City of Pearl Read online

  C ITY

  OF

  P EARL

  KAREN TRAVISS

  For the men and women of the Falklands Task Force—for those who came home, and those who did not, and those who still bear the scars.

  Contents

  Prologue

  The bot was immune to the snow, and so was…

  One

  I’m going home.

  Two

  Eddie Michallat didn’t care for Graham Wiley. Wiley was a…

  Three

  It was a hard walk back to Constantine for humans.

  Four

  The matriarch Mestin might have had authority to make decisions…

  Five

  Shan waited by the shuttle. The sky burned turquoise; the…

  Six

  There had never been any need for maps. The bezeri…

  Seven

  Shan found it even harder to get up off the…

  Eight

  Shan walked as fast as she could back to the…

  Nine

  A new society had been forged in a matter of…

  Ten

  Kristina Hugel double-checked the first batch of blood, urine…

  Eleven

  There were beetroot chips in a bowl on the refectory…

  Twelve

  Josh called at the compound next day unannounced. He could…

  Thirteen

  The next morning Shan took a scoot and went in…

  Fourteen

  There was one general-use laser uplink to Thetis and…

  Fifteen

  Constantine’s school occupied a whole wing of the underground complex.

  Sixteen

  Lindsay sat with Shan in the deserted mess hall, driven…

  Seventeen

  “Look what I found!” Surendra Parekh carried a small dish…

  Eighteen

  Shan followed Aras down the shingle of the beach with…

  Nineteen

  Eddie had left Shan alone for a couple of weeks…

  Twenty

  Behind the cool room where the colonists kept the last…

  Twenty One

  Life went on in Constantine regardless of global politics because…

  Twenty Two

  The sky shook.

  Twenty Three

  “I know you all hate my guts,” said Shan. “But…

  Twenty Four

  It was mid July, just hinting at autumn, and the…

  Twenty Five

  Shan felt good. No, she felt great. She woke up…

  Twenty Six

  It had been years since Aras had gone hunting isenj…

  Twenty Seven

  “We had a colony here, long before the fur-things…

  Twenty Eight

  Eddie’s mouth was dry and his pulse was racing. It…

  Twenty Nine

  Shan had never been good at bereavement. It had been…

  Thirty

  Eddie thought of the aerial shot of Umeh, building on…

  Thirty One

  The night of November 4 turned out to be a…

  Thirty Two

  The Temporary City had a much more permanent appearance to…

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Karen Traviss

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  2198 in the calendar of the gethes .

  GOVERNMENT WOR

  The bot was immune to the snow, and so was Aras. He watched it working its way across the surface of the stone with a blind purpose that defied the ice. Words emerged behind it like droppings.

  GOVERNMENT WORK IS

  A little shaving of ice drifted down as the bot moved. It cut steadily into a block of stone so hard that only an obsessive would have bothered to try to carve it, an odd choice of material in a construction made otherwise of composites and alloys.

  But the bot had no passions as far as Aras could see; its single-mindedness must have been by proxy for its masters. As it finished gouging the last letter out of the stone, it executed a 90-degree turn, moved down the supporting column to the ground and plopped into the snow to trundle away, trailing a wake of parallel lines

  GOVERNMENT WORK IS GOD’S WORK.

  Aras mimicked the lettering, copying it into the unspoiled snow beside him with a steady claw. He considered it, then brushed it away. What was “God”? And why did it care about government, especially so far from home? They were just words. He was only beginning to come to terms with the gethes’ language, and many things still baffled him.

  “Is that gethes?” asked the apprentice navigator. It was his first trip to the quarantine zone, and he was suited and sealed against invisible dangers, those that would never again bother Aras. A slight tilt of the navigator’s head steered Aras’s attention to a low platform on tracks, rumbling around the perimeter. “They look like that?”

  “Bot,” said Aras, using the gethes word he had gleaned from transmissions. “A machine they sent ahead of them to build a habitat. Some are fully intelligent. That one is not. It’s a load-carrier.” Aras stood up and wandered into its path; it paused and corrected its course to avoid him. He blocked it a few more times and then tired of the game. “It cannot distinguish me from a gethes.”

  The gethes were definitely coming. They had known that for a long time, from the first signal that was intercepted, but they were imminent now. There had been a stream of data directed to the bots about the first gethes’ intentions and needs. Now Aras had satisfied his curiosity and allowed the habitat to begin to take shape, and judged it was time to act.

  He wandered through the growing compound unchallenged. There were no security measures to keep him out; bots scattered from his path. But there was no damage he wished to do, nor information he could not easily glean from the intercepted data transmissions.

  The navigator turned and labored through the drifts until the irregular crunch of his boots vanished. The youngster was from the warmlands and even less able to tolerate freezing conditions than the average wess’har.

  But Aras was not an average wess’har. And nor were the comrades he had lost.

  Goodbye, Cimesiat. I’m truly sorry. Aras glanced around the landscape. There was no funeral to be held here, no remains of his friend to re-enter the cycle of life, so he simply remembered. In the coming season there would be black grasses as far as the eye could see, the sharp and glossy blades that grew nowhere else on Bezer’ej. If only they had never landed on this island—if only the isenj had never landed here—then Cimesiat would have died naturally at the proper time. Instead, he had been driven to destroy himself, the fifty-eighth of the remaining c’naatat troops to take his own life since the last of the wars. Peace made you purposeless if you let it. Aras had found his purpose in another war, a slower and more considered battle to protect Bezer’ej. One day he would win it, and he thought of his comrades and wondered if it was a victory for which he would be prepared.

  There were just three of his squadron left, without family, without purpose, without any of the things that made a wess’har want to live. But I have my world, Aras thought. I have duties here enough for another three lifetimes, now that the gethes are coming.

  He squatted and dug his claws into the snow, pushing down into the hard-frozen soil beneath as if he were connecting with it in the disposal rite that Cimesiat would never have. “Forgive me,” he said aloud. “I should have known better.”

  There was silence again. It was a crisp and perfect calm, except for the occasional distant clank of closing hatches and the hum of motors. This was a dead homestead, industrial and unwelcoming, without life or community. The gray composite walls curved into a featureless roof.

&
nbsp; Buildings always bothered Aras. This one was conspicuous, placed where anyone could see it. Imposing on the natural landscape was a vulgar act, an alien’s taste, not a wess’har practice. The arrogance of it nagged at him. He stood up and stared at the horizon north of the island. All the lights on the shoreline had gone; after centuries all traces of isenj building had been reclaimed and erased by the wilderness. It had taken far less time to erase the isenj themselves.

  So gethes built to be seen, too. That was all he could note. He followed the path churned up by the navigator all the way back to the ship, to avoid leaving any more of a mark than was absolutely necessary on the featureless whiteness.

  “We must take it all away,” Aras said. “Their construction must be moved from this place.”

  “And will you erase the gethes when they come?” the navigator asked. He had that bright expression—a mix of fear and adulation—that Aras had seen too many times. You were the Restorer. You can save us again. “Or will we take them before they land?”

  The youngster’s eyes darted between Aras’s face and his claws. Every normal wess’har—clawless, heirs to death—seemed to stare at those claws.

  “I will decide that when we know more about them. If they seek refuge, I will examine their need.” Aras paused, and wondered again if he could have acted differently long ago; but he knew he could not have done anything more or less than to wipe out the isenj cities. He had no idea why this question continued to plague him. “If they come intent on exploitation, I will remove them.”

  “Sir, is it something I should fear?”

  “You’ll be long dead if the worst happens,” Aras said. “But I’ll live to see it.”

  He would live to see it all.

  1

  I will be honest in all my dealings with others.

  I will avoid experiments on feeling life-forms wherever possible.

  I will safeguard the environment.

  I will not plagiarize or hinder the work of other scientists, nor knowingly publish false research.

  I will put the common good before professional pride or profit.

  THE DA VINCI OATH,

  popularly known as the Scientists’ Oath,

  amended 2078

  Mars Orbital

  April 25, 2299

  I’m going home.

  “Good morning,” said Shan Frankland, and held up her warrant card. “We’re from Environmental Hazard Enforcement. Please, step away from the console.”

  She loved those words. They cast a spell. They laid bare men’s souls, if you knew how to look. She looked around the administration center and in three seconds she knew the man at the desk was uninvolved, the woman marshaling traffic was surprised by the intrusion, and the man lounging against the drinks machine…well, his face was too composed and his eyes were moving just wrong. He was the fis-sure in the rock. She would cleave it apart.

  I’m going home. Five days, tops.

  “Inspector McEvoy,” she said, and motioned her bagman forward. “Over to you.” She put her warrant card back in her top pocket and stood watching while her technical team flowed in and put in override codes on all Mars Orbital’s systems. The station was temporarily hers.

  This is the last time I’ll have to do this.

  “May I?” She walked across to the station’s video circuit. The traffic marshal stepped aside. She settled into the seat and tapped the transmission key.

  “May I have your attention, please? This is Superintendent Shan Frankland. This orbital station is now under the jurisdiction of the Enforcement Division of the Federal European Union. There will be no traffic movements or transmissions until the preliminary investigation is complete. Please report to your muster stations at 1600 station time for a briefing from my officers. Thank you for your cooperation. We’ll be out of your way just as soon as we can.”

  She leaned back, satisfied. Space stations were lovely places to carry out environmental hazard audits. Nobody could make a run for it. Nobody could get evidence off the premises. There was only one way off Mars Orbital without a scheduled flight, and that was via an airlock. It was right and fitting that she should have a relatively simple rummage job as her final task before retirement. She had earned it.

  McEvoy crouched down level with her seat. “All locked down, Guv’nor. We should have it logged and wrapped in six hours, but there’s no reason why we couldn’t start carrying out preliminary interviews now.”

  Shan cocked her head discreetly in the direction of the man she’d spotted at the drinks dispenser. “I’d make a start on him,” she said. “Just a feeling. Anyway, I’d better go and pay my respects to the station manager. This has probably ruined her entire day.”

  And this time next month, I’ll be clearing my desk.

  Mars Orbital looked and felt exactly as the schematics on her swiss had told her it would. She took the little red cylinder with its white cross from her pocket and unfurled its plasma screen to study the station layout.

  “You should treat yourself to some new technology,” McEvoy said, and tapped the side of his head, indicating his implants. “How old is that thing?”

  “Hundreds of years, and still as good as that thing in your skull. I’m an old-fashioned girl. I like my computing in my pocket.” She stood up and oriented herself along the lines of the map on the swiss’s screen, then set off down the main passageway. Looking straight ahead, she could detect the gradual curve of the main ring. For a second she felt she might be falling, but she looked straight ahead, resisting the temptation to stare out of the nearest observation area to goggle at a Mars that filled her field of view. It wasn’t her first time away from Earth, but she had never been within touching distance of an inhabited planet before. She wondered if she might find time to do a few tourist things before departing. She’d never get another free flight like this again.

  The station manager’s office was exactly where the swiss said it would be. Its name-plated occupant, Cathy Borodian, was quietly angry. “I thought you people were on a fact-finding mission for the European Assembly.”

  “It wasn’t a complete lie. We’re still finding facts, aren’t we?” Shan stood before her desk and watched the woman trying to cope without access to her mainframe, hands fumbling across the softglass surface; it remained steadfastly blank, showing only a SYSTEM UNAVAILABLE screen under the coffee cup and half-eaten chocolate brioche. “We’ll be out of here as soon as we possibly can. Routine inspection for biological and environmental hazards you’re not licensed to manage.”

  “I don’t think Warrenders is going to be happy about this. They have a contract.”

  “Well, last time I looked, civilian government still just about ran Europe. Not corporations.”

  “Are you able to tell me exactly what the problem is?”

  “So there’s a problem?”

  “No. Not at all.”

  “The Federal European Union doesn’t ship out forty audit and technical officers unless it thinks there might be irregularities. Does that answer your question?”

  “Not completely. What about our teams on the surface? Can they come back inboard?”

  “If they need to, they can flash us and one of my people will escort them.” Shan understood the woman, even if she felt no sympathy for her. She had schedules and commercial pressures, and shutting down the orbital was a major crisis, with or without a police investigation. Downtime cost money. “I’ll be in the cabin you assigned me, if you have any questions—or anything you want to tell me.”

  It turned out to be quite a pleasant cabin. Borodian must have wanted a good report to the Assembly, because there was a real viewplate and a shower cubicle. Shan dropped her grip on the bunk and stood at the plate for a few minutes, mesmerized. McEvoy had told her she could see the American and Pacifica stations at different times of the day if she followed his instructions, but she was far more captivated by the rusty orange disk that filled the window. It was so vivid that it looked unreal, a projection for her ed
ucation or entertainment. No matter how hard she tried to see it as a three-dimensional sphere, it remained an illustration on a flat screen.

  Movement caught her eye. Along the jutting spar of a mooring boom, two figures in self-luminescent green marshaling suits were guiding a tiny vessel into a bay. No mainframe access meant the automatic navigation was down; they were securing the ship manually, one standing on the gantry above the vessel and signaling with spiraling hand gestures, one alongside on the boom operating the winch.

  Odd to think they still used antiquated hand signals. But even Morse code still had its uses. There was a lot to be said for old tech, Shan thought, and toyed with the swiss in her pocket.

  She watched. Slowly, slowly, farther astern, then the figure on the gantry held arms aloft, wrists crossed in an X, the signal to make fast, to secure the lines. The locking buffers extended to take the touch of the stern, and the vessel shivered to a halt. And suddenly she couldn’t see the hand signals of the berth marshals anymore, because she was looking at the leather-glove hands of a gorilla.

  The primate was staring intently into her face as it made the same gesture, the same sign, over and over again; rubbing its palm in a circular motion over its chest, then a fiston-palm gesture. Its eyes never left hers.

  Please help me. Please help me. Please…

  She didn’t know what it meant at the time. The animal technician had said it was asking for food, please, and wasn’t it great that you could teach apes to sign? And she had believed him, right up to the time when a deaf interpreter told her what the gesture really meant.