He sat with his head in his hands as Serrimissani lifted the craft clear of the ground and the blue grasses dwindled beneath in a faint haze of heat and swirling debris. The most she could do was put her arm around him.
What have I come to?
Why can I take mass murder in my stride now? What happened to the Shan Frankland who’d have cheerfully gone to war over one genocide, let alone repeated ones?
She had no idea. She was back in the maze, looking for a line that told her where it was okay to be c’naatat, still breathing, and where it was a threat to life across the system and beyond. Being willing to die once didn’t relieve her of the obligation to keep asking the question: it made it more pressing.
Her only answer was that she was now more steeped in wess’har thinking than human, and that was the line she had crossed.
F’nar: the Frankland clan home, upper terraces
“You don’t have to knock, Eddie.”
Eddie stuck his head around the door just to be on the safe side. “I didn’t know if you’d be swinging from the chandeliers or whatever it is you get up to together.”
Ade showed him two contemptuous fingers, grinned, and beckoned him in. He was indulging in the unmarinelike activity of making something out of dough. “Shan and Aras are on Bezer’ej.”
“And you’re baking cakes.”
“Bread. After a fashion.” Ade paused mid-knead, forearms displaying formidable muscle. “You’re not yourself, mate. What’s wrong?”
“Still in the shit with News Desk.”
“Shan feels bad about that, mate. She knows she shouldn’t have barged in and let them know she wasn’t dead.”
“Doesn’t matter in the global scheme of things, one journo versus a few million dead isenj.” Eddie decided to stop there. He wanted to confide in Ade but that was too close to looking for sympathy for his noble sacrifice, and that was wrong. “I came to tell you that your pet brigadier has been on the UN portal asking after you.”
“Shit.” Ade punched down the dough and tore it into three parts, slapping each down in turn and kneading two at a time, one with each hand. It was quite impressive. “I never got back to her on Rayat.”
“Academic, mate. They want him back. They can’t have him. And you can’t make them honor a deal to restore your lot to full Cub Scout membership.”
“I know. But old habit and all that. Officer says jump, you jump.”
It was easier to tell them Rayat was dead. He was, in any sense of the word. “No trouble patching you through from here.”
Ade twirled the dough into skeins and began plaiting them. “Got to talk to the Boss first. Not my call.”
Eddie dumped his jacket on the sofa. The upholstery still looked white to him, even if a c’naatat saw it as peacock blue. Sometimes this cave of a house felt like home, and sometimes it felt like alien territory, but he missed those months when he was part of the family here even if it had been one in mourning.
“So what’s the business on Bezer’ej, then?”
“Getting the Skavu to fuck off home.”
“Really?”
“Yeah,” Ade said. “Nevyan’s done a deal with Rit to keep the peace if they leave.”
“Well, count me in for waving a few flags when that happens. They’re as bad as I think, aren’t they?”
“Worse. Total fucking savages.” Ade was relatively mild in his dismissal of enemy forces, considering what he’d seen in his career. But the Skavu had hit a nerve in him. “I’d kill the lot of them without a second thought.”
“It’ll be bad enough thinking that they’ll still be out there somewhere.”
“The good thing,” said Ade, “is that a round to the head kills them like any other arsehole.”
He laid the plaited loaf on a sheet of mottled gold glass to rise, and the two of them went out onto the terrace, perched on the broad wall overlooking the city beneath and shared a beer. The brew was getting worse each time. Ade needed Eddie’s expert hand in the process. But it was a beer shared with a friend, and that was all that mattered.
“So what you doing?” asked Ade.
“Getting stuff together for Esganikan about Australia.”
“Ooh, she’s made you her spin-weasel, then?”
“Just analysis. Like reporting, only with an audience of one.”
“Like BBChan 88.”
“Hah bloody hah.”
“Well, when you get home, you won’t be Our Man-In-F’nar, will you? You’ll be grubbing around in the dirt with the rest of the hacks if you don’t grab your advantage with Attila the Parrot.”
Eddie hated the reminder. Home. There were things back on Earth that were hard to get or nonexistent here—food beyond the basics, sex, and a sense of permanence—but the thought of walking away from it almost panicked him. It wasn’t like leaving Turkey or any of the other countries where he’d worked. Once he left Wess’ej, he couldn’t just hop on a flight and visit the place again, catching up with old friends and tutting about how much the place had changed. He couldn’t even call them, not easily anyway.
It was twenty-five years’ separation, and 150 trillion miles. As soon as he landed on Earth, thinking he’d been gone a few months in the bizarre squeezing of time at near-light speed, anyone he called back here would have lived a generation’s worth of experiences.
They might even have forgotten him.
“I thought you’d be spending time with the detachment,” said Eddie. “I know they’re on Mar’an’cas, but you could get up there a few times a week for a hand of cards.”
“I know,” said Ade. “I’m practicing not having them around. Getting used to not having them there.”
“Ah.”
“I’m going to miss them.”
“Or you could make the most of the time you have with them. You’ve still got a few years, if they don’t decide to go back with Thetis.”
“Eddie,” he said gently, “what about the hundreds of years after that? Maybe thousands.”
Ade didn’t say much after that. It seemed like he was thinking for the first time about what being immortal for all intents and purposes actually meant.
“If they could remove c’naatat from you,” Eddie asked, “would you take the option?”
Ade chewed the idea visibly. “Not until I’ve had the life I should have had.”
“Do you think they can do it?”
Ade swung his legs off the wall and stood up, stretching his arms behind his back.
“I think they can. Shapakti did, once. But the bloody thing learns.”
“That’s bugs for you,” said Eddie.
It took him a matter of seconds to think through the implications of a countermeasure for c’naatat and the impact it would have. He added it to the list of stories that were five star, but not worth the shit.
The list of those grew longer. He had another beer instead.
The Temporary City, Bezer’ej: command center
“We have exactly the same pressures here as when we last spoke,” said Sarmatakian Ve. “Except now you have ten thousand competent Skavu at your disposal that you didn’t have before.”
Esganikan took the return call from Surang in front of the duty crew as usual. There was nothing an Eqbas commander would keep from her comrades. Nor did she feel any compulsion not to argue with the senior matriarch’s adviser in front of them.
“Skavu are a liability. They’ve already given me cause for concern here. I can’t risk deploying them on Earth.”
“Can you command them or not?”
“You know I can.”
“Then those are your extra resource.”
Esganikan had been under fire, and she was deterred by nothing; but the idea of Skavu troops on Earth filled her with a dismay so powerful that she couldn’t take it in her stride at that moment. And this couldn’t be solved by jask. So she argued.
“I can’t allow a fleet of Skavu to wait on Bezer’ej for several years with nothing to occupy them, and I strong
ly advise against using them on a mission like Earth.”
“They’re all you have if you want a task force inside of six or seven years.”
Six or seven years. In the context of the time she’d spent in suspension, and the displacement of light-years, it was a short time. But I don’t have this time. I’m older than the rest of the crew. I need to start my life, however late. And for Earth—every year counts too.
“I’ll ask you one more time to reconsider, Sarmatakian. The mission is under-resourced as it is. Adding unsuitable troops to the situation will compromise it.”
“I don’t have a choice. You can accept the Skavu, or reject them and carry out the mission understrength. Or abort it, and I know you won’t do that. We want Earth restored before it becomes a much bigger task.”
The gene bank had waited generations. It could wait longer. But Earth couldn’t, and even the delay between leaving Bezer’ej and planet fall would be marked by deterioration and new problems. Some things were better done sooner than later.
“If I accept the Skavu, then I still face having them hanging around this system longer than they’re welcome. This isn’t one of our project worlds, Chail. This is our own people. However different, however unlike us they are in many ways, they’re wess’har, and we have a duty to them.”
“Then,” said Sarmatakian, “you had better leave for Earth as soon as you can.”
“But what about the rest of the specialists and the remaining assets you promised me?”
“We still commit them. They’re in transit. As there’s no need now to assemble at Bezer’ej, we can deploy them direct from their current locations, which means they’ll start arriving in the Earth system approximately a year after you do, and at intervals thereafter. Purely from my memory, that should give you nearly a full fleet on station within four years of arrival.”
There was no argument. She was right: the resources added up, and all Esganikan had to offer by way of counterargument was that she didn’t like Skavu troops. If she didn’t take them, another commander would have to.
Earth needed intervention: and because of the distances and delays involved, this almost-accidentally assembled task force was the best hope it had. It was her problem to solve.
“Very well,” she said. “I’ll prepare the mission for early departure.”
The operations room staff were quiet, but their scents didn’t seem as agitated as hers. Perhaps it was relief to be getting on with the job, having been denied an opportunity to be useful on Umeh.
“That means rushing through the planning,” said Hayin. “We can leave a clean-up crew on Ouzhari, though, can’t we?”
“Yes,” said Esganikan, crushed. She envied Shan’s ability to conceal her scent. She felt obliged to explain her anxiety to all who detected it. “You know I would have liked more time to prepare, and I don’t like Skavu, but I work with what I’m given, because that’s my duty.”
“The sooner we deal with Earth,” said Hayin, “the sooner we’re back on Eqbas Vorhi.”
There was a general murmur of satisfaction from the crew and a pleasant scent to underscore it. Esganikan desperately wanted to share it, and failed. She went back to her cabin in the detached section of her ship, asked Aitassi not to disturb her, and knelt down to think.
She’d run out of time. She didn’t have troop strength on her side. She had a c’naatat host as a prisoner, insufficient preparation work done, little liaison established, and a fear that if she had overestimated Wess’ej’s capacity to handle the isenj, then she would have another clean-up task on her hands when she passed this way in—how many years’ time? Fifty, sixty, a hundred?
She couldn’t yet tell how long the Earth mission would take. Most missions took five to ten years to stabilize a planet and leave crews in place with the native population. Earth was too far from the core worlds to expect any wess’har or ussissi to want to remain there.
For a moment, she thought the unthinkable.
It was an if only thought, the kind humans had.
The one difference was that this wasn’t an impossible wish to erase events and live a different set of consequences. This was a calculated gamble forming in her head.
Shapakti was a brilliant biologist. Back home, there were many more like him. He would find a lasting solution to removing c’naatat, or they would, but someone would find it, and all she needed was time.
Time could be bought, at a price.
If the Targassati wess’har here could make c’naatat work for them in a crisis, and not be destroyed by it, then so could she.
17
Police are investigating a third killing in Brussels after a senior FEU civil servant was shot dead at his home. He’s not been named, but the FEU has denied claims that he was an intelligence officer. Earlier this week, a junior minister in the Foreign Office and a Treasury official were also found dead in what police have described as a “professional assassination.”
BBChan 557
Chad Island, Bezer’ej
“Hi, Lin,” said Shan. “You’ve let yourself go a bit, haven’t you?”
Aras’s heart pounded with dread, and Shan went into what Ade called her smart-arse mode. That was how each reacted to a tense situation. Hands on hips, Shan appeared ready to reach behind her back to pull a weapon that wouldn’t do a c’naatat-infected creature any damage at all. Nevyan watched in grim silence.
Aras had a cluster of small charges, enough to reduce a few eggs to fragments. That was his priority, and it broke his heart. Shan nudged him, and he called on his human part, the dishonest and destructive monkey, to get him through the next hour. He was sure he was doing it for the right reasons, irrelevant as motive was to Wess’har.
“We’re here to do a deal,” Shan said. “Me and Nevyan. It’s for your own good.”
“It always is,” said Lindsay.
Nevyan studied the assembled bezeri with fully dilated pupils. Most of them were here now—no, all of them, Aras counted—and they seemed at a loss; they made no attempt to repel Shan. They simply studied what was studying them.
Bezeri hadn’t had enemies in hundreds of generations, at least not enemies who confronted them directly. Their enemy was invisible, the by-product of the ambitions of surface-dwelling animals, but it killed them just the same. They didn’t look ready to die quietly again.
“What’s the deal?” asked Lindsay.
“Stop the bezeri destroying other species,” said Shan. “Teach them to manage their resources. And stop them breeding.”
“What’s in it for…us?” Lindsay asked. She stood her ground, a glassy figure shot with lights, and Aras barely recognized her now. “Under the circumstances, being nearly extinct and all that, your proposition sounds a little one-sided.”
“Remember how they got in this mess?” Shan said quietly. “Two twenty-four-carat decisions by you, Commander I-Know-What-I’m-Doing Neville. One more bad call doesn’t undo the damage.”
Lindsay looked at Nevyan. “So what have you got to say for yourself? Or do you do everything Shan tells you?”
“If the Eqbas or their Skavu troops knew what was happening, they’d eradicate you all.” Nevyan might have looked quiet and compliant to a human, but she was pure steel. Aras calculated the route he would need to take to find the eggs nestled in the foliage. “When the Eqbas leave, we take over again, and if I feel you’re a hazard to this planet, I’ll eradicate you myself.”
“Okay, I see the threat,” said Lindsay. “But I’m having trouble spotting the deal.”
“Keep the bezeri in check, both in their habits and their population, and we leave you alone.”
“So, they’re frozen like museum exhibits. Proud remnant of a mighty culture. Roll up and see the living fossils.” Lindsay had adopted Shan’s hands-on-hips stance, a clear indication of who she thought she was arguing with. “We have no incentive, then.” She turned to Aras. “You’re awfully quiet.”
Of course I am. I’m about to take lives that hav
e done nothing wrong, that can’t have done anything wrong, not yet. But if I can’t have children, then neither must these bezeri.
“Your incentive is a sustainable planet,” he said. “Because even c’naatat can’t live indefinitely if the planet is overrun. Sooner or later, you end up like Umeh, nothing but yourselves filling the world. At some point, you need to stop.”
“Forty-four isn’t that point,” said Lindsay. She was looking around the clearing; some bezeri were up in the trees, keeping watch. Her eyes were visible in that gel face, and her darting glance suggested it might have already occurred to her that this was an ambush of sorts. “No deal.”
Shan looked down at her boots, the brown riggers’ boots that Ade had gone to so much effort to find for her. “I killed my own kid,” she said. “I aborted her. If I’d kill my own flesh and blood, Ade’s child, to stop c’naatat hosts proliferating, I won’t have any trouble finishing off this whole colony. Will I?”
Her. Aras hadn’t known that. An isanket. That hurt.
Shan could always silence Lindsay. She had now. Lindsay’s shock, however altered her body had become, was obvious. She took a long time to find words again.
“You’re not lying, are you?”
“I wish I were.”
“You. Of all people. At least you’ve experienced what I’ve been through now. You understand, then.”
Shan let out a dismissive snort. “Cut the shit, Lin. Don’t pull the we’re-all-grieving-mothers-together crap. I’ve not come here to fucking well bond with you like some support group. Get the bezeri to shape up, or I’ll finish the job you started.”
Shan’s brutally worded ultimatum told Aras that she was still hurting a great deal more about the abortion than she let on. The more crude her dismissal, the deeper the wound. Lindsay lapsed into brief silence. The two woman handled their assorted ills and pains in very different ways.
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