City of Pearl

by Karen Traviss

  Mesevy and Lindsay came running down the corridor towards him. “Frankland’s coming,” Lindsay said. “I’ve explained to her over the comm what happened. She’s spitting nails. She’ll crucify me. What the hell was Webster doing? She was supposed to watch her.”

  “None of us knew Surendra would go off like that,” said Mesevy. “It’s not her fault.”

  “How do we get this hatch open now?”

  “It’s a biohazard seal. We don’t.”

  Maybe, if the creature had been beached, nobody would care. They might not even need to know. He was still considering diplomatic solutions when the corridor vibrated with heavy, fast steps. Shan, in fatigue pants and a sports vest, strode in and looked at them as if demanding an answer.

  She jabbed her thumb at the hatch. “In there?”

  “ ’Fraid so,” Eddie said, and stared. There was a long puckered burn scar the length of her left biceps, and sheseemed all muscle. She could have made even a fluffy bathrobe look like combat gear. “She’s not coming out voluntarily.”

  Shan struck the hatch four or five times with the edge of her fist, steady and insistent. “Parekh, stand away from that body and open this hatch,” she yelled. “Now.”

  There was no answer. Shan didn’t wait or knock again. “Get me Chahal and Bennett,” she said, looking more towards Mesevy, who obeyed and sprinted away. Shan glared at the hatch. For a moment Eddie almost believed the door would yield to the force of her stare alone. Lindsay was making a valiant attempt to look as if she could do something, hovering round Shan.

  “Sorry, ma’am,” she said “I screwed up,”

  “Not your fault. She’s the one who did it.”

  “I should have—”

  “But you didn’t. No point worrying about that now.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Get her out of there and then start getting seriously worried. I’d like you to clear a cabin we can confine her in. Restrain her if necessary. When the stupid cow comes out, she’s under arrest.”

  The sound of Bennett and Chahal approaching made them turn. Shan gave Eddie a withering look. He thought she was going to round on him for not stopping Parekh.

  “What are you waiting for?” she asked. “A story? Okay. Stand clear and don’t get in the way.” She turned to Chahal. “Get that door open.”

  “We can either access the seal controls through the deckhead or blow the hatch,” said Chahal, peering at the status panel. He had a belt of tools slung round his waist. “She’s activated the central override from inside.”

  “Which takes longer?”

  “I can get at the seal in about ten minutes with a laser cutter or blow it in five.”

  Shan lowered her voice. “Open it from the roof.” She hammered three times on the hatch again, and shouted. “We’re blowing the hatch in ten minutes, Parekh. Open up and you don’t get hurt. If you don’t, the blast might take your face off and right now I don’t much care if that happens. Okay?”

  There was no response, but Shan had clearly not expected one because Eddie heard Chahal already scrambling across the roof membrane and then a buzzing and faint vibration as he cut through the membrane and into the mechanism beneath. Maybe Parekh would believe the line about blowing the door; Eddie certainly did. Bennett stood with his hands on his hips, staring down at the floor. This was going to end badly.

  Shan’s face was grim and resigned rather than angry, although she looked drained of blood. “Once it’s open, I’ll go in and you be prepared to cuff her.”

  “I don’t have cuffs,” Bennett said.

  “Well, I’ll have to restrain her, then. Got a secure cabin ready?”

  “Webster’s on to that.”

  “Thank fuck she’s on to something.”

  They waited and watched the opening. The hatch’s surface shivered from the stresses being applied to it from the top. Then it sighed gently as the seal broke and the reinforcing bolts yielded within their casing. Shan slammed back the hatch and stared in.

  Later, Eddie would find it hard to recall exactly what he had seen. It was over in seconds. Shan said nothing, walked up to a wide-eyed Parekh and landed one hard punch in her face. The woman dropped without a word, sending a tray and its wet contents clattering to the floor.

  “Get her out of here,” Shan said to Bennett. Parekh, stunned, struggled to stand up as Bennett grabbed her arm and guided her out. It had taken about thirty seconds: economical, brutal and definitely not the navy way. Lindsay was standing at a discreet distance, grim-faced, having had the sense to clear Shan’s path and let her get on with the job. It was clearly the superintendent’s speciality.

  Shan stood rubbing her right hand. Yes, she had hit Parekh hard. “Oh, God,” she sighed, staring at the remains on the floor. “Oh, God. I suppose we’d better try to get the poor thing tidied up.”

  Eddie watched from the hatchway. Shan found a pair of gloves and pulled them on, and then reached for a small plastic board. There was something undignified and desperately sad about scraping the little corpse together like spilled food, but it was the only option. She slid the remains carefully into the tray.

  “You think I’m useless, don’t you?” Eddie said, not looking up from the body. “I should have taken it off her.”

  “I don’t expect a civvie to handle the physical stuff. I would have been amazed if you had. At least you called me.”

  “Christ, you really hit her, didn’t you?”

  “I did indeed. Look, this is serious. It’s a juvenile bezeri, and I have to let Aras know. And the really scary thing about this is that I don’t know how this is going to end.”

  “You’re sure about this? Do they have to know?”

  “Oh yes.”

  Lindsay laid a cloth across the tray, and Shan picked it up and walked out. In the corridor, Mesevy, Rayat and Galvin were standing like witnesses at a crash scene. They said nothing. But it was clear they had seen Parekh dragged away, nose bleeding, and there was no doubt that whether they agreed with her actions or not, she was one of their own. The first lines had been drawn between payload and the command. Life was not going to be cozy in future.

  Shan paused at the end of the passage and turned round.

  “I need to talk to you in private later,” Shan said to Lindsay. “My cabin, after dinner. In the meantime, make sure Parekh is secured and keep the rest of them away from her. Oh, and I authorize you to reissue sidearms to your detachment.” She glanced at Eddie. “Where’s your camera?”

  “I wasn’t recording,” he said.

  “Good,” she said.

  “What the hell did you think you were doing?”

  Shan leaned against the cabin bulkhead, arms folded while Bennett stood against the hatch. Parekh sat huddled on the bunk, knees drawn up, arms wrapped round them. She had two spectacular black eyes.

  “It was dead already,” Parekh said.

  “It’s a bezeri. A juvenile.”

  “Well, if you shared some data with us, I wouldn’t have needed to take a look, would I?”

  “How often do we have to go over this? No samples. And this is why.”

  “Look, it was dead already. We can explain.”

  “Whoa. Let’s rethink our attitude to species, shall we? This isn’t roadkill. It’s a child. Do you know what this is in human terms? You come across the scene of an accident. There’s a dead baby. So you pick up the body and take it away, because you’re curious. You don’t report it, you don’t try to contact the parents, you just take it, and slice it up for a few tests. Do you understand? Is any of this getting through to you fucking academics?”

  Parekh said nothing and simply absorbed the bollocking. Shan waited, although she wasn’t sure why. There was nothing to be gained by the lecture. She turned to Bennett and he stepped back to let her pass before following her out and locking the hatch behind. He was starting to anticipate her movements, like a good deputy.

  “How long are you going to keep her in there, ma’a
m?”

  “Until I’ve made my point to the rest of them and until I know what the price for this is going to be.”

  “The others are in the mess hall. We’ve made them wait for you.”

  It was getting to be too much of a habit, herding the payload into a hall and barking at them. The small room was uncomfortably full. The marines stood around the perimeter of the hall at ease, but their sidearms were now visible. It didn’t feel like the time she walked into the New Year’s Eve party at all. Eddie perched on the end of a bench, part of the group and yet visibly separated, probably making the point that he was just observing.

  “Right, people.” She looked round. Make eye contact with all of them, make it personal. Champciaux appeared to be the only one at ease, but he probably couldn’t see that he would be judged as a gethes, not a harmless collector of rocks who happened to keep the wrong company. “I imagine you’ve all talked about what happened earlier today so I won’t bore you with the details. Dr. Parekh is confined to quarters until I’ve had a response from the bezeri.”

  Galvin half-raised her hand. “Is she under arrest?”

  “In the sense that she won’t be getting out of that cabin until I say so, yes.”

  “Was it really necessary to use violence?”

  “When words fail, yes, it usually is.”

  “And what about us?”

  “Confined to base until further notice. I can’t overemphasize the risk here. If I haven’t made myself clear, this is a final warning. We are not the lords of creation. It’s not our planet. And as I have the authority to impose martial law, I will, and that means I will personally shoot any one of you I catch fucking around.”

  “I think that’s an overreaction,” Rayat said.

  “You’re grave-robbing. How’d you like me rooting around your corpse?”

  “Makes it worth thinking about having a funeral pyre, that, doesn’t it?” Rayat snapped, and shoved past the rest of the group to storm out. Webster, hand resting on her sidearm, blocked his way.

  “Don’t push your luck,” Shan said. There were a few glances, but the outburst faded into sullen obedience as quickly as it had flared.

  The payload filed out silently past Bennett and Lindsay, who were flanking the exit. Eddie followed them, and glanced back once before swinging the main hatch shut behind him.

  “We’re buggered.” Shan sat down on one of the trestle tables and swung her legs. “I’ve no idea how the local politics will play out, but I think we’re going to have our hands full with our learned friends here.”

  “We’ll contain that,” Lindsay said.

  “I won’t lie to you. I’m really going to need you people to hold this together.”

  Bennett looked up. “You’ve got it, ma’am.”

  “Okay, do whatever you have to do to keep them in here. I’ve called Josh, he’s notified Aras and I’m heading over there in the morning to see him. The body is in the cold room. I know it’s unpleasant to have it next to supplies, but there’s nowhere else right now and it’s sealed in a bag anyway, so just keep an eye on it, will you?”

  There was a communal yes, ma’am and they all straightened up as if they had one shared nervous system. They were rock-solid and reliable: good, dependable professionals to have at your back. She thought briefly of the “relief,” her old shift of officers at Western Central, and the memory stuck in her throat in the way memories did when tears nearly caught you unawares.

  Lindsay was the last to leave.

  “Are you feeling okay?” Shan asked.

  “Pretty good, considering.”

  “I just wondered. I thought the baby bezeri might have upset you.”

  “I try not to think of it in those terms. I don’t think Parekh did either. I think she would call it sentimentality.”

  “It’s not me being the sentimental one. It’s them using a religious argument as a scientific one.”

  “You lost me there.”

  “It says so in Josh’s Bible, right there in the first book—that man has dominion. Get scientists in a corner, argue it out with them, and they still use that biblical excuse, except they use the word “sentience” instead of “soul.” They can’t argue bezeri aren’t sentient. But they still see them as animals, and so pretty well anything goes.”

  “You think all life is sacred.”

  “Well, let’s say I haven’t yet heard a good argument for why human life is more sacred than others. That’s not quite the same thing.” The SB chafed away at a corner of her mind, and the name Helen surfaced again. “Anyway, you don’t want a lecture on post-modern ethics. Let’s get back to Parekh.”

  “Look, I’m really sorry about today.”

  “We’ve been through that. You can’t be prepared for some things.”

  “Can I ask why you hit her?”

  Shan folded her arms across her chest. She felt lost without something to lean on. “Primarily to stop her moving another muscle.”

  “And secondarily?”

  “Because I was angry. Does that appall you?”

  “Not entirely. But I wouldn’t have done that.”

  “You’re used to an enemy you deal with at missile length. Mine have always been right here.” She held her hand flat up to her face. “I had to be handy with my fists. And sometimes the book doesn’t have all the answers.”

  “Eddie said you had what he called an ambiguous relationship with terrorism,” said Lindsay.

  “You can’t deal with animal-rights extremists without being exposed to some of their arguments.” She hoped Eddie was talking in general terms. Just how much did the bastard know? “The most difficult thing ab out terrorism is that it’s not absolute. There’s always a case somewhere at the bottom of it, however distorted it gets. Sometimes a reasonable case.”

  “I’m glad I never have to make the call on that,” Lindsay said.

  I did. And I don’t regret it.

  Shan could hear occasional ticks of the composite bulkheads cooling and contracting as the outside temperature dropped. “You think I’m the archetypal bad copper, don’t you?”

  “I’d have to be put in the positions you’ve been in before I’d pass judgment.”

  “An ambiguous answer for an ambiguous situation,” Shan said.

  No, Lindsay didn’t understand at all. When she caused death, it was nothing personal; it was all neat and sanctioned and under rules of engagement. After you’d killed them, you would stand at memorial parades and say what an honorable enemy they were. Shan got to know her targets far too well, and honor never came into it.

  The people who understood her were long gone.

  But there was Aras. Now she had to try to understand him.

  In a short time, the Thetis camp had developed a pulse and a rhythm of its own, like any settlement. It had noises and smells that defined it, a rhythm like a heartbeat.

  This morning the backdrop of sounds was somehow different, and it wasn’t simply the drumming of heavy rain. Eddie took a little time walking the few yards from his cabin to the mess hall, testing the ambient sound: there was no sporadic laughter, no voices raised occasionally to call for a hand with equipment. There was just a constant quiet hum of conversation. For a moment he felt like a kid again, creeping down the stairs to eavesdrop on mum and dad’s hushed argument and wondering what he had done to cause it. He had to remind himself that he was now forty-three and a BBChan correspondent before he could steel himself to open the hatch and walk in.

  Most of the payload was sitting at one table, picking at breakfast plates with no great enthusiasm. They had nowhere else to go. Mesevy was absent; Parekh was still confined to the holding cabin. The conversation stopped when he came in.

  He considered taking his breakfast and going back to his cabin to eat it, but that would simply have postponed the inevitable. He had grassed up their colleague. Commercial rivalries and spoilers had been put aside. Parekh was one of their own, and he was not, and he had called down the wrath of Frankland o
n them.

  He collected a couple of pancakes from the galley and made a point of sitting down right next to Galvin.

  “Everyone okay?” he asked.

  Rayat stared straight ahead. “Considering we’re under martial law now, I suppose everything’s fine.”

  “So what’s happening?”

  “We thought you might tell us. Your being Frankland’s right hand.”

  Eddie laid his fork down carefully. “Okay, if you want to have a knock-down drag-out, let’s do it properly. You people are fucking crazy. These wess’har, whatever they are, took out a whole civilization not far from here for some slight or other. You don’t mix it up with people like that. Parekh could be putting us all at risk.”

  “You know this for a fact, do you?” Galvin asked.

  Champciaux nodded. “I think Eddie’s right about the threat. Best dating for that geophys is a few hundred years, tops. Cities don’t decay that fast, and they leave more solid traces. They blew them to kingdom come, that’s all I can think.”

  “And whose side are you on?” said Rayat.

  “The side that’s going home in one piece.”

  “It’s not the aliens I’m worried about,” Galvin interrupted. “It’s armed troops and a complete psycho copper stopping us doing our work.”

  “Come on, Lou, Parekh was way out of line,” said Paretti. “What she did was stupid. It wasn’t even good science.”

  “Yes, but did that warrant beating her senseless and locking her up?”

  Eddie liked accuracy, whatever Shan had done. “It was one punch,” he said. “I was there.”

  “Okay, seeing as you’re her official mouthpiece, what is Frankland’s agenda, anyway? Government going to muscle in on our investment?” Galvin was from Carmody-Holbein-Lang: it was on Shan’s list of scumbag corporations. Maybe Galvin had felt the weight of EnHaz before. “I really don’t like how this is going. We wake up to find her aboard like some malevolent stowaway, and now she’s siding with some bunch of aliens against her own kind.”

  Some bunch of aliens. How quickly they forgot, Eddie thought. When they had left Earth, the only alien life they had known existed was simple organisms, semi-sentient blobs and moss. Now, in a matter of a few months, the group had reduced at least one remarkable species to an inconvenience, an annoying trifle. Such was the exchange rate when you looked at those who were different to you. One alien was a miracle, two a novelty, a hundred an invasion, and if they thwarted humanity—they were the enemy. It was just like being back on Earth.