Crossing the Line

by Karen Traviss

  Lindsay wanted to sprint down there. Instead she swung herself through hatches with controlled excitement.

  All she had to do was monitor traffic movements around Bezer’ej to get a when. She was going to get Shan Frankland and her plague. It even made it worth working with Mohan Rayat again.

  She leaned round the hatch and found Webster, Qureshi and Chahal sitting around the table having a contest to see who could eat a whole bar of nutty sideways in one go. They turned to her looking like startled hamsters.

  “Stand to,” she said. “It’s time for postcards from Bezer’ej.”

  Lindsay spread the Once-Only suit on the hangar deck again. She wanted to see Rayat’s face. It was worth it.

  “You don’t have to come.”

  He swallowed discreetly, but hard. “Oh yes I do.”

  Twelve square kilometers. Lindsay had kicked that figure around for days. That was the surface area of Christopher Island. Rayat, consulting his database, was confident that six ERDs would do the job, a combined six-kiloton blast and lethal rain of neutrons. She hoped they were right about the location.

  “You’re taking a marine’s place,” said Becken. He wasn’t pleased that Lindsay had decided they had eight bodies and six suits, and that his and Webster’s weren’t going to be filling them. There were barely tolerable spooks and there were bad spooks, and Lindsay could see the detachment had decided with one mind that Rayat was the latter.

  Rayat smiled politely. “I really do have a job to do, gentlemen. And ladies.”

  Qureshi looked studiously blank. “You don’t have to operate it, Doctor. Webster can rig an emulator that’ll take telemetry from my suit, and all you have to do is sit tight and not puke.” She gave him an unnaturally controlled smile in return. “It’ll mirror my suit’s position but it’ll be offset by ten meters to avoid collisions. You’d better hope I don’t land on a cliff.”

  Lindsay had to hand it to Rayat. In the teeth of a gale of hatred and contempt, he looked wholly unruffled. It was something he had in common with Shan. “You land me on Constantine and get me to my location, and I’ll solve the rest of our problems.”

  Twelve square kilometers.

  They had a shuttle ready to eject them and the maiale at five thousand kay from the planet, provided that the wess’har didn’t detect the vessel. The maiale would tow them to two hundred kay before they unhitched and began the descent. It all looked fine on paper.

  “Retrieval bot?” Lindsay had to preserve the illusion.

  “Check,” said Rayat.

  “ERDs?”

  “Yeah, all with delay timers.”

  “That’s comforting.”

  Qureshi watched Rayat and Lindsay wheel the big dull green tubes across the deck and heave them into the shuttle. The Once-Onlies, hanging from their deployment rail like some weird new fashion, sagged as the ERDs were loaded into them.

  “Is that it?” asked Qureshi. Explosives were her speciality. She stood behind Rayat, peering into her appointed suit with its tiny, terrible payload. “I’d be happier if I knew what was going on in there.”

  “Just ERD,” said Rayat, emphasizing each letter. “We detain our infected comrade Frankland, or useful parts thereof, and destroy the source of this organism. That mission objective is now ranked classification ten. Happy?”

  “No,” said Qureshi. “I reckon the whole ship knows about it by now.”

  Bennett’s face was a grim study in betrayal. “Easy peasy,” he said flatly, and Lindsay couldn’t work out if his you’re dead look was directed at her, or at Rayat, or both. “Home in time to watch the footie, I reckon.” He’d liked Shan. He’d liked her too much. She wondered if she could rely on him.

  It was hard enough juggling the various cover stories in her own mind: and she was struggling to ensure that she presented the right set of facts to the right audience. She had to look as if she planned to get a sample of c’naatat off the surface right up to the last minute.

  And Ade Bennett still planned to get one of the colony’s ancient shuttles into the air. He’d spent hours poring over manuals and working out a route and timings to the mothballed craft. She doubted anyone could manage it, but at least the marines could seek evacuation with the colonists. She wouldn’t.

  “You confirmed Frankland’s still on Bezer’ej?” asked Rayat.

  “Best intelligence we have is from the ussissi on Umeh, and they say she is.” Lindsay thought there might have been the faintest hint of disbelief on Rayat’s face. “They’re not secretive, any of them. They don’t think information matters. They seem to base everything on physical superiority and they think nobody can take on the wess’har.”

  “They’re probably right,” said Rayat.

  Bennett checked the seals on his spacesuit and ran his glove across the visor of his helmet, tucked under one arm. He wasn’t looking at Rayat: he was looking at Lindsay.

  “You okay, Ade?” she asked.

  “No, ma’am, I’m not,” he said. “But I’m not paid to be okay about things. I’m paid to front up and earn it.”

  “You can refuse what you think is an unlawful order.”

  “You’d have to give me that order first, ma’am,” said Bennett. “And then I’ll have to decide if it’s one step beyond that line. Won’t I?”

  16

  BBChan 77896 “World in Focus” 0700

  The Alliance of the Americas today lodged a diplomatic protest against FEU plans to allow a party of extraterrestrials to land in Europe.

  Following weeks of violent clashes between police and demonstrators, the Sinostates are understood to be considering withdrawing their support for the landing. AoA spokesman Luis Carreira said today: “We’re fully prepared to use military means to prevent an unauthorized landing if the FEU doesn’t heed the very real concerns of governments worldwide.”

  Ual was not returning calls. Eddie wasn’t sure if that was because he simply wasn’t available or because he was making a point. So he kept calling. Every call meant a trip to the Actaeon’s comms suite—a grand name for a cabin the size of a toilet, he thought—and obeisance to whichever junior officer was on duty.

  Eventually Ual responded. He responded personally, and that was something Eddie had rarely experienced with a human politician. He didn’t even have embarrassing sexual material on him to guarantee the call-back. For a moment he wondered what might constitute sexual depravity for an isenj.

  “I am unhappy with the news, Mr. Michallat,” Ual said, all sucks and wheezes. “It’s most negative.”

  “I hope I haven’t been.”

  “How can I tell? All I know is that I watch your channels and I see angry people who already hate us before they have met us. My colleagues who are still in sleep en route for your world will have an unpleasant awakening if we can’t establish a more amicable approach in the next few years.”

  Blame the news editor. But Eddie’s material was so exclusive that almost nothing was left on the cutting room floor. It was all his doing; he had to put his hands up to it. “I’ve not tried to depict your people in any negative way.”

  “How can I tell? We have just begun to know humans and so we don’t yet know if you calculated to appall your audience.”

  “Have I shown anything that’s inaccurate or misleading?”

  “Nothing. We are as you show us.”

  “Then I can only apologize. There are elements of your lifestyle that some humans find frightening.”

  “That there are so many of us?”

  “Mainly.”

  “You have a fixation with vermin in your culture.”

  “It’s not our nicest trait, I know. But I haven’t set you up. My only option would be to not film your cities at all, and I don’t think I can justify that.”

  “Because it panders to us, or because it panders to humans?”

  “Because it’s not how I’ve chosen to do my job.”

  Ual let out a long bubbling breath. Eddie had no idea what that meant, and no ussi
ssi on hand to interpret it for him. “I understand,” the minister said. “Then we will have to address the issue the next time we talk in front of your camera.”

  So there would be a next time. The only right answer to give, Eddie realized, was the honest one. It worked every time and you didn’t have to remember any lies. He couldn’t imagine why more people didn’t try it.

  Even the game he was playing with Okurt—and through him, with the government—was simply the truth.

  The biosphere in Jejeno was still several months away from completion, and living there before the accommodation units were in place meant being bundled up in a sleeping bag in a freight container at night. It was a one-night novelty as far as Eddie was concerned, but it made a few nice shots. It also gave him a reason for being around isenj.

  He sat on a narrow seat in the ussissi shuttle with his bag on his knees and one hand clutching the straps of webbing the pilot had strung all along the bulkheads of the tiny cargo area. The pilot said he was fed up with humans falling over and being sick when he came in to land.

  “You’re supposed to wish me a nice day,” said Eddie with a grin, but the pilot just fixed him with a feral black stare and didn’t offer him a hand down. He didn’t thank him for flying Air Ussissi either. Eddie wanted to say that he understood why they didn’t trust humans any more, but thought better of it. Whatever his good intentions, he still looked like a regular human to them. He adjusted his respirator.

  Serrimissani met him at the entrance to the construction site, which didn’t appear to have progressed much since his last visit. She was looking sullen. It was hard to describe a sullen-looking mongoose, but he knew which expression and body language went with her blacker moods: eyes slitted half shut, arms unnaturally straight at her sides, lips compressed. He tried to imagine her and a wess’har matriarch relaxing with a beer and telling gethes jokes. Somehow he couldn’t see it.

  “We have seen the news,” she said.

  “Ual’s not very pleased either.”

  “I meant your threat to destroy the Thetis.”

  He’d missed something. He squatted down so as to placate Serrimissani, but not so close that she could sink her teeth in him. “What threat?”

  She beckoned him to follow her and he walked up the path that was studded and rutted with building debris and vehicle tracks. There were two small knots of ussissi; one was standing ten meters from the main habitat entrance and the other was outside the site manager’s hut. They stared at him and said nothing. He followed Serrimissani into the dome and she commandeered a hand-link from an isenj, tuned it with a few savage pokes of a claw, and thrust it under his nose.

  “If you share a communications relay with people, you must expect them to hear what you say,” she said.

  Eddie didn’t have to scroll far through the BBChan headlines. He got as far as use military means to prevent an unauthorized landing and stopped. His stomach was tumbling slowly but inexorably past his caudal vertebrae.

  “Humans make a lot of threats they don’t really intend to carry out,” said Eddie.

  “Fascinating,” said Serrimissani. “But we do not.”

  It was quite a difficult morning after that. He almost forgot that he had a urine sample vial in his bag that needed filling, and not with anything that was likely to vent from his nervous bladder. He had blagged the vial from sickbay via the obliging Lieutenant Yun on the premise that he’d chanced across some yeast with a very high alcohol tolerance.

  He sat on a dormant bot watching work continue. There were more accommodation cubes than before, and the vines had made an impressive job of covering the interior framework. The incongruously decorative fountain tinkled and splashed ahead of him. It could have been a chic and minimalist shopping mall under construction if it hadn’t been so very, very far from home.

  His BBChan ID badge—which had expired on December 31, 2324, he noted—wasn’t going to be much use now.

  There were countries where it was a token of immunity. There were others where they didn’t like it much, but where they had a pragmatic attitude to letting a reporter from a respected news source operate largely unmolested, even if censored on transmission. There were a few where it didn’t matter a damn and they would shoot you anyway, but that was because they were stupid and didn’t realize that killing useful journos was a self-defeating pastime. If you got killed, it was largely bad luck on your part or political naiveté on the part of your attacker.

  But wess’har, isenj and ussissi no longer had any use for him. They already knew what they needed to know. He was just another alien from a species they all had their doubts about.

  One thing was for sure: even if he managed to get a piece of isenj tissue, he wasn’t planning to rush back to Actaeon with it while the natives were so restless. It was an awfully big, shiny, illuminated target.

  And it was—like him—awfully alone out here.

  Aras was happy. When he was happy, distractedly happy, he made sporadic urrrr noises under his breath, like someone riffling through the pages of a crisp-paged book at high speed. It was also the sound he made when he was enjoying oursan.

  Shan combed carefully through his hair and began braiding it, relieved at his temporary good mood. It didn’t take much to keep him happy. On close inspection, it wasn’t at all like human hair: instead of smooth shafts, it was more like threads of feather, with minute wispy vanes and barbs that curled down the length of each strand. She rolled it between her fingertips and admired the bronze highlights.

  He stopped urrrring. “Two months is a very short time for them,” he said quietly.

  “I think that was based on matriarch packing time, not human.” When she turned to pick up a length of hemp tape to tie the braid in place, her boots crunched on something. She stooped to look. “Where’s all this bloody blue glass coming from?”

  “I must have trodden it in from the bell tower,” said Aras.

  The fragments were beautiful, like vicious little high-grade sapphires. When Shan picked one up to examine the color, it cut her palm and left a small speck of blood that stopped flowing immediately. The blue light in her hands fluttered behind the shards as if trying to match the exact shade and then died down again.

  “Did it upset you, smashing the bells like that?” she asked.

  “I thought it an odd request. I don’t understand why he felt the need to obliterate them with such violence. If he wanted to ensure they were never used again, the nanites would have done that. But he said they had to burn bridges.”

  “If he likes dramatic gestures, why didn’t he do it himself?”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  “They’re all as mad as fucking hatters anyway,” Shan said, and finished the braid.

  She wanted it over and done with. She would always love Bezer’ej in the way that you could when you were somewhere desolate for a day trip and you could go home to familiarity later. But it wasn’t home, not even with Aras, and not even here in Josh’s soothing, gold, buried house with its soft light and calming silence.

  She wasn’t sure what home was any more.

  “A few of them are digging in to stay,” Shan said. Aras stiffened. She smoothed down his hair and arranged the braid carefully down his back. “They didn’t think we’d salt the planet. It was hard to tell them we’d already started.”

  “But you did.”

  “Of course.”

  There was no turning back now. On the four landmasses in the southern hemisphere, troops from the Temporary City were dropping units of the bioagent that would spread on the air and water, propagate, and then go into a dormant state on surfaces as soon as the optimum concentration had been reached. It would take about fifty or sixty days to complete. Then they would come north and begin seeding the remaining land-masses, including the continent that broke up into a chain of islands with saints’ names.

  The clock was ticking.

  “Clever buggers,” said Shan. “I spoke to the bloke who designed it. He said h
e studied some of Constantine’s archive files on anthrax to achieve long-term dormancy. And I said to him, blimey, do you know how much you would be worth to the military back home? He wasn’t amused.”

  “You think of us as blokes now. Is your assimilation that complete?”

  “It must be. I’ve not lost any sleep knowing I’m a weapon. That’s a pretty good indicator.”

  There was one more thing she had to do, one of many, but it was personal rather than part of the evacuation. Aras trailed a few paces after her as she walked down to the shore to the Place of Memory of the First and the Place of Memory of the Returned, shrines to the bezeri explorers who had beached their craft to explore the Dry Above. Some never made it back.

  It meant a long walk through Constantine’s fields. It meant walking through the scattered patches of crops in full leaf and flower, past people who had once learned to trust her and who were now probably wondering why they ever bothered.

  She tried to imagine what it was like to have to leave behind everything—everything—you had ever known or worked for. Then she remembered that she had.

  It was tough shit.

  This was for the bezeri.

  At the water’s edge Aras handed her the signaling lamp that translated speech into the patterns of lights the bezeri used to communicate. “Reckon I need it?” she asked, flexing her fingers and sending a kaleidoscope of colors dancing under the skin. Aras had learned when she was joking and when she was not, and he simply cocked his head a little. She didn’t want him to accompany her. It was only the second time she had ventured into the bezeri’s submarine world.

  The other time had been to return the body of a dead infant, killed because Surendra Parekh had ignored an order not to take specimens.

  Shan didn’t need breathing apparatus now. It would be unpleasant, but she knew she couldn’t drown. The isenj had done her a favor even if they hadn’t known it when they had tried a dozen and more ways to kill a c’naatat-infected wess’har.