Crossing the Line

by Karen Traviss

  He was still contemplating how much he needed her to tell him it would all be fine when one of the young Cetekas males approached him, reeking of anxiety. He thought for a moment that the boy had heard—or seen—that he had balanced the crimes of Josh Garrod.

  The boy stopped three meters short of him.

  “What is it?” asked Aras. It would be more dead bezeri, he knew. They would congregate around stricken comrades rather than flee, just like the ussissi, but quite unlike humans or even wess’har. They would come to the source of the pollution. “How many this time?”

  The boy looked puzzled. “I was told to let you know the ussissi are talking about a ship.”

  “What ship?”

  “A small vessel that left here some hours ago. One of their Umeh-based pilots has been asked to rendezvous with it and transfer passengers. His destination is Actaeon. He is hesitant.”

  Aras was silenced by how wrong his expectation had been. He knew at that moment that his carefully reconstructed world of relative normality had been fleeting and was now crumbling apart. He knew what the boy was going to say before he said it. He could feel his freeze instinct gripping him even before the words emerged.

  “They have a prisoner,” said the boy.

  Aras wanted to scream. He tried to form a sound. But nothing came out.

  Had he known, he would not have given Josh such a quick end.

  Lindsay sat in the aft section with her head in her hands for at least ten minutes before unlocking the inner hatch and hauling herself back down the passage into the forward compartment.

  She was shaking. Her mind was completely empty, unable to grasp anything. She hoped it would stay that way for a while.

  She tried to think of David for a moment and found she couldn’t recall his face or his smell. She wished she had kept the clothing he had been buried in.

  Aras had interred him, and now Aras would know what it felt like to lose someone you loved.

  Bennett and Barencoin were talking very quietly, head-to-head in the two cockpit seats. Rayat was staring at the port bulkhead, turning his text pad over and over in his hands.

  They stopped instantly as if someone had thrown a switch.

  “So it was all for bloody nothing,” said Rayat. “You have no idea what you’ve thrown away.”

  “I do,” said Lindsay. “And it wasn’t.” Neither marine said a word. That was frightening. “How long to rendezvous?”

  “Eleven minutes,” said Barencoin, not looking up from the steeple of his fingers.

  “You killed her,” said Bennett.

  He seemed remarkably subdued for a man who had seen the object of his affections step calmly to her death. He was fingering the bridge of his nose, still covered with the pressure dressing. He hadn’t cleaned his face: the blood had dried into flaky streaks from nostrils to chin. Perhaps he was making a point.

  “It was her choice,” said Lin. “If you’d let me set the bloody grenades, she’d have been spared this.”

  Bennett didn’t answer. He turned away and took out his camo compact again and seemed to be checking his nose. For some reason it was really bothering him. Lindsay was starting to realize the intensity of his crush on the late superintendent. She’d butted him with every scrap of force and venom she could muster. It wasn’t quite the romantic memory a man could hang on to in the dark days ahead.

  “I wish the sodding pilot would get on the voice channel,” said Barencoin, and not to her. “I think he’s shitting himself and waiting for incoming. I expect the wess’har know we’re off-planet by now. There’s a hell of a lot of chat from them on the ITX but I can’t understand a word of it.”

  Lindsay leaned back on the bulkhead out of habit, because nobody needed to lean anywhere in zero g. It was hard to find you were hated even more than Mohan Rayat.

  She could hear Bennett and Barencoin talking in very low voices. She caught the words bloody hero. They might have been saying that they weren’t going to play the bloody hero to save her arse, but she doubted it.

  She knew damn well who they were talking about.

  “Gethes shuttle,” said a voice from the ancient console. “We are from Umeh. I am Litasi.”

  “Shuttle Charlie five niner echo, Umeh shuttle this is Shuttle Charlie five niner echo,” said Barencoin. “About time, over.”

  The ussissi wasn’t any better at radio procedure than Rayat. “I have a problem, gethes,” said the little reedy voice. “What have you done?”

  “Umeh shuttle, I’ve got a 9mm round in my right quad and I want to go home,” said Barencoin. He looked at Lindsay: it was her job to do the diplomacy. “Want to talk to our boss, over?” There was no response, just the vague background sounds of cockpit activity. He eased himself out of his seat with some difficulty. The medication was wearing off. “Over to you, ma’am.” He pronounced the ma’am with the clear meaning of arsehole. “Don’t forget to ask what’s happened to Izzy and Chaz.”

  It was coming her way. She never thought it was going to be easy. What was really bothering her was that she almost felt regret that Shan was gone. She didn’t want to feel that at all.

  “This is Commander Lindsay Neville, European Federal Navy. What’s your problem, pilot?”

  “We are neutral, perhaps in a way you cannot comprehend.”

  “I know that.”

  “But we are not fools.”

  “Spit it out.”

  “What?”

  “Come to the point of this conversation.”

  “You have used cobalt weapons and there is talk that your prisoners are Shan Chail and Vijissi.”

  Lindsay paused. And this was the point at which she knew hell was about to shrug its shoulders and wander out for a spot of bother. She heard the word cobalt. For some reason it was more insistent than prisoners.

  “We have no prisoners,” she said at last. “They’re dead. What did you say about cobalt?”

  “You destroyed Ouzhari with a poisoned bomb. The bezeri are dying in great numbers. Now repeat what you said about prisoners.”

  There was a very long silence. It was what Eddie called dead air. Lindsay felt her face become numb but her lips moved and she heard her own voice above the pounding in her temples.

  “We used neutron devices. That’s to confine the damage to the island. The area should be pretty well clear in a couple of days.”

  “You lie. And I ask again, where are your prisoners?”

  “They’re dead.” It slipped out. She was more fixed on the word cobalt. “They’re gone.”

  The line went almost completely silent save for a slight crackling sound. “Gethes, I cannot receive you. You ask too much.”

  Lindsay turned and looked at Rayat. It was all tumbling out of control too fast. “You heap of shit,” she said. “That was your straight ERD? What the hell have you got us into?” And before she knew what she was doing, she had spun to aim a roundhouse punch at him, a touch too fast in zero g. Barencoin caught her as her fist cracked against Rayat’s face with half the force she had wished for. He grabbed her arm. “You bastard. You lied, you bastard.”

  Rayat looked unconcerned. “You’re naive, Commander. Never take vague assurances about technology. Remember how Frankland insisted on checking the camp defense cannon herself?” He pushed himself further away, as if reassured that Barencoin would stop her reaching for a weapon next. “And you punch straight for power, not round. You’re confusing it with a slap. I would have thought you’d seen Frankland do that properly, too.”

  I don’t need reminding.

  Lindsay held her free hand away in concession. Barencoin still had a tight grip on Lindsay’s other forearm: a small cockpit was a dangerous place for a brawl.

  “Cobalt? Fucking floor-cleaners?” he said. It was their tag for BNOs. He let go of her arm. “Oh boy. Are we in the shit now.”

  Litasi’s voice interrupted. “I suggest you set a course for your mother-ship now. Or perhaps the isenj will accept you on Umeh.”

&nbs
p; Lindsay struggled to stop her voice cracking. “You work for the isenj.”

  “And you have killed a ussissi. You make your way there alone.”

  “We didn’t kill him. He…”

  “What, gethes?”

  “He chose to stay with Shan Frankland.”

  There was more dead air, dead dead air. Lindsay wished more than ever that she’d had the balls to pull those pins and blow her and Shan and anyone nearby to pieces. She’d been duped into using salted nuclear weapons. She’d unleashed an environmental catastrophe. She had all kinds of questions but right then the sheer enormity of the disaster overwhelmed her. The fact that she’d denied c’naatat to humanity was lost, buried under the tumbling rocks of realization.

  “Will you accept a surrender?” said Bennett suddenly.

  “Ade?” said Lindsay. Even Barencoin looked shocked. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Not you,” said Bennett. “Me. Pilot, I want to surrender to the wess’har authorities. Will you take me inboard?”

  “Why?”

  “I want to be tried for involvement in the death of two civilian prisoners.”

  “Ade, for fuck’s sake,” said Barencoin. “It was that stupid cow, not you. We stay together and we find Izzy and Chaz.”

  Bennett pulled his bottle-green beret from his jacket. “Sorry, mate.” He shaped it on his head and hauled himself over to the hatch. He turned to look at Lindsay. “You going to stop me, ma’am?”

  She had no idea what he was playing at. It wasn’t a generous gesture to save them. She knew what he felt for Shan. This was revenge. She just didn’t know how or why.

  “They’ll cut your bloody throat the minute you land,” she said. “We nuked Bezer’ej.”

  “Fine by me, ma’am,” said Bennett.

  Barencoin let go of her. “If we wait any longer, we’ll have a wess’har patrol up our chuff. Let’s thin out. Now.”

  It was just Bennett. He could go, for whatever stupid sentimental reason he had to sacrifice himself. They could make it back to Actaeon under their own steam now. She knew it. One fewer pair of lungs to exhaust the oxygen. Fine. She had to concentrate on something.

  “We accept his surrender,” said the child’s voice that Lindsay knew belonged to a creature that could tear out her throat. “We will transfer him to the appropriate authority.”

  Lindsay turned to Bennett. “Sod off, then.” He didn’t matter. It was Rayat she needed to fix. She couldn’t even begin to imagine what to do with him now, or what his objective really was. “Get a move on.”

  Bennett saluted her mechanically. “You can’t even swear like her,” he said. He adjusted his beret and pulled back the handle that opened the hatch to the lobby. Then he stepped in and closed it behind him. He appeared to be fumbling with it and there was a hiss of air on the intercom.

  Lindsay stared through the softglass at him, uneasy.

  “Bastard,” she said.

  The next minute was a very, very long one. Eventually there was a faint scraping along the hull: the ussissi shuttle was docking, forming a temporary seal with the top hatch. Bennett began wiping his face clean of dried blood with the antiseptic pad from his medical kit, checking in the mirror of his camo compact like a girl.

  “Ready,” said the ussissi pilot. “Pressure equalized.”

  Lindsay wondered why Bennett was so preoccupied with his face. Then he peeled off the dressing from the bridge of his nose, starting carefully at his left cheekbone. And he raised two fingers to her in the gesture of defiance that had been Albion’s way of saying fuck you since Agincourt nearly a thousand years before.

  There wasn’t a mark on him: no hint of swelling eyes or deviated septum or even a split lip to show that he’d been smashed in the face.

  And the dressings weren’t that effective.

  She’d missed something. Shan had been cut, or Shan had healed instantly, but Lindsay had missed a critical break in her skin.

  “Oh no,” said Lindsay. “You bastard.”

  “You’ll pay for Shan,” said Bennett. “Don’t you worry about that, ma’am. You’ll pay, one way or another.”

  She tried to force the hatch manually. He watched her for a couple of seconds and then held a cigar-sized tube to the glass: foam sealant. He’d jammed the wheel.

  “I’m a regular gadget shop,” he said. All she could do was watch him as he climbed the ladder and disappeared with something she wanted to destroy more than anything else in creation.

  Rayat turned to look. Lindsay bit her lip so hard that she could taste hot, wet saltiness. She didn’t want him to know what she’d just seen, ever. It would all start again.

  “What a complete balls-up,” Rayat hissed, and turned away again. “I told you we should have taken samples.”

  Bennett was right, though. They couldn’t even swear like Shan Frankland.

  24

  Be not afraid of them that kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do.

  Luke 12:4

  Mestin had been thinking about the outrage for half a day. People came and went in the Exchange of Surplus Things and glanced at her briefly. They were more distracted by the terrible images of Ouzhari on the public screen that spread the full width of the end wall.

  The island had always been black. The unique grass there made it so. But the land was a different black now, the dull dirty charcoal aftermath of a huge fiery explosion. The sky looked hazy and overcast.

  “Destroy them,” she said at last, more to herself than the matriarchs beside her.

  It wasn’t a huge task. The gethes had one ship: but it was in orbit around Umeh, and that meant ignoring an ancient courtesy. Wess’har had never breached the isenj homeworld. The isenj had been in the Ceret system before wess’har arrived, and for a very long time.

  Fersanye and Chayyas waited with Mestin, but every so often they glanced at Nevyan. She was all acid agitation, tugging at her dhren occasionally, more like a nervous gethes. She was examining a pannier of ripe jay but appearing not to see them.

  “What about those in the ship who are not responsible for this attack?” said Fersanye.

  “It’s a warship,” said Mestin. “But we will give them warning to disembark the uninvolved.”

  “But Actaeon is orbiting Umeh.”

  “Then we shall ask them to withdraw from orbit to a safe distance first.”

  Nevyan turned very slowly from the jay and stood over her mother. “You simply don’t understand gethes. They won’t be polite and move themselves to be killed more tidily.”

  Her scent had started to shift. It made Mestin uneasy, and Fersanye sat utterly still.

  “If Actaeon is destroyed that close to Umeh, there will be debris,” said Mestin. “This is not the doing of the isenj.”

  “That is irrelevant,” said Nevyan. “I say they should take the consequences of their ill-chosen alliance.”

  The silence around the matriarchs—and Nevyan, formally or otherwise, had entered that cadre—was total. Those wess’har bringing in produce and taking it away were halted in their tracks. Matriarchs seldom wrangled: rapid consensus was embedded in their genes.

  But Mestin stood up. Nevyan was shorter, smaller. She was still her isanket in many ways.

  “It’s wrong to punish the isenj, even by accident,” she said.

  Nevyan stood her ground. “You never spend enough time learning from Shan Chail. We can’t defend ourselves with our hands bound. This is a gethes trick—a human shield, they call it. Like hostages. A reliance on the niceness and decency of your enemy, their fear of what will happen to the innocent.” And suddenly her rasping sour-leaf scent was swamped by a massive, throat-closing burst of dominance. Mestin stepped back.

  It was over. She was no longer senior matriarch of F’nar. It had been a brief duty.

  Nevyan jiggled her head, realizing what she had done, but she was now fully dominant and didn’t seem uncomfortable with it. Mestin saw a stranger for the first time. “I have to c
ontact Shan,” she said. “We have heard nothing from her for many hours.”

  “Vijissi was supposed to look after her,” said Mestin. “If there had been problems, he would have let us know.”

  “I still need to talk with her. I need her knowledge.”

  A gethes mother might have taken offense, but Mestin was proud that her daughter was pragmatic enough to take her lessons where she could. She had long suspected the girl would be a better matriarch than she could. It was sad to know she couldn’t teach her enough for the changing times, but Shan could fill the gaps, and she resented the human not one bit.

  They returned to Nevyan’s home to sit in the main room and wait for news.

  And it came.

  They heard a ussissi running down the terrace outside, a rapid scrabbling over stones, and when he burst into the room Mestin watched Nevyan freeze for a brief moment. Then she stood. The ussissi came to a halt at her feet, looking up.

  “Shan Chail is dead,” he said. “And Vijissi too. The gethes took them.” His lips were pulled back and all his teeth were visible. “We want balance. We want revenge.”

  Nevyan took the news in silence and walked out slowly to stand on the terrace, Mestin a little behind her. The new matriarch of F’nar looked down on her new responsibility and let out a piercing territorial cry that rang round the caldera, note over note, for a count of ten. The sound echoed off the walls of the basin: the disembodied voice continued for a while after Nevyan closed her mouth and lowered her head.

  Then she turned round, looking past Mestin, and beckoned the ussissi forward with one gesture of her arm. Even without that heavy, overwhelming scent, she was suddenly the most extreme, most dominant female her mother had ever seen.

  “Make contact with the World Before,” said Nevyan Tan Mestin.

  25

  This is a dreadful place. They call it Mar’an’cas and it’s no more than a rock. We’ll have to rely heavily on the hydroponics to grow enough food. It’s an island: Mum says it’s like Alcatraz was, to keep up away from everyone on Wess’ej. I don’t even know if we’ll have food to spare for Black and White.