Judge (24 page)

That silenced Laktiriu. Wess'har could consciously control their fertility, so the idea of an unplanned and unwanted child was beyond them. It simply sounded nightmarish; and it was. Esganikan felt a surge of the conflicting memories of both Shan and Lindsay Neville, and how very differently they'd felt about Lindsay's accidental pregnancy. She wondered if either of them had regretted their decisions in the weeks that followed, but she would never know now unless she asked them. She could hardly approach either of them for a top-up of their body fluids to experience what they'd felt since their
c'naatat
infected the next host. Esganikan had to make do with the snapshot the parasite gave her up to the point of infection. That was distressing enough.

“I shall be discreet,” Laktiriu said. “Let's change the subject.”

It was a prudent approach, and one Esganikan expected of her second-in-command. And somehow she felt very much better for having told at least one member of her crew.

If there was one thing she knew she had inherited from Shan rather than Rayat, it was an unforgiving conscience that muttered quietly in the corner, while the bold Rayat within her told her that risks were there to be taken for the greater good.

After Laktiriu left to get a meal, Esganikan summoned Kiir. She didn't like leaving things to chance now, and the more she saw of emotional human reactions to inevitable death, the more she wondered if Shan and the marines would have been capable of seizing Prachy, knowing she would be killed anyway.

They might have turned squeamish, though. Kiir never did. Skavu always made sure that the job got done.

 

Immigrant Reception Center.

 

“Kiir,” Shan said, “I need your assistance. Come here.”

The Skavu commander straightened up slowly and stared at her, turning his back on the chart laid out on the table. She'd already punched him out once for suggesting that an abomination like her should be killed. She didn't want to leave him with the impression that she wouldn't do it a few more times for fun, and indicated the doors with an imperious jerk of the thumb.

It wasn't fair, she knew, because in his own world he was probably just like Ade and others, ordinary people doing a rotten, thankless job, and she wondered if she shouldn't cut him some slack just for wearing a uniform. Slaughtering unarmed isenj—well, she couldn't get too pious about that. She slept with a wess'har who'd killed an awful lot more isenj civilians than Kiir could probably count. It was one of those ironies of life that Ade adored Aras but would kill Kiir if he got the chance.

“What do you require of me, Shan Chail?” His tone was level but there was almost a thought bubble sketched over his head with
abomination
penciled in it. Qureshi was right about the iguana thing. “I'm preparing to repel FEU threats to our hosts.”

Shan was determined not to mention the shooting down of the FEU fighters. Ade's remorse had left her feeling even more raw about it. She knew she'd never get used to deaths in wars, because her police training was all about death being unacceptable, and not something to be chalked up to experience, however many autopsies she watched impassively with a sandwich in one hand. There was inuring yourself to personal pain to do the job, and there was kidding yourself that people had to kill each other, and she never wanted to find that she couldn't tell the difference any longer.

“It won't take long,” she said.
Am I being disloyal to Ade? He hates this bastard.
“I need weapons.”

Kiir didn't ask why. “What are you competent to use?”

“Most small ballistic firearms. Haven't got a clue how to use energy weapons, except a PEP laser for those pesky public order situations.” He knew all about her 9mm and Ade's rifle. “But what I want is a fighting knife and a few grenades. You know. Small explosives. Ade trained me.”

“Why do you need explosives?”

It was a fair question. “Because I'm an
abomination,
as you so kindly pointed out last time, and if I fell into enemy hands I'd like to fragment myself as efficiently as possible. I've tried spacing myself. Doesn't work.”

“I meant what
task
you require it for, because that will determine what kind, and how much you need.”

“Ah.” Shan wondered how much was lost in the translation; Skavu could speak eqbas'u, as could she, but they wore thin metal collars that interpreted languages for them. “Large biped, like me. And I'll take a few more for my abominable men folk as well.”

“You mock me,” Kiir said flatly. “I'll get you the grenades. But you have a blade. Your sergeant confiscated one from me.”

“Your sword, you mean.” Skavu all carried a large flat saber sheathed on their backs, which seemed quaint and ceremonial like a naval officer's sword, except the Skavu really did use them. Ade would have had the scars to show for it if he hadn't been
c'naatat.
“I want a small blade.” She held her forefingers apart to indicate length. “Fifteen to twenty centimeters, if you have one.”

Shan was suddenly aware of Ade approaching from the right, casual and careful. He stood with his hands in his pockets, head cocked, but in Ade it signified disapproval rather than curiosity.

“You could borrow mine, Boss,” he said quietly.

“No, you better keep it.” She turned back to Kiir. He stared at Ade and then looked back at her, unfathomable. “Kiir, I'll be here for a while, so if you could get those for me, or have one of your men do it, I would be grateful.”

“It's good to be prepared to fragment yourself,
Chail,
” Kiir said. “The consequences of humans' acquiring the organism would be disastrous.”

Kiir summoned a junior officer and sent him on the errand while he went back to his planning session. The breakfast table was covered with a chart of the Australian coastline; it was exactly like the device that Shapakti had used as a microscope when he was surveying the irradiated soil of Ouzhari, a thin sheet of transparent material that Shan thought of as a tea tray. Like the opaque-to-transparent hulls of the Eqbas vessels, it could zoom in and out to different magnifications. Kiir and his officers pored over a global chart of the southern hemisphere as seen from Antarctica and then the image changed instantly into a much more detailed chart of harbors and inlets.

Ade cast a discerning eye over it at a tactful distance, and then steered her away to the lobby with gentle pressure on her elbow.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Fine.”

“I'm sorry, I really am.”

“You forget what I did for a living, Boss. Just because we've had a few relatively quiet years doesn't mean I didn't see a lot of dead blokes in my career.”

Shan didn't regard them as quiet years at all, but the marines certainly hadn't seen frequent action. It seemed all too frequent to her, though.

“Okay. I'm still sorry.”

“Look, I paid my respects to Dave. I'm glad I got the chance. Now let's concentrate on the task in hand. Prachy.”

“Where's Aras?” Shan asked. He was getting left out. She needed to drag him along with them whether he felt like it or not. “I don't want him brooding.”

“He's helping set up hydroponics. Boss, I'm a grown-up now. Treat me like one. Why ask Twat-Features for kit when you could ask me?”

Yes, Ade really was an adult. Shan wasn't blind to her own double standards in keeping things from him for his own good, and then yelling at him for doing the same to her.

“You don't have any more grenades,” she said.

“I could get some, and at least I know what I'm doing. What happened to the last one you kept? You had it before we left.” He was doing his instructor–sergeant routine now. It was actually quite intimidating, even by her standards. “Cops know how many rounds they've got and how many they've expended. I'm like that with frigging ordnance.”

She opened her jacket. “I didn't leave it on the bus…”

“And the knife?”

“I've not got one.”

“I've got a
lovely
knife. Old pattern Fairbairn-Sykes. And you could have—”

“And
you
need it.”

Ade wasn't giving up. When he was locked on to a target, no chaff could distract him. “I know some oranges can put up a fight, Boss, but why else do
you
need a knife now?”

Shan could have used the blade in her swiss, or maybe found a sharp enough knife in the reception center's restaurant, but her first thought had been something separate and disposable so she didn't risk contaminating herself with even the faintest trace of Mohan Rayat. That was one mind she didn't want sharing space with hers. There was one easy test she'd used on herself to check for
c'naatat,
and that was slicing a chunk out of someone: you could watch the wound heal instantly.

It wasn't that she didn't trust Shapakti's judgment, but before she took anybody's word—Rayat's word, especially—that Esganikan Gai had given herself a dose of the parasite, she wanted proof. If they were wrong, the consequences might turn out to be even worse than leaving things alone.

“I'm still waiting, Boss.” Ade looked disappointed and—yes,
hurt.
Did he know how hard that hit her? “I think I can guess.”

He didn't even need her memories. He just knew her.

“Okay,” she said. “It's as good a test as any, isn't it? I need to be sure Esganikan's what we think she is.”

Ade beckoned her outside where they could talk in the remains of a pebbled forecourt that might once have been a Zen garden. In the containment of the defense barrier, it was a pleasantly warm day. Overhead, in the reality of a searing January morning, a police drone craft was making lazy circles in a bee-cam-free sky while it emitted regular pulses of light from its nose.

It must have been disabling media surveillance dust. Journos had no bloody ethical standards these days. Eddie would have had something to say about it. From time to time, a fighter streaked across the sky at a much higher altitude. The FEU carrier was still nudging at the territorial waters and everyone was still jumpy.

“I liked your method best,” she said, watching the flickering ship. Her hands pulsed violet light for a moment and then gave up.

Ade ambled along the pebble border. “Can't shoot dust, unfortunately. “So who's going to drop this turd in their lap, then? And what about her bosses back in Surang? Can't they see this is enough to warrant relieving her of command?”

“Shapakti told Nev that they won't interfere because they don't second-guess commanders in the field.”

“D'you know, that's the first time in my life that I've thought that might be a bad idea.”

“What would you do, then?”

“Just tell the crew. They can't all be stupid. One of the females might even do the
jask
thing and take over if Laktiriu doesn't. But whatever happens, don't let it be
you.
”

They sat down on an ornamental bench. Shan wondered if Ade knew her better than she knew herself, and could see her becoming convinced of her own responsibility to be in charge. No, she hadn't the slightest idea how to run this mission properly; she was just an intelligent, competent copper, nothing more. All her opinions of how she'd run the world, her instant knee-jerk wisdom, were hopelessly inadequate when she tried to apply them to a big, complex system like Earth. Shoot all the bloody wasters, shoot all the fucks who harmed kids and animals, shoot…well, she'd shot a few on a very personal basis, but now that she was looking at a more dispassionate, rational, and industrial scale approach to culling humans, she'd lost her nerve.

And you thought you were so hard, didn't you?

What if she made the whole mission unravel by compromising Esganikan? The Eqbas rescued planets for a living. Shan might have been an EnHaz veteran, but she was just a tourist compared to an Eqbas commander.

But what if
this
is how
c'naatat
escapes into the human population, and I could have stopped it? What if that happens, and removing it isn't as easy as it was with one human in a lab? Didn't I try to die to stop this very thing happening?

Yes, she had. But that didn't mean she was right this time. She listened for some quiet word on the breeze from her commonsense guts.

It told her not to hope for the best. This was Earth, after all.

“Deadline's getting closer,” she said. “Come on, let's root for gentlemanly behavior and the rule of law.”

Shan wondered how she would feel if she looked into Katya Prachy's eyes and saw not a callous bureaucrat who dispensed careless genocide at 150 trillion miles' remove, but an old woman.

She was a copper, though, and she was long past feeling pity for criminals.

F'nar, Wess'ej.

 

“Are you coming to bed, Eddie?”

Erica leaned against the doorframe and pulled an exasperated, weary expression that was exactly like Serrimissani's disapproving scowl. Eddie didn't risk telling her that she looked like a stroppy ussissi.

“I have to watch this, doll. Sorry.” He gestured at the ITX link showing BBChan live. “You've got no idea how frustrating this is.”

“You want to see Brussels wiped off the map, is that it?” She walked across the room in front of the screen and started boiling water and rattling glass cups. “Armageddon, live and uninterrupted. Lovely. But we've got hours yet. Time to get some beer and snacks in, and make a night of it.”

“If I'd
gone,
” he said sourly, “I might have been some use.”

“If you'd
gone,
poppet, you might have made it
worse.
And you're still sticking your oar in, aren't you? I saw that piece on Prachy. I can't believe you did that.”

“It needed saying.”

“Shan needed you to say it, more like.”

Erica made the tea and held the cup out to him, a beautiful piece of wess'har domestic art, all violet and gold swirls; they made the most wonderful glass. Transparency was their obsession. The drains running from terrace to terrace around the caldera were a kind of glass too, like all their utensils, and on Constantine, before Aras had let the nanites loose to erase all signs of human settlement, even the church bells had been royal blue glass like antique Bristol ware. One of the things Eddie had grown to love about wess'har was that what you saw was exactly, painfully, and unremittingly what you got. They hid nothing.

If they said midnight was the deadline, they didn't mean 2359 or 0001. And the consequences would be swift.

“If anything,” Eddie said, responding aloud to his own thoughts, “Esganikan's gone soft. I'm piecing together what I'm getting from the news with the little I hear from Shan, and I'm amazed no shit's hit the fan yet. The Eqbas expect the death penalty. They can't even imagine that a trial would acquit, either. Big cultural mismatch there. Lull before the storm, maybe.”

“If memory serves, the Eqbas were hanging around here for ages before they started on Umeh.”

“Did it scare you, knowing they'd turned up?”

“Bloody right it did. You?”

Eddie tried to remember. He'd logged and recorded a museum's worth of experiences since he'd first come here, but recalling his emotional state accurately at any one point was hard. “I think I knew it was scary, but I was more wrapped up in the ethics of how I reported it all. My footage kicked off riots. It's like realizing you've pulled the trigger without looking where you were aiming.”

“What, like with Prachy?”

“The alternative is never to report anything in case it upsets someone, and almost all stories do. That's news for you.”

Erica seemed to take some time thinking that over. She sat down beside him on the sofa, the one Shan had made with her own hands, which looked white unless you were wess'har. They saw the fabric as peacock blue. It had needed a few repairs over the years, but Shan had done a solid job of building it.

“I'm fed up seeing you sit in judgment on yourself every night.” Erica slid her arm through his, slopping his tea. “You're not the only person in the universe with free choice. You don't run it. It's as much the viewers' bloody responsibility to react sensibly to what they see as it is for you to report it properly, so for goodness' sake stop
doing
this to yourself.”

“Yes, Mum.”

“Come on, you and Shan—you've got the same self-focus. Everything you do is of global importance. Only you can save or condemn the world. That kind of arrogant bullshit.”

“You know what they say about great power.”

“Is that in the Bible?”

“I think it was in a comic, actually.”

Eddie leaned back and watched the images in silence for a long time, Erica's resting against him, and wondered if they'd woken Barry. Brussels mattered. The whole planet did. Barry, and the Champciaux kid, Jérôme, would be the last humans left here one day, a lonely fate however good the wess'har were as neighbors, and that meant that sooner or later—sooner, probably—they'd have to go to Earth to have any hope of normal life. Eddie now fully understood why Shan aborted her kid. It wasn't just curbing the spread of
c'naatat;
it was saving a child from the fate of being utterly alone for a very long time. Having
c'naatat
parents there for you until Kingdom Come didn't make up for not being able to have a lover and all that went with it.

“Esganikan had better get this right,” Erica muttered.

So she was thinking the same thing.

“If she can't, who can?”

“If you're going to wait up for the deadline, I can heat some soup.”

“I'm not hungry. So you're going to keep me company to watch the fall of Rome.”

“Is that on the hit-list too? Can't be much of the place left anyway.”

“Figure of speech, dear, just so you know I'm not a totally uneducated oaf.”

Eddie had once been used to waiting for deadlines to expire and wars to start. They were never
called
wars, of course, always something short of that to satisfy legal niceties, but he'd never seen one on his home turf. Umeh didn't count. If he ever saw one of the British regions scorched and crushed like the Maritime Fringe, he wasn't sure how he'd take it. Zammett had hit a nerve there.

The room filled with the smell of leek and potato soup, grown in the Wess'ej soil still protected by a biobarrier to maintain a little bit of Earth a long way from home. Was it too hot or dry to grow good spuds in England now?

“How long to go?” Erica asked, settling down again beside him to eat.

“Four hours.”

“Ah. You'd think they'd run some old movies, like the countdown to New Year.”

Just hand Prachy over. She's expendable. Ouzhari was.

Would it make any difference in the end? Sooner or later, the Eqbas would use force.

They were lovely neighbors, wess'har, until you crossed that line.

 

PM's office, Kamberra: two hours to deadline.

 

“Okay, this is the agreement, or at least what's in place so far,” said Storley. “We have a location for any handover that's yet to be agreed. The FEU Mitterand Air Base.”

Bari lined up the coffee in anticipation of a long night. Shukry looked in need of it too. “Why there?”

“Access for Eqbas ships as well as the Canadians.”

“Talk me through the timeline.”

“First critical thing is the response from Canada,” said Storley. “Because the Eqbas want Canada to agree to a death sentence, and they're still kicking that around. Expectations will
not
match. The Eqbas assume that a trial will convict, because they don't factor in motive. We have to prove specific
intent
in genocide cases, or else it's just a list of murder charges, which won't get the death penalty in Canada anyway. Either the Eqbas are blind to that, or they're nodding and smiling with the intention of lynching her anyway.”

“I'm not sure what Canada is playing at.” Bari got up for a walk around the office to keep his circulation going. The whole
ADF
was on standby now, because Bari could see this going off like a chain of firecrackers. “Once they have Prachy, and the Eqbas work out she won't die, they've got a ticking bomb in their lap.”

“They're mindful of the risk. They're looking at bringing a general war crimes charge based on the cobalt bombs, and seeing if a death penalty option can be attached to that. Cobalt is only there to wipe out life indiscriminately, no other use. Let's not even get into the legal status of the assault. No war declared, obviously. It's a mire.”

Eqbas didn't like mires. They wouldn't wait through a year of legal pretrial argument. Bari had no intention of saying it explicitly, but he knew Storley and Andreaou thought it too: the cleanest option would be for the Eqbas to kill Prachy there and then, leaving the FEU to decide if it was up for a shooting match with a massively advanced alien navy. It was going to be ugly, but not quite as ugly as the same scene happening on the soil of an ally.

“Who do we have at the location now?”

“Just a diplomatic service observer. No visible involvement to drag us in—the Eqbas are sending the private military contractors and a few Skavu to ride security.”

“By contractors, you mean the former marines.”

“And Frankland. No, she won't be on the ground. No risk or hint that we might hand her over, accidentally or otherwise.”

“Okay, so this is only a question of the size of the turd entering the turbine, not
if
the turd will hit it.”

“I'm afraid so. But we're within the law, and
observing.
”

“Niall, your precision is laudable, but the Eqbas are the law from now on. And if they do have a legal system, I'm too scared to look at it.”

“The air force is on alert five, anyway,” said Andreaou. “But I would still like to see the trial, and let the Eqbas loose later.”

Bari drained his cup and refilled. “Damn, you said it…”

It was just a matter of waiting. Bari waited another ten minutes before the desk system chirped and Persis's voice said: “They've agreed. It's on.”

He wasn't sure whether to be relieved or not.

 

FEU Mitterand Air Base: 2330 hours CET, 30 minutes to deadline.

 

It was a big airfield, and Ade felt edgy and exposed in the middle of a lake of fierce light.

To the marines' left, the Canadian handover party waited; a diplomat, and what looked like cops in anonymous black coveralls with no signs of armor or weapons. To the right, an FEU military police vehicle was idling next to a group of men and women in suits; diplomats or lawyers, by the look of them. Above, an Eqbas command ship hung motionless at five thousand meters, projecting a defense shield that took in the whole airfield and tower right to the perimeter.

And just in front of them, four Skavu waited in a line, completely silent and stock-still in the mild night air.

Chahal nudged Ade. “Tempting,” he said.

“I hope they took their calm pills.” Ade could hear chatter from the command ship in his earpiece. Shan was talking to Esganikan, reminding her that the Canadians were worth being nice to. “Shame, I really fancied a proper raid, one last time.”

“Careful, or the FEU's going to ask for our rifles back,” said Qureshi. “For the museum.”

They were a remnant of a proper commando outfit, reduced to standing around in battered kit, minus any badge or rank to wear. They looked like a weekend skirmish hobby team, but with real and serious ESF670 assault rifles. The rifles might have been obsolete weapons now, but they could still do the business. Ade assumed everyone realized that.

“Boss, what's happening?” Ade checked his watch. “Fifteen minutes to go.”

Shan's voice popped in his earpiece. “They're bringing her onto the tarmac now. Watch for the police vehicle.”

“Here she comes,” said Barencoin.

The police car came to a stop at the line of FEU lawyers and someone jumped out to open the door. The woman they helped out wasn't the frail old lady that the description suggested, but one in reasonably good shape and walking well.

“Bang goes her sympathy vote,” Barencoin muttered. “She needs to get that helpless granny look down a bit better before she goes on trial.”

Prachy, accompanied by a lawyer, walked across in front of the Skavu and stared at them for a second or two before the Canadian diplomat stepped forward and some words were exchanged. The two men nodded at each other, taking those little gradual steps backwards that preceded turning and walking away. Prachy looked as if she wasn't sure what she was supposed to do next.

Once she was in the Canadian vehicle, it wasn't Ade's problem any longer. The men turned away from each other as if on cue and Prachy was left standing between them, exposed for a moment.

Something zipped past Ade's head like an insect. A loud crack split the night air.

Prachy stumbled forward, arms held away from her sides like a diver for a moment before she crumpled onto the concrete. The marines dropped instinctively into a contact formation; there was no cover unless they ran for the cars. For a second, everyone froze, including the Skavu.

“Sniper!” Ade yelled. If anyone had gone to Prachy's aid, he couldn't see. The round had
passed him
. “Ground level, over there—”

Another shot rang out; it sounded as if it came from behind them this time. And that was the one that plunged the handover into disaster. Ade knew it as soon as he heard the wet thwack of a round hitting flesh. Turning, he saw a Canadian officer on the ground and his buddies aiming their short automatics as if they thought the shot had come from the Skavu. Then the Skavu turned towards the Canadians, rifles raised. It was as if a switch had been thrown: the shooting started.

Ade's brain slipped into a different time frame. Everything ran slowly, agonizingly, and Prachy was forgotten. In the crossfire, Ade heard another
thwack
and Becken slumped forward. Shan's voice filled Ade's earpiece saying, “Get them out—” but the sound cut off.

“Cease fire!” Ade yelled. “For fuck's sake, it's
snipers,
you twats—”

The firing stopped. He could hear everyone panting. He looked around frantically, checking where his people were. He couldn't see Qureshi.

“Jon?” Chahal scrambled towards Becken. “Jon?
Jon!
”