City of Pearl (13 page)

But the marines seemed fine about it, embarrassingly so. They gave Shan immediate and visible deference and so did some of the payload. When she walked in, they stiffened as if she'd fired a shot over their heads.
I'm older,
she thought.
I spent twenty-five years perfecting how to look like bad news, and they don't know the first thing about me. I have the advantage for a while.

But perhaps it was getting to Lindsay. She might have been a high-flier back on Earth, but out here she was having to prove herself all over again on top of having an embarrassing personal problem. It must have been galling. It was time to do some bridge building between them. Shan would do it because someone had to.

She was lying on her bunk staring up at the deckhead and rehearsing how to approach the issue when the ground shook.

A dull
whump
echoed round the compound. She listened: nothing more. She jumped from the bunk and began walking down the passage, then broke into a run. At the entrance to the compound, most of the off-duty marines and half the scientists were standing looking around, blind in the pitch-black. “What was that?” she asked.

“Defense grid,” said Chahal, one of the two engineerqualified marines. “Nothing else it could be.”

“I thought we had disabled it. Where's Commander Neville? Get her for me.”

Chahal jogged off. Steps thudded fast towards them. Bennett came running, rifle in one hand, and jerked his thumb back towards the horizon.

“Christ, we've hit something,” he panted. “The defnet was triggered.”

“I'll take the scoot,” Shan said. “Can you track the shot?”

“Green 65 from here,” he said, indicating subjective zero with a chopping motion and then pointing. “Wait for me, ma'am, and I'll get Webster.”

“No. Get Josh Garrod.” She guessed what they had hit wasn't from the colony, and that left one possibility. “I think he'll need to be involved.”

“I don't think so, ma'am.”

“Well
I
think so, Sergeant. He knows the locals a lot better than we do. I promise I'll stay in voice contact at all times.”

Shan went back to her cabin to collect her swiss, a medical kit and a jacket. She couldn't wait for Josh. Hugel stopped her in the passage. “You'll need a medic,” she said. “Do you have any idea how to use that?”

“I'll call you if I need you.” She suspected first aid might have been a little late, even if Hugel had known how to treat an alien.

Shan stepped out into the night, a blackness that came as a shock to someone from a world filled with city lights. Wess'ej, the moon as far as she was concerned, wasn't up yet, and there was no GPS net to guide her. The scoot could map its way back to base, but for the outward leg she was on her own. She started up the machine.

After a distance she picked up a gouged path of soil and debris, visible enough to follow with the hand-light from her swiss. Some of it was metallic. She slowed the scoot down and followed the trail at walking pace until the fragments of twisted metal became larger and she was able to pick out markings on them.

It certainly wasn't the remains of a shell casing. This had to be alien. It was dark and matt, and where her light caught it, there were mid-blue symbols she couldn't decipher.

Somewhere, she knew, at the end of the debris trail, was a dead alien pilot. She parked the scoot and followed the trail slowly on foot. Behind her she could hear the
thud-thud-thud
of someone running as fast as they could. Josh Garrod slowed to a halt beside her, panting.

His face was distraught. He confirmed her worst fear: they had probably shot one of the wess'har peacekeepers. The colonists seldom went off camp at night, and the mission party was checked in for the day.

“You said it wouldn't fire.”

“Josh, I can't tell you how sorry I am.”

“I thought he would be walking here. I had no idea he would use transport.”

Just once,
she thought.
Just once, let me fear the worst and be wrong
. She cursed herself for not checking the defnet and not learning how it worked and not shutting it down herself. There were things you couldn't trust others to do.

Josh was running a little ahead of her now, his breathing audible, but it was more a suppressed sobbing than a struggle to breathe.
I will never accept an assurance again.
Her old training sergeant, long dead, was still muttering in her ear that there was no substitute for your own eyes. It was only the second time she had forgotten that advice.

“Oh, God,” said Josh. But he meant it.

The small vehicle had largely survived the impact. If she had been able to put it back together again, it would have been the size of a land cruiser. She could see the back of a seat jutting out of the churned soil, and what were probably forward stabilizers. This was the tough bit: the time to check for bodies. She walked back to get a shovel from the scoot's pannier to begin digging out around the wreckage. Josh began scooping with his hands. She could hear herself wheezing with the effort, and her nose was dripping.

Now there was enough room to get in and shine a light around. She braced herself for a shock. It was never pleasant discovering entrails and body parts, no matter how many times you had attended accident scenes, but the worse the picture you conjured up beforehand, the easier it was to face the graphic reality.

She aimed the beam.

“Jesus H. Christ,” she said, forgetting cultural sensitivity, and nearly lost her footing.

Reaching out to her from the wreckage was a multifingered, gloved hand.

She set the swiss on the flat top of a piece of cockpit so the light shone onto the body. Josh grabbed the swiss and held it closer for her. If she didn't remove the debris carefully, she might do a lot more damage to whatever was in the seat. Scraping sounds from the tangle of metal stopped her. Pieces of the hull shattered and flew into the air, as if a very large bird were hatching with some violence. A figure out of all proportion to the vessel emerged and tried to step out of the wreckage, managing only to fall to its knees as soon as it was free of the seat.

Josh rushed to its aid. “Aras, Aras,” he kept saying. “Aras, are you all right? It wasn't meant to hit you.”

The alien was big, really big. Shan stared up at him as he uncoiled from his crouching position. His movements weren't human and his smell wasn't human and his sounds weren't human. He was an alien, a real live alien, something only a handful of humans had actually seen, and the shocking joy of it almost crowded out the urgency and fear of dealing with the crisis.

An alien. Great Lord and Lady, the wonder of creation, and she was witnessing it.

Something right on the lower threshold of her hearing irritated the back of her tongue and made her press her ears in a vain attempt to stop the insistent itch. Then it stopped.

The creature had two upper limbs and two legs and a head where heads should have been. For some reason that made him even more disturbing and wonderful. She moved her hands well away from her body and hoped he understood that it indicated she wasn't going to use a weapon.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “It was a mistake. We didn't mean you any harm.” Did he understand? His eyes—very dark, white-ringed, like an animal's, like every animal eye she had ever looked into with its disturbing glimpse into another intelligence—were fixed on hers. It was all she could see of his face. Fabric covered most of his head.

“You're
gethes,
” he said. “Shoot first, as they say.”

If it hadn't been for the underlying resonance in that voice, like the infrasonics that had made her ears itch, he would have sounded almost human. His English was unaccented. He raised gloved hands and began peeling the fabric from his head, and she half-expected to see he was a man after all, but he was not. His skin was bronze with a sheen of iridescence. It was the face of an idealized beast, and shockingly fine.

“You can understand me,” Shan said. No need to worry about the responsibility of first contact; he had met humans before.
But he's an alien, a real alien,
her thoughts kept interrupting.
Be amazed
. “You understand what I'm saying?”

“Even with that accent, yes,” he said. “You're Shan Frankland. Can't you control your people?”

“I can only apologize.”
And I'm going to have someone's guts for garters.
“Don't move. I'll get medical help.”

The alien made a
fuh
noise like a human puff of contempt. “I will recover.”

“You might be in shock. Let me—” She reached out but Josh put his hand out to stop her. The alien stared down at her, unblinking.

“There's nothing your medics could do for me, even if I needed it.” He tested his right arm, flexing it carefully, then his left. “I will be fine.”

Josh put his hands flat together in front of his lips as if in a parody of prayer. He looked afraid. “Come back to Constantine, Aras,” he said. “Stay with us until you're fully fit.”

“This is your peacekeeping friend, isn't it?” Shan said.

“Yes, this is Aras Sar Iussan.”

Aras nodded his fine head and a thick braid of dark hair slid out of his collar. He tucked it back again rather self-consciously. “
Shan Chail,
” he said. “Not an ideal way to meet, is it?”

“Whatever harm we've done you is my responsibility, and I accept the consequences,” Shan said.

She held out her hand. Aras almost went to take it and then appeared to change his mind. “I bear you no ill will. And you're the matriarch, yes?”

It was as good a description as any. “Yes, I am.”

“Then I'll talk with you about the conditions of your stay here. Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow's fine by me.”

The scoot could carry three people but not if one of them was as big as Aras. Shan offered him her seat. “I can walk,” she said. “We'll collect your vessel when it's light and see what's salvageable. Of course, we'll help in any way we can with repairs.”

“The vehicle will take care of itself,” he said. “And I can also walk.”

Josh interrupted. “You take the scoot back, Superintendent, and we'll catch up.”

“Okay. I'll let them know you're on the way.” Aras showed no signs of trauma. She had no idea how he could have walked away from that crash. But he had. It was weird, and because it was weird she would keep it to herself for the time being. She flicked opened her swiss and called Bennett.

She glanced at Aras. He was completely and unnaturally still, and he was staring intently at her. No, this wasn't something she was going to mention.

“Nobody's hurt,” she said. “Just hardware. We're heading back.”

“Are you okay?”

She smiled to herself. “Really, I'm fine. Thanks.”

She met the alien's eyes. It might have been relief on his face, or it might have been mistrust—she had no way yet of knowing. But she knew they had suddenly reached some sort of silent agreement.

“I'll see you later,” she said, and started up her scoot. Sweeping in an arc, she circled the wreckage and saw dark liquid smears on the seat and shattered screen that could easily have been blood. Aras and Josh were already well ahead of her, walking briskly, and she caught up with them from behind, but as she passed them—slowly, so as not to create a slipstream—she noted the dark stains on Aras's light clothing. If that wasn't blood, and plenty of it, she was the Aga Khan.

Yet Aras walked as steadily as Josh. She had seen cars crushed out of recognition in accidents with no harm to the driver, and she'd watched paramedics remove bodies limb by limb from vehicles with just dented door panels. But taking a full cannon round always had one outcome.

And yet Aras walked. And if Josh hadn't expressed surprise at his recovery, neither would she. It was something she felt was better left undiscussed for the time being.

 

Lindsay was waiting for her outside her cabin when she returned, and she looked far from happy. Shan gestured her inside and closed the door behind them. It was a small cabin, and not the place for a row.

“What is it?” Lindsay asked. “What did we hit?”

“The peacekeeping force. Or part of it. We brought down a pilot.”

“Oh shit.”

“Fortunately, he appeared to accept that friendly fire happens. Which is just as well, given their capacity for mass destruction.”

“And when were you going to tell me about that, exactly?”

“What?”

Lindsay held up her hand like a traffic cop, and the vivid colors of Champciaux's geophys scan shone from her palm bioscreen. “Like someone wiped out a whole seaboard of cities. When were you going to let me know the size of the potential military threat?”

Shan didn't blink. “Probably at the same time you were going to tell me you were pregnant.”

There was a silence. Lindsay didn't fill it. Shan paused three beats for effect.
I can still bowl 'em,
she thought. “Let's get one thing straight. We've got an unarmed ship, not enough personnel to play a game of soccer and basic popgun ordnance. They've got an army and they're playing at home. There is no military solution.”

“You should still have discussed it with me.”

Shan almost found herself explaining that there was no hard evidence that the trace scan was the result of a war, and braked hard. “I don't need a lecture on procedure from an officer with no personal discipline.” It probably revealed more about her than it did about Lindsay Neville. Enough had been said. “We
will
be doing things differently from now on.”

Lindsay's voice cracked a little but her expression was set in neutral. “Bennett said nobody was hurt. Either we hit the craft or we didn't. You don't walk away from a direct hit.”