Ally (26 page)

Before she could press further, he reared up and made for the bog, and she wondered how many
shevens
there were, and how long it would be before there were none at all.

Umeh Station, Jejeno: Eight hours after dispersal of bioagent

“Oh God…”

It was a woman engineer who spotted it first. She was leaning against the straight section of transparent composite that formed the base section of the dome, and then she jerked upright as if something had hit her in the back.

“Oh God, what's wrong with it?”

Eddie had been watching her for no reason other than that she was nice-looking, and that erased conscious analysis. She had a small crowd around her now. They were all looking in the direction of whatever had caught her attention. Eddie's other animal instinct, the one that sent him running towards trouble out of sheer curiosity and fear of missing something, took his bee cam from his pocket and flicked it into the air. You never knew until you got there if something was worth filming, and by then you might have missed it. He went prepared.

“It's sick,” said the woman. The name tag on her orange coveralls said
MORANZ
. Eddie peered over the cluster of heads and saw an isenj on the service road. “What's it doing here?”

The bee cam was pressed to the composite like a nosey
neighbor, and Eddie decided against slipping it outside to get a better look.

The isenj was clearly in trouble. Slumped on its side and making futile efforts to crawl towards the dome, it was losing fluid from its mouth, the same thin yellow plasma that had sprayed over him when Minister Ual was shot standing right next to him.

It was blood. The isenj was sick, all right.

“What's it doing here? I've never seen them come close to the dome.”

“It's dying,” said Eddie. Rit had been warned. Genomes didn't follow borders and some of her own people might die when the pathogen was released.

“Can we do something?” The woman looked around her, as if there'd be a xenobiologist handy. “We can't just leave it there. It's trying to get help.”

The crowd was growing. Eddie thought it odd that a dying isenj would head for the dome and not its own medical facilities, but people
in extremis
—and isenj
were
people—did inexplicable things. Perhaps it already knew there was nothing an isenj medic could do for it, and hoped the fur-things in the dome might have a remedy. There were isenj going about their business just fifty meters away. Each watched the struggling creature for a moment before continuing on their way. It might have been an odd reaction to personnel in Umeh Station, who were mostly trained to react to emergencies, but Eddie had seen humans walk by the injured and dying far too many times in his life to pass judgment on another species' unwillingness to get involved.

“I know what this is,” said Eddie. “Don't go outside, and don't touch it.”

“What?” said the woman. He could see she was thinking it was a health hazard to humans, and that was fine if it kept her from getting involved. “Maybe it's been wounded.”

“It's collateral damage,” said Eddie. “Somebody get Lieutenant Cargill and let her know, but for Chrissakes don't go out there.”

“Eddie, what exactly is this?”

He didn't know the man who was speaking to him, but
everyone knew Eddie because he was the BBChan man, one they saw not only in the flesh but also on screen from time to time, albeit with decreasing frequency now. News Desk wasn't hot for downbeat alien disaster stories at the moment.

“Don't worry, it only affects isenj.” There was no point not telling them: the isenj would know soon enough, and they were the only ones it mattered to. “It's a biological weapon. It's tailored to the genome, and it was aimed at the isenj south of here who've got certain genes in common. But the pathogen drifts with prevailing winds.”

They all looked at him in a moment of accusing silence. “Haven't seen
that
on the news, Eddie,” said one.

“Hard to get viewers interested in wars between spiders twenty-five light-years away when the shit hits the fan at home every day.” God, that sounded callous. Eddie had just validated an ancient stereotype. All he needed now was a cigarette dangling from his lip and a press pass shoved in his hat and he'd be Cynical Old Hack, the glib bastard with no heart, intruding on grief to kill time before the bar opened. “Trust me, I've tried.”

The isenj's struggles were pitiful. The death throes of any creature were hard to watch, but humans always managed it okay: they were managing it now. It was a misshapen ball of spines, more like a porcupine than anything, and its spindly legs kicked as if trying to get purchase on a slippery surface. Eddie wasn't sure how the pathogen worked, but if it was bleeding from the mouth, then it was probably hemorrhaging internally. That was a bad way to go.

“You
sure
this isn't a risk to humans?” said the engineer.

“I'm sure,” said Eddie. “They've already made that particular cocktail for Bezer'ej. The wess'har know what they're doing with bioagents.”

“Jesus Christ, is this their war?”

“No, but they gave the isenj here the weapons they asked for. Just like we would.”

Ade appeared beside him and watched for a few moments. His distress was instant and visible. He waded into the sightseers.

“For Chrissake, don't stand there gawping,” he snapped. “Would you want to be a spectator sport if that was you out there? Get back to work, the lot of you. Give the poor bloody thing its dignity.”

The female engineer looked lost. “Won't the isenj send someone to help it?”

“Well, I don't see any ambulances screeching to a halt, so, no, I reckon not. Now move it.”

A voice behind Eddie made him jump. “Come on folks, you heard the sergeant. Get back to work.” Barencoin's voice boomed over their heads and they all swung around. “It's not nice to stare.”

The rest of the marines joined him, spread out and looking like they meant it. The crowd broke up and went its various ways, although the woman engineer kept looking back for as long as she could. Eddie wondered how much of the marines' talent for showing up when one of them needed backup was a natural vigilance and how much was their linked bioscreens, but Ade didn't have one. Even if they were angry with him for not telling them about Rayat, they still functioned as a team, and they watched each other's backs. It took more than a spat like that to really split them. Eddie was glad. They were a small oasis of unshakable common sense in an insane situation. Webster commandeered a small forklift loader and took up position by the airlock doors.

Ade stared at the isenj, then slid the safety catch off his rifle. “Shit, is that the first sick one you've seen?”

“Yeah. You okay?”

“I'm fine.”

“What you going to do?”

“Well, it's not going to make a miraculous recovery, is it? You know what that stuff does.”

“Jesus, Ade, you're not going to shoot it, are you?”

“It's that, or watch how many hours a bioagent takes to kill it. Shan reckons the human version took a few
days.
She found that family in the church, remember. You think that's right? Let the poor bastard suffer?”

Eddie had always said he wanted someone to shoot him if he was ever in a bad way with no hope of recovery. It took
a cold splash of reality, watching someone actually making that decision and loading a rifle, to show him he hadn't thought it through at all.

Ade seemed to be assessing line of sight. He looked over his shoulder a couple of times. “Bugger, I wish this wasn't in full view. Mart, see if you can grab a few blankets, will you?”

Isenj had helped build Umeh Station. Maybe this one was a former worker, and that was why it had headed this way in its final hours, as if its own kind had abandoned it and the fur-things were its last hope.

Barencoin jogged off. Ade watched for a few more moments, muttered, “Sod it,” and strode to the airlock. The next thing Eddie knew, Ade was outside and standing over the stricken isenj. He stood with his back to the dome and fired three quick shots, silenced by the dome's seals, into its head. It twitched and lay still. The whole thing had taken a matter of seconds and nobody in the dome appeared to have noticed.

Ade waited for a few moments—and how
did
you check an isenj was dead?—then gestured at Webster. She pushed the loader out onto the service area. With silent efficiency. They hauled the body onto the flatbed and moved it out of sight of the dome's occupants behind an opaque panel in the wall.

Webster exchanged words with Ade and left the loader outside. Ade sat down it, rifle laid across his knees. Eddie caught Webster as she came back inside.

“Is he okay, Sue?”

“Yeah.” Barencoin passed them with a couple of dark blue blankets under one arm. “He says he'll wait in case any more show up. He thinks they might.” She looked at her hands with an expression of wonder on her face. “They're soft. The quills are
soft.
Springy.”

Eddie thought they were be rigid. Maybe they lost their stiffness on death. “You're not still pissed off with Ade about the Rayat thing, are you?”

“I'm never pissed off,” said Webster. “That's Mart's job.”

Eddie stood with his hands in his pockets watching Ade
for a few minutes and realized the bee cam was still nestled against the window, recording. He snatched it back and considered going out to sit with Ade. He expected outrage or at least protest from crew who'd worked out that the isenj had been put down like an animal, but the personnel inside the dome seemed totally preoccupied with evacuation. What if Ade had put a human out of their misery in the same circumstances? But an isenj was probably like a dog to them, something intelligent and capable of being friendly that you might miss or even mourn, but not as significant as a human.

No, it better to leave Ade alone. Eddie knew him well enough by now. Even so, he hovered around the airlock for the next hour. It was getting dark and Ade couldn't sit out there all night. Eventually he relented, got Becken to scrounge two coffees for him, and took them out to sit with Ade.

He nudged the marine along the flatbed of the loader without a word and put a cup in his hand.

Ade slurped a mouthful. “Never nudge a bloke with a loaded rifle, mate.”

“Safety's on. I've learned that much. You sure you're okay?”

“I'm more okay than that poor bastard under that blanket.”

“We got through worse than this when Shan was gone.”

“I'll live.”

“Yeah. You certainly will.” Ade had defaulted to piss-take mode. “Are you worried about what Her Indoors will say when she finds out you told the rest of them about Rayat?”

“I told her. She's fine about it.”

“Oh. Really? Good.” Eddie was relieved, and slightly surprised. Shan seemed able to forgive Ade anything, as if she'd saved up all the tolerance she should have used getting along with people in general and lavished it all on a ferocious, indulgent concentrate for Ade and Aras. He suspected they had to forgive a lot with her, too. “Mart and the others will come around as well. What are you going to tell Harrison?”

“She won't be serving in twenty-odd years' time, so I don't have to tell her anything. Shan says she'll hand over a body if she likes.”

“She hasn't fragged him, has she?”

“Not yet.”

“She's slipping.”

Eddie meant it as a joke, but he did wonder.

It was completely quiet by Jejeno standards. Eddie hadn't heard any artillery activity in the city for a while. The two men nursed their cups of coffee in silence, and overhead the detached Eqbas ship was a dark shape against the light-polluted night sky, its chevrons a disembodied belt of neon. The chevrons were reprised at a distance. Eddie thought it was a reflection caused somehow by the defense shield until he realized it was the mothership moving slowly across the skyline.

A sudden flare of silent white light just to the north caught Eddie's eye and he stood up to look, although it was a pointless move in a city that was all towers.

Ade nudged him. “It's from the ship,” he said. A second pulse of light was gone in a second. “That's the government offices. This is probably when everyone works out what Rit's done and has a major sense of humor failure.”

“I can't imagine how she's going to hold this together. I know isenj aren't like us, but I don't see this administration lasting the week.”

“Either it lasts,” said Ade, “or Umeh goes back to the drawing board. Year zero. Now they're starting to see what an engineered pathogen can do, I think it might change enough minds.”

Eddie did a mental edit and substituted the word
Earth.

It did the trick. It certainly changed his.

Jejeno: Government of the Northern Assembly

The isenj troops manning the barricade in front of the government center in Jejeno weren't prepared for an enemy that used portable shields.

They also seemed surprised to see Minister Rit with an Eqbas escort. They shrilled and chirped wildly. Rit shrilled back.

“They want to know what's happening,” said Aitassi. “And Rit has told them she plans to take over the government.”

There was no room for misunderstanding. Isenj were far easier to deal with in many ways than the
gethes
that Esganikan had spoken with on Earth.

“Surrender,” she said, keeping it simple. Aitassi, safe within the shield area, translated even though it was obvious that surrender was a sensible choice. “Let us through, or you'll die.”

Isenj used projectile weapons. There was nothing wrong
with proven technology, but it often met its superior, equally proven. They looked at the Eqbas troops, and then at Minister Rit, but they still opened fire.

The first volley of shots hit the generated field in a brief burst of light, dropping short of their target. One round made it as far as the first of Esganikan's twenty troops and bounced against his body armor like a tossed pebble.

Esganikan hadn't learned to fully read emotion in an isenj and knew she never would, but their immediate reaction of frozen shock looked very like a wess'har's. Then they broke ranks, scattered across the street and back into the building, and the Eqbas assault team picked them off. It took less than a minute to clear the way into the Northern Assembly seat of government. Esganikan wondered how much of the army had deserted as she ran after her squad down the wide corridors of polished stone. The place seemed almost deserted.

Aitassi stayed close behind for her own safety, but there were few isenj around, just clerks at desks and monitoring screens. They paused to stare at the coup unfolding in front of them.

“What are they doing?”

Aitassi cornered an isenj as if herding it and they exchanged high-pitched chatter.

“They're crisis management clerks,” she said. “This is the overnight watch—everyone else has gone home for the evening.”

Extraordinary: they were such creatures of habit that they stuck to their schedules even now. With every contact, Esganikan found they were far weaker than they appeared: their air assets globally were no more than a single large nation's, and had been wiped out on the ground in a brief series of preemptive strikes. Now even the clerks had gone home. They seemed equipped only to wage war on each other. They weren't a credible enemy; they were an irritant.

“I feel this will become a saying among troops,” Esganikan, sidearm in hand, carried on down the passage. “Plan for Garav, hope for Umeh.”

A
gethes
would have felt dishonored for trouncing such
a weak enemy, but she was a pragmatist. She fought as a means to an end, not as a tribal ritual, seizing the advantage and feeling only vague sorrow for a once-powerful civilization still putting faith in solid but obsolete technology.

But isenj still had numbers. And unless she destroyed every dissident isenj—most of the planet, it seemed—then at some point she had to walk away and leave Minister Rit to hold back chaos with a Skavu army. She strode into the main cabinet room where she had once been an invited guest and stared at seven isenj ministers distinguishable only by the colors of the decorative beads threaded on the tips of their quills.

It was Rit's turn now. “Your former colleague wishes to address you, Ministers.” Esganikan stepped back and gestured to Aitassi for a translation. Shomen Eit and Nir Bedoi spoke English but none of the others did. The
gethes
had brought one thing of use to Ceret, to Cavanagh's Star, to Nir: and that was a common language that could be learned, simple and flexible enough in its components to be adapted by isenj and wess'har for mutual use. Apart from that, all they'd contributed was chaos.

Rit walked in followed by Ralassi, and the collective raising of ministerial quills indicated either aggression or shock. It was probably both. Ralassi translated her address, and it felt like an oddly restrained revolution—a meeting of ministers reading each other polite statements instead of seizing members of the old regime and killing them.

If
gethes
on Earth were as orderly as this, Esganikan would be grateful.

Rit began her polite, reasoned power grab. Aitassi watched, occasionally snapping her teeth in impatience, while Ralassi interpreted.

“Minister Rit says we have to take a path of major change. We can't expand indefinitely. If we need any more proof after today that we can never oust the wess'har either from Bezer'ej or even Wess'ej, then it will end in our total destruction.”

Esganikan was interested to note how all but one of the cabinet members moved position slightly to put more dis
tance between themselves and Shomen Eit. She wondered what primeval defense mechanisms existed in isenj. All creatures still reverted to ancient archetypes in their moments of stress, just as wess'har did. How did creatures evolved from termite colonies behave when threatened? They rallied to the dominant individuals, to the core and future of the colony.

“You're a traitor and a collaborator, like your misguided husband,” said Shomen Eit, in English. “I'll call on loyal troops to kill you.”

So
that
was how they reacted. Like
gethes
and a dozen other species. Some things seemed to be universal, except among wess'har.

“Minister Rit says you have a choice of working with the new government or being executed, because she has learned that prisoners like you are a liability.”

“And who do you plan to call on to carry out the sentence if I don't comply?” Again Shomen Eit replied in English, and it was clear he was doing it for Esganikan's benefit, testing how firmly she stood behind Rit. He might have thought the coup was at her instigation.

Rit turned to Ralassi and shrilled. Aitassi reacted with agitated little side-to-side movements as if ready to spring at a target. “She asks for a weapon, but I have no idea if she's competent to use it.”

“Ralassi,” said Esganikan, “tell the minister I
am
armed and I'll carry out her instructions.”

She stepped forward and drew the hand weapon that so fascinated the human marines because it bore no resemblance to a
gethes
pistol. She'd executed Jonathan Burgh with it, two pulses to ensure he was dead because she had never killed one of his species at close quarters before. Now she held it to Shomen Eit's upper body. She knew enough about isenj anatomy now from the recent fighting to know that was an effective target area.

Shomen Eit rattled slightly, beads shivering on his quills, but he stood his ground. He smelled of decaying wood. It wasn't unpleasant.

“I had no idea you would go this far,” he said, and he was
definitely addressing Esganikan, not Rit. He seemed to think this was an Eqbas strategy, and telling him otherwise would have served no purpose. “Do you understand you're destroying a civilization?”

“But you called on us to kill
your
enemies, Minister, so why do you think I wouldn't do the same for another isenj with authority?” It genuinely puzzled her. “My objective is to restore this planet. It requires a reduction in your population on a massive scale, and any isenj remaining must be ones who want to maintain a balanced ecology. The detail beyond that is irrelevant in planetary terms.”

Ralassi interrupted. “Minister Rit says you must all choose.”

“I can't serve in an unlawful administration,” said Shomen Eit.

“The Minister says that the law is also irrelevant if there's no habitable planet to govern, and she won't imprison you to provide a rallying point for dissent.”

Shomen Eit had stopped rattling. Resigned or beyond fear—Esganikan badly missed scent cues in situations like this—he wasn't going to surrender. She doubted any promises he made would last out the next few days anyway.

There was a long pause between Rit's next burst of chittering and Ralassi's interpretation, as if he wasn't sure he should repeat the words. But he did.

“Please remove Minister Eit.”

Esganikan liked to be clear. “Do you mean remove or kill?”

Ralassi paused. “Kill.”

It was a necessary act to clear the way for Umeh's survival and restoration. Esganikan squeezed the handgrip of the dull blue cylinder in her hand, and a deafening crack of expanding plasma filled the stone-lined chamber. She followed up immediately with a second pulse, because she left nothing to chance. The six remaining cabinet ministers were silent for a moment and then launched into high-pitched squealing.

“Minister Rit says she is now assuming leadership of this cabinet and will stand down the army—with the support of her colleagues.”

It was as simple as that. Nir Bedoi, effectively the deputy leader—and having no nominal head of state didn't mean there wasn't one in reality—found his voice.

“If this is good for the Northern Assembly in the long-term, then you have my support as your husband did.”

He made a move around Shomen Eit's body; staff had already come to the cabinet chamber doors to investigate the noise, and seemed unsure whether to wait to be called in or not. “But explain what's happening now in the Maritime Fringe territory, and even here. Do we have an epidemic?”

“You asked for tailored genetic bioagents,” said Esganikan. “And that's exactly what we gave you. They were deployed a few hours ago, and we did warn you that there would be citizens here who shared the genetic markers found in nearly all the Fringe's population.”

“There will be a remnant in the fringe without those genes, and they'll rise up against us in due course.”

“In a few days, deaths will be on a scale where anyone surviving the pathogen will die either from other naturally occurring disease or from infrastructure collapse. There'll be nobody to manage the utilities. It will be academic.”

“But how do we clear up a disaster on that scale, with our resources so stretched?”

It was an intelligent question, and one that gave Esganikan her own resource issues. “That's our contribution.”

“What if others attack us?”

These were all the questions she'd worked through with Rit, and even Shomen Eit as recently as a few weeks earlier. “You know we have templates for other pathogens specific to your major population groups. You gave us the tissue samples, remember?”

Ralassi was translating for everyone else's benefit. This was a final, personal warning from the commander who'd enforced environmental restoration on a number of worlds, and had no hesitation in using whatever means she had at her disposal to do the same here.

“And if that fails?”

“Then I shall deploy one more deterrent,” said Esganikan. “The universal isenj pathogen already dispersed on Bezer'ej.
If need be, we will erase this world and start again from a blank sheet.”

Rit rattled. Her gold beads—transparent, tumbled smooth, like drops of sap—seemed to have a life of their own for a moment. She inhaled air noisily, forming an approximation of English.

“Need will not be,” she said. It was a wheeze, a gasp, a breath. But it was clear. “
Need will not be.”

Jejeno, Umeh: Two days later

It had to be done, and this was as good a time as any to do it.

Aras leaned against the viewing plate as the shuttle approached its final descent into Umeh's atmosphere. It was a dismal-looking planet, all grays and ochres and rusty coastlines, and his isenj memories, seldom far from the surface, filled him with strangely mixed emotions.

His scent betrayed him. Both Nevyan and Shan reacted, and his
isan
took hold of his arm just as she had on Bezer'ej two years ago; it was as comforting now as it had been then.

“You don't have to disembark,” Shan said quietly. “We'll get our business done, and then we can go straight back home.”

“Shan, I
do
have to face this. This isn't about reconciliation. I want to know how
I
feel. I want to see their faces.”

Did he mean that? Was there some isenj within driving him too? He didn't know, and he hated not knowing. The ambiguity had never bothered him in the past, so perhaps that dissatisfaction had come from another mind—probably Shan's.

Nevyan watched from the bank of seating opposite, flanked by Serrimissani and Giyadas. The
isanket
was growing very fast now, and needed to see her mother doing a matriarch's duties so she could understand what was almost certainly her future role too. She also wanted to see Eddie, because, as she announced gravely, he became confused
when trying to reconcile human morality with wess'har ethics, and he needed
guidance.

“You can still change your mind if you wish,” Nevyan said. “We won't think any less of you.”

“I can manage this.”

Shan leaned so close to him that he could feel her breath on his cheek. “I can smell you're scared. They can't judge you, Aras.”

“It's not them I fear,” he said. “It's my ability to deal with my own reaction.”

“If you hate them, fine. Don't swallow all this tolerance and forgiveness shite from Deborah Garrod. She's a nice woman, but she deals in a different reality to the likes of you and me.”

“She forgave
me
. It can be done.” Could he do it for the bezeri? He'd have to destroy them anyway. Motive and self-examination were a human failing and he couldn't resist its effects now. “I have to see if I can.”

“I married the bishop of fucking F'nar, did I?”

“Are we married?”

“You're the one who said we were bonded.”