Okurt seemed excited. He was spinning his coffee cup in its saucer again and Lindsay wanted to slap his hand away from it. But he stopped of his own accord when his staff of a dozen officers filed in.
Two of them sat either side of her, a little too close for comfort. She found it hard to brush hips with strangers now. She tried to shrink.
“We’ve received instructions to attempt to reopen negotiations with the wess’har authorities,” said Okurt.
There was silence. None of them were trained in diplomacy, Lindsay thought, and diplomacy as humans understood it wouldn’t work on wess’har. She’d dealt with them just enough to know that.
“They don’t negotiate,” she said.
“I know it’s not going to be easy.”
“How are the isenj going to take this?”
“They’re not privy to this.”
Lindsay went back to staring at her hands. There was quite a lot the isenj weren’t privy to. There were times in life when alarm bells started ringing insistently in your head and wouldn’t stop. She wondered if anyone else could hear them like she did then. Okurt certainly did, but she knew he would follow the orders of politicians who were 150 trillion miles away from the fallout.
“I plan to make contact with F’nar in the next few weeks,” he said. “I have no idea how their political hierarchies operate or even what their geopolitical structures are. Could you help out, Commander?”
Lindsay looked up. “They might prefer to talk to a woman. It’s a matriarchal society.”
“Are you volunteering?”
There was a chance it would get her close enough to Shan. She stifled her excitement and paused a beat before saying, “Okay.” Again, she was conscious of Okurt’s gaze resting just a suspicious second too long on her and she clung to a facade of professional calm.
I’m going to have the bitch.
The prospect almost outweighed the reappearance of Rayat, but not quite. The briefing seemed longer and slower than usual. She caught herself carving her stylus into the smart-paper again and made a deliberate effort to take notes until the meeting broke up and she and Okurt were alone in the wardroom.
“Is there something you want to tell me, Malcolm?”
His bemusement looked genuine enough. “Something on your mind?”
“Why is Dr. Mohan Rayat here and not in the fridge in Thetis?”
Okurt didn’t turn a hair. “We were instructed to retrieve the whole team plus the detachment. Everyone who had any contact with Frankland, just in case they had any contamination.”
It threw her. She really hadn’t guessed. She fought the urge to check her bioscreen. “For their own well-being, of course.”
“You know damn well why.”
“Ah, a word from our sponsors, eh?”
“As far as they’re concerned, we’re just cooperating with their requests. Don’t push it.” He glanced over his shoulder, casual, apparently unconcerned, and then lowered his voice. “And if I had the slightest suspicion that they were carrying this thing, I wouldn’t be letting the commercial medical team crawl all over them.”
“I’m not with you.”
“If you were chief of staff, what precautions would you take here?”
“Defensive?”
“Political.”
Lindsay didn’t need to think that long. “I’d probably want to look at that biotech for our own military purposes before we handed it over.”
“I’m glad to see your strategic common sense is alive and well.”
Lindsay felt she had at least judged Okurt about right. For all his grumbling and cynicism, he was at his core a sailor, an officer, a man who put his ship’s company first and looked after his own. So here was another agenda. She wondered how many more there might be, and if Okurt was aware of them all.
“Are those your real orders?” she asked. No, not that. Don’t let Shan be right. “Cut-and-come-again troops?”
“I still answer to the Defense Discipline Act. Not shareholders.” His almost constant half smile evaporated for a few moments: the lines around his mouth collapsed into worry, into concern, but he snapped them back into place again. “And whatever we do with it, it’ll be in the hands of our federal interests, not hawked round the international marketplace by multinationals. That stays within this wardroom. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“We’ll take her. Don’t worry.”
He didn’t need to say who her was. Lindsay feigned casual indifference. “Want me to get to work on that?”
“You know how I feel about your involvement.”
“I can get to her. I know better than anyone how to do it.”
Okurt looked into her eyes for a while, no doubt scouring for signs of crazed vengeance. She made sure he didn’t find any.
“Okay,” he said. “This place is a sieve. So only you and I know, and that’s it. Understood?”
“Never heard you mention a thing,” she said.
“And maybe you’re not ideal for diplomatic contact.”
“Fair enough.”
It didn’t make her feel brave or clever. She was deceiving a good man. But however decent, sensible, and deserving of loyalty Okurt might be, Shan Frankland had the edge on him: she’d been right.
Lindsay knew that if she was going to get to Shan, she’d have to go through Okurt sooner or later. She needed his trust.
“Is the whole payload thawed out?”
“All of them. The only life on Thetis now is the isenj and their ussissi support team, and they’re still out cold.”
So she had her Royal Marines back on board, and she had Eddie, and Eddie could find out God’s unlisted number if he put his mind to it.
Both Eddie and Shan had taught Lindsay a valuable technique common to both journalists and detectives. If you had enough individual pieces of the model—however small, however innocuous, however incomprehensible on their own—you could recreate the picture on the box.
She had a feeling she had been handed the solution to all her problems in kit form, minus the instructions and any idea of what she was making.
It was no problem. She had time.
“Go on,” said Eddie. Back in the reserve turbine room, they were a hundred meters away from curious ears. The bridge repeater panels flickered and danced, projecting a rainbow of colors onto the lad’s face. “Can’t do any harm, can it?”
The young lieutenant—Barry Yun—was that most cherished of finds, a bloke in the know who wanted to be helpful. Yun was bored and he thought Eddie had lived a glamorous and exciting life. It was amazing what you could achieve just by being able to tell a good yarn.
“All right,” said Yun. “They retrieved the Thetis crew. The thing’s so slow we could catch up and board her.”
“Why?”
“System failure. Safety.”
“Unsafe for humans but safe for isenj and ussissi?”
Yun’s lips moved silently for a second. Eddie felt a warm glow of triumph. Make ’em think you already know the lot. A couple of real facts, just the right degree of a smile, and a bit of timing, and they usually supplied the rest.
“Okay,” Yun said. “I thought it was a stupid story too. Reliable buzz says it’s this biotech. Do you know what some people are offering for this stuff?”
“No. Amaze me.”
“I had to patch the CEO of Holbein through to the boss on his scramble line, not that it’s secure on ITX, of course. He wasn’t asking what the weather was like on Umeh either.”
“All this on a rumor?”
“Pretty strong rumor if you listen. They’re scouring everyone who’s been in contact with Frankland. Even you.”
Eddie held out his palms. “Look. No hair.”
“They even unzipped the body bags. No stone left unturned. They were talking about how they could get access to the colonists.”
“And who’s they?”
“The R and D consortium team.”
“And you know this how, exactly?”
“I cover a lot of comms watches. Plus they’re not too careful what they say in front of the stewards, and I’m always nice to the stewards.”
I know, thought Eddie. “You’re a man after my own heart,” he grinned.
Yun proved it. “So what really happened to the two in the body bags, then?”
“Okay…Parekh was executed for killing an alien kid. Dissected it, counter to all orders not to touch specimens. And Galvin went off-camp against express orders too and got caught in the cross fire with the isenj. So the moral of the story out here is to do as you’re told.”
“I hope Hereward’s well cannoned up when she arrives, then. If any of us are still left.”
The thought don’t react flashed through Eddie instantly. “I thought Hereward was a survey ship,” he lied, knowing the vessel hadn’t even been on the CAD screen when he’d left Earth.
“Look, we have big spaceships and small spaceships. There isn’t enough of a space navy to build specialized hulls like the domestic fleet. They just strap on more armaments to whatever’s flying. We’re lucky they haven’t sent a sodding submarine.”
“I just hope they’ve told the isenj that she’s coming.”
Yun just raised his eyebrows. “Classified,” he said.
It was so classified that Lindsay hadn’t thought to mention it. Maybe she hadn’t been told either. It was a massively provocative act to launch another vessel into a disputed area. These species had been at each other for centuries: did the FEU really think another twenty-five years would see them kiss and make up? And a ship called Hereward suggested Albion had fallen out with the Alliance des Galles again. The FEU had never been a happy family.
But he didn’t think the wess’har—or the isenj, come to that—would give a damn which European tribe was in the ascendant. They’d just lock and load.
“I wouldn’t mind seeing my old mates,” Eddie said, trying not to look too interested in the Hereward even though it was burning holes in him. “Or is that classified too?”
“They should be out of quarantine on Thursday. I imagine they’ll gravitate towards the wardroom, seeing as there’s beer available.”
But Rayat was already out. That told Eddie something, but he wasn’t sure what. He decided not to push his luck. He’d gleaned plenty from Yun for the time being.
He rather wished he hadn’t. The shitty thing about knowing stuff out here was that it mattered, whereas on Earth you knew you were a cog, a nothing, a player in the game. You weren’t actually responsible for the sequelae of information that was awkward and had consequences—not unless you were doing an investigative piece, and then it was up to the Shan Franklands of the world to go and take action on the strength of your allegations. You could go down the pub for a beer and start on something new and interesting the next day. Nobody really got hurt.
Out here he wasn’t a cog. He was the entirety of the media: he was the populace: and he was society. He was all the people who weren’t wearing a uniform, military or corporate. The information he gathered had real, immediate consequences beyond embarrassing headlines and calls for ministerial resignation.
That meant he had to be very careful how he used it.
“Barry, are we carrying much in the way of armament?” he asked.
“Depends what you mean by much.”
“More than just demolition ordnance and a bit of close-in protection.”
Yun’s eyebrows danced briefly again. “Oh, plenty more. We can’t exactly nip back and pick up anything we’ve forgotten to pack.”
“Shit,” said Eddie.
If he rose early enough, Aras could tend to his crops before anyone else was about in the fields. He could see well enough in the pre-dawn light to hoe safely around young plants. It was also cooler and more like Bezer’ej at that hour.
He was missing Bezer’ej. On Bezer’ej, he had no reminders of his enforced celibacy.
At the entrance of one home he passed, a young father was leaning against the doorway, savoring the breeze, a child clutched to his chest. Aras could hear him humming a single note under his breath, the sound Shan called purring, distracted by his thoughts as he suckled the baby. When he saw Aras he simply nodded acknowledgment.
Aras felt a stab of sorrow but returned the nod and hurried on. It was another reason he was going to find the time in F’nar hard to pass. The human infants in Constantine triggered no instinct in him. All he could detect was their frustration and rage. He didn’t like them much: raw, unshaped gethes, all demand and self-absorption, barely tolerable until they learned that they had to fit in with the rest of the world.
No wonder so many humans never managed that.
Aras took the hoe from his pack and assembled it with its narrowest blade. There was ripe yellow-leaf to be harvested. He squeezed the top of the leaf in his hand and it crumpled like soft fabric. The foliage had softened and turned from red to gold, all its toxins safely drained back to its roots. It was ready to eat.
Toxins didn’t trouble him but he harvested at the appointed time. There was more yellow-leaf to pick today than he needed, so he would take it back to the food stores at the Exchange of Surplus Things. That was the way it worked. The Christians in Constantine had also operated a communal food system, but theirs seemed to require that someone tallied all the produce and checked that everyone was contributing their share and not consuming more than they were entitled to.
I thought I understood them.
He had lived in the company of humans longer than he had his own kind. His body housed human genes gleaned from bacteria, viruses and skin cells. But the blood-to-blood contact with Shan had brought with it a far more fundamental experience of what it was to be human, and it was shocking.
I never understood them at all.
Aras hefted the hoe. The handle felt like…felt like a weapon, a stick of some kind. Not his: hers. When he squeezed it he could feel outrage, horror, a sense of knowing something that had changed her world forever.
He abandoned the hoeing and concentrated on recalling the memory. Whatever it was, he needed to know what had marked her so much that it surfaced above the images of waterfalls of fire and the pleading ape.
Human genetic memories didn’t feel at all like isenj ones. Eddie had once shown him how moving pictures were assembled, and Aras found parallels between that technology and the assorted memories that had lodged in his brain. Isenj memories were complete, accurate, realtime sequences; humans’ were snatched and distorted, like spooling through scraps of spliced footage at high speed and having both blank sections and sudden vivid freeze-frames.
And isenj memories felt like the past. Shan’s felt like now.
He concentrated.
Sitting in the dark on a hard bench, a heavy baton in hand. It was Shan. There was an overwhelming sense of disbelief and shock. Do something about it. Balance the score a bit. A door swings open in a sudden shaft of yellow light and it’s someone she knows, someone she respects, telling her to sort it. A massive cold surge of adrenaline and then a blank and that baton feels part of her arm, all sweet animal rage. There’s a man’s face, and he grins but then he stops smiling and—
Aras felt the repeated downward swings of the baton so vividly that it was all he could do to hold onto the hoe. Then he dropped it. Relief as intense as quenched thirst flooded him. He fell to his knees and struggled to find his own thoughts again. No, this was nothing like the mind of an isenj.
Whoever Shan had beaten, she had savored every moment of it.
It disturbed him. He didn’t want to think of his isan—and he admitted to himself that he saw her as that now—as a torturer. It was an unpleasant thought for anyone: it was especially unbearable for him. He busied himself piling the yellow-leaf into a rolling crate and wheeled it down into the network of passages that moved items around the city and to other settlements. The pipework above his head throbbed with the intermittent flow of water to the irrigation systems.
There was one barge re
sting at the loading point, already partly filled with evem, and he laid his bundle of yellow-leaf on top of it before pulling down the cover and inspecting the route information displayed on the top, a few glyphs fingered into the soft surface. Iussan, Baral. So the weather was dry enough back home to start digging up last year’s evem early.
Why had Shan delighted in breaking a man’s bones with her baton?
Aras climbed back to the top of the entrance shaft and found three children—an isanket and two boys—standing and staring at his collection of terrestrial crops. One boy kept putting his arm through the prickling biobarrier and inspecting his skin. The other two were much more interested in the plants, but they acknowledged Aras with sober nods like adults would. He thought of Josh’s daughter Rachel, all giggles and carefree silliness.
“Aras Sar Iussan, this is new,” said the isanket, pointing.
“It’s called tea,” he said. “Humans dry the leaves and make an infusion from it for drinking. Its closest relatives are grown for their beauty, but the tea plant has both qualities, so Targassat would approve of it.”
“Is it pleasant?”
“You would find it bitter. Humans enjoy it. This is for Shan Chail.”
The isanket looked hard at the glossy leaves as if absorbing every detail of them, which she was. Then she tipped her head politely and walked off, the two boys trailing obediently behind her as they would throughout the rest of their lives.
Aras tried to recall his first isan’s face and failed. He felt no guilt at that: Askiniyas had been dead nearly five hundred years, one more c’naatat host who had decided it was better to return to the cycle by her own hand. Sometimes, when people talked of the sacrifices of c’naatat troops, they often forgot the matriarchs who had transmitted the symbiont to their males out of duty, some unaware of the true nature of c’naatat, others not.
Askiniyas hadn’t known. Nor had his house-brothers until his infection traveled through them all.
I started it. It was my fault.
Ben Garrod might have been right. Josh’s ancestor claimed there were punishments meted out by the unseen being called God, and if there was a punishment for infecting your entire family through copulation, then Aras felt he had truly been punished by his endless celibacy.
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