beer as he was, Eddie knew he wasn't going to leave Wess'ej gladly. He had too much unfinished business. His days of covering momentous events and going home for dinner, unchanged, were over. He was ripped in half now.

“Some of the Umeh Station crew have asked to stay,” said Giyadas. “Five of them. They said they have too many things they still want to see.”

“And is Giyadas going to let them?”

“Yes. She can always kill them if they become a problem.”

It didn't seem to bother Giyadas one bit.
That's my little matriarch, all right.
“Well, then…”

“I will miss you.”

Eddie wished she hadn't said it. He'd tried to avoid it. But as the days ticked away, he did the maths and looked at the distances, and knew that he'd feel nothing but regret for a lost opportunity—an unknown opportunity—if he walked away now and became just another human back on Earth again, even one with an extraordinary experience behind him.

They always said that walking on the Moon changed the early astronauts. Nothing was the same again for them, apparently.

And if you'd lived among aliens, and learned to love them—

Eddie only had one brief human life. Making this kind of choice was a lot harder for him than it was for Shan and Ade, with all their infinity stretching ahead of them.

“Well, I'll stay, too, then.”

Oh God. That's it. I just did it.

Giyadas blinked. “This is good news.”

He'd never see Earth again. He knew that. He'd always known it, really. “How could I not stick around to keep an eye on you, doll?”

“But you'll be dead by the time Shan gets back.”

“Well, very old…” No, probably dead. She was right, and he didn't care. “But that's okay. Shan won't miss me at all.”

Giyadas grabbed his hand with a grip that belied her fragile fingers.

“Besides,” she said, “we don't want any other
bastard
getting all your stories, do we?”

No, she had a point there. Eddie was far from done with Wess'ej.

There'd be women in the Umeh Station remnant, and he could live without beer. That was a small price to pay for not looking up at the Earth sky each night, and wondering what had become of his little
isanket
.

He'd break the news to Shan later. He never did like long goodbyes.

FEU Fleet Ops
Status update
January 5, 2399

Eqbas Vorhi fleet: inbound for Pacific Rim Space Center.

Thetis: inbound for FEU Mars Orbital for Earth transfer.

Personnel: six FEU passport holders still remain in Cavanagh's Star system. All others embarked.