City of Pearl (22 page)

“Seldom.”

“Seldom.”

“And you had a lot of information about these companies.”

“I was advising them on countermeasures. I was in their headquarters. I needed to know where their senior personnel lived, what vehicles they drove, what their identity codes were. I even advised them exactly where to vary their routes to the office each morning.”

“And they poured it all out to you because you were a police officer sent to save them.”

“I never needed to hack a system or pick a lock to get data. They handed it all over.”

“Plus Green Rage knew what your officers were doing and where they were looking, of course.”

“They might very well have known, yes. I strongly suspect they did.”

“And evidence went missing.”

“I always was a shit-head when it came to filing.”

Eddie smiled at her. She smiled back. It was a lovely game. She was very good at it. He had enough to make a very interesting piece, but it would be of so little interest to anyone in twenty-five years—or seventy-five—that it was more like the technical exercises in figure skating, something you did to show you could but that nobody paid to watch.

“Why are you telling me this?”

“I've told you nothing, Eddie.”

“I think you have.”

“Then I've told you enough so that you know the kind of person you're dealing with. And that I'll still be that person when we get back to Earth.”

It took him several seconds to realize he had been threatened. It hurt him: not because she had told him obliquely that she would exact some unspecified revenge if he crossed her, but because she hadn't understood that he just wanted to know for his own peace of mind. He wanted her to be a hero, a courageous maverick, somebody you couldn't buy or blackmail or beat into compliance.

“There's going to be nobody in power left to care what you did when we go home,” he said. “But maybe in years to come, what you did will show people that they don't always have to follow orders. A lot of people these days will see you as a courageous individual.”

Do I really mean that? Or am I trying to con her? Some chance.
The color had risen in Shan's face and he felt almost uncomfortable to see the emotion in her. She was angry.

“Let me tell you this,” she said. “If I did anything, I'll keep it to myself because I don't want to be admired or worshiped for it. I don't even want to
think
adulation might motivate me, so as long as there's nothing to worship, I'll know that anything that I did was done because it was right, and not for my own aggrandizement. There are some things any decent human should be prepared to do, without reward and without recognition, because they're the right thing to do.”

Eddie pocketed the bee cam and finished his apricot strip. “Ah.”

“I do believe I've left you lost for words, Mr. Michallat.”

“And you enjoyed
that.
”

“Nah. Like you say, who cares anymore? Nobody except me.”

“I've made some more home brew if you're interested.”

“I won't reveal any more under the influence of alcohol.”

“I was being sociable.”

“I apologize. But I'm a tea drinker. Maybe we can have a cuppa some time.”

“I'll hold you to that. One more thing.”

“What?”

“Just a tip. Watch Rayat. He talks about circumventing the restrictions by not having your marines hanging round. He might have rethought his position since they…since Parekh was killed, but I know a slimeball when I see one, and I wouldn't even put mutiny past him.”

“Thanks.”

“Time we got back to cleaning our latrines.”

“See you,” she said, and winked at him.

No, Eddie didn't understand her at all. He played back the interview again and again, just to see the moment when the name Helen Marchant shattered the ice of her composure. He even started editing the piece.

After a couple of hours he gave up and filed the rushes for later, maybe much later. She was right. Nobody would care anymore, not when it was measured against the dramas unfolding on this planet.

Besides, he liked her. She'd simply become too involved, and that was a failing he couldn't deny her.

 

The recall to the Temporary City was sudden, and Aras left Black and White with Josh's son, James. Mestin would not discuss the matter by link. That always meant she was angry. He wondered if she had found out about Parekh, and that he was being summoned to receive the inevitable order to finally end his stewardship of Constantine and kill every human on Bezer'ej. It would not only be disastrous for the colony; it would be a disaster for him.

Wess'har didn't lie even by omission. It was just a human habit, genetic or otherwise, that he had half-absorbed in the long time he had lived among the colonists and that sometimes made it easier to be among them. White lies, Josh called them. Aras hoped Mestin would mistake his agitated scent for fear.

Perhaps she knew he was lying and had finally worked out what punishment she could mete out to a
c'naatat
that would be worse than his exile or his time as a prisoner of the isenj. She would need to be very inventive, he thought.

When the bezeri pilot picked him up from the shore,Aras had the feeling that it didn't want to talk to him any more than the last one had. He wondered if they suddenly doubted his ability—and the ability of all wess'har—to protect them. He had reassured them about the new
gethes.
Now they had lost a child to them, and in appalling circumstances.

Time would tell. But bezeri were no better at forgetting than he was.

“We have some intelligence reports from the ussissi,” Mestin said. The ussissi worked for everyone and served no one. They told each other things. Aras wondered how the
gethes
with their obsession for concealment and their greed for information would view the ussissi if they ever met. “There is another human ship inbound.
Actaeon.
And it is in contact with the isenj.”

So, it would be
when
they met. Aras felt relief flood his body like a nutrient: this was not about Parekh. But the relief didn't last long enough.

“Aras, did you know of this ship?”

“No. Nothing.” He wondered if Shan did. He had so wanted to like her, to trust her. Now he had two fears: that she knew somehow that he carried
c'naatat,
and that she had concealed this second mission.

“This is a fast ship, much faster than the
Thetis,
with hundreds of
gethes
on board. It left their homeworld years later but it will be in our space in a season, perhaps two.”

The transmissions back to Earth were monitored and there had not been the slightest hint of expectation that others were coming. Shan might not know that more
gethes
were on their way. “When did it leave?”

Mestin took a long time looking through the screen in her lap, and looked agitated. “What is 2351?”

“A designation for a human year.” So Shan could not have known.
Actaeon
had left fifty years after she had embarked.
Gethes'
technology was advancing. “And the isenj?”

“They made contact with the
gethes.
They are making friends and allies, and apparently discussing how they might share technologies like their instantaneous communications, which the
gethes
want very much. They have set up a relay close to the
gethes'
homeworld, the better to demonstrate their wares.”

“Earth. It's called Earth.” Aras reminded her, and started doing his sums. There was an isenj instantaneous communications node ten light-years out from Earth, so that meant they had detected
Actaeon
fifteen years ago if they had managed to send out another relay and have it on station by now. If the ussissi hadn't known about it—and if they had, then one of them would have talked about it eventually—then the isenj were treating this with extreme secrecy. And that meant that they had started to play a very long-term game.

For a short-lived species, they had an astonishing capacity to think ahead. Perhaps it was a consequence of their trait of genetic memory. They might have imagined that they lived forever.

“They are becoming a problem, Aras.”

“Are you going to ask me to remove them?”

“They exist as a glorified
zoo.
That is the word, isn't it? Where humans imprison other species and stare at them? And they exist because you made a mistake in not enforcing the blockade, and let them live. And that is why the other
gethes
are coming. Because of
you.
We cannot relive the past, but how much easier things would be now if you had saved their gene bank and let them perish in their first season on Bezer'ej.”

She was right and he hated her briefly and instantly because she had dismissed the hardest part of his life in a single sentence. “And if I had, we would have learned nothing about a potential threat that we would have faced sooner or later. And we would not have potential hostages.” He had tried to explain how that kind of negotiation worked with humans, but wess'har did not negotiate and did not take prisoners. “I think you should let me advise the matriarchs on this, seeing as I am the expert on
gethes.
”

It was very bad form to argue with a matriarch. But Aras had no mating favors to lose. It was wonderfully liberating.

Mestin sat back in her heap of cushions. He knew what she wanted to do and she wanted to do it now, but she was clearly outgunned by the matriarchs in F'nar on this one. He had a little more time.

“Prepare your plan to cleanse the island, and wait for instructions,” she said. “In the end, you will do as the matriarchs say.”

 

Helen.

Shan's head was clearer now. The niggling half-thoughts like items you hadn't written on your shopping list were evaporating as the Suppressed Briefing played out, triggered one instruction at a time by events.

But it was just
Helen
. And Helen was a Perault, married to a Marchant apparently, and Eugenie had told her so in the briefing.

And thank you for Helen
.

No wonder Helen had been so grateful. She hadn't ended up in court on charges of conspiracy, murder, arson and membership of a banned organization, because Shan had known so much about counter-terrorism that she could cross the dividing line herself as easily as moving from pupil to teacher. Helen was washed clean. And no wonder Perault had been so grateful; dumb idealistic Shan, feeding security intelligence to them because she thought it was
right.

What was the difference, anyway? What was the differe nce between that and punishing the companies that slipped through the courts by setting the extreme greens on their CEOs and shareholders? A leak here, a detail there. Her political masters had been perfectly comfortable with the latter tactic. It was one of the things that gave EnHaz its teeth. Without it, she'd have been no more than an armed forest ranger.

Helen.
Helen had been chief of IT at one of the biotech firms, someone Shan needed to know. She knew about Shan's recurring waking nightmare of the gorilla because Shan had told her in an unguarded moment; she had been stupid enough to reveal it because she suspected Helen might have been a security risk and she wanted to test her attitude to research. Well, she hadn't been wrong about Helen, but the woman suddenly knew her for the potential ally she was. And then it began.

Helen had been the only person who had ever managed to turn Shan's skills back on her. No, it wasn't stupidity. Shan knew she was the best at her job and never doubted it. But on that one day, Helen had been better.

This is your chance to make amends for that animal, Superintendent. Get to the gene bank if you can, and…

Perault's next instruction refused to come. Shan had wanted to make amends for a very long time.

Perault was probably dead by now and so was Helen, and it didn't matter anymore. No wonder Perault thought she was the woman for the job. She knew exactly what would make her break the rules and how far she would go to do it.

It was a hard realization, and she put the screen on pause.
I'm black and white. I can't see gray areas even when I'm right in them
. And what motivated Perault? Was she like her sister Helen, or was she just a typical politician, doing whatever it took to keep herself out of a scandal? If so, this seemed a massively extravagant way to do it.

Shan would never know now.

She found it hard to concentrate on the reports on her screen. The light in her cabin was too harsh and there wasn't enough room to stretch her stiff shoulders without hitting her hand against the shelving that Chahal had fixed on the bulkhead for her.

She shook herself out of the speculation and went back to scanning the research data. Champciaux's geological surveys were the most interesting in a dismal selection.

Her eyes were starting to prickle and water with the effort when she smelled sandalwood and Aras simply appeared in the cabin.

“Jesus, don't creep up on me like that,” she said. “I was miles away. Make a bit of noise.”

He appeared to take no offense. “Did your talk with Eddie upset you?”

“That obvious, eh?”

“I could smell you down the corridor.”

“D'you know, that would have been
such
a handy sense to have had when I was interrogating suspects.”

“But humans prefer being lied to. I think you would tire of inescapable reality very fast.”

“Maybe.” She gestured to the bunk: he was too big for the folding chair. “Take a seat. Let's just say Eddie told me something I didn't know that made me wonder why I was sent here.”