City of Pearl (12 page)

“Go limp,” Bennett shouted at her. “Go on. Do a starfish. Arms and legs apart. Stop struggling.”

And then she was half on the firm ground. Becken grabbed her and rolled her inboard. Bennett, on his back with his pole under his spine, waited for Becken to throw the line back and pull him in.

Part of the
sheven
flashed above the bog again. It might have been a small one. It could have been huge. Shan still held tightly to the rope knotted round her waist.

“That was close,” said Rayat. He hauled Mesevy to her feet and steadied her. The two marines stood panting with exertion, coated in more samples than Mesevy could ever want.

“Back to base,” Shan said, spotting the point at which they expected her to take control, and relieved by its familiarity. “I think it's
endex
for the day. Follow Josh.”

She put her hand on Bennett's shoulder. “Nice job,” she said.

He didn't answer. He was staring ahead, white-faced, and his legs looked like they were starting to buckle. It took her a while to recognize terror. When she saw it, it seemed more shocking than watching Mesevy being sucked into the bog. She caught his elbow. She didn't want the others to see him go down.

“You okay?” she said.

“Yeah. Fine.”

“No you're not.” She grabbed his face in both hands and forced him to look at her. The slime and mud was still thick on him, and his eyes, fixed and wide, seemed startling. “Come on. Breathe slowly.”

The others were a little ahead, and Becken stopped to look: then he ushered the others on, seeming to realize Bennett didn't want an audience.

“It's okay. Come on. Deep breaths.”

“I'm sorry, ma'am.”

“Hey, no problem. Just stand still for a while.”

“Okay. Okay.” He jerked his head out of her hands and vomited to one side of the path. Abject fear; sheer bloody animal fear. She felt something of his embarrassment. But he'd held on long enough to save Mesevy, and that took more guts than she could imagine. The
sheven
would have meant an unpleasant death, one that she didn't feel like facing to save a stranger.

“I'll never live this one down.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, leaving another smear of bog behind it, and walked stiffly ahead. He had lost more than control of his stomach. He'd soiled himself. “Some fucking marine I am. Sorry, ma'am. No offense.”

Shan matched his pace and wished desperately that she had a knack for reassurance. “Don't be bloody daft,” she said. “I've lost my bottle a few times, I can tell you. You'd have to be a fool not to be afraid out here.”

“But I lose it
all
the time. And everyone knows when it happens.” He held out his left palm, lit and live with data transmissions that charted spiked heart rate and peak adrenaline. “This bloody thing transmits all the time. I can't fart without it relaying the fact.”

“No privacy, then? Ever?”

He shook his head. “Full-body diagnostics and voice. Battlefield fail-safe. I can't disable it without a technician. Except the video, of course.”

She took his arm carefully. “There's no shame in fear, Ade.” Using his first name seemed nakedly familiar. “It's nature's way of telling you not to be a dick-head.”

“No, I'm a panicker. That's why I joined up, to get a bloody grip on it.”

“You didn't look like a panicker to me today.”

He shrugged, sad and so deserving of a hug that she almost attempted it. There weren't many heroes in her world. Bennett, who could face fear bad enough to make him lose control of his bowels and still function, had just become one of them.

Before they reached the camp, the reality of Bennett's ever-vigilant bioscreen came home to her. Qureshi and Balwant Singh Chahal ambled towards them, grinning.

“Nice one, Sarge,” they called. “Waste of time making you breakfast, eh?” Bennett ignored the jibe and walked on.

“Oi, leave it out,” Shan snapped. The marines stood frozen. “It's not a fucking joke, all right? Show some respect.”

She regretted the outburst instantly, and was surprised to see the two marines snap upright. They stopped a fraction short of saluting.

Bennett turned to her. “That's very kind of you, ma'am, but they know I dumped because I was scared. I've done it before. But thanks anyway.”

“That damn thing records everything you do and say?”

“Everything.”

“Really
everything
?”

Bennett caught on. “Ah…yes. It's not just the medication that keeps you celibate when you're missionactive. Once they switch you on, everyone knows what you get up to.”

Their glances met for just a second too long for either of them to feel comfortable, and Shan was surprised to feel some dismay at the prospect of broadcast sex. She hadn't even realized she found him appealing in that way. Shame. He was a nice bloke, a brave one, but that was as far as it could go. She made him his mug of coffee in the mess hall, not in his cabin, just to avoid thinking those undisciplined thoughts again. It was nothing she couldn't suppress, after all.

 

“Guess what,” said Champciaux. His fine-boned patrician face appeared round Shan's half-open hatchway. Now that he'd shaved off his thinning hair, he looked rather striking. “The AI got the cartography scanner back on line.”

“I know,” said Shan. “I saw the downlink activate.”

“Yes, but I've done some work on the images. Have you got five minutes to take a look?”

She closed the screen and leaned back in her chair, unsure what thrill a geologist could possibly show her. Champciaux had a kind of innocence about him, or perhaps she had imposed it on him because he was funded by less aggressive organizations than the others. He was a pure academic. He just examined rocks. He didn't change genes or juggle disease against profit or defy nature. He just looked at creation.

Now he showed her what he looked at. It was a very vivid image on smartpaper, and somehow that seemed more real than the usual images on screen. She held the sheet and stared at it, not sure what she was seeing. The reds and blues and lime greens were three-dimensional; an image of a landscape like a fly-through, gently rolling land sliced with meandering streams. On top of the miniature world were superimposed yellow and violet lines, very regular, very unnatural, a grid like a wiring diagram. The bizarre tartan covered the whole sheet.

“City,” he said.

“I can't get the scale.”

“Think Angkor Wat,” said Champciaux. “A city of millions. Even if the physical traces like walls and roads have disappeared with time, they still leave depressions and variations in the natural landscape. You can sometimes only see it with sonar or laser satellite imaging.”

“Yeah, I've seen the archaeology shows. Tell me where this is.”

“These are the islands down the chain we're on. Not only that, but I've got similar images from the coastline all the way down the continent. This was a heavily inhabited planet at some time in the past. Now, I'm not an expert on this, because I'm a rock man, but I can read geophys data like this as well as anyone.”

Shan was suddenly standing with Josh Garrod staring out at unspoiled alien heath, being told that there had once been a settlement there, a settlement that had been wiped away—not wiped out, not razed to the ground, but wiped
away,
erased in every sense of the word. She tried to orientate herself on the map.

“And where are we?”

Champciaux flicked the icon at the margin of the smartsheet, and a new image appeared. “Right here,” he said. He flicked the sizing icon and the scale enlarged.

Shan could pick out the coastline, the tiny speck of their camp and the barely discernible lace of Constantine's concealed domes. The building was superimposed on a layer of fainter grid lines that covered the whole island like a net. And when she changed scale, there it was again, on the next island, and the next.

The network of traces might have been older than the missing city. The planet's history was one of those blanks she would have to fill in, and for all she knew it could have been just like much of inhabited Earth, building on building, century after century. But she knew in her gut that it wasn't like that at all.

The wess'har hadn't just wiped away a city. They had obliterated a nation.

“May I hang on to this? I want to show it to someone.”

Champciaux nodded. “What do you think? I know we're not here for archaeology, but this has got to be a hell of a find.”

“It depends on whether those lines really were artificial and not like the organic roads.”

And it depended on how the cities ceased to exist. Shan was getting the feeling that wess'har really didn't piss about. Champciaux looked slightly deflated.

“I'll see what I can find out from the locals,” she said, trying to look like kindly caution rather than someone who had just had her worst fears confirmed. Civilians—real civilians—didn't generally handle that sort of information well.

But at least she now knew the true scale of what she might be dealing with. She wondered if Josh would be able to help her a little further with her inquiries. People normally did, if you asked them in the right way.

She seldom had to ask twice.

 

“Have you got a moment?”

Hugel peered round the hatch frame of Shan's cabin. Shan looked up from the screen of her swiss. This was getting to be a steady stream. “Something wrong?”

“Not exactly wrong, but I just wanted to make you aware of a potentially delicate situation.” Hugel stepped in and shut the hatch. “I'm breaching patient confidentiality.”

“Go ahead. I won't tell the General Medical Council if you don't.”

“It's Commander Neville.”

“Yeah, what
is
up with her? She's not all there at the moment.”

“She's pregnant.”

Shan leaned back in her seat and groaned. “Oh great. Terrific.”

“Under the circumstances you needed to know. It's not the end of the world—just something we need to manage carefully. The colony women cope, but they're acclimatized to low oxygen.”

“She's not a colonist. She's supposed to be the bloody commanding officer of a warship.”

“Well, there's no reason why she can't do what she needs to do for quite a few months. It's not as if she's in a combat situation.”

“She's going ahead with this, then?”

“Yes.”

“Well, her choice. But what a bloody stupid thing to do.” Shan replayed their earlier conversation at high speed, tasting a certain betrayal. “She assured me her people were disciplined pros who could keep it in their trousers. I rest my case.”

“I believe she conceived before departure, and didn't realize.” Hugel looked uncomfortable. “Mistakes happen.”

“Sorry. I know it's unprofessional of me to react like that but it adds another complication, doesn't it?”

“Medically, yes. This is a higher-risk pregnancy, even though she's young and fit.”

“Well, let me know when she needs to relinquish command. Who else knows?”

“Just us. You won't mention this conversation? Please?”

“No,” Shan said.
Let's see how long Lindsay takes to tell me herself.
“Thanks for letting me know.”

“While I'm here, Eddie says he needs to talk to Aras about an interview.”

“I'll pass on the request.”

Hugel gave her an awkward smile, as if unsure how to extract herself from the cabin. “You won't be too hard on Lindsay, will you?”

“I'll remember every last scrap of my man-management training, I promise.”

“That's what I was afraid of. You're from a pretty macho and unforgiving line of work.”

“You saying I don't understand women?”

“Possibly.”

“If girls want to play boys'games and get boys'pay, they have to do what boys do. I'm not allowed to say that professionally, but I'm in my own cabin twenty-five light-years from Central Personnel and they can come out and discipline me anytime they feel like it.” She realized she might as well have had
NEANDERTHAL
tattooed on her forehead. “Teams depend on people pulling their weight.”

“People like Lindsay depend on you, too.”

“Yes, and I accepted that and all that went with it, personal costs and all.”

Hugel nodded. “I thought as much.”

Shan bit back a response. If it helped Hugel feel superior to analyze her, that was fine. She knew why she had felt irrational anger now: Lindsay hadn't done what Shan Frankland would have done in the same situation.

So people made mistakes. She thought of Green Rage and it diverted her from Lindsay. That wasn't a mistake at all, and having to play along with the public illusion that it was a cock-up had hurt her, and still hurt. But it had to be that way. Her professional pride came second to getting that job done. It didn't even matter anymore because everyone who had something to lose from that operation was dead or forgotten.

Silly cow,
she told herself.
You did it because it mattered, not so you could let everyone know how fucking noble you were.
She still felt cheated, and guilty because of that.

For some reason—and probably a reason connected with the Suppressed Briefing—the name Helen popped into her mind. She chased it for a while, and then let it fade.

 

How do I broach this with her?

It didn't bode well that her second-in-command—her 2IC, as the marines had taken to calling Lindsay—hadn't seen fit to tell her she was pregnant in the middle of a mission.

Shan couldn't sleep; there was nothing to do with insomnia other than use it for thinking time. Okay, so the kid was pissed off at finding her command had been cut from under her by a politician with no explanation. All the preparatory training she'd been through had been overturned by events. But that was just too bad. She needed to learn that Shan didn't like her bagman keeping information from her. It fed her natural distrust of the world.