And to Aras.
Stop it.
The cargo bay hatch opened and Shan stepped over the coaming. The opening in the bulkhead was closing in two sections, top to bottom, like a pair of scissors.
Vijissi shot through after her.
“For Chrissakes, Vijissi, get back now,” Shan yelled.
But Vijissi tried to look after Shan to the very last, and as the deckhead opened and the escaping atmosphere whipped her hair, her lungs began struggling and he grabbed her hand hard in his oddly soft paw.
So this it, Shan thought. She really was dying. It didn’t feel that momentous, just disappointing. She gripped Vijissi, not wanting to look into his face.
It was agonizingly cold. Her chest hurt. She had seconds.
She pushed out from the open hatch and let go of Vijissi and didn’t see where he went, because she had screwed her eyes up tight to shut out the bottomless, distanceless, silent void that had no up or down or near or far.
She was holding out in vacuum longer than any human. That was something. It felt like walking under the sea to apologize to the bezeri for the last time, only much, much colder.
Her last thought before her lungs gave up straining for one final breath and the final blackness engulfed her was that she had never told Aras that she loved him.
I think I do.
Maybe he knows anyway.
Maybe—
23
I can assure you I had no idea what Commander Neville was planning. Her orders were only to detain one of our own citizens, Superintendent Frankland. I greatly regret the events on Bezer’ej and I fully appreciate the likelihood that this will be viewed as an outright act of war by the wess’har authorities. Your offer of asylum for those members of the Actaeon crew who want it is a generous one and we will evacuate to Jejeno any personnel who wish to leave.
Message from the FEU foreign minister
to Minister PAR PARAL UAL
“He lies,” said Ual.
Eddie thought of the urine vial in his inside pocket and the way the ruby bead and the fragment of quill rattled, pricking his conscience. He hadn’t let the container out of his sight. He wasn’t sure if he’d ever be able to hand it over to Shan now.
He was stranded on Umeh. But it was still a safer haven than Actaeon.
“Why do you think that?” he asked.
Ual shimmered with emerald beads. “How did he expect to take this Frankland off Bezer’ej if they landed by dropping in cloth suits?”
“You know a lot.”
“There are no restricted frequencies on what you call ITX. That concept is one we have to learn from you, I think. Unless you speak in that odd code some of you employ, all hear everything if they choose to listen.”
“And you do.” Eddie was still finding it hard to come to terms with the fact that enemies could share an open ITX relay. Humans wouldn’t. But then if there was a serious threat of the wess’har trashing the thing in a fit of pique, and the isenj couldn’t nip out to repair it…no, he was starting to grasp how they thought. Nobody poisoned a shared water supply. “I would like to broadcast a story on this. Can you confirm how serious the situation is?”
There was a cup of coffee and a bowl of some isenj beverage on the polished cube of a table between them. Ual didn’t seem to be in a drinking mood. Even without a facial expression to guide him, Eddie knew the minister was scared.
“The ussissi are saying the environmental damage to that area of Bezer’ej is severe and that the bezeri are dying in very large numbers,” said Ual. “You will recall what happened when we did the same thing unintentionally. Your kind appear to have used a very unpleasant device indeed, one containing cobalt, a persistent poison to add to the initial destruction.”
Eddie didn’t know much about physics, although he had an extensive mental catalog of things that people could use to kill each other. He checked his database. Salted bombs, especially cobalt, were at the far unethical end of ordnance, a terrorist’s weapon. They were ultra-dirty.
“They weren’t leaving anything to chance, then,” said Eddie quietly, ashamed beyond belief. He could hardly believe it of Lindsay. He still found it hard to accept how ruthless women could be. “I have to tell this story, Ual. People on Earth need to know what we’ve done.”
“Humans have no difficulty saying negative things about their own kind, then.”
“I certainly don’t. But sometimes the likes of me are the only ones who will tell hard truths.”
“And why are you asking me for help?”
“For facts I might not know.”
“Your masters might not broadcast them.”
Eddie was caught off guard. He had grown up in a world where information couldn’t be suppressed easily. There were simply too many routes and too many connections between people and nations for anyone to control it, except…except if you were isolated on one end of a line 150 trillion miles from home. They could cut him off.
He couldn’t call anyone except via that ITX line, and the FEU was controlling the Earth end of that. There was no chance of placing the story elsewhere or slipping a note to someone down the pub. If he had a story, it went through BBChan, and BBChan was reliant on the FEU relay. The station could make all the brave stands it wanted, but if it didn’t receive the information, he was stuffed.
“I took my eye off the ball,” he said. “But I’ll find a way through.”
“I think you might not need to,” said Ual. He leaned forward, rattling musically like fine crystal, and pushed the now tepid coffee towards Eddie. “And I assume you will stay. I enjoy our chats. This isn’t a sensible time to return to Actaeon.”
“Thanks,” said Eddie. “I know.”
The ground car was waiting outside the ministry, parked so close to the entrance that when he opened the front door he could step straight into its open side without walking on pavement. Serrimissani was waiting inside the vehicle, absorbed by moving images on her text pad.
“You exceed even the isenj’s crimes,” she said. She wasn’t her usual impatient, stroppy self: she seemed very subdued indeed. “What have you started, gethes?”
Eddie bristled. “Don’t lump me in with them,” he snapped. “I am not crew. I am not military. I’m an independent civilian and I’m as disgusted as you are.”
She stared at him. And then, overtaken by an impulse, he squeezed past her, the back of his hand brushing against that odd stiffly ridged coat for the first time, and stumbled out through the car’s other side opening onto the street and into the tight-packed crowds of isenj.
He almost fell, but the press of bodies held him up and he regained his balance. So many isenj stopped in their tracks that the river came to a halt at his point in the stream. He heard a chattering commotion from a distance where the flow had not stopped as fast, a motorway pile-up in the making. He wondered if any isenj had been crushed or trampled. But there was nothing he could do except move or not move with them.
For the first time, he walked the roads of Jejeno. He had no choice. This was not a crowd. It was a current and he drifted on it. The scent of wet wood and leaves, incongruously sylvan for a world with no forests or open land to speak of, filled his mouth. He couldn’t speak their language and he had no idea where he was going. He looked down on the top of thousands of spider heads.
The chattering and rasping was rising in volume. “Anyone here speak English?” he shouted. Oh, you tourist. You swore you’d never say that. He was near the ministry. There might be government staff in the throng. They might speak—
“Why you do this attack?” rasped a voice behind him.
Eddie tried to turn his head. The isenj sounded about three or four meters away. “I don’t know. They’re afraid of c’naatat. Lots of humans would want it.”
“Fool,” said the voice.
“Don’t you want it?”
“Look around you,” said the isenj. “Fool.”
It was a great moment in television, but Eddie couldn’t get h
is arm free to release the bee-cam from his pocket. He accepted it as a lesson in reality. This moment was about him, and not an event to be filtered through a lens into distant entertainment.
And how was he going to get out of the crowd?
“Michallat,” called Serrimissani. There was an exchange of chittering. He craned his neck as far as he could. Serrimissani was clambering over the mass of isenj like a sheepdog running across the tiled backs of a tight-packed flock. “Move diagonally. Swing round.”
He tried. He changed direction. It was like being a container ship. He could turn, and he could stop, but it was a big U-turn and a long time stopping. Serrimissani caught up with him, the angry mongoose again, and seized his sleeve to steer him. The cacophony around him was deafening now.
The ussissi held onto him until they had eased around a full arc and the car and the ministry building were in sight again. She shoved him the last meter and he fell into the open car.
As he was scrambling to his knees, Serrimissani cuffed him hard across the back of the head and he felt hot needles plunge into his shoulder. He yelled out.
She had bitten him. She was enraged.
Eddie rolled over and hoisted himself backwards onto the seat by his triceps. He hurt all over, especially his head and shoulder.
“Next time it will be your throat,” she hissed. “Never do that again. You cause chaos. You cause injury. Your kind will never learn to control your impulses.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. He felt his shoulder: it was wet with something he suspected was his own blood rather than her saliva. He wondered what you could catch from a ussissi bite.
“Take me back to Umeh Station,” he said. “I want to hear what you all have to say. I want to show humans back on Earth what you think of us, in case it helps bring us to our senses.”
Serrimissani gave him her scorpion-snack look and stared deliberately out of the opening. Then she turned back to him.
“I am afraid for you,” she said. “And you should fear us too.”
“Will your people talk to me on camera?”
“Let us hope you continue to be useful to the isenj, or there will be no gethes left alive in this system by the end of the season.”
Eddie took that as a yes.
The ussissi were one now: they prowled around the quiet disorder of Constantine’s evacuation, oddly synchronized in their movements, sniffing through the final ranks of colonists who were waiting to embark from the Temporary City. High-pitched chattering filled the air but the humans were silent.
Aras stood and watched from a distance. All he wanted was Josh Garrod and Dr. Mohan Rayat, but he wanted Josh more. He had never felt quite like this. Wess’har were not vengeful. They would balance, and do the job without hesitation as he had done at Mjat, but they didn’t invest emotion in the act. Now Aras not only wanted to hurt Josh: he needed to.
He wasn’t proud of it. It was a human legacy. But he felt no guilt either.
And where was Shan? She still hadn’t called in. He would have to search for her. He was beginning to worry, even though she was the one person other than himself who had least to fear from violence.
The ussissi were still searching, staring up into faces, comparing features to the images in their virin’ve. Aras was reminded of pictures from Constantine’s history archive, of dogs set to guard humans. He didn’t want to dwell on the parallels. He was responsible for the humans being here and he was ultimately responsible for Shan becoming a magnet for human greed. He hadn’t set the bombs, but his actions had led to this point. He had to clear up the mess he had made.
No, Josh betrayed me. He betrayed the bezeri. He could have chosen otherwise.
Aras had been watching the search of the line for a while when someone new joined it and approached one of the ussissi.
It was Josh Garrod.
He wasn’t making any attempt to slip unnoticed into the queue. The ussissis’ single, constant, chittering voice stopped abruptly and they all stared as one at Josh.
For a moment Aras thought they were going to disobey him and rip the man apart where he stood. They were certainly agitated enough to do it. But they didn’t, and simply surrounded him as if he might make a run for it. The other colonists made a sudden and large space around them. Josh spotted Aras and moved towards him, one arm outstretched as if in plea.
When Aras saw Josh’s face—stricken, anguished, drained of blood—something in him welled up and took him over in a way it hadn’t when he destroyed Mjat. This was a man he had held as a newborn, whose father and grandfather and ancestors right back to Ben Garrod had been his friends. They had almost been his family. He had come as close to loving them as kin as a wess’har ever could. And now in an instant they had smashed everything he had struggled to restore for five hundred years.
He grabbed Josh by his collar. His eyes hurt, as if there was an unbearable pressure building inside them, and he had never felt that before. He tried to shake the sensation aside. It was constricting his throat.
“Why did you betray me? Why did you do this?” Motive didn’t matter, but a part of him needed an answer. “Tell me. I thought we shared the same purpose. I thought you were my friend.”
Josh’s voice was almost a sob. “We didn’t know what was in the bomb, Aras. We didn’t know.”
“You took the gethes there to carry out their desecration. You knew. How could you do this?”
“But we didn’t know they were going to use such a persistent poison.” Josh’s breath was coming fast, scented with the sourness of an empty stomach that was almost more pungent than the acrid scent of panic. “They told us it would dissipate in days, or we’d never have helped them. We’d never have risked the bezeri like that. We thought that burning the island was better than allowing c’naatat to be exploited. Tell us what we can do now to help. Anything. Just tell us.”
Josh sagged against Aras’s grip. Aras believed every word of his repentance.
But words weren’t enough to soothe his pain. He envied Shan her profanities. A ussissi seized his other sleeve, trying to pull him away from Josh.
“We will do this,” she said. “This will distress you. Just go.”
Aras shook the ussissi off. He let go of Josh and stood looking at him and almost drowning in the pain that was threatening to overwhelm him. And he felt Josh’s anguish and regret too, because Josh was a good man who had never wavered from a path of respect and noninterference until the gethes drove him to it.
“I’m sorry, my friend.” Josh appeared to be weeping. He put his hand out to touch Aras, something he had always avoided for fear of contamination. Aras stepped back. It was too late for that now. “We never meant this to happen. God forgive us.”
Aras knew that and it made no difference. His human side wanted to comfort Josh but his wess’har mind—and he was still wess’har, however altered—said that the man’s apologies and tears and true intent counted for nothing.
Aras felt himself reach for his tilgir and pull it from its sheath as if he was going to do some harmless pruning. “I truly cared for your community, and I truly cared for you.” He should have let him pray first, he knew, but prolonging the agony wasn’t the wess’har way. “Now I have to balance. I’m sorry. I am so very, very sorry.”
Josh opened his lips as if to speak and Aras swung the blade two-handed, right to left. Josh fell and the only sound was two thuds as he hit the ground.
The silence around Aras was complete and lasted three seconds.
Then it dissolved into small cries, and then screams, and the ussissi turned as one and rushed at the huddle of colonists, scattering them.
They were simply holding them back. But it all fell into chaos, children crying and screaming, men running. Aras stood looking down at Josh’s body, only half aware of the panic and noise around him. He wasn’t about to repent and he felt no guilt.
He was wess’har. He had done what he should have done many, many years ago.
But it hurt him in a
way that shooting Surendra Parekh never had. He could feel shaking starting in the pit of his stomach and the pain in his eyes had grown from prickling to stabbing.
The ussissi female trotted up to him, head lowered in appeasement.
“Go,” she said. “We will deal with this.”
This time he accepted her help. “Be careful of the blood,” he said. He noticed he had a great spray of it down his tunic and he could smell it. “He has been to Ouzhari. Or I might have caught him with my claws.” He doubted that even c’naatat could survive decapitation, but Aras was taking no chances. “Burn his body.”
Fire was a prudent move. But Aras also remembered all that Ben Garrod had told him about Hell, and the image distressed him.
Aras walked down to the cliffs again and searched for the lights. His tilgir dangled from his hand. He’d clean it later.
It wasn’t unknown for the bezeri to go deep at times of threat and crisis. He hoped that was what they had done, but he doubted it in that core of him that understood and accepted reality. He’d watched the single, unbroken mass of green light fade and die, and that was what he knew had happened to the bezeri.
Those were the ones who had died quickly, closest to the fallout from Actaeon’s bombs. There were other bezeri settlements further from the chain, but in time the contamination would travel further and drop silently into the sea with each rainstorm. It would seal the fate of the remaining bezeri population and the other life on which they fed and depended. They were tied to place. They could never flee.
Now there was Rayat to hunt down.
Aras would have a go, as Shan called it. He would also have a go at that little female, the one Shan called Lin, if Shan had not already killed her. It had been her doing as well. Perhaps he would turn Rayat over to the ussissi. It would appease their rage for a while.
And where was Shan? Isan or not, he would give her a piece of his mind for worrying him so.
Crossing the Line Page 32
