Judge (3 page)

Varguti had him on the back foot. “And yet you're not quite that
bastard
now, are you?”

“If you have evidence that Esganikan isn't behaving responsibly,
then
will you act?”

Varguti wasn't even mildly annoyed with him, just impatient. He could smell it. “Yes, within obvious limits.”

Obvious limits.
Esganikan was 150 trillion miles away, five years ahead of the second fleet sent to support her, with a loyal army of fanatical Skavu, a young and deferential Eqbas crew, and enough firepower and bioweapons capability to scour Earth as clean as Umeh. If she decided to do anything that the matriarchs here didn't sanction, there wasn't a lot they could do about it other than tell her to pack it in.

And would she obey?

If her
c'naatat
had changed her outlook as subtly as Rayat suspected, as it had all its hosts, then he wasn't placing bets.

“Thank you for your time,
Sho Chail,
” he said.

Rayat left her office—unguarded, unremarkable, and open to any Surang citizen—and made his way down curving stairs onto the next walkway level. There was nowhere on Eqbas Vorhi he couldn't go, which was a strange situation for a prisoner; he'd stopped thinking of himself as one except for the times he felt an urge to contact Earth, which he was banned from doing because Shan had once told Shapakti that he was a slimy bastard who should never be trusted with a link, especially now that he had detailed knowledge of
c'naatat.
Shapakti, scared shitless of her and always mindful of an
isan
's advice, made sure that Rayat didn't. Eqbas technology was nothing if not thorough. Wherever he went on the planet, the communications systems identified him and prevented his sending messages.

He had not yet given up.

Rayat waited on the walkway, looking out onto a city of impossible and breathtaking beauty. If anyone had pointed out Surang to him when he first arrived and told him that the structure was a vast ivory bracket fungus or coral, he might have believed them. But it was a city every bit as constructed as Moscow or Brussels. He took out his
virin
and checked the news feeds.

FEU ON HIGH ALERT AS ALIEN FLEET REACHES EARTH

Ah, Eddie. A dream headline for you, except you've already done them all now.

Rayat could access all the incoming information that he wanted, all the Earth channels still being picked up by the local ITX node, but eventually he'd stopped wanting to know what was happening back home. He almost had to force himself to check the daily digests. But now that the fleet had arrived, and Earth was in turmoil, he wanted to know what was happening very badly indeed.

I started this. I was tasked to investigate
c'naatat
long before Frankland ever stuck her bloody nose in. I was the one who opted for the cobalt bombs. I'll finish the job.

Nobody took any notice of Rayat as he leaned on a curved retaining wall and studied the selection on his
virin.
He'd been here so long that most Eqbas knew all about him, the exiled
gethes
who committed genocide and—somehow—had been spared the usual wess'har justice. He flicked through the news feeds, gazing at the image that filled his palm like a face frozen under ice.

An evangelist was in full cry. “Judgment day is coming!” he roared. “Look at the signs—who'll be saved? Only the few—”

“You're not wrong there, friend,” Rayat muttered. “Stand by for downsizing.”

It wasn't as if Eddie's incessant torrent of documentaries hadn't given Earth the handbook for an Eqbas occupation. Humans just didn't take any notice.

Rayat worked through his options while watching the
paskeghur
boarding point. He liked to think of it as the metro. The transport route snaked through and under the city like a digestive tract, largely unseen, while the passengers within had the impression of being in a shallow boat skimming the tops of the vines that covered the heart of the city, with no sense of being in a subterranean tunnel. It must have been a similar technology to their transparent ships' hulls and solid sheets of microscope; but even after twenty years here, he still didn't quite understand how it worked.

And I don't understand how they think, either. Just when I feel that I do…I really don't.

Rayat glanced back to the headline feed on his
virin.
The FEU, Sinostates, African Assembly and the South Americas had now put their armed forces on the highest state of alert. Warships blockaded key waterways; fighters patrolled borders. Rayat thought it was a forlorn hope to try to stop the Eqbas that way, but then realized it was mostly to deter refugees who had already started fleeing.

There was nowhere to go, but they didn't seem to realize that.

He switched off and waited. It was easier than watching the wheels come off when he could do nothing. Eventually Da Shapakti stepped out of the
paskeghur
looking happy with life—Rayat could read Eqbas wess'har very easily now—and stared straight up at Rayat. He could probably smell him. The Eqbas biologist made his way through the crush, moving between the exchanges, the halls and chambers where Eqbas came to deposit surplus things and collect whatever took their fancy. It was busy today. Rayat gestured to Shapakti to stay where he was and ran down the steps to meet him.

They were friends and colleagues rather than researcher and captive specimen. Rayat felt a pang of guilt about the lab rats that Aras had rescued from him with a warning about his carrion-eater's habits, and wondered if it was his own shame or Shan's censorious voice deep in his mind. Even now, Rayat worked hard at separating his own thoughts from the ones
c'naatat
had created within him. Now that he was infected again, they seemed more insistent, but even during the periods that the parasite was removed from his body, they still nagged at him.

“Did Varguti listen?” Shapakti asked, stepping close to the exchange walls to avoid the pedestrians. “You should have let me talk to her as well.”

“If I'd done that,” said Rayat, “then she might have given you an order not to do something, and you'd have obeyed, wouldn't you?”

Shapakti tilted his head slowly. He knew what was coming, more or less. “You
know
I would obey the matriarch in matters of state. Besides, it's unlikely anyone would want to disobey the consensus.”

“I have to call Shan.”

“You're banned, and she never responded to you last time anyway.”

I tried. Stupid cow. I've been waiting twenty years to get hold of her again. No, twenty-five, if I count the journey here.
“Then
you
call her.”

“No—”

“Or you let me call Eddie and ask
him
to call her.”

“I'm not happy with this.”

Rayat caught Shapakti's arm and steered him into the nearest exchange, a chamber that would have said
stock exchange
to any human. The trilling and warbling was at fever pitch as wess'har debated and chatted. Yet this wasn't about money—they had no equivalent economy—but
ideas.
It was a shop for exchanging ideas.

“Help me warn Shan,” Rayat said, in English now. “If I can get her to listen.”

“When you speak English, you're being deceitful,” Shapakti hissed. “You put me in an impossible position.”

“And what can Varguti do to you? Are you breaking a law? No. Help me do this. Just to warn Shan, or at least find out if Esganikan's crew know she's infected.”

“And if they don't…what can
Shan Chail
do?”

Rayat had thought about that, long and hard. He'd had plenty of time to do it, too. And now he knew more about wess'har than Shan herself. She'd known them a few years; he'd lived with them for a generation.

“Long screwdriver.” Rayat waited for Shapakti's comprehension. “It's what we call the ability to control frontline events on the battlefield straight from the top.”

“Bypassing the field commanders…a foolish thing, because you can never see the situation as clearly as they can.”

“But sometimes it has to be done.”

There was plenty Shan Frankland could do thirty light-years away. He knew how the
jask
pheromone worked in establishing dominance among wess'har females, and
c'naatat
had given Shan the full chemistry set. If anyone could bring Esganikan into line, it was Shan, chock full of the dominant wess'har matriarchal pheromone and her own arrogant sense of messianic, world-saving, uninvited righteousness.

He had his long screwdriver. He had Shan Frankland.

If she'd listen to him, she would be his instrument on Earth.

 

Kamberra, Australia, Office of the Prime Minister.

 

This was the worst day of Den Bari's life, and he knew it had been coming for a long time.

“I don't want to talk to your foreign minister,” he said, standing with his back to his desk. “I want your president. And no, I'm not prepared to wait.”

He turned around to look at the conference screen, hands in pockets, hoping he didn't appear as agitated as he was.
Agitated.
Nothing more than that. He wasn't afraid, and he'd do what he had to. Out of range of the desk cam, his own defense minister and foreign secretary—Andreaou and Nairn—stood listening like a couple of bookends, identically posed but mirrored, with one arm across the chest cupping the other elbow, knuckles of one hand resting against their lips. Whatever responses they were going to give him today, they'd be the bloody same.

I could have predicted this to the day. It's not like the Eqbas didn't give us plenty of notice. I just had no idea how exact they were.

“I'll get right back to you,” said the FEU liaison.

Bari killed the link and looked to his ministers. “What does Europe think they're going to get out of this?”

Jan Nairn turned and studied the wraparound plot of the Australian Antarctic waters, now studded with real-time projections of naval and air activity. Mawson, the largest settlement in their Antarctic territory, was facing a FEU carrier group sitting just a few hundred provocative meters outside territorial waters.

“I don't think they fully understand the Eqbas capability,” Nairn said. “Maybe this is just an excuse to expand east across the AAD border.”

“I'd agree with that,” said Andreaou. “It's pretty transparent—if they wanted to lean on us to do anything, they'd go for a mainland city. I thought they'd given up on the AAD claim, though.”

“We'll see.” Bari was trying to keep all the status screens in sight at once, and it was hard. The Eqbas ship had returned to a high orbit after checking out the Westside, the western landmass of an Australia looking ever more likely to split into two landmasses, and now it was just waiting, silent, while more ships appeared on the satellite image as if they were falling out of nowhere. “How the hell do they
do
that? How come we didn't detect them until the last minute, Annie?”

Andreaou folded her arms. “Because they're bloody aliens, Den,
advanced
aliens…they do that, you know. This isn't the time to piss off the defense staff.”

“Okay, let me try to get some sense out of Zammett, and then we shift to the EM center for the duration.” Bari turned to the doorway and called to his PA. “Sal? Sal, warn the FEU ambassador we'll want to see him today, will you? And tell the Uni to bugger off if they're still bleating about access to the Eqbas, because this isn't some academic thesis for their benefit. None of that international scientific cooperation crapola. We process this like any migration and resettlement issue.”

They're our damn aliens. We invited them here. They're going to help us. Get your own.

There was still no response from the FEU. Bari was running out of patience. Andreaou switched to her earpiece.

“Chief of Staff,” she mouthed at him. “She says there's more FEU navy heading our way…”

Bari ran out of patience and tapped the desk to call up the FEU link again, waiting for the image of the European portal to appear. “I really think it's time I spoke to your president, please.”

He counted to eight before the screen turned into Michael Zammett's office in Brussels. Bari didn't have the same long history with Zammett as his predecessor, although that hadn't been a happy relationship anyway; so maybe a clean sheet augured better. But it was hard to see how it could be more cordial with a carrier off the ADD coast.

“Prime Minister,” said Zammett, unsmiling. “I think we've all been caught out by the arrival of the Eqbas. Are you prepared to update us on that?”

Bari aimed for studied indifference and picked up his coffee. “I was rather hoping you'd want to discuss the carrier you've got rather close to our waters, Michael. Your GPS had better be
very
accurate.”

“As we were saying…Eqbas?”

“They're here. We noticed. It shouldn't be a surprise, seeing as they gave us a pretty accurate estimate of their arrival years ago.”

“And you still plan to allow them to use your territory as a base.”

“That's what we've been saying for the last twenty-odd years, yes…”
And I can't
un
invite them. We found that out too late.
“Do you still have a problem with that?”

“It's massively destabilizing for the region.”

“The Antarctic? Because we're all just fine about it down here.”

“Our carrier group is simply observing.”

“Look, the Eqbas are going to land. We've got accommodation for them, and no pressure is going to prevent them landing here. You think that they'll just drive around the block and then go home because they can't find a parking space? Just accept it and back off.”