Judge

by Karen Traviss

  Rayat felt oddly clean now, despite Esganikan’s death. Whatever happened, and however he was judged if the truth ever emerged, he felt he’d taken the only safe and rational choice. His orders had been to secure the parasite, although that was when nobody had a clear idea of what it was, and asset denial was part of that. But it was his job to evaluate risks to national security, often on the hoof and without recourse to his masters—whoever they might be at any given time—and so he judged c’naatat to be more a hazard than an asset. It was his call. Nobody minded a slimy bastard saving them from disaster, it seemed.

  “What about the rest of your family?” Rayat asked. He helped Shapakti load the small freight carriage. “Won’t they be targeted when the matriarchs realize you’ve absconded with the project? Don’t you need to get them out too?”

  “You should know us better by now, Mohan.” The biologist shut down his systems. “Why would my actions reflect on them?”

  “They would on Earth. Your family would suffer.”

  “This isn’t Earth, and we’re not humans. If any of my family come with me, it will be because we want to stay together, not because we fear retribution for my actions.”

  It would turn into a circular argument, he knew it. Wess’har had a blind spot when it came to threats. It sat oddly with their all-out military strategies, part of that on-off switch they seemed to have.

  “So are they coming with you?”

  “Wait and see,” said Shapakti.

  When they got to the landing strip that night and transferred the cargo, Shapakti’s brothers and isan were sitting quietly in the small ship as if they were waiting impatiently to go on a sightseeing trip. They greeted Rayat casually.

  He nodded back. “Have you told them what you’re doing, Shap?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “Bloody hell, your whole family suddenly becomes revolutionaries? Just like that?”

  “I don’t understand why this troubles you.”

  “Never mind.”

  The bulkhead hatch closed silently like a wound healing. Rayat would never fully understand wess’har. It was as if bits of their legendary consensus broke off and spawned little deviant offspring, each of them harmonious in themselves but forever at odds with its parent.

  “I still think you should have trusted me to handle the Esganikan situation,” Shapakti said. “And told me what you planned.”

  “Sorry,” said Rayat. “Old habit.”

  Shapakti lifted the ship into a vertical climb and Rayat found himself thinking, as he often did, what c’naatat might have been harnessed for if only mankind could have used it sparingly.

  But it was a slippery slope. He was certain that it was best never to step on it at all.

  Reception center, near Kamberra.

  “Hi, Eddie.” Ade leaned back against the headboard and wedged the virin between his bent knees to look at the tiny image transmitted from trillions of miles away. “Wait until I tell you what a shit day I had.”

  “Hi, mate. You took your time calling.”

  “Been a bit busy.”

  “I’ve been keeping up with the news.”

  “Then…well, you know about the Prachy job. Izzy and Jon didn’t make it.”

  Eddie must have heard plenty of bad news in his time and had learned to keep going when the cam was running. But his face crumpled. Even in that small image, Ade could see he lost it for a moment. He’d really liked Qureshi. Ade had to remind himself that they were all faces from the past for Eddie, people he hadn’t seen for twenty-five years, and perhaps that softened the blow a little.

  “No,” Eddie said hoarsely. “Oh no. Please. Oh God, I’m so sorry.”

  “I’m not done yet. Can I unload on you?”

  “Anything you want, mate. It’s…oh, sod it.”

  Ade was glad that Eddie didn’t say it was tragic that they’d survived a deep-space mission and gone home to die in a pissy-arsed stunt that wasn’t worth the effort. He didn’t need reminding. The thought hung there just the same.

  “We had the funerals today and then Shan and I got married. Then Kiir went nuts and killed Esganikan because she’d taken a dose of Rayat’s c’naatat. I was going to kill Kiir myself but Shan slotted him before I got a chance. Did I leave anything out? No, I don’t think I did. Like I said, a shit day.”

  Eddie was quiet for a long time. Ade could see his lips trying to form a response.

  “You can do a journo answer if it’s easier,” said Ade.

  “It’s not, mate. And you’re not okay, and don’t tell me you’ve had worse.”

  No, Ade probably hadn’t. “I just wanted to let you know.”

  “How’s Shan? Aras?”

  “About the same, I think. Can’t even drink ourselves into oblivion, can we?”

  “Well, it’s looking better than Umeh did when the Eqbas started.”

  Ade didn’t know what to say next. “I don’t think Shan’s even told to Giyadas yet. But let her know. She wanted Shan to finish Esganikan off, but Kiir beat her to it.”

  “Ah.” Eddie looked as if he hadn’t been privy to that. “I’ll pass it on anyway.”

  “Better go now.”

  “I’d say take care, but it seems a bit sick. But for Chrissakes get out of there. Come home.”

  Ade closed the link and slid the virin back in his new black pants. Shan was in the shower; Aras was washing his tunic in the small basin. Ade found himself back in an earlier life again, restless and edgy in the aftermath of a fight, wanting to get out and visit a few bars just to blot out his thoughts with noise, beer and chatter.

  “Why did you stop me taking Kiir down, Aras?” he asked.

  Aras looked up. “I felt Kiir was right.”

  “But he fucked it all up. Shan wanted Laktiriu to have a bit of lead time before she took over.”

  “Shan,” said Aras, “was tasked to execute Esganikan herself, so this is a very academic argument.” He smelled angry. “There’s also the chance that you might have got it wrong, too. You might have died.”

  Ade started thinking of objections to it all and then fell into the maze that was c’naatat: who should live, who should not, and who was a risk. He’d done what Esganikan did, in a way, and so had Aras. Only Shan had resisted the urge to infect another person. And even she applied double standards about who was allowed to live.

  It was a mess. When people started playing judge and jury like that, without some rules of engagement, it scared him.

  “I’m going out,” he said. “The lads are at a bar Shukry found for them. I’ll blag a ride into town from one of the cops on the perimeter. Tell Shan I won’t be late.”

  She wouldn’t mind. She’d understand, like she always did, and this was never going to be a normal wedding night anyway.

  It took a while to find a police officer, but she was very obliging about running him into the city and making sure he found the right bar. It was a bigger shock in some ways than a truly alien world; some things had changed enormously in a century and some hadn’t. He’d also grown used to the quiet and emptiness of Wess’ej. The flashing lights in the bar dazzled him as he walked down the steps into noise that felt like a brick wall against his chest.

  “Jesus, Mart,” he said, “I’m getting old. This is too loud.”

  “You can’t even get drunk, can you?” Barencoin pushed a beer at him, one of a forest of bottles lined up on the table. Chahal was getting more at the bar. “Chaz, get Ade a few bags of nuts, will you?”

  “It’s all going pear-shaped,” Ade said. “Kiir just fragged Esganikan. Shan shot him.”

  “Christ, Ade…” Barencoin shook his head. “How much worse is this going to get?”

  “She had a dose of…well, what I’ve got, from Rayat.” There was no point being careless with information in public when you never knew who might recognize you. “Deliberate.”

  Webster took a pull from her bottle. “Bloody mercy killing then. Who’d want that arsehole stuck in their head for the r
est of their life?”

  “How did Kiir find out?”

  Ade shrugged. He never knew who was in touch with what when it came to Eqbas. And now he was past caring. He wanted to immerse himself in noise and the safe company of people who had been through exactly what he had.

  The beer was blissful, even if it didn’t touch him.

  “You still want to go back, now that they can turn you back into mild-mannered normal Ade, or are you too attached to your neon dick?” Barencoin asked.

  “Yeah, I want to go. I can always come back later when they’ve tidied this place up, can’t I?”

  They didn’t actually manage a laugh. They talked a lot about Qureshi and Becken, and it helped. Late in the evening—later than they’d planned—they walked around the underground mall and found a curry house, the crowning event of a run ashore, and he felt guilty that it delighted him. Reality crashed back in when they had to summon Shukry to get them transport back to the reception center, because no civilian traffic was allowed within five klicks of the site now.

  “You better creep in quietly,” said Webster as they made their way upstairs. There was no sign of the day’s earlier events in the lobby, although the corridor to the stores was sealed off. “Women change when you marry them. Shan’s going to be standing there demanding what time you call this.”

  As it turned out, she wasn’t: Aras was asleep on top of the bed covers, and Shan was sitting on the balcony with her arms folded on the rail, chin resting on them as she looked out towards the sea.

  “Sorry, Boss,” he said. “Had to get out.”

  “Understood. Decent curry? I can smell it.”

  “Nice. Could have been hotter.”

  “So, do you want the perfect end to a perfect day?”

  “Now what?”

  “I needn’t have worried about Laktiriu, sweetheart. She’s all sorted.” Shan sat back and put her feet up on the rail. “She says we have to leave. She wants all sources of c’naatat off Earth, just in case. And there I was thinking I was leaving her in the lurch. When I asked her how Kiir found out about Esganikan, she said that Rayat got a message to him through their engineering update system. Just like old times, eh?”

  It could have been worse. The Eqbas could have solved the problem the explosive way. Laktiriu was taking the middle path and just sending them back, which was going soft for wess’har.

  But Rayat—even light-years away, he was still a shit-house, and still a source of trouble.

  It was good to have another motive to get back to the Cavanagh system.

  15

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  Rabi’ah: one week after the change of Eqbas command.

  The opinion-formers of environmental reconstruction toured Rabi’ah, making notes as an Eqbas hydrology team installed the new water supply. They looked baffled.

  “Is that it?” A representative from the African Assembly stood next to the Eqbas engineers as they sunk boreholes the wess’har way. Like Bari, he’d expected to see big machinery and pipework. The Eqbas just had things that looked like old-fashioned drain rods, and were easing them gently into the ground. “Don’t you drill?”

  “The device inserts itself.”

  “How do you lay the pipes?”

  “They build themselves once the template material is activated. It may take some weeks for the routing to reach the coast, but it will find its way there and attach to the desalination system.”

  “Does it displace material underground? How does it move spoil?”

  Bari was a lawyer by training, and expected the technology to go right over his head, but it seemed to be giving the experts a hard time too—even one from the FEU.

  For all Mike Zammett’s posturing, there were no official hostilities, and Bari saw the presentation value in holding open house. The FEU wasn’t a stable monolith, and member states could be easily wooed by the promise of quick fixes on water supplies.

  But what do we have to worry about anyway? As long as the Eqbas are here, we have our big brother standing next to us in the playground. Go ahead, Zammett. Rattle that saber.

  Over the last twenty-four hours, the as long as bit had assumed a new significance. The Eqbas commander who showed up with Shan Frankland and another new kind of alien in tow wasn’t Esganikan Gai. All Bari knew was that Esganikan was dead. He was finding it hard to get used to the Eqbas tendency to blurt out bald statements that would give his own PR team heart attacks.

  Shukry appeared and discreetly beckoned him out of the knot of fascinated spectators watching aliens stick bits of wire in the ground, assured that fresh water would eventually come out at the dry end. The two men wandered away from the entertainment to a quiet spot at the edge of the protective canopy.

  “It’s true, sir, she’s dead,” Shukry whispered. “I’ve been trying to persuade Laktiriu that it’s not something we want to talk about. Trouble is, if someone asks them a question, they tend to answer.”

  It was just as well that the Eqbas hadn’t spoken in public yet. It was only a week or two since they’d arrived, and nobody was going to notice that the main player had vanished. Nobody really knew what Eqbas protocol meant anyway. The change wouldn’t invite questions, at least not for a long time—and it was relatively easy to keep the media away from the mission team.

  “Shukry, key personnel from advanced civilizations shouldn’t just drop dead after they’ve arrived,” Bari said. “You know what I’d wonder? Freaky alien disease. And that either starts people thinking space-plague nonsense, or it makes the Eqbas look less than omnipotent, and frankly all that’s keeping us from Arma-bloody-geddon is that we’ve seen what they did to Umeh.”

  “I don’t think killed by a disgruntled member of your own army is any more reassuring, PM…”

  “Oh God. Is that par for the course, or is it mutiny?”

  “It gets worse.”

  “I’m praying that this is just teething problems shaking out early.”

  “Like I said, sir, ask and they answer. Frankland seems to be trying to teach the new girl to shut up. She’s learning fast.”

  “So how bad is it?”

  “The wrinkly-looking aliens form the bulk of the troops, the Skavu—remember the briefing notes? They’re fanatical about ecology. Seems that Esganikan was carrying some bioagent—”

  “Oh, that’s a word we don’t want to say, and don’t mention it to the Chief of Staff.”

  “No, I don’t think it’s biowarfare. It’s some condition that was supposed to make her invulnerable or something, and the Skavu hate messing with nature, so an officer assassinated her.”

  “Oh, that’d be the biotech the FEU was after when all this started. Good to keep up to speed via BBChan, isn’t it? Well, it obviously didn’t make Esganikan invulnerable. Scratch one rumor.”

  “PR’s advising that we just ignore the personnel change unless asked, in which case the change of command is due to an accident.”

  “It’s still bad. They’re about to change the whole planet, and they have fatal accidents?”

  “We just have to brazen it out and rely on the sheer welter of novelty drowning the who and why. A handy smoke screen.”

  That struck a chord with Bari. He could barely cope with the informatio
n coming in, and found himself taking refuge in whatever floated to the top, the big concepts. He still had time on his side. Everyone was still reeling. Twenty-five years’ advance notice meant nothing, absolutely nothing, because there had been no communication while the Eqbas were in transit and humans were lousy at continuity over that time scale. Just the volume of data sharing on climate, ecology and communications specs since the Eqbas had arrived was swamping the scientists and technicians here.

  “Smoke screen it is, then,” said Bari.

  It was time to cement the new relationship. Bari headed over to Laktiriu, seeing the Skavu soldier with her in a new light and noting the sword, which he assumed was ceremonial. Shan Frankland was probably now his best bet for keeping a handle on this. She was the only human on the Eqbas team, and the former FEU marine who went around with her was just a bagman as far as he could tell.

  “Commander,” said Bari, extending his hand to Laktiriu, “I’m very sorry about your colleague. We won’t discuss it out of respect, and knowing how badly our media can distort things I’d advise you to avoid even referring to it.” He could say keep your mouth shut a hundred different ways, a lawyer’s gift. “I think fact-finding sessions like these are worth a lot more than statements, anyway. You could keep most countries’ attention on the topic of water alone.”

  “Perhaps we should delay any announcements on reducing solar warming for a few months, then,” said Laktiriu. “I realize we have more technology to transfer than your industrial capacity can handle in the short term.”

  “I’m happy to open to this up to some of the countries who are supporting our approach.”

  “That’s commendable. Climate can only be managed globally. It’s a pity we have no isenj with us—they engineered entire climate systems.”

  Isenj was rapidly becoming one of those words laden with darker meaning. Bari took comfort in the fact that the BBChan material showed Umeh as so devoid of natural life that he couldn’t begin to imagine what a day was like there. They’d asked for it. But then one state had invited the Eqbas to help them out, and that parallel hadn’t escaped him.