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Varguti. “And what can anyone do thirty light-years away, even if there was a problem?”
    â€œDid she ever actually tell Curas Ti what she’d done?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œExactly— I did. Da Shapakti did. Has she even told her crew? Do you believe me when I say she infected herself deliberately?”
    â€œYes. Da Shapakti confirmed it. But motive is irrelevant—”
    â€œActually, Sho Chail, that’s just not true.” Wess’har—both the Eqbas here and their Wess’ej cousins—cared only about outcomes, not motivation. Most of the time that made them seem brutally hard-line; but sometimes it showed their blind spot about predicting risks. Vastly superior power had only compounded the trait. “If Esganikan was keeping it from you, she had a reason. It’s not how wess’har behave. You’re totally open. You don’t hide things.”
    Varguti was beginning to waver. Rayat could see it. She was cocking her head, the four lobes of her pupils opening and closing, and then she froze for a couple of seconds. Wess’har always did that when they were alarmed.
    â€œWhen we send armies to other worlds, the commander has complete autonomy.” Varguti sounded as if she was trying to convince herself. “The time scales are too long and the distances are too great for any government to understand the situation she might find herself in. We do not need to know every small detail of her strategy, and we do not, to use your phrase, second-guess her.”
    Rayat was jolted out of the debate for a moment by the injection of English after so many years of being immersed in eqbas’u. Home. Earth. I’ll never see it again. “But what if she becomes a problem? What if she’s not competent to do the job?”
    â€œYou must justify that claim.”
    â€œShe’s lied by omission, and she’s taken an infection to Earth—the very same parasite that I tried to destroy on Ouzhari because I thought it was too dangerous to give to my own government. They sent me to get it, and I don’t disobey my orders easily, I can assure you.” Rayat could feel his voice straining in his desperation to be believed. “ I started this. I understand it better than you do—look, ask Wess’ej. Ask your cousins. They’ll tell you.”
    Varguti knelt back on her heels, apparently more interested in some information shimmering in her ice-sheet of a desk. The office was all low tables and serene filtered light like an upmarket Japanese restaurant, something Rayat hadn’t seen in a very long time and would probably never see again.
    â€œI refuse to believe Esganikan would infect humans deliberately,” said Varguti.
    â€œ Sho Chail, it doesn’t have to be deliberate. The fact that a c’naatat host has reached Earth is the problem. Anything might happen. We’ve had an accidental infection before.”
    â€œNow I know you panic for no reason, because there are three more c’naatat hosts on that mission, and you have no fears about them despite the fact that two of them are human, and the wess’har Aras has already deliberately infected a human once. Where is your logic now?”
    Rayat was helpless for a moment. He should have seen that coming. The reason he had dismissed it was because he knew Shan, and he knew that she would kill herself rather than let the parasite fall into anyone else’s hands—because she’d done it before. Aras and Ade…well, he also knew that Shan wouldn’t allow another misjudgment on their part. They’d already spread it once too often, both of them.
    I know trouble when I see it. It used to be my job to cause it, more often than not.
    â€œI panic, ” said Rayat, “because normal wess’har keep c’naatat at arm’s length, and Aras is proof of what happens when the parasite takes hold. He spread c’naatat through his troops