Judge (5 page)

“It's always the bloody same, and it doesn't change, no matter what.” Barencoin kept moving the focus around, changing the image in the bulkhead. Suddenly, he was getting images from 45-degree angles, as if a new cam had moved in. The Eqbas must have put their atmospheric remotes in place already. “All this frigging around to disembark. Not that there'll be anyone waiting on the jetty for us, eh?”

“Speak for yourself,” said Becken. “I'm a bloody space marine. I'll be beating women off with a shitty stick.”

“Not if we end up in the Muslim sector.” Barencoin nudged Ade in the ribs.

“Can't you go and ask what the holdup is?”

“Are we there yet?” Ade lisped, mocking.
Shut up, Mart. Time enough to find out just how crappy things are down there now.
“Are we there yet, Dad?”

“I just want out of here.”

“If you feel like hassling Esganikan, go ahead, mate. I'll stand back and enjoy the show.”

“Seriously, what are
you
going to do? Are you really going to go ashore with that thing inside you?”

“It's only some kind of bacteria. Not a zombie tapeworm.”

“You going to ring a bell or something to clear a path, then?”

Ade had already shown Barencoin the Eqbas smartgel barrier that turned from liquid to a thin film when you touched it. Eqbas tech was all about materials that reshaped and reformed into something else entirely. He shrugged, fumbled in his belt pouch, and pulled out the small ball of gel in its sac. “They're bloody clever, the Eqbas. This is a pretty good barrier.”

“You're going to dress up in a giant condom. Classy, yet understated…”

Ade wondered how much to tell him, but distracting Barencoin was sometimes like keeping a kid quiet. Ade had developed the knack of getting the gel to flow over his skin like a liquid by prodding it just the right way. And it was all a matter of what you prodded it with, of course, but that was more than Barencoin needed to know right then. “It works okay.”

Ade cupped the gel ball in his palm and pressed his index finger into the surface. It deformed and crept over his hand like a rising glossy tide, matting down to a more even satiny texture as it went. Barencoin stared. Becken craned his head to watch.

Ade withdrew his finger with a flick and the gel's progress stopped at his wrist to form a barely visible glove. Barencoin tilted his head, fascinated. Then he reached out and touched the back of Ade's hand.

“Feels clammy.”

“That's to stop perves like you trying to hold my hand, Mart.”

Becken tried an experimental prod too. “It's
still
a giant condom.”

And that, of course, was how Ade had come across the technology. He'd had never been good at controlling his blushing; he blushed now. It wasn't a very marine-like thing to do, but Shan always said she found it
endearing.
It made him feel like a total pillock. Becken, ever alert to the little telltale signs of discomfort among his mates, sniggered.

“Don't tell me that's what Eqbas use,” he said. “What about this genetic transfer thing they do when they're shagging? They can't do that with a franger on, can they?”

It was a very old word for very old technology. Barencoin was always a more creative thinker than Becken, though, and he frowned. “Ade, you said you'd been done. Why did you need a condom?” The joke evaporated. Barencoin couldn't have known how painful a topic it was, and that meant he didn't know when to stop. “And she's past it—”

The wound was still more raw than Ade had thought. “You know the worst thing about
c'naatat
?” he snapped. “It fixes all that stuff. Yeah, we need 'em. Because it all went wrong, and we had to get rid of the baby. So shut the fuck up about it, okay?”

Barencoin's face was suddenly all regret and shock, which was rare for him. He didn't have any smart-arse comebacks for once. “Look, I wouldn't have taken the piss if I'd known. I'm sorry, mate. I had no idea.”

Ade felt worse about it now than he had when the pain of the abortion was fresh, and had to walk away. He wasn't stepping back to avoid hitting Barencoin, but because it was so intensely private a tragedy—something Shan would never have wanted others to know—he was instantly ashamed of his outburst. It was one more thing in the growing list that he couldn't share with the people he'd trusted with his life up to now, and it left him with a bigger sense of loss than if he'd been physically separated from them.

“Hey, come on.” Barencoin tried to go after him but Ade could hear him struggling to get past the tide of ussissi walking the other way. It was a busy ship right now. “Come on, Ade, I'm sorry.”

Ade was halfway to the aft section of the ship when he realized he still had the gel coating on his hand. He slipped into a comms alcove for a moment.
Come on, you were handling this okay. People deal with it all the time, and do it for a lot less reason. You couldn't bring a
c'naatat
kid into the world.
He wondered how much of his reaction was realizing that the stupid fantasy of creating an average domestic life of the kind he'd never had was just that—fantasy. He would have to be content with having a woman he loved and who he knew he could trust. And it didn't matter that he had to share her with Aras.
Normal
had changed for good in the Cavanagh system. It was just a matter of accepting that there would be days when he slipped back into the basic human mold.

The ship moved.

Ade had to check that it wasn't just the visible horizon that had shifted. The views from the bulkheads weren't always exactly line of sight; they were projections of some kind. But he was sure the ship was moving. The crew going about their business around him reacted too. Then he saw why. Esganikan Gai strode through the ship, her copper red plume of hair bobbing as she moved like a juggernaut. Shan trailed after her. Ade somehow read the body language as Shan playing bagman to Esganikan, and he wasn't comfortable with that. The Boss
had
to be the alpha female. She could tear Esganikan up for arse-paper, he was sure of that.

“You can disembark shortly,” Esganikan said. “We're landing.”

“Where?” Ade asked.

“For the time being, the location called St George. There's accommodation provided for us elsewhere, but I want to inspect it first.”

More saints, then: it boded ill. They hadn't had much luck with the islands of Constantine, Chad and Christopher back on Bezer'ej. Esganikan swept on but Shan paused and gave Ade a shrug. “Well, you wouldn't expect her to wait for the monkey boys to tell her where she can land, would you?”

“So who's doing the diplomacy and liaison?”

“Don't look at me. It's not my forte.”

Ade had complete faith in Shan. She could do anything. She could even act as if she actually gave a toss what humans on Earth thought about her, for a while at least.

“You'll do a good job, Boss. You always do.”

“I might,” she said. “If the first job wasn't pursuing the FEU to hand over the tossers who authorized Rayat's use of cobalt bombs. I think that's going to get a bit hairy.”

The Eqbas didn't believe in any statute of limitations. The order had been given at least twenty-five years ago, more than fifty if you counted the fact that
Actaeon
deployed with neutron bombs—BNOs, biohaz neutralization ordnance, banned for use on Earth—in the first place. Whoever gave Rayat his orders was old or dead, but the Eqbas didn't give a shit. If the guilty were alive, they wanted them; and their concept of guilt was just as inflexible as their Wess'ej cousins'. Only outcomes mattered, not motives, but giving an immoral order was as bad as obeying it. Ade was still struggling to reconcile the two. He wasn't sure that he ever would.

“It's been years since I arrested anyone.” Shan felt down the back of her belt and withdrew her 9mm handgun, ancient and still in excellent, lethal working order. “Think I can still feel collars? Nick a few bastards?”

“Damn sure of it,” he said.

He could have sworn she was looking forward to that. She was a copper, a hard street copper, back on the familiar beat of Earth. And she'd remembered what she did best.

He watched her go. There was nowhere obvious to secure himself for landing, and he wasn't up to facing Barencoin for a while, so he kept out of the way in the comms alcove and touched the bulkhead to see if he could make it transparent. It became an instant window on an Earth that was now an ice plain, not desert.

As the ship dropped—or the focus shifted, he was never sure which—he strained to work out scale and position, and failed. But it was white beneath, and there wasn't much snow left on Earth now. Where were they?

Jesus, she's coming in over the South Pole…

Esganikan probably just wanted to see for herself, like the big kid she sometimes seemed to be. She didn't have to worry about triple-A or even being detected. Ade wondered what would happen if the Eqbas ever came up against a civilization as advanced as them but as dishonest as humans. Maybe they already had.

Becken appeared and crammed into the alcove with him. “Shit, Ade, look at that.”

“It's Antarctica, Jon. Big white flat place. Didn't you do exercises down here?”

“Not at this speed—”

A piercing rapid blipping sound almost deafened him. Something mid-gray and matte streaked backwards past them at eye level, then another. “
Shit.
”

“Fighters.”

“Ours?”

“Not now…”

“
Shit.
” Ade hadn't even heard engine noise. It was like watching a vid minus audio. “She's coming in from the west, through FEU airspace.”

Both marines looked at each other for a split second in disbelief before a searing white light blinded them and left green spots in Ade's field of vision. The jets had passed; now the Eqbas ship was clear of the ice and over tundra, a moss-green and gray blur, and then there were the tops of low buildings. The ship seemed to slow instantly with no feeling of inertia—Esganikan had given up sensors in favor of sightseeing, Ade suspected—and came to a dead stop over a small town.

“Did we shoot something down?” Becken whispered. “Where are we now?”

“Christ knows.” Ade gathered his wits long enough to touch the magnification. He was looking down onto a narrow street at the upturned faces of people as frozen as any startled wess'har.
Here's your first real UFO, folks. Be amazed.
“I can't see any flags. Jesus, if she's shot down an FEU vessel—”

The ship moved off again and passed the coastline at a more sedate patrol speed. Ade saw something he recognized: the angled boxy shape of a frigate churning a white wake behind her. The next thing he saw was a billowing mass of yellow flame and white smoke, and he was looking straight down the line of a missile.

Becken ducked instinctively despite the Eqbas shielding. Ade did too. Two or three seconds: no explosion. They straightened up and there was nothing out there but choppy sea smearing into a pale gray blur as the Eqbas ship headed north.

“Welcome home,” Becken muttered. “Who shot at who?”

It wasn't a great start. It was Umeh all over again, except this was Earth, and that hurt.

 

F'nar, Wess'ej: Nevyan's home, upper terraces.

 

F'nar had been Eddie Michallat's home for twenty-seven years, but he never took the view for granted.

It beat the Leeds skyline for grandeur by a long chalk. At this time of the morning, Ceret—Cavanagh's Star to humans—had risen high enough to cast a peach light over the unbroken layer of nacre that covered the whole city, and gave it the name the colonists sometimes used: City of Pearl.

The gleaming layer was insect shit, deposited by millions of
tem
flies swarming on every smooth and sun-warmed surface. But it had the luster of extinct Tahitian pearl, and, as shit went, it was breathtakingly lovely.

Eddie stood at the irregularly shaped window and stared out across the caldera. He knew every house excavated in the walls of the caldera itself, every clan of wess'har who lived there, every territorial call of the matriarchs who ran the place. It was as much home as any place he'd ever known. He liked it here.

“Eddie, you know they've arrived, don't you?”

“Okay, sweetie.”

“You've been waiting a long time for this.”

“Okay.”

He didn't turn around right away. The ITX screen was active—he could see the reflection on the glass bowl by the spigot facing him—and he knew he was going to have to psych himself up to see old friends who were now much younger than he was. For
c'naatat
hosts, age was irrelevant. But time had passed; time, and people, and events. In all those years, he'd been broadcasting into what felt like a silence, waiting for the reply that would come one day from his closest confidants. ITX no longer felt instant.

I miss you. All of you.

“Eddie, you knew this would happen one day.”

“I did,” he said, and turned around. “God knows we've talked about this enough. Maybe I've worked myself up too much.”

Erica was one of the civilian contractors who'd stayed behind on Wess'ej when
Actaeon
's crew left, and had this been Earth, they'd have been celebrating their silver wedding. It was the longest relationship Eddie had ever had, lived out wholly in an alien city, quietly comfortable in the way of couples needing to stick together, and it had produced a son. Barry had seemed like a blessing until Eddie began to worry about what kind of life he had forced on a kid who would have to return to Earth simply to find a girlfriend.

Other than that, he had no complaints.