City of Pearl

by Karen Traviss

  It was the first confirmation she had heard that the colony was a controlled, enclosed environment, even if it appeared part of the landscape. It answered the question she had tried to ask that first day: How did they manage to grow food crops here? It took more than the right light and irrigation to create the right conditions for a plant. It took bacteria and the right balance of minerals and acidity, too.

  “You terraformed an area for them? How does that fit in with not interfering with the local ecology?”

  “The colony has to be contained in case one of your imports manages to get a foothold and affects the ecology here. The barrier does that. When the colony eventually leaves, we will restore the island.”

  She thought of the geophys scans that Champciaux had showed her. “Am I right in thinking you’ve restored rather a lot of this world?” She slid her hand into her pants pocket and pulled out the smartpaper to show him. “All these cities?”

  Aras tilted his head, apparently unconcerned. “Yes. All of them.”

  “Isenj?”

  “Yes.” He took the smartsheet in his gloved fingers and considered it, expressionless. “We can contain ecosystems. And restore them.”

  She was getting very straight answers. When interviewing suspects, that meant they wanted to cough to everything. She took the gamble that it worked that way with wess’har too. “And were those cities destroyed by war?”

  “If by war you mean planned destruction, yes. For you, war means army against army, yes? There was no isenj army. Only ours. We erased everything.”

  Was he apologizing for his nation’s record or simply stating fact? It didn’t seem to bother him. “Okay,” she said. It was like interrogating a psychopath. There wasn’t even a hint that he thought it was wrong. “What do you want from us?”

  “I expect free access to your camp. And I take it the defenses will be deactivated.”

  “Already done.” He probably had the technology to take what data he wanted anyway; he’d certainly been able to render Thetis dead in the water. There was no point trying to keep secrets. “I’ll brief my people. You’ll be welcome.”

  “Thank you.”

  “May I ask you a favor, Aras? Before we leave here, may I meet your people and the aquatic species?”

  “The bezeri?”

  “Yes. I would like to make contact. I really would.”

  His eyes were still fixed on hers. It was the sort of body language that would have started a fight back home, but she couldn’t imagine anyone being mad enough to take him on, not even her. He was 170 kilos if he was an ounce. “I will ask,” he said politely.

  The meeting seemed to be over. She finished her tea and took her leave of them, feeling a lot more hopeful than she had the night before. She set off up the slope out of the settlement and began walking back to the base, enjoying the warmth of the sun and the smell of damp earth and grass. There was a real chance she could pull off this mission without disrupting the lives of the colonists.

  Gene bank. The SB hadn’t given up reminding her about that. What did it want her to do now? From what Aras Sar Iussan had said, it was intact. Secure it. Why and how? Perault hadn’t banked on wess’har and isenj and the whole shooting match.

  There was something else, but it wasn’t emerging yet. She let it go.

  Aras carefully dusted the crumbs from the table into his hand and let them fall back onto the tray. Shan Frankland was not what he expected. For all the apologies and polite compliance, there was a directness and lack of art that he found unsettlingly…wess’har.

  “I think she’s honest,” he said.

  Josh topped up his glass of tea. “You thought she was lying.”

  “She smelled as if she was concealing something. She was, but not her orders. It was her opinion.”

  “Should we trust her?”

  “It’s not her you need to be wary of. It’s the others.”

  “I hate to think that we’ve endangered your interests and our hosts’ by leading them here.”

  “You can’t unmake history, Joshua. You’re here, and they were coming anyway. I allowed you to stay. I will deal with the consequences.”

  Aras got up and stretched. All his damaged tissue had been replaced and the c’naatat had finished the maintenance of its own biosphere—his body. He wondered what little improvements it had seen fit to include in its latest iteration. It might have improved the impact-absorbing qualities of his skull or his spine; it might have tinkered with his circulation again to deal with sudden blood loss. He would find out in due course.

  It had frightened him at first, not knowing where it was taking him from one day to the next, but it seemed to have reached the stage of rearranging details, not grabbing so many fragments of other life-forms’ DNA to add to his own. He was almost comfortable with being a world.

  Then a ball of white flame rolled down the road towards him, leaving charred buildings in its wake. Where’s my fam-ily? He shook the thought away. It hadn’t surfaced in a long time.

  “I should go,” he said. “I need to talk to the bezeri. You’ll make sure these scientists don’t attempt a sea crossing, won’t you? I’ll have the security cordon strengthened. One of them is a marine biologist, and that means she’ll want a vessel sooner or later.”

  “I can imagine the consequences if they got hold of c’naatat. Leave it to me.”

  “What would Shan Chail make of it, do you think? Would she recoil, like you, or would she see it as a boon to mankind?”

  Josh sighed. “We don’t fear you, Aras. We never would. But we want to go to God in the end. You do understand that, don’t you?”

  “I think I do now,” Aras said. He took the last roll from the tray and pocketed it. He wanted to change the subject. It pained him to hear Josh explaining why he shouldn’t mind being a respected leper. “Do you think Shan Chail knew what she was doing when she offered me food?”

  Josh laughed, smelling of relief. “I doubt it. Are you going to tell her what it means?”

  “Perhaps.”

  Josh was right. She would be oblivious of the significance of the gesture, just as she probably had no idea that she could exert influence over a wess’har male simply by being strong, aggressive and female. The more time passed, the more he found himself vulnerable to the slightest promise of affection and companionship. It was the one thing the c’naatat had not improved.

  He wondered briefly if the symbiont was deliberately making him crave contact in order to spread itself to new hosts. It was a common mechanism. The terrestrial Toxoplasma gondii made rodents reckless, easier prey for cats, which the parasite depended on to complete its life cycle.

  Humans often carried the organism too. If his c’naatat had come across the parasite in its endless hunt for bargains among other species’ genomes, it might have snapped it up.

  Good for c’naatat, and no harm to him. But an enormous threat to the ecology of every planet and the balance of every civilization he could conceive of, apart from the restrained wess’har.

  Aras climbed the stairs from Josh’s house and made his way back up the surface. Respectful nods greeted him. Children gave him shy smiles but kept their distance. He wondered what parents told those children to prompt that degree of caution.

  They had little to fear. He’d never known a human to become infected; it might have been due to their fixed genes. They had to reproduce to see any change in characteristics. But wess’har, with their easy exchange of genetic material through copulation, their malleable genome that altered in an individual’s own lifetime, were far more susceptible to being colonized. C’naatat had gleaned bacteria, shed skin cells and viruses from humans and bolted material onto Aras’s receptive wess’har genes just as it had collected fragments from every large host it had passed through.

  Including the isenj.

  Aras walked along the vanished perimeter of the isenj city once called Mjat and down what had been a main route flanked by houses. There was less than nothing left. But he
remembered exactly where it was. He hadn’t needed to see the gethes’ clever images of the ghost of a civilization to recall those roads.

  He had destroyed them: it was his command. He had strafed the cities with fire and cut down isenj, and set loose the reclamation nanites that devoured the deserted homes. It had been nearly five hundred years ago by the Constantine calendar, but he remembered it all.

  Isenj, spreading faster and farther than ever before thanks to c’naatat. Thousands of them, living indefinitely, their cities spreading by meters each hour. Pollution diffusing into the seas, killing millions of bezeri. From the air, not a single patch of the blue and amber grassland left on the chain of islands. Desolation within one planetary year. If he didn’t stop it here, and now, every world within reach of the isenj would suffer the same fate.

  If the isenj had heeded the warning and left Bezer’ej before they stumbled across the c’naatat themselves, there would have been no need to slaughter them. Once a few had been infected, it spread like mold on the humans’ bread.

  He shut his eyes for a moment. Was this guilt? Ben had talked about the human concept of guilt, and Aras had never quite grasped it. No, he would do the same again. He would do it without pity but without anger. It was necessary.

  A ball of white flame bowling down the street, sucking air with it. The deafening shrills of dying isenj. A sense of panic and hatred. Where is my family? Hiding under a collapsed door, too terrified to come out and see the charred bodies.

  He was seeing through isenj eyes now. It was not empathy. It was real. It was a memory.

  There were delights the c’naatat had given him, but they were far outnumbered by the agonies. Endowing him with genetic memory scavenged from an isenj was one of the worst.

  It was hard to live with your victim in your head.

  14

  This place is just astonishing. We had an eclipse today and nobody thought to tell us it was coming. Isn’t that something? We all stood out in the compound and went crazy. I think we went crazier than the payload. I got a picture, but then I remembered there’s nobody I know left to send it to. It got to me then. We keep going when we’re on a deployment because there’s a normal world to fight for and return to. Without that, it’s getting harder to focus on the job.

  MARINE BALWANT SINGH CHAHAL,

  from his private journal

  There was one general-use laser uplink to Thetis and Paretti was hogging it. Rayat was making his displeasure clear.

  Eddie thought that had started the slanging match in the comms room. He could hear it even in the compound. He wandered in, preparing to referee, because he wanted them both off the link as soon as possible so he could file his latest piece. Time didn’t actually matter. The data sat in a buffer until Thetis was in line of sight to receive the datastream and—more importantly—until Shan Frankland had cleared it to go. But it didn’t feel that way.

  “You’ve been through my data, you bastard. Don’t deny it.” Paretti was sitting in the chair and Rayat was leaning over him, hand braced on the table. But it was Paretti who was making the accusations. When they noticed Eddie was standing in the hatchway they paused, looked right through him and carried on.

  Rayat put his other hand on the table. “What would I want your data for? Not even close to my areas of research.”

  “And Warrenders wouldn’t be interested, of course.”

  “Hey—”

  “This is a spoiler. You’re giving my data to your employer—”

  Eddie banged the heel of his hand on the hatch. “Lads, I hate to interrupt, but can you take this outside? Please. Don’t make me fetch the Iron Lady.”

  Rayat didn’t seem worried by the prospect of summoning Shan. “Good idea,” he said to Paretti. “She’s supposed to be clearing all the transmissions. She’ll be able to show you that I haven’t accessed your bloody files.” He pushed past Eddie.

  Paretti, slightly chubby, middle-aged with prematurely gray curls, looked like a cherub who wasn’t aging gracefully. He scowled at Eddie.

  “Hey, don’t take it out on me….what’s he done thistime?” asked Eddie. Well, it might be a story, and it might not, and anyway he liked Paretti a lot more than he liked Rayat. “Can I ask?”

  “Someone had a poke around my data and it’s probably him.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Because he works for Warrenders and he’s on a very meaty bonus scheme. He’ll get five percent of any profit made from the data here. What do you think that’s going to be worth when he steps on the Tarmac in seventy-five years’time?”

  “But you’re from different disciplines.”

  “And if he’s on the same deal as I am, which he probably is, he’ll get a flat bonus of a million euros for anything he can get hold of that will block HSL or Carmody-Holbein-Lang from patenting anything I discover here. Spoiler.”

  The concept of ruining someone else’s exclusive was not unfamiliar to Eddie; journalists did it all the time. It was part of the grand game. But the sums involved were usually much, much smaller. “I picked the wrong subjects at school, obviously,” he said.

  “That’ll teach you to sneer at the nerds.”

  “So, it’s test tubes at fifty paces, then?”

  “It’s not funny, Eddie. I gave up my whole life to get here. I left behind everyone and everything for this.”

  So did we all. Perhaps scientists had hearts after all, thought Eddie. He was so caught up in the thrill of novelty that he really didn’t miss anyone or anything yet. His life was one of transmission, not reception.

  Whump, whump, whump. He knew those boots by now. Shan appeared in the hatchway, winked at Eddie and sat on the edge of the table. “All right, Vani. Give me one excuse to give Rayat a serious smacking. You know I want to.”

  “I think he’s doing a spoiler on my data.”

  “I so love working alongside Warrenders.” She gave Paretti what looked like a genuine smile. “But I’ve also had occasion to visit your employers at HSL. You know what I think? You’re all scumbags, equal under the law.”

  “You know how much Rayat is on if he screws us?”

  “I’d heard. It’s not illegal. It’s childish, selfish, wasteful of resources and ultimately stops the public benefiting from your discoveries at a reasonable price, but it’s not against the law.”

  “What if I kick seven shades of shit out of him?”

  Shan shrugged. “I might be too busy to notice.”

  “I’m serious, Superintendent. This is industrial espionage.”

  “No, it’s not. Try breaking his fingers. It used to work fine for me.”

  She stood up and walked back out. Paretti ran his fingers through his unkempt curls and began loading his data. “Ten minutes,” he said, without looking at Eddie. “Don’t breathe down my neck.”

  Out in the compound, Rayat was remonstrating with Shan. Eddie thought she was in a pretty good mood today. He stood and watched, as did Webster and Chahal. Rayat was demanding that she do something about Paretti’s allegations.

  “Why?” Shan asked. Lindsay emerged from the mess hall; Bennett stopped to join the audience too.

  “He’s impugned my professional reputation.”

  “Come on, we’re twenty-five light-years from anyone who gives a toss.”

  “So you’re not going to do anything?”

  “Well, now you come to mention it, I think I will. You know what? I’m going to let you all have the same privilege as me and take a look at each other’s data before it’s transmitted. How’s that?”

  “You can’t do that.”

  “I can. Fair’s fair.”

  “My company paid for this mission.”

  Shan glanced at Eddie. “Is that so, Mr. Michallat?”

  Eddie checked his database and stuck it back in his pocket. “My original report quoted twenty percent of the total cost.”

  Shan looked off to one side as if she were calculating and walked over to speak to Chahal. He disappeare
d into the passageway and came back with a laser cutter and handed it to her. “Mind your fingers, ma’am,” he called after her. She walked back into the crew quarters.

  Rayat looked as puzzled as the rest of them. Eddie was half-expecting to see her emerge with a mangled uplink module, sliced apart to teach them all a lesson, but he could still hear Paretti talking to the AI on board Thetis. Two minutes later, Shan came back with an armful of what looked like rubbish and broken furniture and beckoned to Rayat.

  “There,” she said. “One-fifth of your desk.” She dumped a tray-sized slab of composite at his feet. “A fifth of your chair.” Two chair legs followed. “And your mattress, your coffee mug and your plate.” Pieces fluttered and clattered to the ground. Rayat simply stared at her; Webster was chewing at her lower lip in a vain attempt not to laugh. “And as soon as it’s practical, I’ll get you the aft section of Thetis and you can be on your way. Now shut up and get on with it.”

  Eddie badly wanted to applaud but thought better of it. Rayat was still standing and staring down at the pile of debris long after Shan had disappeared into the mess hall and Webster had fled, no doubt to guffaw in private.

  Eddie followed Shan inside. “I hate to think what you’re like after a few drinks,” he said.

  Shan gave him a smile as she helped herself to some tea from the dispenser. He had a feeling that was exactly the effect she had intended. “One reason why I very rarely touch the stuff.”

  “Is this about Mars Orbital?”

  “No, it’s nothing to do with Warrenders. I just hate whiny people, and Rayat never stops.” And she laughed. It was genuine amusement, totally artless. “I don’t know what came over me.”

  Of course she did. He didn’t believe that any more than he believed that a copper with her record—decorated for valor, head of a snatch team, fast-tracked in the Serious Fraud Office—could misplace a bunch of terrorists after a massive covert operation. History was full of police cock-ups, but he hadn’t believed the story then, and he certainly didn’t believe it now that he had met her. For all the apparent caprice, she wasn’t someone who left anything to chance.