“Did you hit it?” he asked.
“I pulled it off you.” Her face was white and she smelled of panic, but she was going through the motions of controlled calm. “What have I done? Have I made things worse?” She was peering at his chest, then his back. “Christ, that thing’s done some damage. Don’t move. Here, hold still.”
“Don’t touch it.”
“Sorry. Look, put some pressure on it. You’ll bleed to death.”
“No, I won’t,” he said. He made a grab for the stab-tail and held it by its neck. Its tail flicked back and just missed his arm, but he managed to get both hands on it and held it still while he searched for wounds. No, the blood was his own. The stab-tail was an old, weak creature and the effort of the attack had all but killed it. It was dying of exhaustion; its flight membranes were dry and lifeless and its fangringed little mouth opened and closed pathetically. After a while it stopped struggling, and he took his hands off it and left it to die. At least that was one problem he had been spared. He couldn’t afford to infect something so predatory.
He stood up, relieved. But Shan’s eyes were on his chest, fixed on the bloodstains left by the wound, her expression all astonishment and suspicion.
“I’ve seen enough stabbings to know you should be starting to lose consciousness by now,” she said quietly. “Does it hurt?”
“Of course it hurts. Resilience is not the same as feeling no pain. Far from it.”
“Resilience? Is that what you call it?” She made as if to touch the wound again and he raised his arm in warning. “Okay. Okay. I’ll back off.”
“I don’t need help.”
“You’re not even hemorrhaging, are you?”
“I don’t. Not for long.”
“But that spike went right through you.”
“It will heal. Believe me, it will heal.”
The immediate crisis was past. He looked at the blood on his clothing: so what had the c’naatat decided to borrow from the stab-tail, if anything? Would he notice the changes? Experience told him he would be aware in a few days if the parasite had taken a liking to any of the predator’s features. He didn’t relish the prospect of wings again. The colonists had reacted to those in the most extraordinary way.
Shan sat down beside him so that her shoulder was resting against his, and said nothing for a while. She smelled agitated.
“You heal bloody fast.”
“I think you already said that.” The pain was faint now. He shifted slightly.
“I thought as much when we shot you down. Kris Hugel keeps asking if I can persuade you to give some tissue samples. She was really fascinated by how you walked away from that crash.”
Under his tunic, he felt discreetly for his tilgir. The blade was good and sharp. He didn’t want to use it. Please, Shan Chail, don’t disappoint me. Don’t be a gethes. “You know, don’t you?”
“Know what?”
He tightened his grip on the blade and dreaded what he would have to do. He had not felt that about Parekh. He had not felt that about the isenj. But this was his friend. “You have calculated my age, and you have seen the images in Constantine’s records, and you have seen me survive fatal injuries. Somehow you know about c’naatat. Now answer me this: Did you touch me to try to acquire it?”
Her expression was one of genuine and total bewilderment. “I haven’t got a clue what c’naatat is. What the hell is this about?”
He had gone one word too far. “No matter.”
“No, don’t you bloody well ‘no matter’ me. You’ve accused me of something and I don’t even know what it is. Come on. What’s the problem here?”
The tilgir was still there. He could silence her if he had to, but it was the last thing he wanted to do.
“If I tell you, it must stay with you. Or I will have to kill you. I mean that.”
She pulled a hard and unamused face. “Don’t take the piss. I’m not in the mood.”
“This is far from a joke. I am infected with a native parasite called c’naatat. It has colonized my body and does whatever it sees fit to keep me alive as its host.”
“Does what, exactly?”
“Repairs injury, restores cellular degeneration, neutralizes pathogens and toxins. It assimilates useful gene sequences from other sources to improve its host’s survival capabilities.”
“Let me guess. You don’t look at all like a normal wess’har, do you? That was the long gold thing in the picture. It was you.” She made an embarrassed face, screwing up her eyes for a second. “Sorry. I didn’t mean thing. Person.”
“That was in the early days of my exposure to human DNA. C’naatat seems to like gethes’ features.”
Shan made that mmm sound of a human pondering something serious and said nothing. He wondered if she were playing Eddie’s trick of sitting in silence and waiting for the other person to weaken and start talking.
“Could it infect a human?”
“I have no idea. But it’s a very adaptable organism, and it seems to favor large, mobile hosts.”
“So this is your disease.”
“Yes.”
“So what can kill you?”
Aras knew she had finally worked it out. “Only catastrophic injury like fragmentation. I could starve to death, eventually, or asphyxiate in the right conditions, but my body’s ability to adapt makes me wonder even about that. I have no idea just how many survival mechanisms it has collected over time.”
“Oh, shit,” said Shan. “Shit.”
“Not your idea of a miracle, then.”
“I’m ten paces ahead of you on this, Aras. Do you want me to tell you how we’d make use of this if we got our hands on it, or can you imagine?”
“Only too well.”
“You better stay clear of the payload. Like I said, they’ll have you chopped, diced and on slides in no time if they find out.”
She was silent again, looking out over the plain with her lips moving slightly every so often as if she was going to say something. He could feel the warmth of her through his tunic. It was some comfort.
“How the hell have you coped with this?” she asked.
“Sometimes well, sometimes not.”
“This is a nightmare.”
That much was reassuring. She had not become wildly excited; she had not started to talk of c’naatat being a boon to mankind. She had not asked how it might benefit her or discussed the parasite’s value. She was frightened for her world and for him, but he hoped she would not become afraid of him as the others had. After a taste of real comradeship, that occasional precious touch, he felt he couldn’t face a return to isolation.
“So you’ve watched everyone you know die. You don’t know what new feature you’re going to wake up with. Jesus, I’m not sure I could cope with that.”
“Ben—Josh’s ancestor—said it was my punishment from God,” said Aras.
“Well, Ben was a sanctimonious bastard. Have the colonists ever shown any interest in it?”
“And keep them from their God in heaven? They reject it totally. It terrifies them.”
“So why did Ben think it was punishment? For being a heathen alien?”
“For slaughtering isenj. I caught it from them here when I was their prisoner of war, you see. Open wounds are an ideal vector. And isenj have genetic memory. So now I have some of their memories, memories of me and what I did to them. I can see why Ben thought it had been designed to teach me a lesson.”
Shan’s face crumpled for a second or two and she looked away, angry. “Aras, I’m so sorry.” She took his hand and he knew for certain that it wasn’t to grab a sample. “Is that why you wiped them out? To stop this spreading further?”
“Isenj breed rapidly anyway, but with the c’naatat reducing their death rate they became a plague. There were a billion or more bezeri before the isenj came, and now there are just a few hundred thousand. It has taken centuries for their population to recover even to that level—and that is what pollution really means, Shan
Chail. It means the death of other beings. As I said, I would do it again.”
She linked her arm through his and they sat on the slope for a long time, watching a rockvelvet creep up on the dead stab-tail to leave the world tidy again. A few cusics, crablike things, began edging closer to it, eventually taking a few nips of flesh and then swarming over the body. The black velvet continued its approach, draping from rock to rock in a relentless flow towards the carrion.
It slid up over a leg. A cusic froze, claws raised in defense of its prize, but then beat a retreat. Gradually, mechanically, the rockvelvet forced the cusics away with its persistence and enveloped the corpse, shrouding it like a black drape. The mound slowly flattened as the creature beneath was digested, and the shroud eventually gathered itself and flowed off to a sunny rock to bask until its next meal. The whole quiet destruction had taken about fifteen minutes.
Shan made that sighing sound again. “What about your own people?”
“I am in exile. A war hero, admittedly, but no isan would copulate with me, not with this condition. You transmit your genetic material vertically, to your children, don’t you? We share ours horizontally as well when we copulate. Consider it the worst possible venereal disease.”
“Surely someone would be curious what it would be like to live that long. Humans certainly would. We wouldn’t give a toss how much havoc it wreaked with world ecology. We’re halfway to hell with an aging population as it is.”
“Wess’har don’t share your attitude towards death. We are far more aware of our genetic survival than our individual ones.”
He stood up and helped her to her feet. If he had sought a demonstration of his powers of recovery, he couldn’t have staged a more impressive one. But at least she still took his hand when he offered it and didn’t recoil. If anything, his revelations seemed to have stirred a gentleness in her, a concern that was obvious from the way she had dropped her voice and softened that rigid posture. She walked slowly in pace with him, arm through his, occasionally rubbing her hand on it in that comfort gesture he had seen the colonists use so many times.
He couldn’t expect the gethes to ignore the military potential of c’naatat. His own kind hadn’t, for all their discipline. It had given them a hope of redressing the imbalance against a far more populous enemy, creating reusable troops who could survive terrible injuries and still fight. But recovery was a design flaw if you fell into enemy hands. The matriarchs never planned for that to happen. And they never planned to rescue hostages, either. He was just unlucky.
His isenj captors taunted him about it. His people didn’t give a damn, they reminded him, when he’d finished screaming. He didn’t matter anymore. He was a monster, a murderer of children and the unarmed. He deserved what he got.
Looking back, Aras was unsure what had been worse: the physical torture or being force-fed carrion. The isenj knew how particular wess’har were about other life-forms. It was the heart of their belief and self-respect. He wondered if Shan would understand that. It would have seemed ludicrous to a gethes. The pain faded, and c’naatat didn’t scar: but being defiled in that way, defiled to the very heart of yourself, was far harder to forget.
In a way it was easier to scream. Sometimes they could make him scream for days.
Shan squeezed his arm.
“Promise me something,” she said.
“What?”
“If there’s the slightest risk of this getting out through me, if I catch it, if I might let something slip out…you know what to do, don’t you?” She tapped her fingers against the tilgir under his clothing. He had forgotten she would be able to feel the hard metal handle against her hip. Her expression was earnest, grim. “Do what you have to. But make it quick.”
Ben had told him all about guilt and repentance. So this was what guilt felt like.
It hurt.
22
You should be within communications range of Thetis in the next 72 hours. Their comms fit is not compatible with your encryption and you will need to use plain voice to establish contact. According to the isenj, you are also likely to attract wess’har attention at a range of approximately 750,000 kilometers. Please maintain an open channel with the isenj relay at all times for instructions. You are not to land on Cavanagh’s Star II, regardless of what emergency might present itself. You are not to take any action that the isenj might interpret as an act of aggression towards them, whatever the provocation.
AIR MARSHAL XAVIER RONQUILLO MORALES,
FEU Chief of Staff, to CO Actaeon
The sky shook.
That was the only way Eddie could describe it. The subsonic throb had woken him before the alarm went off, and he had stumbled out of the camp to see what was happening. On his way out he saw Chahal and Paretti huddled under a table, and stopped.
“What the hell are you doing?” he said.
“Earthquake,” they answered in unison. Eddie didn’t come from earthquake country, so he ignored them. Earthquakes shook the ground. That wasn’t what was happening now.
Outside, there was only one place to look, and that was up. And above him was a sight that stopped him breathing.
Two great slow-moving craft were passing over the fields, casting cold shadows. They were smooth and curved like blue bullets, and he had never seen anything quite like them. At first he couldn’t grasp their scale. Then he realized they were flying much higher than he imagined and so—so they were immense beyond his comprehension. He couldn’t hear them, but he could feel them in his mouth and in his bones. Primeval fear overwhelmed him.
Someone tapped his shoulder. Startled, he spun round to find Shan standing beside him, looking as if she had been up all night. He could chart the shadows under her eyes almost to the hour now.
“Isenj?” he shouted over the vibration.
“I can hear you okay,” she said. “No, that’s the wess’har.”
“What are they doing?”
“Reinforcing the garrison again. I think we have a problem.”
She looked scared. It was an odd expression. He had seen angry, and he had seen contemptuous, and he had even seen shocked, but scared was new. It didn’t seem the right time to ask. He stared up again, watching the huge ships pass majestically overhead and fade into the glare of the rising sun.
Eddie didn’t watch where Shan went, nor was he even aware of her leaving. He squatted down on the ground for a few moments and tried to regain his orientation. The experience totally shattered his perception of the world. A year ago, by his conscious reckoning, he had been a member of the most advanced species in creation. Now he was a small, isolated speck on an alien world, watching truly massive ships—ships that seemed beyond the skill and technology of humans—sweep over him on business he couldn’t comprehend. Humans didn’t matter. He wasn’t part of the game. He had stood amid running street battles in Italy, oblivious to genuine danger, feeling immune from the events around him because he had a camera. The headset and the eyepiece were a shield against all perils, and a number of reporters thought that way right up to the moment they got killed. He wished he could feel that way now.
Then he was angry. It was one of the few times in his life that his first instinct had not been to run for his camera. He had missed the shot.
“Bugger,” he said.
Sabine Mesevy passed him. He turned to look, and noted she was in her best fatigues, smart and clean, with her chestnut hair pinned back in a pleat. She seemed not to be alarmed by the military activity.
“Where you off to, then?” he said. “You scrub up well.”
“Church,” she said. “It’s Sunday, in case you’ve lost track. Why don’t you come?”
“No thanks. Heaven might rejoice at a repentant sinner, but its jury is still out on journalists.”
“Shame.” She smiled at him. “Lovely stained-glass window. It would make a great shot.”
For the matriarchs, the unthinkable had happened. The blockade of Bezer’ej had fallen after 495 years.
Aras strode through the passages of the Temporary City, now crammed with extra troops. They had been deceived by scale. The isenj had somehow landed three tiny craft within thirty kilometers of them. The defense grid was set to detect and neutralize much larger vessels to defend against a mass landing. And there was only one reason for landing a small force, and that was to carry out a covert action on specific targets.
The isenj had learned something from the wess’har after all. They had learned that winning wasn’t entirely about numbers.
“Mestin Chail is busy,” said one of the new males fresh in from F’nar, not looking up from his screen, and Aras cuffed him hard round the head. He stumbled but he didn’t fall. He gaped at Aras.
“You must be new here,” Aras said. “But you know who I am. I will see Mestin now.”
It was one of the privileges of being Aras Sar Iussan, the Restorer of Bezer’ej, the last of the c’naatat troops. He could see anyone he damn well pleased, even a commanding matriarch. In a social hierarchy where age and experience created rank among males, Aras was very nearly as respected as a female. He planned to use that advantage.
Mestin was standing in the center of the control chamber while her husbands and cousins and older children went about the tasks of organizing supply lines and setting up accommodation for the incoming clans. She glanced at Aras and beckoned him over.
“Are you certain they landed?” he asked.
“Ussissi information is very reliable. They say the isenj timed the incursion to coincide with the arrival of Actaeon. They thought we might have our minds on other things.”
“We did.”
“The ussissi also say the isenj have sent in two teams to infiltrate the Temporary City and destroy our defenses.” She brought up the local-scale chart of the area with a movement of her hand and pointed out a constellation of colored points of light, two blue, twelve amber: she had deployed a number of foot units in the hunt already. “We will find them the slow way. I have no intention of using destructive weapons in this environment yet. And if we fail, then we have enough troops and materiel in place to deal with an invasion.”