“It makes no difference now. C’naatat is beyond human reach again.”
Ade jerked his thumb in the direction of Shapakti. “Now his boss-woman’s here, can she spare him to do Shan a favor?”
“Is that wise?”
“Shan wants to learn the language. She speaks wess’u and so does he. He can teach her.”
“I’ll ask Esganikan.”
“How much does she know about Shan?”
“She knows as much as I do. We don’t conceal matters from each other. It’s a most corrosive habit and I would like to get out of it soon.”
Ade shrugged. “Okay. Shan doesn’t know Lin and Rayat are here, by the way. Aras thought she’d go off on one if we told her.”
“Is she well enough to talk to me?” Shan would understand that Nevyan had duties to carry out before she could visit a friend. Aras needed time with her first. It occurred to Nevyan that Ade might need that too, but that was a matter for the three of them to resolve. “I should be with her, at least for a little while.”
“She’s eating everything that doesn’t move and swearing like a trooper, so apart from the fact she looks like a corpse, she’s getting back to normal.”
“A harsh assessment.”
“What did you expect me to do, cry my eyes out at the state of her?” Ade fumbled with his beret and shoved it into his pocket. “Done that. She doesn’t need reminding what a state she’s in.”
“Do you want to talk to Commander Neville?”
“I’ve got nothing to say to her.”
“Will you help us to examine the material on her communication device and Rayat’s?”
Ade glanced down at his boots. They were exceptionally shiny. “What are we looking for?”
“We want to know who authorized the use of nuclear devices.”
“The FEU.”
“Personally. Organizations aren’t responsible. People are.” Nevyan beckoned Aitassi: the aide would trust him to extract information. “And even if they’re no longer alive when we reach Earth, those who later contribute to their guilt will be.”
Nevyan saw that same reversion to a child’s face: Ade Bennett understood responsibility no better than Barencoin did, although both of them clearly wanted to. She wondered how any gethes would ever learn.
If they didn’t learn, the Eqbas would teach them the hard way.
Ade skipped his daily run for the first time in more than twenty years, barring days when he’d actually been in combat. He’d do an extra few kilometers tomorrow. Once you let things slip, you lost all discipline.
But Shan’s alive.
The thought kept rolling over him anew as if he’d forgotten—as if he could. He had a second chance. You didn’t get those often and you didn’t waste them. He jogged back home along the terraces, occasionally feeling for the two handhelds in his top pocket, and realized that he didn’t actually have a clue what he was going to do with that unimaginable opportunity.
He leaned on the pearl-encrusted door and it swung open. The smell of hot oil and caramelizing sugars filled the living room and the table was covered in plates and bowls. Aras, holding a sizzling pan in one hand, gave Ade an exasperated look and motioned him to the table.
“Hey, I just saw Mart and Sue and—” Ade paused. Shan was up. She was really up, in every sense. She was standing in front of the screen that occupied a large section of one wall, a walking corpse in her formal black uniform pants and a white sports vest. Neither fitted her any longer. She looked freshly horrific.
“Shit,” she said. “What the fuck’s happening back there?” Something on the BBChan news feed was annoying her. Then she stopped and glanced over her shoulder. “Hi, Ade. Find me anyone?”
“Nevyan’s going to ask Esganikan.”
“And she is?” Shan set an unsteady but determined course for the table and half fell onto the bench beside it. She reached for a pile of netun jay and munched contentedly.
“She’s the commander of the second Eqbas mission.”
“Yeah, I’m going to want to talk to her.”
How long had he been away? A matter of hours. Shan’s arms had some suggestion of sinews and he could no longer see bone across the full width of her chest. Her black hair was almost a respectable crew cut, slightly fluffy and thick enough to make her look more like a woman again. And she was, as far as she was concerned, back in charge of the operation. It was written all over her, from the set of her shoulders to that way she had of clenching her jaw.
“I’m waiting,” she said. She was eating like a horse; netun, those nice little chewy flat-breads Aras called gurut, a bowl of an bright orange evem soup, and a large jug of tea. “I can’t just sit here on my arse all day.”
“You can.” Ade decided to distract her from expeditions and laid the handhelds on the table. She was a copper. She’d done more investigations than he’d had hot dinners. She knew her way around records and files. “Take a look at this.”
She picked up the handhelds and turned them over. “That reminds me,” she said. “Can I have my sidearm and my swiss back, please?”
Aras smelled annoyed, a scent almost like grapefruit oil. Ade was finding that kind of cue easier to pick up now.
“Yes, isan. But you have no need to go out and use them, have you?”
“I’ll sit and eat until I’m fit to go out. That was the deal.”
She examined Rayat’s device with one hand, taking a bite out of a netun and wiping a stray bead of bright gold filling off her chin with a careful finger. The handheld clicked into life and she studied the image. Ade liked to watch her think. It was exciting to imagine what process was going on in that agile, ferocious mind, as long as he wasn’t on the receiving end of it.
“Nevyan needs information from that,” he said.
“I really ought to do a verified copy of the data before I go crashing around. You know me, stick to rules of evidence.” Her eyes were fixed on the device, appraising and unemotional. Then she almost smiled. “What do you want to find?”
Aras slammed the pan down on the range and leaned across the table, hands flat on it. “Enough,” he hissed. “She isn’t well enough for this.”
“Sweetheart, I’m a big girl and I’ll decide what I need to know.” She put her hand on his. “This is what I do. I’m a copper.” She paused as if something funny had occurred to her. “Do you know, I never put my papers in? I never actually resigned. Is Wessex Regional Constabulary still there any more? Did anyone tell them I was dead so they could release my pension?”
“I can find out for you,” said Ade. He never worried about his pension. “Here, have some tea.”
“This means you’ve had contact with Rayat.”
“Leave him to Nevyan,” said Aras.
“He’s alive and here, then?”
“I—”
“Aras, I’ve managed to keep my head for two months in space without a fucking suit.” Her tone was calm and she squeezed his hand, but it was tinted with warning. Ade could see her knuckles whiten. “I’m capable of hearing a sitrep from Ade without going ballistic. Go on, Ade. Brief me.”
Ade felt he was pushing Aras’s self-control to the limit. Wess’har didn’t seem to have much, not as far as anger was concerned. He glanced at Aras’s grim expression, and then at Shan: and Shan was the Boss. He deferred.
“Ual brought Rayat and Lindsay here. Mart, Sue and Jon arrested them.”
“Result.” She gave him an approving thumbs-up, apparently unconcerned. “Nice job.”
“Actually, they turned up in the second Eqbas ship. The commander is a big scary bird called Esganikan Gai.”
“But you’re not afraid of big scary birds, are you?”
“Nah.” He grinned, feeling a little precious warmth from her. “Not usually.”
She winked. “Good.”
“And they’ve sent teams to recce Umeh and Bezer’ej from orbit.”
Shan thumbed the controls of the handheld. “What am I looking for in here?”
“Culpability. That’s what Serrimissani called it.”
“Explicit orders to deploy ERDs.”
“Yeah.”
“Personal, not collective, right?”
“Names.”
Shan reached for another gurut and chewed carefully while she browsed through files. If she hadn’t looked so skeletal and swamped by her uniform, she could easily have passed for her old self, in control, analytical, and not about to take any shit: a senior detective going about her business. He wondered if she was going to collapse when his back was turned.
“Get me my swiss, will you, sweetheart?” she said, eyes not moving from the handheld. Ade went to the cupboard and reached for it at the same time Aras did. They stared at each other for a second too long and Ade felt his face redden.
Silly sod. She didn’t mean you.
Aras took the swiss and handed it to Ade with an expression and scent that he simply couldn’t read at all. If Shan had seen the reaction, she showed no sign of it. But she never missed a trick and Ade felt inexplicably humiliated.
Ade surrendered the swiss. “Thanks,” she said. No, she was completely deadpan. He couldn’t even smell a reaction, and he was sure he could do that by now. “Now, this is what you do. You shove this in here. A little upgrade I borrowed when I was in Special Branch.”
Both the swiss and Rayat’s handheld made a satisfying simultaneous chunk sound and Shan smiled, not at him or Aras but to herself.
“I’d have thought a spook’s kit would have been harder to crack,” said Ade.
“Yeah, they often think that too,” said Shan. “It pays to play Mr. Plod. Anyway, Rayat wouldn’t want to draw attention to himself if anyone from the Thetis payload picked this up. But all I’ve done is get in. Rayat’s too professional to have obviously encrypted stuff. Anyway, what are we looking for? Some dialogue that shows he was given explicit instructions to use Beano bombs? Okay, tell me what you know about the sequence of events that led up to deployment.”
Ade wasn’t sure where to start. “When we started planning to use the Once-Only suits?”
“When Rayat got involved.”
Ade shut his eyes and imagined himself back on board Actaeon again. Think. In Actaeon’s armory, Neville and me and Rayat looking at the racks. “He was using his handheld as if he was messaging someone, and then he wanted to know if we could get ERDs down to the surface in the Once-Only suits. I said yes because they were about thirty kilos each, and I said it was a bad idea. Then Commander Neville said he couldn’t deploy ERDs and they had an argument about Beano bombs too. She was adamant they weren’t going to use any, and Rayat wasn’t going to discuss it in front of me so I asked her if she wanted me to leave and she said yes.”
“Well, she’s as good as dead anyway so her motive doesn’t matter now.” Shan scrolled and tapped, eyes moving between her swiss and the handheld. “He couldn’t encrypt on the ITX so if he was phoning home, it was either plain language or code. Let’s have a look at his message log.”
“He won’t have one. He’ll have done a fast shred.”
Shan turned the handheld so that Ade could see it. It was just a screen of numbers and symbols. “Outgoing message paths. He hasn’t bothered to erase them. And he’s not that careless.” She chewed her lip thoughtfully. Aras hovered again, taking her left hand and folding her fingers around a mug as a silent order to drink its contents. “He hasn’t sent that many in the past six months, which isn’t surprising really. Let’s have a look at the address book.”
“Not even Lindsay would be thick enough to file a number labeled SPOOK HQ.”
“They’re going to show up on Earth with a warrant, aren’t they?”
“Who?”
“Esganikan and company. They’d better hope the suspects are going to be around in twenty-five years’ time. Or maybe they’re just looking for an excuse for a punch-up.”
“That’s not very wess’har.”
“No. But they must have thought about the time differential.”
“Surely.”
“Yeah, surely.” The idea was bothering her, he could see that, a puzzle she couldn’t crack. “But if the alternative is to say the guilty parties might be dead when you turn up, then you might as well write off the whole crime. And wess’har don’t seem to believe in a statute of limitations or spent convictions.”
“They said something about those who later contribute to their guilt.”
Shan appeared to consider that and then flicked through files. Ade moved to look over her shoulder. She shifted a little, evidently uncomfortable, and then tugged at his pants leg.
“Sit down.”
“Sorry.”
“Is there any slang term for Beano bombs?”
“That is the slang. Biological neutralization ordnance.”
“Any other names?”
“Oh… bleach. Floor cleaners.”
Aras sat down at the table opposite Shan and tucked into the pile of gurut, making a faint riffling sound like someone flicking through a wad of paper. Ade had never heard it before.
“What are you so pleased about?” asked Shan.
The urrrring sound stopped. “You’re home, isan.”
“Yeah, I’m glad to be back, too,” she said. “I really am.”
It was a brief moment and one that didn’t include Ade. He’d have to get used to that. Shan laid aside the handheld for a moment and wolfed down more netun.
“Is it me, or is it hot in here?”
“It’s you,” said Aras.
“Okay, cool-down time,” she said, and made an unsteady path for the back terrace, the rear one that overlooked the plain. Aras had excavated his home at the furthest edge of the caldera. He must have had a hard time coming to terms with being c’naatat in a city where everyone was part of a family.
There was an uneasy silence. Aras opened the large container he had built for Black and White and placed food in their green glass bowl. Ade wandered across and stood watching, trying to find the right moment to talk.
Two noses poked out of the nest ball of shredded fabric, then the rats waddled out and snatched chunks of capsicum and soybeans. They rushed into separate corners to devour them.
“You’re going to thump me, aren’t you?” said Ade.
Aras began urrrring again. He could still talk while he was doing it. Ade was fascinated and realized how dully human he must have seemed to Shan by comparison.
“No. I would prefer that she rests and eats, but she’s Shan, so she’ll do as she pleases.”
“I think Lin and Rayat will occupy her.”
“She seemed quite calm about their presence. Please help me keep her that way.”
“Anything else you want to say to me?” Back off, get out, leave my missus alone. “If so, now’s the time.”
Aras picked up a gurut and chewed thoughtfully. “Yes. It’s your turn to clean the floors.”
If he had wanted to tell him to sod off he’d have done it, Ade reasoned. He went to look at Rayat’s handheld, coupled to Shan’s machine by a fiber, and realized she had taken her swiss out to the terrace with her.
He stood at the door. Shan was leaning on the stone balustrade, head bent, swiss in one hand. Then she raised her arm and there was a flash of reflected light. He realized she had the swiss’s bubble-thin screen on its mirror setting.
She turned, suddenly aware of him, thinly disguised shock on her face.
“You okay, Boss?”
She pinched the bridge of her nose. “Why didn’t you tell me how bad I really looked?”
“You’re looking a lot better than when they found you.”
She ran her hand over her head as if testing how thick her hair was. It was the first time it had occurred to him that she cared how she looked and that her current condition might distress her. She’d always taken care of her appearance, but in an officer sort of way that was more about polished boots and smart uniform than the usual do-I-look-okay fussing of a woman. She’d had lovel
y long jet-black hair and now she didn’t. She had also had a nice arse, and that was gone too, but she wouldn’t know that.
“Sod it, I’m over a hundred and twenty.” She forced a smile but it was unconvincing. “And I’ve been a bit dead lately, so all in all I’m looking okay for my age.”
“We’ll get you some decent fatigues made up.”
“And boots. My boots didn’t make it.”
“I bet I can find a ussissi who can blag a pair from Umeh Station.”
“You’re a good bloke, Ade.”
“Salt of the earth, me.”
“Come on, let’s get on with rummaging Rayat’s bloody data.”
She seemed crushed. But he didn’t care what she looked like right then and he knew Aras didn’t either. It was enough to have her back. He put a cautious hand under her elbow and gave her just enough support to walk back into the living room with some dignity.
“It’s all right,” he said, giving Aras a help-me-out-here look. “A couple more days and you’ll look good as new. It’s not worth getting upset about.”
“Do I look upset?”
“Yeah. Frankly, yeah, you do. Your hair’s growing back at a hell of a rate, though. You’ll be back to normal before you know it.”
“Don’t kid yourself it’s about how I look.” She placed her swiss on the table and linked it up to Rayat’s device again. Aras sat down next to her and put his hand on her arm. “It’s what’s in Rayat’s handheld. It’s a bit of a shock when you find that he was briefed by Eugenie Perault. Remember her?”
“The minister who did your Suppressed Briefing for the mission,” said Ade.
“Go on, you might as well say it.”
“The one who shanghaied you.”
Shan stopped short of shaking Aras’s hand off her arm, but Ade could see she had braced her frail muscles. If she could do that it was at least a sign that she was regenerating more tissue.
“Maybe,” she said. “But I want to know why she briefed both of us for the same mission. And I need to know if the bitch knew what was really out here.”
10
We demand the following. We require the return of Minister Par Paral Ual, who acts without authority: we demand that you hand over Aras Sar Iussan for trial: and we demand that you withdraw your vessel from our space.
The World Before Page 17
