Crossing the Line

by Karen Traviss

  The biobarrier crackled slightly as they passed through into Constantine’s shielded, controlled environment. Aras trod carefully to avoid the overwintering kale that was shrouded in snow-like sculptures.

  Wess’har had no sculpture, no poetry, no music. He almost understood those concepts now, but not entirely. There was a great deal of human DNA in him: c’naatat had probably found it in shed skin cells and bacteria and taken a fancy to it, but it had not helped him grasp the human fondness for what was clearly unreal. He had often wondered why the symbiont had devoted so much energy to altering his appearance and fashioning a makeshift human out of him.

  It took him some time to realize that it had given him yet another refinement to help him—its world—survive. It was trying to help him to fit into human society. It seemed to know he was outcast from his own forever.

  It knew how badly he needed to belong.

  Malcolm Okurt had not signed up for this. He told Lindsay Neville so. He took it as a personal slight, he said, and it was bad enough having to crew a vessel with civilians without getting dragged into politics as well. He was the only person Lindsay knew who could spit the words out like that. At chill-down, his orders were to follow up the Thetis mission. Nobody mentioned anything about aliens, especially not four separate civilizations.

  “I thought you’d want to get out of here as fast as you could,” he said.

  Lindsay paused, and not for effect. “I’ve got unfinished business. I lost my kid here.”

  Okurt knew that well enough. She just wanted to remind him that she needed a wide berth at times. She didn’t feel the pain at all, not right then. She made sure she didn’t because if she did then she would fall apart, and as she told Okurt, she had a task to complete.

  She steadied herself and glanced at her bioscreen, the living battlefield computer display grown into the palm of her hand. She couldn’t switch off the light, but she had disabled the monitor functions because it depressed her to see the unchanging bio signs of her comrades in chill-sleep. It made them look as if they were dead.

  Okurt must have been watching her gaze. “They phased those out years ago,” he said. “Unreliable.”

  So nobody had them any more, nobody except her and a few Royal Marines who were on their way home. She turned her hand palm down on the table.

  When Okurt was agitated he had a habit of spinning his coffee cup in its saucer, and he was doing it now. “We might have been able to help, had we been allowed access.”

  “I know.” She was drawing parallel lines on the pad in front of her, darker and deeper and harder with each stroke. “Do you have current orders regarding Frankland?”

  “We’re backing off for the time being. No point getting into a pissing match with the wess’har, not if we want to do business with them. If she’s got what you say she’s got, there’ll be other ways to acquire it. I’ve got enough on my plate trying to keep the isenj sweet without the wess’har noticing we’re kissing both their arses.”

  “I can’t help thinking this double game is going to be the proverbial hiding to nothing.”

  “It’s diplomacy. Evenhandedness. Like arming both sides in a war.”

  “The wess’har don’t deal in gray areas.”

  “Well, they’ll get fed up with the isenj taking pot shots at them sooner or later and then an offer of assistance might be appreciated.”

  “And who’s going to negotiate with them?”

  “I pulled the winning ticket.”

  “Oh. I take it the isenj aren’t privy to this.”

  “Of course not. And it wasn’t my idea. Thanks to the bloody EP or ITX or whatever they’re calling it today, I don’t have the luxury of making my own decisions. I’ve got politicians and chiefs of staff second-guessing me a comms call away. I might as well be a bloody glove-puppet. And don’t tell me ITX is a boon to mankind. It’s a pain in the arse.”

  Lindsay wondered how different things would have been if Thetis had been able to get instant messages and instructions back from Earth. It might have made matters worse. She wondered if it would have saved Surendra Parekh: somehow she doubted it. Somewhere there was a bezeri parent who had lost a child because of the biologist’s arrogant curiosity about cephalopods, and for a split second she felt every shade of that alien pain.

  No, she was content that Shan had let the wess’har execute the woman.

  But that didn’t excuse her allowing David to die. She took the rising bubble of pain and crushed it into herself again.

  “At least we’ll probably go down as the most economically viable mission in history,” said Okurt. “Instant comms, new territory, maybe even immortality in a bottle. That’s what exploration’s really about. Unless Frankland’s already acquired the biotech for a specific corporation, of course.”

  “She said she wasn’t paid to get the tech. I’m inclined to believe her. She’s not like that.”

  “Come on, everybody’s like that sooner or later.”

  “Not her. She’s EnHaz. An environmental protection officer. As far as she’s concerned, she’s on a personal mission to cleanse the bloody universe. And she loathes corporations, believe me. Enough to let terrorists loose on them. Enough to be a terrorist.”

  “Well, whatever EnHaz was, I’ve got my orders—detain her, as and when, for unauthorized killing of a civilian and for being a potential biohazard. That’ll do for now.”

  Despite her hatred, Lindsay fought back an urge to correct Okurt about Frankland’s involvement. It might have been her weapon that shot Parekh, but she hadn’t fired it, whatever she claimed. The woman would have said anything to protect her pet wess’har, Aras. Lindsay had confronted him once: she had no doubt he would have killed her too without losing a second’s sleep over it.

  “I want Frankland,” she said. “But I want her for the right reasons. This isn’t vengeance.”

  She dug her stylus into the paper. She hadn’t written a single word, just black lines. When she caught Okurt staring, she tapped the border of the smartpaper and the surface plumped up into pristine white nothingness again.

  “I’m sure it isn’t,” he said, eyeing her in evident disbelief. She put the stylus back in her breast pocket.

  Actaeon’s wardroom was comfortable and quiet, with all the refinements that fifty years of further development could make in a ship. You could hardly hear the constant rush of air or feel the vibration of machinery that had permeated Thetis. But it was still too small for two commanders. All the security she had once derived from knowing her exact place in the service hierarchy had evaporated. Out of rank, and out of time: she wanted to be busy.

  “I can’t sit around filing reports forever,” she said. “You need an extra pair of hands.”

  “What I need is to get this base set up on Umeh, and I need people who’ve had alien contact experience. And I don’t mean Eddie bloody Michallat, either. I won’t have BBChan running the show, even if they do think they’re a government department.”

  “The isenj like Eddie. He might be your best route to Frankland too. Even she liked him in the end.”

  It was too painful to say Shan. It was the way you referred to a friend.

  “She’s just one woman,” Okurt said. “How much trouble can a disgraced copper be?”

  “Find out why she was demoted in the first place before you dismiss her.” Lindsay was surprised he hadn’t heard the gossip. Buzzes like that usually flew round a ship fast: the antiterrorist officer who went native. Yes, Shan had enjoyed quite a checkered career. “Civvy police dip in and out of uniform discipline as and when it suits them, and she doesn’t know the meaning of rules of engagement. So don’t give her an inch. She wasn’t always in EnHaz—she’s ex–Special Branch. You name it, she’s done it.”

  “Get it in perspective. She’s just another plod with a few more brain cells. She isn’t special forces.”

  “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” Lindsay reached in her jacket and pulled out her sidearm. She laid it on the t
able. Okurt said nothing but his eyes were a study in amazement. “Promise me this. If we’re ever in a position to take her, let me do it. I let her walk away once and I regretted it. I won’t make that mistake again.”

  Okurt still stared at the weapon. “Perhaps you should stow that in the armory,” he said.

  “No thanks.” She slipped it back into her jacket. “Trust me. I’ve never been more controlled. There’s only one person who needs to worry about me.”

  A plod with a few more brain cells.

  No, Okurt didn’t have a clue about Shan Frankland.

  2

  TO: Foreign Office, Federal European Union

  FROM: CDR. MALCOLM OKURT, CSV Actaeon

  We have been unable to detain Superintendent Frankland as she has been granted protection by the wess’har authorities. The best intelligence we have is that she is still on CS2. Under the circumstances, I believe we have no option but to let the matter rest for the time being: pressing the issue will compromise any later negotiations we might have with the wess’har regarding landings on CS2. The BBChan embed here says that we should start calling the planet by the name Bezer’ej when dealing with the wess’har, and Asht when talking to the isenj, but not CS2 or Cavanagh’s Star 2. Apparently it smacks of colonialism and might offend the local population.

  It was hard being nothing more than an extra pair of hands.

  Shan stabbed the shovel into the frost-hardened ground and turned another spadeful of soil. She made a few rough calculations. Another fifty square meters and she’d be done.

  The claws were really getting on her nerves now. She kept catching them on the handle of the spade, snagging her pants, scratching her face. She couldn’t quite get the hang of them. Sometimes they were worse than the lights.

  But they weren’t worse than the nightmares.

  The sensations persisted into waking. She was in a room enveloped in a smell like a forest floor. She couldn’t see anyone, but she knew somebody was there. The sequence of events was jumbled: but however it manifested, the events were the same—searing loneliness, the wild panic of trying not to breathe and then inhaling a lungful of icy water, followed by agonizing pain between her shoulder blades.

  And she had thought she was coping pretty well, all things considered. The dream symbolism was unoriginal except for the smell. Maybe I’m not as tough as I think, she decided. An unbroken night’s sleep would have been welcome.

  And nobody needs a copper out here.

  The ground was almost too hard to dig, but she wanted to make an early start, a manual start, to prove that she had no intention of freeloading on the Constantine colony’s generosity.

  And they don’t need to learn how to control a riot or secure a crime scene or keep yourself from going barmy with boredom during a month-long surveillance. They don’t need me at all.

  It was just as well that the wess’har thought she might come in useful one day. Otherwise she was just a mouth that needed feeding, and there were no shops here. If she didn’t plant it and grow it, she didn’t eat it. Suddenly all those dreams she had once cherished—a patch of soil to cultivate when she turned in her warrant card, a little more time to herself—seemed painfully ironic. She’d got exactly, literally, all too bloody generously what she had wished for. She rammed the spade hard into the soil again.

  The sun—Cavanagh’s Star to humans, Ceret to wess’har—was making little impression on the frost at this time of the morning. Shan stopped and leaned on the shovel. Josh Garrod was making his way towards her, stumbling over the furrows that frozen water had burst and broken.

  He was in a hurry. That wasn’t encouraging; there was nothing to rush for here. She started towards him, sensing that there was some emergency and responding to ingrained police training, but he waved her back with both hands. He had her grip slung over his shoulder on a strap.

  Maybe it was good news that couldn’t wait. She doubted it.

  When he reached her he was puffing clouds of acrid anxiety. Her altered sense of smell, another little retro-fit provided by her c’naatat, confirmed her fears. She had never seen the stoic colony leader in a flat panic before.

  “You’ve got to get out.” He pulled the bag off his back and held it out to her to take it. “I’ll show you where to go—”

  “Whoa, roll this back a bit,” she said, but she already knew what he was going to say. “Just tell me why.”

  “They’re here,” he said. “They know. They’re searching Constantine for you.”

  “Wess’har?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  There was the merest kick of adrenaline and then a sudden, cold, alien focus. “Where’s Aras?” It had only been a matter of time. There was no monopoly of information. But she had expected a little more breathing space before the matriarchs discovered what Aras had done to her. Now she didn’t even have time to wonder how.

  “They’ve taken him. He told me to hide you. I promised him, Shan. Don’t make me break that.”

  “Well, you’ve done your bit.” She took the grip from him and slung it across her shoulder, then started walking back towards Constantine, shovel in hand.

  Josh grabbed her shoulder. “You’re not going back.”

  Shan glared at his hand. He withdrew it. “I bloody well am.”

  “You can hide out—”

  “Yeah, ’course I can.” Aras didn’t deserve this. She owed him. She quickened her pace. “Good idea.”

  “Shan, they’ll execute you. You know that.”

  “They’ll have a job on their hands then, won’t they? I’m a bit hard to kill. You might have noticed.”

  Josh broke into a run to keep up with her. She was a lot taller than the native-born, and now faster on her feet, too. “It’s a big planet,” he puffed. “They’ll never find you.”

  “You reckon? We found you, and we were twenty-five light-years away. Sorry, Josh—I only know one way to deal with this, and that’s to go and meet it. If it takes me, fine, and if I take it, that’s great too, but I won’t spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder. Because that’s going to be a bloody long time.”

  He didn’t know her at all. He should have realized that she would never leave Aras. It was more than the biological links that c’naatat had forged between them: it was every bond of loyalty she had known as a police officer, stronger than family, and then—then there was something more besides, something she hadn’t felt before. It was primeval, foreign, urgent. It was an overwhelming compulsion to defend.

  She wondered if it was a remnant of the Suppressed Briefing. Perhaps there was still stuff that the Foreign Office had drug-programmed into her subconscious to be accessed later that she still didn’t know about. It was as persistently irritating as a half-forgotten name or song, itching away in the back of her mind but refusing to be remembered clearly.

  No, this was different.

  Josh stumbled after her across the frost-hard ruts of soil, sidestepping planted areas despite his panic. Ahead of them the half-buried skylight domes of Constantine shimmered in the weak sunlight; on the horizon, the idyll of a terrestrial farm was shattered. Beyond the biobarrier the wess’har had erected to contain Constantine’s ecology, the silver and blue early spring wilderness of Bezer’ej was a constant reminder that humans were temporary visitors here.

  Out of habit, Shan reached behind her back and remembered she’d left her handgun in her room. She felt the fabric of her bag. Her fingers found the comforting outline of a pack of cartridges and a couple of small grenades that she didn’t like to leave lying around. But in her mind’s eye she could see the gun still sitting on the table beside her bed.

  “Shit,” she said aloud. She’d assumed you didn’t need a weapon when you were digging. It was the sort of mistake she never normally made. “Shit.”

  “I put it inside your grip,” Josh said, suddenly revealing that he knew her a lot better than she thought he did. “I thought you might need it.”

  Neither of them
said gun. “Good thinking,” said Shan.

  She had expected to find a full-scale rummage team scouring Constantine. There were certainly enough wess’har troops stationed at the Temporary City on the mainland to provide one. But they were wess’har, and they didn’t think like humans and they certainly hadn’t read the police manual on apprehending suspects. She was surprised to see just three of them ambling round the underground galleries of the buried colony, giving the impression—an inaccurate one, she knew—that they were lost.

  They held lovely gold instruments. Their weapons, like everything else in their functional culture, looked good. Two of the wess’har were males, but the other was a young female, bigger and stronger than her companions, a junior matriarch.

  None of them looked at all like Aras.

  It was easy to forget he was wess’har too. He was still strikingly alien: nobody would have mistaken him for a human. But his face and body had been resculpted by c’naatat with the human genes it had scavenged during his years of contact with the colonists at Constantine. From the relatively slender, pale elegance of a long-muzzled wess’har it had built an approximation of a man—huge and hard, with a face that was at once a beast’s and a human’s.

  But these were pure wess’har, looking for all the world like paramilitary seahorses. She gestured to Josh to leave, and focused on the female walking along the gallery opposite her, high above the main street of Constantine and almost level with the roof of the church of St. Francis. Shan ran up the winding stairway after her, two steps at a time.

  “You looking for me?” she called.

  The female spun round and froze. It was never a good idea to startle someone who was armed, least of all a wess’har. But the creature cocked her pretty chess piece head to one side and stared.

  “Are you the gethes Shan Frankland?”

  “Who’s asking?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Yeah, I’m Superintendent Frankland.” As if her rank might make a difference: it was simply habit. “And who the fuck are you?”