Judge (16 page)

She made a good point. Wess'har always did.

“Seeing as I'm wearing my hazmat rig,” he said, “can I see Ouzhari?”

He'd never been there, although he'd seen the apocalyptic images after the bombs had detonated.
C'naatat
was native to the island and nowhere else. Now he wondered how, and why, and if it might have come from another place. It was a question he knew he shouldn't pursue, ever.

“The radiation levels are back to normal.” Giyadas fired up the shuttle's drives. “But the biohazards are still there, yes.”

“Let's go, then,” he said. “Please?”

Ouzhari was the smallest and southernmost island in the chain that started with Constantine nearest the coast, and it had first been named Christopher, although they all had bezeri names; Eddie couldn't remember which island went with which saint, but they all began with C. Aras had described the landscape as glossy black grass and pure white sand. But even from half a kilometer offshore, Eddie could see that while the sand was white again, the grass that had grown nowhere else had vanished for good. Nothing had regenerated. The vegetation now colonizing the island was the same as on the islands north of it, a mix of bronze and blue-gray spiky stuff like aggressive heather. Eddie, with his eye for a good shot, could imagine the visual drama of the way it had once been.

He suited up again when they landed. He walked along the shore with Giyadas, savoring the tranquillity and the rhythmic wash of the waves.

“All for nothing,” said Eddie.
C'naatat
survived the cobalt bombs intended to destroy it, but not much else had: not the species that lived on Ouzhari, not the relative safety and peace of Earth, not the comfortable wess'har isolation far from Eqbas Vorhi, and not friendships. He thought of Aras and Josh, and pitied Aras having to live with the memory of executing a friend. “What a fucking mess.”

Eddie turned around to look at the footprints he'd left in the icing sugar sand, and very nearly crouched down to grab a handful of it like any beachcomber. But there would always be the risk of dormant
c'naatat
lurking in it. The idyll ended right there.

“I'm done, doll,” he said. “Time to go.”

He almost asked to visit Constantine and relive the brief months of wonder and terror, when alien planets were exciting stories, and he had been a much younger, blinder man. But he wasn't in the mood now. He'd come back one day, maybe with Aras, just as the big guy had promised.

Eddie missed him. He had a long wait until he saw him again.

 

Aliens' accommodation, Immigrant Reception Center, twenty kilometers south of Kamberra.

 

Barencoin dropped his bergen on the lobby's dusty inlaid floor and looked around the entrance to the hotel.

“I suppose it's too much to hope they kept the bar open,” he said. “But my first stop after I have a pee is to search the stores.”

“That's the spirit, Barkers.” Jon Becken consulted his handheld. Eqbas crew and ussissi milled around them with the occasional Skavu officer, looking even more bewildered than Ade felt. “Seeing as there's no porter to carry our luggage, allow me to show you all to the presidential suite.”

Some of the Skavu had already moved into the center—officers, Ade guessed, because there were too many troops even for this huge complex to swallow—and they gave Ade a long wary look that said they knew who he was, what he was, and that they'd all heard about his robust disagreement with their Fourth To Die, their commander, Kiir.
Stupid titles. But if he comes the acid with me again, I'll make the fucker live up to it.
Ade and Shan were
abominations
to the Skavu, who played their environmental credentials like a fundamentalist religion. It had exploded into violence twice, and Ade was fairly sure it would do so again. He was counting on it. He'd promised Kiir that he'd kill him. Ade didn't like to disappoint.

“What do you suppose their planet's like?” Chahal asked, staring back at the Skavu. “You're right, Izzy. They do look like fucking iguanas.”

“I bet it's all frigging cycle routes,” Barencoin muttered, and joined in the staring. One of the Skavu barked a sound at the others, and they walked away with some reluctance. “But they can come and have a go if they think they're hard enough.”

Ade listened carefully for a hint of unhappiness in the voices of his RM detachment, but they were tired, disoriented, and just grateful to be in a place that said
Earth
to them. He didn't know how long that would last. The bio-screen in Becken's palm, a computer grown into living flesh, had lit up again but wasn't showing any data; they all had one, except Ade. It was a redundant system that still functioned but had nothing to connect to, just like them.
C'naatat
had expelled Ade's early on in its makeover of his genome, but he checked his palm again anyway. He had its own lights, thanks, and his
c'naatat
knew where it wanted to put them.

Ade was still living down the piss-taking about the bioluminescence that had gravitated to his tattoos. It was fine with the ones on his arm, but sometimes he regretted getting so rat-arsed with Dave Pharoah that he'd had his dick tattooed for a bet. It kept Shan amused, anyway. That was worth any number of neon knob jokes from Barencoin.

I'm going to visit the Ankara war graves. I said I would one day, Dave. They can't stop me.

“I'm a lost soul,” said Chahal. “I hope we find something to keep us busy.”

“Fed up, fucked up, and—well, not that far from home, eh?” Barencoin jerked his thumb over his shoulder at nothing in particular as they climbed the stairs. “Christ, Chaz, I'll give you a list. Smartening up this place, for a start. Filling out your ADF forms. Getting your bank account released. We've got plenty to crack on with.”

The lift to the upper floors wasn't half as interesting as the huge stairwell, which had obviously begun life as the central feature of a place that had once wowed tourists. Then it had been turned into a place to store visitors who weren't so welcome before shipping them out again, which struck Ade as an ironic thing for a country founded on transported criminals. The water feature was disconnected now, and a white chalky deposit was all that was left to show an artificial waterfall had been there; but it was still bloody big and impressive. Barencoin sprinted up the stairs with his bergen on his back, which was relatively effortless given the lower gravity and higher oxygen levels of Earth. They still had their Wess'ej muscles and lung capacity from a few years' acclimatization in a tougher world. For a while, they'd find the place a stroll, boiling hot or not.

“Poser,” Qureshi called after him. “There's no women here to impress now.”

“We've got to keep fit for upcoming shagging duties, though,” Becken said, pausing to look over the staircase into the abyss. Ade could see empty beer containers down there. “Even Ade still runs every day, and he's a real superhero who doesn't have to.”

Ade smiled. “Piss off, Jon.”

“
C'naatat
—I mean, it does amazing stuff. Does it improve sex too?”

“Yeah…”

“Really?”

“I'm not telling you. I told you before. Don't ask.”

“Well, if Shan hasn't kicked you out, and Aras has two dicks, then you must be getting good at it.”

“Leave him alone,” said Qureshi. “It's romantic. Don't spoil it, you crude bugger.”

There was the usual chorus of
oo-ooo-oo!
and she gestured eloquently with a finger.

Ade shrugged. “I'm going to get married,
properly
this time.”

He almost wished he hadn't said it, and braced for barracking. Barencoin leaned over the banister above him. “Who's the lucky woman, and have you told Shan yet?”

“There's your alternative career, Mart, comedy…”

“Seriously. Do we get an invite? And who's going to do it? Don't you have to have a passport or residency or something?”

“If the Aussies can process you lot in a few days, they can turn a blind eye to
any
paperwork.”

No, he hadn't asked Shan. They were as married as they could ever be, even down to his mum's ring because there was nothing else he owned that he could give her at the time, but it wasn't enough now that they were on Earth and he could do it properly. Anything less smacked of…of lack of commitment.
Until death us do part
really meant something when you had
c'naatat.

“Won't it be bigamy?” asked Becken.

“I was never married before,” said Ade.

“I mean Shan. There's Aras. It's not strictly legal, polyandry, is it? Not here.”

“Can you even spell it? Sod what's legal here.”

“Okay, Aras is an alien. I think she can argue that one of you doesn't count towards her recommended daily allowance. I'll be best man.”

It was a joke that started Ade fretting. His mates ribbed him about sharing her, but it was a mix of the usual good-natured banter and general human curiosity about the
logistics
of it all, approached with a kid's need to know the scary stuff. They never asked him the really important things, like if he was worried she had a favorite, or if he thought that Aras was better at it than he was, or if she would leave him for Aras in the end. It was that messy emotional side of life that still worried him, even if he picked up their memories from the genetic transfer during sex. He
knew
what Shan felt about him from right inside her mind. No regular man could have that certainty.

But he wasn't absorbing the memories now. The gel barrier condom stopped
oursan.
That meant he didn't pick up Aras's memories via Shan either, although she must have been getting them. It made him feel suddenly out of the loop.

Ade stopped at the top to gaze down the full depth of the stairwell, hoping to see Aras somewhere. He'd been very quiet since they landed. Ade hoped it was just the usual stunned silence at seeing a new planet—shit, how many humans could even say that and mean it?—and not some sense of dissatisfaction. There was no sign of him.

Yeah, I've been all over Shan, hogging her attention. I'm like a kid. I'm home, sort of. I know there are things to do and see. I'm excited. Does he feel left out? I just don't know. And I can't know now, not if he won't tell me.

“Ade, come and look!” It was Qureshi's voice. “This is the life!”

He followed the sound. The rooms allocated to the marines were on the coast side of the block. Qureshi and the others clustered on the balcony of one of them, looking out to sea. There was plenty of it.

“Wow,” said Chahal. “What a view…”

They'd seen alien worlds of astonishing variety—pearl cities, underground cities, cities that covered a whole planet and reached into the sky—but here they were
oohing
and
aahing
about a glittering sea that filled the horizon, standing on a balcony in a disused hotel that needed more than a lick of paint.

Humans were bloody weird. But Ade found it an amazing sight too, probably because he never thought he'd see it again.

“Okay, settle in, and we'll meet back here in ten minutes,” Barencoin said. “Then we plan an op to locate and liberate some fucking
beer
.”

The banter started again. “Shit, he's taken command, Ade…”

“Can we shoot him for mutiny?”

“Not until he's got the beer.”

“If I'm promoted over you in the ADF, Jon, I'm going to work on being
unreasonable.
”

Ade was relieved they were back on form. They seemed to like the idea of joining the Australian forces; there was no longer a Corps of Royal Marines to feel excluded from, and somehow they'd latched on to that as a source of sanity. There was also the small matter of the FEU being the proverbial sack of cunts not deserving of their loyalty, and probably about to get a serious good hiding from the Eqbas, which added up to a valid pair of reasons for not begging Brussels to be let back in. Ade hadn't been able to bring himself to look at the news coverage of the regimental amalgamations. It would be in some archive somewhere, some badly researched load of shit that got all the dates and military terms wrong—Eddie would have got it right, he knew—and went on about the end of a proud and unique history spanning centuries, and outliving even the monarchy that gave it its name.

But I can keep my badges. It's history now.

He tried to remember where he'd put his medals. Shan had fished them out of the memorial cairn he'd built for her when he thought she was dead, and shoved them back in his pocket. He had another grave now where they'd find a home; Dave Pharoah's.

“Stop moping, Sarge,” Chahal said. “What's up with you now?”

“Thinking. That's all.” Ade leaned over the balcony. There was a breeze, but it was still too hot. Arriving in January in the southern hemisphere was bad news. “Are you pissed off with Shan?”

“Why?” asked Qureshi.

“Because she wouldn't do a prisoner swap.”

“Well, she can't, can she?” Qureshi dropped her voice. “Not with
c'naatat
. It's bad enough knowing Rayat and Lindsay are still out there somewhere without handing the thing over to the government.”

Becken joined in. “Seriously, mate, if she'd done that just to get us back in some bloody regiment
pretending
to be Royals, I'd have had to shoot her, even if she
is
the undead, just to show my displeasure.”

Shan respected the detachment. They knew that, even Barencoin. But she was also fond of them, and they probably
didn't
know that, because she was good at being unreadable even when she didn't need to be.