City of Pearl

by Karen Traviss

  Green Rage. He took out his database and set it to look through the BBChan library download, already seventy-five years out of date, but perfectly adequate for this purpose. He retreated to his cabin—which truly was just a cube—to inspect the results. Shan Frankland, Chief Superintendent, Anti-Terrorism Unit, and a police enquiry into the collapse of Operation Green Rage. Yes, that was it. She had been in charge of Op Green Rage six years ago—no, about eighty-one years now, but no matter—and spent millions in taxpayers’ money on an undercover operation but the eco-terrorists had got away. She had been found “negligent” and transferred out of ATU. There was a lot of material to read.

  He began scrolling through the pages, too engrossed to transfer the data to the comfortably large screen of his editing kit. There was a sudden and steady hunger in him to dig. He took a renewed interest in her tarnished career. By the end of the afternoon, he’d quite forgotten his headache.

  9

  We never thought this was going to be paradise. We thought it was going to be hard but necessary work, waiting out the dark times until Earth became ready again. So I tell you this: think what you like, hate who you like, because that’s between you and God, but you will act as the community requires, or the community will no longer require you.

  BEN GARROD to the council assembly,

  Constantine, Easter 2220

  A new society had been forged in a matter of days, and societies needed rules. Shan set those rules; she was the government. But it gave her no pleasure to pose as governor of Constantine, and she hoped it never would. The colonists had their own ruling structure and she wasn’t planning to interfere. Whatever else the SB had in mind for her, her task was to ensure that Thetis caused the minimum of trouble.

  Trouble, in this case, meant offending foreign governments, and at least one of them clearly wasn’t living in mud huts or devoid of its own technology. That meant avoiding trouble very carefully indeed.

  Shan had already set up her cabin as an office. The alpha-monkey part of her brain told her the uniformed personnel, if nobody else, needed to see someone in charge sitting at a desk in order to feel reassured. As the work surface folded down from one of the bulkheads it was impossible to fashion the room to look imposing, but it was close enough. It said stability.

  She made notes on the pullout screen on her swiss. No contact between the mission team and the colonists except by prior agreement with Josh Garrod. If he hadn’t been the leader before, he certainly was now. No team member to enter the colony without prior permission from me. Me: only to enter by agreement with Josh. She wondered if she would ever find a way to replace the screen; it was fragile from a thousand erasures. Field missions: colonists to be invited to observe if they wish. Alien reps …

  She paused.

  Alien reps: invite them to set any other restrictions they want. She had no idea what aliens found objectionable. There was no point guessing.

  Lindsay Neville came when summoned. She perched on the edge of the bunk, offering as little backside area to the surface as possible. Shan noted that. Her territory had been adequately marked, then, if the commander was that uncomfortable in it. She certainly looked tired.

  “Have the colonists expressed a wish to avoid contact with the team?” Lindsay asked.

  “No. I just don’t want any complicated relationships.”

  “My people have been selected for self-sufficiency,” Lindsay said sharply.

  “What the hell does that mean? They knit their own socks out of recycled cartridge cases?”

  “They weren’t expecting to have any ‘relationships,’ as you put it, for some time. Most have opted for suppressants.”

  “Well, I’m glad to see bromide is alive and well in the European navy.” Lindsay did seem tetchy about such a minor detail, Shan decided. Maybe it was already a sore point among her detachment. “I’m not doubting their professional discipline. Just not taking chances, that’s all. Besides, there’s more to offending our colonists than just trying to screw their daughters.”

  “Or sons.”

  “Indeed. Or sons. Let’s just stay out of their way without being downright rude.”

  “Very well, ma’am. But remember, they’re not police officers. These are very expensive, highly trained special ops troops. Even if they do rig latrines.”

  At least she had the guts to say it. Shan deliberately took no visible offense. “I stand corrected,” she said. Sometimes complete indifference commanded more fear than a strong reaction. “Just make sure they’re clear about the rules, that’s all. And one precaution—all external comms transmissions are to be routed through your command center. We want to know what’s being said, just in case.”

  “The payload won’t like that, ma’am. Nor will the journalist.” Lindsay had clearly categorized him as a separate species, neither uniformed personnel nor scientist. Shan suspected he would see himself that way too.

  “Michallat can send what he likes as long as I see it. He’ll be used to having his stories screened if he’s been a war reporter. Tell the payload that I’ll be the only one seeing their material and I won’t disclose it to another company. Look, does it matter? I can stop them transmitting altogether if push comes to shove. Remind them of that.”

  “Very good, ma’am.” Lindsay took her orders and disappeared. Shan removed a strip of compressed apricot and soya from her pocket and chewed it thoughtfully. It was the only field ration she’d been able to find that didn’t leave a tang of metal in her mouth. Some of the marines were suppressed, eh? Well, she hoped that sort of suppression was a more pleasant experience than the SB. It was one of those things about space travel that you didn’t think about until you had to, like toilet arrangements or laundry. The rest of the mission team had the edge on her. One way or another, they were all people who were used to living awkwardly and getting by in remote places. Police officers usually went home at the end of the day, however unpleasant the duties were. It made a difference.

  She thought briefly of her first commanding officer, her first “guv’nor,” and the rest of the relief at Western Central. They were all dead now. And if any of them were still alive, they were very old indeed, and she was not. She realized she had lost the last people who would slap her on the back and treat her as one of the boys. She took the water bottle from her desk, flipped the cap and raised it to nowhere in particular.

  “Goodbye, Guv’nor,” she said.

  10

  You have ignored a final warning to cease and desist. By ignoring this warning, you have relinquished all rights to due process, trial by peer, appeal against sentence, and all human rights granted to you under Federal European legislation. By authority of the Attorney General I hereby remove your rights and grant officers the right to take any action against you that they see fit, with full immunity from prosecution and disciplinary process.

  Formal abrogation of rights caution,

  European Criminal Justice Act 2274

  Kristina Hugel double-checked the first batch of blood, urine and stool samples. “You didn’t realize you were pregnant when you came aboard? Didn’t you have a final medical?”

  “Yes, but it must have happened after that,” said Lindsay. Jesus Christ, contraception didn’t just fail like that. She’d been so careful. “I would have acted if I had known.”

  She didn’t know whether she meant she would have aborted the fetus or the mission. She hadn’t even known the guy’s name. It was just a last-minute, final-night-ashore grab at being normal and human before she plunged into the abyss. It was a wartime reaction.

  “Well, you’re okay, if that’s what’s worrying you. How you deal with this is up to you.”

  “It’s not exactly the first question I wanted to ask the mission medic.”

  “What, whether I could fix you up?” Hugel opened her medical kit. It looked like a mechanic’s toolbox, a clean light gray, but there were no wrenches in it. “Here. Effectively you’re a month gone, so use this in the morning for th
ree days. Top of the thigh. That should do the trick.”

  She left the sub-Q spray on the table between them. It sat there as conspicuously as the absence of the word baby in their conversation. It was strictly a functional exchange of clinical options between two professionals.

  “Thanks,” said Lindsay. She looked at it for a few moments and then tucked it into her top pocket. “Do you always carry a supply of this?”

  “Always, when I’m working with mixed teams. If you decide not to use it, let me know, because there’ll be things we’ll need to monitor. Low oxygen and high gee don’t make for healthy blood pressure and fetal development.”

  She didn’t say anything else. Lindsay walked out into the compound, but only knew that she had when she found herself there. Her body was moving independently of her. No, she hadn’t planned this at all. What-ifs started to crowd in on her and she turned away from them before any had a chance to resolve themselves into solid worries. There were practical things that needed doing in the base, and now was as good a time as any to draw up rotas and busy herself with detail. She turned back towards the mess hall.

  “You’re looking knackered,” Shan observed. She pushed the containers of salt, mustard and ketchup out of the way of their elbows and wiped the table clean with a dry cloth before placing the roster board carefully at the exact midpoint between them. “It sucks you dry, this gravity.”

  The two women sat head-to-head in the canteen, trying to work out the most efficient use of the two scoots while everyone got acclimatized to the conditions. The marines and scientists had spent a couple of months preflight up in high country lugging five-kilo weights in their backpacks, but it didn’t solve all the problems. There was still some gasping and sweating to get used to.

  “I’ll be okay in a few days.” How am I going to tell her I made a big mistake? This woman didn’t even risk spilling salt. It would be worse than having to tell her marines. “Any thoughts on who we pair up?”

  Shan shrugged. “You know your people best.”

  “Sometimes someone who’s fresh to the situation can see the obvious. I don’t know the scientists at all.”

  Shan glanced down the list of names and fumbled in her pocket. She pulled a stylus from the innards of her swiss and began tapping.

  “Okay…Marines paired with payload: Chahal goes with Paretti, Webster with Parekh, Qureshi with Galvin, Barencoin with Champciaux, Becken with Rayat, and you can pair Mesevy.”

  “Is there a method in this single-gender pairing?”

  “Do you know how many boy–girl patrol teams I’ve had to break up in my police career? Plenty. Usually after an angry partner showed up at the station with a bread knife.”

  Lindsay bristled. “Like I said, my people are professionals, ma’am.”

  “Okay.” Shan slipped the stylus back into her swiss with exaggerated precision and rolled the cylinder back and forth in her hand. “Your discipline problem, not mine. You can probably trust Bennett with Mesevy. You can cover Hugel if she ever goes off camp. And you can certainly trust me not to molest Eddie. But in the fullness of time, highly trained professionals in small groups still behave just like real people.” The older woman gave Lindsay one of those tight-lipped mock smiles and pushed the roster gently back across the table so it rested in front of her. Lindsay tried to disguise her distaste with silence.

  “You did ask me to make the decision,” Shan said.

  “I did, didn’t I?”

  “That’s okay. I’ll just mark up gender as a sensitive area to avoid with you.” She glanced at the swiss and stood up. “Time to see the elders of Constantine, I think.”

  Lindsay watched her ramrod back disappear out the door and swore under her breath. Not a good start. She thought a little show of deference might help build a relationship, but all it had done was make Frankland think she was a wimp. It was her job as CO to sort rosters. She felt the sub-Q spray in her top pocket and wished that decision would go away of its own accord. She knew it wouldn’t.

  And it was another thing she couldn’t expect Shan Frankland to sort for her.

  Josh had made himself available to Shan for orientation,as he put it. He met her outside the church, looking suitably bucolic in a worn beige smock. She got the feeling he wanted to get the questions over with as rapidly as possible, and she couldn’t blame him. He had work to do; the new humans were still a threat to his way of life. If she minimized the threat, she reasoned, then he might be more forthcoming.

  “How many people?” she asked.

  “One thousand and forty-one,” he said. They walked a route around the colony by tracking the dome roofs, joining them up like dots in a child’s drawing.

  Shan looked out across the blistered ground. “You came here with about two hundred people?”

  “Thereabouts, and they were carefully selected to give us a reasonable gene pool. No problems so far.”

  “Dr. Hugel would be interested in seeing any medical records you might have. I think that’s one of her areas of expertise, genetics.”

  “If she finds it useful, she’s welcome to it.”

  A small breakthrough there, then. Shan fought an over-whelming urge to get something done. She had less of an idea what her true task was with each day, despite the SB, but that same sense of absolute urgency, even zeal, was still as strong as ever.

  They were high enough on the plain now to see for miles across colored patches of fields and farther, to where the orange-and-blue alien landscape began. The borderline of the human world on the planet was striking. There was no gradual blending of the cultivated and the wild, no thinning out of grass or cycad. It was as if there was a wall around Constantine. There were things, too, that she thought she should have been able to see and could not.

  “How do you inter your dead?” she asked, and realized at once that it sounded a harsh question. But there was no graveyard to be seen, and if there was one thing she knew about Christians it was that they marked their graves with memorials. The park near her home had been paved with ancient gravestones. One, worn almost smooth by the centuries, bore the name of an Elizabeth Totton, aged forty-three years, who had died of “teeth.” She had never worked out what “teeth” was. “Do you cremate?”

  “No, we don’t.” Josh seemed unperturbed by her directness. “We buried the first few who died here, but none after that.”

  “Sorry to be thick, but what do you do, then?”

  “When I find one, I’ll show you,” Josh said.

  It was a non sequitur if ever she had heard one. For a while she thought she had totally misunderstood the drift in language, and walked along beside him in silence. Just how different could these people get in a couple of hundred years? If nineteenth-century men had traveled back to the seventeenth century, they would still have understood the language, archaic or not, despite the huge technical gulf. Maybe Josh was a bit deaf: some of the older Pagans she knew were like that, reluctant to be treated for hearing loss or have cell grafts.

  And maybe he was just avoiding her crass question after all.

  There was only the nearby hum of bees and the distant whirring and clicking of the planet to be heard. Josh led her near to the edge of the colony, where bramble and tayberry bushes crept close to stubby lilac-colored grasses. They stood there in silence for several minutes and scanned the horizon. It struck Shan that as the Earth flora ended in a stark line, so did the bees, as if they didn’t want to venture into the unknown either.

  “There,” Josh said suddenly. He pointed, and she looked.

  “What am I looking for?”

  “The black patches,” he said.

  It took her a while to see what he saw. But there they were, three black patches on the sunward side of a rock in the wild lands. They walked up to it. Shan stared.

  As far as she could see, the stone was covered with areas of jet black, velvety lichen, perfect and unbroken. The patches had clean edges; the surface was uneven. It was unusual to see any plant that black wi
thout some hint of green or purple in it, but this lichen—or fungus, perhaps—was as black as it came.

  Then it moved.

  Shan flinched back, startled. The black mantle inched away down the stone and onto the ground. The two other patches came to life and began to follow it.

  “I think we might have frightened them,” Josh said, and stood back to let the things pass. They moved slowly, looking oddly like scraps of fabric animated by some small creature hiding beneath. “Or they’ve smelled dinner somewhere.”

  Shan thought she should have recorded them, and reached for her swiss as an afterthought. She held its viewfinder above them and captured a few slow minutes of the creatures’ progress. “What are they?”

  “Rockvelvets,” Josh said. “And that’s how we bury our dead.”

  “I think you’re going to have to draw me a picture.”

  “They digest dead bodies. They’re carrion eaters.”

  “Oh.”

  “We bring our people out here and let the planet take care of them. Does that disgust you?”

  Shan shrugged. “Pagans like that sort of solution. So do Parsis. But I didn’t think Christians did, what with all that resurrection stuff.”

  “I imagine some don’t. But when the customs and rituals were first written, people had no idea we would be keeping Christianity alive in another part of the galaxy. We adapt.”

  Shan toyed with the idea of being nailed into a box or waiting for the rockvelvets to come. The slow black caress seemed benign by comparison. “Don’t your people need a focus for grieving?”