“Yes ma’am,” he said. “Bennett, ma’am. Former Five-Ten Troop.”
There was always several seconds’ delay even with the instant relay of the ITX. The last relay of the entangled photon link was a little way from Earth and had to limp the last leg at light speed. Ade counted.
“Brigadier Harrison,” she said. “I see the service might have dispensed with you, but you haven’t dispensed with the service.”
“Is that what you wanted to discuss with me, ma’am?”
“Yes. We need to do some administrative resolution if you’re all returning to Earth at some stage.”
Here we go. Ade avoided catching Eddie’s eye even in his peripheral vision. “You’ll have to be specific.”
“The Defense Ministry reopened the case. The senior Judge Advocate feels that the hearing was wrongly convened and that the finding of guilt can’t stand.”
Ade chewed the words carefully and extracted a faint and grudging flavor of apology from them. It was a start.
“What does that mean exactly, ma’am?”
One, two, three, four, five…
“That you may be eligible for reenlistment with your good names intact, with no loss of privileges.”
He waited. Qureshi and Eddie, leaning against the wall behind the screen, were doing a good job of holding their breath. The pause was far longer than the delay on the ITX router.
“Ma’am,” he said at last. “What’s the condition attached?”
Harrison lost her glacial detachment for a moment and the quick compression of her lips said she was reluctant to tell him.
“My intelligence colleagues tell me one of their number is still in theater and he hasn’t reported in for some time. They’d like to talk to him.”
“Dr. Rayat? No need to be discreet, ma’am. Everyone knows he’s a spook, including the Eqbas.”
Shit. He’d used the present tense. That was no big deal for Harrison, but Qureshi thought Rayat was dead. Oh shit.
“Very well, and I make this offer on behalf of my colleagues, who appear to be above me in the food chain these days…find Rayat, and we can discuss your futures.”
“They want him back.”
“Yes.”
Shan would have been proud of him. “Do they think he’s misbehaved, or are they just worried for his safety?”
“One never knows with the intelligence community.”
“Very good, ma’am. I’ll report back as soon as I can.”
“Please do, Mister Bennett.”
Ade killed the link before Harrison got the chance to. The silence hung over the room, building like a storm.
“Mister Bennett, my arse,” Ade muttered. “Don’t try to psych me, missus.”
“Oh shit,” said Eddie. Ade willed him not to say the c’naatat word in front of Qureshi. “That does it, then.”
Qureshi folded her arms and shrugged. “What do we do, dredge up the Rayat bits and bag them? Do you remember where you dumped him?”
“How badly do you want to be reinstated, Izzy?”
“Pretty badly, if only to avoid having war criminal on my résumé. Won’t proof of death do?”
“How do we prove that?” Jesus, this was getting stupid. Ade couldn’t keep it up much longer. First rule: you trusted your mates and they trusted you. You watched each other’s backs. Arses were covered. You’d put your life on the line for them because they’d do the same for you. Armies ran on that simple act of faith and personal trust, and if you didn’t live that principle, you weren’t just fucked—you were scum. “Izzy, go and round up the lads and find somewhere private we can talk. This is messier than it looks.”
Qureshi paused for a second then walked out without a word. Ade wrestled with reality. Eddie stood next to his seat and put on hand on the back of it, leaning slightly over him.
“You can’t tell anyone about Rayat. Or Lin. They haven’t asked about her, have they?”
“Eddie, they won’t want Lin back in the shape she’s in now.”
“I thought she was alive.”
“She is. She’s just changed a lot.”
“Oh God.”
“C’naatat does that.”
“What happened?”
“Christ, Eddie, she’s been living under water. Use your imagination. It’s not her I’m worried about. It’s that bastard Rayat.”
“Do you know where they are?”
“Maybe.”
“Ade, I’ve known about this since Christmas and I haven’t said a word. I learned my lesson with Shan. Do you reckon they know about Rayat?”
“How could they? He hasn’t had any comms access since he caught the bloody thing.” Ade couldn’t recall if Shan had explained exactly how Rayat and Lin had acquired c’naatat: as usual, Eddie had put two and zero together, made an intuitive leap, and worked out that there were now two more carriers. Ade wasn’t going to fill in the details. “And he isn’t going to be handed over to anyone, so we’re stuck. Problem is…look, I have to tell them. I can’t do this to them. They have to know why I can’t deliver Rayat.”
Eddie straightened up and adjusted his bulging pockets. “And you’ve got no guarantee that the Ministry’s going to keep their promise. Jesus, if they want him back—it’ll be between twenty-five and seventy-five years before they get their hands on him. Nobody who can sign an authorization is going to be around then, and even if they make you all Major-Generals with knobs on today, what’s to say that’ll be honored when you get back?”
“They,” said Ade. “When they get back. I’m not going. You know I can’t.”
“What a fucking mess.”
“Not if they’ll forego their chance to get back in.”
“What else are they going to do?”
“You reckon any Earth government is going to argue with Esganikan ‘Read-My-Lips’ Gai? There’s another way to do this.”
“Yeah.” Eddie began counting off on his fingers. “One, tell them he’s dead. Two, wait until you get back to Earth and challenge the verdict in the courts. Three…”
“You’ve got a three, have you?”
“Give me time.”
“You can’t cover things up forever, least of all with people you’re close to.”
“You’ve never had an affair, I take it.”
“Fucking right I haven’t.”
“You think Shan tells you everything?”
“I know she does.” Oh yes. I was pregnant and now I’m not. She could have kept it to herself, but she couldn’t live with the secrecy. Sometimes people unburdened themselves to share the shit, and sometimes they just did it because it was right at some instinctive level. “And…well, sex with c’naatat carriers…okay, we share genetic memories. If an event is big enough and bad enough, you can’t hide it.”
Eddie looked as if he was going to bite back with some cynical disbelief, but his expression sagged into sad realization. “You’re a matched pair, you two. Bloody scout’s honor, I-might-be-some-time, death before dishonor.”
“I like honesty. It’s easy.”
“I didn’t say it was wrong. Just that you’re an endangered species. Ade, you’ve got to discuss this with Shan. You have to.”
The door swung open with some force and Sophia Cargill loomed in the doorway.
“I hate to interrupt, gentlemen, but shift it, will you? Got work to do.”
“We’re gone,” said Eddie.
As they walked across the open plaza in the center of the dome, Ade marshaled his thoughts and he fumbled in his pouch belt for the virin, the wess’har communications device that he was only just beginning to get the hang of. He tried to get a link through to Shan, but the sequence of finger positions defeated him and he slowed to a stop to concentrate on it. He ended up getting the Eqbas ship on station above him.
“I must speak to Shan Chail,” he said in his best wess’u. “I have a problem.”
“We’ll contact her,” said the bridge officer. “Did you understand that? We…will…call…her
.”
“I understand.” Just about. “Tell her it concerns Rayat.”
Eddie stared at Ade as he slid the virin back in his belt.
“You can do the two voices.” Eddie sounded envious. “That’s amazing. I’ve tried for months to do it.”
“It’s the genes in me,” said Ade, embarrassed. “It’s nothing clever.”
Ade began walking again, dodging bots and small loaders. He wondered if Cargill had a realistic view of how much the Eqbas were prepared to transport, and how much the colony on Mar’an’cas could deal with. But that wasn’t his main problem right now: he had to decide how to make things right for his detachment, the men and women who were his personal responsibility whether they were still technically marines or not. They’d do no less for him. Wherever Qureshi had found a secure space, she’d spotted him because he heard a sharp whistle and looked around to see her beckoning to him from a service area.
There was a time when all he had to do was glance at the living computer grown into his palm to see the vital signs of the whole detachment, all of them linked through the bioscreen system implanted in them—data, communications, health monitoring, the works. Even Lindsay Neville had one. Now c’naatat had purged him of it and all the implanted links in his eyes, ears and organs, another reminder that he wasn’t really one of them any longer.
Sometimes there wasn’t much difference between being surgically loaded with battlefield data systems and having an alien symbiont. Either way, it separated you from those who didn’t have it.
The detachment was holed up in a storeroom. Chahal was making a careful examination of the bagged plants, pressing his finger into the soil and trickling water into the drums from his ration bottle.
“So, Rayat’s arse for our honor,” said Barencoin. He sat on a cupboard, swinging his legs idly. “Shame the fucker’s dead. Why didn’t you tell them that?”
“Because we need to discuss this,” said Ade.
“Nobody will remember us anyway by the time we get back to Earth. It’s what we do to survive when we get home that matters.”
Sue Webster—solidly unflappable, rosy-cheeked, endlessly cheerful, and very adept at silent kills with her fighting knife—swatted him across the knee as she edged past him. “Mart, what difference is your employment history going to make when the Eqbas show up on Earth, eh? Think about it.”
“The adventure ends one day, mate,” said Barencoin. “We’ve all got maybe sixty or seventy years to fill when we get back. But we’re from another age. Earth’s an alien world to us now. You’ve got this illusion that we’re still part of it because we can watch the fucking telly and check our bank accounts when we can get a link out. But we won’t fit back in. We never will.”
Sue shook her head in mild exasperation. “You saw what was happening to this planet when we dropped below the cloud cover. It’s doomsday. All change. New order. Might be paradise, might be hell. Won’t be the same as it is now, though. Job prospects on Earth are going to be the last of your worries.”
“So if we found Rayat’s decaying remains and waved them in front of the ITX cam,” said Becken, “then the Boss Spook says that’s nice, thank you very much, we just wanted to know what happened to him out of curiosity so we can update our pension mailing list, and you’re now back in business, no hard feelings. Yeah? Is that the size of it?”
Ade glanced at Qureshi. She was silent, sitting on a table with her arms around her knees. He could almost see the replay in her brain, the way she was reliving the conversation from the time he shut the door and started taking to Harrison. Maybe it was his guilt, which was always willing to stand a double watch, that made him think she was slowly working it out.
Chahal joined in the involuntary head-shaking. “Whatever they say now, in twenty-five or thirty years’ time, none of those promises are going to mean shit.”
Becken snorted. “That’s one thing we can bank on.”
Ade wanted clarity. He got it with Shan and now he expected it from everyone. “So what do you want me to do? Use the lever we have, such as it is, or tell them to fuck off?”
“We don’t know what they want.”
“Find Rayat.”
“Well, he’s in the Cavanagh system. He can’t be anywhere else. Job done. And that takes us where, exactly?”
It bought Ade some time. He could seek clarification, a nice Shan-type phrase that didn’t translate into calling Harrison a spook-puppet.
“Do you want the finding of guilt overturned, or do you also want to continue serving?”
There was a pause. The marines all looked at one another. Ade could guess: they knew what they really wanted—for life to go on as if the last couple of years had never happened—but they didn’t understand the price, or if the bargain would be kept.
Qureshi found her voice at last. “Let’s find out exactly what they want us to do. Because they know something that we don’t. Rayat had something they want, or he did something they need to check on, or whatever, but they need him.”
Ade teetered on the edge of doing the right thing, the decent thing, because if he couldn’t trust special forces troops with this information—if he couldn’t trust comrades—then he couldn’t rely on anyone, and he didn’t want to have that same cold mistrustful core growing in him that he’d felt at the root of Shan’s memories.
“He’s not dead.” Ade blurted it out. “And they can’t possibly know if he’s dead or not.”
“Aw, shit…” Barencoin was instant anger. “You fucking liar, Ade. You told us he was dead. And Neville too. You said you handed them both over to the bezeri.”
“I did.” No point dragging Aras into it. It wasn’t the poor sod’s fault there were two extra c’naatat on staff. “He’s not dead, and neither is Lin.”
“But Bezer’ej is loaded with human-specific pathogens. The wess’har answer to asset denial. And the sea’s a bit damp, yeah? Am I understanding you right?”
Sometimes Barencoin’s chain of logic was so like Shan’s it was painful, right down to the language. “You got it.”
“So either the pathogen is bullshit, or those bastards have got c’naatat.”
I should have just said I lied and that I’d chickened out of killing them. I could have done a good job of that. Really convincing. “It’s a cock-up all round.”
“This just gets better with every passing day, doesn’t it?” Barencoin slid off the cupboard and strode slowly around the room, rubbing his face with both hands. He was one of those very dark blokes with pale skin that showed permanent five-o’clock shadow, and combined with his aggressive body language it made him look like a bad-tempered pirate on his day off. “Eddie, I notice you didn’t call your news desk to hold the front page or whatever shit it is you do. You knew?”
“Yeah.” Eddie sounded utterly unmoved. Ade realized that he’d probably come up against some real bastards in his career and an angry Barencoin wasn’t going to make him back down. He didn’t even give in to Aras when he was throttling the life out of him. “But if you’ve seen one c’naatat, you’ve seen ’em all. Old news.”
“It’s not fucking funny.”
“Since when did you become the environmental conscience of the FEU?”
“It’s another layer of shit we don’t need. You bloody sure they don’t know he’s got a dose?”
Ade had now had enough. “No, they don’t. So shut it. And they don’t know about Lin either. Rayat’s just dropped off their radar and they want to know why. And now you know that if the next thing they want is for us to bring him home in exchange for clearing us, the answer’s no can do.”
“Christ.”
Chahal and Webster just stood up and got on with packing the food and plants into crates they could lift between them, and everyone seemed to have run out of things to say. Eddie patted Ade’s back and bent down to give Qureshi a hand wrapping plants.
You’ve done it now. And Shan’s going to go ballistic.
Ade knew that as soon as he le
ft the room, they’d start arguing, and saying what a shit their sergeant had turned out to be, and how they’d trusted him. Right then Ade didn’t give a toss about the Corps, or his honor on some record at HQ, but that he’d fallen from grace with people who weren’t just friends or co-workers or any of that civilian shit, but were brothers and sisters in a way that maybe even Aras wasn’t.
That was his honor: the respect and trust of his mates. Sorry didn’t begin to cover it. He felt desperately alone and wondered what had happened to his solid dull common sense.
And it still wasn’t over. Now he had to face Shan again. He’d lost too much ground with her already and she’d tear him up for arse-paper for letting anyone know about Rayat and Lin.
“I’m going to wander around and see what else I can lift,” he said, and as Eddie went to follow him he held up his hand to indicate he didn’t want company.
“You going to ask Harrison a bit more?” said Becken. “Work out what their game really is? Because if they know he’s got a dose, or that they can get it anytime from Ouzhari, then there’ll always be some bastard trying to get out here to grab it. Shan said that, didn’t she?”
Becken didn’t have to add that Shan took the airlock option rather than hand the parasite over to Rayat and his spookmasters. It was one of those ironies so huge that it had almost lost all meaning.
“I’ll wait a few days.” Ade shut the store door behind him and wished that c’naatat hadn’t given him any more useful extras, because his hearing was acute now, as acute sometimes as Aras’s. Before he moved out of range, the last words he caught were Ismat Qureshi’s.
“…whatever happened to good old Ade?”
Good question. He didn’t know either.
He hadn’t even told them that the bezeri had a shabby history of genocide, and that at least one of them now carried c’naatat. There was only so much of his own inadequacy and bad judgment he could dump on them in a day.
Call me back, Shan, he thought. He’d face the consequences of his own actions, but reassurance from someone who believed in him would have been good right then. Jesus, woman, I need to hear your voice.
Ally Page 19
