Judge (19 page)

“You really want me to?”

“Only if you're comfortable in it.”

Shan wouldn't be, but it was only for a matter of hours at most, and she found she'd do pretty well anything to make Ade happy. Like Aras, he hadn't had enough harmless joy in his life. She was considering the possibility of a smart dress, nothing frothy or girly, the Prachy issue still in her forebrain but dulled by the bliss of a plate of chips, when her swiss chirped.

“I never get junk messages now,” she said, flipping open the screen and inserting an earpiece. She didn't want the few drinkers at the far table to hear her.

F'nar ITX.

It was Nevyan.
Shit.
She hadn't called her. It was still just days ago in Shan's mind, not twenty-five years. “Nev, I'm sorry, I haven't called Eddie either—”

“It's Giyadas.” The voice was tinged with overtone, but it was Eddie's accent, perfect English. Little Giyadas had grown up. Shan wasn't quite ready for that. “I remember you, Shan. You must speak to my mother later, but first I have bad news for you.”

“Eddie?” It was her first thought. “Is he okay?”

“Eddie's fine, and you have to speak to him too. But first, listen—Esganikan Gai is carrying
c'naatat.
She infected herself with Rayat's blood, but I don't imagine she told you, or else you and I would be having a very different conversation right now.”

“Oh shit…”

Shan's evening was suddenly heading downhill fast. Ade paused in mid-chew, listening intently to Shan's side of the exchange.

“You're a citizen of F'nar, Shan,” said Giyadas. “A matriarch—an
isan.
”

“I know.” Shan struggled to work out a plan on the fly, and stood by for a bollocking from Giyadas for not spotting Esganikan's ruse already. “Give me a few minutes and I'll work out how we tackle this.”

“No need,” said Giyadas. “The matriarchs of F'nar have asked that you kill her. In fact, we
order
it.”

Immigrant Reception Center, south of Kamberra: next morning.

 

Aras could see uniformed police on the road leading to the center's outer perimeter fence, building another barrier with posts set in cement and a brightly colored gate that folded neatly into the upright sections on both sides. They'd begun work just as it was getting light and the air was still relatively cool.

He found that staring out of the window helped. They'd been discussing Esganikan for hours now. Shan had paused to argue about the time scale with Giyadas, who seemed to have grown into an even more formidable matriarch than Nevyan.

“Yeah, and I'm saying that we
have
to get another credible commander in place before I do it,” Shan whispered. It was a ferocious hiss, as loud as she dared speak in case she was overheard beyond this room. The ancient device had its limitations. “Or the whole thing goes to rat shit, and I'm not taking over this fucking mission, okay? I'm not competent to run an army and an environmental remediation team. I'm a bloody copper.”

Ade watched Shan getting more agitated and considered taking the swiss, telling Giyadas to mind her own business, and destroying the ITX link for good. He'd also considered taking a device and removing Esganikan himself, but that had been pure anger, and it would only have made Shan's situation worse. He could hear Giyadas's voice very faintly. She seemed in a hurry.

Shan waited, listening, but she was blinking rapidly, jaw muscles twitching. “Okay, so Rayat might find a way to tip off Kiir…so? Well, I'll take that risk. I'm the one on the ground here…no, I can't do that. You have to trust me on this. I have to have her second-in-command in place first. Laktiriu Avo. She needs to get up to speed.”

The argument slowed to a weary series of grunts, then Shan shut the link and sat down at the small table again.

“I'm doing this to my time scale,” she said, as if they needed convincing.

“Okay, Boss.” Ade put his hand on her arm. “I still think you should leave Prachy to me and the lads.”

“No, because if I pull out of that, Esganikan will wonder why.” Shan shook her head. “We go ahead with that. Here's the op order, then. I get Eddie to do a BBChan piece outing Prachy, and if that doesn't get the FEU to give way by the deadline, we go after her. Then I concentrate on Laktiriu as Esganikan's successor. Then, when I think she's up to it, I do the job.”

“Then,” Ade said quietly, “we get married, and then you, me, and Aras go home. Yes? Because if you stay after that—if any of us stay—then I don't think we'll
ever
be able to go.”

Shan stared at Ade for a few seconds before she did that little adoring frown at him, as if she'd hurt him and regretted it. Aras seldom seemed to evoke that in her these days. It didn't trouble him, but he did take note of it; Ade was indulged like a child, and Aras was expected to be an adult. That seemed fair, given that he was the senior house-brother.

“Why do you agree to assassinate one woman and yet go to great lengths to stop the killing of another—who'll be killed anyway?” Aras asked.

Shan looked fixed and grim. It was her
don't start with me
look. “Because one is a serious biohazard, and the other isn't.”

“That wasn't the answer you gave Esganikan about Prachy.”

“Okay, Aras, maybe I'm getting wess'har about things. The two are not related. One target fits in one ethical framework, and the other fits in a different one.”

“Human rules for humans, wess'har for wess'har.”

“I hadn't thought of it that way, but it's one possible explanation, yes. All I know is that they look like different situations to me.”

“Motive doesn't matter.”

“And they'll both end up dead. But yes, motive still matters to me most of the time.”

Shan was very pale now, pumped with adrenaline. She wasn't a woman who took the easiest path through life; she agonized over what was right, and frequently did what was least convenient for herself, an unusual thing in a human. The only surrender she had made to expedience was to let him and Ade live. They were bio-hazards too, just like Lindsay and Rayat—and Esganikan.

Ade kept squeezing her arm, almost as if he was reassuring himself she was still there. “How do we work out if she's infected any of her crew?”

“That worries me, too.”

“Wess'har are poor at feigning reactions,” Aras said. “If the Eqbas crew show caution about physical contact with me, it's a fair assumption that they aren't carriers.”

“But do they
know
?”

“I'd say not.”

Shan raked her hair with her fingers. She needed to get some sleep,
c'naatat
or not. They'd been debating this all night. “Okay, one piece at a time. Prachy first. Let me call Eddie. Lovely, isn't it? The first thing I say to him in twenty-five years is, ‘Hi, mate, do me a favor, will you?'”

She got up and went into the bathroom, probably for privacy; that was Shan's habit at home. At least the hotel complex now had a good water supply, thanks to the desalination pipeline the Eqbas technicians had set up. Government engineers had already arrived to cluster around it and marvel at its efficiency.

“It's outcomes,” said Ade, scratching his hair. “Shan's all about outcomes. You know that. Very clear about consequences. Esganikan's a risk.”

“
We're
risks.
We've
both infected a human deliberately. Esganikan hasn't. We live, she dies. Does that not trouble you?”

“Are you
defending
the crafty bitch? Or saying we should be fragged too?”

“No, I'm simply saying that it's inconsistent, and that it causes me distress as a result. I have no answers or better suggestions, other than to walk away from it.”

“Then why are you riding Shan about it? Life's full of dilemmas we never solve.”

“Because I always feared that she would be used, Ade. She's very loyal. She's been used by the matriarchs before. I don't want to see her killed carrying out the orders of matriarchs who summoned the Eqbas in the first place.”

“Hey, we were bloody glad they did at the time, remember? When we thought Shan was dead? We wanted the shit kicked out of the FEU. The only thing that changed is that Shan came back. Everyone and everything else is still
dead
.”

It was true, of course. Aras wondered how they might be looking at events on Earth now if they had all spent the last twenty-five years living out their lives on Wess'ej. Perhaps the whole situation would have seemed more like an ancient wound, a scar, the incident recalled but the pain forgotten. It certainly wouldn't have felt this urgent. Cryo-suspension had done nothing to stop the momentum of events that thrust them forward back then. Aras sat in silence with Ade, not wanting to talk further, until Shan came out of the bathroom toweling her hair.

She took a comb and tugged at tangles. “I wonder if the FEU appreciates the irony that the only reason Esganikan hasn't just dumped a metric fuckload of human-specific pathogens into their atmosphere and finished them off is because she doesn't want to harm other life as a side-effect—like power stations going critical and a few continents of decaying human flesh polluting the place.”

Aras tried to draw the line between venting his own distress and being helpful in a situation that seemed to be escalating out of control. “I think Esganikan badly underestimated the time this restoration would take.”

“No shit, Sherlock.” Shan looked crestfallen for a moment. “Look, I came because I felt I had to keep an eye on her, as if I could do a damn thing to stop the Skavu and the slaughter and the whole shebang, as if there was a
nice
way of removing humans to make way for other species. I know bloody well that there isn't, and I know I've presented the FEU with temptation just by being here. But I'm bloody glad I
did
come now, because if I hadn't, who would have dealt with Esganikan? But I swear we
will
go home, as soon as this is over, and that removes all temptation for anyone else to make a grab for
c'naatat.
No us, no Esganikan. It'll be over.”

“So, as ever, you make the best of a bad job, and find a retrospective justification for it.”

“I said we'll leave
as soon as I'm done here.
”

“You miss this kind of life.”

“What?”

“This is what you do best. I can see it on your face. You like
sorting
situations. You have no idea how to do anything else.”

Shan paused for a second as if Aras's accusation had hit a nerve.

“I think the novelty wore off a long time ago.”

“Accept, then, that the FEU may not hand over Prachy, that you might not be able to find her, and the outcome in fifty years will be exactly the same, except for the state of your conscience.”

“Come on, knock it off, you two,” Ade said. He hated arguments, and Aras regretted reminding him of the way violence always started in his childhood home. But some things had to be
said.
“I agree with the Boss. Sorry, mate.”

“And Prachy can't
vanish,
” Shan said. “Europe's the most heavily cammed, scanned, and recorded society in the world. She can't leave her house without public security surveillance picking her up, or even buy groceries without the transaction being scanned, recorded on her medical records, and charged to her account. She can't move anywhere without passing through a monitoring system.” Shan held out a small device, flipped it open from a small penlike tube to a flat sheet, and laid it on the table. “She never had to assume an identity, you see. Just a civil servant who never thought anyone would come after her, not a spook out in the field like Rayat. Detective work is mostly sifting the obvious. Look.” Shan pulled a file of documents and screen grabs on the display into a fan so they could see some of each one: directories, publications, and lists. “
PRACHY
. Patchy audit trail, starting with the Civil Service Staff Association's list of retired members. Cross-referencing with awards, I find the field she claimed to work in—treasury forecasting—and then I find her writing papers at some university, because smart people don't usually want to pack it all in when they have to retire. Combine that with a few totally unconnected comments she's made in public fora about the state of her local waste management service, and I pin her down to one of three cities. Get one of the Gaia crowd's friend of a friend of a friend to check the mass transit passes database—because Europe really got a taste for tracking people's movements in the twenty-first century, and never stopped—and I have her home address. It took me four hours, start to finish. No rocket science necessary.”

Aras and Ade looked at each other. It seemed like an impressive feat, but then Shan was a police officer, and an expert at taking one or two pieces of a puzzle and working out who might give her the others. Eddie would have been proud of her. They worked the same way.

“I take it she's not at home,” said Ade.

“No, the word from greens on the ground is that she hasn't been seen for a couple of days, and the transit guy lost her at the port authority data portal. So my guess is that the FEU moved her to the mainland to lose her. It wouldn't be so hard to find her in a few small islands with thirty million people, as I've shown, not if she kept her real name until the last few days.”

As far as Aras was concerned, Prachy was missing, and the deadline would not be met, and Esganikan would launch an attack on those she held responsible for harboring her, the FEU government. The whole stalking exercise was a massive waste of effort. It might also put Shan in danger. He was getting more frustrated and angry by the minute.

“Aren't you going to ask me what I do next?” she asked. She held up the flattened communications device. “Transit guy's database includes full ID. Hologram image, biometric security markers, the works, so, ironically, the security services can track naughty people when they need to. All those can go out via BBChan when Eddie does his piece. Now, tell me—would
you
want to shelter her once you saw what was coming down the pike? Someone will see her, sell her a coffee, let her ride the monorail. Someone will grass on her. Humans are lovely creatures like that.”

“It's a shame you can't ask Esganikan if she remembers any more of what Rayat remembers,” said Aras, deadly serious. Shan seemed to take it as sarcasm.

“It's obsolete data anyway. Unless she wants to have a trial and call witnesses.” She snapped the sheet back into a tube and took out her swiss. “Time to loose the hunting hacks, gentlemen.”

 

Cabinet Meeting Room, Government House, Kamberra: four days after landing.

 

“Frankland has to be in intelligence.” Niall Storley, the attorney general, had such a quiet voice that he could stop a meeting dead simply by forcing people to strain to hear him. Bari rather admired that strategy. “Records say she was Special Branch and an antiterrorist officer, and then she got busted over some eco-terrorist op and she resurfaced in EnHaz, as it used to be. All the same line of work, strong gene-tech component, and then she ends up in the Cavanagh system at the same time as an FEU spook called Rayat. That's looking like she's got some data they want back. I doubt that the FEU would go to the brink over a simple criminal extradition. They want Frankland for something else.”

“Biotech fits,” said Andreaou. Everyone had been scouring the archives. “That was the rumor at the time.”

“Well, we can't swap her for Prachy, even if we were minded to,” said Bari. “One, the Eqbas don't want it. Two, if it's biotech she has access to, we want it. Or at least we want to deny it to the FEU.”