Ade glanced at the open door of his room and went to check.
“You’ve been a naughty girl, Boss,” he said. “You should leave the housework to us.”
“I was bored,” she lied. “Anyway, you can bounce a coin off that bed.”
“I noticed. Tidy job. Thanks.”
She studied Ade’s expression—cautious, anxious for approval—and recalled the dreamed memory that she had been grappling with when Shapakti disturbed her. It hadn’t come from Aras. The vivid tableau of violence had been conducted in English, a woman yelling at someone to stop. She could guess a lot from that: it was Ade’s memory.
For a moment she recalled something warm and wet on her face like a spray of saliva, and she put her hand up instinctively to swat it away. Then she felt her stomach roll with nausea.
Whatever that memory was, it wasn’t good. And it wasn’t saliva, because she’d been spat at too often to mistake it for anything else.
“I’m going to Bezer’ej for a recce,” she said.
“We’ll—” Aras began, but Shan interrupted him.
“On my own. I’ll be fine.”
“You won’t like what you see.”
“Funny, that’s happened quite a few times in my career.”
Ade rinsed his hands and made a grab for his jacket. “I’ve got to sort out some billets for the lads,” he said. His glance darted between them. “Please, don’t have a row about this, will you?”
Shan shrugged. “Of course not.”
The soul of tact, Ade Bennett. He gave both of them an uncomfortable smile and left. Silence flooded in after him.
“Want to say something?” she asked.
Aras was now accomplished at displacement activity. He rummaged through the larder. “No, but you do, isan.”
“I moved my stuff back into our bedroom. Are you okay with that?”
“Yes.”
“No problems sharing a bed with me again?”
“You’re offended that I haven’t attempted to copulate.”
Sometimes the no-nonsense wess’har style wasn’t what she needed to hear. “Okay, I know I don’t look too good right now.”
“You’re still frail. It’s not appropriate for your condition. I must care for you.”
“I thought that we’d be relieved to be together again.” No, I don’t need anyone. I really don’t, remember? “I just didn’t think it would be this uncomfortable.”
“These are early days. I thought you were dead. It’s hard for me to adjust too.”
“You blame Ade.”
“But you’re back.”
“And you’re okay with him?”
“You spaced yourself.”
“Exactly. It was my own bloody fault. I didn’t have to go after Lin and I was so cock-sure of myself that I didn’t think anyone could take me.” The memory she had picked up from Ade’s blood was one of being violently abused. She wondered what she had triggered in him when she lashed out at him, and she now knew why she felt ashamed. “As long as you don’t take it out on him.”
Aras tilted his head slightly. “He’s my brother. In most senses.”
Shan wrapped her arms round his waist and rested her forehead against his chin. Theirs was an accidental relationship, a blend of duty and sympathy, the sort that was based on pragmatism rather than impulse; it was the sort she could trust. “I know this is hard for you too.”
“I wanted to use the grenade. Eddie and Ade stopped me.”
“Oh, Christ, I’m sorry.”
“It’s in the past.”
“Well, we’re both going to find out what we went through, aren’t we? Swap-a-nightmare time.” Oursan was fun but c’naatat transferred memories across the receptor cells too, the vivid ones that you couldn’t erase. “I think I’ve picked up some bad ones from Ade just from blood contact.”
“I imagine a soldier with a violent father has some very unpleasant memories.”
Shan had never known Ade’s background, but nobody who fitted into normal family life would have signed up for a deployment like this. She felt the punch again. She wondered what the splash of warm moisture on her face might be and dreaded the revelation.
“You always got on before,” Shan said.
“Will you prefer him to me?”
She jerked her head back. “Whoa, where did that come from?”
“You felt pity and comradeship for me and you feel the same for him.”
“Hey, I’m not a bloody charity shop.”
“If that’s what you want, I’d be very happy to have him as a house-brother. But perhaps human monogamy will make you choose between us.”
“Don’t talk crap,” she said. “We had a deal. I don’t walk out on a deal. And I’m not Lindsay Neville. I don’t fuck someone by accident or because I got tanked up out of my skull either, okay? Don’t you know me by now?”
“You said it yourself. You ruined Ade’s life. I know how your framework of responsibility operates, and I will respect your decisions, whatever they are.”
“You know what? If I had the energy, I’d storm out, but frankly I can’t be arsed.” She stepped back from him, hands held up in angry submission. “When I’m feeling fit, maybe I’ll handle this better.”
It was time for a walk. Her anger had been an asset in her career, a savage dog let off the leash when she chose to free it and send people running for safety. It had kept her sane in space. But now her anger wouldn’t come to heel. She didn’t like being in thrall to any emotion and that included passion.
She walked through the city feeling like a copper on the beat again, a memory from a long and uncomplicated time ago, acknowledging wess’har she recognized and those she didn’t. This wasn’t Reading Metro. They didn’t wrap themselves in defensive anonymity here. And, like a copper, she knew that Ade had been lying—benignly—and that he wasn’t sorting out billets for his detachment.
She’d find him. F’nar was compact enough to cover in a few hours and it wasn’t a place to hide, so she’d start with known associates and affiliations—Nevyan’s place—and work out from there. Like Eddie, she could always find out what she needed to know.
In a world where there were few secrets to uncover, she wondered what skills she might have to learn to occupy herself in the very long future.
Eddie took a deep breath. He was afraid what he would see.
“Okay, kid.” He brushed his palm across the top of Giyadas’s rocking-horse mane. She had a skill he needed: she could press the correct sequences into the ITX console simultaneously, while he had to tap through them in laborious sequence to activate the image in Nevyan’s wall. “Let’s see what’s on the news, eh?”
“It will be depressing,” said Giyadas.
Eddie heard his own phrases in her mouth. She was six as far as he was concerned. Six-year-olds—even matriarchs in waiting—deserved a carefree childhood, protected from concepts like depressing news. But it didn’t appear to dent her mood.
There were only two news feeds he could access via the ITX now, and both were running similar images. They hadn’t changed much in three days. Apart from the sports and entertainment segments, they spewed wall-to-wall unedited footage of troop movements along the FEU borders with Africa and the Sinostates.
Eddie could hear the voice-over but he didn’t want to.Unless the FEU agrees to stand down and hand over control of the ITX link to the UN so that global negotiation can take place, the African Alliance is threatening to seize the FEU downlink array at Amman. Sinostates president Yi says she will deploy troops to ensure that the relay station is handed over to the UN undamaged.
The Amman relay was sandwiched on a finger of land between the two superpowers. The Middle East had never been very good at staying out of the crucible. Eddie exhaled and thought better of sending ’Desk the images of Eqbas-held worlds that Ual had given him.
He’d abandoned all the rules of the game. Self-censorship didn’t matter any more.
“Why are they doing this?”
asked Giyadas.
“So the other nations can talk to your mother and Esganikan and…well, agree some kind of peace.” Eddie rolled the words around in his brain and they left him reeling. “If this has UN backing then the FEU has to give in.”
Giyadas appeared to be mesmerized by the sudden switch to the studio. She tilted her head about as far as it would go, studying the faces and prodding the console to switch between story icons.
“There can be no negotiation,” she said. “Why do they think talking will change what must be done?”
There was no point panicking over the political commentary of a child. But Eddie did, because this child thought as the adult wess’har did, and the adult wess’har of two worlds had clearly made up their minds that Earth was due for a visit.
“Can you get me my news desk now, sweetheart?”
Giyadas looked over her shoulder at him. “Is this just pictures, Eddie?”
He didn’t understand her question at first. He heard a journalist’s question; were there any interviews to follow? But then he realized she was asking him something more profound. “For me, you mean?”
“Yes. What is real to you? Do you see your home at war? Or do you see a clever film, something that makes you feel accomplished?”
Shan had once asked him a similar question about Earth; did the people back home see his reports on the war in the Cavanagh system as a movie, massively distant and unreal?
It wasn’t unreal now. And it was still at least twenty-five years before they would see the unimaginable reality of an Eqbas task force.
“I think I see a product,” he said. “And that tells me I need to stop doing this job.”
He sat on the thin hard bench and stared at the shimmering wall with its armored vehicles full of bots and an earnest young major in a Sinostates uniform explaining that every effort would be made to minimize collateral damage. Troops with a universal expression that Eddie had seen on Ade’s face and a hundred others—wide-eyed, unblinking, brows slightly raised—stared from the back of trucks.
“Okay, I’ve seen enough,” he said. “Let’s talk to ’Desk.”
Giyadas played the console like a concert pianist. The wall defaulted to smooth stone for a moment and then back to the news.
“I can’t find your ’Desk.”
He could see the transmission: the ITX was still live. “Let me have a go.”
Giyadas had a way of lowering her voice as if she was talking to an idiot. “It’s not there,” she said. “The link has gone.”
Eddie didn’t disbelieve her, but he stood behind her anyway and laid his hand on hers—cool, suede-like, utterly alien—to move it to the controls he felt might yield a connection.
“See?” said Giyadas. “I am no fool.”
The wall was flooded with an inappropriately peaceful powder-blue holding screen. It simply said UN PORTAL in the global and two subglobal languages—English flanked by Mandarin and Arabic.
The FEU had caved in, with or without armed conflict. Eddie wondered what live footage he had not seen.
Either way, he was now cut off again from BBChan, the last remnant of what he called home.
We will return you to Jejeno,” said Esganikan, in passable English. “You may need protection from your fellows. Our troops will accompany you.”
Ual hadn’t quite planned it this way. Ralassi seemed not to be taking any notice and trotted around the ship’s compartment, examining the bulkhead displays with an Eqbas ussissi. Ual’s fate didn’t affect them. Ussissi were beyond sectarian disputes.
“But it’s unthinkable for any wess’har troops to land on Umeh,” he said.
“Then think it.”
It was hard to tell if she was massively arrogant or just finding her way through a complex and inexact alien language. She was a big creature and she intimidated him. She knelt on a thick pad of fabric, leaning forward slightly from the waist like a ussissi about to spring.
“There will be a bad reaction,” said Ual.
“If we don’t land we can’t help you. So we land and help or we take you back and leave you. Either way, there will be no further colonization of other planets by your people.”
Know the enemy. There were unspoken assumptions about other species that shaped the isenj view of the world. Wess’har believed in balance and would not take life. Humans wanted something in exchange for anything they gave, and they wanted it fast, and they usually wanted more than was fair. Ussissi cooperated with everyone but drew the line at choosing sides. And nobody wanted to die.
Ual had not fully understood the Eqbas capacity for taking you at your word and then refusing to deviate from their plans. I asked them to help. Eddie had once told him a human myth about having three wishes, and how careful you had to be about the way you worded your wish.
“What form might your help take?” Ual asked.
Esganikan had that wess’har trait of suddenly becoming absolutely still, not just immobile but frozen. “You have problems feeding an increasing population and dealing with the pollution caused by that. The first step is to reverse your population growth.” She dipped her head suddenly, the great plume of red fur catching the light. “Normally we would begin reestablishing a sustainable balance between species in the ecosystem, but as you appear to have eradicated everything beyond food plants and marine life then that presents us with problems. There is little to restore. Do you maintain any genetic archive, like the gethes do?”
“No.”
“A pity.”
“But Tasir Var is not entirely… urbanized.”
“Your moon.”
“Have you observed it?”
“We still assess Umeh from orbit. We will break a vessel out to there soon.”
Ual pondered break. Eddie said the Eqbas ships split into sections. “You could take the remaining native species from Tasir Var.”
“Not an ideal solution, but at the moment I can think of no other. Da Shapakti is the expert. His priority must be Bezer’ej.”
If Esganikan knew it was called Asht then she was refusing to use the isenj name. Ual accepted that Asht was now beyond isenj reach; and he always had, even though his colleagues and the electorate thought otherwise. Sometimes you needed to trade pride and dreams for a safer reality.
Two Eqbas males entered the compartment and called up wonderfully detailed images of Umeh’s topography in the bulkhead. It seemed as if the hull of the ship was a liquid sheet full of light.
“Do you have any means to limit your birthrate?” asked Esganikan.
“Yes, but regions are reluctant to use it in case their neighbors don’t and they are overrun. We have never fully developed such… unpopular medicine.”
“Then we will create a solution that acts on all isenj equally at the same time.”
Ual hesitated. “What?”
“A medication. An intervention.”
“But how will you ensure that all use it?”
Esganikan stood up and passed her hands across the surface of the bulkhead, creating a closer view of Ebj, the Northern Assembly territory. She put a long multijointed finger on a fine tracery of lines.
“Is this part of the water grid?”
“Yes.”
“Does every Umeh region have such a network?”
Ual began to see the Eqbas mind at work. “I would say that twenty such grids serve ninety percent of the population.”
“And the remainder?”
“They exist on more remote islands and have their own extraction and pumping systems.” Umeh was a world in precarious and shifting equilibrium: discomfort was spread fairly, a necessary thing in a crowded world that needed to defuse tension to maintain order. “You plan to…intervene in the water supply, then?”
“It is the least drastic solution and the most universal. You must all consume water.”
“So you want me to show you how to access the regional systems.”
“All of them.”
“Even Ebj?”
&nbs
p; “As I said, we will treat all equally. We wish to be fair, and your internal politics are not our concern.” She cocked her head. She seemed to be searching his face. “We have your DNA. Are all isenj similar? If not, we shall need more tissue specimens.”
Ual heard his beads rattle in an involuntary reflex of quill fluffing. My tissue. My DNA. But he concentrated on his duty. “I have not agreed to this.”
“We will do it anyway.” Esganikan dismissed the images in the bulkhead with an imperial wave reminiscent of a human’s. “The alternative is culling, and that is an extreme measure, but we can do that too, and easily, as there are few other life-forms to consider.” She glanced at Ual as if expecting a reply: she had odd shiny eyes like a human, too, and the same flat featureless skin. “You don’t want us to cull.”
Ual had to remind himself she was absolutely literal. This wasn’t one of Eddie’s verbal games.
“No, but I believe your claim that you will do it if we don’t comply.”
It was Eddie.
If Eddie had actively handed over that quill to create the bioweapon or had done so from accident or innocence, the result was the same. Asht—Bezer’ej was now out of isenj reach, and he was secretly glad of the removal of one more temptation to overstretch their capacity. But he wasn’t wess’har. He did care about motive.
I rarely trust anyone. But he was inexplicably hurt that Eddie might have done something behind his back, to use the human phrase.
Esganikan did that rapid head-tilting gesture, side to side, pupils dilating and closing into thin crossed lines.
“You misunderstand us,” she said. “As long as you remain on your own world and harm no other species in it, your problems are yours to resolve. When you step beyond that line, they are ours.” Her English was getting better by the minute. “But your colonizing missions are over. And they are over for the gethes, too. You will both learn to live in balance within your own boundaries.”
Ual reached down and snapped off a quill from among the older ones by his legs, the ones set to shed soon. He took off the corundum bead and handed the quill to Esganikan. This had to be a conscious act, not a betrayal.