Crossing the Line

by Karen Traviss

  The heads weren’t comfortable, but Lindsay could guarantee no visitors. She tacked the smartpaper sheets across three bulkheads and sat on the lid of the toilet bowl, one boot braced against the door even though it was locked. She kept running her eyes over the scrawled words and arrows, right to left, then left to right, then up and down again. It was just absorption. Something would leap out—a solution, or a gap to fill.

  Shan: PLAGUE.

  She said it was a disease. Lindsay remembered that very clearly. She told Hugel it was a plague.

  Who else?

  Diseases spread. So who else had it?

  She could have been lying. No. She was telling the truth because she was so mightily confident of her authority that she couldn’t even be bothered to lie. So she had a disease, and she must have caught it somewhere between Constantine, the wess’har homeworld and the wess’har garrison, the Temporary City.

  Someone went into a nearby cubicle, locked the door noisily and coughed. Lindsay fixed on the smartpaper.

  Plague.

  No, that was a distraction. It didn’t matter a damn where Shan caught it or even what it was. What mattered was finding her and destroying the asset. Everyone in Actaeon believed she was the source, and that was what they would pursue, so she needed access to Shan somewhere she could use a weapon of such force that it could kill her.

  Where was she?

  Wess’ej was out of the question. Nobody had enough data on the terrain to plan any sort of extraction operation even if Actaeon had the muscle to take on the matriarchs. They had a chance on Bezer’ej, though, and especially on the island where Constantine was located.

  And if Shan wasn’t there, she would need to get her there.

  There wasn’t enough data to take it any further. Lindsay took out her stylus and wrote Background on one of the sheets. She’d retrace her steps. She would go back to the origins of the Constantine mission and run from the first telemetry right through their mission data to whatever she could get out of the isenj. Eddie would come in handy there. They liked him; Shan liked him too.

  “How long are you going to sit there?” said a voice above her.

  She jumped to her feet, a pure reflex of panic. Her stylus clattered to the deck.

  “You bastard,” she said.

  Mohan Rayat peered over the gap at the top of the cubicle. It didn’t look at all comical. “Two heads are better than one. Share your problem.”

  Lindsay peeled the sheets quickly from the bulkheads, cheeks burning. “If you ever do that again, I swear I’ll kill you. Get out.”

  “Why don’t you drop the sorry attempt to emulate Frankland and talk to me sensibly? You’ll want to hear what I’ve got to say.”

  “Sod off.”

  “Well, listen anyway. I have something you’re going to need on that little trip of yours.”

  Lindsay’s stomach leapt with sudden panic. “What trip?”

  “Please, cut the crap. What was it our absent dominatrix used to say? ‘There’s no monopoly of information.’ The logistics of landing on a planet do tend to leak out.”

  “My marines don’t discuss operational matters with civilians.”

  “Your marines have to remove kit from pusser’s store. The Supply Branch isn’t so tight-lipped, and neither are the inventory tags that track matériel around the system.”

  “It’s a shame you weren’t standing where Galvin was when the shooting started.”

  “What, so I’d take two stray rounds from your god-almighty Booties?”

  Lindsay knew she wasn’t well. She also knew that sleepless night after sleepless night marred your judgment. Judgment suitably suspended, she flung open her cubicle door and slammed open Rayat’s. Maybe he wasn’t expecting a fiftykilo woman to ram him and knock him off his vantage point on the toilet seat. He certainly didn’t seem to be expecting her to press the barrel of her sidearm so hard into his temple that she could see the skin around it turn white.

  “Shut it,” she hissed.

  Rayat was wedged where he had slipped, one leg behind the pipework and the other at a painfully awkward angle across the toilet seat. “Whoa. It’s okay. It’s okay.”

  Lindsay could feel a tremor running up her arm, but it wasn’t emanating from Rayat. She could see her own hand, index finger curled against the trigger. It almost didn’t belong to her. Her ears hurt from the pounding pulse.

  “Do you bloody well know what this has cost me?” She jabbed the barrel harder into his skin. “Do you?”

  “I’m sorry. Let’s…let’s just calm down and talk this through.”

  Shan would have pulled the trigger. Shan wouldn’t have lost her temper in the first place. But she wasn’t Shan. She couldn’t do it. Rayat’s eyes said he wasn’t sure if she would or not.

  “If I put one through you, what do you think they’d do to me? What do you think I’ve got left to lose?”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Stay out of my way.”

  Rayat put his hand up to his temple, very slowly, very deliberately, and gradually eased the weapon away from his head with his index and middle fingers. Lindsay let him because she hadn’t a clue how to climb down from the situation. It must have showed on her face. She still held her aim level with his head, but she needed both hands to keep it steady.

  “I’ll tell you,” he said. “But this isn’t for Okurt, okay?”

  Lindsay didn’t nod. She didn’t want to look cooperative. She let Rayat go on.

  “Lindsay, we both have our reasons for wanting to take Frankland. I can’t get to her alone.”

  He’d never called her by her first name. “So why is that my problem?”

  “We both need a solution that doesn’t involve handing over her tissues to commercial interests.” Rayat actually looked alarmed. He might have risked deflecting her weapon, but his tone was quiet and soothing. It dawned on her that while he clearly didn’t consider her a hard bastard like Shan, he definitely seemed to think she was unstable. That was fine. She could do barking mad very well. “You’re not a fool. You know it’s a dangerous technology in the wrong hands.”

  Lindsay let the pistol dip a little. Rayat’s eyes followed it. She braced her arm again and he blinked.

  “And whose hands are the right hands?”

  “Do you want it to become standard issue for the military?”

  “Depends if I was front-line infantry or not.” Barking mad. Play unpredictable. Lindsay shoved the gun into her side pocket and squatted down so close to Rayat that he couldn’t move from where he had fallen. “But I can’t see us strolling in and lifting wess’har biotech without an argument, and if Shan’s with the matriarchs, she’s as good as gone.”

  Rayat closed his eyes for a second and swallowed. “I don’t think it’s that simple.”

  “I know someone will be stupid enough one day to go after her.”

  “I meant that it’s…look, I have reason to think there’s another source.”

  “Yes, a bloody enormous psycho wess’har war criminal who’s going to be impossible to take.”

  “No. Not him, and not there.”

  Rayat stopped. Lindsay was going to take out her gun again and ask where, but the hatch to the heads swung open.

  “Oh, excuse me.” One of the civilian stewards stared down at them, clearly interpreting the scene in a highly original way. “Get a room, for goodness’ sake.” He turned and stalked out.

  Lindsay had lost the moment. She shook her head at Rayat. “Oh, great. I think we could do without that rumor starting.” She stood back and let him get to his feet. “D’you know, Doctor, you really don’t sound like a pharmacologist or a Treasury officer at all.”

  “I think you know what I am.”

  “Traditionally, my kind don’t like your kind very much.”

  “We both serve our state. I just don’t happen to enjoy dressing up like a pox-doctor’s clerk and talking like Hornblower.”

  “You tell me exactly what we’re
dealing with, and I’ll tell you if I’m willing to help you.”

  Lindsay waited a few seconds. Rayat seemed to be considering the offer but said nothing. She shrugged, collected her papers from the floor of the adjacent cubicle and walked out.

  Nobody in uniform ever believed they were told the whole truth. You took your orders, but with a pinch of salt; and you looked after yourself and your comrades, and then maybe your country. That was the trouble with spooks like Rayat.

  They never seemed to have any comrades.

  Mestin’s most junior husband, Sevaor, held out a perfectly amethyst glass bowl as if he expected Shan to take it.

  “Mestin will come to you soon,” he said. “Drink this while you wait.”

  Shan took the cup and peered in. The liquid in it was speckled with small brown fragments. Whatever it was, it couldn’t poison her and it made sense to accept hospitality.

  “An infusion,” said Sevaor. He was enchantingly gold, glittering, wood-scented. “Gethes like infusions.”

  “As do I,” said Shan, and instantly regretted her sarcasm. “Thank you.”

  She sipped. It tasted like turpentine. Sevaor was standing way too close for her comfort, and she stepped back discreetly. He closed the gap. She stepped back again.

  Wess’har had evolved from burrow-dwelling creatures, and they didn’t just tolerate being crammed together—they seemed to crave it. Combined with their eye-watering candor, it made them challenging neighbors.

  Shan finished her turpentine tea and stood waiting for Mestin. They weren’t big on seating either. The house rang with the double-voiced noise of youngsters and adults. She put the glass bowl on the perilously uneven window ledge and admired the exquisite pools of lavender light that it cast on the floor. Like the buried colony of Constantine, the warren of rooms and alleys that made up the terraced city of F’nar were somehow illuminated by natural light. She still hadn’t found out how they did it.

  Mestin strolled in to the lobby with the rolling gait of an overconfident sailor. All the females seemed to walk like that. “We go down,” she said abruptly, and beckoned Shan to follow her.

  And she meant down, too. Shan followed Mestin down a corridor that ran from the Exchange of Surplus Things deep into the ground beneath the city, on another field trip that Mestin assured her would help her fully understand what her new responsibilities were.

  She tried to link the tunneling habit to a species mind-set. Once you knew that humans were monkeys, things fell into place. Perhaps she’d get a better insight into the wess’har psyche from picking the right animal parallel.

  Maybe badgers, she thought. Blennies. Kakapo. No, they were all endearing, appealing. Wess’har were aesthetically attractive, but they weren’t any more cute than the needle-teethed ussissi. Trapdoor spiders. Yes, that was more like it. Scorpions.

  Mestin’s Spartan helmet of hair was silhouetted against the faint light filtering up from the tunnel ahead. Shan followed her step for step. The lighting rose gently like a sudden sunrise as they walked through a modest doorway.

  “Jesus,” said Shan.

  Above her head, to both sides of her, and as far as her eye could see, there were racks and tunnels and recesses. A few were filled with machinery. For a brief moment she lost her up-down orientation, like standing in an Escher engraving. She felt cocooned by a felt-lined silence. There were no echoes at all when she spoke.

  Some of the warehoused machines were clearly fighter craft, the kind she had seen on Bezer’ej, and some appeared industrial. Others made no sense to her at all. They were simply organic shapes of differing colors with detail worked into them that could have been controls. She could read wess’har script now, and that was no easy task for a human used to orderly lines of characters. The curved side of one machine bore the apparently random swirls and patches of text, ideograms strung out in fishbone diagrams and flowcharts. It made sense—eventually.

  The inscription read TEMPLATE CRAFT.

  “Each wess’har city has something like this,” said Mestin. “I think you would call it insurance. And I felt you needed to see it to understand why we’re so alarmed by the gethes.”

  The underground hangars almost explained how an apparently agricultural society managed to mount such an impressive reinforcement of the garrison on Bezer’ej, the Temporary City.

  “Where’s your industrial capacity? I’ve seen nothing but agriculture.” Shan reached out and put her hand on the blue-gray hull nearest to her. It was as clean and impressive as an exhibit in a military museum. “This takes scale and urbanization.”

  “You ask interesting questions for a police officer.”

  “I was planning to be an economist before I was drafted into the police. Manpower shortage, you see. But I sort of stayed. Where does this all come from?”

  “The World Before.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Our ancestors came to this planet ten thousand years ago. We did not arrive empty-handed.”

  If you could ever get used to shocks, then Shan was becoming accustomed to them. Just as she thought she had a complete picture of the wess’har, just as she was confident she had the measure of them, knew them, they would drop a bombshell into the conversation.

  “You never told me you weren’t native to this planet,” she said.

  “You never told me you were the descendants of apes.”

  “It just didn’t occur to me.”

  “Nor me. I brought you down here to show you the limited defenses at our disposal, not to give you a history lesson.” Mestin walked ahead, glancing from side to side as if she were in a market doing her shopping. There were enough cans of serious beans here to make somebody very uncomfortable indeed. “I realize you’re not a soldier, but you can understand force as well as anyone.”

  “But where do you build these ships?”

  “Grow is probably the more accurate description. Many came with our ancestors and we have modified them. This is the same base technology as dhren. But it isn’t inexhaustible.”

  Shan thought of the first time she had metAras. It hadn’t been a happy meeting: her military support team had managed to shoot down his craft. But he had walked away from the crash—her first clue that he had an extraordinary physiology. And when she went to inspect the wrecked metal airframe the next day, it had crumbled and scattered like dust beneath her boots. It was a rare instance of a pilot being repaired and the aircraft dying and decomposing. Smart metals.

  And there was Actaeon, knocking herself out to get hold of c’naatat when there were these industrial riches to be plundered.

  Mestin looked as if she was scanning Shan’s face for a reaction. And? Shan took the hint.

  “Are you telling me that you’re running out of kit?”

  “Correct,” said Mestin. “But we can adapt what we still have to counter the isenj. They’re limited by their population problems. We’re limited by the inverse—we are too few. But if you add an extra enemy to that, you can see our dilemma.”

  Shan thought of the annihilated, erased, utterly destroyed city of Mjat that had once stood coast-to-coast on the wilderness of an island that now housed Constantine. And these machines—or their originals, anyway—were older than the first human cities. “You’re not doing too badly for your size,” she said.

  “We will be too thinly stretched if gethes come in large numbers.”

  “Well, they won’t.” They? Assimilation had ambushed Shan and it hadn’t met much resistance. “Economics meets physics. Too far, too expensive, and too bloody hard for that much heavy lift. But a few with a foothold in this system could expand over the years, and you do think long-term, don’t you?”

  “Bloody.” In Mestin’s mouth, the word was softened by a chord of multiple notes. “Bloody.”

  “And then there’s the Sarajevo factor. It can take just one human to destabilize local politics.”

  “We noticed.” Mestin might have been capable of irony, or she might not. Either way
, it stung. “What is Sarajevo?”

  “Forget it,” said Shan. She felt for a moment that the whole situation was her fault. If only she had—no, that was stupid. The real damage had been done two centuries ago when Constantine was settled; and contact with the isenj had happened seventy-five years after she left Earth. Whatever she’d done or hadn’t done, it couldn’t have prevented this moment. The two women now stood staring at the smoothly curved fuselage of a craft that was so gently blue, so much like the skin of a grape, that Shan imagined it would feel moist and velvety to her touch.

  “So what else can you do?” she asked. “Reclamation nanites, biobarriers—that implies you have some sort of biological engineering capability.”

  Mestin inclined her maned head and looked even more disturbingly like a Spartan soldier; and Shan now knew that the two cultures also shared an unforgiving attitude to warfare as well as their mutual frugality and iron discipline. “Yes, our ancestors were skilled at bioweapons. We have never used the technology in that capacity. Not yet.”

  “Ah,” said Shan, mindful of the word yet, and feeling that she had found the snake in Eden that Josh always talked about. “But you could.”

  “Potentially,” said Mestin.

  They walked a little further down the passage in silence. Shan reasoned that even snakes were entitled to defend themselves. But bioweapons went beyond her all-encompassing view that it didn’t matter much how you died in battle. Bioweapons smacked of secret labs and all the terrible things she knew went on behind locked doors.

  It disturbed her; Mestin must have smelled that, because she froze.

  “Doesn’t sound very wess’har, creating bioweapons,” said Shan. “The ultimate interference with the natural order.”

  “A weapon of last resort,” said Mestin, wafting citrus. Shan had to remind herself that she was still the ranking female, hormonally speaking. Mestin seemed to be finding it hard not to defer to her. “The pathogens themselves come to no harm. Just the targets.” Wess’har morality had a seductive logic all its own. “Did gethes give that much thought to the fate of cavalry horses?”

  “I’m not arguing. I’m just trying to make sense of this. So you all left the World Before and came here, then.”