“We go,” said Saib imperiously, assuming his Sahib role. All he needed was native bearers, and the image of the colonial hunter would have been complete.
The impression most bezeri gave her now was of being amorphous big cats, able to spring and leap with great muscle contractions. Some had retained their translucency and others had developed camouflage-like mottling. A dozen of them rushed out of the settlement, crashing through bushes and splashing into the surf. Lindsay braced herself and went in after them. She was used to submerging but the first rush of cold seawater into her nose and the sensation of her gills opening from slits that ran parallel with what were once her ribs was always a second or two of near panic.
Once she passed that stage, she was an aquatic creature again, using bioluminescence to speak. Once she’d clung to vocalization underwater: now it seemed irrelevant.
Once. Her transforming exile was weeks, months—not years.
The bezeri also seemed to find the amphibious transition effortless. They dived to the shelf a hundred meters out to sea where they had assembled podships and began sliding into them. The pods—translucent organic material, grown from plants—were a lot faster than swimming.
The ships also reminded Lindsay of the challenges facing the bezeri ashore if they were to become capable of holding the planet against any colonizers who would inevitably have space flight capability. The ships were powered by a natural seed pod ejection system that had been selectively bred for generations into something that could eject a laden pod ten meters or so onto dry land and get it back into the water again. The technology wouldn’t be much use on land.
Okay, they’re ticking things off fast the evolutionary list now: walking on dry land, talking, building settlements. The industrial revolution will have to wait. First—they need to discover fire.
Lindsay could pilot a podship, and the old skills she learned as a fleet aviation cadet came back, along with memories of training for collision repair at sea; standing in a training tank with a damage control team, slipping in fast-rising ice-cold water, trying to get panels secured across breaches in the mocked-up hull in darkness, simulating a real incident on board a stricken ship.
I could stroll that now. Cold water’s easy, I can detect objects without even using my eyes. I’d be really useful as part of a ship’s company.
C’naatat would be a gift for the military, and for any industry needing to send humans into hostile environments. Shan said it would get used. She’d always known: and so had Rayat.
Was he dead now? He always had a plan on the go. Lindsay worried at a vague level that Rayat would always be trouble until the day she saw his corpse and watched it rot. Nothing short of that would convince her.
She shook aside the speculation. Bezeri knew their way around the islands in pods without charts and Lindsay trailed after them, trying to tap into the natural navigational skills that were now within her. Bezeri were also more adept at landing on beaches than she was. It was a largely uncontrolled beaching exactly like the first time she’d come ashore in a pod, using simple friction to slow her, but this time she skidded a long way up a smooth sandy cove. The pod shot past the rest of the flotilla, narrowly avoiding a collision.
Lindsay slipped out of her pod in a flood of water and waited for a rebuke from Saib for her lack of seamanship, but none came. He poured from his vessel like a jar of drained pickles and slid onto the beach, leaving an indentation, and swung across to the foot of low cliffs.
“We have never been beyond here.” He shimmered his happy colors—amber, blue, violet—and thudded up to the cliffs, followed by Carf and Maipay, as if looking for a path inland. Lindsay followed in the wake of churned sand that they left. “We must visit all. We must go to the furthest…north.”
“Yes, north,” said Lindsay. Their rate of language absorption varied a lot, and Saib was the most articulate by far, but the others were at least speaking some English. “The mainland.”
“Are there sheven there?”
“There seem to be sheven or creatures very like them everywhere.” Lindsay jogged past them, and the sun cast her hazy shadow ahead of her like a glass of water, dark patches and lens-magnified pools of bright light. What she saw was still basically humanoid in shape. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that. “I don’t know how plentiful they are, though.”
Clare’s cliffs crumbled into slopes of scree half a kilometer east and Lindsay led the bezeri onto a rolling plain dotted with pockets of heath and large cracked gray boulders. The island was more like Constantine. There was the same blue-gray grasslike ground cover and spiked lavender bushes that grew knee-high. Orange foliage in the mid-distance bore a resemblance to the tree-ferns that stood as an exotic alien backdrop to the rural terrestrial idyll created for the Constantine colonists by Aras. There was enough of the familiar here to prod Lindsay’s memory of a recent and almost happier time.
“You remember,” said Saib. “I remember too. Your glass on the grave.”
“So…you have some of my memories as well, not just Shan’s.”
Saib considered the question, drumming the tips of his tentacles on the ground. Sometimes he reminded her of a sarcastic and impatient uncle almost to the point of comedy, and then she’d remind herself of his reflexes and his capacity to take down a giant sheven, and the humor evaporated.
“No, this is Shan too,” he said. “Thinking of the glass colors.”
I have to get a grip. I can’t keep resenting every mention of her. Shan had seen David’s grave, of course: Aras made the glass headstone, a cluster of flowers from roses and native blooms. Did it mean anything to her, then, to surface in her memories? Whatever it was, however genetic memory functioned, Saib had expressed Shan’s recollections and almost nobody else’s. If he’d taken on her other characteristics as well, it would make him one very aggressive, self-righteous squid. And he had plenty of that attitude to start with.
Lindsay paused and looked up, searching for stabtails, the hawk-sized flying predators that were an occasional sight on Constantine. After a few minutes she saw something else that had been a familiar sight around the colony. It was an alyat, a flying relative of the sheven.
It was a different color: it was a vivid, transparent peacock blue. But blue or not, it was still an alyat. She remembered them having no color, resting in branches and looking for all the world like plastic bags scattered by a high wind. They were transparent membrane too, a single piece of digestive tract that fell on prey and enfolded it, just like a sheven did in streams and bogs. In terms of things you didn’t want dropping on you, alyats beat spiders by a long way.
“Look.” She pointed and the bezeri turned to follow her gesture. “Alyat. Flying sheven.”
Lindsay could almost see the cogs of thought grinding as the bezeri studied the creature. It was like watching a cat at a window, chattering its teeth on seeing a bird outside. They were wondering how they could catch them. Everything that moved seem to be fair game.
She was starting to realize how central hunting was to the bezeri psyche. They’d been without large challenging prey for a long time, many generations, and even millennia if she went by the azin shell records that Mohan Rayat had learned to interpret. The prospect of the chase excited them in a primeval way.
“I have not felt so well for so long,” said Saib. “I feel new.”
And then it dawned on Lindsay: not only had c’naatat enabled them to suddenly find prey that answered something deep in their psychology, deep in their genes, but it had also given them all renewed vigor as individuals. C’naatat restored the body. These survivors of an ecologically vulnerable race were all in a better state—apart from bereavement—than they had been before the neutron radiation scoured Ouzhari. In a selfish way that humans might recognize, the bezeri remnant of forty-four had seized on what was in it for them. They’d been old and slow: now they were young again.
Lindsay looked at her hands, translucent gel streaked with cartilage, and wondered if she f
elt better than before. Less than three years earlier, she’d been a promising naval officer, a commander at 26, and gambling that a rare opportunity to go extra-solar in the search for the Constantine colony would end in a quick mission report on a failed dream, and 150 years out of Earth time that would nevertheless make her a uniquely qualified officer on her return. It was a huge risk. And she had no way of knowing what was waiting on a planet that—officially, anyway—nobody knew was inhabited, let alone in the middle of a war zone.
Lindsay made a conscious effort not to look back. Three years was too far, even further than 150 trillion miles.
“We will also live here,” said Saib grandly.
Maipay ambled around, looking as if he was walking on his knuckles. “We can live all these places. We live where we want, hunt what we want.”
Their attitude was rapacious. Lindsay wondered what the frugal and environmentally responsible wess’har would think now of the bezeri, the creatures they waged war against the isenj to protect, and who had turned out to be every bit as profligate as the despised gethes. Saib and Maipay loped off, Maipay occasionally using a tentacle extended behind him in exactly the kangaroo-bounce that Pili had first used. Lindsay watched them cover the ground in a zigzag pattern. Something they disturbed flew up from cover and they went charging after it, jinking and changing course like cheetahs.
Their intoxication with their newfound strength and the instincts they’d long buried was overwhelming them. The creature, whatever it was, made its escape and soared into the sky as a dark dot and vanished, leaving the two bezeri circling and excited.
They were destructive. But it was still a big planet, and its previous predation by isenj had been repaired by the wess’har so that it seemed as apparently wild and unspoiled as before. There were only forty-four bezeri, no real threat to any ecology. Lindsay could humor them. If there was one lesson she had taken to heart in the last year, it was that she couldn’t use Earth morality as a benchmark with any degree of confidence.
She bent and collected sharp stones and dry fluffy plant fiber.
“Come on,” she said. She squatted down and formed the dry fiber into a loose ball of kindling, then held one stone in each had. “Forget the hunting. My schedule says this is your week to discover fire.”
Northern Assembly–Maritime Fringe border, Umeh
After a while, Ade stopped noticing the bodies.
The bulkheads of the patrol vessel had switched to transparency and he looked down into canyons of high-rises that looked full of debris.
The Skavu were searching for a pocket of survivors in a wasteland of the dead and dying. Ade looked up at them occasionally, just to see if he could relate to anything in those faces, and he simply couldn’t tell. Wess’har had once been as alien as that, though. Perhaps he was judging too soon.
“There,” said Kiir.
The vessel felt as if it was banking, but it was an illusion caused by the transparent bulkhead shifting position to the deck, exactly as on Esganikan’s shapeshifting warship. Qureshi and Chahal peered through the deck and said nothing, then sat upright with their rifles across their laps staring into mid-distance.
“It’s bloody millions,” said Chahal, muffled slightly by his breather mask. “Jesus, that stuff covers some ground.”
In some areas there was what appeared to be a black and brown velvet carpet. Had it been familiar shapes of human bodies, he wondered how long it would have been before he could shut it out. He waited for the isenj deep in him to react at some primeval level, but nothing emerged.
His higher brain could tell him, though. It said that he should have found this beyond a nightmare.
“What are we actually going to do when we find survivors?” asked Qureshi. “I mean, if they’re dying, then it’s—”
“I’ll do it,” said Ade. He’d done it once this week and he could do it again if it ended some poor bastard’s suffering. “But you’re picking up non-targeted genomes, aren’t you? Healthy isenj?”
“Won’t be healthy long with all those bodies decaying,” Chahal muttered.
The patrol ship touched down in the middle of a broad street paved with bright turquoise and amber images of long-extinct foliage. Ade’s brain saw shapes in the doorways as black disposal bags, but then resolved into bodies, and when the bulkhead dissolved into a hatch, the smell hit him—not the smell of decomposing bodies and shattered bowels that he knew, but something else. The forest-floor smell of isenj was mixed with something sulfurous.
Ade didn’t need a breather but right then it would have been useful. He swallowed a threatening wave of nausea and stepped out of the ship. Kiir—masked like the others—stared at him and paused, as if waiting for something.
“You can breathe this air freely?”
Ade nodded, and realized that the Skavu didn’t know all the little tricks that c’naatat could pull. Esganikan hadn’t briefed them thoroughly. Maybe that was just as well. He checked the ESF670’s scan for concealed ordnance—fat lot of use in a world that didn’t use terrestrial explosives—and covered Qureshi and Chahal while they ducked out of the ship and took cover behind the pillars of a doorway that was mercifully free of corpses. Kiir gestured towards another building. His squad started a recognizable house-clearance procedure.
“Jesus, Ade,” said Chahal. “Look. They do it almost like us.”
“Only so many ways a biped can get through a rectangular gap safely.”
It made the Skavu feel familiar. They knew what they were doing, and professional reassurance went a long way. Apart from the fact that they were surly bastards—or seemed like it—they were doing the basics that human soldiers had been doing for centuries, and Ade concentrated on the kinship rather than the fact he didn’t like them much.
Qureshi sighted up on the roofline opposite. “I want to know what happened to First, Second and Third To Die, personally.”
“Promotion must be crap.”
“This is our recruiting poster, eh? Bloody space marines.” She stepped backwards into a dark recess and there was a strawlike crunch. She froze. “Ade, what have I trodden in?”
“Hold still.” He could guess. He leaned into the recess just to be certain it wasn’t an anti-personnel device—even if isenj didn’t appear to have them—and confirmed it. It was a light-colored isenj, unusual, very small, and dead. He guessed it was a child. Maybe the isenj deep in him knew. “Okay, just step off carefully.”
“Oh, God…” she sighed.
“Jesus, they’re everywhere.”
Kiir’s squad was making its way down the silent street, door to door. Ade never assumed anything in a foreign city, but there was nothing here, no vehicles like those he’d seen when the Eqbas had wiped out a Fringe armored column. There were no vehicles here at all, and the flat fronted buildings could have been apartments or offices. Civvies could kill you as efficiently as uniformed troops, and bloody often did, so it was a bogus distinction when your arse was on the line.
Isenj didn’t seem to wear uniforms anyway.
Ade caught up with Kiir. “Sir, if you have a plan, now would be a good time to share it with us.”
“There!” Kiir barked. Something black shot past the corner of Ade’s eye and he swung round, rifle raised like a reflex. “This zone must be cleared.”
Where the hell was he going to put detainees? “Sir, who are we—”
Kiir held his weapon two-handed in front of his chest and fired. Ade couldn’t imagine how he aimed the thing, but when he looked up there was an isenj lying on the roadway in a spreading pool of clear fluid.
Ade understood now. “We don’t do that, sir.”
Qureshi and Chahal backed up towards Ade, still watching the high-rises, expecting—as he had—to be dealing with snipers.
Back home, Ade had a rule book that told him how to deal with an officer who shot noncombatants. Here, he didn’t even have a common moral framework with any of the species. His gut said stop this. But his brain said that the isenj wh
o were untouched by the pathogen would die from disease spread by unburied corpses, and the isenj had no refugee shelters. It was an impossible choice. But he made it.
Chahal turned to Ade. “We’re not doing this, are we, Sarge?”
“Fire if fired upon,” Ade said. “Find some bugger dying, finish them off if your gut tells you to. Other than that—just cover the street.”
And it wasn’t enough. He’d seen enough combat to know the gray areas, and he’d slipped around the regs and not regretted it, but this was something he’d never seen: culling. He always thought he’d handle this differently.
But the deaths here were on a scale that was too big to process.
“If I had not been told to allow you to do as you wanted, I would have shot you for disobedience by now,” said Kiir.
Ade slipped his fighting knife out of his belt. “And, sir, I’d have got up and stuck this in you to see what color you bled. Do we understand each other?”
Kiir might well have been angry but it was impossible to tell. Jesus, we go out for a quick acquaint with the new boys and here I fucking am squaring up to the CO. Ade didn’t get an answer, so he carried on down the road, foot-patrol routine, hoping that the isenj had the sense to run.
Where? This is the end of the world for them.
Qureshi moved ahead of him on point. “Now I know,” she said. “I mean, we’ve been in some hairy situations over the years and we bend the rules a bit but I wondered why people let holocausts happen, and what sort of bastards they are. You know what? They’re like me.”
The distinctive crack-ack-ack of the Skavu weapon seemed to be coming from all around them now. There were other squads operating.
“I’ve got nothing to lose, Izzy. You and Chaz thin out, and call Shan for extraction.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. It was a bloody long way back across the border on a carpet of bodies. “I’m happy to slot Kiir. Life’s cheap here.”
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