Read City of Pearl for Free Online

aren’t very many and they aren’t well armed, as far as the drones can tell. We need as much intelligence as we can gather to prepare us for future incursions.”
    â€œThat seems reasonable.” Mestin’s cousin-by-mating, Fersanye, had her clan’s genetic pragmatism as well as its feral looks. “I find it surprising that humans share so little in motivation.”
    â€œPerhaps it’s because they don’t mix their bloodlines as much as we do. Either way, the species of human that’s coming is as much of a potential threat as the isenj, and even if this mission fails, Joshua believes more will come in the future.”
    â€œWhat are our options?”
    â€œTo get to know them and then decide if they’re potential allies.”
    â€œIf they have long-range military ambitions, we’ll be stretched very thin handling enemies on two fronts.”
    â€œPerhaps. Let me meet them and see.”
    â€œWe were lucky with the first humans. We might be lucky again.” Fersanye’s tone indicated she thought it was a genuine possibility. “I still think we might have made a mistake in letting the colony send a transmission.”
    â€œNot the first mistake I’ve made, I expect.” Sarcasm was another human habit Aras had picked up, and it still went unnoticed by the average literal wess’har. Fersanye nodded as if she were accepting an apology. “But if the colony had been allowed to die, how many innocent species would have died in their cryo stores?”
    â€œYou made the best decision you could at the time,” Fersanye said. “You always have. Now is a different time. Let us learn.”
    Aras closed the link. Fersanye would never have thought he needed forgiveness for killing isenj civilians. She was wess’har, unburdened by rules of engagement, by the differences between legitimate targets and civilians, by fear of causing offense. He had been wess’har once, too. These days he wondered what he was.
    He thought of his first human friend, Benjamin Garrod, Joshua’s great-great-great-grandfather, dead for more than a hundred years and as freshly mourned and vividly remembered as if he had passed into earth yesterday. Benjamin understood what it was to have pain trapped in your head.
    And yet Aras now couldn’t recall the face of his own isan. It was bad not to remember your wife.
    But, as Benjamin had told him, not even a wess’har could be expected to remember things that had happened when the year on Earth was A.D . 1880.
    Â 
    Something went clack against the hull.
    Commander Lindsay Neville glanced up. Apart from that clack , the ship’s cramped cockpit was showing normal on every panel.
    â€œMicrometeor impact, Boss?” Sergeant Adrian Bennett had logged more flight time than Lindsay had, and she wanted him to be right. “Shouldn’t be.”
    â€œMight be.” Lindsay checked the hull status panel again. “No, nothing. I’ll run more checks. Could be contraction noises.”
    Their target planet, Cavanagh’s Star II, was a couple of days away now, and it had a large moon orbiting it. The forward video feed had shown two small pale disks, and when Thetis ’s centrifuge turned the right way, you could actually see them from the viewing port. It seemed much more real to watch it with the naked eye, and both worlds had now resolved into a mass of blue, white and green swirls.
    For a moment Lindsay wondered if the revive program had malfunctioned and they were just weeks out from Earth, beginning the gradual acceleration that would take them twenty-five light-years. The clack might have been a boarding crew, coming inboard to check them out. But it was not Earth. There were two planets, and their polar ice caps were substantial. She watched for a while and realized Bennett was standing—hanging—behind her in zero gee.
    â€œLooks reassuring,” he said. There was a flurry