Ally (43 page)

“Academic, mate. They want him back. They can't have him. And you can't make them honor a deal to restore your lot to full Cub Scout membership.”

“I know. But old habit and all that. Officer says jump, you jump.”

It was easier to tell them Rayat was dead. He was, in any sense of the word. “No trouble patching you through from here.”

Ade twirled the dough into skeins and began plaiting them. “Got to talk to the Boss first. Not my call.”

Eddie dumped his jacket on the sofa. The upholstery still looked white to him, even if a
c'naatat
saw it as peacock blue. Sometimes this cave of a house felt like home, and sometimes it felt like alien territory, but he missed those months when he was part of the family here even if it had been one in mourning.

“So what's the business on Bezer'ej, then?”

“Getting the Skavu to fuck off home.”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” Ade said. “Nevyan's done a deal with Rit to keep the peace if they leave.”

“Well, count me in for waving a few flags when that happens. They're as bad as I think, aren't they?”

“Worse. Total fucking savages.” Ade was relatively mild in his dismissal of enemy forces, considering what he'd seen in his career. But the Skavu had hit a nerve in him. “I'd kill the lot of them without a second thought.”

“It'll be bad enough thinking that they'll still be out there somewhere.”

“The good thing,” said Ade, “is that a round to the head kills them like any other arsehole.”

He laid the plaited loaf on a sheet of mottled gold glass to rise, and the two of them went out onto the terrace, perched on the broad wall overlooking the city beneath and shared a beer. The brew was getting worse each time. Ade needed Eddie's expert hand in the process. But it was a beer shared with a friend, and that was all that mattered.

“So what you doing?” asked Ade.

“Getting stuff together for Esganikan about Australia.”

“Ooh, she's made you her spin-weasel, then?”

“Just analysis. Like reporting, only with an audience of one.”

“Like BBChan 88.”

“Hah bloody hah.”

“Well, when you get home, you won't be Our Man-In-F'nar, will you? You'll be grubbing around in the dirt with the rest of the hacks if you don't grab your advantage with Attila the Parrot.”

Eddie hated the reminder.
Home.
There were things back on Earth that were hard to get or nonexistent here—food beyond the basics, sex, and a sense of permanence—but the thought of walking away from it almost panicked him. It wasn't like leaving Turkey or any of the other countries where he'd worked. Once he left Wess'ej, he couldn't just hop on a flight and visit the place again, catching up with old friends and tutting about how much the place had changed. He couldn't even call them, not easily anyway.

It was twenty-five years' separation, and 150 trillion miles. As soon as he landed on Earth, thinking he'd been gone a few months in the bizarre squeezing of time at near-light speed, anyone he called back here would have lived a generation's worth of experiences.

They might even have forgotten him.

“I thought you'd be spending time with the detachment,” said Eddie. “I know they're on Mar'an'cas, but you could get up there a few times a week for a hand of cards.”

“I know,” said Ade. “I'm practicing not having them around. Getting used to not having them there.”

“Ah.”

“I'm going to miss them.”

“Or you could make the most of the time you have with them. You've still got a few years, if they don't decide to go back with
Thetis.
”

“Eddie,” he said gently, “what about the hundreds of years after that? Maybe thousands.”

Ade didn't say much after that. It seemed like he was thinking for the first time about what being immortal for all intents and purposes actually meant.

“If they could remove
c'naatat
from you,” Eddie asked, “would you take the option?”

Ade chewed the idea visibly. “Not until I've had the life I should have had.”

“Do you think they can do it?”

Ade swung his legs off the wall and stood up, stretching his arms behind his back.

“I think they can. Shapakti did, once. But the bloody thing learns.”

“That's bugs for you,” said Eddie.

It took him a matter of seconds to think through the implications of a countermeasure for
c'naatat
and the impact it would have. He added it to the list of stories that were five star, but not worth the shit.

The list of those grew longer. He had another beer instead.

The Temporary City, Bezer'ej: command center

“We have exactly the same pressures here as when we last spoke,” said Sarmatakian Ve. “Except now you have ten thousand competent Skavu at your disposal that you didn't have before.”

Esganikan took the return call from Surang in front of the duty crew as usual. There was nothing an Eqbas commander would keep from her comrades. Nor did she feel any compulsion not to argue with the senior matriarch's adviser in front of them.

“Skavu are a liability. They've already given me cause for concern here. I can't risk deploying them on Earth.”

“Can you command them or not?”

“You know I can.”

“Then those are your extra resource.”

Esganikan had been under fire, and she was deterred by nothing; but the idea of Skavu troops on Earth filled her with a dismay so powerful that she couldn't take it in her stride at that moment. And this couldn't be solved by
jask.
So she argued.

“I can't allow a fleet of Skavu to wait on Bezer'ej for several years with nothing to occupy them, and I strongly advise against using them on a mission like Earth.”

“They're all you have if you want a task force inside of six or seven years.”

Six or seven years.
In the context of the time she'd spent in suspension, and the displacement of light-years, it was a short time.
But I don't have this time. I'm older than the rest of the crew. I need to start my life, however late. And for Earth—every year counts too.

“I'll ask you one more time to reconsider, Sarmatakian. The mission is under-resourced as it is. Adding unsuitable troops to the situation will compromise it.”

“I don't have a choice. You can accept the Skavu, or reject them and carry out the mission understrength. Or abort it, and I know you won't do that. We want Earth restored before it becomes a much bigger task.”

The gene bank had waited generations. It could wait lon
ger. But Earth couldn't, and even the delay between leaving Bezer'ej and planet fall would be marked by deterioration and new problems. Some things were better done sooner than later.

“If I accept the Skavu, then I still face having them hanging around this system longer than they're welcome. This isn't one of our project worlds,
Chail.
This is our own people. However different, however unlike us they are in many ways, they're wess'har, and we have a duty to them.”

“Then,” said Sarmatakian, “you had better leave for Earth as soon as you can.”

“But what about the rest of the specialists and the remaining assets you promised me?”

“We still commit them. They're in transit. As there's no need now to assemble at Bezer'ej, we can deploy them direct from their current locations, which means they'll start arriving in the Earth system approximately a year after you do, and at intervals thereafter. Purely from my memory, that should give you nearly a full fleet on station within four years of arrival.”

There was no argument. She was right: the resources added up, and all Esganikan had to offer by way of counterargument was that she didn't like Skavu troops. If she didn't take them, another commander would have to.

Earth needed intervention: and because of the distances and delays involved, this almost-accidentally assembled task force was the best hope it had. It was
her
problem to solve.

“Very well,” she said. “I'll prepare the mission for early departure.”

The operations room staff were quiet, but their scents didn't seem as agitated as hers. Perhaps it was relief to be getting on with the job, having been denied an opportunity to be useful on Umeh.

“That means rushing through the planning,” said Hayin. “We can leave a clean-up crew on Ouzhari, though, can't we?”

“Yes,” said Esganikan, crushed. She envied Shan's ability to conceal her scent. She felt obliged to explain her anxiety to all who detected it. “You know I would have liked more
time to prepare, and I don't like Skavu, but I work with what I'm given, because that's my duty.”

“The sooner we deal with Earth,” said Hayin, “the sooner we're back on Eqbas Vorhi.”

There was a general murmur of satisfaction from the crew and a pleasant scent to underscore it. Esganikan desperately wanted to share it, and failed. She went back to her cabin in the detached section of her ship, asked Aitassi not to disturb her, and knelt down to think.

She'd run out of time. She didn't have troop strength on her side. She had a
c'naatat
host as a prisoner, insufficient preparation work done, little liaison established, and a fear that if she had overestimated Wess'ej's capacity to handle the isenj, then she would have another clean-up task on her hands when she passed this way in—how many years' time? Fifty, sixty, a hundred?

She couldn't yet tell how long the Earth mission would take. Most missions took five to ten years to stabilize a planet and leave crews in place with the native population. Earth was too far from the core worlds to expect any wess'har or ussissi to want to remain there.

For a moment, she thought the unthinkable.

It was an
if only
thought, the kind humans had.

The one difference was that this wasn't an impossible wish to erase events and live a different set of consequences. This was a calculated gamble forming in her head.

Shapakti was a brilliant biologist. Back home, there were many more like him. He would find a lasting solution to removing
c'naatat
, or they would, but someone would find it, and all she needed was time.

Time could be bought, at a price.

If the Targassati wess'har here could make
c'naatat
work for them in a crisis, and not be destroyed by it, then so could she.

Chad Island, Bezer'ej

“Hi, Lin,” said Shan. “You've let yourself go a bit, haven't you?”

Aras's heart pounded with dread, and Shan went into what Ade called her
smart-arse mode.
That was how each reacted to a tense situation. Hands on hips, Shan appeared ready to reach behind her back to pull a weapon that wouldn't do a
c'naatat
-infected creature any damage at all. Nevyan watched in grim silence.

Aras had a cluster of small charges, enough to reduce a few eggs to fragments. That was his priority, and it broke his heart. Shan nudged him, and he called on his human part, the dishonest and destructive monkey, to get him through the next hour. He was sure he was doing it for the right reasons, irrelevant as motive was to Wess'har.

“We're here to do a deal,” Shan said. “Me and Nevyan. It's for your own good.”

“It always is,” said Lindsay.

Nevyan studied the assembled bezeri with fully dilated pupils. Most of them were here now—no, all of them, Aras counted—and they seemed at a loss; they made no attempt to repel Shan. They simply studied what was studying them.

Bezeri hadn't had enemies in hundreds of generations, at
least not enemies who confronted them directly. Their enemy was invisible, the by-product of the ambitions of surface-dwelling animals, but it killed them just the same. They didn't look ready to die quietly again.

“What's the deal?” asked Lindsay.

“Stop the bezeri destroying other species,” said Shan. “Teach them to manage their resources. And stop them breeding.”

“What's in it for…us?” Lindsay asked. She stood her ground, a glassy figure shot with lights, and Aras barely recognized her now. “Under the circumstances, being nearly extinct and all that, your proposition sounds a little one-sided.”

“Remember how they got in this mess?” Shan said quietly. “
Two
twenty-four-carat decisions by you, Commander I-Know-What-I'm-Doing Neville. One more bad call doesn't undo the damage.”

Lindsay looked at Nevyan. “So what have you got to say for yourself? Or do you do everything Shan tells you?”

“If the Eqbas or their Skavu troops knew what was happening, they'd eradicate you all.” Nevyan might have looked quiet and compliant to a human, but she was pure steel. Aras calculated the route he would need to take to find the eggs nestled in the foliage. “When the Eqbas leave, we take over again, and if I feel you're a hazard to this planet, I'll eradicate you myself.”

“Okay, I see the threat,” said Lindsay. “But I'm having trouble spotting the deal.”

“Keep the bezeri in check, both in their habits and their population, and we leave you alone.”

“So, they're frozen like museum exhibits. Proud remnant of a mighty culture. Roll up and see the living fossils.” Lindsay had adopted Shan's hands-on-hips stance, a clear indication of who she thought she was arguing with. “We have no incentive, then.” She turned to Aras. “You're awfully quiet.”

Of course I am. I'm about to take lives that have done nothing wrong, that can't have done anything wrong, not yet. But if I can't have children, then neither must these bezeri.

“Your incentive is a sustainable planet,” he said. “Because even
c'naatat
can't live indefinitely if the planet is overrun. Sooner or later, you end up like Umeh, nothing but yourselves filling the world. At some point, you need to stop.”

“Forty-four isn't that point,” said Lindsay. She was looking around the clearing; some bezeri were up in the trees, keeping watch. Her eyes were visible in that gel face, and her darting glance suggested it might have already occurred to her that this was an ambush of sorts. “No deal.”

Shan looked down at her boots, the brown riggers' boots that Ade had gone to so much effort to find for her. “I killed my own kid,” she said. “I aborted her. If I'd kill my own flesh and blood, Ade's child, to stop
c'naatat
hosts proliferating, I won't have any trouble finishing off this whole colony. Will I?”

Her.
Aras hadn't known that. An
isanket.
That hurt.

Shan could always silence Lindsay. She had now. Lindsay's shock, however altered her body had become, was obvious. She took a long time to find words again.

“You're not lying, are you?”

“I wish I were.”

“You. Of all people. At least you've experienced what I've been through now. You understand, then.”

Shan let out a dismissive snort. “Cut the shit, Lin. Don't pull the we're-all-grieving-mothers-together crap. I've not come here to fucking well bond with you like some support group. Get the bezeri to shape up, or I'll finish the job you started.”

Shan's brutally worded ultimatum told Aras that she was still hurting a great deal more about the abortion than she let on. The more crude her dismissal, the deeper the wound. Lindsay lapsed into brief silence. The two woman handled their assorted ills and pains in very different ways.

Lindsay seemed to be struggling with Shan's revelation. “There's still nothing in it for them.”

“If the Eqbas succeed in finding a way to remove
c'naatat
from hosts, then there
is
a solution,” said Nevyan. “In time, when the solution is found, the bezeri can breed, restore their
numbers, and then the parasite can be removed. But until that happens, they must stop.”

Lindsay stood silent for a long time. Aras judged this was the point to wander off. He heard her say, “Let me discuss this with Saib and the others,” before her voice faded and was swept away by the breeze. In the foliage, clustered on a stalk in the cool moist shadow, a clutch of eggs that couldn't be allowed to hatch did indeed look like exotic fruits. As he dug out a pit and laid the small charge, it occurred to him that grinding or mincing would have done the fragmentation job a lot more tidily. But he only had explosives to hand, and that would do the job. He set the fuse and withdrew to squat in the shelter of a tree.

The blast deafened him for a moment and in the seconds of absolute silence that followed, he saw movement and sparkling light. A couple of bezeri were rushing towards the detonation, bounding on limblike tentacles, clearing the bushes in great leaps. The nearest they had ever come to encountering explosives was—if they could detect it at all—the distant sound of wess'har skirmishes during the abortive attempt at an isenj landing. The bezeri had no idea what had happened.

Aras recognized one of the bezeri heading his way as the one who'd been searching for
sheven
in the bog. It was only when the creature rushed to the exact spot where the eggs had been that Aras realized this might be the mother.

He felt he guessed correctly. She thrashed around the bushes, making an incoherent bubbling growl, and saw only a shallow crater where her eggs had been. Her mantle lit instantly with the most vivid green light, no other color at all. She became an emerald beacon.

Aras no longer had his signal lamp, and so he couldn't interpret the language of bioluminescence. But he'd seen that green light before, and he needed no lamp to interpret it. He'd seen it when the bezeri were dying in the shallows after Mohan Rayat, Lindsay Neville, Josh Garrod and Jonathan Burgh had detonated cobalt-slated nuclear devices on Ouzhari island.

It was a scream of agony.

Now, perhaps, a deal might be discussed. Aras stumbled far from the green-screaming mother, bent double, and vomited.

“You're going to regret that,” said Lindsay Neville's voice.

The Temporary City, Bezer'ej

Shapakti and Rayat were hunched over an examination tray whose magnified image was now a familiar one: the radial brush pattern of
c'naatat.
In he corner, behind a loose mesh, were the two blue and gold macaws.

“You don't allow them to fly free now,” Esganikan said. Shapakti looked up, startled. When engrossed in work, he didn't even smell her coming. Not even the noise of the macaws distracted him.

“It's for their own safety,” Shapakti explained. “They like having company, but they seem to get bored…and then they become disruptive.”

Rayat looked up at nothing in particular as if he was listening. Esganikan thought about his insinuating human trick of planting ideas in minds with apparently casual statements, and realized that she'd learned a valuable lesson that would stand her in good stead on Earth.

“You missed my conversation with Sarmatakian in the command center,” she said. “We're leaving for Earth as soon as we can make arrangements. A few weeks at most. The Skavu are making up the shortfall in the fleet.”

Shapakti took the news in stunned silence.

“Some of your people have very lurid descriptions of their…environmental correctness,” said Rayat.

“Nothing we say is lurid,” Esganikan explained. “It is accurate.”

“They massacre populations for the smallest infringement, I hear.”

“Their own as well as their neighbors', yes.”

“Right.” Rayat nodded to himself a few times, as if distracted. The color of his face changed—blood diminishing,
a more yellow tone—and his pupils dilated. “Well, I can predict the outcome, I think.”

“What about my research?” Shapakti said at last. “I can't complete it in weeks, and probably not even months. I thought I had at least four years.”

Rayat appeared to take great interest in that. He showed some agitation or excitement: she wasn't sure which. But his blinking became rapid. “So what happens to me? Does that mean you're taking me with you?”

Esganikan read his reaction. Now she was sure how he operated. He'd got her thinking about the benefits of
c'naatat
. He was now hoping he might go home to Earth as her prisoner. Shan Frankland had been right: he was still set on getting the parasite back to Earth for his government by one vector or another.

It would reach Earth, but not as he intended. And when it did, it would remain beyond the reach and use of his masters.

Esganikan leaned over to look at Shapakti's images of the parasite—or symbiont, depending on how benign its host felt towards it—that had caused so much grief. Shapakti held the microscope tray so she could see the enlarged image better. Shan called it a fractal hairbrush.

“Few biological problems have ever defeated you, Shapakti.” Esganikan found herself considering delivery systems for agents to counter
c'naatat
infection. They would have been a great deal more efficient than the obliteration bombing the wess'har had been forced to use on this planet. “Do you lack resources here?”

“Yes—for this project, anyway.”

“You return home now, then. When we can manage
c'naatat,
it opens up many possibilities.”

“Gai Chail,
I do believe that same thought was what started this cascade of problems here in the wess'har wars.”

“F'nar is a culture from history, Shapakti. They live a carefully preserved agrarian lifestyle that we didn't even live centuries ago. They don't have the technology. We stand the best chance of understanding this organism.”

The macaws started a noisy destruction of something me
tallic in their temporary prison. Shapakti glanced at Rayat as if seeking a reaction. “And then what do we do with that understanding, other than having a way of removing it from its host in the event of contamination?”

“That alone would solve most of the problems it presents.”

“My friend Rayat says that makes it
more
dangerous, because of its potential then to be used at will as a military enhancement.”

Esganikan noted the word
friend,
which wasn't ironic. “It's only dangerous if others like the
gethes
have that technology, and they don't, and they never will. But consider what flexibility it would offer us for missions.”

“Don't you think I haven't?” Shapakti made a gesture towards the far wall of his laboratory, where he had an image of his home in real time, linked by the instantaneous communications system. “My family is in a conscious phase now. I can talk to them. Then when I embark on the next journey, they go into suspension again. I spend a great deal of time thinking how life extension might work with the time-displaced like us. But I doubt if being able to live consciously through centuries of separation from loved ones is any advantage at all.”

It was inevitable: he had a family waiting for him, and the painful difficulty of managing that was the main reason why mission crew were almost always single, either the very young or those—like her—who had delayed bonding and children for the duration of their career.

There was only so much time you could buy with a combination of cryo-suspension and time dilation. Sooner or later, the days and months you lived in the conscious now added up to become a spent life. Esganikan counted them with increasing anxiety that had now reached the point where she had to take a calculated risk.

I need to buy myself time.

I have a small force, a long way from home, and I might need to manage casualties.

If the wess'har here could use
c'naatat
and not be controlled by it, even with their obsolete technology, then so can we.

“If we could manage
c'naatat,
we could enhance our military capability,” she said.

“Do we even need to?”

“And families would have an alternative to cryo-suspension.”

“We could, of course, just be more strict about who crews missions.”

“And that means we never deploy the experienced and the mature, and we need to do that, Shapakti.” Esganikan paused and looked Rayat up and down. His hair was streaked with gray, which indicated maturity in a human. He was utterly alone and everyone he held dear on his homeworld—if he held anyone dear at all—was dead. She saw her future in him. “I want to suggest something to you.”