Judge (11 page)

As meetings went, it was the most surreal imaginable. He couldn't think of anything to say as they flew back to Kamberra. Persis and Shukry sat scribbling on their handhelds, heads down.

“You think I've sold my soul to the devil,” Bari said at last. “And not even discussed with the full cabinet.”

“No, PM.”

“Not at all, PM…”

“Come on.” Damn, he was going to have to tell the cabinet that it wasn't for discussion. Nairn and Andreaou realized that, but the others would want to complicate matters. If he could hand them a quick win, something spectacular that made life a lot better for a lot of people,
their
people, then they'd face facts. “Look, there's been no shooting yet but we're at war, and not with the FEU. I'm collaborating. I don't happen to think the Eqbas are a hundred percent wrong, either. I'll go to the country on it if I have to.”

“Like you said, PM, the Eqbas aren't leaving any time soon,” said Shukry. “I'm not sure that going down in a blaze of glory defending all mankind is any more moral than saving your own tribe if you can. It just makes better movies.”

Persis, ever the pragmatist, nodded. “And the FEU or Sinostates wouldn't think twice about paving us over for a vehicle park.”

That made it all right, then. Bari leaned his forehead against the window, imagining the endless arid bush irrigated and alive again, and realized what a bloody hard job it was to be judge and jury.

 

Surang, Eqbas Vorhi: Da Shapakti's clan home.

 

Rayat rushed to check the headlines as soon as Shapakti's son Mejiku opened the door. The family were used to him by now. He was Dad's loony
gethes
pal, not an alien lab specimen, and it was comforting to have at least one place in the galaxy where he wasn't automatically mistrusted.

“The
gethes
are very afraid,” said Mejiku, following him into the huge central living room that doubled as a kitchen and general meeting place. “I've watched the transmissions. They have all their armies ready to fight.”

“We're so lovable, aren't we?” Rayat gazed at the news feed, unsurprised. “You could call it the indomitable human spirit, but given the inevitable outcome, I'd call it stupidity.”

Eqbas families were as strictly matriarchal as the Wess'ej wess'har, but males were the majority by only two to one; the huge clans of four or even five husbands per
isan
that he'd seen on Wess'ej were very rare here. Rayat still found it hard to think of the Wess'ej wess'har as the redneck cousins. He stood watching the BBChan coverage of the standoff between Australia and the FEU. He had to do it now. Shan would have too much on her plate to spare him any time once the fighting started.

You could have taken the call twenty-five years ago, Shan. I was trying to do the right thing.

“Come on, Shapakti,” he said. “Make the call.”

Shapakti seemed to be checking that his
isan,
Fenelian, wasn't home. “I think you're right,” he said, darting into a corridor and disappearing for a few moments. Mejiku smelled anxious and took the opportunity to slip out. Avoidance wasn't a wess'har trait. He might have been simply giving his father space because he was so agitated. “This has to be done.”

“What made you change your mind?”

“Because you talk like
Shan Chail
sometimes, and I know her level of commitment. She killed her own child. That takes a certain rigidity of principle.”

Rayat didn't think anything could take his mind off the matter at hand, but that bombshell did. He wondered if he didn't understand eqbas'u as well as he thought. “What do you mean, killed?”

“She conceived a child, without intending to,” Shapakti said, completely unabashed. “Her internal organs regenerated. She removed it herself, and was very distressed by the action, but she wouldn't bring a
c'naatat
child into the world, she said.”

Rayat found he'd lost a little righteous steam.

“Dear God,” he said. “I had no idea. When was this?”

“Not long before we left.”

Rayat couldn't quite take it in. It was whole new side of the woman that he could never have imagined in a million years. Given her callous intolerance of Lindsay Neville's unplanned pregnancy, he had trouble imagining how Shan had handled her own.

“Why have you never told me this?”

“Because you never asked. It didn't seem relevant. So she's the person who would make a decision about Esganikan with most objectivity.”

If Rayat ever got to speak to Shan, he'd find it hard not to let the revelation color his attitude. He'd always thought of her as a thuggish, humorless, moralizing bully without a scrap of human emotion, whatever the nature of her relationship with Ade and Aras. Then he found himself wondering how the hell she defeated
c'naatat
's defenses to terminate the pregnancy, and having a vivid picture of exactly how she might have done it—how he might have done it in her position. He felt uncharacteristically sorry for her.

He'd expected he would gloat if he ever heard her bad news. Life wasn't like that any longer, though, and neither was he. Maybe it was having a little of all of that bizarre little family in his head.

“Let's do it,” he said.

Shapakti opened the ITX link on his
virin
and called Shan's device. Rayat hovered. Shan would take notice of Shapakti. He'd get her listening and convince her. Rayat couldn't expect him to do more than that, because no wess'har would interfere with a commander in the field.

“
Shan Chail,
” Shapakti said. Rayat could hear both sides of the conversation. “Do you remember me? Shapakti?”

Shan's voice was remarkably clear. “Of course I do. How are you?”

“I'm well. We watch the news from Earth. It won't be an easy task.”

“Did you want to speak to Esganikan?”

“No, to you.”

“Any luck with
c'naatat
?”

“Yes. I sent a message to Esganikan. I can remove the parasite from humans now.”

Shan paused. The link was instant, routed via the ship's node, so there was no delay on the relay and the pause was significant. “She didn't mention it. Is that what you called to tell me?”

“No.” Shapakti froze for a moment and Rayat thought he was about to lose his nerve. “Mohan Rayat has a message for you. He tried to call you twice all those years ago before he left.”

There was another long pause. “We're done here, Shapakti. Sorry, but I'm not in the mood for his games. He wants to talk to me? He's got my code.”

“He's here, but the
virin
system is set to prevent him contacting Earth. I'm relaying this message.”

“This is one of his stunts, and he's got you to play along with it—”

“It's very serious.”

“I'll call you back,” she said. “I've got a couple of crises running at the moment that are higher on the list. He's waited twenty-five years, so he can wait a bit longer. Oh, and don't contact the FEU for him, you hear? You might
think
you know him by now, but you don't.”

The link went dead.

“Shit,” said Rayat, defaulting to English. “Shit.” If Shan was anything, she was pragmatic and detached in an emergency. She didn't hang up in a fit of pique. “I know what it is. All she heard was ‘remove
c'naatat
' and now her world's in disarray again. You know what she's doing now? She's getting into gear to kick Esganikan's arse for not telling her. Forget everything else. It's about trust and her sex life, in that order.”

“I think,” said Shapakti, “that she fears you're trying to manipulate her, and she doesn't want to hear anything that might make her doubt herself. She's not a self-centered person.”

“Hoist by my own petard again, eh?”

“Deception destroys the fabric of interaction.”

“You're full of them today, my friend.”

“She may well know that Esganikan carries
c'naatat
, and chooses not to admit that to us.”

Rayat was already on to the next strategy. He couldn't wait around for Shan to come to her senses, or rely on her working it out for herself. Who else was there? Who else took the risk of
c'naatat
as seriously as Shan?

Kiir.
Kiir, Fourth to Die, the commander of the Skavu troops.

The Skavu made Shan look like an amateur when it came to green zealotry. He'd heard the ussissi talking about their dread of
c'naatat.
And Kiir was all for exterminating Shan, Ade and Aras. Abominations, he called them.

“You have to trust Shan,” Shapakti said. “She will
know
.”

“Trust her to turn a blind eye to stopping the thing spreading if it's in someone she likes or needs?”

“She spaced herself to stop
you
having it.”

“And she's still around, so she obviously changed her mind about self destruction.”

“If you doubt her, then why rely on her? Why is this so crucial, anyway? No wess'har would infect another species, especially
gethes
.”

“You've got a short memory for a wess'har. Aras infected Shan.
C'naatat
makes you do all kinds of things you never would otherwise. I swear it influences its hosts.”

Shapakti did that little annoyed head-jiggle, side to side, to show his irritation. “Like making
you
decide that it was your duty to
stop
your masters getting hold of it, counter to your patriotic mission—”

“It's called new data in the equation. It's more dangerous than I first thought.”

“I think, Mohan, that you still want to win. To be right.”

It was Rayat's job to protect national security. It was his remit to take decisions on his own, do anything he felt was necessary. For a moment, he wondered if he'd simply been out of contact for too long and too altered by
c'naatat
to have unclouded judgment. If Shan deposed Esganikan, there was still no guarantee that
c'naatat
would never get out into the human population. It was there. It was on Earth, and it shouldn't have been.

“I need to find out how I can get in touch with the Skavu command,” he said. “I need to talk to Kiir.”

Yarralumla, Kamberra: early evening.

 

Kamberra still existed, unlike Perth, but it was a ghost town of apparently abandoned suburbs glittering with solar collectors in the setting sun.

It was only when the Eqbas shuttle passed over the center of the city that Shan could see that not all life had gone underground. The capital, neat roads in concentric circles, had lost what little grass she remembered from the ITX images and acquired a number of giant canopies. Kamberra made a defiant statement that Australia was still open for business, even if it tended to wait for the cooler hours before emerging.

Food production had changed out of all recognition. Space-station technology generally hadn't traveled far from Earth, but it now came in handy at home to grow crops in a very hostile environment. Shan thought of the isenj, living in their sterile world and growing their food indoors, and tried not to see omens all around her.

“Nanites could clear all that now,” Esganikan said, apparently offended by the miles of deserted houses.

“They might want the option of coming back topside,” said Shan. She bent over with her hands braced on her knees as she looked down through the deck, out of habit more than necessity. If she needed to see better, she could magnify the image; but that stopped her from looking at Esganikan. If she did that, she doubted she could resist the urge to demand why the commander was still keeping things from her. “That's what they're looking for from us, remember. Climate management. Which the FEU
doesn't
want, because we have a history here of ballsing up that kind of project. There's your flashpoint.”

“The FEU could behave sensibly and benefit as well.”

When are you going to come clean with me?
“You're new here…”

“I realize Europe will
not
.”

Shan tried not to meet Ade's eyes, but it was impossible. He gave her that wounded and wary look that said
don't start it, not here.
They'd been here before, anyway; it wasn't the first time they'd realized they didn't have to be
c'naatat
hosts any longer, that they could return to normal, and the dilemma and self-recrimination started all over again.

What about Aras? Can Shapakti remove it from wess'har too?

And if I think it's that dangerous, why am I still walking around?

It was one thing to make the noble sacrifice yourself, and quite another to kill someone you loved for a principle.

Esganikan was still musing over Australia's potential, oblivious of the suspicion festering in Shan.

“They still appear to make insufficient use of desalination,” she said. “We could resolve that for them very easily.”

Shan acted out cold normality. “It was always expensive tech.”

“What could be more expensive than destroying your environment?”

“Don't try common sense arguments with humans. Just scare the shit out of them and give them orders, or we'll be here forever.” Shan straightened up and nudged Ade with her boot. He was sitting cross-legged on the deck, elbows on knees, gazing down. “That's like putting your arse on an image scanner, Royal. What an inspiring view of the invading army.”

“I've got my pants on, Boss.” Ade got to his feet in one fluid movement, using his arms to develop momentum. He looked into her face, frowning. “Besides, I think it looks opaque from the outside. Doesn't it, Esganikan?”

Ade squeezed Shan's shoulder one-handed and went back to studying the terrain through the deck. He seemed to have become used to it. Aras wasn't concerned by it at all; wess'har didn't have that falling reflex. Some of the crew had found it hilarious to watch Eddie or the marines edging onto a section of deck when it became transparent, as if they might fall through. Shan still checked the deck instinctively when she moved around, just a glance down, but Ade seemed totally immune.

“Lots of sightseers,” he said. “Magnify.” The deck resolved into a view from a hundred meters. “Yeah, plenty of people out gawping today. Hey, that UV canopy must have cost an arm and leg. Look at the spread of it.”

Shan risked a glance at Esganikan, willing herself not to bawl her out. The Eqbas seemed to be more interested in Ade. She was watching him, head cocked, then turned slowly to look at Joluti, and for a moment Shan got that irrational feeling of wanting to warn her off looking at her old man.

Don't be stupid. She's Eqbas. Ade's not her type.

“So we've got the full house.” Ade consulted his
virin.
He was more at ease with the transparent device than Shan. It required a guitarist's wrist to manipulate the controls. “Can I punch out the FEU ambassador?”

“Ladies first,” said Shan.

“Can I smack him after you're done with him, then?”

“I'll see what I can leave in one piece.”

Even though she was invulnerable, and a lifetime of police work had accustomed her to every encounter being a hostile one, the prospect of another awkward confrontation didn't thrill Shan. Her jokes were whistling in the dark. As the shuttle reached the airspace over the grounds of Old Government House, the media pack and their swarms of bee cams—smaller and faster than Eddie's obsolete model—made her wonder how this was being viewed in other parts of the world, and she could guess. She could even see the shot in her mind's eye.

“That's a distressing image to give the hacks,” she said. “That'll be on every bulletin. Guaranteed.”

Ade stepped back from the transparent section. “What will?”

“Try imagining what this looks like from the ground, with your bee cam tilting up…”

Aras rocked his head as if in irritation. “Iconic.”

“Don't blow the roof off, will you, Esganikan?” Ade gave in to laughter now. “It'll look like cheap theatrics.”

“Will they see it as a joke or an omen?” Aras asked, obviously understanding the unspoken idea that still eluded Esganikan. There was learning the language, and then there was knowing cultural reference, like movies, and Esganikan didn't.

“I'm putting my money on the latter,” Shan said.

The shuttle settled on the ground and Esganikan stood facing the bulkhead waiting for the hatch to form. She rolled her head like an athlete easing kinks out her neck muscles, and Shan wondered if she was nervous too, or if trampling over another planet was like any routine day for her.

It's never routine. Kicking down doors never got routine for me.

From the transparent section of the hull, Shan could see the crowd beyond the police cordon, curbed by a simple red cable and demonstrating what good rule-followers humans could be when they put their minds to it. All that compliant
Homo sapiens
needed was a good dominant example to norm with, she thought, but that had been tried before with varying degrees of abject failure. She settled for being satisfied that anybody still respected a police cordon. It was still way too close to the building for her tastes. The white mansion sat isolated on an ocean of neat gravel fringed by desert plants, a fitting icon for a world drowning in its real seas.

“Lay on, Macduff.” She stepped close up behind Esganikan to chivvy her along. “Make a good entrance, at least.”

“Beachhead landing,” Ade muttered. Aras seemed preoccupied with other thoughts—Jesus, hadn't she told him enough times that she wouldn't leave him,
c'naatat
cure or not?—and walked down the shallow ramp that extruded from the ship's casing, followed by Joluti and the senior environmental analyst, Mekuliet Nal. It was all a matter of not looking around, of concentrating on that long gravel path up to the doors.

Ade nudged Shan in the back.

“Look,” he said.

She did, and turned away immediately. A knot of people pressed close to the cordon, two of them holding a banner with letters that flashed and sparkled, scrolling slogans. The words took a little effort to read, but one phrase was clear enough:
GAIA'S GUARD
. Another read
SAVED
.

“They probably mean the gene bank,” said Aras.

Ade raised his eyebrows. “Well, they sure as shit don't mean humanity.”

There was another banner-waving group to the left of them, though, proclaiming
WELCOME GOD'S BOUNTY HOME
and another in Arabic that Shan couldn't read, but at least the two groups appeared engaged in friendly conversation. They looked ecstatically happy. She wondered if they had the slightest idea what had happened to Umeh.

Ade nodded in the direction of an ornamental pond with a fountain in the grounds. “You might want to walk on that, Boss. Give 'em a thrill.”

“Bollocks.” It was a waste of scarce water, but it was probably switched on solely for VIPs' visits these days, and an alien warlord coming to scour your planet clean was as V as an IP got. “I can put up with Bible-bashers like Deborah, but I'm not getting sucked in by that lot to further their agenda.”

“You including the Muslims in that, Boss? Izzy can help you out there.”

A cheer went up and someone shouted, “Frankland! Hey, you did it!” That section of the crowd dissolved into shouts and clapping, and the bee cams tracked rapidly to the spot like missiles.

“Fucking pathetic,” Shan muttered. “This is exactly what I wanted to avoid. How the hell do they know who I am?”

“Eddie's transmissions.”

“Helen Marchant, more like. I bet I was her green recruiting poster in my absence.” Shan slipped past Esganikan and headed for the refuge of the colonnaded doorway. “Just as well I haven't come back to do undercover duties.”

By the time they climbed the few steps to the entrance, a group of people stood waiting in the hall by the open doors, tidying their suits and looking nervous. Shan glanced back over her shoulder at the group with the Gaia's Guard banner and wondered if she should now use her influence to mobilize the greens. But what could they do? Now that the Eqbas were here, she had no need to seek out the militant element willing to use direct action against governments and corporations, the eco-terrorists she'd used for her own unofficial enforcement purposes a lifetime ago in EnHaz. There was a whole Eqbas task force waiting to do give the un-green a good kicking; they could kick a lot harder, too. It was now all about identifying people who'd work with the Eqbas and put their plans into effect, the kind of cooperative partnership stuff she'd never been very good at. Nobody called in a cop like her to set up joint working parties.

There were bound to be plenty of humans who wouldn't cooperate, of course. Shan was waiting for the emergence of the anti-alien movements, the folks who'd watched too many vids and thought that Earth could be defended from vastly superior forces by good old human grit and unfeasibly simple countermeasures like computer viruses and water. It was the kind of mythology that developed only in countries that had no experience of being invaded by a bigger neighbor.

Why the hell did I ever come back?

Shan suspected the silent influence of her
c'naatat
these days, and interrogated it fiercely. Were these really
her
thoughts,
her
aims? She tested them all against logic, and faced up to the fact that she was as likely to be here now through excessive faith in her own power as through the subliminal urging of her parasite to carry it further afield to propagate.

Neither was a particularly edifying thought.

“Is that a real weapon, ma'am?” asked the police officer on the door, glancing down Shan's back. She still carried her 9mm pistol, ancient but perfectly reliable. “Because we have gun control here.”

Shan wondered if the officer had noticed that Ade was carrying a big fuck-off ESF670 rifle over his shoulder. Maybe he thought it was simpler to ask a woman to surrender her arms first.

“I can control it just fine,” she said, trying to keep in mind that the bloke was only doing the same job that she had for so long, and it wasn't his fault that she was a stupid cow who'd been conned yet again by her own gung ho sense of duty. “And I've still got a firearms permit with
Superintendent
Frankland written on it.”

They stood with gazes locked for a couple of seconds until the officer got the idea and gave her a brief nod. She wasn't a cop any longer, not technically, not
really,
because she had to be past compulsory retirement age by a few decades—on paper; and she remembered leaving her warrant card in the cairn of rocks that Ade had built as a memorial to her while she was still dead—on paper.

Sometimes it was all about how you carried it off. She still felt like a copper and thought like one, and she probably always would. She hadn't even wanted to be one; she'd been drafted. Now she had no idea how to be anything else.

“It's hard to quit,” Ade whispered. “Isn't it?”

They had a lot in common, her and Ade; everything, in fact. The queue of civil servants lining up to pay their respects were unashamedly mesmerized by meeting real live aliens from another planet. Their faces had a uniform childlike quality, wide-eyed and chins slightly lowered, that erased all gender and ethnic variations between them. Bari looked relieved. But he also looked astonished.

Shit, I did that once. When I first met Aras. A real live alien. A miracle.

She wasn't about to take Aras for granted again, and made sure she caught his wrist and steered him close to her. Esganikan ambled down the polished hallway looking from side to side with her hands clasped as if she was considering putting in an offer for the place. Shan played her automatic game of picking out which suspects in the lineup looked as if they were breaking sweat, just to see if her old copper's radar was still working. As they walked into the elegant period room at the end of the hall, she spotted one.