Judge (28 page)

And there'd be more Eqbas ships in a few years. For all Shan knew, there might be even more after that. She was starting to see things as she used to, the little crusades and wrongs that needed putting right even if that meant a step outside the law, and that was something she'd lost sight of recently.

This was why I went to Cavanagh's Star in the first place; it's why I'm here now, Esganikan or not.

It was almost getting tempting to hang around and see what happened in the longer term. She resisted it.

“We're going to live through some interesting times, then,” Mo said. “You better get some more sandwiches down you.”

It turned into an unexpectedly tolerable day, and Mo's grandchildren had the time of their lives on a brief flight in the Eqbas shuttle. Shan wondered how they'd look back on that later in life. It was a little miracle in its own right. Esganikan was definitely fascinated by children, possibly because they seemed almost a different species to adult humans. Wess'har kids were just scaled-down versions with limited databases that they filled up as time went on, exemplified by the terrifying astute Giyadas, arguing complex ethics with Shan as a six-year-old.

And now Giyadas was pulling rank on Shan as senior matriarch, and ordering her to whack Esganikan. My, how she'd grown. Nevyan must have been proud of her.

“This isn't Umeh, Esganikan,” Shan reminded her, trying to resist the urge to record Mo's grandson giggling with delight that the “doggie”—Aitassi—could actually speak. “It'll be worth the extra time it'll take to clean up the place.”

“Time,” said Esganikan, “doesn't worry me.”

I'll bet it doesn't,
Shan thought. But Esganikan was still running out of it, and fast.

When they had landed at Rabi'ah, the sky was crammed with angry gunmetal clouds and the wind was whipping dust into their faces. Now a few fat spots of rain, rare precious rain, plopped onto the parched earth at their feet.

“You even brought us rain, Superintendent,” said Mo, holding his hand out to catch the drops. “You're a regular miracle worker.”

Shan saw just rain. If there were any miracles going down, they were all Eqbas technologies that would be coming to Rabi'ah sooner rather than later—desalinated water pipelines, biobarriers, temperature-energy converters.

“See you soon,” said Deborah, waving as Shan got back in the shuttle.

She would. There were two funerals scheduled here in the next couple of days.

En route to police headquarters, Kamberra.

 

“You said ten people at this meeting, tops. Why are we holding it at the police HQ?”

Shan sat in the back of the car with one eye on her borrowed handheld, watching the news headlines. She decided she would rather have faced a rioting mob than address a meeting of the key greens in the capital. But it had to be done sooner rather than later if the mission wanted more active allies out there in the human community, and she had the kind of credibility that spoke more to them than Esganikan's imperious approach.

And I kept saying I never wanted to be the Eco-Prophet, didn't I? But I play the card when I need to. I'm slipping.

Shukry was driving them into town. “Well, maybe a few more than ten. You know how hard it is to tell activists that they can't come. They all want to be represented.”

It was her idea anyway. She couldn't complain. “How many?”

“Maybe forty.” Shukry half turned in the driver's seat, looking as if he was waiting for her to explode. “The police HQ is the easiest place to secure when we let ordinary punters in. Creates a better impression than wheeling them into some ADF camp or worse, too. You didn't really want the greens crawling all over the reception center, did you?”

Shan thought of the Skavu. “Probably not.”

“How about you, ma'am?” Shukry asked Laktiriu. Shan had persuaded Esganikan's deputy to come along for the meeting on the pretext that she needed to learn to work cooperatively with the greens. It sounded a whole lot better than telling her that she had to get up to speed before Shan blew her boss to Kingdom Come. “Are you okay with meeting a large group like this?”

“You're not the first aliens I've worked with,” she said. “I have a method.”

Shan wasn't sure if that was encouraging or ominous. Aras, withdrawn and silent, concentrated on the news feed as if he wanted to avoid being drawn into the conversation. The deaths of Qureshi and Becken had probably hit him harder than she thought, but she also knew him well enough to know that he felt alone among humans in a way he hadn't on Bezer'ej.

She tried to jolly him along. “Do you want to take a day or two away from the center to see some of the wildlife havens? We could make the time.”

“I'm not in the mood,” Aras said quietly. “And you have work to do.”

He meant Laktiriu. She struck Shan as a thorough, dutiful
isan
with a less aggressive approach than Esganikan. Shan took nothing for granted with wess'har females, but she'd seen that they were capable of being cooperative with humans. Mestin, Nevyan's mother, and other matriarchs before her had managed to get along with human neighbors, so it was possible.

Laktiriu always had the human-specific pathogen to wave as her big stick if all else failed, but Shan didn't want to be here if the Eqbas decided to use that. She'd seen what it did to the handful of colonists who'd refused to leave Constantine. Maybe it was cowardice to shut her eyes and hope it didn't happen on her watch, but she was getting used to the idea that she had far less control of the situation than she expected.

Things were happening faster than she could handle and yet there was little conflict to see so far. No aerial bombardment, no bioweapons dropped on cities, and none of the destruction seen on Umeh: everyone had been holding their breath, expecting just that, but not all invasions started with a bang and scaled down.

Apart from what Shan saw on the news feeds, the survivalists who'd taken to the mountains vowing to resist the invaders to the last man, she had no real grasp of how the landings were seen by ordinary people outside Australia. It struck her that she had now made the full transition to being an alien among her own species.

“Sooner or later, there's going to have to be some contact between the wider public and the Eqbas, isn't there?” Shukry steered through a security arch picked out in warning chevrons over the access road. “The PR blokes have kept the media off your backs so far, but you have to come out sooner or later. Then there's the pressure on the PM from other governments. They want some contact too. Since his speech yesterday, he's been taking calls for hours at a stretch.”

“There's no
have to
with Eqbas,” Shan said.

“What about you?”

“Not my decision,” she said. “And I'm not going to be staying. Anyway, all the time the Eqbas and their entourage stay away from the public, they're not giving you a security problem. Because that's what I'd be thinking of—how many officers and how much money it was going to take to keep public order indefinitely. How long do you think it'll be before humans have seen enough of aliens to enable them to walk in the street on without causing a riot?”

“Maybe you better ask the police commissioner. You'll be able to pop into his office on the way out.”

It was tempting to slip back into old habits and offer the local police the benefit of her experience, but it was also quicksand she planned to sidestep. If this had been the wess'har, she'd have known what to say, but the Eqbas were subtly different, a little more likely to behave like humans: they were interventionist. The Skavu—no, she didn't even want to think about it.

Humans bombed the first populated alien planet they ever landed on. Don't lose sight of that. This is what happens when you start a fight you can't finish.

The security arch loomed over them like a car wash, panels flickering with hundreds of moving sensor tiles. When the detectors were level with Shan, the vehicle stopped dead and the driver swore under his breath.

“Are you carrying something, ma'am?” he asked.

“Yes, and I'm not going anywhere without it.” Shan leaned forward a little to draw the 9mm from her belt, and held it flat on her palm so the onboard safety recorder could see it. Shukry activated his head-up display and the security center sent a message to wait. “My permit was never revoked. Come to that, I might still have my authorization to decitizenize anyone I deem in need of a comeuppance.”

“What's that? Shukry asked.

“In the good old days, we withdrew the civil rights of slags who habitually broke the law by reading them a legal warning. Then you could deal with them no holds barred, any way you bloody well liked.”

“Jesus,” Shukry said. “But that's Europe for you. Police state.”

“Fine by me…do they still do decitting?”

“No idea.”

Once again, Shan regretted Eddie's absence. He would have handled this so much better. He could have explained what a woolly liberal Shan was compared with an Eqbas commander, and carried out a magnificent hearts-and-minds campaign. But he wasn't, and she began to see all the small detail of what was needed here on Earth that hadn't seemed to matter on Umeh.

Liaison, getting opinion-formers on side, motivating people…

“Shit,” she said under her breath, and walked into a room that held forty people, not ten. She sat down and looked at the expectant faces. Their expressions told her they hoped she might be the green messiah she was so determined never to be. And then they just stared at Aras and Laktiriu like kids. It was actually heartening to see pure wonder on adults' faces. She softened slightly.

“Where shall we start?” she said. “You'll have questions, so why don't we start there? This is Laktiriu Avo, one of the Eqbas commanders, and…my husband, Aras, who's restored ecologies too.”

Don't mention that he had to, because he'd just killed every isenj in Mjat.

Silence.

“Hey, they speak excellent English,” she said. “Feel free. Anyone?”

“Seeing as the Eqbas are vegan in every sense of the word, can we look forward to an end to livestock and dairy farming?” asked the man from the Compassion Alliance, identified by a T-shirt whose front was dominated by a video loop of slaughterhouse footage. It was hard to look away. Laktiriu's pupils were snapping away like crazy; it wasn't the best advert for humankind's baseline. “And what about cell-cultured meat?”

Managing expectation, Eddie liked to remind her, was the key to not losing support when things didn't turn out the way folks wanted. Shan finally averted her eyes from the repeating cycle of poultry carnage across the table.

“How far are you going to restore habitats?”

“What are you going to do about stopping deforestation in Europe?”

“How are you going to deal with the loonies who've taken to the hills swearing they'll resist the invasion to the last human?”

“Are you actually going to
cull
humans? It's about time. They could start with the survivalists.”

Greens seemed a lot more
managerial
than she remembered. It used to be just fire-bombing unethical pharmaceutical and biotech corporations, measurable stuff that seemed strategically logical to her, even when she still thought the right thing to do was to prevent it.

“I think networks of like-minded people are going to be very important in years to come…”

It was a long afternoon. Laktiriu seemed to be enjoying herself.

She'd make a competent mission commander. She
had
to.

 

Nazel Island, Bezer'ej.

 

It was at times like this that Eddie could see the moral heart of the wess'har, and understood the power of its appeal to Shan. They could have taken a bezeri by force, but instead they asked if any of them would
volunteer
to be a research subject on Eqbas Vorhi.

It was all very civilized for a species that waged total war and wiped out millions of isenj.

He trudged along the pebble shore behind Giyadas and Lindsay the squid woman, trying hard not to stare at her. He wondered if he was just giving into journalistic voyeurism again, or if he really was trying to build bridges again with an old buddy. Either way, he felt sorry for her.

“So what have the bezeri decided to do?” he asked. “Are they going to play ball with us, or what?”

Shan might have written off Lindsay as an over-emotional weakling who gave uniformed women a bad name, but she was still sane as far as Eddie could tell, and keeping your marbles together after what she'd been through took some doing. Shan should have cut her some slack.

“None of them want to go to Eqbas Vorhi,” Lindsay said, indicating the huddle of bezeri watching from the cliff. “They say it's too far and they'll be away too long.”

Giyadas stood on the shore with her hands clasped behind her back, human-style. It wasn't a comfortable position for wess'har because of their shoulder articulation, and they preferred to hold their hands clasped against their chest when relaxed, looking as if they were in constant prayer. With those elegant seahorse heads, the overall misleading effect was one of angelic human piety. Eddie was sure that the example he'd set Giyadas over the years had been anything but pious.

She thought like a journalist. She even swore like him occasionally. Sometimes he felt that she was more his child than Barry.

“I can understand that it's daunting for them,” Giyadas said. “That's a pity.”

And that was where the illusion of similarity with Eddie's own species ended. Humans would never have taken
no
for an answer. Somehow, they'd have tricked or forced a bezeri into making the journey to the research center in Surang, because a bezeri was just an animal, however clever and articulate. It wasn't Us, it was Them, and their needs came a poor second. But wess'har—when they said they didn't exploit other creatures, they meant it. They wouldn't even ask the ussissi on Umeh to acquire isenj tissue samples; that would have compromised the odd neutrality that the creatures maintained. In the end, Eddie did it for them, and tied himself up in an ethical maze that he'd never quite escaped.

“I did try,” Lindsay said. “But I stopped short of coercing them. I'm sorry. Bezeri are obsessed with place. Homebodies. Not exactly a colonial empire in the making even if their population expands like crazy. They only want Bezer'ej, and then only specific parts of it.”

Giyadas tilted her head on one side to look at her, crosshair pupils flaring into four lobes. “I asked Shapakti about the possibility of biopsy samples, but he still needs a living bezeri to be certain that removal doesn't have other side effects in the host.”

“Can't they model that?” Lindsay asked. “Even we could do that.”

“The Eqbas can model perfectly well. Shapakti simply doesn't take even the remotest chance. If he's wrong…the bezeri really will be extinct this time.”

There was an awkward silence. The human core of Lindsay, woken again by the hope of going home, was reminded of what she and Rayat had done all those years ago, and she seemed not to feel she'd atoned for that yet.

Come on, Lin. Shan said it. Rayat said it. It was tough on the bezeri, but if you'd known they wiped out a rival sentient race themselves—would you have felt so bad?

“Pili's tribe has expanded a great deal,” Giyadas said. “We estimate about five hundred living aquatically now. Don't you want to reunite the clans?”

“How do you know that?” Lindsay asked. “You haven't done any oceanographic surveys.”

“We upgraded the defense-grid satellites. We can detect their lights near the surface from time to time.”

Giyadas swung her arms forward again and wandered up to the foot of the cliff. Sometimes she reminded Eddie of Shan, because she usually wore an Eqbas-like suit that was more like fatigues than the traditional white opalescent
dhren
of the matriarchs of F'nar. It gave her that uniformed no-nonsense look.

“You never told me.”

“If they'd been making trouble for you, you'd have told us.” Giyadas tilted her head back to look up at the bezeri. She was in earshot of them now. “Saib? Is Saib among you?”