Ally

by Karen Traviss

  Yes, isenj were brilliant engineers. And the trouble with brilliant engineers was that they always felt they could fix things in the end, even when the situation was beyond them.

  Esganikan touched the controls and the bulkhead became opaque again. “Call Shomen Eit. I can’t wait any longer for him to decide when he wants to talk about the transfer of bioweapons. Arrange a time for us to meet.” The minister spoke English now, the one positive thing the gethes had contributed to the situation: they had a common language, alien though it was. She could have called Shomen Eit herself, but it was usually Aitassi’s role to interpret, and bored ussissi troubled her. “We’ve never walked away from a request to restore a planet. The isenj can only save themselves by reducing their population. There’s no other option, and they know it.”

  Earth was the priority. She had to keep that in mind. Earth had biodiversity—thousands, even millions, of different types of people to save, from insects to large carnivores. Gethes might not have seen their fellow Earth species as people, but that was a lesson they would have to learn in time.

  There was a skittering noise along the passage: a ussissi in a hurry, a small one. Aitassi turned. It was one of her male youngsters. He dropped down onto his four rear legs to approach her, head lowered, clearly very excited about something.

  “Hilissi’s baby’s here!” He almost bounced. “Come and see!”

  Aitassi gave him a quick nip on the ear that might have been more annoyance than playful matriarchal sparring with a juvenile of her pack. Ussissi took their family with them when they traveled. Eqbas didn’t. Only a handful of her crew even had families: the time dilation involved in missions made it a single-status navy by necessity. The males maintained the integrity of their DNA by medication rather than the natural way by oursan. They too wanted to go back home and start their lives.

  It was no way to live. Service life was a great sacrifice. The one benefit—a dubious one—was that the compressed passage of time on board ship and the frequent periods of suspension meant an apparently extended life. The invasion and restoration of Garav was generations ago: for Esganikan, it was only ten years. It gave mission personnel a unique perspective.

  I might even know how Shan Frankland feels in due course, seeing all I knew long dead.

  “I have to go,” Aitassi said, appearing softened by the news. “It’s Hilissi’s first. She’s very pleased.”

  The ussissi disappeared down the passage, Aitassi trailing the excited youngster. Esganikan thought it was cruelly bad timing. The last thing she needed was a reminder that she had to put off having her own family for many more years.

  I have to complete the Earth adjustment mission first. I can’t go home until I’ve done my duty. What kind of isan shirks her duty? Can do, must do.

  She was running out of time. Even Earth wasn’t in quite the same hurry that she was. She switched back to the remote’s view of Umeh to remind herself that the Northern Assembly and the Maritime Fringe weren’t quite one sprawl of building any longer. There was a space, naked soil, the fabric of the living planet as it had been: a bomb crater that had exposed earth that hadn’t seen light in centuries.

  They’d planted a tree there. It was what the carrion-eating humans, the gethes, called a park. The tree had to be imported from Umeh’s moon of Tasir Var, but it was a real tree, and it was growing.

  Nothing else had grown on Umeh in living memory except food plants sealed in enclosed hydroponic houses and fungus vats.

  It was a start. Some things might happen late, but they happened in the end. She hoped her life would mirror the tree’s.

  Bezer’ej: Nazel, the island called Chad by the gethes

  Lindsay Neville was getting impatient with Saib. The bezeri elder lurched along the shoreline, occasionally trailing a tentacle in the water as if he didn’t believe he could survive out of it.

  She stepped in front of him so he could see her bioluminescence. Lights signals were strictly line of sight, and she had to treat him like a deaf man, making sure he could see her before she communicated.

  Light signaling was second nature to her now. She could even add a tone to it: this time it was exasperation, staccato pulses of red between the patterns of meaning. You’re not going to die, Saib. I gave you the parasite.

  Saib was perpetually sullen. She wondered if he’d been a happier creature before the bombing. If we can’t die, then why can’t we return to the sea? What difference does it make?

  You can die if someone detonates an explosive next to you. Lindsay had taken everything from them when she let Rayat con her into deploying cobalt-salted bombs. The one thing she could give them was the ability to defend themselves from terrestrial creatures. Take control of the land and secure your future. The isenj nearly wiped you out. So did we. Don’t let that happen to you again.

  Saib paused, sparkling with pinpoints of gold and green light. It was his equivalent of muttering to himself. We, he said. We. Look at yourself. He inched along the shore like a translucent elephant seal, casting some of his tentacles forward to pull his bulk and pushing behind him with the others. What are you now? What are we?

  It was like the constant niggling low-level argument with Rayat. Survivors, she said. And you agreed to it. I didn’t drag you ashore, either.

  There were forty-four bezeri left alive. C’naatat was all that could preserve them. The only ones left of breeding age were from one family, and they’d been resigned to extinction until Rayat literally walked out of his imprisonment and Lindsay decided that she might embrace something that looked like a higher purpose. It had taken a lot of effort to infect them with her own tissue, but she’d done it.

  The altered wess’har was out hunting, said Saib. I saw him.

  You mean Aras? Wess’har don’t hunt. She decided they’d need to learn new words like vegan. They don’t eat flesh or use other creatures.

  The human soldier was with him, Saib said. He had a weapon.

  So they were looking for someone. Maybe it was Rayat. Shan would have shoved a grenade down his throat in a heartbeat.

  Was it Ade Bennett? Lindsay asked. The one who brought me to you?

  Yes. I thought they had seen me, so I returned to the water.

  Lindsay stopped and blocked Saib’s path. C’naatat might have made her unrecognizably amphibious, but she still felt that jolt of alarm. Did they see you or not?

  I don’t believe they did.

  If they see you moving ashore, they’ll know you carry the parasite.

  And then what will they do? Saib’s tone was pure contempt. Punish us? Kill us?

  Lindsay thought of Aras, and then Shan. Maybe.

  Saib shimmered amber. It was the light pattern the signal lamp had never managed to translate, but Lindsay understood it clearly now as a special kind of anger. He was a respected elder, suddenly without authority and being challenged not only by a female but an alien—and an alien chimera, at that.

  He inched towards her but stopped when she stood her ground. You worry too much. Wess’har have always tried to protect us. They won’t attempt to kill us.

  Shan Frankland will, though, said Lindsay.

  Saib seemed unconcerned. She said she would defend us.

  They really didn’t understand the woman. They had no idea. She drowned in the empty part of the Dry Above to keep the parasite from spreading, Lindsay explained. Did he understand spacing? He certainly understood drowning in air. If she can face taking her own life, taking yours won’t be a problem, will it?

  Saib always had to have the last word. You might not understand her as well as you think.

  Ice water ran down Lindsay’s back. She had a brief, awful thought that some previous host of c’naatat was telepathic. She couldn’t cope with that, she really couldn’t. She’s fanatical, Saib. You have no idea.

  Saib didn’t seem convinced. She pledged to protect us. She hardly knew us, so she had no other reason other than inner voices that drive her.

  It was an astute a
ssessment for a squid.

  Lindsay stepped back to let Saib lumber on along the beach. She fell in behind him, watching the wobbles and shock waves in his mantle and wondering how long it would be before c’naatat adapted him fully for terrestrial life. Whatever the parasite was, it had intervened to save her and Rayat from being crushed and drowned on the ocean bed; and it had taken seconds to call up unknown fragments of DNA to do the impossible and protect Shan from cold hard space. Turning a squid into an ambulant land animal wouldn’t stretch it at all.

  But c’naatat was unpredictable. She knew that now. She looked through her own hands—gelatine, water, smeared glass—and wondered why she was still shaped like a bipedal human and not some amalgam of forms. Aras was like the regular wess’har once, they said, one of those long, lean, gold seahorses; now you could mistake him for a large human at a quick glance in poor light.

  But Shan and Ade still looked much the same. Whatever c’naatat did, it responded to a voice Lindsay couldn’t hear.

  She stopped and put her fingers to her neck. Ridges like keloid scars ran from under her ears and jaw to her collarbone—or at least where it had been—and down her rib cage.

  Gills. She had gills. Lately the realization would occasionally hit her anew, shocking her for a moment.

  It was okay. She could handle this. She could cope. She would make herself cope. Humans started out with gills during gestation; no big deal, nothing alien at all. She took a long slow breath and concentrated on the next second at hand, no further in the future than that, until she had control of herself again.

  In a way, it was easier turning into a cephalopod than living with being Lindsay Neville, destroyer of bezeri and mother of a dead child. There was life in it. From a benchmark of death she could use c’naatat to create new life, of a kind.

  Rayat despises us for our past genocide, said Saib. She could see his light signals from any angle. And you don’t.

  No, she didn’t. You didn’t slaughter the birzula personally.

  Saib paused. I don’t feel sorry that my ancestors did.

  Lindsay found that harder to handle. She heard Shan’s voice telling her not to apply her human morality, shabby thing that it was, to alien cultures. Humans had no examples to set the galaxy.

  And I helped Rayat detonate cobalt devices, she said. I didn’t intend for any bezeri to die, just to stop anyone getting hold of the parasite. But I was responsible. This is how terrible crimes are committed.

  Saib gave a little shudder that reverberated through his bulk. Rayat said the wess’har will hate us for killing all the birzula and hunting our prey to extinction.

  Lindsay had no idea where Rayat was, and the bezeri no longer seemed to care. They’d wanted both of them for punishment—death, inevitably—but they settled on servitude. Then they seemed to lose interest in vengeance and tolerated their two human prisoners as servants. She couldn’t square that attitude with an intelligent species that had destroyed another in a deliberate, unapologetic act of genocide. But, as Shan always said, aliens didn’t think like humans. It was hard enough to fathom or predict the actions of her own kind, let alone intelligent squid.

  Saib teetered at the edge of the water. Lindsay moved to one side of him and gave him a nudge to steer him back to land.

  If you don’t try harder, you’ll be confined to the sea forever.

  Saib grumbled gold again. We’re from the sea. Is that so bad?

  The parasite can make you fit for any environment. Give it a chance. See what change can bring you.

  Can we have mates again? Saib asked.

  Lindsay shrugged. You can certainly try.

  My female’s long dead.

  Then take another, Saib. See what happens.

  Saib seemed to consider the idea. Perhaps he didn’t fancy any of the remaining elderly females. He must have had some inclination to try a new way of life, or he wouldn’t have agreed to be infected with c’naatat; but maybe he didn’t really understand what it did, even if he’d seen Lindsay and Rayat change from air-breathing, vulnerable humans to aquatic creatures that could survive in deep ocean and eat any food in a matter of seconds, minutes, hours. C’naatat was instant evolution.

  Where has Rayat gone? asked Saib.

  Lindsay wondered if the bezeri could work out the real threat from Earth. He’s trying to get back home. He wants to give the parasite to our government.

  To make soldiers that can’t die?

  Either Rayat had discussed c’naatat’s potential, or Saib was an astute tactician. More or less, said Lindsay.

  Very dangerous.

  Rayat was dangerous too. It’s called c’naatat. It lives on Ouzhari, nowhere else. We tried to destroy it to stop humans getting hold of it.

  But you got hold of it. You have it.

  Saib, I asked for it, so I could serve you as punishment.

  The old bezeri shimmered. Your regret makes you weak.

  Rayat referred to the bezeri as Nazi squid, and when Saib made comments like that then Lindsay could see exactly what he meant. When the first Earth mission had killed one of the bezeri infants and faced retaliation from the wess’har, she’d seen them as helpless victims. She knew now that they’d been as brutal and exploitative in their own context as any human society.

  But that didn’t make her innocent. And it didn’t give her any purpose for her interminable future.

  “You have to learn to speak,” Lindsay said aloud. She found she had to make a conscious effort to suck in air; speech was a habit you could lose when your body had changed so radically. Her bioluminescence mirrored her words. “Sound’s more efficient than light on land. I know you can do it. You made the sound leenz under water.”

  Saib was as stubborn as they came. He really was a grumpy old man, but she took heart in his willingness to be infected with c’naatat. Bezeri were creatures of extreme habit. It was their unshakeable fixation with their spawning grounds and territories round Ouzhari that put most of them in the fallout zone when the bombs were detonated.

  It was also what had led them to total war with the birzula over hunting territories. Bezer’ej was a big world with big oceans; but the bezeri wouldn’t move. Their azin shell maps were their history. Their mindset was all about place.

  And Saib was as hard to shift as any of his kind.

  “Come on, you cantankerous old sod,” she said. “Try.”

  His bulk shook like an angry jelly. The sound that emerged was more of a belch than a word, but it was clear enough: “Leenz-eeeee.”

  “There you go,” she said, and didn’t translate into lights this time.

  She walked on, trying not to think about how she remained upright and rigid when she could see only opaque structures like cartilage in her forearms and legs. If the bezeri came ashore, though, what would they do? They had no history of technology of the kind that relied on wheels and heat and metal. They made stone implements. They bred organic vessels from plants. They wrote in sand pictures or etched symbols in stone and shell.

  They were Paleolithic. They needed to undergo a whole industrial revolution—or grab the trappings of another civilization and make it their own.

  And they’d found no other survivors.

  Saib didn’t like to be seen to give in too easily. He muttered again, sparkling orange light. We can hide in the sea.

  “The sea didn’t save you from me, old man.”

  “Leeeenz-eeeeeee.”

  “Clever. Keep it up.”

  He shuffled, scattering pebbles. Any other huge sea creature would have struggled to move and found its organs failing without the supporting buoyancy of water, but c’naatat seemed to be taking care of that.

  Lindsay was as adrift as he was now. She had nothing except her belt and a few tools: no data, no knowledge, and no skills beyond the basic survival techniques she learned as a navy pilot. She was newly reduced to a primitive, just like the bezeri.

  Perhaps the Eqbas would help. But as soon as the bezeri asked for knowledge
of land-based technology, it would be clear to them what had happened. And Lindsay had no way of knowing how they’d react to the news that c’naatat had spread into new hosts.

  Nobody knew, not even Rayat. If he’d walked ashore, he’d have headed for the Eqbas as his best chance of escape. Would he guess that she would infect the bezeri? He did all he could to avoid it himself. Maybe he hadn’t been lying. Maybe he really did think the parasite was a disaster waiting to happen if it ever got off the planet. In the end, he was just like Shan: they were both cold, obsessive, soulless bastards. Lindsay was better off without him.

  “Home,” Saib said aloud. The sound was rasping, like a human’s vocal fry. “Home.”

  “You want to go home?” Well, c’naatat was getting into gear with something, then: language. “Or are you asking if this is home?”

  Whatever Saib meant, the answer defeated him. He shook visibly. Gold and scarlet light burst from his mantle in neon-bright outrage and frustration, and he lumbered into the shallows, thrashing tentacles in the water. She knew all the nuances now. She waded after him and slid into the sea. Her lungs didn’t protest any longer. Her gills parted, open gashes of red mouths, and the sea felt like soothing relief as it engulfed her.

  You’ve got time, she signaled. Time is one problem you don’t have now. Take it easy.

  Back in his preferred element, Saib shot into deeper water and picked up speed, pumping water behind him. If he didn’t make the transition as the dominant elder, none of the others would.

  You can train us to be an army, then.

  Ah, so he was thinking it through. He just didn’t want to lose face.

  I believe I can, Lindsay said.

  The Dry Above is a better place to fight, is it?

  Yes. She had his interest now. Because your biggest threats will be land animals like humans.

  Lindsay saw a future Bezer’ej that wasn’t a disputed territory for wess’har, isenj and humans to fight over. She wondered if she was going insane. Who needed most to be on dry land—them, or her? But she had a vision now, and she was going to use that to put things right.

  All she’d done was bring two native Bezer’ej life-forms together, c’naatat and bezeri. It wasn’t the same as infecting a human never meant to be here. And Shan Frankland wasn’t so rigorous about eradicating c’naatat from the human population when it came to her precious Ade, either: she let him live. The knowledge that the bitch had some areas in her life that weren’t governed by her inflexible brand of justice gave Lindsay some sour comfort.