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  Nevyan was staying on her homeworld. It was her duty, just as Shan felt hers was returning to Earth with the Eqbas fleet. She had to be here.

  To do what, exactly? You think one poxy human, even you, can make a difference to a fleet that pretty well leveled Umeh?

  The shifting bulkheads always made her feel like she was negotiating a hall of mirrors. She almost tripped over the communications officer as an apparently solid sheet of material thinned and parted in front of her, disorienting her enough to make her think she was falling again.

  “Shan Chail.” The Eqbas put his thin spider of a hand out to stop her but he didn’t actually touch her. They were all scared of catching her parasite, unlikely though that was. “Shan Chail, you must adjust more slowly. You’ll injure yourself.”

  That was the very least of her worries. Almost any injury or illness she could think of was simply temporary pain; c’naatat could repair anything except fragmentation. She wondered if all the Eqbas understood what the parasite could do quite as well as Esganikan did.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “Where’s Ade?”

  The Eqbas pointed the way with an awkward human gesture. Shan followed the line of his finger to in the accommodation decks, neat rows of body-sized chambers stacked at a slight angle like tilted honeycombs. There were still dark shapes in some, but the two individuals who mattered most to her—a Royal Marine sergeant and a five-hundred-year-old alien war criminal—weren’t among them. She couldn’t pick up their respective scents in the melee of smells flooding the ship, and she had to stop a passing ussissi to ask for directions. The meerkatlike creature, chest-tall and—to use Eddie’s description—like a foul-tempered Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, indicated aft with a jerk of his head.

  She found Ade and Aras leaning against a patch of transparent bulkhead and gazing down at the planet beneath them just as she had, like a couple of kids who were desperate to go out and play in some exciting new place. They struck her as oddly alike despite the fact that Ade still looked like a regular man and Aras—however much human DNA his c’naatat had scavenged—would never pass for a human. C’naatat liked tinkering and rearranging its host’s genome, sometimes visibly, sometimes not.

  “So we made it back.” Ade managed a smile, looking her up and down. “Jesus, Boss, you look rough.”

  “The sodding cryo didn’t put me out for the count.” Shan was too self-conscious to greet either of them with a kiss. Somehow being the Guv’nor and showing affection in public still didn’t mix. “I’ve been awake on and off for most of the bloody journey. You?”

  “Dead to the world. Out like a light.”

  Aras seemed more interested in the spectacle below. “I recall nothing of being in suspension.”

  “So when did you find out that Eddie had stayed behind?”

  Aras turned to look at her, eyes neither wess’har nor human but charcoal-black and sad like a dog’s. “When I went to look for him. I checked on everyone I knew in cryo.”

  “Didn’t you think of thawing me out and telling me?”

  “Why? What could you have done? There was no going back.”

  Wess’har were scrupulously pragmatic. In a human, that behavior would have been riddled with ulterior motive, the kind of thing that corroded trust; but in Aras it was exactly what he said, no more and no less. He had occasionally lied by simple delay, but for all the changes that c’naatat had made to him over five centuries, his core was still wess’har—literal, uninterested in deception, and nose-bleedingly honest to the point of offense.

  He was right, of course. She’d just have been impotently angry. Ade snapped back into sergeant mode and distracted her.

  “How long do you think we’re going to be here, Boss?” He still called her that, as if she was his senior officer, and she found it touching now rather than embarrassing. “Just asking. Stuff I need to do.”

  It was a reminder that he had a life that she knew little about beyond the memories that c’naatat had transferred to her. She found it odd to be that intimate with another person—there was no relationship closer than one between c’naatat hosts—and relive his most traumatic moments as vividly as if she were him, and yet have no idea where he grew up or what he’d regretted leaving behind. She’d have to find out. It mattered.

  “Months at the very least,” she said. “What did you want to do, then?” She tried to keep an eye on Aras. He’d wandered away and opened another transparent section in the bulkhead, as if he wanted to contemplate Earth without interruption. “You might as well make the most of the trip, because we won’t be coming back again.”

  Ade shrugged and looked away for a moment. “I want to go back to Ankara and pay my respects to Dave.”

  Dave was his best mate, shot dead next to him in the battle for Ankara. Shan had relived the warm spray of brain tissue on her face as c’naatat plucked the event right out of Ade’s transferred memories. She understood the compulsion at a level of empathy denied to normal humans.

  “Draw up a list,” she said. “I’ll make sure you get to do it all.”

  She had a list of her own, but there were no old friends on it. There was the gene bank to hand over, and a court martial finding to be set aside, and macaws to return to the wild. When she thought about it, it sounded like a list of excuses for coming back, tasks that someone else could have carried out or that were no longer relevant.

  And there were ghosts to be laid, but they weren’t important now. She could erase her past anywhere, any time. She didn’t need to make pilgrimages.

  Then why have you really come back?

  Aras still stood frozen at the temporary window in the bulkhead. Wess’har had a great capacity for standing completely immobile, unnaturally so, and it usually meant they were startled or stressed.

  “Aras, are you okay?”

  “I remember it,” he said. “I remember Earth as clearly as I remembered Umeh before I saw it for the first time. How odd to remember what you’ve never experienced.”

  “I think we’re all going to find Earth’s not like we remembered,” Ade said. “Except the colonists. Let’s see if it lives up to their expectations.” He gave Shan a fond swipe on the backside as if he was determined to pretend none of them were upset by Eddie’s decision. “I’m going to make sure the lads are okay. Don’t land without me.”

  “I thought they’d sorted out a landing site before we left,” Shan said irritably. “But maybe a lot changed in twenty-five years.”

  “Apparently, Australia’s had seven changes of government while we were in transit.”

  “I see you’re up to speed—”

  “No offense, Boss. I just asked the Eqbas when I woke up. I don’t like not knowing stuff. Oh, and the FEU, Sinostates, and Africa have gone to their second-highest defcon state.”

  “Only second? Shit, I thought we were scarier than that.”

  “Give it time,” he said. “They’re just warming up.”

  He strode off looking as if he belonged on the ship and she watched him go. It was natural—sensible—for a soldier to orientate himself before arriving in uncertain territory. Shan hesitated to use the word enemy, but the Eqbas mission wasn’t any more universally welcome than it had been when fighting broke out over it when it was first announced. Maybe the Australians had gone through a few changes of mind about the invitation to land on their turf and sort out Earth, too. But they probably realized what every world the Eqbas visited realized sooner rather than later: once invited, once their attention was focused, Eqbas didn’t turn around and go home.

  “Shit.” She wandered over to Aras and put her hand on his back. “I wish I’d stayed out of the cryo. Lots of catching up to do now.”

  Aras indicated an interior bulkhead. It formed into a viewing screen at a gesture from him, and suddenly she was looking at a vaguely familiar logo and a scene she almost recognized. It took her a few seconds to work out that it was the latest incarnation of BBChan; the setting was familiar.

  “Jejeno,” said
Aras. “I’ve been catching up on Eddie’s broadcasts over the last twenty-five years. He’s been prolific. And Jejeno has…changed.”

  It was all coming back too fast. Shan found herself looking at the once-crowded isenj homeworld of Umeh, the city of Jejeno, where every meter of land had been covered with high-rise buildings, every living thing that wasn’t isenj or a food crop obliterated, every natural system destroyed and replaced by an engineered climate—until the Eqbas had shown up, and millions of isenj had died. By now, it was probably billions.

  Aras was right: it had changed.

  In shot, Eddie—a much older Eddie—was walking around an open area in the city that looked as if it was grassed parkland. On Earth, that would have been totally unremarkable. On Umeh, it was a miracle.

  Isenj, black and brown egg-shaped bodies on spider legs, mouths fringed with small teeth like a piranha’s, tottered through the background. They were an orderly people who looked nothing like humans, but who had far more in common with them than with their neighbors in the Cavanagh system, the wess’har. Some of them paused to watch Eddie doing his piece to camera, just like humans. The audio was muted, but the normality of the scene was shocking.

  “What happened?” Shan asked. But she knew: Jejeno wasn’t the dystopian urban landscape she recalled because most of the isenj population had been removed the hard way. “God. So they really did it.”

  But it wasn’t the outcome of the war she’d walked away from that really shattered her composure. It was seeing Eddie Michallat now pushing seventy years old. He’d been younger than her when she’d last seen him.

  Time was a bastard. It took everyone in the end, and this was somehow harder than first leaving Earth on a moment’s notice and knowing everyone she cared about would be dead or senile by the time she was revived again.

  But that’s what c’naatat ’s like, too. It’ll keep you going, repair you indefinitely, while everyone you know—everyone without the parasite—ages and dies.

  She’d known from the start that was how the bloody thing worked. It was a simultaneous curse and blessing.

  Now, for the first time, she really felt it.

  Eqbas Vorhi, office of Varguti Sho, senior matriarch of Surang: 2401 in the calendar of the gethes.

  “If you don’t act now,” said Mohan Rayat, “Esganikan Gai is going to play right into my government’s hands and give humans c’naatat. She’s infected. And she’s on Earth.”

  Varguti Sho, the most senior matriarch of the city-state of Surang, was new to the job. That meant she might be persuaded more easily than her predecessors, who seemed to think that while it was irregular for a commander to dose herself with a biohazard and fail to tell her own government, it wasn’t a cause for alarm. They had done nothing in the intervening years despite his warnings. He had to make them understand.

  Wrong. It’s everything you want to stamp out. It’s everything I’ve come to fear. It’s a potential disaster. Didn’t all this trouble with humans start there?

  “Curas Ti trusted Esganikan to treat the parasite as an experiment,” said Varguti. “And what can anyone do thirty light-years away, even if there was a problem?”

  “Did she ever actually tell Curas Ti what she’d done?”

  “No.”

  “Exactly—I did. Da Shapakti did. Has she even told her crew? Do you believe me when I say she infected herself deliberately?”

  “Yes. Da Shapakti confirmed it. But motive is irrelevant—”

  “Actually, Sho Chail, that’s just not true.” Wess’har—both the Eqbas here and their Wess’ej cousins—cared only about outcomes, not motivation. Most of the time that made them seem brutally hard-line; but sometimes it showed their blind spot about predicting risks. Vastly superior power had only compounded the trait. “If Esganikan was keeping it from you, she had a reason. It’s not how wess’har behave. You’re totally open. You don’t hide things.”

  Varguti was beginning to waver. Rayat could see it. She was cocking her head, the four lobes of her pupils opening and closing, and then she froze for a couple of seconds. Wess’har always did that when they were alarmed.

  “When we send armies to other worlds, the commander has complete autonomy.” Varguti sounded as if she was trying to convince herself. “The time scales are too long and the distances are too great for any government to understand the situation she might find herself in. We do not need to know every small detail of her strategy, and we do not, to use your phrase, second-guess her.”

  Rayat was jolted out of the debate for a moment by the injection of English after so many years of being immersed in eqbas’u. Home. Earth. I’ll never see it again. “But what if she becomes a problem? What if she’s not competent to do the job?”

  “You must justify that claim.”

  “She’s lied by omission, and she’s taken an infection to Earth—the very same parasite that I tried to destroy on Ouzhari because I thought it was too dangerous to give to my own government. They sent me to get it, and I don’t disobey my orders easily, I can assure you.” Rayat could feel his voice straining in his desperation to be believed. “I started this. I understand it better than you do—look, ask Wess’ej. Ask your cousins. They’ll tell you.”

  Varguti knelt back on her heels, apparently more interested in some information shimmering in her ice-sheet of a desk. The office was all low tables and serene filtered light like an upmarket Japanese restaurant, something Rayat hadn’t seen in a very long time and would probably never see again.

  “I refuse to believe Esganikan would infect humans deliberately,” said Varguti.

  “Sho Chail, it doesn’t have to be deliberate. The fact that a c’naatat host has reached Earth is the problem. Anything might happen. We’ve had an accidental infection before.”

  “Now I know you panic for no reason, because there are three more c’naatat hosts on that mission, and you have no fears about them despite the fact that two of them are human, and the wess’har Aras has already deliberately infected a human once. Where is your logic now?”

  Rayat was helpless for a moment. He should have seen that coming. The reason he had dismissed it was because he knew Shan, and he knew that she would kill herself rather than let the parasite fall into anyone else’s hands—because she’d done it before. Aras and Ade…well, he also knew that Shan wouldn’t allow another misjudgment on their part. They’d already spread it once too often, both of them.

  I know trouble when I see it. It used to be my job to cause it, more often than not.

  “I panic,” said Rayat, “because normal wess’har keep c’naatat at arm’s length, and Aras is proof of what happens when the parasite takes hold. He spread c’naatat through his troops because it looked like a good idea. It wasn’t. When he gave it to Shan, he did it to save her life—because he was too influenced by whatever c’naatat brought with it to just let her die like she should have.”

  “Like you should have, too…”

  “I’m glad you’re getting my point.”

  “You’re not getting mine.”

  “You have to stop Esganikan. Recall her. Appoint another commander on the ground. Just get her out of there before anything goes wrong.”

  “She has done nothing to make me think she’s a risk.” Varguti seemed a lot more emphatic now. Rayat had lost her again, just when he thought he’d swayed her. The subtle tricks he’d been so adept at using when he was an intelligence officer dealing with weak, suggestible humans were no use on wess’har. “The risk is that gethes seize a host, but they don’t have the capacity to breach Eqbas security. In the highly unlikely event that they do, then Da Shapakti now has the countermeasures.”

  Rayat felt his throat closing and his pulse pounding. C’naatat didn’t do much to stop that. It seemed to think a little physical stress was good for him. “But you don’t have a mass delivery system for that—”

  “We will have one.”

  “—and do you really want to commit yet another task force to Earth simply t
o clean up the mess? Have you any idea of the social and environmental chaos that a zero death rate would cause even in a few decades on Earth?”

  Varguti stared at him for a moment. She didn’t have the bright gold irises of the Wess’ej wess’har, and somehow it made all Eqbas look less ferociously intelligent; but that was a serious underestimation. They just don’t think like we do. Rayat waited. There was no point angering her.

  “Yes,” she said. “We can predict exactly what it will do, far more accurately than gethes can. Yours isn’t the only world we’ve adjusted in our history. And so far, I have no reason to think that Esganikan Gai is any more of a risk than Shan Frankland.”

  Rayat felt deflated. But he’d come through plenty, through a one-way ticket to Bezer’ej and becoming an aquatic creature and even living with the torment of nearly wiping out a sentient species. He’d been switched between mortal and immortal so many times that having his c’naatat back again seemed unremarkable. So a few spats with a dangerously optimistic Eqbas matriarch was just a minor setback. He’d try another tack.

  “The reason to worry,” he said, “is that her c’naatat has my genetic material, my memories, and I was an unscrupulous bastard ready to do whatever it took to get c’naatat for my masters, or keep it from their enemies.”

  Varguti had him on the back foot. “And yet you’re not quite that bastard now, are you?”

  “If you have evidence that Esganikan isn’t behaving responsibly, then will you act?”

  Varguti wasn’t even mildly annoyed with him, just impatient. He could smell it. “Yes, within obvious limits.”

  Obvious limits. Esganikan was 150 trillion miles away, five years ahead of the second fleet sent to support her, with a loyal army of fanatical Skavu, a young and deferential Eqbas crew, and enough firepower and bioweapons capability to scour Earth as clean as Umeh. If she decided to do anything that the matriarchs here didn’t sanction, there wasn’t a lot they could do about it other than tell her to pack it in.