Crossing the Line

by Karen Traviss

  JEAN ARLENE,

  President, African Assembly

  Asajin was dead. Mestin hadn’t known her well but she noted her disposal with regret. Her four jurej’ve walked through the fields carrying the dhren-wrapped body on a pallet and Mestin’s heart went out to them. Other wess’har who were harvesting yellow-leaf stopped and glanced before going about their business.

  Mestin was managing F’nar the only way she knew, by walking about the city, seeing what was happening and what people were saying, with Nevyan and Siyyas at her heels. She was conscious that it was a theoretical hierarchy and that there was no true hormonal dominance to warrant the two junior matriarchs bothering to defer to her: she was only dominant because a gethes—unpredictable, unfathomable Shan Frankland—had ceded her rights. The common good would hold a consensus together, but Mestin worried that she would lack the jask, the ferociously protective decisiveness, to make the right choices in a true crisis.

  She was not afraid of her peers turning on her. She was afraid of failure. Failure was something she felt Wess’ej would not be able to afford in the coming years.

  Mestin stared after the sad little party disappearing into the shimmering amber heat haze. The males would leave their dead isan out on the plain for the real gethes, the many native species that ate dead flesh, and come back to face an uncertain future.

  “Who will take them?” she asked. Asajin had died earlier that morning and it was high time other matriarchs came forward to give homes to the children and oursan to the males. Nobody liked splitting up a family. It was a difficult calculation to work out which male would fit in best to which household. Once they were mated again, it would be all harmony and contentment but there was a brief, awkward time when matriarchs would ponder over which genetic qualities they might add to the family mix.

  Mestin thought they had better be quick about it. The males looked in poor condition, dull-skinned and lacking a decent sheen to their hair. Asajin had been ill for some time; her jurej’ve had not had the frequency of oursan they needed to stay fit. The youngest one, still suckling a child, looked worst of all.

  “I will,” said Nevyan.

  Mestin thought of stopping and arguing with her daughter but decided against it. “What’s in them that you would add to the clan, then?”

  “It’s more that they’re in need of an isan,” Nevyan said. “And if I’m to follow you one day, then I must learn duty.”

  Nevyan had never shown signs of bonding with any junior male in particular, and there had been much speculation about what she was looking for in a jurej. Mestin had always thought another shot of genes from the confident Fersanye clan would have done the line no end of good, as well as cementing a clan bond. But Nevyan had to make her own choices.

  Siyyas said nothing. There was no scent at all to add a silent comment on the conversation; and Siyyas was not the isan her sharp-minded, perceptive aunt the matriarch-historian Siyyas Bur was. So much for genetics, Mestin thought.

  “Most considerate, not to break up a family,” said Mestin. However warmly the males and their children would be welcomed into new clans, separating house-brothers was painful. Establishing a household anew with an unmated isan was a pragmatic and compassionate move. It wasn’t what she had wanted for Nevyan, but she was proud of her. Nevyan would one day make far better choices for F’nar than she ever could.

  “I can join them in Asajin’s home,” Nevyan said. “There’s no purpose in taking them from the environment they know. What will Shan make of this? It would be good for her to learn how things are done here.”

  Mestin did then stop and turn. Her daughter was leaving home, in a sentence, in a decision taken as they strolled around the city. She was accepting four new husbands and their children, males she hardly knew. But that was irrelevant because once they had mated and the oursan bond had been formed, wess’har biochemistry would ensure that they would be what she wanted and would defend against all threats. And they would consider her their perfect isan for the rest of their lives.

  From what Mestin knew of gethes, she didn’t think Shan Frankland would understand it at all.

  “Why does it matter to you what Shan Frankland thinks?” It wasn’t a challenge: Mestin was genuinely curious. Nevyan had given the woman a dhren, but that wouldn’t make a matriarch out of a gethes. “Do you need her approval?”

  “She has characteristics we’ll all need in the years to come,” said Nevyan.

  “You can’t acquire them by oursan.”

  “Then I’ll learn them by observation.”

  The thought of Frankland becoming a cousin-by-mating wasn’t as distasteful as Mestin imagined. She couldn’t think of any of her jurej’ve who would agree to the act of oursan with an alien, with or without c’naatat, but the human definitely had an edge that spoke of a capacity for survival.

  It was a pity not to be able to absorb those genes into the clans.

  They waited in silence, watching for the return of the former jurej’ve of Asanjin Selit Giyadas, who would be surprised to find themselves accepted wholesale into the household of Nevyan Tan Mestin but would accept it and—eventually—be completely happy with the arrangement. The males came back into view, almost appearing to reform into solidity from fragments shattered by the mirage of hot summer air. They were walking faster now. One carried the pallet; another clutched the dhren and other fabric.

  There was no point wasting good textiles. Even the colonists of Constantine spared the rockvelvets the extra task of digesting the clothes of their dead. They had that much in common.

  Nevyan suddenly exuded a cloud of anxiety. Mestin wanted to hold her and comfort her, but the uncertainty was something her child had to face. And now she becomes an isan. She wouldn’t be coming home tonight. It was a cause for rejoicing. By the morning, she wouldn’t miss her family. She would be immersed in a new reality.

  Mestin thought humans would all have been a lot happier if their copulation resulted in the stable bond that oursan ensured wess’har. Fersanye, who was more scientifically minded, said their promiscuity was a consequence of their need to propagate their genes through offspring. Mestin decided it was part of their innate greed to always have something extra, and preferably something that belonged to someone else.

  She wondered if Shan Frankland had some of that sexual acquisitiveness in her. C’naatat would be a hard lesson for her if she had.

  Marine Ismat Qureshi had rigged a temporary securing bar across the hatch that separated the Kilo deck cargo area from rest of Actaeon.

  It made Lindsay feel better. There was no indication on any safety repeater or state-board to say that the hatch was locked. The bar simply stopped anyone walking in on them. She wanted to brainstorm this plan to infiltrate Bezer’ej in private, without observers, and without Okurt realizing she was maneuvering into a position where he had to allow her to lead the mission.

  She stared at the flaccid bag of fabric on the deck and tried to get the idea straight in her mind. And the Royal Marines were all staring at her: Barencoin, Bennett, Qureshi, Chahal, Webster and Becken, all Extreme Environment Warfare Cadre, all relaxed, all apparently unconcerned by the nightmare lying at her feet.

  “Dear God,” she said. She prodded it with her boot. It was a white, man-sized quilt: it looked like fabric, but it acted like a gel pack. When the fabric moved, the surface rippled with embedded softglass, throwing up slow billows of black like oil welling through milk. There was one totally black area that showed small currents of white when she kicked it gently. It reminded her rather unpleasantly of a bull’s-eye target.

  It certainly didn’t look much like transport.

  Qureshi, leaning against the hatch as if her slight weight would add to the bar’s effectiveness, folded her arms. “We never said it was comfortable, ma’am.”

  It was a Once-Only suit.

  Lindsay knew how they worked, more or less, but she had hoped never to test one. There were far better ways to escape a stricken vessel and
far more efficient lifeboats, but ships kept a few of the suits stowed away on board just in case. And it really was the absolute, final, last of last resorts. It was bailout when all else failed.

  Its design dated from the first days of manned space flight. Even the name was borrowed from another primitive emergency escape suit that mariners had used centuries before.

  And it looked it.

  “So you just zip yourself into this bag.”

  “No, you put your spacesuit on before you get in. Then you pull the pin and the insulating foam fills the inner skin.”

  “Oh, that’s totally reassuring. And then I plummet towards the planet?”

  “We like to think of it as guided descent,” said Bennett. “You can steer and orientate.”

  “Forgive me, but I’m still thinking of it as getting into a glorified sleeping bag and dropping into empty space from orbit. High orbit.”

  “You’ve done your pilot training,” said Qureshi. “If you’ve parachuted and ejected, this isn’t that much worse. Not really.”

  “Have you done this?”

  Qureshi nodded, looking bemused, as if everyone did a spot of free-fall through a planet’s atmosphere now and then. Extreme environment commandos did. “We’ve all done it from a hundred kay, anyway. It doesn’t make you feel any more sick than a spacewalk. More or less.”

  “I seem to recall something about reaching supersonic velocity,” said Lindsay.

  “Correct,” said Chahal. “And we’re all alive to tell the tale.”

  Lindsay chewed her lip thoughtfully. “I don’t need to point out that this thing doesn’t take off again, do I?”

  “That’s why they call it a Once-Only,” said Bennett, and Lindsay wasn’t sure if he was being stolidly literal or sarcastic. “But I have an idea for that too.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “The colony ship. Christopher. They said they mothballed it, remember?”

  “You reckon it’s feasible?”

  “Maybe not the vessel itself, not without a lot of prep, but it’s still got a couple of tillies.” It was an odd archaic word for a runabout vehicle, and Bennett was the only one who used it to mean shuttles. “And they’re built to start first time. So we land, do the biz, and shoot through. Job done.”

  “Provided we don’t land looking like barbecue briquettes.”

  Bennett joined in the ritual boot-prodding of the crumpled suit. “I know it looks like liquid, ma’am, but once it’s activated, it’s a heat-shield—all that black and white stuff automatically positions itself where you need it, black stuff to burn off at the hot-spots, white stuff to deflect all round. As long as you get shot of it as fast as you can once you land, it’s as safe as houses.”

  Lindsay’s image was of houses falling down in disrepair, then hard landings in a soft suit. “Why do you need to dump the shield?”

  “Because it goes on getting hotter after you’ve landed, ma’am.” Bennett’s expression was silent wonder at how she ever made commander. “A lot hotter. Remember you’re coming in through atmosphere.”

  “Oh,” said Lindsay. She thought of the suit moving patches of black and white stuff around, unbidden. “At least I’ll plunge to my doom looking like art.”

  Wherever they were planning to land, whatever their task at the end of it, the Once-Only was the most stealthy system they had. Actaeon hadn’t come equipped for covert missions. But she had come with plenty of ordnance, even if she hadn’t been expecting to deal with a massively equipped wess’har defense force.

  The armory held a lot of what Chahal called “insurance ordnance”—tactical nukes, neuts, emergency BNOs, chems, FAEs, and even ultra-yield conventionals, and plenty of interesting modes to deploy them together. On Earth that made you a world power; out here it would just irritate the wess’har for a few hours. And there were no resupply chains twenty-five light-years from home.

  Lindsay rubbed her forehead. “Okay. You do this all the time. I don’t.”

  Bennett appeared to be watching her calculate the odds. “If we were going to land, ma’am, that’s our only way past their defnet. It’s the smallest possible profile.” He was trying hard to convince her. “We’ve removed all the survival kit to make room for—well, whatever we tool up with.”

  “I prefer to work backwards from objectives,” Lindsay said. She knew damn well what her objectives were now. The problem was what objectives she would have to feign to get the hardware, personnel and access she needed to get within killing range of Shan.

  There was also the small matter of what it would actually take to kill the woman. She had no idea. It wasn’t a bullet, silver or otherwise. If the miraculous survival of Shan’s alien friend was anything to go by, it wasn’t a serious crash either.

  “I can see one small snag,” said Lindsay.

  “What?” asked Bennett.

  “How do we get into orbit around Bezer’ej for the drop without triggering the wess’har defnet? It’s going to take a shuttle, and the shuttle is bigger than the isenj fighters. That means they will see us coming.”

  “Thought of that,” said Webster. “Maiale.”

  “I’m lost now.”

  “Chariots. Means pig in Italian. Um…1939 to 1945 World War? Ring any bells, ma’am?”

  “Bennett’s the history man, not me.”

  “They were like torpedoes, one-or two-man submarine transport to ferry diver commandos around. They sat astride them. Quicker than swimming to the target.” Webster was an inventive woman. “So we use a powered tow to take us the final leg from the shuttle to the point where we use the suits’ systems to descend. That gives us longer on oxygen before we’re drawing on the suit’s supply. We can adapt one of the small cargo tugs to pull us in, maybe with extra O2. We’re talking a total load of maybe two to three thousand kilos. That’s doable. Chaz and I have modeled it a few times.”

  They all called each other by harmless kids’ nicknames: Chaz, Izzy, Barkers. They weren’t harmless at all. Lindsay tried to visualize speeds and distances. “Well that sounds like even more fun. And if we land, and achieve our objective, how do we get out through the defnet again?”

  “It’s a gamble,” said Chahal. “But I suspect it looks for incoming, not outgoing, and if these vessels were allowed to land on Bezer’ej in the first place, chances are it’s tagged them as friendly anyway.”

  “And if you’re wrong?”

  “Then we’re fucked, ma’am, but at least we won’t know much about it.”

  This was my idea, Lindsay thought. I must be out of my skull. “If you’re all up for it—”

  The hatch juddered against the metal bar Qureshi had jammed across it. Then there was silence.

  “Who is it?” Lindsay yelled. The marines gathered up the Once-Only suit with smooth efficiency and bundled it into the nearest locker. Lindsay walked slowly up to the hatch and nodded at Qureshi to release the magnetic clamp.

  The hatch swung open. It was Mohan Rayat.

  There were things you thought you would say when you caught up with someone like Rayat. Lindsay hadn’t rehearsed them quite as often as she had various denouements with Shan, but she thought she’d have a line. She didn’t.

  “Dr. Rayat,” she said. “Anything we can do for you?”

  She had always wanted him to look like a weasel caught in headlights, but he didn’t. He could meet her eyes, which she thought was the confidence of a man at ease with being a total shit.

  “I think we can do something for each other,” he said. “Am I interrupting something?”

  “Training,” she said.

  The marines stood around in that I’m-relaxed-but-I-could-turn-nasty pose that Rayat seemed to provoke. Qureshi looked especially hostile. Maybe her leg was playing her up, and she still blamed Rayat for causing the skirmish where she acquired the wound. Rayat didn’t look as if he was leaving of his own accord.

  “If you have a point to make, then make it,” said Lindsay. “We’re busy.”

  Rayat stare
d pointedly at Qureshi. “It’s a confidential matter.”

  “There’s nothing I keep from the detachment,” said Lindsay, and knew it was an empty gesture. “If I can hear it, so can they.”

  “All right, we have a mutual objective.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Based on what premise?”

  “You work for a pharmaceutical corporation and we work for our country. No mutuality there, I suspect.”

  Rayat shrugged. “Actually, I’m paid by the Federal European Treasury.”

  “You work for Warrenders.”

  “I imagine they think so too. Anyway, Warrenders ceased trading about ten years ago. Takeover by Holbein.”

  Lindsay wished once again that she had Shan’s quick, savage tongue. “I wouldn’t believe you if you told me what time it was,” she managed. But he had been revived for a reason, and before the others: she doubted if it was for health screening. They could have done that without reviving anybody at all, she was certain. Whatever it was, Rayat needed to be conscious for it, and the rest of the party had been revived to preserve the story or…she wasn’t sure what else. She almost didn’t want to imagine.

  “I’m sure you’re capable of carrying out security checks,” Rayat said calmly. “Confirm what I’ve said and then get back to me. We both want to secure whatever Frankland’s carrying for our own government, and I need the means of access, and you need my technical expertise.”

  “Why would we need a pharmacologist, exactly?”

  “That’s not my only area of expertise.”

  It was very easy to say absolutely nothing while Rayat turned and stepped back through the hatch. She couldn’t think of a single damned word. Qureshi barred the hatch behind him again.

  The Treasury? What the hell would the Treasury want with that biotech, let alone Rayat?

  “Do you know, I wouldn’t even like that bloke as pet food,” said Becken. “You believe him, ma’am?”

  “I’ll check,” said Lindsay.

  “How did he know what we’ve been tasked with?” asked Qureshi.