Read Online Ally by Karen Traviss - Free Book Online

Lindsay.
    Very dangerous.
    Rayat was dangerous too. It’s called c’naatat. It lives on Ouzhari, nowhere else. We tried to destroy it to stop humans getting hold of it.
    But you got hold of it. You have it.
    Saib, I asked for it, so I could serve you as punishment.
    The old bezeri shimmered. Your regret makes you weak.
    Rayat referred to the bezeri as Nazi squid, and when Saib made comments like that then Lindsay could see exactly what he meant. When the first Earth mission had killed one of the bezeri infants and faced retaliation from the wess’har, she’d seen them as helpless victims. She knew now that they’d been as brutal and exploitative in their own context as any human society.
    But that didn’t make her innocent. And it didn’t give her any purpose for her interminable future.
    â€œYou have to learn to speak,” Lindsay said aloud. She found she had to make a conscious effort to suck in air; speech was a habit you could lose when your body had changed so radically. Her bioluminescence mirrored herwords. “Sound’s more efficient than light on land. I know you can do it. You made the sound leenz under water.”
    Saib was as stubborn as they came. He really was a grumpy old man, but she took heart in his willingness to be infected with c’naatat. Bezeri were creatures of extreme habit. It was their unshakeable fixation with their spawning grounds and territories round Ouzhari that put most of them in the fallout zone when the bombs were detonated.
    It was also what had led them to total war with the birzula over hunting territories. Bezer’ej was a big world with big oceans; but the bezeri wouldn’t move. Their azin shell maps were their history. Their mindset was all about place.
    And Saib was as hard to shift as any of his kind.
    â€œCome on, you cantankerous old sod,” she said. “Try.”
    His bulk shook like an angry jelly. The sound that emerged was more of a belch than a word, but it was clear enough: “Leenz- eeeee .”
    â€œThere you go,” she said, and didn’t translate into lights this time.
    She walked on, trying not to think about how she remained upright and rigid when she could see only opaque structures like cartilage in her forearms and legs. If the bezeri came ashore, though, what would they do? They had no history of technology of the kind that relied on wheels and heat and metal. They made stone implements. They bred organic vessels from plants. They wrote in sand pictures or etched symbols in stone and shell.
    They were Paleolithic. They needed to undergo a whole industrial revolution—or grab the trappings of another civilization and make it their own.
    And they’d found no other survivors.
    Saib didn’t like to be seen to give in too easily. He muttered again, sparkling orange light. We can hide in the sea.
    â€œThe sea didn’t save you from me, old man.”
    â€œLeeeenz- eeeeeee .”
    â€œClever. Keep it up.”
    He shuffled, scattering pebbles. Any other huge sea creature would have struggled to move and found its organs failing without the supporting buoyancy of water, but c’naatat seemed to be taking care of that.
    Lindsay was as adrift as he was now. She had nothing except her belt and a few tools: no data, no knowledge, and no skills beyond the basic survival techniques she learned as a navy pilot. She was newly reduced to a primitive, just like the bezeri.
    Perhaps the Eqbas would help. But as soon as the bezeri asked for knowledge of land-based technology, it would be clear to them what had happened. And Lindsay had no way of knowing how they’d react to the news that c’naatat had spread into new hosts.
    Nobody knew, not even Rayat. If he’d walked ashore, he’d have headed for the Eqbas as his best chance of escape. Would he guess that she would infect the bezeri? He did all he could to avoid it himself. Maybe he hadn’t been lying. Maybe he really