Ally (30 page)

“I have not felt so well for so long,” said Saib. “I feel
new.
”

And then it dawned on Lindsay: not only had
c'naatat
enabled them to suddenly find prey that answered something deep in their psychology, deep in their genes, but it had also given them all renewed vigor as individuals.
C'naatat
restored the body. These survivors of an ecologically vulnerable race were all in a better state—apart from bereavement—than they had been before the neutron radiation scoured Ouzhari. In a selfish way that humans might recognize, the bezeri remnant of forty-four had seized on what was in it for
them.
They'd been old and slow: now they were young again.

Lindsay looked at her hands, translucent gel streaked with cartilage, and wondered if
she
felt better than before. Less than three years earlier, she'd been a promising naval officer, a commander at 26, and gambling that a rare opportunity to go extra-solar in the search for the Constantine colony would end in a quick mission report on a failed dream, and 150 years out of Earth time that would nevertheless make her a uniquely qualified officer on her return. It was a huge risk. And she had no way of knowing what was waiting on a planet that—officially, anyway—nobody knew was inhabited, let alone in the middle of a war zone.

Lindsay made a conscious effort not to look back. Three years was too far, even further than 150 trillion miles.

“We will also live
here,
” said Saib grandly.

Maipay ambled around, looking as if he was walking on his knuckles. “We can live
all
these places. We live where we want, hunt what we want.”

Their attitude was rapacious. Lindsay wondered what the frugal and environmentally responsible wess'har would think now of the bezeri, the creatures they waged war against the isenj to protect, and who had turned out to be every bit as profligate as the despised
gethes
. Saib and Maipay loped off, Maipay occasionally using a tentacle extended behind him in exactly the kangaroo-bounce that Pili had first used. Lindsay watched them cover the ground in a zigzag pattern. Something they disturbed flew up from cover and they went charging after it, jinking and changing course like cheetahs.

Their intoxication with their newfound strength and the instincts they'd long buried was overwhelming them. The creature, whatever it was, made its escape and soared into the sky as a dark dot and vanished, leaving the two bezeri circling and excited.

They were destructive. But it was still a big planet, and its previous predation by isenj had been repaired by the wess'har so that it seemed as apparently wild and unspoiled as before. There were only forty-four bezeri, no real threat to any ecology. Lindsay could humor them. If there was one lesson she had taken to heart in the last year, it was that she couldn't use Earth morality as a benchmark with any degree of confidence.

She bent and collected sharp stones and dry fluffy plant fiber.

“Come on,” she said. She squatted down and formed the dry fiber into a loose ball of kindling, then held one stone in each had. “Forget the hunting. My schedule says this is your week to discover fire.”

Northern Assembly–Maritime Fringe border, Umeh

After a while, Ade stopped noticing the bodies.

The bulkheads of the patrol vessel had switched to transparency and he looked down into canyons of high-rises that looked full of debris.

The Skavu were searching for a pocket of survivors in a wasteland of the dead and dying. Ade looked up at them occasionally, just to see if he could relate to anything in those faces, and he simply couldn't tell. Wess'har had once been as alien as that, though. Perhaps he was judging too soon.

“There,” said Kiir.

The vessel felt as if it was banking, but it was an illusion caused by the transparent bulkhead shifting position to the deck, exactly as on Esganikan's shapeshifting warship. Qureshi and Chahal peered through the deck and said nothing, then sat upright with their rifles across their laps staring into mid-distance.

“It's bloody millions,” said Chahal, muffled slightly by his breather mask. “Jesus, that stuff covers some ground.”

In some areas there was what appeared to be a black and brown velvet carpet. Had it been familiar shapes of human bodies, he wondered how long it would have been before he
could shut it out. He waited for the isenj deep in him to react at some primeval level, but nothing emerged.

His higher brain could tell him, though. It said that he should have found this beyond a nightmare.

“What are we actually going to do when we find survivors?” asked Qureshi. “I mean, if they're dying, then it's—”

“I'll do it,” said Ade. He'd done it once this week and he could do it again if it ended some poor bastard's suffering. “But you're picking up non-targeted genomes, aren't you? Healthy isenj?”

“Won't be healthy long with all those bodies decaying,” Chahal muttered.

The patrol ship touched down in the middle of a broad street paved with bright turquoise and amber images of long-extinct foliage. Ade's brain saw shapes in the doorways as black disposal bags, but then resolved into bodies, and when the bulkhead dissolved into a hatch, the smell hit him—not the smell of decomposing bodies and shattered bowels that he knew, but something else. The forest-floor smell of isenj was mixed with something sulfurous.

Ade didn't need a breather but right then it would have been useful. He swallowed a threatening wave of nausea and stepped out of the ship. Kiir—masked like the others—stared at him and paused, as if waiting for something.

“You can breathe this air freely?”

Ade nodded, and realized that the Skavu didn't know all the little tricks that
c'naatat
could pull. Esganikan hadn't briefed them thoroughly. Maybe that was just as well. He checked the ESF670's scan for concealed ordnance—fat lot of use in a world that didn't use terrestrial explosives—and covered Qureshi and Chahal while they ducked out of the ship and took cover behind the pillars of a doorway that was mercifully free of corpses. Kiir gestured towards another building. His squad started a recognizable house-clearance procedure.

“Jesus, Ade,” said Chahal. “Look. They do it almost like us.”

“Only so many ways a biped can get through a rectangular gap safely.”

It made the Skavu feel familiar. They knew what they were doing, and professional reassurance went a long way. Apart from the fact that they were surly bastards—or seemed like it—they were doing the basics that human soldiers had been doing for centuries, and Ade concentrated on the kinship rather than the fact he didn't like them much.

Qureshi sighted up on the roofline opposite. “I want to know what happened to First, Second and Third To Die, personally.”

“Promotion must be crap.”

“This is our recruiting poster, eh? Bloody space marines.” She stepped backwards into a dark recess and there was a strawlike crunch. She froze. “Ade, what have I trodden in?”

“Hold still.” He could guess. He leaned into the recess just to be certain it wasn't an anti-personnel device—even if isenj didn't appear to have them—and confirmed it. It was a light-colored isenj, unusual, very small, and dead. He guessed it was a child. Maybe the isenj deep in him knew. “Okay, just step off carefully.”

“Oh, God…” she sighed.

“Jesus, they're everywhere.”

Kiir's squad was making its way down the silent street, door to door. Ade never assumed anything in a foreign city, but there was nothing here, no vehicles like those he'd seen when the Eqbas had wiped out a Fringe armored column. There were no vehicles here at all, and the flat fronted buildings could have been apartments or offices. Civvies could kill you as efficiently as uniformed troops, and bloody often did, so it was a bogus distinction when your arse was on the line.

Isenj didn't seem to wear uniforms anyway.

Ade caught up with Kiir. “Sir, if you have a plan, now would be a good time to share it with us.”

“There!” Kiir barked. Something black shot past the corner of Ade's eye and he swung round, rifle raised like a reflex. “This zone must be cleared.”

Where the hell was he going to put detainees? “Sir, who are we—”

Kiir held his weapon two-handed in front of his chest
and fired. Ade couldn't imagine how he aimed the thing, but when he looked up there was an isenj lying on the roadway in a spreading pool of clear fluid.

Ade understood now. “We don't do that, sir.”

Qureshi and Chahal backed up towards Ade, still watching the high-rises, expecting—as he had—to be dealing with snipers.

Back home, Ade had a rule book that told him how to deal with an officer who shot noncombatants. Here, he didn't even have a common moral framework with any of the species. His gut said
stop this.
But his brain said that the isenj who were untouched by the pathogen would die from disease spread by unburied corpses, and the isenj had no refugee shelters. It was an impossible choice. But he made it.

Chahal turned to Ade. “We're not doing this, are we, Sarge?”

“Fire if fired upon,” Ade said. “Find some bugger dying, finish them off if your gut tells you to. Other than that—just cover the street.”

And it wasn't enough. He'd seen enough combat to know the gray areas, and he'd slipped around the regs and not regretted it, but this was something he'd never seen: culling. He always thought he'd handle this differently.

But the deaths here were on a scale that was too big to process.

“If I had not been told to allow you to do as you wanted, I would have shot you for disobedience by now,” said Kiir.

Ade slipped his fighting knife out of his belt. “And, sir, I'd have got up and stuck this in you to see what color you bled. Do we understand each other?”

Kiir might well have been angry but it was impossible to tell.
Jesus, we go out for a quick acquaint with the new boys and here I fucking am squaring up to the CO.
Ade didn't get an answer, so he carried on down the road, foot-patrol routine, hoping that the isenj had the sense to run.

Where? This is the end of the world for them.

Qureshi moved ahead of him on point. “Now I know,” she said. “I mean, we've been in some hairy situations over the years and we bend the rules a bit but I wondered why people
let holocausts happen, and what sort of bastards they are. You know what? They're like
me.
”

The distinctive
crack-ack-ack
of the Skavu weapon seemed to be coming from all around them now. There were other squads operating.

“I've got nothing to lose, Izzy. You and Chaz thin out, and call Shan for extraction.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. It was a bloody long way back across the border on a carpet of bodies. “I'm happy to slot Kiir. Life's cheap here.”

There was no chain of command. Legally, none of them were service personnel now. Even if they had been, there was no war between them and the isenj. There were only rules of engagement that no longer bound them and a bit of common sense.

“Piss off, Sarge,” said Qureshi cheerfully. “I'm staying. It's your turn to get shot by aliens.”

Chahal was staring into his palm, checking his bioscreen. “We've got five squads within a kilometer according to the sweep. They've got ten thousand troops covering two hundred million isenj here, and they've got the time to go picking off the ones that got away. I mean, what does that say about them? Is it a sport with them?”

“Well, we either walk now, or I stop this bunch,” said Ade. “Is the isenj in me driving this, or is it kinder to shoot them all rather than let them starve or die of some other disease?”

“You remember isenj stuff?”

“Chaz, don't give me that look.”

“Do you?”

“I don't know.”

The Skavu squad stacked either side of a gaping door, paused, and then—on a signal Ade didn't see—rushed the building. Rounds cracked and echoed: shouts, squeals, and then silence. But the squeals resonated within him. They were universal, uncontrolled, just animal pain and fear.

“Okay,” he said. “I've had enough.”

There was a second between could-have-saved and you-let-it-happen. And the second had
passed.
One of Kiir's
squad came out and started running down the road close to the wall. Ade went in.

Oh God, Aras…

Aras did this once.

Ade was in the present, about to confront Skavu executioners, and also behind Aras's eyes five centuries ago, bombing Mjat because only fragmentation could destroy
c'naatat
-infected isenj. Ade's moral compass spun. That guiding gut-feel of a single right and wrong had vanished and been replaced by a thousand different ones.

It was a suicidal move even for Ade: live rounds, maybe explosives, blokes who didn't know your procedure and who didn't think like you. Kiir and one of his Skavu were systematically dispatching about twenty isenj lying on the floor, or maybe they were just making sure they were dead. Ade's sense of time disintegrated, and he felt he was spending minutes trying to decide if these were sick isenj like the one he'd shot, or healthy ones with different genomes. He could hear running boots. A pool of watery fluid was spreading on the tiles, looking for all the world as if someone had peed. But it was plasma-like isenj blood. He'd seen that before.

Eddie.
Ade remembered: his spare camera.
Get me some shots of Skavu.
He clipped the cam to his webbing like a radhaz sensor and just let it run.

One of the Skavu went to walk past him, his job done, moving on to the next.

“I can't let you do this, mate,” Ade said. “Once, I didn't stop something I could have. Now, I will.”