TO: Superintendent Shan Frankland
FROM:CO Actaeon on behalf of Federal European Union
You are required to accompany the Thetis crew and return to Earth. A movement control warrant has been authorized and you are to be placed under quarantine and taken for medical assessment. If you do not deliver yourself to this authority within twenty-four hours we will be forced to act to contain the biohazard. The RM detachment has orders to detain you.
The Temporary City had a much more permanent appearance to it now. The coming and going of transports and combat craft picked it out from a great distance, like the telltale procession of rockvelvets seeking a corpse.
Aras suppressed his Targassati aversion to objects that imposed on the natural landscape. This was a necessary reinforcement; he just wished it could have looked more balanced. He walked into the command center of the base and found not only Mestin but also her daughter Nevyan directing operations.
Aras still thought of Nevyan as an isanket, a little girl, a matriarch-to-be. The grim concentration on her face said otherwise. Aras caught Mestin’s eye and his unspoken question must have been visible.
“She has to learn her duties sometime, and now is as good a time as any,” Mestin said, and left her daughter tapping three-dimensional plans and re-routing vessels with elegant hand movements. “I see the isenj have told all creation about c’naatat.”
“It was never a secret.”
“Why has the Actaeon demanded Shan Frankland?” There was nothing by way of transmissions that escaped Mestin’s intelligence net. “This is not about the bezerikiller any longer, I suspect.”
Aras steeled himself to lie by omission. “They think she has access to c’naatat, because they believe it to be medical technology. They have no idea it occurs naturally. Their logic says that if it is technology, then they can acquire it.”
“Are they serious about taking her?”
“At the moment.”
“If they attempt to, then they must learn that we mean what we say.” Mestin glanced back over her shoulder to check on Nevyan. “Personally, I would destroy all the gethes now and have done with it, but Fersanye and Chayyas believe it will do little to stop them coming in the long term, and so we should use the opportunity to find another, more lasting barrier.”
Aras held out a human data chip to Mestin. “This is a recording of a conversation between Eddie Michallat and Shan Frankland.”
“And he gave you this.” Mestin stared at it and turned it in her fingers. “Why?”
“He says Shan Chail knows many more ways to fight small wars against certain types of human than we do. And I agree with him. Knowing their minds will be far more significant than technical intelligence.”
“Everything will have a use,” said Mestin. “I do not like change, but change is coming. Bring Shan Chail here until the gethes have left. I want no mistakes.”
Aras worried at the prospect of having Shan kept at close quarters with wess’har even for a day or two. If he protested, it would draw attention. Lying was painful and difficult; he resolved to unlearn the skill as quickly as was practical. He would have to school Shan before she left.
Outside the air throbbed with the arrival of two more transports carrying personnel and equipment. Aras watched the smooth dark shapes for a few minutes and wondered what the bezeri would say about it all. It was part of the protection agreement, but it did not mean they would enjoy it.
He sat in the small surface skimmer for a few minutes, bobbing on the waves and waiting. A cluster of lights emerged from the depths. He took out his lamp and positioned over the brow of the vessel ready for a conversation.
Make them leave, said the first bezeri to reach the shallows. There was a great deal of green light in the words, a sure sign of anxiety. Make them leave our world alone.
We will, Aras signaled. The gethes are leaving today and no others will ever be allowed to land again.
There was a shimmer of blues at the far end of his vision. What price will you be prepared to pay? When will you tire of this?
Aras paused. It was the first time he had ever seen doubt expressed about wess’har commitment—or capability. The bezeri accepted their invincibility without question.
Whatever threatens you also threatens us, Aras replied. We will not abandon you.
The lights settled into a general haze of violets and ambers, and then sank rapidly into the depths. Aras flicked the skimmer into life and headed back to the island and Constantine. It was the first time the bezeri had taken their leave of him without a farewell.
It’s for the best,” Shan told Josh. She stuffed her few possessions back into the grip and slung it across her back. “I want to keep you out of this.”
She made her way up the stairs to the upper level of galleries, Josh trailing behind her. On the way there seemed to be far more colonists than she had ever seen underground on a normal day. They were scared; perhaps they expected a shooting match as the remnant of the mission withdrew. But they showed no resentment of the trouble she had brought to their world.
“One thing I forgot,” said Shan. She fumbled in one of the pockets of her waistcoat. An obliging colonist had altered all her clothes. “My tomatoes. Would you mind hanging on to them for me?” She pressed the container of precious seeds into Josh’s hand.
Aras was waiting for her at the top of the ramp. Behind him were half a dozen wess’har males carrying metallic objects about thirty centimeters long, but nothing like his gevir. Their vivid, finely draped clothing was as far from a military uniform as she could imagine but they could only be troops. She met their stares.
“Time to go,” said Aras. “Tlivat will escort you to the Temporary City.”
“And what are you planning to do?”
“I shall ensure the gethes leave.”
She knew better than to argue with Aras, and she knew he would come to no lasting harm. She was already starting to get used to the idea that he would always be around whatever happened. Tlivat watched the rest of the wess’har head off towards the camp and turned to Shan with a visible sniff.
“You have no need to be afraid,” he said. Whatever scent she was exuding, he had not identified it as c’naatat. Perhaps they couldn’t tell; maybe all alien things smelled the same to them. They hadn’t lived beside humans like Aras had. She had no doubt that Aras would be in serious trouble if—no, when the matriarchs discovered what she was. By then, she hoped she would have made herself so useful to them that they would understand Aras’s rash gesture.
Tlivat had a surface vessel waiting on the beach. It was easy to forget Constantine was on an island. The sea was a calm dark gray, reflecting an overcast sky, and an occasional flash of brilliantly colored lights caught her eye as she helped him push the vessel into the shallows. It rocked alarmingly as she stepped in, and she reminded herself that she could not drown, even if she could not swim. There was now no real reason to learn anyway.
Tlivat set the skimmer towards the mainland and leaned back in the stern, his hands on a console that had emerged gracefully from the keel of the craft like a rapidly growing plant. A small pod of bezeri trailed them. Shan wondered if the mother of the dead child was among them.
Tlivat tilted his head. “They are curious.”
“They know me as the bearer of bad news,” said Shan.
He made a pointing gesture at her chest. “Your pocket is flashing.”
“Oh. Thanks.” Shan had disoriented herself, imagining the world as the bezeri saw it with these odd rigid creatures coasting along overhead in the upper reaches of their atmosphere. We’re birds, she thought. She pulled out her swiss and checked to see what it had gathered for her.
It was a message from Eddie. Shame: she really should have made time to say goodbye and apologize for having such a low opinion of him. It wasn’t personal. She had a low opinion of most humans, and maybe that was why he thought La Rochefoucauld was apt for her.
Shan, it read. I think you need to see this, for all sor
ts of reasons. Call it a selection from the cutting-room floor. That was it, apart from a large video file accompanying it. Of course: her embarrassingly frank interview about Green Rage. What a nice bloke, she thought. A gentleman.
She braced herself in the skimmer as best she could to avoid being thrown around by the larger waves. Tlivat was not a conversationalist. She occupied herself by checking the functions on her swiss, and then she decided to relive the interview with Eddie.
The screen of the swiss spread into a picture. But it wasn’t the scrubby grass around the camp, or a close-up of her. It was hard to see what it was at first, just a mass of gray and off-white shapes, but then the shot pulled back in a series of jerks and she realized she was looking at a planet from high orbit. She had only just started to work out what the colors were when the screen split into two, one side showing a ussissi with a hearing device draped over its head, and the other an isenj, fidgeting on a padded bench.
It was an interview all right, but it wasn’t hers. And it told her more than she had wanted to know about what happened to c’naatat prisoners of war.
Shan shut the swiss and put it back into her pocket. She would be far more patient with Aras in future, she decided. All the way to the Temporary City, she fought to clear images of horror from her mind.
If her own c’naatat had really cared for her welfare, it would have allowed her to get obliviously drunk.
“Don’t worry, they don’t expect you to shoot her,” Barencoin said. Qureshi pulled a face and went on cleaning her rifle.
Lindsay didn’t much care if they had to shoot Shan or not. Eddie kept telling her she was making a big mistake, but orders were orders, and she had no problem complying with this one.
The camp was closing down. Bennett, Hugel and Champciaux were crating up essential kit. Mesevy had been pottering around in the greenhouses for a while, salvaging plants and photosynthetic panels for the colony. Whatever they left behind the colonists would recycle in that conscientious smug way of theirs.
“Let’s get it over with,” said Chahal.
None of them appeared to have much enthusiasm for the task. Lindsay tried to loom over them, Shan-style. It hurt her afresh each time when she realized just how many mannerisms she had picked up from the woman.
“What’s your problem with this?” she asked quietly. “You’re not afraid of a hard target. Come on.”
The marines looked at her. “We’re supposed to detain her, not shoot her,” said Barencoin. “And I don’t fancy pulling this off in the colony. It’s a rabbit warren. Loads of civvies around. No, I think we should call it off.”
“And if she’s what they say she is, it wouldn’t matter what we pumped into her,” Qureshi said. “I didn’t join up to mess around with things like this. She’s not a threat, not if she’s holed up here.”
“Did you hear me? We have our orders. Front up and earn it, people.”
There was a long pause. They would have been out the door by now if Shan had given the order, Lindsay thought. But they stood up and slung their rifles on their webbing, although their expressions were unmarinelike in their sullen acceptance of the command.
“Ma’am, I think you should stay out of this,” Barencoin said. “It’s too personal for you.”
“You saying I can’t carry out my duty?”
“Yes, ma’am, I think I am. We don’t blame you. It’s terrible what you’ve been through, with David—”
“She can save lives, and she knows she can.” Lindsay knew what she would have done in the same position. There was no question. It was as clear to her as the time she had given Hugel back the sub-Q that was meant to abort her child. “She gets what’s coming to her. That’s our job. We defend and protect human life above all else. We put our own kind first, before aliens, before animals, before plants and pretty views. Is that understood?”
Their faces told her it was not. But they tightened their helmet straps and waited. Barencoin looked embarrassed. They would have stood there a lot longer if a distinctive quiet rush of air hadn’t made them all look towards the deckhead.
“Wess’har,” Chahal said, and they sprinted outside into a compound already ringed by wess’har troops. They were shockingly alien in the flesh, so unlike the familiar burly Aras that they were genuinely frightening. None of the team had seen one before but it was clear who they were, and they were extraordinary. Their faces were animal and unfathomable; their weapons were not. One stepped forward. Either it recognized Lindsay, or it was looking for the likely alpha female. She remembered that much of what Shan had told her.
“You will leave,” it said. The voice had many levels and notes to it, but it was perfectly clear. “You will all go to your shuttle and we will escort you into a docking orbit with your Actaeon vessel. Then you will all return to your home and you will not set foot on Bezer’ej or Wess’ej at any time.”
Lindsay tried to judge how much trouble they might be. Shan said they didn’t bluff. They were absolutely literal. There was an unspoiled plain that had once been an isenj city as proof of that.
“We won’t leave without Shan Frankland,” she said, ignoring what her guts were telling her. “We have orders to detain her. You understand orders, don’t you?”
The wess’har didn’t even blink. Their flower-irised eyes were unpleasantly compelling. “You will leave without her.”
“We can’t do that.”
“Then you will die. Those who wish to go may leave now.” The wess’har stepped back; Aras walked through their line and stood within two meters of Lindsay. She had seen him many times but this was different. It was personal. She stared at him and tried to hate him.
He seemed immune to her hostility. “Commander, Shan Frankland is now in the Temporary City. There is nothing you can do to retrieve her, except perhaps get killed.” He had such kind eyes, sad as a dog’s, in that curious hard face. “Make your choice.”
“I will not leave without her.”
“And we do not negotiate.”
Lindsay still had her hand on her rifle, although she was well aware that it was pointless. “I didn’t expect you to help,” she said. “But I expected Shan to. She’ll answer to Earth authorities.”
“I think not.” He stepped forward again, and this time he was inches from her, huge and suddenly menacing. “Understand this. If you knew what sort of life you coveted for your son, if you realized what my condition truly meant, then you would thank her. If she had tried to use it to cure your son, I would have had to destroy every one of you, and I would have done so. The end would be the same. The intervening detail of your small expectations of each other doesn’t concern me. Now go.”
Lindsay realized she had stepped back from him. Eddie, Hugel, and Champciaux were looking bewildered with their grips in their hands. The wess’har troops raised what looked like musical instruments, like sections of horns, beautiful golden curved objects. The open ends each pointed straight at one of the mission team.
“You go or you die,” said the wess’har.
Eddie spoke up. “Commander, we’re the ones with the stone axes here. Let’s be smart for once and leave.”
Lindsay looked over her shoulder at her marines. They were all combat troops, and she wouldn’t have thought of any of them as cowards. She knew they would take on anything if she ordered them to. But their hands were at their sides. If she was going to die, she would probably be doing it alone.
“Let’s go home, ma’am,” Qureshi said.
It was one promise Shan hadn’t kept. She said she would get them all home in one piece. It was up to Lindsay to take on that promise now.
It was hardly the best evening for a baptism. The sky was clear as glass, but there was a biting wind from the sea. Only the fading roses and violets of the sunset gave any impression of warmth.
Shan and Aras stood on the top of the cliff and looked down on to the beach where a large crowd of the colonists had gathered. The assembly seemed a cheerful one. Several of the colonist
s held what looked like bath towels. Mesevy, draped in a shapeless off-white shift that reached her ankles, picked her way down the beach to the water’s edge with Josh and Sam.
“Bloody mad in this weather,” said Shan, and noted that all three of them flinched visibly as they waded into the water to waist height. Josh and Sam stood either side of Mesevy and looked as if they were reciting something while she listened, her eyes closed. Then they each placed an arm across her back and dipped her backwards into the sea, immersing her totally for a few seconds before pulling her back upright again. She stood soaked, hair flattened to her head, gasping. Shan couldn’t hear what was being said, but she heard the “amen” from the crowd.
“So that’s a baptism,” said Aras.
“Never seen that before,” Shan said.
And neither had the bezeri. As Shan looked farther out to sea, she could see scatterings of light, blue and gold, flickering and shimmering just beneath the surface. The bezeri were watching the humans. It was unusual to see them so near the surface lately; their dread of invaders had driven them deep.
“What do you reckon they’re thinking?”
Aras considered the lights for a while and moved his head slightly as if reading aloud to himself. “Some of them are asking whether the humans are trying to breathe under water. They’re debating whether to try to bring Mesevy to the surface if she gets into difficulty.”
Shan smiled. “Have you explained baptism to them?”
“There’s never been an adult baptism here before.”
“I never thought of that.”
“I explained that the water cleanses the human’s soul. The bezeri wanted to know if the soul-dirt that was washed off would pollute their environment.”
The crowd on the shoreline broke up and began moving back up the beach. Shan knew now what the big towels were for. Mesevy was wrapped tight in them, shivering.
“Your technology is pretty good, isn’t it?”
Aras nodded. “You say so.”
“Can you do selective memory wipes?”
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