Judge (14 page)

Rayat was thinking shipyards for a moment, vapor hissing from robotic presses and the smell of hull composite being formed. But that wasn't how Eqbas built ships. They used nanotech, creating ships that could be grown from templates and whose form and function could be changed dynamically by altering the materials at a molecular level.

“So how do they get updated?” he asked, imagining them limping back to port for a refit of some kind. “And why don't you just break down the old ones with nanites? You can do that. I know you can. I've seen it.”

“Why deconstruct them while they still have use for others?” Rujalian looked as if he was groping for simpler language, probably doubting Rayat's ability to understand eqbas'u. “We transmit new instructions. The component materials have to be told how to change the way they react and behave. There are limits with the older nanites, of course, but that's no bad thing with allies like the Skavu, is it?”

There was more trilling and a cacophony of discussion, in their two-toned voices that sounded as chaotic as a birdhouse. “Hang on,” said Rayat, “is that like sending them an updated program? An upgrade made up of instructions?”

“Yes, it is. Are you
sure
you were a scientist?”

Rayat didn't know who or how, but something in his head said
message vector,
and that was something he needed very badly right now. “How often do you do this?”

“Whenever they request it.”

“Do you…ever send updates without their asking?”

“Occasionally.”

“Do you run diagnostic checks?”

Rujalian looked at him with his head cocked so far on one side that it was comical. “We can, but why?”

“Just curious.”

Rayat
was
curious, that was true. But he was far more interested in working out how he might get a message to the Skavu, in terms they understood, that their mission commander was an abomination, a
c'naatat
carrier.

He knew he could rely on them to do the right thing. All he had to do was work out how to send an intelligible message.

“
Roger
, my friend, tell me more about your neighbor,” he said.

Rujalian seemed to find it very funny to be called
Roger,
and trilled happily. Wess'har were very open if you asked them questions. That was common to both sides of the family. Humans were pretty helpful too, most of the time, but not as unfailingly detailed. Rayat left the ideas exchange armed with the knowledge that once every few weeks—he kept the Gregorian calendar running alongside the Eqbas one even now—a maintenance status check was downloaded to Skavu vessels via the ITX. He also knew who sent it, how they sent it, and what he had to do to add code to it, for want of a better word.

He also knew the Eqbas responsible for it didn't speak or read English—very few did—and wouldn't notice if the words
YOUR COMMANDER HAS
C'NAATAT
were embedded in the code, and so the message would end up shunted to the diagnostic display that showed parts of the program that wouldn't run for some reason. Eqbas, being the efficient bastards that they were, didn't have many duff lines of code. The Skavu would notice that, he hoped—and they
did
process English through their translation collars.

“Once again, the
lingua franca par excellence
comes into its own,” he said aloud as he walked back into Shapakti's office.

“Latin
and
French,” said Shapakti. “And you seem smug.”

“I think I have a solution to getting a warning to Earth.”

Shapakti wafted agitated citrus again. “Eddie Michallat may have the best chance. You could have passed him a message by now.”

“Old habits die hard, Shap. I've found a way of getting a warning direct to the Skavu fleet.”

Shapakti filled the room with his anxiety scent now, as pungent as grapefruit peel. “I think that's a bad idea. Telling
Shan Chail
is, as you call it, the long screwdriver. She can be relied upon. Telling the Skavu is pulling a pin from a grenade. That's the phrase, isn't it? They are
volatile
.”

Rayat paused to consider what the worst thing that might happen. The Skavu understood
c'naatat
enough to know that it needed to be destroyed by fragmenting the host. All he wanted was for
c'naatat
to be taken out of the Eqbas armory before it got out of control.

“I'm going to have to do it, Shap. You
know
that. Things are going to be bad enough on Earth without adding a plague like that. Have I ever showed you
zombie
movies? Funny how they never addressed the whole population problem aspect of the not-quite-dead. But
zombies
don't go on breeding, of course.”

Shapakti had frozen in that classic wess'har shock pose, and he didn't ask what zombies were. “I would seek to dissuade you. You may cause a problem where none existed before. There are three other
c'naatat
hosts on Earth, remember. All four may yet come home without incident.”

“How strongly do you feel about that?”

Shapakti was very still; not quite frozen, but motionless enough for Rayat to gauge his mood.

“I would stop you if I could,” he said. “So don't ask me to help you.”

“Okay.” Rayat nodded. He liked Shapakti. It wasn't fair on him to push this further. Rayat preferred to do his intelligence work alone anyway.

It was just like old times.

Rayat spent the rest of the day reading up on ship construction and nanite command codes via the communal library link, an easy task because Eqbas were every bit as open with information as their wess'har cousins. Shan might have been unwise to return to Earth with her parasite, but she wasn't as big a risk as a wess'har with a hidden agenda. Esganikan wasn't at all like Nevyan or the wess'har Rayat had known in the past; he couldn't trust her, and he didn't know what she'd do next. She might have wanted to explore extended life for all kinds of practical reasons, but now she had plenty of Rayat in her, and Rayat knew how his own mind worked.

She had to be exposed, and stopped. He couldn't trust her not to be Mohan Rayat. And he couldn't count on her being Shan Frankland.

 

St George, Eastside Australia: Eqbas temporary camp.

 

Aras stood in the blazing heat with the
virin
cupped in his palms, and stared at the image that had formed within it.

“Is she angry with me?” Eddie's voice hadn't changed but his hair was thinner and grayer; his face was deeply lined. Wess'ej, clean and unspoiled, still took its toll on humans with its higher gravity and austere life. “Look, I'll face it like a man, Aras. Just let me talk to her.”

“She's…regretful. I would not say
angry.
”

“Does she understand why I had to stay?”

“Ask her yourself. She's busy talking to the government here, but she'll always have time for you.” The
virin
had a limited field of view but it was clear there was someone else with Eddie. Behind him, Aras could see the shimmering city of F'nar reflecting light like a covering of snow, and a shadow moving. “You've been meticulous in cataloguing the progress on Umeh. A little remiss in keeping us updated on your own circumstances, though.”

Eddie shrugged in a way that usually indicated benign embarrassment, as if he felt uncomfortable with praise. When he reached out of the field of view and pulled someone into the frame, Aras understood why.

“I have a family now,” he said. “This is my son, Barry.”

Barry was around fifteen with sharp features and light brown hair. Aras assumed he was the likeness of his mother, a woman Aras hadn't yet seen.

“Hi, Aras,” said Barry Michallat.
Eddie has a son.
Even Eddie, solitary and obsessed Eddie, had a child, but Aras didn't. He should have been happy for Eddie, but all he could feel was shocked betrayal that made absolutely no sense. “I've heard all about you. How's Earth?”

“It might be dying,” said Aras. “Or it might be going through a normal cycle in its life. Either way, life is changing here.”

“But the Eqbas can fix it, right?” Eddie cut in. “Have you seen Umeh? Seriously, have you seen it?”

“I've seen your programs, yes.”

“Has anyone on Earth taken any notice?”

“Time will tell.”

“Aras, it's been just about scoured clean and the population is below one billion. In
twenty-five years
.”

Ferociously efficient nanites were a standard wess'har method of remediating polluted land and stripping down the detritus of construction. Nanites had reclaimed Ouzhari and the surrounding area after the isenj had been driven from Bezer'ej: nanites had left Constantine pristine again, as if no human colony had ever settled there, and no mission had set up base. But Eqbas nanite technology, ten thousand years removed from that of Wess'ej, seemed to have done much more in the time available.

“Show me the latest images,” said Aras. He hadn't yet checked all the ITX links from home and what might be available now. It was hard to know where to begin to pick up the threads of his interrupted life after five hundred years of relative stability. “The last I saw were years old.”

“It'll knock your socks off.” Eddie grinned, but unconvincingly. He fumbled with something in his hand. “Here's the view south of Jejeno today. Live.”

Aras pressed the
virin
to accept output from the Wess'ej ITX node. The image stirred no recollection in him, neither from his conscious recollection of the all-encompassing city nor from the more fleeting genetic memory of isenj who had hosted his
c'naatat
before him. Where there had been tight-packed towers and spires covering every meter of land as far as the horizon, there was now a more open vista with patches of light green vegetation and light yellow cycad-like trees. The sky was clearer; the whole impression was one of a city that had been thinned out. From this altitude and angle—the observation point must have been relatively low in the sky, perhaps a monitoring remote left by the Eqbas—he could see no living rivers of isenj packing the streets and moving in carefully managed traffic streams.

But this was Jejeno, the capital of the Northern Assembly on the Ebj landmass—just one of Umeh's nations. There were three more island continents. This was
not
the complete picture.

“Now show me the Maritime Fringe,” he said. “Show me Pareg, Tivskur and Sil.”

It took a few moments for Eddie to patch through the images: Aras didn't need to see them all, because Tivskur's coast summed it up. What had been a packed coastline crenellated with ports and inlets, with towering structures right up to the pinkish gray polluted sea—the dying sea—was now completely flattened. It reminded him of Ouzhari after the cobalt-salted neutron devices had incinerated it. It had a velvety uniformity; not a wasteland, but a blank sheet. The buildings were gone, utterly gone without even ruins to show where they'd stood.

Aras had used nanites for clearance on Bezer'ej post-war, and years later when the colony of Constantine was evacuated, so he knew what he was looking at without any prompting from Eddie. The built environment and everything in it—including corpses—had been broken down into their components by nanites. It was bare soil, barren, but clean. Like a new volcanic island erupting from the sea and cooling, it would in time become colonized by…what? The isenj had destroyed everything living that wasn't of direct use to them, and were eventually forced to manage their climate with brilliant but doomed engineering on a planetary scale. They would import native flora and fauna from the isenj moon of Tasir Var.

There were no isenj in Tivskur, of course. They were all dead.

“So the genome-targeted bioweapons were used,” Aras said at last. Somehow he thought the phrase
knock your socks off
implied a positive surprise, but this wasn't. Part of him—and not his inherited isenj memories—took no pleasure in seeing the demise of a people even if they had once tortured him as a prisoner of war, and reviled him as a war criminal; in fact, he regretted the loss of talented engineers who might have had elegant solutions for some of Earth's problems. “Was it Minister Rit who decided to use them, or Nevyan?”

“Rit,” said Eddie. “Deployed by wess'har craft.”

“Just as they agreed to do.”

“I didn't say I
approved
of it, Aras. Just that…well, desperate situations sometimes require extreme solutions.”

Aras wasn't shocked by the mass slaughter. He was wess'har, and no life-form was more valued or sacred than another; but those with choice and control had more responsibility for exercising it responsibly, and if they didn't then balancing had to take place.

He'd done that balancing. He'd led the assault on the isenj colony on Bezer'ej centuries before, when he was just a normal wess'har male, because they'd polluted the seas and caused the deaths of bezeri. He would do it again without a second thought. This was the ethos of his species.

But to see that isenj could kill isenj in those numbers…as Rit had said, change could only come if whole lines of genetic memory were wiped out, not just culling for the sake of numbers.
Thinking
had to change. Isenj were physically hidebound by their genetic memory.

“Tell me,” he said, dragging his gaze away from the
virin,
“do we now have a population made up almost wholly of the Northern Assembly isenj?”

“I reckon so,” said Eddie. “Ethnic cleansing, by genome.”

Barry was still in shot, looking awkward and bored. He'd grown up in a world where this was normal—but it would not be normal on Earth. Humans were appalled by racism and yet hardwired to seek out and favor their own kind, their closest genetic match.