Ally

by Karen Traviss

  Saib persisted, pausing to drift with the current, tentacles trailing. But why can’t we just go deep? Who would find us? Who could kill us?

  You still have to eat, said Lindsay. The isenj killed their own oceans. If they get a foothold on this planet again, they’ll kill yours too. They almost did before, remember?

  She knew that Saib remembered, all right. Or at least he recalled the azin shell maps with their exquisite designs of colored sand that recounted the time the isenj had claimed Bezer’ej and caught c’naatat. They bred. They bred in their millions, and they didn’t die until Aras and his troops destroyed them: male, female, young, old, soldier, civilian, no quarter given. Shan had fallen for a war criminal. Lindsay wasn’t sure if that was ironic or inevitable.

  Millions of us died, said Saib. Filthy isenj. Filthy polluters. We called the wess’har to drive them away.

  For a moment, Lindsay had an uncharitable thought that the bezeri might have been in decline anyway because of their ruthless hunting. Perhaps the isenj only accelerated the process. It was odd how her picture shifted simply from discovering their history.

  Did the wess’har know what the isenj had done? She assumed they didn’t.

  Daylight faded into soft green light above her and the sounds of the ocean and its relentless weight enveloped her again.

  Dominate the land, Saib. Lindsay thought of all she could teach them: every scrap of her naval training required hardware and technology of the kind the bezeri couldn’t make. And there was none on Bezer’ej to plunder now, not even the human colonists’ mothballed ship. The wess’har restoration process had reduced nearly every artifact to its component elements. That’s the only way you’ll get control of your future. Hold the Dry Above.

  You dream, said Saib.

  Lindsay’s spirits sank further with each meter she moved away from the sunlight above. Her own ability to cope with the last few weeks under water stunned her and she tried not to think about it too closely in case reality crowded in on her again and it all came unraveled in screaming, water-choked hysteria. As long as she didn’t think her resolve had come from Shan’s borrowed genes, she was fine: that was her ultimate fear. She didn’t want those memories and attitudes smuggled in with c’naatat through Ade Bennett’s blood. She needed her courage to be her own. It was all she had left.

  Shan must have struggled for sanity like this when she was floating in space.

  Lindsay seized that. If Shan could take it, then so could she.

  Get your people together, Saib, Lindsay said. Tell them that they have to get used to the Dry Above.

  The Temporary City, Bezer’ej: biohazard lab

  “This is too fucking weird for me.”

  Shan hovered at Shapakti’s elbow, and for a moment Ade saw the detective she must have been in her police days: harrying the lab for forensics, grimly impatient, working something through in her mind that showed in the twitch of muscle in her jaw.

  He had to say it. It was a boil to be lanced: you infected Lindsay and Rayat, and now look what’s happened. Just when he thought Shan had forgiven him, he was back in the shit again. “So…what if it is an altered bezeri, Boss?”

  “No idea,” she said wearily. “How do you track a creature that can go anywhere? And what do we do when we find them—shoot them? And what if it’s a sheven instead? Jesus H. Christ. What a fucking mess.”

  Ade glanced at Aras, who stood quietly in the corner of the laboratory watching Shapakti with his head slightly to one side like he was lost in thought. Aras raised his eyes from the bench Shapakti was working at and met Ade’s stare. He shrugged—just a micro-movement of the muscles, nothing more. Then he lowered his head a fraction. I don’t know and I wish I did. Ade understood right away; they were so well attuned now that he didn’t have to ask.

  “Aras, I need an answer,” said Shan.

  “To what question?”

  “If the bezeri are infected, what options do we have?”

  “If you’re asking if infected bezeri represent a risk that I would feel justified in removing, I don’t know.”

  Ade thought about the bezeri’s recently revealed history—overfishing and genocide, very human sins that he understood pretty well—and knew what was going through Shan’s mind. It was going through his too. They’ll do it again.

  “They don’t have a history of being environmentally responsible,” Shan said quietly. Shapakti peered down at the glass tray, head cocking left and right. Shan wasn’t giving him a lot of room. “Not a good start, is it?”

  “A few weeks ago,” said Aras, “you wanted to save them.”

  “A few weeks ago, they weren’t bloody c’naatat.” She was starting to get that shutdown look, turning back into a Superintendent Frankland about to break bad news, talking to necessary strangers. “And I didn’t know they had form for being environmental vandals.”

  Her next request would be for a grenade that could frag a four-meter heap of gel. Ade knew it.

  “Look,” said Shapakti. He could switch to English with more ease than Ade could manage wess’u. “Observe the cells.”

  When the biologist tilted the tray a little, Ade could see that it was actually an image like a microscope display. It looked like tiny radial hairbrushes scattered between a mass of tangled wires and misshapen lumps.

  “Shit,” said Shan. “Shit.”

  “What is it, Boss? Is that c’naatat?”

  “It is, isn’t it?” Shan was staring at the display, not at Shapakti. “That’s what you showed me on Ouzhari.”

  Ade allowed himself a moment of distraction. He’d expected to be underwhelmed when he finally saw c’naatat, but he wasn’t. It astounded him. As Shapakti increased the magnification, it unwound into brushes within brushes like a fractal. It was infinite. It was like looking at a galaxy and seeing it break up into stars and worlds.

  “But what’s the host?” asked Aras. He didn’t seem amazed. Maybe he’d seen it before. “Is it bezeri or sheven?”

  Shan stepped back from leaning over Shapakti, shaking her head, mouth set in that position that showed she’d thrust her lower jaw forward. It usually preceded clenched fists, a sudden turn on her heel and a fast march towards the nearest door. Ade edged slowly towards the exit to head her off as casually as he could.

  “I don’t know which is worse, immortal predators or bezeri,” she said. “That explains the lights. You think Lindsay came ashore and a sheven grabbed her?”

  “It’s bezeri,” said Shapakti. He tilted the transparent tray and the image enlarged several times. Icons that Ade couldn’t begin to identify appeared in a row on the right-hand side and Shapakti tapped at them with long spider fingers, summoning up more cell-like images. Ade hadn’t even seen him insert any samples. It was incomprehensible technology. “There are distinctly bezeri features as well as c’naatat, isenj and human.”

  “No sheven?” said Shan, as if that would make matters worse than they already were. She was right, though: it would. Those bloody things were everywhere already, and giving them extra superpowers was bound to end in tears. “You sure? Because the last thing we need is them chomping on wildlife here and spreading it further.”

  “It’s a native organism,” said Aras. “But it hasn’t spread here. It hasn’t infected native carnivores, and if it could do that easily then I’d have seen evidence of it by now among flying species like the stabtails.”

  “Bezeri are carnivores. Omnivores, anyway.”

  “But they only caught it through a human vector in the marine environment. I rarely guess, Shan Chail, but if I didn’t infect them by accident in five hundred years, then this may well be the result of a deliberate act, the same way that Rayat and Lindsay acquired bezeri characteristics.”

  It was just the thing to make Shan blow a gasket. But she settled for going white and angry instead. “If I find she’s pissed around with the ecosystems here, I might lose my legendary patience.”

  Shapakti looked up for a moment. “But you have non
e.”

  “I know. It’s humor.”

  “Oh.” Shapakti pondered, head cocked. “Do you think she’s foolish enough to infect them deliberately?”

  It begged the obvious answer. Shan gave it: Ade winced.

  “Two out of three c’naatat hosts in this room have done just that,” she said, “and they’re both a lot smarter and a lot more disciplined than Lindsay fucking Neville.”

  “Intent makes no difference.”

  “Oh, it does. It makes me angrier.”

  Shapakti switched topics with surprising tact, or maybe it was just that wess’har habit of darting from one topic to the next. “There are many structures in the cells that correspond to nothing I have on record. There might well be sheven elements in this and many other things. But I can say that this is very similar to the bezeri material we’ve gathered.”

  Shan stood with fists on hips, seeming to have forgotten the door. “Okay, let’s scope the worst nuclear accident here. We’ve got c’naatat bezeri material ashore. That’s two new problems—bezeri contaminated with c’naatat, and bezeri ashore.”

  “Bezeri always did come ashore,” Aras said quietly. “They used podships to explore the beaches. You’ve seen the memorial to the first of them who did this and died in the attempt. They can survive out of water for a brief time, if you recall what happened to the beached infant Surendra Parekh found.”

  Ade did, and Shan did too. Ade wondered if he’d look back on that incident one day and see it as the point at which human-wess’har relations really went to rat shit. Silly cow, Parekh: she thought the beached bezeri was dead. It certainly was after she’d finished with it.

  Shan didn’t deviate. “Yeah, but they didn’t bloody walk ashore and stroll around with a picnic lunch, did they? You said you saw a large gelatinous shape moving around in the marshes and going back into the water.”

  “Yes, isan. Something has changed.”

  “I’ll say. Walking bezeri. C’naatat bezeri.”

  Shan turned for the door. Ade risked stepping in front of her.

  “Where you off to, then, Boss?”

  She looked him in the eye, all hostile out-of-my-way ice. Then her expression softened as if she’d suddenly recognized him in a crowd of strangers and was glad of it.

  “If you ask Rayat if he knows the time, he’ll just say yes.” She edged forward half a pace, impatient. “I want another chat with him just in case there’s something he forgot to tell me.”

  “I’ll give you a hand.”

  “Ade, I’m not exactly new to interrogations.”

  “I just don’t want you getting upset.”

  She almost smiled, but put her left hand firmly on his elbow to steer him aside. “You’re too nice for your own good sometimes, you know that?”

  Ade knew that. But he also knew he had his father in him, and that—given the opportunity—he could make Rayat wish that he could die. He let Shan pass and watched her stride down the passageway, longing for her to drop the act and show how broken she really was by what she’d had to do.

  She had to be grieving. He needed to comfort her, to feel some kind of bloody use for a change. When she was out of sight and he turned his attention back to the lab, Aras was staring at the specimen captured in the tray, oblivious.

  “Infection control is a difficult thing,” said Shapakti, jerking Ade back to the here and now. “If we assume the worst, then—”

  Aras didn’t take his eyes off the tray. “Shan Chail will always assume the worst.”

  “Then the worst,” said Shapakti, “is that the bezeri become infected and that they spread c’naatat, and eventually destroy the ecology of the planet. But there are few of them, and it may well be possible to stop the spread.”

  Aras wasn’t prone to outbursts. Apart from his raging grief when Shan died, he was almost mild mannered in that oddly bipolar wess’har way, patient to the point of being dull and then flipping without warning into a ruthless killer. Ade knew. He’d tracked isenj troops with him: and wess’har really didn’t take prisoners.

  “What has it all been for?” Aras asked. There was an almost infrasonic rumble in his voice, right on the threshold of Ade’s hearing. “The last five centuries, what has it all been for? What do I have to do now, kill them? After defending them for so many years?”

  He turned so sharply that his long dark braid whipped around almost horizontally as he stormed out. Ade’s instinct was to go after him. Shapakti held out a restraining arm but stopped short of grabbing Ade.

  “It’s snowballing.” Ade wasn’t sure what he would say to Aras when he caught up with him. Yeah, you went into exile for them, and we kicked off a war over them, and you executed your best friend because of them—and now we might have to kill them. It was all turning to shit and Ade knew he’d played his part in getting it there. “How do we stop this, Shapakti? You got any ideas?”

  The biologist seemed mesmerized by his specimens. In another chamber, the two macaws he’d recreated from the gene bank started screeching at each other, their flapping wings making fut-fut-fut sounds. “When we can define what we want to stop, Ade Bennett, then we can proceed,” said Shapakti. “But that also depends on what the bezeri do next.”

  “It’ll end in tears.”

  “What?”

  “Just a saying.”

  “It may end in culling.”

  A wess’har could use the word cull without any connotation of an animal at the top of the food chain pulling a gun on one at the bottom that was just a bit too inconvenient for its tastes. It still meant dead. Aras faced the prospect of seeing the bezeri wiped out again, really wiped out.

  It must have been a bloody nightmare to think about that after all he’d been through for so very, very long. Ade debated who needed him most right then, and decided that out of the two of them, Shan was probably coping better.

  Ade went in search of Aras.

  3

  We have complete choice as individuals: the only decisions we can take are our own. And yet so many species use the state of being an individual as an excuse for inaction, helplessness and irresponsibility. No situation is so overwhelming that action is pointless.

  TARGASSAT OF SURANG,

  on taking action

  F’nar, Wess’ej: February 2377

  Every world that Eddie Michallat knew was already full of crazy bitches, and nobody needed another one.

  He watched the news from Earth with one hand pressed to his mouth. He hadn’t even noticed he’d done it. On the screen on the wall, part of the stone itself, a woman called Helen Marchant urged governments to intervene with troops to stop the clearance of replanted forests for agricultural use.

  “Stupid cow,” he muttered.

  “Why is cow an insult?” asked Giyadas. She was a child, but young wess’har seemed simply to be undersized adults hungrily absorbing data. She was catching up fast. “Stupid should suffice.”

  “Is this my daily lecture on speciesism, doll?”

  “I’m interested.”

  Eddie ruffled her mane, tufted hair that ran in a stiff brush from front to back across her little seahorse skull like a Spartan’s plume. “I’m just being rude about her, that’s all.”

  “So by comparison with what you think of as an inferior species, you insult her. And you also make her not human, and so not worthy of respect.”

  “Thank you, Jeremy Bentham.”

  “Is that an insult too?”

  “No.” Eddie laughed; these days Giyadas was his only source of humor. He slipped his handheld out of his pocket and fingered in Bentham. “Read that.” Damn, she was just a kid, wess’har or not, and sometimes he worried that he was burdening her with too much adult crap—adult human crap. “Try some felicific calculus.”

  Giyadas read intently, long muzzle tipped down so that her chin almost rested on her chest. This alien child could read his language, but he hadn’t a hope in hell of reading hers or even speaking it: he couldn’t manage the overtones that gave
wess’u its two distinct and simultaneous voices. It rendered him illiterate. For a journalist, that was as near to hell as he might ever come. Giyadas viewed his ignorance with a grave patience that bordered on pity.

  And Helen Marchant carried on calling for war to save the forests.

  “She is mad, you know, doll.”

  “She only wants what the Eqbas have done for generations. This is not mad to us.”

  Marchant was a clever nutter, then. She’d once persuaded an antiterrorist officer called Shan Frankland to become an ally of her eco-guerilla movement. Knowing Shan, that must have taken some doing. Eddie didn’t underestimate Marchant one bloody bit.

  Giyadas studied the handheld’s cream matte surface as it filled with text and images. She looked up, head cocked to one side, crosswire pupils flaring into four teardrop lobes. Eddie didn’t find those bright citrine eyes quite so alien now.

  “This Bentham shares many of Targassat’s views,” she said.

  “Yes, he was one of the great liberal reformers.”

  “How could he be?”

  Giyadas was the equivalent of maybe a seven year old human kid now. Eddie still measured his words, and got them badly wrong every time. “Well, at the time, people didn’t see the world that way. Women and anyone who wasn’t white didn’t have rights, the rich ruled, and animal rights were unheard of.”

  “I meant that he said those things nearly six hundred years ago by your calendar and little has changed among the gethes since. So he is not a reformer. Intent is nothing. Only action matters.”

  I’m debating utilitarianism with an alien child 25 light-years from home, and she’s winning. Wess’har logic was hard. “That’s true, sweetheart.”