City of Pearl (3 page)

First snows, 2374.

It was a hard walk back to Constantine for humans. Aras was mindful of their little legs and their poor stamina, and kept pausing to allow Josh to keep up. The snow grabbed at them and hid obstacles. But it had a clean silence about it, and it reminded Aras of home, the plain of Baral in Wess'ej, which he hadn't seen in a long time.

“You're sure they're coming?” Josh asked. He puffed little clouds before him. “You're sure it's a human ship?”

“Yes. It's not isenj, it's not ours, and the markings resemble yours.”

“We don't want them here.”

“We haven't made contact yet. At their speed, they'll pass here next season. There's time to discuss this.”

“For you, maybe.”

“I could prevent it landing.”

“No, no more killing.”

“My duty is to maintain the balance here. You know I will, if I have to.” Aras felt it was well to remind Josh that however much he regretted his own military past, no amount of exposure to human morality would prevent him doing his duty again. The past was not the present. It was foolish to forget history; but remembering would not change what needed to be done, only how he would feel about it.

Josh reeked of agitated embarrassment. Aras wondered if he did, after all, regard him as a monster for eradicating the isenj from the planet, even though Josh said he understood those had been difficult times. It was as if every mention of the massacre—centuries past, in local reckoning as well as in human years—caused him pain. Aras had moved beyond that. Josh's ancestor had forgiven him;
forgiveness
had been the first human concept he truly understood, even before his body started assimilating human genes and their attendant behavior. He could not change the past; he could only regret it and strive to change the future. That was forgiveness, he thought.

Josh looked up. If he could see anything, the incoming ship would be only an abnormally bright star. “Perhaps we could avoid them,” he said, a child's frightened hope breaking through his usually steady voice.

“They're on a direct course. They're coming here, and it's likely they will land unless I prevent them. If they're coming, they're coming to see you. Don't you want to see your own kind again?”

Josh paused and bent over, hands braced on knees, panting. Aras waited for him to recover his breath. He straightened up.

“We had little in common with them when my people left,” he said. “And how much will we have in common after all these years? Even less. You probably know that.”

Aras thought briefly of the colony's archives. Yes, he knew what the seculars were like. He also knew what the God-worshipers of all kinds were like, too, and most of them were no better, indistinguishable except for their funny little rituals. Josh and his people at least tried to be different.

“No, I don't think this other human society is compatible with yours,” Aras said. “But this isn't society. It's just a ship. A few people.”

They waded on in silence. Eventually the snow became more shallow, and Aras felt level ground beneath it, and knew they were nearly at the compound.

Josh was silent. Aras could not tell whether he was out of breath or in the grip of anxiety, because the stinging aroma of the man's eucalyptus oil salve overwhelmed his sense of smell. They crunched above the main street, passing over knee-high roofs clear of snow from which glowed the faint warm light of homes. Over the decades Aras had always wondered what truly went on in the buried village when he wasn't there. He had visited humans but he suspected,
knew,
that they switched into another state when he entered the room, and that he would never see them behaving naturally. They urged their children to behave and offered him their finest foods when what he really wanted was to wander in, barely acknowledged, and merge in with the family.

But he was two meters tall, inhuman and clawed. And every generation took their time getting used to him.

Humans were the only family he would ever know now. He would accept whatever degree of belonging they could offer him. Wess'har society had no place for a male who could not be allowed to mate.

“I'll call the other council members and we'll meet in the church,” Josh said. “This isn't a decision I can make alone. You'll attend, won't you?”

“Yes,” Aras said. “If that's what you want.”

“Sometimes I feel we run to you like children each time there's a problem.”

“I have nothing more urgent,” Aras said. He meant it literally: the welfare of this colony, the balance of this world, were his calling. But Josh smiled, as if he'd cracked a joke.

“We'll find a solution,” Josh said.

GOVERNMENT WORK IS GOD'S WORK

Underground, deep in the heart of Constantine, Aras glanced at the inscription set in the wall of St Francis Church. It was his most vivid memory of the coming of humans, and it had taken him years to begin to grasp its meaning. The saying had originally been the boast of European colonial invaders subduing what seemed to them a less advanced culture. Now it was the earnest wish of a band of idealists struggling to survive so far from home that few of them could even write down the distance in their notation.

Using power intelligently did indeed require a superior being. He had to admit that. The council—mainly male, which still baffled Aras—settled round a table near the altar and looked up at him as if they expected a momentous statement. They were afraid: he could smell, see and hear it. They fidgeted. They gave off pungent acid scents as they shifted position. All their muscles, from shoulders to throat, were tense, forcing their voices a little higher.

“They
are
coming here, right?” said Martin Tyndale.

“Oh yes. It's a ship with cargo space and little armament.” For Aras, a trifle; for them, a potential disaster. “You have little to fear.”

“How do you know that?”

“The monitor took readings through the hull. There are few people on board, and they're not conscious. I would say they're either intending to stop en route to another planet, where they have items to collect, or they're planning to collect something here to fill those cargo spaces. It's hard to tell when there's no voice traffic.”

Martin didn't look reassured. “Perhaps they think we need rescuing. We should never have sent the message.”

“We haven't asked for help,” Josh said. “We've refused all attempts at contact. I'm afraid they've probably come to collect material with a view to exploiting the planet.”

“Then I'll turn them back.” Aras knew the rest of the colonists' sensitivities well enough to avoid explaining how. It was a subject they didn't discuss. “There are questions you should ask yourselves. What could they do to you if they were allowed to land? They could infect you with pathogens. They could introduce a way of life you don't like. They could try to exploit the planet, and even encourage others to try to come here. You know I won't allow that. So we will deal with it accordingly.”

Josh appeared reassured. “Then we evaluate their mission and take it from there.”

“That's sensible. It gives us an opportunity to see if they are an isolated group or the vanguard of something more serious. And we need to know what they are capable of doing.”

Aras wondered sometimes why the humans bothered to gather a group to make decisions, because when matters were serious, they looked to him, and they never put it to the vote. Maybe, when he wasn't there, they dissented among themselves and had to count heads to reach a decision. But whenever he made a suggestion, it became the only course of action.

He wondered how they would have reacted if he had told them the safest option was to destroy the sleeping ship before it reached them. He looked round at their faces. They were all worry and fear, and—he sniffed discreetly—a little excitement.

“If I'm wrong,” Aras said, slowly, “and they offer violence…will you fight?”

The waft of urgency began to take on a stronger, denser scent. “We'll defend ourselves and our work,” said Luke Guillot. “And if that means fighting, yes.”

Josh was nodding. “We're prepared for any test God sends.”

Aras had lived among humans for six generations, and he still found some of their ethics inconsistent. If you were prepared to kill, then why not kill when you not only had an advantage, but your target would know nothing about it? What was the point in letting the situation develop into far more messy conflict? Why was it more honorable to look your victim in the face?

It was no trouble to him, either way. He decided to let them have their way. Besides, he was anxious to see how the other species of human, the Godless, shaped up. It was intelligence worth gathering.

The matriarch Mestin might have had authority to make decisions for her clan stationed here on Bezer'ej, but Aras needed approval from a wider group of
isan've
to justify what he had planned. He didn't like using the long-range link. It attracted the isenj's attention, which concerned him even though their reactions and furies were less than nothing to him now.

He had time to travel back to Wess'ej before the human ship was in range. Perhaps these were things that needed to be conducted face-to-face. But that meant exposing himself to the curiosity of normal wess'har, and right now that was something he didn't feel inclined to do. It was hard to be different, to be a genuine alien among your own kind. He settled for the long-range communications net and asked for an audience with the
isan've,
the matriarch of F'nar, whose opinions on off-world policy seemed to carry most weight across Wess'ej.

“I believe we should let the humans land, or at least some of them,” he said to the void in the cockpit of his grounded craft. The vessel seldom flew, but he preferred to live in it or in Constantine rather than in the Temporary City. “There aren't very many and they aren't well armed, as far as the drones can tell. We need as much intelligence as we can gather to prepare us for future incursions.”

“That seems reasonable.” Mestin's cousin-by-mating, Fersanye, had her clan's genetic pragmatism as well as its feral looks. “I find it surprising that humans share so little in motivation.”

“Perhaps it's because they don't mix their bloodlines as much as we do. Either way, the species of human that's coming is as much of a potential threat as the isenj, and even if this mission fails, Joshua believes more will come in the future.”

“What are our options?”

“To get to know them and then decide if they're potential allies.”

“If they have long-range military ambitions, we'll be stretched very thin handling enemies on two fronts.”

“Perhaps. Let me meet them and see.”

“We were lucky with the first humans. We might be lucky again.” Fersanye's tone indicated she thought it was a genuine possibility. “I still think we might have made a mistake in letting the colony send a transmission.”

“Not the first mistake I've made, I expect.” Sarcasm was another human habit Aras had picked up, and it still went unnoticed by the average literal wess'har. Fersanye nodded as if she were accepting an apology. “But if the colony had been allowed to die, how many innocent species would have died in their cryo stores?”

“You made the best decision you could at the time,” Fersanye said. “You always have. Now is a different time. Let us learn.”

Aras closed the link. Fersanye would never have thought he needed forgiveness for killing isenj civilians. She was wess'har, unburdened by rules of engagement, by the differences between legitimate targets and civilians, by fear of causing offense. He had been wess'har once, too. These days he wondered what he was.

He thought of his first human friend, Benjamin Garrod, Joshua's great-great-great-grandfather, dead for more than a hundred years and as freshly mourned and vividly remembered as if he had passed into earth yesterday. Benjamin understood what it was to have pain trapped in your head.

And yet Aras now couldn't recall the face of his own
isan.
It was bad not to remember your wife.

But, as Benjamin had told him, not even a wess'har could be expected to remember things that had happened when the year on Earth was
A.D
. 1880.

 

Something went
clack
against the hull.

Commander Lindsay Neville glanced up. Apart from that
clack
, the ship's cramped cockpit was showing normal on every panel.

“Micrometeor impact, Boss?” Sergeant Adrian Bennett had logged more flight time than Lindsay had, and she wanted him to be right. “Shouldn't be.”

“Might be.” Lindsay checked the hull status panel again. “No, nothing. I'll run more checks. Could be contraction noises.”

Their target planet, Cavanagh's Star II, was a couple of days away now, and it had a large moon orbiting it. The forward video feed had shown two small pale disks, and when
Thetis
's centrifuge turned the right way, you could actually see them from the viewing port. It seemed much more real to watch it with the naked eye, and both worlds had now resolved into a mass of blue, white and green swirls.

For a moment Lindsay wondered if the revive program had malfunctioned and they were just weeks out from Earth, beginning the gradual acceleration that would take them twenty-five light-years. The
clack
might have been a boarding crew, coming inboard to check them out. But it was not Earth. There were two planets, and their polar ice caps were substantial. She watched for a while and realized Bennett was standing—hanging—behind her in zero gee.

“Looks reassuring,” he said. There was a flurry of light and sighing noises as streams of telemetry came in from the main planet. The AI was gathering spectrometry and highresolution images at a frantic rate, and instantly beaming back the raw data. In a couple of decades, others would be marveling at those pictures on the news, unless something more fascinating had cropped up in the meantime.

“Well, I don't think I'll be needing my piloting skills,” Lindsay said, and folded her arms across her chest to stop them floating. “Not that we'd have a prayer if this crate ever needed to be flown manually.”

“All it has to do is to get into orbit and stay there.”

“Yeah.”

Bennett looked thoughtful. He appeared to be the standard issue concrete-reliable Royal Marine sergeant, except for the times he gave her those dubious looks. She was lucky—she had a whole detachment of booties, as the navy called them, the best specialist troops she could want. She could easily have been lumbered with a ragbag of army and air force personnel. They said cap badges were just for comfort, a sop to identity in a vast anonymous European defense force of core skills and interchangeable parts. But as far as she was concerned, booties weren't interchangeable at all.

“It's the name, isn't it, Boss?” Bennett said.

“What about it?”

“
Thetis.
You know. Historically speaking.”

“I'm no historian.”

“
Thetis
was a submarine.”

“I'm not going to enjoy this story, am I? Go on.”

“
Thetis
sank with nearly all hands and the dockyard civilians on board within sight of land, all because a test drain had been blocked by a fresh coat of paint.”

“Thank you for enlightening me, Bennett.”

“No trouble, Boss.”

Lindsay didn't believe in bad
joss
and all that superstitious bullshit. Bad
joss
, bad luck, meant bad planning and poor attention to detail, as the original
Thetis
had proven. Behind every disaster there was a string of false assumptions and checks not made. Lindsay Neville could plan bad
joss
out of her life, and if anyone called her boring—well, that was just fine.

Drill keeps you alive.

She couldn't plan for the civilian scientists she had in the freezer, though, because she hadn't even met them in an ambulant state. That bothered her. And she certainly hadn't planned to wake up and find her command had been usurped by a bloody civvie, and a copper at that. Shan Frankland's file in the AI's database had been less than informative. But the words Special Branch and “EnHaz” were enough to worry her. That was several lines before she got to the part where she was ordered to “offer full support and cooperation to any instruction” that Frankland issued when revived on establishing orbit. The FEU had hijacked her ship. She couldn't even thaw the payload or the rest of the marines until bloody Superintendent Frankland—confidentially briefed Superintendent Frankland—gave the order.

“Had any feelings about this deployment, Ade?” she asked. “You've clocked more spacetime than me.”

Bennett chewed his inner lip as if calculating. “I've never had a payload of civvies embarked, if that's what you mean. But this lot are trained, aren't they? I mean, they've worked extreme environments. They're not tourists.”

“And Frankland?”

Bennett shrugged. “None of my business, Boss.”

It was time to refresh her knowledge of the civilians. She pulled down a container of coffee and swung for the hatch. “Ought to try to memorize names and faces before they wake up,” she said. “They all look the same in chill. I suppose I could call them all Doc.”

She curled up against a bulkhead, feeling awkward. Onboard carriers, she had always had a cabin to retreat to, but
Thetis
was designed simply to store unconscious people in transit. There were no cabins or wardrooms or stewards, and the only privacy was the flimsy bathroom where anyone could hear what was going on. Slurping hard on the coffee, she stared at the eight faces that appeared and changed on the smartpaper hanging in front of her.

“Hugel—physician. Rayat—pharmacologist. Mesevy—botanist.” She shut her eyes and repeated the names.

“Do we need to remember what they do?” asked Bennett.

“Seems rude not to.”

“They all have different specialities.”

“That's to avoid fistfights, apparently. The techs told me you don't know a thing about rivalry until you've seen blokes in white coats going at it. But some of them work for rival corporations, and they're all on some incentive bonus or other, so they might slug it out.” She shut her eyes again, and felt oddly disoriented. She thought she'd got over that sensation. “Champciaux—geologist. Galvin—xenozoologist. Parekh—biologist—”

“
Marine
biologist.”

“Thank you. Paretti—xenomicrobiologist. You've already done this, haven't you?”

“I loaded it into my panel, Boss.” Bennett held out his open palm, shimmering with color and text. The living display warped and flexed with the contours of his hand: the graphics weren't perfect because the bioscreen panel was designed for larger areas of flesh. “Just until we get to know each other.”

“I might have to resort to that.” But it was bad enough taking a shower and finding a shifting display under the soapsuds without seeing a stranger's face as well. Lindsay carried on staring at the smartpaper and repeating the mantra of names.

“Michallat,” she said. “Journalist. Anthropologist. What use is he going to be?”

“You can never have too many anthropologists, Boss. Handy for ballast.”

She knew what the problem would be: boredom. The payload would be off doing what they did best and she would have six spring-coiled booties looking for something to keep them occupied. There weren't going to be any colonists alive down there. She concentrated on revising those parts of the mission that involved looking for debris from the landing. There would be useful survival data from that for future missions, and it was going to make her an extraterrestrial specialist. It was going to fast-track her career better than a dozen small ship commands. It was worth it.

But she slept badly that watch. There was no need for them to operate a watch system, because the AI could maneuver into orbit without their input, but they did it out of a need to wrap themselves in that familiar comfort of routine. Bennett woke her, looking more relaxed than usual.

“Just established orbit, Boss. Thought you'd like to see it. Shall we—”

A red flash caught her peripheral vision at exactly the same time as the insistent
pip-pip-pip
of an alarm broke the hum and chatter of the AI. Bennett frowned and Lindsay swung into position at the console.

“Last time I heard that sound I had missiles locked on me,” she said. They had been exercise missiles, but it still rattled her. “That's got to be a malfunction.”

Bennett tapped the console. There was a five-centimeter display almost lost in the rest of the telemetry panels, and it was pulsing red. The AI interface was set to text, and words began pouring like torrential rain down the main head-up display in front of the pilot's seat.

INTERFERENCE IN NAVIGATION LASER.
INTERFERENCE IN NAVIGATION LASER.

“What the hell's causing that?”

“No idea, Boss.” Bennett tapped reset panels and overrides. “No idea at all.”

The litany changed abruptly.
NAVIGATION LASER DISABLED. BACKUP DISABLED
. And the lights around them went out. This was a rotten time for a systems failure. For a second they hung in the blackness, not breathing, and then the lights came on again and with them a dozen different alarms clamoring to tell of system failures.

“What have we got, Ade?”

Bennett confirmed her fears. “Life-support and cryo. Nothing else.”

“Are we just lucky or have we been shut down deliberately?”

“Oh, God. Look at that.”

The sensors that swept for EM frequencies were alive, not with the usual crackling of distant stars but with a clear pulse. Bennett was now leaning over the display with a fixed expression that made Lindsay think he was panicking. Marines didn't panic. She elbowed him out of the way, and realized why he was transfixed.

“We're being targeted,” she said. The screen confirmed it; something was delivering EM pulses to key systems and crippling them. She switched to her headset to give her a view of the whole ship in 3D, and saw red pulsing lights covering the whole aft section of
Thetis.

In a normal combat situation she would have had firing solutions. She would have had a good idea of the weapons ranged against her. A hundred exercises and a thousand drills had taught her that. But this was an unarmed survey ship, and no Thursday war had ever prepared her for an apparent assault from an enemy she could neither see nor even imagine. Unless the colonists had survived and taken “Onward Christian Soldiers” to a new level of understanding, she was dealing with an alien force.