Crossing the Line

by Karen Traviss

  “No, Ouzhari is the island to the very south, the one where none may land. And you will die for that.”

  Eddie spread his hands. “I haven’t got a clue what you’re talking about.” He wished he did. One part of his brain was chattering great story, great story, great story in an insistent reflex, and another part was saying run, run like hell.

  “The wess’har are searching for your Commander Neville.”

  Oh God. Lindsay.

  “I think we’ve really fucked up this time,” said Eddie. “I’m sorry. Really I am. Are Shan and Aras okay?”

  “Aras is looking for bezeri to see how badly affected they might be. I know nothing of Shan Frankland.”

  Eddie stood back, utterly helpless and ashamed. The ussissi bared their teeth and then scattered, glancing back at him as if they might change their minds and fall on him like a pack after all, acting out the Actaeon myth.

  He was caught or the wrong side of a border crossing, and he could see it closing before his eyes like the doors of an elevator he had just missed. He would never be going back to Actaeon again. His stomach was churning and he could feel the pulse in his temples through his teeth.

  But he wasn’t so sure he was on the wrong side of the line.

  Actaeon definitely wasn’t the safest place to be right now.

  21

  There ought to be a room in every house to swear in. Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.

  MARK TWAIN

  The first bezeri to be washed up on Chad Island—to the north of Christopher—was a juvenile female.

  The cobalt in the gethes’ bombs had poisoned the air and the land—and the sea. It was an especially filthy weapon. It was designed to poison for many years to come, a grotesque twist on the sleeping pathogen that his wess’har comrades were spreading. It killed indiscriminately.

  Aras knelt down and laid his hand on the gelatinous mantle of the bezeri. There were already tiny keteya swarming over it, seizing the chance of a meal. And his heart broke.

  He had never understood what humans had meant by that, but he knew now. There was a definite sensation of pain deep in his chest, a pressure that made breathing unpleasant, and it ran all the way up the back of his throat into his mouth.

  Why did they do this?

  He stood up and looked out across the bay. The cloud cover meant that he should have been able to see some light from bezeri near the surface, but there was nothing. He had walked into the water several times and used the signaling lamp, but they didn’t come.

  Aras knew how vulnerable they were to poisons in the water. Their settlements were clustered near landmasses. The slightest chemical changes were dangerous: isenj pollution had nearly destroyed them. It was very easy to kill bezeri without planning to.

  Aras battled with the pressure of sorrow that threatened to crush his chest and thought of all the years he had spent watching the bezeri recover their numbers, never as great as before the isenj arrived, but a recovery nonetheless. The isenj hadn’t planned to kill bezeri any more than the gethes had.

  Surendra Parekh hadn’t set out to kill bezeri either.

  He had balanced that crime with two shots from Shan’s old but efficient hand-weapon. He wondered what it would take to balance this crime, and he began to see it would take a great deal of balancing indeed, and more than he could carry out alone.

  And then there was Josh. Aras was staring at the water but not seeing it.

  Why did he betray me?

  Josh was another gethes who probably hadn’t planned to kill bezeri. He never meant to do it. Aras could almost hear him now. He would repent. He would seek forgiveness from God. But it was none of his god’s business to forgive this.

  Aras wasn’t minded to leave Josh’s punishment to his god. He’d do it himself. He had forbidden the ussissi and the Cetekas clan to touch him.

  Find him. Hold him. Wait for me to get back.

  After nearly two hundred years of living alongside them, Aras had finally understood a fundamental aspect of humans. For a moment he feared it had become clear because the Shan-parts of him had clarified it.

  Difference made others invisible to gethes.

  Was she like that? No. She behaved differently, whatever went on in her mind.

  The sea was still dark gray and lightless. There were no bezeri to be seen.

  Aras recalled a game he used to play with little Rachel Garrod. She called it hide and seek. Sometimes he would find her huddled in a corner with a garment over her head, and she was astonished that he could see and find her, because she could not see him. Adult gethes behaved similarly. They believed other species had no individuality, no sense of self, simply because they couldn’t see it, measure it, or experience it; and if they could not conceive of it, it could not exist. Perhaps wess’har, used to feeling fleetingly what another felt through oursan, could stretch their imaginations a little further.

  Aras knew that the bezeri female who now lay rotting at his feet had felt and feared, because that was what all life did in one way or another. And even if she had neither complex language nor the ability to conjure up abstract concepts—and she did, he knew she did—then her life would be no less valid because of that. That was what separated his kind from gethes.

  Gethes thought their imaginary god had made them unique, both as individuals and as a species, even if they no longer believed in him.

  The keteya were leaving visible holes in the bezeri’s mantle now. Aras wondered what would happen to them, too.

  For a moment he wished the gethes had succeeded in grabbing c’naatat for themselves. He would have delighted in seeing them reach extinction in their own filth and excess.

  But many others would have died with them, and he shook the vengeance away. It was a uselessly violent thought, and he hadn’t lavished one like that even upon the isenj. The thought felt like Shan’s. He understood her various angers a lot better now.

  He stood over the bezeri until she started to fall apart under the small but persistent assaults of the keteya. It was getting dark. He had been there on the shore for hours, and it occurred to him that Shan would be worrying about him. She would be back by now. She would have found Lindsay Neville and killed her. The marines wouldn’t touch her. He was sure of that.

  Shan could always imagine what it was like to be behind someone else’s eyes. He thought of the gorilla, and was glad that she could still feel pain for the being, and for all things that were even less like her than the ape. He hadn’t misjudged her at all, not from the very first time he had met her. He would go back to Constantine and find her, and then he would seek some comfort from the one human who had ever justified his affection and loyalty.

  A light caught his eye.

  It was faint, and green. He had never seen that single, unchanging color before: it defied the signal lamp’s translation. The device stayed silent. Then the light was joined by others.

  Aras scrambled back up the cliff as fast as he could to get a better vantage point. When he turned and looked down onto the darkening water, he could see light upon light, all green, all unchanging, but growing in intensity and number

  His signal lamp started to crackle. He couldn’t make out any words.

  The lights flared. They were brighter than he had ever seen now, even brighter than the communal songs that rippled through the water for weeks at a time; and still he didn’t understand them.

  The sea was on fire with green light. He stared at it, lost, remembering the wess’har who saw the lights many years before and who first understood when the bezeri were calling out help us.

  The signal lamp spat out a stream of loud static, and his own moment of revelation was terrible. The bezeri weren’t calling for help this time.

  They were screaming.

  22

  We have had no contact from Shan Frankland or Vijissi. They might be keeping radio silence because they still seek the human invaders. We would also ask for confirmation
of the identity of an unidentified vessel that has left Constantine and is heading for Wess’ej. It is not on our schedule even though it responded with nonhostile code.

  (Operations overseer, Temporary City)

  In zero g, the shattered rounds that were easing out of Shan’s body simply drifted in front of her. It was like watching a film of yourself being shot, run backwards. Eddie would have been amazed by it.

  Shan had wondered if she would ever get used to c’naatat’s thorough healing procedures and now she knew she would never have the chance to.

  She couldn’t.

  Vijissi was curled up in a ball beside her, panting. He was badly hurt. Shan nudged him with her shoulder, making him drift back against the bulkhead, and he opened his black hunter’s eyes and focused on her. She hoped he’d make it. To his right, just in her peripheral vision, Ade Bennett was still fussing with the tape over his broken nose, checking carefully with the mirror of his camo compact held very close to his face. Shan had never taken him for a vain man. He looked upset.

  Then he noticed she was looking his way. He snapped the compact shut. “How you feeling?” he said. He swung as close to her as he dared. “You still in pain?”

  She stared at him. It was all she could do while gagged but she knew she could always convey a command without opening her mouth. He shot a few nervous glances in Lindsay’s direction and then began easing the tape off.

  “Leave that,” said Lindsay, looking up from the tracking screen.

  Bennett took no notice whatsoever and peeled the last of the tape clear. It hurt. He winced as if he could tell. Shan looked into his earnest hazel eyes and the grubby dressing that separated them. They were almost nose-to-nose.

  “Piss off,” she said.

  If she’d head-butted him again, he couldn’t have looked more wounded. He cared what she thought of him. He probably thought he’d done the honorable thing and faced down his superior officer to save her life. Under normal circumstances, it would have been an heroic act. But he really should have let Lindsay fragment her. It just made things a whole lot messier now.

  “I’m really sorry, Boss,” he said to her. “Really I am. But I’ll make damn sure they treat you right.”

  “I bet,” said Shan, and she could have sworn his eyes looked a little glassy.

  “Here we go,” said Barencoin. The shuttle was tiny: one main compartment forward, propulsion section midships, and two aft service compartments leading on to a small open cargo bay. Shan could hear everything. “Isenj codes, ussissi pilot. That’s our escort. Twenty-eight minutes to intercept once we break course. On your mark.”

  “Okay. Get us out of Wess’ej space.”

  “Very good, ma’am.”

  Shan pushed herself away from the bulkhead with her feet and rolled slowly to get a better look. Lindsay was leaning over Barencoin, looking at the readouts.

  “I need a pee,” Shan said. She kept thinking about the grenades. Barencoin had them: she could see them tucked neatly into pockets on his webbing. It would be a damn shame to blow them on this fragile ship and take two good men with her, but she had run out of options. She just needed to get her hands and legs free, and she had less than twenty-eight minutes to do it. She tried not to think of Aras but it was impossible. “Does this thing have heads?”

  Lindsay drifted over to her. Shan expected a boot in the face or something equally eloquent. It never came.

  “You shot me point-blank,” said Lindsay. “Aren’t you supposed to shout something like, ‘Stop—armed police’?”

  “No, I was trying to kill you,” said Shan. “And I don’t normally miss at that range. Not unless some bastard shoots me first, of course.”

  “How many people have you killed?”

  Shan paused to count. “Eight.”

  “Including Parekh?”

  “Maybe. I forget.”

  Lindsay had never believed that. And now she looked scared. Shan thought she might be scared of her. Then it became clear. Oh, it’s not about revenge. Not entirely, anyway.

  “Can’t you wait half an hour?” Lindsay asked. Her tone was quiet, her expression seeking something.

  “When a girl’s got to go, she’s got to go.”

  “Not going to try anything stupid, are you? You know I need to hand you over.”

  Lindsay had always found it hard to meet her gaze. Shan had spent a professional lifetime cultivating that gorgon’s stare and she knew it worked, especially on Lindsay. But she was looking into Lindsay’s eyes now, and it was very clear she was thinking something she wanted Shan to realize.

  Ah.

  Lindsay might have been gutless when it came to it, but she knew Shan wasn’t.

  “You know you can trust me to be sensible,” said Shan. Go on, Lin, do something right for once. “I know how much I’m worth.”

  Lindsay almost looked relieved. “I’ll take you aft.”

  “I can do that,” said Bennett, who clearly didn’t trust Lindsay any further than he could spit. “I—”

  “Sod off,” said Shan. “I still have my dignity.”

  They didn’t even have to take her alive to get a tissue sample. She had to be gone, really gone. And there were ways to be gone forever out here.

  For exactly five vivid and painful seconds, she thought of Aras again and it was unbearable. Then she switched off, as she always had.

  “I come too,” said Vijissi suddenly. He heaved himself straight and pulled himself hand over hand to the hatch. “She is not to be trusted.”

  Shan gave Lindsay an imperceptible nod. Lindsay shrugged, clearly playing along. “If you bite, I’ll shoot you, you little bastard,” she said. She fumbled with the locking straps and released Shan’s legs. For a second Shan thought of putting the boot in, but it would only have satisfied her temper, not achieve her objective. She behaved.

  Vijissi looked like it would take all his effort to accompany them a few meters. He trailed the two women through the propulsion section, through a barely hip-wide passage, and into the aft section that opened onto the cargo bay with its loading hatches on deck, deckhead, and three bulkheads. They were all closed. Through the pressure hatch, it was a black void.

  Lindsay hit the hatch lock behind her. “What are you planning?” she asked.

  “You know damn well or you wouldn’t have secured that hatch,” said Shan. She turned slightly and gestured with her bound hands. “They’ll never find a small cold object in space. It’s about as dead as anyone can get. And it’s quick. They reckon less than twelve seconds.” But twelve seconds sounded like a long time right then. Where’s my last noble thought? Why am I just walking through this? Where’s my fear and regret and panic? “Get this off me.”

  “No.”

  “If I go, I go with dignity, not fucking trussed up like some chicken.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Vijissi struggled into animation. It seemed to have dawned on him a little late that Shan was planning an exit through the air lock.

  “No!” He settled beside her. Zero g made his panic slow and undramatic. “No, I promised Mestin I would always look after you—”

  “It’s too late, mate.”

  No, no, no, I don’t want to die, and I want to see Aras again, and it’s not the way I wanted to end it, and—

  Then the other Shan took over, the one who always knew what to do in a crisis. “Free my hands,” she ordered.

  Lindsay hesitated.

  Then she relented and reached for Shan’s wrists. Shan thought a final punch might have been satisfying, but there was no adequate amount of revenge she could ever exact for detonating ERDs on Christopher.

  Lindsay seemed confident that the ERDs had detonated. Shan hoped Aras had been a long way from the explosions, but if he had survived, he’d be alone, and she knew he dreaded loneliness more than death. My poor bloody Aras. It wasn’t fair to him.

  The comms panel beside them lit up. Bennett was on the squawk box.

  “Hey, what’s happening bac
k there?” he demanded. He must have seen the lock status show up on the panel. And they’d taken longer than he’d allowed for. “Commander? Come on, bloody well—”

  “Stay out of this Ade,” said Shan. “Do me a favor and tell Aras I’m sorry and I didn’t abandon him.”

  “Christ, you—”

  Lindsay shut off the sound. Shan wondered if Bennett had heard her, and if he could still hear her now. And then she looked round at the locked hatch behind them, and she could see his face pressed to the plate, all horror. She really wished she hadn’t. She turned quickly back to the cargo bay.

  “I’ve never doubted your integrity,” Lindsay said, and moved like a swimmer to the manual controls that would open both the aft hatch and all the cargo bay doors.

  It was the compliment that hurt, not the hatred. Shan almost weakened. She had one last weapon. It was personal and it was vengeful. It struck her as very telling that in her last moments she still wanted to lash out and wound.

  So that’s what I am, then, she thought. And here’s something to remember me by.

  “Now this is how you do it, girlie,” Shan said, and stood as tall as she could manage. “Next time you lose your bottle and you can’t pull that pin, think of me. Because you’d give anything to be just like me, wouldn’t you? And you never will. I’m all the guts and conviction you’ll never have.”

  Lindsay said nothing, not with her mouth anyway. Her face crumpled for a second.

  Gotcha, thought Shan. Lindsay would have plenty of time to think on that until she died old and disappointed by her own inadequacies. It was better than a punch. Bruises healed.

  I would have been dead by now anyway. Old age back home, or here with an isenj round in my skull. Borrowed time. And it’s run out. Quit whining.

  Then Shan stopped thinking. It was down to her brain-stem now, the lungfish-lemur-monkey within, and she let it do the panicking rush to destruction for her, because every second she examined the situation was a second closer to turning back and surrendering. The bezeri had died for this. Her life didn’t matter a damn, except to her.