Judge Read Free

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.
    â€œShan 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.
    â€œI’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.
    â€œSo we made it back.” Ade managed a smile, looking her up and down. “Jesus, Boss, you look rough.”
    â€œThe 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?”
    â€œDead to the world. Out like a light.”
    Aras seemed more interested in the spectacle below. “I recall nothing of being in suspension.”
    â€œSo 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.”
    â€œDidn’t you think of thawing me out and telling me?”
    â€œWhy? 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.
    â€œHow long do you think we’re going to be here, Boss?” He still