Read Online Ally by Karen Traviss - Free Book Online Page A

did think the parasite was a disaster waiting to happen if it ever got off the planet. In the end, he was just like Shan: they were both cold, obsessive, soulless bastards. Lindsay was better off without him.
    â€œHome,” Saib said aloud. The sound was rasping, like a human’s vocal fry. “Home.”
    â€œYou want to go home?” Well, c’naatat was getting into gear with something, then: language. “Or are you asking if this is home?”
    Whatever Saib meant, the answer defeated him. He shook visibly. Gold and scarlet light burst from his mantle in neon-bright outrage and frustration, and he lumbered into the shallows, thrashing tentacles in the water. She knew all the nuances now. She waded after him and slid into the sea. Her lungs didn’t protest any longer. Her gills parted, open gashes of red mouths, and the sea felt like soothing relief as it engulfed her.
    You’ve got time, she signaled. Time is one problem you don’t have now. Take it easy.
    Back in his preferred element, Saib shot into deeper water and picked up speed, pumping water behind him. If he didn’t make the transition as the dominant elder, none of the others would.
    You can train us to be an army, then.
    Ah, so he was thinking it through. He just didn’t want to lose face.
    I believe I can, Lindsay said.
    The Dry Above is a better place to fight, is it?
    Yes. She had his interest now. Because your biggest threats will be land animals like humans.
    Lindsay saw a future Bezer’ej that wasn’t a disputed territory for wess’har, isenj and humans to fight over. She wondered if she was going insane. Who needed most to be on dry land—them, or her? But she had a vision now, and she was going to use that to put things right.
    All she’d done was bring two native Bezer’ej life-forms together, c’naatat and bezeri. It wasn’t the same as infecting a human never meant to be here. And Shan Frankland wasn’t so rigorous about eradicating c’naatat from the human population when it came to her precious Ade, either: she let him live. The knowledge that the bitch had some areas in her life that weren’t governed by her inflexible brand of justice gave Lindsay some sour comfort.
    Saib persisted, pausing to drift with the current, tentacles trailing. But why can’t we just go deep? Who would find us? Who could kill us?
    You still have to eat, said Lindsay. The isenj killed their own oceans. If they get a foothold on this planet again, they’ll kill yours too. They almost did before, remember?
    She knew that Saib remembered, all right. Or at least he recalled the azin shell maps with their exquisite designs of colored sand that recounted the time the isenj had claimed Bezer’ej and caught c’naatat. They bred. They bred in their millions, and they didn’t die until Aras and his troops destroyed them: male, female, young, old, soldier, civilian, no quarter given. Shan had fallen for a war criminal. Lindsay wasn’t sure if that was ironic or inevitable.
    Millions of us died, said Saib. Filthy isenj. Filthy polluters. We called the wess’har to drive them away.
    For a moment, Lindsay had an uncharitable thought that the bezeri might have been in decline anyway because of their ruthless hunting. Perhaps the isenj only accelerated theprocess. It was odd how her picture shifted simply from discovering their history.
    Did the wess’har know what the isenj had done? She assumed they didn’t.
    Daylight faded into soft green light above her and the sounds of the ocean and its relentless weight enveloped her again.
    Dominate the land, Saib. Lindsay thought of all she could teach them: every scrap of her naval training required hardware and technology of the kind the bezeri couldn’t make. And there was none on Bezer’ej to plunder now, not even the human colonists’ mothballed ship. The wess’har restoration process had reduced nearly every