Crossing the Line

by Karen Traviss

  They rang solemnly for five more minutes. Then Josh brought his bell to a dead stop and showed Aras how to do the same.

  “I’ve collected the items from the altar,” Josh said. It was a strangely dispassionate way of describing the carved image of his tortured dead deity. Aras still found their fixation with redeeming physical agony a disturbing one. “I’ll bar the door behind me so we don’t have any accidents.”

  “Are you absolutely sure you want me to do this? It seems unnecessary. The nanites will—”

  “I want them destroyed here, please.”

  “It makes no difference how they are eradicated.”

  “Yes, it does. We need a harsh reminder that we have burned our bridges. It makes us move forward.”

  Aras gave him time to clear the building. Then he climbed the fragile ladder that led to the top of the tower and squeezed into the gap between the vault of the roof and the headstock to which the bells were attached. He took out his tilgir.

  It had been a pleasure and an education to make those bells. It was fitting that he should now be the last person to touch them.

  It took a while to hack through the rope and composite pins that secured the crowns to the headstock. There was creaking. Then gaps began opening, and with a sudden lurch all six bells dropped in close sequence down the well of the tower in a brief, unnatural silence that ended in a cacophony of bouncing shards that churned in a glittering eruption of sapphire and cobalt fragments like a missile piecing the surface of a frozen sea.

  The agonizing noise calmed in seconds into tinkling, then into nothing at all. The bells of St. Francis were finally silent.

  The erasure of Constantine had begun.

  15

  Humans lie even to themselves. They promote the idea that all intelligent beings—intelligent by their narrow definition—are all the same within and will behave the same if exposed to the same environment. They fear to admit that there are varied characteristics that define each race and species. If they still have not managed to erase great differences within their own species, how can they believe they can achieve it with nonhumans? And yet they will labor on under the willingly shared lie that all beings will be reasonable and behave like humans if they are treated like humans. Logic and history tells us we will behave like isenj, or like wess’har, or like ussissi. We all behave as we are.

  SIYYAS BUR, matriarch historian

  Okurt wasn’t unlikable. He wasn’t as quietly impressive as the Royal Marines from Thetis, but neither was he the sarcastic buffoon that he seemed to have created as a defensive shell. Eddie thought the current situation was a lot to ask of a man who had never been properly trained for alien contact.

  He expected to be debriefed as soon as he put one foot through the last of the inner hatches. But there was polite restraint from everyone. It was a full twelve hours before Okurt left a message inviting him to lunch in the wardroom with the senior staff.

  Meals were the backbone of the day. Okurt believed that his staff should have one meal where they didn’t have to operate a console with one hand and snatch a snack in the other. “We are not a grazing animal,” he told Eddie. “Officers dine.” There were disposable napkins and matching shatterproofs. The table itself looked like solid naval oak until you stood up too quickly and caught it with your leg to discover it was tough, feather light blown composite with a convincing grain, and that it stowed up flat into a bulkhead. It was sweetly patriarchal. Okurt sat at the head of the table like a father waiting to carve the Sunday roast.

  It would have been a nice ordinary lunch if Eddie hadn’t had a long list of unpleasant news he needed to impart to Actaeon and her masters.

  “You do seem to be getting on well with the isenj,” said Okurt. “Still using an interpreter?”

  “Not with Ual,” Eddie said. “Very fluent. It’s a struggle for him to make the sounds, but he knows exactly what he’s saying.”

  “Shout.”

  “Eh?”

  “ ‘If they fail to understand, shout: and do not dissemble, because God is your authority.’ ” Okurt laughed. “Old advice to those taking on the white man’s burden in the colonies.”

  “Good if you’re talking to people with pointed sticks. Bad if they have missiles.”

  “We could do with fostering some enthusiasm for the space program, seeing as it pays us.” Okurt passed round sliced protein that might have been soy but could just as easily have been cell-culture chicken. The parallel of bountiful provision by the government’s hand was not lost on Eddie. “I hear the views of F’nar raised approval a bit. Staggeringly pretty. Shame the inhabitants would rather blow our heads off than let us visit.”

  Lindsay picked at her chicken salad, or perhaps it was a soy salad after all, and looked preoccupied. Eddie thought it was time to put her out of her misery. It was a matter of things being best hidden in plain sight.

  “Can I ask you a question, Malcolm?” Eddie liked to give his quarry a sporting hundred-meter start. “I hear from reliable defense sources back home that the Hereward has changed course.”

  Lindsay looked up at him. It was convincing shock. It was a shock that he had mentioned it, of course, but it did the job just fine. She hadn’t told Okurt that Eddie knew about it. Maybe she hadn’t even told him that she knew. Okurt made a commendable show of looking unperturbed.

  “It’s true the Hereward is being deployed to this sector, Eddie, yes. Your sources are correct. Might I ask how and when?”

  “Sources. The only item in my professional code of honor. That’s all you need to know.”

  “How widely have you discussed this?” Okurt asked.

  “We haven’t reported it yet.” Eddie smiled. Well, that was true. Okurt would know that anyway. “Come on. You don’t pay me.”

  “Do the isenj know?”

  A sloppy admission, very sloppy. So he was more worried about the isenj than the wess’har, and that was a view Eddie couldn’t share after the events of the last week. But then Okurt was just a field officer, not a politician. “Would you like me to ask them?”

  Okurt managed a smile and pushed the jug of instant Chardonnay-flavored drink down the oak-alike table. Lindsay fielded it and poured, a study in displacement activity.

  “It’s only a support vessel,” Okurt said at last. “And it won’t be here for twenty-five years.”

  “A well cannoned-up support vessel, though. Never mind. Plenty of time to get back in everyone’s good books.” Eddie sliced his hydroponic tomato purely as stage timing. “Because the wess’har know about it, and they’re mobilizing.”

  Okurt and Lindsay both stopped chewing for a split second at exactly the same time.

  “I imagine you’re going to tell us all about it,” said Okurt.

  “Yes, because I’d like to be out of here before they’re ready to roll. I’m old-fashioned that way. I like to keep my entrails inside my body cavity.”

  Okurt was shunting bits of chicken around his plate with his fork. Despite being lightweight composite, the crockery still carried a gold rim and the ship’s huntsman crest. Eddie couldn’t help noticing that the huntsman was being ripped apart by his own hounds.

  “They interpreted it as a hostile act, and it was bad timing after extracting all the human crew from Thetis,” said Eddie.

  “Why?”

  “The ussissi have gone ballistic. The paranoid little buggers think we’re shaping up to destroy the ship because of the opposition back home to bringing isenj to Earth.”

  Lindsay said nothing. She took another pull at the glass of not-wine that Eddie now wished were hundred-proof navy rum. He could have done with a real drink.

  “Want to see my rushes?” said Eddie.

  It wasn’t quite the same game he had played before. He liked juggling with information, flushing out who knew what, as much as Shan clearly enjoyed the challenge of interrogation. But he just needed to be clear—in his heart of hearts—why he was playing.

  He was helping to avert disas
ter. He was trying to stop humans making a big mistake and getting into a fight with another species that would actually win, and win well. He was saving the last of a civilization of intelligent squid.

  He hadn’t abandoned his professional standards at all.

  “Yes, we would,” said Okurt.

  Eddie unrolled his screen and set it on the console table that ran down the length of the short bulkhead. The assembled senior staff watched the raw footage like they were staring at a road crash.

  “I tried to get as close as I could,” said Eddie modestly.

  The bee-cam was staring down into the cockpit of a huge and enigmatic fighter craft. If he had sent the cam up its tailpipe it wouldn’t have told a human the first thing about how it worked and what it could do. In fact, it didn’t even appear to have a tailpipe.

  “There are a thousand wess’har cities down there, and they’ve all got a box of kit like this,” said Eddie. He was watch ing faces while they watched his shots: he had hit the spot, and hard. “And I don’t want to worry you, but Wess’ej is just the outpost of a larger wess’har civilization about five light-years away. The ones on Wess’ej are the namby-pamby lefty liberals and hippies. The others are a lot less tolerant.”

  “What’s that?” asked the weapons officer. He was looking at a brightly colored 3-D map of wilderness crisscrossed by regular lines and angles, giving the impression of plans for a rigidly designed road network that someone was hoping to build on a greenfield site. It was Olivier Champciaux’s geophys data from Bezer’ej, the material that had made even Shan Frankland nervous and that Champciaux hadn’t been willing to let him broadcast for copyright reasons. Eddie didn’t give a stuff about copyright now.

  “That’s a geophys scan of part of Bezer’ej. It was an isenj city. A big one.” Timing was part of the show. Eddie paused and spread butter on a bread roll. “And that’s all that’s left of it after a visit from the Wess’ej Liberal Party.”

  There was a collective murmur of unease. This propaganda business was easy. Eddie wondered why he hadn’t made it his life’s work.

  “Do they know you spied on them?” said Okurt.

  “They knew. They just didn’t give a shit. You can be that confident when you’ve got an arsenal like theirs.”

  “I don’t suppose I could ask you for this material to show to the joint chiefs before you broadcast it, could I?”

  “If it keeps my entrails in place, you’re welcome,” said Eddie. He left the playback running. There was the usual jerk and blur as the recording changed to another session’s shooting, and the cam rested on an idyllic wide shot of F’nar’s shimmering terraces. Shan, back to camera, walked into frame and stood with hands on hips. Then she turned her head, appeared to notice she was in shot and stepped aside. The mike picked up a brief “Sorry.”

  Eddie saw Lindsay’s reaction. She leaned forward a fraction, no more.

  “Sorry, Lin,” said Eddie.

  “No problem,” said Lindsay. “So she lives there, now, eh?”

  “Yeah.”

  Okurt didn’t appear interested in Shan, which was odd given his shopping list. “Is there anything else? Not that you haven’t kept us absorbed so far.”

  “Yeah, the wess’har are about to plow in the salt.” It was a neat line. Eddie got the attention he had planned, with eight heads all turned towards him in uniformed synchrony. “They’ve developed a biological agent that’s specific against humans and they’re about to spread it around Bezer’ej to make sure we’re never going to land there. They’re really very freaked about the risk to the bezeri. Oh, and they’re kicking the colony off the planet. So they took the news about Hereward really well, all things considered.”

  “You told them.”

  “And I flushed out a lot about their capability. Better to find out now.”

  Okurt gave Eddie the sort of look that made him think he might check under his bunk before turning in each night for the foreseeable future.

  “And what about this biotech?” said Lindsay.

  “You’ll never get it.”

  “I didn’t think they’d hand it over.”

  “I mean that it’s a natural organism from Bezer’ej, and you’re never going to get there anyway now. A fluke. There’s no tech to steal or buy or borrow. The only route to it is a chunk out of Shan or Aras, and I think you can calculate the odds of getting that.”

  Lindsay’s expression didn’t flicker. “We could offer to help evacuate the colony,” she said. “Might give us some access.”

  “Don’t bother,” Eddie said. “Shan’s doing it personally. You know what she’s like for getting stuck in.”

  He thought he saw Lindsay’s expression brighten, but he was mistaken. She drained her glass and went on picking at the remains of her salad. Eddie, satisfied that he had drawn a very accurate picture of the risks of provoking wess’har wrath, dubbed the footage across to a chip and handed it to Okurt.

  “Knock yourself out, Commander,” he said. “As long as my arse is out of firing range.”

  Eddie walked back to his cabin, feeling that he had done the right thing for once, albeit with a little more theater than the fearsomely wonderful Mestin might have thought decent. Shan would have appreciated it, though. They came from the same school of psyching out the opposition. He respected that.

  He swung his legs up on his bunk and began wondering if his nerve would hold long enough to get a sample of DNA from an isenj.

  “How much of this am I supposed to know I’ve heard?” asked Okurt.

  Lindsay wasn’t moving. She was leaning against his cabin hatch. If Okurt was going to leave before she’d had her say, he’d have to go through her.

  “All you need to know is that I’m detaining a wanted person and that I’ve requested access to a shuttle. We have a very narrow window for this, and it might be the only one we ever get.”

  Okurt spun his coffee cup on the table, looking past it in defocus at the status board but not appearing to see that either. “And even if you can land, how do you plan to get off the planet? We can’t retrieve you. You know that.”

  “Dr. Mesevy’s still down there. We can merge in with the colonists when they’re evacuated.” She had the story ready. He had no way of checking it. “She’ll help.”

  “There are only a thousand or so of them. Don’t you think they’d spot a stranger or six, especially rather fit ones with very short hair and palm-bioscreens?”

  “Depends how we embark. We can also get access to the original colony mission shuttles and fly out.”

  “Just like that, eh?”

  “Have you ever worked with Royal Marines before, Malcolm?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “If it can be done, they’ll do it.”

  “Your chances are still close to zero.”

  “We’re prepared to take casualties. The priority is to get her.”

  “I still don’t see how you’re going to take her. She’s effectively on home turf.”

  “We don’t have to. We just need a good stash of tissue samples.”

  Okurt suddenly recovered his focus. “My orders said alive. You’ll have to have a bloody good reason for bringing her back in kit form, if you get out at all. Unless, of course, Dr. Rayat has overriding orders.”

  “He does, but you don’t need to know.”

  Okurt had his back to her now, refilling his cup. “Okay, next question. Suppose you do get to her and—God knows how—take a chunk. And you can’t get the shuttles airborne. How are you going to get the material off Bezer’ej?”

  “Remote sample collection bot. Six kilos, self-propelling.” Waiting had paid off. She was cold and detached now, a million miles from the sobbing mother who had heard the news from Ade Bennett that they were going to exhume her baby. “You were looking at that to get a sample from David’s body. You must have thought it was feasible too.”

  Okurt turned slowly to face her. “I know I should have told you. I’m sorry.”

 
“But you didn’t. Now I’m telling you how it’s going to be. I’m landing at Constantine by Once-Onlies with the detachment and we’re going to find Shan Frankland, neutralize her and get a sample off the planet. Either we lift clear and you can have a shuttle rendezvous with us at a safe distance, or you can intercept that sample. Job done.”

  “We can’t extract you if it all goes tits up.”

  “I said we know that.”

  “The wess’har will go completely fucking crazy.”

  “They’re cranking up to war anyway. We’ll be out on our ear so we might as well use what time we have left to acquire that—that parasite, bug, whatever—for our own use.” She had to cover the armaments she wanted to take, hiding the real plan in plain sight. The only hard bit was showing the right side of the puzzle to the audience of the moment without an inconsistency alerting them to the fact that she was planning something else entirely. “Dr. Rayat has commandeered appropriate ordnance.”

  Okurt was spinning his cup in its saucer, first clockwise, then anti-clockwise: his hand slipped and it tumbled to the floor, bouncing a couple of times. Lindsay didn’t field it. He left it where it rolled.

  “God help us if you screw this up,” he said. “I should stop you taking tactical weapons.”

  “The armory inventory is locked down.”

  “I still have my key-code and I can still count.”

  “Forget what you counted. It’s just for insurance.” Lindsay kept her face carefully blank and hoped a red flush at her throat wasn’t giving the game away. She’d fastened her shirt to the top. “Just in case.”

  Okurt turned away and consulted his screen. “I’d better work out how we’re going to get you near enough to the drop zone,” he said. “And that’s not a given.”

  It was very hard not to run down to the barracks, the small makeshift mess that the marines had set up in compartments vacated by building materials for the biodome on Umeh. They carried their Royal Marine-ness with them wherever they went.