“You can disembark shortly,” Esganikan said. “We’re landing.”
“Where?” Ade asked.
“For the time being, the location called St George. There’s accommodation provided for us elsewhere, but I want to inspect it first.”
More saints, then: it boded ill. They hadn’t had much luck with the islands of Constantine, Chad and Christopher back on Bezer’ej. Esganikan swept on but Shan paused and gave Ade a shrug. “Well, you wouldn’t expect her to wait for the monkey boys to tell her where she can land, would you?”
“So who’s doing the diplomacy and liaison?”
“Don’t look at me. It’s not my forte.”
Ade had complete faith in Shan. She could do anything. She could even act as if she actually gave a toss what humans on Earth thought about her, for a while at least.
“You’ll do a good job, Boss. You always do.”
“I might,” she said. “If the first job wasn’t pursuing the FEU to hand over the tossers who authorized Rayat’s use of cobalt bombs. I think that’s going to get a bit hairy.”
The Eqbas didn’t believe in any statute of limitations. The order had been given at least twenty-five years ago, more than fifty if you counted the fact that Actaeon deployed with neutron bombs—BNOs, biohaz neutralization ordnance, banned for use on Earth—in the first place. Whoever gave Rayat his orders was old or dead, but the Eqbas didn’t give a shit. If the guilty were alive, they wanted them; and their concept of guilt was just as inflexible as their Wess’ej cousins’. Only outcomes mattered, not motives, but giving an immoral order was as bad as obeying it. Ade was still struggling to reconcile the two. He wasn’t sure that he ever would.
“It’s been years since I arrested anyone.” Shan felt down the back of her belt and withdrew her 9mm handgun, ancient and still in excellent, lethal working order. “Think I can still feel collars? Nick a few bastards?”
“Damn sure of it,” he said.
He could have sworn she was looking forward to that. She was a copper, a hard street copper, back on the familiar beat of Earth. And she’d remembered what she did best.
He watched her go. There was nowhere obvious to secure himself for landing, and he wasn’t up to facing Barencoin for a while, so he kept out of the way in the comms alcove and touched the bulkhead to see if he could make it transparent. It became an instant window on an Earth that was now an ice plain, not desert.
As the ship dropped—or the focus shifted, he was never sure which—he strained to work out scale and position, and failed. But it was white beneath, and there wasn’t much snow left on Earth now. Where were they?
Jesus, she’s coming in over the South Pole…
Esganikan probably just wanted to see for herself, like the big kid she sometimes seemed to be. She didn’t have to worry about triple-A or even being detected. Ade wondered what would happen if the Eqbas ever came up against a civilization as advanced as them but as dishonest as humans. Maybe they already had.
Becken appeared and crammed into the alcove with him. “Shit, Ade, look at that.”
“It’s Antarctica, Jon. Big white flat place. Didn’t you do exercises down here?”
“Not at this speed—”
A piercing rapid blipping sound almost deafened him. Something mid-gray and matte streaked backwards past them at eye level, then another. “Shit.”
“Fighters.”
“Ours?”
“Not now…”
“Shit.” Ade hadn’t even heard engine noise. It was like watching a vid minus audio. “She’s coming in from the west, through FEU airspace.”
Both marines looked at each other for a split second in disbelief before a searing white light blinded them and left green spots in Ade’s field of vision. The jets had passed; now the Eqbas ship was clear of the ice and over tundra, a moss-green and gray blur, and then there were the tops of low buildings. The ship seemed to slow instantly with no feeling of inertia—Esganikan had given up sensors in favor of sightseeing, Ade suspected—and came to a dead stop over a small town.
“Did we shoot something down?” Becken whispered. “Where are we now?”
“Christ knows.” Ade gathered his wits long enough to touch the magnification. He was looking down onto a narrow street at the upturned faces of people as frozen as any startled wess’har. Here’s your first real UFO, folks. Be amazed. “I can’t see any flags. Jesus, if she’s shot down an FEU vessel—”
The ship moved off again and passed the coastline at a more sedate patrol speed. Ade saw something he recognized: the angled boxy shape of a frigate churning a white wake behind her. The next thing he saw was a billowing mass of yellow flame and white smoke, and he was looking straight down the line of a missile.
Becken ducked instinctively despite the Eqbas shielding. Ade did too. Two or three seconds: no explosion. They straightened up and there was nothing out there but choppy sea smearing into a pale gray blur as the Eqbas ship headed north.
“Welcome home,” Becken muttered. “Who shot at who?”
It wasn’t a great start. It was Umeh all over again, except this was Earth, and that hurt.
F’nar, Wess’ej: Nevyan’s home, upper terraces.
F’nar had been Eddie Michallat’s home for twenty-seven years, but he never took the view for granted.
It beat the Leeds skyline for grandeur by a long chalk. At this time of the morning, Ceret—Cavanagh’s Star to humans—had risen high enough to cast a peach light over the unbroken layer of nacre that covered the whole city, and gave it the name the colonists sometimes used: City of Pearl.
The gleaming layer was insect shit, deposited by millions of tem flies swarming on every smooth and sun-warmed surface. But it had the luster of extinct Tahitian pearl, and, as shit went, it was breathtakingly lovely.
Eddie stood at the irregularly shaped window and stared out across the caldera. He knew every house excavated in the walls of the caldera itself, every clan of wess’har who lived there, every territorial call of the matriarchs who ran the place. It was as much home as any place he’d ever known. He liked it here.
“Eddie, you know they’ve arrived, don’t you?”
“Okay, sweetie.”
“You’ve been waiting a long time for this.”
“Okay.”
He didn’t turn around right away. The ITX screen was active—he could see the reflection on the glass bowl by the spigot facing him—and he knew he was going to have to psych himself up to see old friends who were now much younger than he was. For c’naatat hosts, age was irrelevant. But time had passed; time, and people, and events. In all those years, he’d been broadcasting into what felt like a silence, waiting for the reply that would come one day from his closest confidants. ITX no longer felt instant.
I miss you. All of you.
“Eddie, you knew this would happen one day.”
“I did,” he said, and turned around. “God knows we’ve talked about this enough. Maybe I’ve worked myself up too much.”
Erica was one of the civilian contractors who’d stayed behind on Wess’ej when Actaeon ’s crew left, and had this been Earth, they’d have been celebrating their silver wedding. It was the longest relationship Eddie had ever had, lived out wholly in an alien city, quietly comfortable in the way of couples needing to stick together, and it had produced a son. Barry had seemed like a blessing until Eddie began to worry about what kind of life he had forced on a kid who would have to return to Earth simply to find a girlfriend.
Other than that, he had no complaints.
“You think Shan’s going to go ballistic at you for staying here, don’t you?” Erica said. “Look, she’s half a bloody galaxy away. What’s she going to do about it?”
“You never met her, did you? And it’s not that far.”
“I saw her a couple of times. But she’s still a long way away.”
“That’s the problem. I let her down.”
“Eddie, do you really want to be back there? With half the wor
ld waiting to start a war with the other? Oh, wait—that’s just what you miss, isn’t it? The good old days of watching someone else get their head blown off.”
“Okay.” Eddie waved vaguely, not sure if he was waving her away or waving her off. “Okay.”
Erica turned up the audio. The sound of studio chatter filled the room. “Promise me you won’t rant about what an inane bunch of wankers young reporters are today. Just accept you feel left out.”
“No, I’ll rant…it’s a reflex when I see morons.”
The insets at the side of the screen were far more interesting than the main image. There was a studio discussion between political commentators, a feed from a green rally, and another aerial mapsat shot of the FEU carrier group patrolling along the edge of Australian waters. Eddie focused on the rally and opted for the image, making it fill the screen; it had that excited sense of people waiting to see a movie premiere, not cowering masses on the brink of apocalypse. He wondered if they had any idea that even the massive environmental efforts they’d made in recent years might not buy them time with the Eqbas. And if the Eqbas didn’t start a shooting match, the FEU looked like it would.
Nothing like an excuse to start up old feuds. The Eqbas are coming to cull the herd, and all we can do is squabble over who gets to be first in the queue.
Eddie had played the game of working out just what level of human population the Eqbas would think was viable to give other species a place at the table. Two billion? One? It sure as shit wasn’t going to be the current seven billion.
“I still think Shan was mad to go back,” he said. “I guarantee they won’t be able to resist having a crack at grabbing her.”
“Which they?”
“All of them. FEU, Sinostates, even the Aussies.” Eddie had said too much at the wrong time about c’naatat, but he hadn’t been believed by his news editor in the end. The FEU wasn’t quite so quick to dismiss it; they wouldn’t have sent Rayat to check it out in the first place. “They just need a sample. Nothing more. But that’s Shan for you—she can’t delegate.”
As he concentrated on the green rally, he watched a reporter doing a vox pop in the crowd. Whatever a reporter was these days, he had no idea: some wannabe twat gagging to do the job for free or even pay for the privilege, just to get some reassurance that they existed by seeing themselves permanently recorded in some news archive, so they’d be somebody. Next week, they’d be back to serving donuts. When did reporting get to be about the reporter? In his day, it had still been about the story, outward-looking, inquiring; now it was a karaoke night. Maybe he was better off out here after all.
At times like this, Eddie missed Shan. She understood the therapeutic value of a good effing and blinding session. “Too many citizen journalists,” he said. “Bloody amateurs. Shame the development of the human brain didn’t keep pace with the expansion of self-publishing technology.”
“You’re right, it is a reflex, isn’t it?” Erica leaned over his chair and kissed him on the top of the head. “I’m going to be back by lunchtime. Olivier found a cave system and wants me to put an optic line down there to chart it.”
“But you’re not going in, right?”
“No, that’s what an optic line’s for, poppet. Remember? White man’s magic? The cam?” She paused at the door. “Why not go down to the exchange and see if Giyadas wants to watch this too?”
“Yeah. Maybe I will.”
“And don’t forget you’ve got to pack for Jejeno. You’ve a lot to do.”
The door closed behind her as easily as she seemed to leave Earth’s woes behind. This was a house full of memories today, because this had been Aras’s home, the setting for so many painful, shocking and even wonderful times that Eddie had partly forgotten until now. The distance of years now lent a vivid relief to it all. Maybe the reality had been different, but he had—he absolutely had—seen Shan brought back like a mummified corpse from space, from the dead depths of absolute cold and airlessness, and he’d seen her breathe again. He hadn’t imagined that. He knew exactly what c’naatat could do.
I bet Shan would be amazed at Umeh now. Another dead thing come back to life, at a price.
At sixty-eight, Eddie had a lifetime of headline memories to catalogue. The last years had been tame by comparison. But they had been spent living among aliens, and once again he was in a blasé period about that. Wonder waxed and waned.
What’s it going to be like talking to you again, you old tart? You saw me a few months ago. I’ve missed you for a generation. The reunion’s going to be very one-sided, doll.
How long had she been thawed out from cryo now? Maybe she’d call him soon, keen to share the experience with him. He envied her being in the thick of things, and if only he’d gone too, if only he’d been there right now—
“We’re going to have to leave that report now and bring you breaking news—reports are coming in of an incident involving the Eqbas flagship and FEU fighters over European Antarctica,” said the anchorwoman. She seemed to have no footage to run, and it was frustrating her visibly. Her fancy hairstyle quivered as she fidgeted. They were all used to simply jumping from feed to feed now, rarely interpreting, offering nothing to guide the viewer. No wonder news ratings had fallen off in the last few years. “We don’t have pictures yet…I’m being told that the alien fleet is simply too fast for our unmanned newscraft to follow. We’ll bring you mapsat or cockpit images as soon as we can.”
“What incident, you silly cow?” said Eddie. “World war? Argument over a parking bay? Jesus H. Christ, this is the worst time to go with half a story…”
But his stomach was churning, and he knew how this would end, because he’d seen it all before. The last thing running through his mind right then were his fears for his buddies. He had complete faith—blind, even—in Eqbas might, but part of him, the largest part, felt a gut-churning dread for his world even if he’d never see it again. It was his son’s future—and most of his own memories, which was all anyone was left with in the final days of life.
I’m only sixty-eight. This is insane. Stop the mawkishness.
Eddie grabbed a cup of tea, made from the bushes that Aras had planted for Shan, and settled in to be a very reluctant spectator for the rest of the day.
I should have been there, though. What a fucking story.
He thought of calling Shan on the ITX, but that was probably the last thing she needed right then. Boy, I’ve got slack in my old age. There was a time when he’d have called her on her deathbed and not felt a scrap of guilt, because the story came first, cold and pure. He waited a full hour before the first images began to show up, and as a blurred oval streak shot through a sky-colored frame—totally meaningless, minus scale, but the best they could do thus far—the ITX link chimed.
Eddie half stood, hand braced on the arm of the sofa, looking over his shoulder at the console to check the source. He didn’t want a conversation right now, but it might have been Nevyan or Giyadas, and they didn’t call for idle gossip. But the light showed the link was coming in from Earth. From home.
At last, BBChan News Desk had remembered they actually had someone out here, someone who’d been under fire in an Eqbas ship, someone who’d had a front-row seat for the destruction of Umeh, their man in the Cavanagh system.
He’d try to be gracious. But they’d taken their fucking time. He got up and squeezed the virin in his palm, opening the link at his end.
“Michallat,” he said, trying to sound busy yet distracted. There was nothing worse than making ’Desk feel that you waited on their calls like some love-struck teenage girl. He patched the link through to the main screen, but the icon was blank, just faintly crackling dead air. “Who’s that?”
“Mr. Michallat,” said the voice. “This is the office of President Michael Zammett. Can you talk? We’d like some independent input…”
For some reason, Eddie was disappointed that it wasn’t News Desk.
Australia, Earth: St George landing site.
Esganikan had the feeling of being in a post-cryo haze from which she hadn’t fully awakened; the present was there, but overlaid by an almost visible mesh of translucent images. When the hatch opened and the ship’s ramp extruded from the bulkhead, she saw flash-frames of a city she didn’t recognize, gray and square.
“I’m not bound by Earth’s internal borders,” she said.
Is this dreaming? I thought humans did this in their sleep.
Eqbas didn’t dream as such, but these images, a whole random sequence of them, had begun intruding on her thoughts within a day or so of the c’naatat organism entering her bloodstream. They were memories of experiences she was certain she’d never had, and she was beginning to feel real fear about what c’naatat was doing to her.
“There’s such a thing as not making more trouble than you need,” Shan said, clearly angry even if her scent was suppressed. “It’ll save you time in the long run.”
Children. Human children. Whose? No, I can remember being one…
“You’re too attached to Earth,” Esganikan said flatly, making an effort to concentrate on the solid world in front of her. “I treat Earth no worse than Umeh, and you went along with that, did you not?” She turned to face Shan, and at that moment she couldn’t tell if this was a woman with whom she had everything in common or potentially her worst enemy. “In fact, I showed much more caution. I merely flew over the European outpost and I fired no shots even when fired upon by that ship. If you recall, I destroyed a military base on Umeh for firing on us. That demonstrates my restraint.”
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