City of Pearl (19 page)

The payload filed out silently past Bennett and Lindsay, who were flanking the exit. Eddie followed them, and glanced back once before swinging the main hatch shut behind him.

“We're buggered.” Shan sat down on one of the trestle tables and swung her legs. “I've no idea how the local politics will play out, but I think we're going to have our hands full with our learned friends here.”

“We'll contain that,” Lindsay said.

“I won't lie to you. I'm really going to need you people to hold this together.”

Bennett looked up. “You've got it, ma'am.”

“Okay, do whatever you have to do to keep them in here. I've called Josh, he's notified Aras and I'm heading over there in the morning to see him. The body is in the cold room. I know it's unpleasant to have it next to supplies, but there's nowhere else right now and it's sealed in a bag anyway, so just keep an eye on it, will you?”

There was a communal
yes, ma'am
and they all straightened up as if they had one shared nervous system. They were rock-solid and reliable: good, dependable professionals to have at your back. She thought briefly of the “relief,” her old shift of officers at Western Central, and the memory stuck in her throat in the way memories did when tears nearly caught you unawares.

Lindsay was the last to leave.

“Are you feeling okay?” Shan asked.

“Pretty good, considering.”

“I just wondered. I thought the baby bezeri might have upset you.”

“I try not to think of it in those terms. I don't think Parekh did either. I think she would call it sentimentality.”

“It's not me being the sentimental one. It's them using a religious argument as a scientific one.”

“You lost me there.”

“It says so in Josh's Bible, right there in the first book—that man has dominion. Get scientists in a corner, argue it out with them, and they still use that biblical excuse, except they use the word “sentience” instead of “soul.” They can't argue bezeri aren't sentient. But they still see them as animals, and so pretty well anything goes.”

“You think all life is sacred.”

“Well, let's say I haven't yet heard a good argument for why human life is more sacred than others. That's not quite the same thing.” The SB chafed away at a corner of her mind, and the name Helen surfaced again. “Anyway, you don't want a lecture on post-modern ethics. Let's get back to Parekh.”

“Look, I'm really sorry about today.”

“We've been through that. You can't be prepared for some things.”

“Can I ask why you hit her?”

Shan folded her arms across her chest. She felt lost without something to lean on. “Primarily to stop her moving another muscle.”

“And secondarily?”

“Because I was angry. Does that appall you?”

“Not entirely. But I wouldn't have done that.”

“You're used to an enemy you deal with at missile length. Mine have always been right here.” She held her hand flat up to her face. “I had to be handy with my fists. And sometimes the book doesn't have all the answers.”

“Eddie said you had what he called an ambiguous relationship with terrorism,” said Lindsay.

“You can't deal with animal-rights extremists without being exposed to some of their arguments.” She hoped Eddie was talking in general terms.
Just how much did the bas
tard know?
“The most difficult thing ab out terrorism is that it's not absolute. There's always a case somewhere at the bottom of it, however distorted it gets. Sometimes a reasonable case.”

“I'm glad I never have to make the call on that,” Lindsay said.

I did. And I don't regret it
.

Shan could hear occasional ticks of the composite bulkheads cooling and contracting as the outside temperature dropped. “You think I'm the archetypal bad copper, don't you?”

“I'd have to be put in the positions you've been in before I'd pass judgment.”

“An ambiguous answer for an ambiguous situation,” Shan said.

No, Lindsay didn't understand at all. When she caused death, it was nothing personal; it was all neat and sanctioned and under rules of engagement. After you'd killed them, you would stand at memorial parades and say what an honorable enemy they were. Shan got to know her targets far too well, and honor never came into it.

The people who understood her were long gone.

But there was Aras. Now she had to try to understand him.

 

In a short time, the
Thetis
camp had developed a pulse and a rhythm of its own, like any settlement. It had noises and smells that defined it, a rhythm like a heartbeat.

This morning the backdrop of sounds was somehow different, and it wasn't simply the drumming of heavy rain. Eddie took a little time walking the few yards from his cabin to the mess hall, testing the ambient sound: there was no sporadic laughter, no voices raised occasionally to call for a hand with equipment. There was just a constant quiet hum of conversation. For a moment he felt like a kid again, creeping down the stairs to eavesdrop on mum and dad's hushed argument and wondering what he had done to cause it. He had to remind himself that he was now forty-three and a BBChan correspondent before he could steel himself to open the hatch and walk in.

Most of the payload was sitting at one table, picking at breakfast plates with no great enthusiasm. They had nowhere else to go. Mesevy was absent; Parekh was still confined to the holding cabin. The conversation stopped when he came in.

He considered taking his breakfast and going back to his cabin to eat it, but that would simply have postponed the inevitable. He had grassed up their colleague. Commercial rivalries and spoilers had been put aside. Parekh was one of their own, and he was not, and he had called down the wrath of Frankland on them.

He collected a couple of pancakes from the galley and made a point of sitting down right next to Galvin.

“Everyone okay?” he asked.

Rayat stared straight ahead. “Considering we're under martial law now, I suppose everything's fine.”

“So what's happening?”

“We thought you might tell us. Your being Frankland's right hand.”

Eddie laid his fork down carefully. “Okay, if you want to have a knock-down drag-out, let's do it properly. You people are fucking crazy. These wess'har, whatever they are, took out a whole civilization not far from here for some slight or other. You don't mix it up with people like that. Parekh could be putting us all at risk.”

“You know this for a fact, do you?” Galvin asked.

Champciaux nodded. “I think Eddie's right about the threat. Best dating for that geophys is a few hundred years, tops. Cities don't decay that fast, and they leave more solid traces. They blew them to kingdom come, that's all I can think.”

“And whose side are you on?” said Rayat.

“The side that's going home in one piece.”

“It's not the aliens I'm worried about,” Galvin interrupted. “It's armed troops and a complete psycho copper stopping us doing our work.”

“Come on, Lou, Parekh was way out of line,” said Paretti. “What she did was stupid. It wasn't even good science.”

“Yes, but did that warrant beating her senseless and locking her up?”

Eddie liked accuracy, whatever Shan had done. “It was one punch,” he said. “I was there.”

“Okay, seeing as you're her official mouthpiece, what
is
Frankland's agenda, anyway? Government going to muscle in on our investment?” Galvin was from Carmody-Holbein-Lang: it was on Shan's list of scumbag corporations. Maybe Galvin had felt the weight of EnHaz before. “I really don't like how this is going. We wake up to find her aboard like some malevolent stowaway, and now she's siding with some bunch of aliens against her own kind.”

Some bunch of aliens.
How quickly they forgot, Eddie thought. When they had left Earth, the only alien life they had known existed was simple organisms, semi-sentient blobs and moss. Now, in a matter of a few months, the group had reduced at least one remarkable species to an inconvenience, an annoying trifle. Such was the exchange rate when you looked at those who were different to you. One alien was a miracle, two a novelty, a hundred an invasion, and if they thwarted humanity—they were the enemy. It was just like being back on Earth.

“For a group of PhDs, you're having a worryingly hard time accepting that we're not the top of the food chain anymore,” said Eddie. “I think we should just sit very still and hope the wess'har don't notice us.”

Rayat, who had been tracing patterns on the tabletop with his forefinger, looked up. He didn't appear angry. He smiled, which Eddie found slightly disturbing.

“I have no intention of sitting still and wasting this journey,” he said. “I need to get hold of native flora. Novel pharmaceuticals. There's only so much I can get out of looking at adapted terrestrial species. And I can't tolerate those restrictions.”

“Not much you can do about it. The colonists are pretty clear about that.”

“The natives, as you put it, aren't always at our side when we work. Without our military escort, how would they know what we took? How would they notice? If you hadn't gone whining to Frankland, would anyone have known about her sample?”

There was a silence round the table. It was as if everyone had interpreted Rayat's comment in exactly the same way.
Without our military escort.
There was only one way to achieve that.

“That's pretty dangerous thinking,” Eddie said at last.

“I wasn't suggesting we mutiny,” said Rayat, but his face said otherwise.

“And did it occur to you that sentient species would notice one of their number was missing?”

“Are they truly sentient?”

“Would it matter if they weren't?” Eddie found himself detaching from his journalist's grandstand seat and abandoning all the distance of his trade.
Jesus, this is real. I'm in this. It's happening to me.
“The locals make the rules. Take it from me. I've been arrested while filming overseas and held by local police with far less weaponry than this lot and it is very, very nasty. They can do what they want with you when you're on their turf and there's no embassy to bail you out.”

Rayat shrugged, so genuinely dismissive that Eddie felt a blaze of anger. Maybe he had been immune to challenge and correction for too long to understand that there were bigger kids in the playground. Paretti's glance darted back and forth between them as if he were expecting escalation. Right then, Eddie was ready to swing for him.

Then Mesevy walked in and let an armful of freshly picked cucumbers roll onto the table like logs, and the moment was defused.

“I'd better be getting on with editing,” Eddie said, and left the table.

Back in his cabin, he couldn't concentrate on the previous day's footage. Rain spattered against the small window like a hail of rocks as a gust drove it. Eddie let the editing console slide off his lap and lay back on his bunk, and all he could think about was that he had
become involved
. It was professional anathema. Every other story he had ever covered in his life had
not
been like this.

I am a dispassionate observer.

I am a real-time historian
.

In the thick of riots, he was almost safe behind police lines; after a chemical fire that killed twenty people, he had caught a cab back to the office and enjoyed a beer after work. He had even spent an evening in a five-star hotel sampling room service while from the window he watched distant shells exploding and wiping out a Greek village.

It had its risks. He could easily have been killed in all those situations, given bad luck. And he had been banged up in a two-meter-square cell in Yemen not knowing if BBChan even knew where he was. But that sense of detachment, of being special and set apart from the messy drama of ordinary lives, was now gone. He was here and he wasinit.

He felt himself sliding into something his professional persona had once regarded with disdain. He was starting to take sides.

 

There were two things Aras was not planning to tell Mestin.

One was that he feared Shan Frankland knew that he carried the
c'naatat
parasite.

The other was that one of the
gethes
had taken a bezeri child and killed it.

He lay back in the cramped pod as the bezeri pilot brought him back to the surface and the Dry Above. Normally the journey would be whiled away chatting in lights, but today there was nothing but a faint blue glow holding steady across the pilot's mantle, a sad silence in its terms.

Not even the isenj sought us out to kill us.

Summoning the bezeri from the depths with the lamp to tell them their child had been taken was the hardest thing Aras had done in many years. Their sorrow was a vivid blue. It had so many shades to it, so much agony, that his interpretation system had been unable to convey the full intensity.

We want balance. We want forfeit.

It was arrogance rather than cruelty that had motivated the
gethes,
but that was the cause of most brutal acts. Hiding behind lack of intent was a human excuse.

And the bezeri had been correct. Even the isenj, the careless and profligate isenj who didn't recognize the bezeri had rights, had never taken them and killed them. The poisoning of their environment had been a brutal consequence, not an objective.

But wess'har cared only about what was, and what was done, not what was intended.

Aras knew the outrage would be the final justification that Mestin needed to order him to wipe all humans from the face of the planet. He had overseen the destruction of the isenj, but he would not, if he could help it, see his friends in Constantine pay the price for the
gethes'
stupidity.