Ally

by Karen Traviss

  “That means diverting resources from environmental management. It’ll cost health—lives.”

  “So will allowing the Eqbas to remodel our world the way they see fit.”

  “You’re the one who asked them for targeted biological weapons.”

  “Perhaps that’s another capacity we need to develop for ourselves.”

  Rit felt the push from her ancestor, the rattling quills unheard for eons urging her to protect the colony. The transition from dutiful wife to politician with her own agenda was effortless and immediate.

  “Ralassi,” she said. “I can’t do anything more here. See if we can find a route back to my chambers.”

  Shomen Eit turned on her sharply, beads rattling and shimmering. “You’re walking out when you should be coordinating the defense of this nation?”

  “I can do nothing here.” But I can do plenty elsewhere.

  “Your husband had a sense of duty.”

  “It killed him, too.” Rit resisted the bait. “And it’s a poor excuse for an argument to remind me that I’m a widow and that I only hold his office through a loophole in the law.”

  She gestured to Ralassi and moved towards the door, imbued with a confidence that had nothing to do with her own life’s experience and everything to do with an ancestral memory of an alpha warrior in a primitive colony mound who knew what had to be done to save the future.

  The street-by-street fighting had now spilled over the Northern Assembly border. Slow going, hand-to-hand fighting in a shattered, tight-packed maze of streets: she had time. She had to act now.

  “You betray this government by abandoning your position,” said Eit.

  Rit wondered if he was going to attempt to bar her way, but he didn’t. Ralassi must have thought so too, because his lips were pulled back in that precursor to a serious threat she’d seen once or twice before. Like isenj, ussissi had a capacity for suddenly snapping in extreme situations and plunging into violence.

  They said ussissi always became one united creature, a superbly coordinated mob when they attacked, but Rit had never seen it, and her memory told her that none of her ancestors had seen it either.

  The doors closed behind her. In the long stone-lined corridor outside, shellfire seemed distant. The clerical staff were still at their posts, collating information being sent back from utilities and hospitals, and they didn’t need a cabinet minister to implement a disaster plan. Isenj were orderly. They were planners and engineers. They could always stave off a crisis.

  And that is our weakness. Sometimes, the crisis has to happen to restore sanity. Sometimes, we have to start over.

  “What are you planning?” asked Ralassi. He was the last ussissi left in the building as far as she could tell.

  “Call Esganikan Gai.”

  “Without consulting your cabinet colleagues?”

  “Yes. And without consulting them again, I’m also asking her to invade Umeh.”

  Ralassi’s beaded belts, strung over one shoulder, slapped and cracked as he walked. Rit wondered if the ussissi penchant for beading had come from contact with isenj culture. If it was, it was the only element they’d borrowed. He said nothing for a few paces and then slowed to a halt.

  “You remind me so much of Minister Ual,” he said. “But be sure you’ve thought this through, and not simply continuing a flawed plan out of love and duty.”

  “I have,” she said, and thought of her sons and what she had to do. “Now find me a quiet and secure place where I can call Esganikan Gai.”

  Ralassi made no comment, neutral and unjudgmental again, and trotted off down the passage with his claws skittering on the polished pale blue stone. There was no stone like this left for quarrying, just the composite recovered from endless rebuilding over millennia. In Rit’s ancestral memory—now painfully raw and fresh, kicked into higher conscious levels of her recall by the crisis—she was suddenly aware of how fast, how geometrically overcrowding had accelerated so that one year Jejeno seemed a busy city and the next it was noticeably oppressive. It was long before she was born.

  I know what I think. This isn’t my instinct to kill to protect food sources for my young. This is rational, this is seeking a new solution because none of the others work.

  Rit made her way down the passage to a chamber where staff were coordinating rescue teams. They acknowledged her with clicks and whistles and went straight back to their tasks.

  She approached one of them sitting at a desk with a planning map in front of him that covered the whole desk.

  “I have a request for you,” she said quietly.

  “Yes, Minister?”

  Rit reached out to the schematic of the south side of the city and tapped it until the scale changed and the southern border with the Maritime Fringe appeared. Then she focused on the junction of roads that had been obliterated by an explosion in a previous attack, and that was now a park.

  “Speak to the emergency authority in this area,” she said. “And make sure they protect the dalf tree there.”

  “A tree…”

  “A tree,” she said. “And one dearly bought.”

  F’nar, Wess’ej: agricultural zone

  “…and the general asks him what his ambition is, and the squaddie says, ‘To get the brush before those other two bastards, sir.’”

  Jon Becken straightened up from his spade to receive his applause, one arm held wide and a silly grin on his face. The Royal Marines’ detachment—five of them, if Shan didn’t count Ade—roared with laughter and went on hoeing the soil between the rows of onions. If they didn’t grow it, they didn’t eat it; life here was uncomplicated, but the marines were trained to live off the land, so vegetable gardening represented an easier break.

  Shan and Nevyan strolled between irregularly shaped crop bed, carefully designed to harmonize with the wild landscape. They were contained in a nearly invisible biobarrier to maintain an Earthlike growing environment.

  “I didn’t hear the rest of the joke,” said Nevyan.

  Shan shrugged, thinking of Aras. “Just as well.”

  “So why did you leave Bezer’ej so soon?”

  “There’s something I haven’t told you.”

  Nevyan emitted a faint whiff of acid irritation. “You used to be open with me, my friend.”

  Yes, I did. “Lindsay’s infected the bezeri with c’naatat. There’s something wandering around on land and Shapakti’s taken a look at the cells it left. And one of the bezeri seems to have acquired the power of speech.”

  Nevyan froze for a moment and Shan found herself a few paces ahead of her. She stopped and turned.

  “Speech,” said Nevyan.

  “Yes, apparently it told Aras it wasn’t sorry for the bezeri’s record.”

  “This is appalling.”

  “Nev, I tried to go after Lin, but I’m dependent on Esganikan for transport, resources, everything.”

  Wess’har didn’t bother to control their tempers, but Nevyan almost tried. “Dealing with infected isenj on Bezer’ej was hard enough. Now we have to deal with c’naatat hosts who could be anywhere on land or sea.”

  Deal with. So Nevyan had defaulted to worst scenario too. The bezeri had fallen from grace in an instant, and it had nothing to do with their shameful past.

  “We might not have to eradicate them.”

  “You mean kill. Say kill.”

  Shan had thought it over a thousand times in the last all-too-brief days, searching for the clear line that divided black from white. “Okay, if they don’t breed, they’re just a tragic anomaly. If they breed or spread c’naatat, they’re a problem.”

  “C’naatat never spread accidentally among Bezer’ej native species. When non-native life arrived, it spread.”

  Large, mobile hosts. Aras had said that once. C’naatat liked them. Like any organism, it sought the best vector for reproduction. Spacefaring aliens were as good as it got.

  “It likes difference,” said Shan. That wasn’t very scientific, but she took a gues
s that c’naatat assessed potential hosts and latched on to what it didn’t recognize as the locals. “It likes novelty. It’s a collector of foreign DNA. Look at me, or Aras.”

  Shan held out her hands and they rippled with bezeri light. Nevyan reeked of agitation. “I don’t care what Esganikan wants. I have to assess this.”

  “That means taking a team back to Bezer’ej, and the bezeri don’t want you there now.”

  “The bezeri may no longer be in the best position to judge,” said Nevyan, “and none of the other life-forms under threat from them can ask us for help as they once did.”

  Shan watched the delicate fence between Targassat’s philosophy of non-interference and the old Eqbas doctrine of policing collapsing before her eyes. She searched for her own line, and failed. And having a choice, must make it. Targassat had made hers, and Shan would too.

  “If they’re not breeding now,” said Shan, “there’s no telling what changes will occur in the future. I think we have to wipe them out.”

  The suggestion of genocide slipped out as easily as any decision she’d ever made. Shan felt it lock into her memory as a moment she would be able to recall in photographic detail for the rest of her life; she was staring almost unseeing at the marines in their dusty lovat green T-shirts and combat trousers, their conversation a murmur on a breeze heady with coconut-scented weeds and pungent onion, and she knew that any of those smells or sights or sounds would trigger this moment in her again. It wouldn’t be a happy memory.

  Is it because I see the bezeri as animals? Would I do this if I believed they were people? Is this even my thinking at all?

  For a woman whose self-awareness was as solid and brutal as a steel bar, genetic memory was a cruelly unsettling trait. But her rational brain said, Yes, stop it now, stop it before it gets worse than you can imagine. Aras was thinking it too.

  Nevyan held her hands clasped in front of her. “We could ignore this. The bezeri will never trouble us. But others may yet arrive to trouble them, as the gethes did.”

  Genies like the promise of eternal life didn’t get shoved back into bottles that easily. Nevyan was right: it wasn’t just the ecology of Bezer’ej. It was the lure and value of c’naatat too. There was almost an inevitability that other off-worlders would come after it, just like humans had.

  “But if we kill them, I’m still around. So are Aras and Ade. I’m the root cause of all this contagion.”

  “And you’re my friend,” said Nevyan.

  Shan groped for the line again and couldn’t find it. She felt nobody expected her to, either, as if spacing herself was so unutterably noble that it relieved her of all future obligation to do the right thing. It didn’t. It just showed her how easily it could be done again if she really wanted to.

  She didn’t.

  F’nar was beautiful. The whole planet was magical, and this was her home, and she didn’t want to die. The bezeri must have felt the same way. As choices went, it stank, and Shan knew she could no more reconcile the reality of controlling c’naatat with the morality of who should have been forced to surrender it than she could reconcile human and wess’har ethics.

  “Shit,” she said.

  “And Rayat?”

  “Word association, eh?” Even now, Nevyan could still make her smile. “Shapakti’s using him to find a way of removing c’naatat and leaving the host alive.”

  “If that could be done, it would relieve us of the burden of destroying the bezeri.”

  “And make it a viable weapon. At the moment, it’s still carrying a WARNING: MAY CAUSE GLOBAL DISASTER sticker.”

  “We have no way of knowing if it can be done, and when, and in that time—”

  “Are we talking each other into genocide, Nev?”

  “That might be your word for it.”

  “We’ve still got some way to go. We have to find them first, then work out how we kill what we find.”

  I killed people I felt were a problem to society, and had others kill them. I’ve been here before. It’s only a matter of numbers.

  Motive didn’t matter. Outcomes, always outcomes. Shan’s morality hadn’t shifted. She’d just started applying it more widely.

  She stood in silence with Nevyan and watched the marines for a while, then turned and walked slowly back towards the pearl city and a late lunch with an increasingly distressed Aras, and an Ade who was definitely—and touchingly—playing the morale-boosting sergeant to him.

  Nevyan’s sense of burden was tangible. She was still just a kid, not really ready for all this crap. Was anyone?

  Shan wondered how things would have turned out if she had told Eugenie Perault to stuff her mission and gone home. She had no way of knowing if anyone else would have made the situation unfold differently, and she was past the stage of thinking she was the only person fit for the job.

  “There’s never going to be a return to normal, is there?” she said.

  Nevyan dug her hand into the front pocket of her dhren. “Life is in constant change, but we rarely notice it.”

  She took out her virin, the communications device that Shan had never really got the hang of. It was pulsing with color and images that Shan couldn’t see clearly from the side angle. But she could certainly smell the agitation and anxiety rolling off Nevyan; the young matriarch held the virin in both hands now, moving her fingers over it as if lathering a bar of soap, and suddenly sound emerged from it.

  “Nevyan Chail, we have unauthorized ships approaching Bezer’ej.”

  Had the isenj more of a fleet than the Eqbas had thought, or had elements of the Eqbas task force turned up ludicrously early? It couldn’t be a human fleet. Shan took out her swiss and opened the link to Ade without even thinking. Something in her head said emergency and she switched over to autopilot.

  “What ships are these?” said Nevyan. “Why are they here?”

  “They speak eqbas’u, chail, and they say they’re Skavu. They’ve come to back up Esganikan Gai’s Umeh mission. They say they are her allies.”

  5

  If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.

  NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI, 1469–1527

  The Exchange of Surplus Things, F’nar

  Aras could smell the excitement rolling off the marines—including Ade. He wasn’t sure if that was the correct interpretation of it, but they smelled strongly of humans who wanted very badly to go somewhere and do something. They watched the screen set in the wall of the Exchange as if totally oblivious to everyone else in the hall.

  “This is a bloody funny way to run a briefing,” said Ismat Qureshi. Eddie Michallat sidled up to her: it had long been obvious that he found the marine attractive but he appeared to do nothing about it. Aras thought that was a wasted life, and humans had such a short span that it saddened him. “Like having your comcen in the supermarket for everyone to gawp at.”

  It was more than that. Nevyan was having a heated discussion with Esganikan via a communications link, and with the risk of jask removed, they were both expressing their anger fully. The hall smelled of mangoes, and nobody—not even the ussissi packed in between the curious wess’har who had come to watch their leaders argue—could miss the pheromonal signal that Nevyan was the dominant matriarch. The other senior matriarchs of the city—Nevyan’s mother Mestin, Chayyas and Fersanye—stood behind her but said nothing. Shan kept her scent locked down and stood beside the marines with her arms folded, jaw muscles clenching and unclenching.

  “Who are they?” Nevyan demanded. “Who are the Skavu?”

  “They’re from Garav, a world we restored several generations ago. It’s two months from this system.” Esganikan had the tone of someone who felt she was owed a little gratitude. “They became enthusiastic converts to a balanced way of life.”

  “After a war?”

  “A war I fought in, yes. They became allies, and I need personnel right now.”

  “And I need to know more about them.”

&nb
sp; “They’re dedicated and they’re thorough. They don’t compromise.”

  It sounded like euphemisms a human would use. Aras watched Mart Barencoin close his eyes for a second and mouth something that looked like Oh shit. The two engineer-trained marines, Sue Webster and Bulwant Singh Chahal, turned to look at him and their expressions matched his; dread.

  Nevyan—a head shorter than most matriarchs, built more like a male—persisted with her onslaught. “Why did you not warn us they were coming? Why allow them to simply arrive in this system unannounced?”

  “I was told they were weeks away,” said Esganikan. “And they announced themselves. You want the isenj problem addressed? Then this is how I do it. I accepted their offer of assistance.”

  “When? You told me nothing of this.”

  “I took the decision a matter of days ago.”

  “The Skavu must have embarked many weeks ago to have arrived so soon, long before you accepted their offer, which makes them overconfident of their welcome.”

  “But they’re here, and they have a job to do, and they’ll obey my command.”

  “How many troops?”

  “In this wave, ten thousand.”

  Nevyan hesitated. “They can’t be billeted here.”

  “No, I plan to accommodate them on Bezer’ej.”

  “That’s impossible. The Temporary City was never designed for those numbers.”

  “Nor was it designed for two thousand of my troops, either, but you made no complaint about that when you summoned us.” Esganikan’s face filled the screen, cutting off the top of her bobbing copper-red plume. Aras couldn’t argue with her logic, but he shared Nevyan’s alarm at a wholly unknown race being pulled in as support in a system where there were already too many tensions. “I’ll vouch for the Skavu. I’ll keep them under control, and I guarantee they’ll do no harm to Bezer’ej. They are not your problem. They’ve come to deal with Umeh, and they won’t trouble you.”