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  “There’s only so much you can do with sea defenses, I suppose.”

  “Whose bright idea was it to come back?”

  “Izzy, you’re the one who wanted a shag and a real beer. You could have been happy with sobriety and contemplative self-abuse, but no…”

  Qureshi whacked Barencoin sharply on the backside. This had been Ade’s sole objective—getting his people home alive. There was nothing he could do about the state that home was in.

  Six out, six back.

  They’d embarked in EFS Thetis for the Cavanagh’s Star system in 2299, and all that mattered was that they were back in one piece. The scientists who’d gone with them hadn’t been so lucky, but that was their own stupid fault for pissing about with the wess’har; but the rolling clusterfuck that the mission turned into wasn’t the marines’ fault, even if Ade still felt it might have been his. Now they were nearly home—no, not home, not for me—and somehow the injustice and shame of being court-martialed didn’t seem to matter. They’d step off the ship, and people would just look at them as a five-minute wonder, people from the past. The world wasn’t going to go on as normal. The Eqbas were going to turn it upside down.

  Barencoin blew out a long breath. “Well, hurrah for the Boss, but we might have got home sooner without her.” He was a good bloke, but he wouldn’t say a cheery word even if his nuts were clamped in a vice. “We’re still fucked.”

  “Okay, Mouth Almighty, that’s down to me,” said Ade. “I could have sorted a deal for you before we embarked, but there was the small matter of not being able to hand over Rayat, remember? Anyway, I’ll bet they wouldn’t have honored the deal. It’ll be easier now we’re back.”

  “What if we’ve changed our minds?” said Jon Becken.

  “What do you mean, changed your minds?”

  “Maybe we want to be civvies now. Jesus, it’s going to be hard going back to the FEU now that it’s almost at bloody war with Australia. You think we want to be fighting on different sides?”

  “Who said Ade was going to be fighting?” said Chahal.

  “Esganikan’s got her army.” Ade didn’t want to think about allegiances. His was clear: he didn’t belong on Earth, and he was here solely to keep an eye on Shan. “She doesn’t need me when she’s got that psycho bastard Kiir, does she?”

  The rest of the detachment—Qureshi, Chahal, Becken, and Sue Webster—dropped the subject and occupied themselves tidying the remnant of their uniforms. It was that awful limbo period when the fighting was over and the euphoria of going home was tarnished by frustration at delays in disembarkation. But this time there was no familiarity to rush back to—no partner waiting at home, no pubs to stroll back into and regale the regulars with tales from the front, no relief at the return to normality, because normal was gone for all of them, forever.

  It was the first time Ade had really felt that. It wasn’t just him; he wasn’t the only one permanently displaced. Even without his vastly altered genome, the other marines were now almost as alien as he was.

  We were fucked as soon as we left Earth. We knew that. But it takes awhile for the reality to bite.

  “Well, at least we’ve all got unique extrasolar experience of alien relations,” said Chahal. “Five distinct species, and lived to tell the tale. Good ad-quals, eh?”

  “Christ, you’ll have a career ahead of you in civvy management,” Barencoin muttered. He’d read international law at university and seemed completely unwilling to use it beyond being the proverbial barrack-room lawyer. “But you and Sue are all right. You’re engineers. Engineers are never out of work, even if you have to build lavatories.”

  Webster played with the focus again. The Eqbas ship was almost like a fairground attraction at times, and they were bored. “Mind your manners,” she said. “I build brilliant latrines.”

  “You can live off the fees for media interviews,” said Qureshi. “You built a crapper on another planet. That’s got to be good for five minutes prime-time.”

  They were way behind on Earth technology—as if that mattered now—but they had a story to tell if nothing else. Ade suspected the story would first have to be told to the intelligence corps. They’d want details. Maybe that was the way to open the batting and get them reinstated. They want to be Royals again. And so did he, he really did, and he knew it now he was back on Earth: it was over for him, but it would only break his heart if he let it.

  “It’s all right for the bloody navy,” said Becken. He meant the remaining crew of the unlucky Actaeon, the FEU warship blown apart in reprisal for the bombing on Bezer’ej. “They’re all squeaky-clean frigging heroes. They get welcomed back into the fold and debriefed, but we’ll be told to fuck off.”

  “Cheer up, you miserable sod,” said Qureshi. “You don’t know that. I bet they’re as short of recruits as ever. We haven’t even made contact yet.”

  One of the Eqbas crewmen walked up behind them and trilled. “You look at Anarchic,” he said, struggling with English. His overtone voice made him sound like an audio circuit glitch, two streams of sound trying to form the words. “Look at the warships.”

  “Ooh, Navy Days?” said Becken. “I used to love Navy Days as a kid. Made me want to sign up. So they still have navies, then.”

  “You still have war,” said the Eqbas, and jabbed at the image with a multijointed spidery finger. Not all of them spoke immaculate English like their boss. “But no to worry. As much trouble as isenj, they. Better view when we get remotes out.”

  “Antarctic,” Chahal said. “He means the Antarctic. But I think I like Anarchic better.”

  Barencoin and Qureshi vied for control of the bulkhead image, moving the focus along the Australian sector of the continent. There was a fringe of land exposed, dotted with small towns that had only been survey stations when they’d first left Earth. And the Eqbas was right: there were warships off the coast.

  Barencoin lost the battle for the zoom to Qureshi. “Is it one of ours, Marine?” he said in a posh mock-officer accent, but then the impression stopped dead. “Oh shit, it is…”

  Ade watched as an aerial image of a carrier with FEU deck markings and pennant code filled the bulkhead. The shape of carriers had changed a little in the missing century, but it was still a carrier, and still way out of FEU waters. Nobody really needed carriers now. But nothing sat there and loomed menacingly quite as well as a warship. It gave you something to worry about for a long time.

  “If I was an optimist,” Ade said, “I’d believe that was the South Atlantic guard ship.”

  “And what about those frigates?” Barencoin tapped the bulkhead, but it made no sound. “Maybe they’re hiring out hulls as cruise liners to earn revenue. Peace dividend and all that.”

  Ade caught a reassuring cedar-and-fruit scent of Shan and turned to see her walking briskly down the passageway, not exactly an elegant stride but always enough to make him feel that things were under control and sorted even if they weren’t.

  “Maybe,” she said, passing them without pausing, “you need to find a news channel and watch the FEU getting stroppy with the Aussies about our arrival. ’Cos they’re waving their todgers at each other in some macho display of bravado.”

  “That’s all right,” Becken called to her retreating back. “We’ll hide behind you, Boss. You show ’em.”

  Boss. They all called her that now, partly because Ade did, but it still made him flinch. That’s my missus. Don’t get too familiar.

  “What’s Australia got that the FEU wants?” Webster asked. “Apart from a lot of dust, and some Antarctic land when the ice melts completely?”

  “Our undead oppo here,” said Barencoin, giving Ade a slap on the back. “Eh, Sarge?”

  “They don’t know about me,” said Ade. “Rayat never got chance for a call home after he found out.”

  “But I bet they know about Shan.” Barencoin put a playful armlock on him, but Ade noted he was careful to avoid skin contact. “That’s why they wanted her in the first place,
isn’t it? And I bet Esganikan told that Marchant bint that Shan was coming with us, and then Marchant told her buddies, and then it wasn’t a secret any more.”

  It was bound to come out sooner or later. But there was nothing they could do about it. They’d have to get to her first.

  Like me and Mart did. We took her down with just a couple of rifles, didn’t we?

  “Bollocks,” said Ade, shaking Barencoin off.

  “It’ll be fun explaining your reluctance to rejoin the Corps after you made such a song and dance about reinstatement.”

  “You won’t have to.” Barencoin was too hard on the heels of his thoughts sometimes. “That’s my job. You keep your trap shut and pick up where you left off, okay?”

  “But if we go back to FEU jurisdiction, they debrief us. They’ll want to know every cough, shit, and fart we’ve taken for the last few years. That’s a bloody big story to keep straight between five of us. ‘Oh yeah, don’t worry, sir, Sergeant Bennett is the creature from the Black Lagoon on his day off. Now let’s talk about this fascinating water reclamation scheme on Wess’ej.’ They’ll be happy with that, will they?”

  “Well, maybe you should have started rehearsing it earlier.” So what? Ade knew the FEU couldn’t lay a finger on him whether it knew he had c’naatat or not. “It doesn’t matter what you tell them. There’s sod all they can do about it now.”

  Between them, Qureshi and Barencoin voiced all the fears and anxieties he still harbored, and asked all the troubling questions. It was a hard homecoming for too many reasons. His last conversation with the top brass on Earth had promised the detachment would be reinstated, more or less, especially if they could tell the FEU what had happened to Rayat. But that had been years ago, and anyone whose career depended on that promise being honored was long retired—or dead—now, and Rayat was thirty light-years away on Eqbas Vorhi. It was all academic.

  Fuck ’em.

  Barencoin shrugged. For once, he looked clean-shaven, which was no small feat. The cryo seemed to have slowed his beard growth.

  “Yeah, the FEU’s going to make a big thing about missing civvies. Just for something to do, if nothing else. How many payload came back out of seven? Hugel and Mesevy. Two. Out of seven.”

  “Not counting Rayat and Lindsay,” Ade said. “Champciaux wanted to stay.”

  “We only lost two, really, and one of those was a blue-on-blue.”

  “And Eddie,” said Qureshi.

  Barencoin shrugged. “Yeah, that gutted me. I never thought he’d stay behind.”

  “Why shouldn’t he?” said Ade. Shit, Eddie’s my mate. I’m the one who’s entitled to feel abandoned, not you. It was still a massive shock, more like Eddie was dead than just separated from them by a generation. “He hasn’t got any ties here either.”

  “I really thought he’d come. We need him to do the smarmy talk with the puny Earthlings, don’t we? Shan can’t do smarmy. Esganikan the Hun definitely can’t. That leaves Deborah Garrod. She knows less about Earth than the aliens do.”

  There was also the small matter of her being the leader of a devout Christian colony; Australia’s population was 45 percent Muslim. Last time Ade had checked, twenty-five years ago, the Christians were getting uppity again thanks to the apparently miraculous return of the lost colony complete with its precious gene bank. He marveled at the ability of people to grasp such flimsy things and build their lives and actions around them. But maybe that was what he’d done all his adult life, by hanging on to an affiliation that was another set of ideas held together by a little metal symbol: a globe and laurel instead of a cross.

  The Corps was real, though, solid and visible in his comrades. Maybe Deborah Garrod saw what she trusted and believed reflected in her friends and family, too. He decided not to judge.

  Becken sucked his teeth noisily. “What do you suppose Rayat’s doing now?”

  “I don’t care,” said Barencoin, “as long as the Eqbas are still shoving a fucking probe up his spook arse on an hourly basis.”

  He didn’t mention Lindsay Neville. But she’d been a squid-woman for twenty-five years now, so maybe it was a subject he didn’t want to discuss, because nobody wanted to imagine how much she’d changed with a dose of c’naatat and only a bunch of genocidal Nazi cephalopods for company. Ade was compiling a long list of things and people he had to check on as soon as he got time on the ITX link, from Eddie and Giyadas—Jesus, the kid would be an adult now—and the state of Jejeno, and even Lindsay and Rayat. What mattered most right then, now that he was sure Shan was fine and Aras was okay, was to look after his detachment, whose status was still an issue.

  “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. Barenco
in 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.