Ally (8 page)

Then it dawned on him: responsibility was about
proximity.
It wasn't just about breaking the chain of events.

“So, the government that had
Actaeon
carry nuclear weapons wasn't responsible.”

She considered that for a second. “No. Where would this end if it was?
All
humans would be responsible. And
all
humans don't have the ability to prevent this. There's always a line to draw.”

“Do you understand why we don't get it?”

“I know you don't think like us.”

“We're going to have to learn.”

“We might try to think like you, too,” said Giyadas. “But as we've made up our minds about what we think is the right way for us to behave, that would be no use.”

She gave him a very adult nod and walked off, every inch the matriarch she would be one day. Just when he thought he'd nailed the wess'har mindset, there was one final twist that jerked it out of his reach again.
Face it, Monkey Boy, we're always going to be wrong unless we behave like they do.
They didn't even agree with the Eqbas side of the family some of the time. He could see that Earth's diplomats were going to crash and burn on the first day.

Shan thought a lot like a wess'har long before she'd been pumped full of their DNA, even if she didn't hold with their line on guilt. No wonder she liked it here. She wasn't an alien like she'd been on Earth. He sat back in the makeshift seat he'd built out of crates and suddenly understood why Shan had spent so much time building a sofa 150 trillion light-years from home. He scrolled back to the first package Giyadas had edited, running his fingertip over the reactive pigment embedded in the smartfabric, and replayed the sequence.

It was a moving screen print, just like the marines' chameleon camouflage battledress that detected the terrain and
mimicked it. Once, the technology had provided trivial but fascinating shirts that played movies. Like the organic computers grown into the marines' palms, and the implants that gave them head-up displays in their eyes, it was all technology from the entertainment industry.

As are we all: a distant diversion for the folks back home, aliens in your living room.

Eddie watched.

The sequence was a glimpse into the wess'har mind. Giyadas had cut the shots together scrupulously: every angle, every scene, every separate shot was included in some form, even if it was wobbly and canted. It was a representative sample of what the Eqbas fighter's on-board cam had recorded during the bombing run. The steady shots had been cut proportionally too: effectively, nothing had been omitted. Wess'har had a literal eye. They saw the world as it was.

“We're fucked,” he said aloud. “Fucked, fucked,
fucked.
”

Eddie got up and walked through the maze of interconnecting passages that made up Nevyan's home and led to the terraced walkway circling the caldera that housed F'nar. The wess'har's warren-dwelling heritage was visible in the way they'd cut into the natural landscape, lining the bowl of the dead volcano with row upon row of terraces and tunneled homes. That alone was spectacular enough; but the most extraordinary aspect of the city was the uniform coating of nacre that covered every smooth surface. Ashlars, paths, doors and the roofs of the small buildings in the basin were all covered in the natural pearl fecal deposits laid by the surprisingly drab
tem
flies that swarmed in hot weather.

It was, as Shan put it, only insect shit. But it was exquisite and magical, and there was never a day that Eddie didn't find it mesmerizing. The city changed constantly as the light varied: it was an iconic view, a studio backdrop, a souvenir shot, the essence of F'nar. Just as Surang on Eqbas Vorhi was a billowing cityscape of sinuous, almost organic-looking buildings like an outcrop of exotic fungi, F'nar was a wedding cake in a near desert.

Shit, I even
see
in headlines. Another gulf.

He wa five light-years from the Eqbas homeworld and
twenty-five from his own. He thought of Surang, and wondered how he could ever go back to Earth now when there were so many new things to be seen and discovered closer to—

Home. Yes,
home.

The thought didn't shock him half as much as he expected.

The Temporary City, Bezer'ej

Shan stood opposite Rayat. She folded her arms, feet slightly spread, the width of the table between them.

“Okay, Superintendent.” Rayat was annoyingly calm, but if he thought he was going to provoke her, he had another thing coming. “Decided my fate yet? Experimental subject for the removal of
c'naatat,
or grenade practice?”

“Don't piss me about,” she said. She never thought she could tire of anger, but she very nearly had. “I don't suppose you recall seeing any infected bezeri during your stay down below, do you?”

She caught a whiff of acid. Rayat had reacted; it was the scent equivalent of a surprised flinch. He might have been posed for a poker match, but he didn't know how to control his skin chemistry like Shan did. Whatever scrap of her he'd inherited with
c'naatat,
he hadn't mastered that one yet.

“I take it you found one, then.”

“Possibly.”

“I took a lot of care
not
to contaminate them. The only tissue contact either Lindsay or I had was with a cadaver.”

“You're sure.”

“I introduced some of its mantle tissue into open wounds to encourage
c'naatat
to develop bioluminescence for signaling.” Rayat held out his hand to Shan as if offering to shake it: green light danced under the skin. Shan had her facial muscles locked into I-don-t-give-a-shit, but her hands responded whether she wanted them to or not. Green light sparkled in her fingers, making them look backlit as they rested on her sleeve. She glanced at them and they stopped.
It troubled her that she didn't know why they did it or how she could control it consistently. “How did you get
your
lights, Superintendent?”

That was a mystery too. She hated mysteries. “Free with a dose of seawater, I expect.”

“Extraordinary, bezeri signaling. Photophores and light-producing cells combined. Bright colors even in daylight. You can imagine the applications in bioengineering—”

“That's fascinating, but we've got a bezeri strolling around on dry land now.” She managed to resist the bait. He was slipping if he thought he could rile her by pressing the old EnHaz buttons. “Anything you want to tell me?”

“Well, Superintendent, if it's strolling, it's probably Lindsay Neville.”

“Aras said it was large and shapeless as far as he could see.”

“She's let herself go a little.”

“Look, maybe you get a hard on from verbal fencing, sunshine, but it doesn't do a thing for me. What happened?”

Shan didn't move a muscle, and she didn't blink. She counted to six before Rayat leaned back slightly and looked away, but it might have been a maneuver rather than a concession. Rayat was as much of a gamesman as she was.

“Last time I saw Lin, she was still humanoid in shape, but composed of gelatinous tissue,” he said. “Human-shaped bezeri.”

“How come you're still a Rayat-shaped arsehole?”

“You know
c'naatat
doesn't produce the same result twice. Look at you and your…family, for a start.” He gave the impression of being genuinely fascinated by it. “Are you aware of
toxoplasma gondii
? Protozoan that alters rodent behavior and makes them easier prey so it can continue its reproductive cycle in predators.”

“I am,” Shan said. “And, yes, I've wondered if
c'naatat
influences me. We all have. So Lin wants to be a bezeri. Or
c'naatat
wants bezeri to take up hiking. Or maybe both. Right now all I want to do is to gauge the size of the problem. You say there's forty-four bezeri left, one complete family and the rest too old to breed. Right?”

“Correct.”

“So many of those are now carrying
c'naatat
?”

“When I got out, none of them were.”

Shan leaned a fraction closer. “Aras has had contact with bezeri for centuries, and they never picked it up from him, and they never got it from me, either, so they're not easy to infect. So what's Lindsay been up to?”

“She seems to feel she has to be their savior to atone for killing so many of them. Their numbers won't ever recover now. They have no breeding population.”

“Oh, I can do Lindsay logic.”

“So can I, alas.”

“She's saving them the permanent way, isn't she?”

“Maybe she hasn't infected them all.”

“Lindsay likes her lists and rotas. She'll have lined them up and doled it out at roll call.”

“The risk probably isn't as serious as it looks,” said Rayat, clasping his hands and resting them on the table. “They weren't a breeding colony, Superintendent. One family with fertile members, and they don't inbreed.”

Shan hesitated for a painful split-second that Rayat couldn't see. She wouldn't bank on the infertile ones staying that way. She certainly hadn't. “They're still a risk.”

“They aren't about to disperse across the galaxy. They're very territorial for a start. There might be a risk to the ecology here, but the problem's quarantined.”

“Good to see your approach to risk assessment hasn't changed since Ouzhari.”

“But I don't know what happens if
c'naatat
carriers are confined to an environment indefinitely.”

Shan knew, or at least Aras did. It was why he and his troops wiped out the isenj colonies here. The combination of the natural isenj breeding rate and a zero death rate had been an environmental disaster. With the bezeri's penchant for hunting to extinction, the critical thing was to make sure they didn't multiply into billions.

And only a few weeks ago, you were still hoping you'd find more of them so they could breed and repopulate. Life's fucking ironic.

“Are you listening, Superintendent…?”

“I don't have any police rank now, actually.”

“That seems to make no difference.”

“I'd appeal to your sense of responsibility if I thought you had one, and hope you'd help me avert another disaster.”

“I don't want this to spread any more than you do, Shan.”
Shan.
Jesus, he was trying to be chummy. She hated people using her first name unless she bloody well said they could. “And I'm not playing games now. If
c'naatat
can be reversed at will, then it's even more dangerous because it's fully exploitable with no apparent downside. So it stays here. The Eqbas
can
remove it, can't they?”

“Never tried a live subject,” said Shan. She didn't believe in miraculous conversions. She'd seen way too many that corresponded with a prisoner's desire to get out of the shit she was about to unload on them. “So I'll make decisions based on what I
know.
”

She never stopped to ask if it was her responsibility; everything just
was.

“I wouldn't have deployed ERDs on Ouzhari if I hadn't been serious about asset denial.”

“You talk a good game, Rayat, but you missed out the bit where you busted a gut to try to get a sample back to Earth.”

“Initially. But I know what it can do now. And I don't like it.”

“You still went back to Constantine to see if there was an intact ship.”

“Yes. But I'm stuck here now. Like you.”

Smarmy bastard.
It was just another feint to get in position to ship a
c'naatat
sample back to his FEU bosses.
Thetis
was due back in a few months to evacuate personnel from Umeh Station, and if he didn't have his eye on a ticket home that way, then he really was going soft.

“One more time.” Shan was sure she could beat it out of him eventually, but maybe there was nothing in there after all. “How would you describe Lindsay's state of mind when it came to
c'naatat
?”

Rayat looked genuinely thoughtful. “The squid messiah, as Eddie might say. Don't worry, she's not working with me.”

Shan knew that. Lindsay had no motive for getting the damn thing back to Earth. She was wallowing in guilt and repentance, and maybe even acting out what she would have wanted for her dead kid.

“She came ashore to get a few keepsakes from her kid's grave, though.”

Rayat either shared Shan's concern or was acting brilliantly. “You think she'll come back for the rest.”

“Perhaps.” If the Eqbas couldn't follow traces of the bezeri in the ocean it meant they'd gone deep, or moved on—but bezeri didn't move on. They clung tenaciously to their territory. They killed to keep it, too. “Something came ashore here, anyway.”

“You know you might have to hunt them down and destroy them.”

“Is this going to be some attempt at justification?”

“No, just wargaming. If they spread it, how do you track it? And when you track it, how do you destroy it?”

“That's my problem,” said Shan.

Inside her jacket, in a pocket that nestled just under her left breast, she kept her last grenade. It was a guaranteed way out if she ever needed it. It was also the best weapon she had to take out a
c'naatat
host. Rayat wasn't worth hanging on to for scraps of information, and this was the best—and possibly last—chance she'd get she remove one more problem.

He's not your prisoner.

He's no threat right now.

You could cause a roof collapse.

Shan glanced around the small chamber, applied a little rudimentary physics, and decided to chance it. A voice in her rational brain said none of that crap mattered and that Rayat was a complication she should have dealt with a long time ago.