Ally

by Karen Traviss

  He scrambled upright, struggling against a wave as his head broke the surface again and he was back in thin, noisy air. He shivered as he flopped down on the beach and sat with the water draining out of his clothing.

  The crunch of pebbles behind him made him inhale involuntarily to check the scent on the air. Ade. He didn’t turn around and sat contemplating his folly and ill-defined betrayal.

  “Jesus, mate, you’re soaking.” Ade squatted down beside him and stared into his face, forcing him to look him in the eye. “What happened?”

  “I’m waiting for the bezeri.”

  “To…shoot them?”

  He’d thought about it. “To talk to them.”

  Ade swallowed as if embarrassed. The lump at the front of his throat bobbed up and down. “You might have a long wait.”

  “I haven’t gone insane.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “You have the tone of someone reasoning with the unstable.”

  “Sorry. But you don’t have a signal lamp, do you? I gave it to Lindsay. So you can’t understand each other.”

  “Rayat said they were starting to understand English.”

  “But how would they reply, though?”

  Aras had no idea. Emotions rarely overtook him but they had now. He was raging, and he knew it. Ade simply waited with him, squatting back on his heels and finally sitting down with his knees pulled up to his chest, arms folded around them.

  “You’re right, they know we’re here,” said Ade. “They always did.”

  Aras kept his gaze on the water. He was at the right angle to see the shallows, and after a while he saw what he first thought was reflection on the sea, and then realized was speckled blue light.

  It was a bezeri, a large one, and it moved closer inshore.

  Aras scrambled to his feet and walked down the slope of shingle. Ade followed him, reeking of agitation. He seemed to hate arguments but had no trouble fighting wars, and the shared memory reminded Aras that rows between his parents led to his father beating his mother, and then Ade and his brother. He was conditioned to dread argument.

  Aras stood ankle-deep in the water, staring down at the bezeri, wondering if it could hear well enough, let alone understand him.

  “You never told me,” said Aras. He raised his voice. “You—never—told—me—you—killed—everything—else.”

  The lights danced, still blue, then suffused with green.

  Aras plunged into the shallows so he was alongside the huge gel mantle, and the bezeri backed off a meter.

  “Do you understand me? Do you?”

  Ade waded in after him. “Aras, steady on—”

  “Get back, Ade.” Aras pushed him away. He started shouting and felt no embarrassment. “Can you hear me, bezeri? Are you the same as your ancestors? Do you regret killing the birzula, hunting everything you could find? You destroyed your world. You did it.”

  The lights froze for a moment, and the surface of the water broke as a column of gel reared up, draining foam. The bezeri literally stood on the sand of the shallows. The part above the water was taller than Aras. Yes, this creatures had changed. That meant only one thing.

  “Shit, that’s big,” said Ade.

  Aras stood his ground. He was so angry he didn’t care what it did to him. He couldn’t die, and neither could the bezeri.

  “I wasted lives on you!” Aras yelled. It wasn’t true: the isenj had still needed stopping, bezeri or none. “It was for nothing…”

  A stoma opened in the glassy mantle and Aras heard an intake of air, a wet slurping sound like a human sniffing loudly.

  “This…our world.”

  The sound was like hearing imagined voices in a wind, enough to recognize but still fleeting. Ade had a tight grip on Aras’s arm as if to pull him back.

  “Your ancestors—”

  “We…not sorry…thanks…”

  The stoma shut in a wet slap, and the bezeri flopped back into the water, splashing Aras as it spun in the shallows and shot out towards the ocean with a powerful jet of expelled water that nearly knocked him off his feet.

  Ade kept him upright, a fierce two-handed grip on his arm. “Easy, mate.”

  “It can speak.”

  “C’naatat. Well, that proves it.”

  “It regrets nothing. It learned nothing.”

  “I know. I know.” Ade was dragging him back to the shore, with that same patient, soothing tone he used when Aras was sobbing and grieving for Shan. “Doesn’t matter, mate, it doesn’t matter at all now.”

  They stumbled up the beach. Aras turned and looked back at the sea and then sank down on his knees. Ade grabbed his face in both hands and made him look up.

  “Aras, look at me.”

  “And Josh—”

  “Aras, shut up and listen, mate.” Ade changed before him: a voice that had to be listened to, eyes impossible to avoid, the embodiment of certainty. “Not wasted. None of it. The isenj had to go. Josh had to pay. There’s more to this planet than the bezeri. You didn’t waste a single life, believe me you didn’t, and I’ve been there, remember. I’ve lost my mates, I’ve lost men under me, and I know the difference between pissing away their lives and having to spend them. Got it?”

  They’d swapped memories. Aras knew what Ade had seen and done. “Why does it feel so terrible, after all these years?”

  “Aras, I asked if you understood.” Ade gave him a little shake, hands still clamped to each side of his head. “Say it.”

  “It…it was not wasted. We had to act.”

  “You had to protect the planet.”

  “I did.”

  “Good.” Ade let go and then hugged him fiercely. “It’s been a shitty year all round. Too much all at once, mate, that’s all. Shan, the bombing, the war, now this.” Ade was so utterly reassuring that Aras let himself believe him. Ade knew. “Let’s go home. Fuck the bezeri, and fuck everything.”

  “This is still my—”

  “You did a five-hundred-year tour of duty. I think that’s enough for anyone.” Ade stood up and actually hauled Aras to his feet. He wasn’t a big man even by human standards—Shan was taller—but he could somehow shift Aras. “Come on. Let’s catch up with Shan. That’s what matters, the three of us.”

  Aras walked back towards the Temporary City with him, not speaking, but seeing Ade in the new light: as a sergeant, not just a soldier, but a man who could hold a squad together and get them through the unimaginable. Aras had been a soldier too. The bond with Ade was precious to him in more ways than he’d imagined. He still seethed inside, but Ade had taken the edge off his agony and now he felt foolish at his outburst.

  “I should have had better control,” said Aras. “I apologize.”

  “I’ve done worse,” said Ade. “And shit myself, as well. Besides, you got some intel out of it. We know the bastards have metamorphosed.”

  Bastards. The bezeri had now been relegated into the catchall of the unwelcome along with Rayat, the FEU and at least some of the isenj. Ade knew how to compartmentalize the world to cope with it.

  Aras would do that too, then. He was no longer the bezeri’s ally. And until he heard them say that they regretted their past, and that their future would be different, then he couldn’t rule out being their enemy.

  The Temporary City, Bezer’ej: holding cell

  “I heard,” said Rayat, arms folded. “Why don’t you just let her do it?”

  Esganikan looked him over, trying to see what it was that made the usually controlled Shan Frankland descend into rage when she saw him. There might have been scents and minute gestures that irritated a human female, but Esganikan couldn’t tell. Rayat simply appeared to her to be calm and almost amused. That might have been the trigger. He wasn’t showing deference.

  “Is that a bluff?” asked Esganikan.

  Rayat’s brow puckered briefly. “No, just that it’s inevitable.”

  “You’ve given up this plan to acquire c’naatat for your government to use.” She s
niffed the air. He was pungent with human sweat, underlaid with that sharp scent that might have been fear or anger. Human scent signaling was far more blurred than a wess’har’s. “This is a radical change.”

  “I’ve seen how dangerous it is, and I can work out what we’d do with it,” Rayat said wearily, as if he’d repeated it too many times to Shan.

  “You could have done that before you became infected.”

  Rayat looked up at her, eyes wide and finely lined at the corners. His hair was streaked with gray. Shan said he was younger than she was, but he didn’t look it. “It was something to be quarantined for safety then,” he said sharply. “Once you can remove it, it becomes a viable weapon. That’s the difference. And you’re working on removing it, aren’t you?”

  “We are. You know this.”

  “My apologies. That was rhetorical.” He pushed his fingers through his hair and gave his head a little shake. “C’naatat has its downside in its current state. You can use it to keep people alive and make them adapt to any environment. Fantastic. Miracle cure, a means to survive in hostile environments—medicine and the military would welcome it. But it’s also an incurable disease that spreads relatively easily in humans and that would create population chaos. Nobody dies. I could give a long list of all the disasters inherent in a growing and pretty well immortal population, but I don’t have to, do I? The wonder cure has its curse. An incentive not to use it. Take the curse away, and it becomes usable with the deceptive appearance of no consequences.”

  Esganikan listened patiently. She made adjustments for human motivation and saw his point. Humans didn’t accept that it would always be a curse for them. They would feel they could get away with it, as Shan put it, that the problem would be someone else’s.

  “Are you pleading for mercy in some oblique way?”

  “Sorry?”

  “This is why you irradiated Ouzhari. Asset denial.”

  “Removing temptation, yes. But forget mercy. You know what I am?”

  “A spook.”

  “You understand the psychology of my profession.”

  “That you accept risk of death.”

  “That’s one way of putting it.”

  Esganikan had been warned: he was a slimy bastard, Shan said, and would attempt to manipulate her into doing his bidding. She tilted her head a little further to see every pore and hair on his face, to search for lies.

  “Do you want to go home, Rayat?”

  He let out a breath. “Of course I do. Everyone does, don’t they? You do too. This isn’t home for any of us.”

  It isn’t. It’ll be years before I see mine again. “You can’t go home until we can remove the organism. That could be a very long time indeed. Are you ready for that? Is that why you say I should let Shan kill you instead? Like the wess’har troops who took their own lives rather than go on?”

  Esganikan wished she hadn’t sent Shan away. The woman could read the signals from Rayat: she couldn’t. He raised his eyebrows and his lips parted, but it meant nothing to her. She’d never seen the expression on Shan’s face and so she couldn’t match it to a state of mind.

  And Shan had warned her he could feign emotions anyway. Normal humans did that a great deal, so a c’naatat- infected human might even be able to feign scents. Shan could suppress hers totally.

  “The good thing about c’naatat,” Rayat said slowly, “is that at least you can wait for the cure. The thing it buys you is time.”

  Esganikan felt those words were different. She weighed them carefully and saw the germ of an idea.

  “Shapakti is a diligent researcher,” she said. Time. I never thought I was greedy, but time… “He’ll make progress, I know. He managed to remove it from human cells once, but the organism adapts.”

  Rayat looked suddenly interested. “I have my theories.”

  “You’re a scientist by training. Shan told me so. You might help him.”

  “The lab rat puts on the white coat, eh?” He made a little snorting noise, gazing in defocus towards the light shaft. “Good old Frankland. I’m a pharmacologist, actually. Easier to train a scientist as a spy than to train a spy to pass himself off as a scientist.”

  “Yes or no?”

  “Yes.”

  “You really do believe it’s too dangerous for any human to possess.”

  “At every level. Wess’har might have the moral fiber to use it sensibly, but humans generally don’t.”

  Esganikan looked into his face for a few more moments but Rayat said nothing further. He didn’t even appear uncomfortable at her gaze: no licking of lips, no blinking, no little twitching movements. She thought of Shan’s advice on resisting Rayat’s manipulation, and decided that so far she had only given him a stay of execution, and something to keep him occupied while Shapakti worked on a consistent and non-lethal method of removing c’naatat.

  I don’t want to slaughter the bezeri. And I also want to be certain that they’re environmentally irresponsible before I have to.

  She didn’t enjoy killing. If humans thought that wess’har killed without caring, they were wrong.

  But dead, as Shan put it, was dead.

  Esganikan walked back along the passage that sloped gently up to the exit, catching the faint remnant of Shan’s scent on the air: no emotional state, just that waxy human smell blended with wess’har female musk and a woody freshness. Shan kept her anger to herself.

  Wess’har could use c’naatat wisely, and humans couldn’t.

  C’naatat bought Rayat time.

  He was manipulating her. He was trying to flatter her, and to get her to take him home, where he could deliver his prize.

  He wouldn’t go home, then. She’d make sure of that. But if he thought he had insinuated his wishes into her mind, he’d taken her for a stupid malleable gethes.

  All he had given her were ideas. She wouldn’t give him a way home.

  4

  Pacific Rim UN delegate Jim Matsoukis has called for those responsible for authorizing the bombing of Bezer’ej to stand trial for war crimes. The Federal European Union denies sanctioning the attack and says those responsible were handed over to the wess’har.

  Matsoukis attacked the denial as “not just a lie, but a lie that’ll have repercussions for everyone on the planet.” He added: “If the wess’har authorities are still calling for us to punish whoever authorized the bombing from this end, then they know something we don’t. And why deploy a ship with cobalt bombs unless there was an acceptance that the FEU might use them?”

  FEU space vessels routinely carry nuclear ordnance including ERDs—“neutron” bombs—and cobalt devices for emergency sterilization of biohazards in orbital laboratories. Cobalt is banned for weapons use by international treaty.

  BBChan update, February 2, 2377

  Chad Island, known in the bezeri language as Nazel

  “I don’t care,” said Lindsay.

  “I hurt,” said Saib.

  “Hurt is better than dead. Keep moving. Where’s have you been, Keet?”

  Chad was an island of stony coastline with rock pools like the shores of Constantine, not a textbook idyll like Ouzhari, its southernmost cousin in the chain. There were no icing-sugar beaches giving way to dunes tufted with glossy black grass: it was a silver gray island that looked less magical and more plainly grubby when Cavanagh’s Star—Ceret, Nir, whatever—dipped behind clouds. Lindsay tried to imagine the geology that created the variety of shorelines as she coaxed Saib and Keet inland and further away from the sea. They inched up the exposed sand between the outcrops of rock, sliding through gaps with an audible wet sound like someone peeling off plastic gloves.

  “Seeing the Aras,” said Keet.

  “What?”

  “I see Aras. I tell him, not sorry.”

  Lindsay stopped dead, furious. “I told you to steer clear of the Eqbas camp. You idiot. Don’t do it again.” There was nothing Aras or anyone else could do about the bezeri now, but she felt advertising their changed p
hysiology was a bad move anyway. “You took the lamp? Where is it?”

  “No, I speak!”

  Brilliant. That’ll get back to Shan in no time. Ah well. “You stay away from the mainland and the Eqbas patrols unless I say otherwise. Understand?”

  Keet lapsed into silence, and as he moved he looked uncannily like a sulky teenager scuffing his heels in protest.

  “No change,” he said.

  “You don’t want to change, or you can’t change?” She stopped and confronted them, still mirroring her spoken words in light signals. Learn, damn you. It was a real speak-and-show lesson. The two elderly bezeri settled in heaps of translucent mantle and exhaled like air escaping from a tire. “Look, I can live under water. And you’re moving across dry land and you’re talking. You’re making sounds. C’naatat will do whatever you need it to do to keep you alive.”

  “Want to,” said Keet sullenly.

  “Take back this planet. Defend it.”

  “With forty?”

  “Forty’s all you need if you’re immortal.”

  She turned and walked towards the fringe of brilliant yellow and amber mossy bushes that marked the edge of the beach. The moss formed mounds that were waist high in places and looked soft and insubstantial until her arm brushed against one and it scratched her.

  Doesn’t matter. You’re indestructible—more or less.

  “Hurt too,” said Keet behind her.

  But they still followed her, through the rigid moss bushes and into heathland dotted with coppices of chocolate brown stubby trees with trailing branches that appeared to grow back into the soil. The ground beneath her feet felt slightly spongy. She paused, remembering the bogs on Constantine with their shifting organic roads, mats of vegetation afloat on quicksand and constantly, dangerously changing. Indestructible or not, she didn’t fancy testing her new powers of recovery in liquid mud populated by God only knew what kind of creatures.

  “Go careful,” she said. “Follow where I tread.”