“Well, then?”
Ade took her hand and squeezed gently. “All over me, please. And thanks for checking.” She was perfect: she understood every anxiety a bloke might have. “I’ll deck Mart if he says anything out of order.”
“It’s the thought that counts.”
His stomach knotted and that luscious weight settled on his chest, making him catch his breath. He loved her to distraction. Being with her was effortless: there was no mystery to her, no game with hidden rules to work out. He felt secure despite her occasional anger.
“I was really worried you’d be embarrassed to be seen with me.”
Shan shook her head with an exasperated snort. He knew when she was having difficulty broaching a subject and she was close to that now. “Shit, Ade, I love you. What makes you think I’m ashamed of you?”
She’d never said it before: love. He knew she didn’t like saying the word. It caught him off guard and he found his mouth working independently of his brain. “I’m just so ordinary.”
“Oh, yeah. I forgot that. Everyone freefalls from space and shoots aliens. When are you going to do something different?” She edged up to him on the bench and gave him a ferocious hug. “Ade, you’ll never be ordinary as long as you’ve got a hole in your arse. You’re a commando, for fuck’s sake. I’ll smack anyone who even looks at you the wrong way, okay?”
That was all he needed to hear. Being stranded twenty-five light-years from Earth among warring aliens with some parasite living in his guts was nothing, absolutely nothing. He was home now; and he had never been home before. When he thought she was dead, he’d made himself stop thinking about what might have been, but now he could stand on that edge and imagine what he would have lost. There was no other word for it: he mourned her at last. It was a frightening, bittersweet, unbearable panic. He threw his arms around her and pressed his face into her neck, feeling like he’d just been reunited with her after a long absence.
“What’s up, sweetheart?” she said.
“Just feeling normal,” he said. “And I don’t take normal for granted.”
He thought of what lovely kids they could have had—fierce and clever daughters, loyal and protective sons—and put the idea out of his head.
Bezer’ej
Rayat rejoiced in the simple pleasure of learning a new skill. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d had such uncomplicated joy; but talking in light was probably on a par with learning to walk, if only he could remember how that had felt.
Share? he asked. He offered a handful of what he thought of as glass worms to Keet.
You are not what I expected, said the patriarch. I expected you would try to kill us again. We heard about the infant too. The isenj killed us accidentally. You sought us out to kill us.
Infant? He probably meant the juvenile bezeri that Parekh had thought was dead. She found it beached; she dissected it. She ended up in a body bag because she ignored the warning not to take organic samples. So humans were not only genocidal, they were child-killers. It was a tough image to improve.
I can’t put this right, said Rayat. And sorry won’t help.
Keet slipped the worms up into his mantle. There was a beak in a fold of the flesh at the front, not within the ring of tentacles as it would be on a terrestrial squid. Somehow the arrangement seemed more like a mouth and made him that much more…human.
Saib says Leenz says the same thing. Sorry does not help. She grieves for her child buried here. There is no sorry that can stop the grief.
Rayat watched but he couldn’t see the progress of the worms into Keet’s digestive system. Lindsay was doing her mourning late. That was the trouble with mood enhancers; you had to stop taking them sooner or later, and the reality that had driven you to them was still waiting patiently, drumming its fingers, happy to pick up the conversation of misery again.
How did people complete the grieving cycle?
Seeing where their loved one had died was important.
So was seeing the grave.
David Neville’s grave was on Constantine, and Rayat needed to go there.
It was an opportunity. He felt both satisfaction at its convenience and the slight worry that he’d already blown his credibility with Lindsay the last time he maneuvered her into doing his bidding. She was remarkably malleable. Most people were, once you worked out their motivation. He’d talked her into taking nuclear weapons to Bezer’ej and he’d talked her into acquiring c’naatat, and she knew it. Now all he wanted to do was have a legitimate excuse for visiting Constantine; a pretty harmless act for her to collude in, but she was twice bitten. She might refuse this time.
He’d try anyway. He had to. He turned to see where she was.
Lindsay had taken an interest in the maps and Pili held them in front of her, caressing the smooth surface of the shell with one tentacle as if pointing lovingly to familiar features. Rayat could make out words in the lights that shimmered in her mantle: my clan, my home, our hunting grounds.
And this town had a name. He couldn’t translate it into English; he could have used the signal lamp, but suddenly he didn’t want to. He wanted to understand one bezeri word as a bezeri did, simply by feeling the resonance of that pattern in his mind. At a deeper level the word became town; he left it at that and savored the pattern and color and movement.
Town.
The rest of the bezeri came out of hiding now and moved around the settlement. The more Rayat explored it, the more it looked like russet clay jars thrown on a potter’s wheel and then piled up while still soft so that they sagged together in a random honeycomb. And now that he’d started to find positive elements in life underwater, he started to appreciate the beauty of his new environment. It was the blues and pinks and violets that struck him most. The carnival colors almost glowed; they painted everything from weed and coral-like growths to a surprisingly wide variety of animals.
There were no large predators, according to Keet. The biggest seemed to be what Lindsay called the killer whelks, irsi. One of them edged into the settlement on its own, skittering along the silt on its front claws and gouging a wake behind it with its long tail. It looked more comical than menacing. But Rayat could imagine what a pack of them might be able to do. He swam up to it and it shied away from him, propelling itself off the seabed with spurts of water jetted out beneath it. Then it paused on an outcrop, testing the water with a fringe of bright orange projections as if it was playing an invisible piano.
“They don’t have a lot of bottle,” said Lindsay. “You can scare them off with a bit of noise.” She shook her rattle hard. The whelk took off like a missile. “See? They’re all mouth and trousers.”
“Odd that there aren’t any big predators.”
“The whelks from hell are big enough.”
“But water supports big bodies. There ought to be something that fills the niche of sharks and orcas. Even whales.” Rayat thought of the land animals of Bezer’ej, or at least the creatures he’d seen on Constantine. “Maybe a marine version of the sheven.”
“Great,” said Lindsay. “They’d be fun.”
“I’ll ask Keet.”
“I don’t like the idea of a carnivorous plastic bag at the best of times, let alone a whale-sized one.”
Lindsay was almost chatty. Bezer’ej had a number of species that were no more than transparent sheets of digestive material that enveloped their prey; alyats could fly, and sheven lived in the bogs and streams. Yes, the idea of a bigger marine version was unsettling. Being engulfed and digested was a terrifying thought.
“Perhaps the bezeri will teach us to pilot those podships one day,” said Rayat.
Lindsay’s tone hardened a little. He could hear it even under water. “I didn’t think we planned to do any traveling.”
“Face it, you’re going to want to visit David’s grave sooner or later.” He planted the idea almost without thinking. But he was certain it must have crossed her mind. “And it’s almost a hundred kay to Constantine. That’s
a bloody long swim, and you don’t know what’s out there.”
She stared at him. It must have been sunny on the surface; the colors around him were vivid and Lindsay’s uniform pants looked navy blue again rather than black.
“Since when did you worry about my welfare?”
“You think I want to live on my own down here? Fascinating as the bezeri are, I’d prefer to have human company, even if it tends to get a little whiny at times.” There was no point in looking too friendly. She’d get suspicious. “Lin, we’re stuck here. Let’s try to get on.”
Too late. She had that wary look, head tilted back a little. “Why didn’t you refuse c’naatat?”
“Because I didn’t want to die. It’s a pretty consistent motive in organisms. If you recall correctly, we were about to be tipped off a raft into the middle of the ocean at the time.”
“Yeah.”
“And why did you insist I come along to do the undead thing, then?”
“It was time you paid for what you did.”
“Well, then we both know why we’re here, then. Let’s cut the crap and concentrate on being productive.”
They looked at one another in silence—both sound and light—and then Lindsay dropped her head. It was odd to watch someone’s body language under water; it was as if they were moving in air, but slowed down and exaggerated.
“You’re right,” she said. “I do want to see David’s grave, if there’s anything left of it.”
“The nanites were probably confined to the area within the bioscreen. It’ll still be there, probably.” What was it like to lose a kid? Rayat looked for the worst experience he could recall, his greatest pain, and tried to superimpose his grandfather’s death on the situation. Think how she thinks. Feel how she feels. That was how you got to know a target and deal with them, by thinking as they did. Lindsay needed to feel David’s death wasn’t her fault. “If you’d had a termination, you’d feel just as bad. At least you gave him a chance.”
“Well, you seem to be making progress with Keet. I’ll leave you to get around to the subject of how we visit Constantine.”
We.
So far, so good. She needed support. Damn, sometimes he felt he did, too. He thought of patting her on the shoulder but reconsidered, and went back to sit with Keet and exchange illuminated words while the other bezeri went through the stack of azin shell records.
One of them had two sheets of shell and a collection of small pots the size of cups. She coated one slice of shell with something sticky, spread from one tentacle, and then sprinkled sand in very fine lines with another arm. As Rayat watched, a sand image grew before his eyes.
So that’s how they do it.
The bezeri’s precision astonished him. But this was how they had written in ancient times, and this one still had the skill. She was making a record; maybe she was tallying the retrieved maps, listing them. Or maybe she was recording how alien air-breathers came to the Dry Above and destroyed them and all hope.
Rayat didn’t want to ask. He just watched, mesmerized by seeing an intelligent squid create a document as a child might have glued glitter to a greetings card. When the shell sheet was covered in symbols and color, the bezeri wiped the sticky substance around the edge of the shell and pressed the two layers tight together.
Rayat still thought the price had to be paid, but he genuinely regretted wiping out a species like this one. He withdrew to the rocks to collect food, and wondered again why there were no other large animals in this part of the ocean.
F’nar, Wess’ej: Nevyan’s home
Nevyan’s library had become Eddie’s edit suite.
It was quiet, it had a comms screen set in the wall, and she’d let him keep a table and chair in there. The jury-rigged furniture was square-built and very unwess’har, but made out of old vegetable crates he’d hammered together, so it was recycled and therefore admirable according to Giyadas.
She was very pleased to have him back. She sat with him for hours, simply absorbing whatever it was she absorbed to be able to stun him with her perception.
It was a comfortable den; with the lighting dimmed, and his various screens, cams and keyboards spread out, it felt just like editing footage back home. All he needed was a big mug of coffee and a stack of pizza and he could have forgotten he was 150 trillion miles from Earth. When the marines from the detachment dropped in for a chat, sometimes with beer, the place almost had a real buzz. He missed working in an office. You could work from anywhere in the galaxy, and he’d proved it, but he was one of those people who liked a crowd around him. There was only so much monkey that technology could take out of you.
He imagined a pizza and wondered how he was going to cut the rushes from Esganikan’s attempt at diplomacy into something fresh enough to tempt a jaded news editor’s palate.
“Eddie.” Giyadas stood at his elbow. “Eddie, I have something for you.”
“Pizza, doll? With extra mozzarella?”
“That’s cheese.”
“Yes.”
“Coagulated excretions.”
“Don’t ever get a job waiting on tables, will you? You’re not cut out for it.” He gave her a hug and she seemed not to mind. “What is it, then?”
She reached forward and touched the screen to activate another ITX feed. “Esganikan sends this. She says she’s sorry you weren’t there and she hopes this is enough.” Eddie was used to Eqbas recordings now. He tried to work out the orientation of the static image and decided it was an aerial view and needed rotating 90 degrees right. He tapped the icons on the control strip and the image flipped and began to play.
“Oh shit,” he said.
It was the ten seconds of perfectly steady on-board footage from what had to be a fighter’s cockpit that most disturbed him. It showed nothing graphic. The craft was making a straight run down a road flanked by typical isenj high-rises, solid and continuous as canyon walls, and the dark river flowing between them resolved into masses of isenj troops. But although he didn’t see any missile strike in those ten seconds, his memory and imagination filled the gaps in advance. He knew what was coming.
The fact that isenj blood was straw-yellow plasma and their body parts were hard to recognize in the debris didn’t save him from that jolt when the unidentifiable image he was looking at snapped suddenly into something called person. He felt that same awful combination of revulsion and reluctance to look away. For a second, he saw Minister Ual’s thin blood on his clothes again. The columns of troops and vehicles had nowhere to run: they couldn’t even turn. Had the footage been of a human war, BBChan would never have transmitted it.
Giyadas said nothing. It crossed Eddie’s mind several minutes too late that a kid shouldn’t see that kind of footage, but she was wess’har. They had strong stomachs.
He had one of those once, too.
“Your bastard news editor won’t be angry with you now,” said Giyadas primly. Oh yes, she absorbed everything he said. “You missed nothing.”
He looked down at her, certain he’d protect her like she was his own, and hoped he’d never see her vague resemblance to an Eqbas.
“No,” he said. “You got it all.”
12
FEU Defense Minister Margit Huber today refused to comment on allegations that she wanted to stage a military strike against Australia over the Eqbas crisis to “effect regime change.” Civil service unions claim a leaked memo shows that Sinostates president May Yi Jun threatened to withdraw FEU access to Sino airspace and bases if it went ahead. An aide now faces charges connected to leaking information.
BBChan 557, December 24 2376
Eqbas ship 886-001-005-6; in detached fleet mode, Northern Assembly airspace south of Jejeno
President Pirb repeated his call to arms as the Eqbas fighters pounded his military bases. Esganikan couldn’t understand it, but Aitassi translated the audio message that was being relayed across the messaging system in each of Umeh’s four landmasses.
“He repeats his plea fo
r other nations to commit forces to attacking Wess’ej and reclaiming Bezer’ej.” One of her clan wandered onto the bridge and gave her a bowl of fried fruits: it had been a long watch. “I wonder if he knows his range and limits.”
“In which order of priority?”
“It varies each time he repeats it. Either way, it’s academic.”
The gethes had got it right with mass media. Esganikan wished for an isenj version of Eddie, with news programming she could tap into for the state of play across Umeh quickly and easily. Isenj preferred their complex network of personal links, only some of which bothered to use images. The nearest they had to media was the collective gossip of loosely defined groups.
“Where exactly does Umeh space begin?” asked Hayin.
“Where I say it does.” Esganikan stood with her hands clasped in front of her. She found herself trying Shan’s resting stance with hands on hips, but it was uncomfortable for wess’har shoulders. “No isenj vessel needs to go beyond Tasir Var. Beyond that, if they head towards Wess’ej space, open fire. Tell them so. They’re confined.”
It wasn’t if. It was when. She knew it; isenj liked gestures.
Joluti kept an eye on the displays that monitored the locations of the detached ship components. A squadron of fighters was formed in the hangar, ready to intercept isenj long-range craft heading off-world, and a small shuttle was inbound from Bezer’ej and Tasir Var. It carried a tree.
“How many variants of the pathogen was Shapakti able to create?” asked Joluti.
“Seven distinct strains.”
“Guesswork.”
“Without a complete genome record, how can we know who lives where? Isenj must interbreed to some extent.”
“They do realize they’ll have to accept the risk of deaths among their own people, don’t they?”
“I’ve explained that to them.”
“A sad fate for the civilization that spread an entangled photon network.” Joluti reached out and grabbed a chunk of vegetable from Aitassi’s bowl. “To be reduced to this.”
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