Ally

by Karen Traviss

  “Oh, I can do Lindsay logic.”

  “So can I, alas.”

  “She’s saving them the permanent way, isn’t she?”

  “Maybe she hasn’t infected them all.”

  “Lindsay likes her lists and rotas. She’ll have lined them up and doled it out at roll call.”

  “The risk probably isn’t as serious as it looks,” said Rayat, clasping his hands and resting them on the table. “They weren’t a breeding colony, Superintendent. One family with fertile members, and they don’t inbreed.”

  Shan hesitated for a painful split-second that Rayat couldn’t see. She wouldn’t bank on the infertile ones staying that way. She certainly hadn’t. “They’re still a risk.”

  “They aren’t about to disperse across the galaxy. They’re very territorial for a start. There might be a risk to the ecology here, but the problem’s quarantined.”

  “Good to see your approach to risk assessment hasn’t changed since Ouzhari.”

  “But I don’t know what happens if c’naatat carriers are confined to an environment indefinitely.”

  Shan knew, or at least Aras did. It was why he and his troops wiped out the isenj colonies here. The combination of the natural isenj breeding rate and a zero death rate had been an environmental disaster. With the bezeri’s penchant for hunting to extinction, the critical thing was to make sure they didn’t multiply into billions.

  And only a few weeks ago, you were still hoping you’d find more of them so they could breed and repopulate. Life’s fucking ironic.

  “Are you listening, Superintendent…?”

  “I don’t have any police rank now, actually.”

  “That seems to make no difference.”

  “I’d appeal to your sense of responsibility if I thought you had one, and hope you’d help me avert another disaster.”

  “I don’t want this to spread any more than you do, Shan.” Shan. Jesus, he was trying to be chummy. She hated people using her first name unless she bloody well said they could. “And I’m not playing games now. If c’naatat can be reversed at will, then it’s even more dangerous because it’s fully exploitable with no apparent downside. So it stays here. The Eqbas can remove it, can’t they?”

  “Never tried a live subject,” said Shan. She didn’t believe in miraculous conversions. She’d seen way too many that corresponded with a prisoner’s desire to get out of the shit she was about to unload on them. “So I’ll make decisions based on what I know.”

  She never stopped to ask if it was her responsibility; everything just was.

  “I wouldn’t have deployed ERDs on Ouzhari if I hadn’t been serious about asset denial.”

  “You talk a good game, Rayat, but you missed out the bit where you busted a gut to try to get a sample back to Earth.”

  “Initially. But I know what it can do now. And I don’t like it.”

  “You still went back to Constantine to see if there was an intact ship.”

  “Yes. But I’m stuck here now. Like you.”

  Smarmy bastard. It was just another feint to get in position to ship a c’naatat sample back to his FEU bosses. Thetis was due back in a few months to evacuate personnel from Umeh Station, and if he didn’t have his eye on a ticket home that way, then he really was going soft.

  “One more time.” Shan was sure she could beat it out of him eventually, but maybe there was nothing in there after all. “How would you describe Lindsay’s state of mind when it came to c’naatat?”

  Rayat looked genuinely thoughtful. “The squid messiah, as Eddie might say. Don’t worry, she’s not working with me.”

  Shan knew that. Lindsay had no motive for getting the damn thing back to Earth. She was wallowing in guilt and repentance, and maybe even acting out what she would have wanted for her dead kid.

  “She came ashore to get a few keepsakes from her kid’s grave, though.”

  Rayat either shared Shan’s concern or was acting brilliantly. “You think she’ll come back for the rest.”

  “Perhaps.” If the Eqbas couldn’t follow traces of the bezeri in the ocean it meant they’d gone deep, or moved on—but bezeri didn’t move on. They clung tenaciously to their territory. They killed to keep it, too. “Something came ashore here, anyway.”

  “You know you might have to hunt them down and destroy them.”

  “Is this going to be some attempt at justification?”

  “No, just wargaming. If they spread it, how do you track it? And when you track it, how do you destroy it?”

  “That’s my problem,” said Shan.

  Inside her jacket, in a pocket that nestled just under her left breast, she kept her last grenade. It was a guaranteed way out if she ever needed it. It was also the best weapon she had to take out a c’naatat host. Rayat wasn’t worth hanging on to for scraps of information, and this was the best—and possibly last—chance she’d get she remove one more problem.

  He’s not your prisoner.

  He’s no threat right now.

  You could cause a roof collapse.

  Shan glanced around the small chamber, applied a little rudimentary physics, and decided to chance it. A voice in her rational brain said none of that crap mattered and that Rayat was a complication she should have dealt with a long time ago.

  “Time I got on with it,” she said. “Goodbye.”

  It struck her as odd how that persona took over without argument. The Shan Frankland who shut the door behind her and took out the grenade for priming was a creature of rational calculation without a hint of dread, doubt or guilt, and it wasn’t the first time she’d taken the decision to eradicate a pain in the arse without the process of law. It wouldn’t be the last, either: she knew that. The grenade, a little curved slab of drab composite with a cap like an antique lighter, sat in her palm as if it had always been there. She flipped the cap up with her thumbnail to set the blast pattern. The pin was a thin strip that swung through ninety degrees, and once it was pulled clear and the pressure on the cap was released, two sections inside pulled apart, broke a sac of reactive gel, and started the impossibly short chain of a detonation.

  Pin, door open, throw, close. Or was it door open, pin, throw, close?

  Shit, she’d never drilled for this. One quick demonstration from Ade, and that was it. How hard could it be? She grasped the strip and eased it to the correct angle, thumb holding the cap closed again. Her left hand felt for the door. In her right palm, the small grenade felt reassuringly heavy.

  It’ll be a mess. I’ll have to clean up. Can’t let anyone uncontaminated risk it.

  She’d done worse.

  One, two, three…

  The faint scent hit her just as she began to lean her weight against the door, and it stopped her for a fraction of a moment. That heartbeat was enough for someone a lot heavier than her—Esganikan—to shove her away from the door, and hard.

  The grenade skidded across the floor.

  She had five seconds.

  It might have been her own training or it might have been Ade’s, but she flung herself full length along the flagstones to grab the grenade and snap the cap tight shut in one hand. Her heart pounded. She counted. This time, she really wanted to live. She did.

  …three, four, five.

  Nothing happened. Shan exhaled and eased herself onto her knees with her left arm, her right hand clamped tight around the grenade. The pin was a fiddly bastard to reinsert. She slid it back to its closed position and wondered if the thing was stable now. She’d have to ask Ade. Shit.

  “Give that to me,” said Esganikan. She held out her hand imperiously. “I want Rayat kept alive.”

  “Piss off,” said Shan. She got to her feet. “I should have done this ages ago.”

  “Shapakti said you would do this.”

  “Shapakti’s going to get what’s coming to him for grassing me up, then, isn’t he?”

  If Esganikan wanted to take the grenade from her, she’d have to fight her for it. The two matriarchs stood facing ea
ch other, angry and wary. Shan could smell it, the faint scent of tropical fruit. The last thing she needed now was to oust Esganikan from her position by accident. It was a job she didn’t want.

  Don’t react. No jask. Don’t. Don’t…

  “I want to continue the tests.” Esganikan loomed over Shan. “Especially now we have infected bezeri. We need to be able to remove it.”

  “And that makes it a tactical weapon, not a guaranteed own-goal. Rayat was right about that.” Rayat was right about a lot of things. “It’s Rayat’s mission to secure it.”

  “So you make a habit of this game with grenades.”

  Shan had pulled a pin before, but that was different. That was to make Chayyas see sense and not punish Aras for infecting her. This time—this was vermin control. “Maybe you should too. You’ll regret not finishing off that bastard. Let me do us all a favor.”

  “I want him alive.”

  “You can test it on me.”

  “Removing c’naatat might kill the host. I need you alive too. I knew you would try this, and I forbid you to try again.”

  Forbid was a challenge Shan would never normally refuse. She tensed to punch Esganikan out of the way, but there was enough common sense left in the Superintendent Frankland persona for it to pin down the angry animal called Shan and tell it that she absolutely could not provoke a jask reaction by going for Esganikan.

  You can’t depose her. You can’t plunge her mission into chaos, do you hear me?

  “Good timing, then.” Shan felt her shoulders sag and the ache of dissipating adrenaline working through her muscles. She hated that unspent fight reflex flooding her system. It would leave her edgy for hours. “So Shapakti told you where I was going.”

  “I asked him.”

  Less than a minute. I shouldn’t have wasted time talking. “So what are you going to do about the bezeri?”

  “Evaluate the risk, which means tracking them.” Esganikan put one hand on the door to Rayat’s holding cell. Wess’har didn’t lock doors and they’d had to improvise with a bolt at Shan’s insistence. “And if we judge them a risk, we’ll remove them. If they show no signs of making a serious impact on the environment, then we leave them be—as we do you and your males.”

  In a human it would have been a bitchslap. In an Eqbas, it was simply an explanation. But the fact that she, Ade and Aras were seen no differently to a bezeri was a reminder that brought her up short: not just because it was sobering to remember she was a biohazard, but that she’d done the unthinkable and separated herself from…the animals.

  That’s not me. I never thought that way. I never have.

  Perhaps it was a bezeri voice in her, or even an isenj one. She didn’t like to hear it.” I can’t do much without your teams to help me track them.”

  “You need do nothing. The most useful thing you can do for us is to use your unique asset of being a human police officer.”

  “What, rattle a few door handles?”

  “Your networks on Earth. You can activate the humans most likely to cooperate with the adjustment of Earth.”

  “I’m nearly eighty years adrift. I don’t have a list. Helen Marchant should be doing that for you.”

  “She says that you’re the most powerful icon for them. You recovered the gene bank. You’re the—”

  “Then get a bumper sticker. That works too.”

  “What?”

  “Doesn’t matter.” This was what Shan had dreaded in her EnHaz days: the lure of vanity, the prospect of heroism muddying the waters of her motivation. Please, please, if there’s one wess’har trait you can give me, you bloody thing, it’s not caring about motive. “I can’t do this. I can’t be a martyr.”

  “In the years between now and our arrival on Earth, humans motivated by you can prepare the ground and make the adjustment much, much easier.”

  “For you?”

  “For Earth.”

  “Since when did you discover public relations?”

  “I work with what humans are, and humans are persuadable with nebulous things. They can do great things with inspiration. The Christian colony crossed star systems to save terrestrial species on no more motivation than the belief in a supernatural being.”

  The Eqbas had discovered something of spin, and that was a very un-wess’har thing. “You’ve been hanging around with Eddie a little too much.”

  Esganikan’s hand pushed against the cell door. She was going inside, and that made Shan uneasy because she wouldn’t be around to keep an eye on Rayat. “You can help.”

  “I’ll think about it,” said Shan.

  She thought. She thought as she walked away, forcing herself to breathe evenly. C’naatat hadn’t seen fit to smooth out her adrenaline reactions and she still occasionally stopped breathing, a legacy of her months floating in vacuum. Ade hated her doing that and would nudge her to make her breathe again, like he was making sure she wasn’t dead and that she really had come back to him. It disturbed her, too: she distracted herself wondering what the parasite did to oxygenate her tissues in those periods. But the thoughts that Esganikan put in her mind were insistent.

  I don’t want ties to Earth. I have to forget it. I’ve done my job and this is my home now, and, Jesus, have I got enough problems to occupy me here.

  If she succumbed to the Saint Shan ruse, then how did she explain away Eddie’s report on her nobly British I-might-be-some-time walk out the airlock? How could she be a dead saint and still give pep talks to the faithful? What had that stupid bitch Marchant told people already?

  C’naatat was a crazy story, and like all reports of reality, people generally believed what they wanted to believe and ignored what didn’t fit. Perhaps she’d been dismissed as a myth already.

  I never ignore what doesn’t fit. My whole working life has been about looking for it.

  It was one more reminder that she didn’t fit on Earth. She found she was already picking her way through a patch of tufted lavender grass a few hundred meters from the Temporary City, too preoccupied to notice how far she’d walked. Scattered across the land, the disassembled bubbles of bronze and blue metal habitats that would coalesce into a compete warship on command looked like exotic puffballs.

  But it was normal now. This was normal. Her ménage à trois was normal, and her alien friends were normal. Even c’naatat was now normal. Earth was not.

  Shan took in the unspoiled wilderness and knew exactly why Umeh needed to change or die. It wasn’t logical thought, because there were no laws of the universe that said grass and biodiversity were inherently better than concrete and one lonely species, but she believed it. And you had to believe something, to make a moral choice, or you’d be nothing.

  And having choice, must make it.

  She’d made hers, and Marchant could find another saint. Or a bumper sticker.

  Shoreline, five kilometers from the Temporary City

  Aras let out an irritated hiss. It was a typical wess’har sound and it surprised him: for a moment he was a human standing outside watching himself and wondering what this creature was. He waded into the water waist-deep and searched, irrationally angry at betrayal.

  This isn’t me. This isn’t wess’har.

  The sensation was fleeting. He considered the fact that he might be changing again, edging closer to being human, but there was none of the characteristic raised temperature that accompanied the peak of c’naatat’s genetic rearrangement.

  C’naatat had done a long and thorough job of remodeling him, apart from his way of seeing the world. Aras wasn’t usually aware of it, but Ade told him he was just as “bloody rude and crude” as any normal wess’har. But a lasting sense of betrayal was a human thing, one he’d tasted all too recently when Josh Garrod—friend, almost family—had done the unthinkable.

  It doesn’t matter. The why doesn’t matter. Deal with the now.

  But the bezeri hadn’t told him about their past crimes, and while his wess’har heart said only actions mattered, his human elem
ent was bitterly hurt by the deception. The bezeri had never been his friends like the humans of Constantine, but he’d certainly been their guardian, and had he known what he was guarding, then his actions might have been different.

  It was thousands of years ago. It was long before wess’har came to this system. You can’t punish their descendants for thoughts.

  They were here, he knew it. The bezeri had always been fond of this bay; it was his regular landing place from Constantine on his trips to the garrison at the Temporary City, the spot where bezeri pilots would pick him up in their podships and take him across the strait. He waded around, looking for familiar lights rising up to meet him. He could see nothing.

  And Ade had given his signal lamp to Lindsay. Even if Aras found a bezeri, he couldn’t talk with them. He had no bioluminescence; he didn’t even have the random flickering in his hands like Shan had.

  But Mohan Rayat could speak in lights. The gethes who nearly wiped them out could talk to them, and he couldn’t. Shan called this kind of thing irony. It tipped Aras over an edge he hadn’t known was there.

  He hammered his fists on the surface of the water, thrashing foam into the air. “Come and face me! We died for you!” he screamed. “My brothers. My friends. Everyone I loved. We fought for you, and you’re everything we despise. I killed Josh for you. Come and face me—”

  Aras felt his breath sobbing from his chest as if it was another life escaping. It was grief. He knew grief: he’d raged briefly like this when Shan was taken from him, and it felt every bit as physically agonizing and unbearable as those terrible days. And he couldn’t stop it. It erupted, and with the grief came a spewing torrent of other unbearable emotions that he could hardly identify and that threatened to choke him unconscious. He found himself sinking down into the water onto his knees, and he was back in a world that he rarely visited, a world that now only reminded him of having his head held under water by his isenj captors.

  You spread c’naatat among wess’har. Who are you really angry with?

  The bezeri weren’t who he’d thought they were. It shouldn’t have mattered. But it did, and he couldn’t stop it mattering. The sea pressed on him and carried distant sounds. He could see well even in the depths, but he found he was staring into a void that suddenly seemed as empty and hostile as space.