Ally by Karen Traviss Read Free Book Online

think the Northern Assembly will use bioweapons if we give them the capacity?”
    Aitassi made a little dubious chattering noise. “They’ll try it once.”
    â€œOnce is all it takes.”
    â€œPerhaps leaving the weapons with the local wess’har might be a better idea.”
    â€œIf the matriarchs of F’nar were prepared to use those countermeasures, they’d have done it by now. They have their own biological weapon capability. They’ve already seeded this planet with anti-isenj pathogens.”
    â€œGeneric ones, commander. They never had the tissue samples to create more targeted weapons.”
    â€œThey’ve never attacked Umeh so they didn’t need them. They only fought isenj in disputed territory.”
    The wess’har had arrived in this system ten thousand years ago. If they’d looked at their isenj neighbors then, and identified them as the threat they clearly were, things might have been very different. Instead they waited until a few hundred years ago, and intervened when the bezeri begged for aid. Too little; and far too late.
    That’s the problem with Targassat’s ideology. Don’t interfere. Turn a blind eye. And this is what happens.
    Shan Frankland would have called them bloody hippies. Apparently it meant the same thing.
    â€œI’m waiting for Curas Ti to respond,” said Esganikan. “I need to know exactly what resources she can now commit to Earth.”
    Aitassi didn’t say the obvious, that the matriarch of Surang, Curas Ti, should have worked that out by now. Earth mattered. Earth was more than the homeworld of humans who needed controlling: Earth had biodiversity to lose. Species there became extinct in decades, and it would take twenty-five years to reach the planet.
    Esganikan drummed her fingers on the console and the grim picture of the Ebj continent switched to another orbital image, this time a far more familiar one: Surang, her home city on Eqbas Vorhi five light-years away.
    Yes, she missed it.
    It was a landscape of discreet but artificial canyons and cliffs studded with terraced homes and communal buildings where the business of government and manufacture took place. Compared to the deliberately concealed architecture of Wess’ej, where the local wess’har strove to blend in with the landscape, it looked intrusive. This was the world that the followers of Targassat left thousands of years before, rejecting the responsibility that wess’har had always accepted as an ancient race: the duty to teach, enable and—if necessary—impose environmental stability on other worlds.
    But we came to your aid when you asked us to deal with the humans. We were heading home, and we’ve been away a long time. Now you don’t even want us on Wess’ej.
    Esganikan shook herself out of her growing resentment of her cousins. “I’d like a quick and straightforward solution.” She was thinking once again of how many years it might be before she could return to Surang and start a family of her own. “But there won’t be one.”
    How did I get drawn into this? Why did I not just let the isenj drown on their own filth?
    Another screen activated in the bulkhead, spreading from a pinpoint to form a rectangle a meter across. Curas Ti’s adviser on alien ecology, Sarmatakian Ve, seemed harassed. The backdrop behind her was a room that Esganikan recognized, dominated by a wall that was a single image of world’s weather systems: the climate-modeling center, in Upper Girim.
    â€œIs Curas Ti free to talk to me yet?” she asked.
    â€œWe have a pressing problem at the moment,” said Sarmatakian. “We need to divert part of the fleet we’ve allocated to Hac Demil.”
    â€œHac Demil has been stable for centuries.”
    â€œThis is a natural disaster. A magma explosion. They’ve asked for our aid to restore the atmosphere, but it’ll still take months to