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  And would she obey?

  If her c’naatat had changed her outlook as subtly as Rayat suspected, as it had all its hosts, then he wasn’t placing bets.

  “Thank you for your time, Sho Chail,” he said.

  Rayat left her office—unguarded, unremarkable, and open to any Surang citizen—and made his way down curving stairs onto the next walkway level. There was nowhere on Eqbas Vorhi he couldn’t go, which was a strange situation for a prisoner; he’d stopped thinking of himself as one except for the times he felt an urge to contact Earth, which he was banned from doing because Shan had once told Shapakti that he was a slimy bastard who should never be trusted with a link, especially now that he had detailed knowledge of c’naatat. Shapakti, scared shitless of her and always mindful of an isan’s advice, made sure that Rayat didn’t. Eqbas technology was nothing if not thorough. Wherever he went on the planet, the communications systems identified him and prevented his sending messages.

  He had not yet given up.

  Rayat waited on the walkway, looking out onto a city of impossible and breathtaking beauty. If anyone had pointed out Surang to him when he first arrived and told him that the structure was a vast ivory bracket fungus or coral, he might have believed them. But it was a city every bit as constructed as Moscow or Brussels. He took out his virin and checked the news feeds.

  FEU ON HIGH ALERT AS ALIEN FLEET REACHES EARTH

  Ah, Eddie. A dream headline for you, except you’ve already done them all now.

  Rayat could access all the incoming information that he wanted, all the Earth channels still being picked up by the local ITX node, but eventually he’d stopped wanting to know what was happening back home. He almost had to force himself to check the daily digests. But now that the fleet had arrived, and Earth was in turmoil, he wanted to know what was happening very badly indeed.

  I started this. I was tasked to investigate c’naatat long before Frankland ever stuck her bloody nose in. I was the one who opted for the cobalt bombs. I’ll finish the job.

  Nobody took any notice of Rayat as he leaned on a curved retaining wall and studied the selection on his virin. He’d been here so long that most Eqbas knew all about him, the exiled gethes who committed genocide and—somehow—had been spared the usual wess’har justice. He flicked through the news feeds, gazing at the image that filled his palm like a face frozen under ice.

  An evangelist was in full cry. “Judgment day is coming!” he roared. “Look at the signs—who’ll be saved? Only the few—”

  “You’re not wrong there, friend,” Rayat muttered. “Stand by for downsizing.”

  It wasn’t as if Eddie’s incessant torrent of documentaries hadn’t given Earth the handbook for an Eqbas occupation. Humans just didn’t take any notice.

  Rayat worked through his options while watching the paskeghur boarding point. He liked to think of it as the metro. The transport route snaked through and under the city like a digestive tract, largely unseen, while the passengers within had the impression of being in a shallow boat skimming the tops of the vines that covered the heart of the city, with no sense of being in a subterranean tunnel. It must have been a similar technology to their transparent ships’ hulls and solid sheets of microscope; but even after twenty years here, he still didn’t quite understand how it worked.

  And I don’t understand how they think, either. Just when I feel that I do…I really don’t.

  Rayat glanced back to the headline feed on his virin. The FEU, Sinostates, African Assembly and the South Americas had now put their armed forces on the highest state of alert. Warships blockaded key waterways; fighters patrolled borders. Rayat thought it was a forlorn hope to try to stop the Eqbas that way, but then realized it was mostly to deter refugees who had already started fleeing.

  There was nowhere to go, but they didn’t seem to realize that.

  He switched off and waited. It was easier than watching the wheels come off when he could do nothing. Eventually Da Shapakti stepped out of the paskeghur looking happy with life—Rayat could read Eqbas wess’har very easily now—and stared straight up at Rayat. He could probably smell him. The Eqbas biologist made his way through the crush, moving between the exchanges, the halls and chambers where Eqbas came to deposit surplus things and collect whatever took their fancy. It was busy today. Rayat gestured to Shapakti to stay where he was and ran down the steps to meet him.

  They were friends and colleagues rather than researcher and captive specimen. Rayat felt a pang of guilt about the lab rats that Aras had rescued from him with a warning about his carrion-eater’s habits, and wondered if it was his own shame or Shan’s censorious voice deep in his mind. Even now, Rayat worked hard at separating his own thoughts from the ones c’naatat had created within him. Now that he was infected again, they seemed more insistent, but even during the periods that the parasite was removed from his body, they still nagged at him.

  “Did Varguti listen?” Shapakti asked, stepping close to the exchange walls to avoid the pedestrians. “You should have let me talk to her as well.”

  “If I’d done that,” said Rayat, “then she might have given you an order not to do something, and you’d have obeyed, wouldn’t you?”

  Shapakti tilted his head slowly. He knew what was coming, more or less. “You know I would obey the matriarch in matters of state. Besides, it’s unlikely anyone would want to disobey the consensus.”

  “I have to call Shan.”

  “You’re banned, and she never responded to you last time anyway.”

  I tried. Stupid cow. I’ve been waiting twenty years to get hold of her again. No, twenty-five, if I count the journey here. “Then you call her.”

  “No—”

  “Or you let me call Eddie and ask him to call her.”

  “I’m not happy with this.”

  Rayat caught Shapakti’s arm and steered him into the nearest exchange, a chamber that would have said stock exchange to any human. The trilling and warbling was at fever pitch as wess’har debated and chatted. Yet this wasn’t about money—they had no equivalent economy—but ideas. It was a shop for exchanging ideas.

  “Help me warn Shan,” Rayat said, in English now. “If I can get her to listen.”

  “When you speak English, you’re being deceitful,” Shapakti hissed. “You put me in an impossible position.”

  “And what can Varguti do to you? Are you breaking a law? No. Help me do this. Just to warn Shan, or at least find out if Esganikan’s crew know she’s infected.”

  “And if they don’t…what can Shan Chail do?”

  Rayat had thought about that, long and hard. He’d had plenty of time to do it, too. And now he knew more about wess’har than Shan herself. She’d known them a few years; he’d lived with them for a generation.

  “Long screwdriver.” Rayat waited for Shapakti’s comprehension. “It’s what we call the ability to control frontline events on the battlefield straight from the top.”

  “Bypassing the field commanders…a foolish thing, because you can never see the situation as clearly as they can.”

  “But sometimes it has to be done.”

  There was plenty Shan Frankland could do thirty light-years away. He knew how the jask pheromone worked in establishing dominance among wess’har females, and c’naatat had given Shan the full chemistry set. If anyone could bring Esganikan into line, it was Shan, chock full of the dominant wess’har matriarchal pheromone and her own arrogant sense of messianic, world-saving, uninvited righteousness.

  He had his long screwdriver. He had Shan Frankland.

  If she’d listen to him, she would be his instrument on Earth.

  Kamberra, Australia, Office of the Prime Minister.

  This was the worst day of Den Bari’s life, and he knew it had been coming for a long time.

  “I don’t want to talk to your foreign minister,” he said, standing with his back to his desk. “I want your president. And no, I’m not prepared to wait.”

  He turned around to lo
ok at the conference screen, hands in pockets, hoping he didn’t appear as agitated as he was. Agitated. Nothing more than that. He wasn’t afraid, and he’d do what he had to. Out of range of the desk cam, his own defense minister and foreign secretary—Andreaou and Nairn—stood listening like a couple of bookends, identically posed but mirrored, with one arm across the chest cupping the other elbow, knuckles of one hand resting against their lips. Whatever responses they were going to give him today, they’d be the bloody same.

  I could have predicted this to the day. It’s not like the Eqbas didn’t give us plenty of notice. I just had no idea how exact they were.

  “I’ll get right back to you,” said the FEU liaison.

  Bari killed the link and looked to his ministers. “What does Europe think they’re going to get out of this?”

  Jan Nairn turned and studied the wraparound plot of the Australian Antarctic waters, now studded with real-time projections of naval and air activity. Mawson, the largest settlement in their Antarctic territory, was facing a FEU carrier group sitting just a few hundred provocative meters outside territorial waters.

  “I don’t think they fully understand the Eqbas capability,” Nairn said. “Maybe this is just an excuse to expand east across the AAD border.”

  “I’d agree with that,” said Andreaou. “It’s pretty transparent—if they wanted to lean on us to do anything, they’d go for a mainland city. I thought they’d given up on the AAD claim, though.”

  “We’ll see.” Bari was trying to keep all the status screens in sight at once, and it was hard. The Eqbas ship had returned to a high orbit after checking out the Westside, the western landmass of an Australia looking ever more likely to split into two landmasses, and now it was just waiting, silent, while more ships appeared on the satellite image as if they were falling out of nowhere. “How the hell do they do that? How come we didn’t detect them until the last minute, Annie?”

  Andreaou folded her arms. “Because they’re bloody aliens, Den, advanced aliens…they do that, you know. This isn’t the time to piss off the defense staff.”

  “Okay, let me try to get some sense out of Zammett, and then we shift to the EM center for the duration.” Bari turned to the doorway and called to his PA. “Sal? Sal, warn the FEU ambassador we’ll want to see him today, will you? And tell the Uni to bugger off if they’re still bleating about access to the Eqbas, because this isn’t some academic thesis for their benefit. None of that international scientific cooperation crapola. We process this like any migration and resettlement issue.”

  They’re our damn aliens. We invited them here. They’re going to help us. Get your own.

  There was still no response from the FEU. Bari was running out of patience. Andreaou switched to her earpiece.

  “Chief of Staff,” she mouthed at him. “She says there’s more FEU navy heading our way…”

  Bari ran out of patience and tapped the desk to call up the FEU link again, waiting for the image of the European portal to appear. “I really think it’s time I spoke to your president, please.”

  He counted to eight before the screen turned into Michael Zammett’s office in Brussels. Bari didn’t have the same long history with Zammett as his predecessor, although that hadn’t been a happy relationship anyway; so maybe a clean sheet augured better. But it was hard to see how it could be more cordial with a carrier off the ADD coast.

  “Prime Minister,” said Zammett, unsmiling. “I think we’ve all been caught out by the arrival of the Eqbas. Are you prepared to update us on that?”

  Bari aimed for studied indifference and picked up his coffee. “I was rather hoping you’d want to discuss the carrier you’ve got rather close to our waters, Michael. Your GPS had better be very accurate.”

  “As we were saying…Eqbas?”

  “They’re here. We noticed. It shouldn’t be a surprise, seeing as they gave us a pretty accurate estimate of their arrival years ago.”

  “And you still plan to allow them to use your territory as a base.”

  “That’s what we’ve been saying for the last twenty-odd years, yes…” And I can’t uninvite them. We found that out too late. “Do you still have a problem with that?”

  “It’s massively destabilizing for the region.”

  “The Antarctic? Because we’re all just fine about it down here.”

  “Our carrier group is simply observing.”

  “Look, the Eqbas are going to land. We’ve got accommodation for them, and no pressure is going to prevent them landing here. You think that they’ll just drive around the block and then go home because they can’t find a parking space? Just accept it and back off.”

  “There has never been any international agreement on this invitation.”

  Diplomacy had long since given up on the FEU relationship. “There wasn’t any agreement when the FEU invited the isenj here way back when, either. If you cherry-pick international law, Michael, you just encourage the small fry like us to misbehave too.”

  “You could always come to an agreement with us.”

  “Over what? ADD land? I think not.”

  “No, that you don’t allow them to carry out climate modification that’ll disadvantage other states.”

  Bari looked at Nairn and just got raised eyebrows. Allow? He hadn’t even spoken to the Eqbas yet, but Canh Pho had in 2376, and it was clear even then that the Eqbas didn’t negotiate. They had their own agenda in which the conditions laid down by Earth governments didn’t play a part. The sane response was to cooperate and hope to be the survivors.

  It is, isn’t it? To accept that there’s no other way to win?

  “I don’t know exactly what they have in mind now,” Bari said. “But I do know they want to try some of your people for war crimes.”

  Zammett wasn’t fazed. He had a habit of simply ignoring any point he didn’t like with an ease that made Bari wonder if he’d actually heard him at all. “We expect our returning military personnel to be handed over immediately.”

  “As soon as they’ve passed quarantine.”

  Andreaou caught Bari’s eye with a raised finger and pointed to the status display of the Antarctic waters.

  “On the move,” she mouthed.

  If Zammett thought the Australian Defense Force or any of its Pacific Rim allies were too stretched to deal with an FEU incursion, he’d get a rude awakening.

  “Michael,” said Bari. “I’m asking you to keep out of our waters, because we will respond. You know that. There’s nothing to lever out of us now. It’s just a good way of getting the wrong sort of attention from the Eqbas.”

  Again, Zammett just didn’t react. “We’d like to be kept informed of the situation with the Eqbas. Good day, Prime Minister.”

  Bari knew dismissal when he heard it. Nairn yawned, feeling the long hours as keenly as the rest of them, and they stood in silence waiting for someone to state the obvious.

  What do they really want from us?

  “They’re just skimming the territorial line,” Andreaou said, jerking her thumb at the status chart. “It’s pointless. Maybe they think we can dictate to the Eqbas what environmental measures they’re going to implement.”

  Bari wasn’t even going to try. He’d seen what happened to a planet called Umeh. It was a sad day when the best intelligence he had was a long-running series of documentaries from the Cavanagh system that most of the public had ceased to care about, because there were much bigger disasters at home.

  We lost interest in life on other worlds. What does that say about us?

  “They made their mind up a long time ago,” Bari said. “And if it doesn’t suit the FEU, that’s too bad. I’m authorizing use of force under emergency powers. If the FEU crosses that line—turn them back.”

  Normally, a superpower’s warship on the doorstep would have been the most pressing item on a ministerial agenda. But the Eqbas had much bigger guns, they weren’t going to go away, and they were still the best chance this country had of surviving in a d
eteriorating global environment.

  The Eqbas were Bari’s priority.

  2

  For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Chuck him out, the brute!”

  But it’s “Saviour of ’is country,” when the guns begin to shoot;

  An’ it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ anything you please;

  But Tommy ain’t a bloomin’ fool—you bet that Tommy sees!

  “Tommy,” RUDYARD KIPLING, 1865–1936

  Eqbas flagship: Earth orbit.

  Marine Ismat Qureshi stared at the ESF670 rifle in her hands as if she knew it was as obsolete as a Lee-Enfield. “She did it, then.”

  “Who did?” asked Barencoin. Beyond the transparent bulkhead was an intense rust red desert. Ade had once thought that all deserts looked the same, but they didn’t. It was red in a way that Mars wasn’t. “Who did what?”

  “Shan got us all home,” Qureshi said. “She said she’d get us back, and here we are. Back on the rock in one piece. Well, nearly back.”

  Qureshi touched the bulkhead and the image zoomed back with a speed that made Ade’s stomach lurch at the illusion of instant takeoff. All she’d done was change the magnification; they were back in orbit again, looking down on the blue-white globe they’d expected to see. The Arctic icecap was a small patch even in January, and although the very worst climate predictions didn’t appear to have happened yet, it still wasn’t the world they’d left.

  Qureshi zoomed in with the bulkhead again, this time on the Pacific to the east of the Sinostates.

  “Shit, the coastlines have changed a bit.”

  Barencoin moved the focus. “Look, mum, no islands.”

  “God, look at Australia. The sea’s really carved into the south.”