The World Before

by Karen Traviss

  “Most governments are now demanding direct access to the wess’har. Years ago we all agreed that we’d share first contacts with aliens, but that was when we didn’t think it would actually happen.”

  “Extraordinary how simple communication conduits shape worlds.”

  “You understand what’s happening at the Earth end?”

  “That your own government is in what you call a cleft stick.” Ual’s command of English never ceased to surprise Eddie. “If you prevent access to us, the other nations will turn against you. If you open up the ITX link, then you lose control of the situation—such control as you have at such a vast distance, of course.”

  “This all hinges on how other Earth governments show their disapproval. It might be trade sanctions, which won’t make much of a dent on a territory the size of the FEU. Or it might be armed conflict, and that’s a different kettle of fish.”

  “I shall remember that phrase. And who might be able to take on such a federation?”

  “The Sinostates and Africa are strong enough. Africa’s been making the most noise.”

  “I noted that.”

  “Then there’s the Pacific Rim States. They’re vocal but they’re small. The Americas don’t play much these days. But Canada might back the FEU if it decides it wants an excuse for more American territory. They’ve really developed a taste for warmer weather.” Eddie scratched the bridge of his nose. “It all depends how they gang up. We love a good family brawl.”

  Ual made a gargling noise. It might have been amusement. “But this would have less to do with our dilemma here than the opportunity to change the balance of power at home.”

  “How well you know us.” Eddie decided to try the tea. Without milk—even soy milk—it was mouth-puckeringly tannic. Given the state of supplies in Jejeno it was a generous gesture. “But don’t forget there’s plenty of people who really oppose what we did here. It’s just that they’re not high in the global pecking order.”

  “Do politicians think so many years ahead?”

  “They think in days.” Eddie took another gulp of tea. Now here’s the big one. “Have you told the FEU that the Eqbas are coming?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ah.” Devious bastards: they were sitting on it after all. He had to send that report now. The thought almost diverted him. “How did they take it?”

  “They thanked me for the intelligence.”

  Ual sipped something from his cup, wafting a faint aroma of something yeasty and savory. Eddie could hear his own pulse pounding in his ears as he raised the bowl of tea to his lips: the sound of his own swallowing was deafening. He’d fallen off the tightrope at last. He’d wobbled a few times, tilting between observer and player, but he had always felt he could regain his balance.

  Now he’d lost it for good. The next question was going to demand an answer that was tantamount to political advice. It wouldn’t make much difference to Earth, but it might make a huge difference to Umeh.

  “Okay, we’ve done the dance,” said Eddie. “Now what do you want me to say to Nevyan? You must know that they’re never going to hand over Aras.”

  “I know the wess’har mean what they say.”

  “What, then? What do you want?”

  “I want you to talk to the Royal Marines at Umeh Station.”

  Eddie tried not to jump too far ahead. You couldn’t second-guess aliens. It was all too easy to listen to Ual and think he was human, and then misjudge him totally. “About what?”

  “I would like them to do a job for me.”

  “Interesting.”

  “I wonder if they would be willing to arrest—that’s the word, isn’t it, arrest?—Commander Neville and Dr. Rayat.”

  “You’re going to put them on trial?”

  “No, I intend to take them to F’nar and hand them over to Nevyan Tan Mestin, and I won’t be expecting an exchange of prisoners. That’s what your marines do well, isn’t it? They captured Frankland. They can certainly take these two.”

  Eddie never knew if he was being observed covertly or not. That usually didn’t matter: there was a silly kid at the heart of every journalist who got a buzz out of thinking they were dangerous enough to be spied upon. But it mattered now, because Eddie knew he had slipped well out of the neutral zone and into representing the interests of Wess’ej.

  “This isn’t what your cabinet colleagues have agreed to, is it?”

  “No, Eddie. This is my decision and I don’t have the authority to make it, but make it I have. You see my reasoning here.”

  “You’re putting your hands up. A white flag.”

  “I think I understand that. Yes. It is, I suppose, a surrender.”

  Holy shit. Ual was doing a Mossad. He was going to kidnap a target and sort things out via the back door. Eddie thought for a second that there might be a trap laid for him here, but he considered the world from an isenj point of view, and it looked terrifying enough to explain rash measures.

  “We expected Umeh Station to be destroyed in retaliation,” said Ual. “And I still believe that even if Wess’ej doesn’t exact some retribution, then Eqbas Vorhi will. Ask the ussissi.” He held out a stick-thin arm and offered Eddie a cube of what looked like gray rubber. “Do you have the means to play back this data?”

  “I doubt it. What is it?”

  “A little summary of Eqbas activity over the last few thousand years.” Ual turned on his dais and called out. “Lij? Lij, fetch me a data player, please. Mr. Michallat needs one.”

  Eddie was distracted by the promise of new information from the data cube. The history of the World Before seemed more urgent now. He still found their cultural attitudes to information totally confusing, because while no race—wess’har, isenj, or ussissi—made any effort to conceal information, neither did they go to any lengths to share it. The ussissi confused him most of all. They traveled between the various worlds but they seemed not to put information at a premium.

  Perhaps only humans thought knowledge was power. Maybe he was seeing the universe through a journalist’s eyes, where information was more than simple currency: it was life itself.

  He finished his tea and got up to stare out of the window onto the streets below. Lij crept in like a spider, clutching a small box.

  Eddie couldn’t see any pavement in the road beneath. All he saw was isenj, close-packed and moving at a steady rate like flowing liquid. He wanted to walk among them again, but he recalled the last time he had done that and been swept up helplessly in the current of bodies. He could see the dome of Umeh Station from here. It was within walking distance.

  “Your government is going to go ballistic when they find you’ve given away their bargaining chip.”

  “But you and I know there is no bargain to be struck here.” Ual made that chandelier sound and Eddie didn’t look round. “This world is a high price to pay for one ancient soldier. It’s time we moved on.”

  “Humans don’t, if that’s any comfort. And we haven’t even got genetic memory to keep our feuds alive. We’ve really got to work at it.”

  “Will you help me? If I walk in to Umeh Station and ask for a Royal Marine, I fear my plans will quickly become public—especially if they refuse.”

  “I could ask Nevyan,” said Eddie. “But we don’t know who’ll be listening on the ITX, do we? Leave it to me.”

  “Thank you.”

  Eddie felt a pang of guilt about the use he had made of Ual’s shed quill. But at least he now knew that isenj too could play double games, and he had purged his guilt a little. “If they agree to this, how are they going to make contact with you?”

  “I’ll visit the base, as I have before. Culturally, we’re poor at covert behavior, so the shorter the communications chain, the better.”

  “You’d fit right in on Earth,” said Eddie.

  Things had certainly moved on at Umeh Station.

  As Eddie stepped through the airlock and took off his breather mask, he was struck by the progress in completing the
accommodation sections. He also noticed the tropical temperature.

  “Lots more bodies than this place was designed for,” said the harassed site foreman. “We’re working on it. Who you looking for, then?”

  “The marines,” said Eddie. “Ex-marines, rather.”

  “Probably on the building site in the accommodation section. Big strong boys. Even the girl.”

  Eddie had never thought of Sue Webster quite that way but she was engineer-trained and good at rigging water supplies. That probably required a bit of muscle. He didn’t know what Jon Becken’s non-combat specialty was, but he suspected Mart Barencoin’s wasn’t construction.

  “I always knew you’d make a good brickie’s mate,” said Eddie.

  Becken looked down from the top of an accommodation cube with a length of conduit in one hand like a spear, an archetypal tribal warrior in an incongruous T-shirt that read Fly Crab Air.

  “I’d offer you a beer,” he said. “But we’re on rationing.”

  “How’s things?”

  “Piss poor as usual.” Becken swung himself down from the roof, getting a foothold on a doorframe. Ladders were clearly for wimps. “I’ll find Mart and Sue. Is Ade with you?”

  “He’s a bit busy on Wess’ej.”

  It seemed Qureshi and Chahal hadn’t shared the news of Ade’s awkward condition. Maybe they thought that the fewer people who knew, the better. Eddie looked around.

  “Ma’am is in the office,” said Becken, shaping ma’am into an expression of obvious contempt.

  “Yeah, I do have to talk to her some time.”

  “So you’ve not had any contact with her since she kicked off War of the Worlds, have you?”

  “No.” This was too public a place to discuss Ual’s proposal. “Can I have a word with you and the others?”

  Becken wiped the palms of his hands on his backside. “Interview?”

  “No, a conversation. Private. Has anyone mentioned Eqbas Vorhi to you?”

  “If that’s what the ussissi call the World Before, yes.”

  “Want to do a bit of peacekeeping?”

  Becken adopted a carefully blank expression, the sort Eddie read as a strong desire not to react. “Let’s find Mart and Sue, shall we?”

  Barencoin and Webster were fiddling with a water pump. Webster’s rosy, scrubbed face and buxom frame made her look like a paramilitary milkmaid.

  “Eddie’s got a dodgy proposal for us,” said Becken.

  Am I that obvious? “You might be able to do something really useful.”

  Barencoin exchanged glances with Webster and Becken. “We’re pretty useful here.”

  “Do you know that the isenj are talking about exchanging Lin and Rayat for Aras?”

  “I’m glad I wasn’t holding anything fragile when you said that.”

  “Don’t take the piss. Are you up for solving a problem and saving a lot of shooting?”

  “Depends. We’ve been kicked out of the Corps, in case you hadn’t realized. Sue and Jon weren’t even involved. Bastards.”

  Eddie hoped he had read Barencoin correctly as a man who nursed his grudges like babies. “Elements in the isenj administration want to hand over our two colleagues and forget about Aras, just as a goodwill gesture.”

  “They’re shitting themselves about what’s coming over the hill, aren’t they?”

  “House-bricks, mate.”

  “Okay, as long as we don’t get shafted again, we’ll do it for free. Compliments of the Corps.”

  “Really?”

  “You thought we’d refuse?”

  “You haven’t asked me or Jon,” said Webster, a little steel glinting through her bucolic veneer.

  “Okay,” said Barencoin. “Hands up everyone who wants to defend hysterical bezeri-killer Neville and slimy spook Rayat and watch the wess’har turn this place into charcoal. Nobody? Well, carried unanimously. Let’s get to it.”

  Webster gave him a weary look and stood a little closer to Eddie. “I think you’ll find anyone in this place would gladly turn them in. Why the secrecy?”

  “Because the isenj won’t let Lin and Rayat off the planet unless they get Aras. Ual’s being a very naughty spider.”

  “You trust him?”

  “More than I trust the FEU. It’s his arse that’s in the firing line.”

  “And then what happens to us?”

  Eddie paused. He was way out of his depth, but Aras had said Ade’s comrades were welcome to join him. That was permission enough. “You can stay on Wess’ej.”

  “At least we’d all be together,” said Jon.

  Barencoin wasn’t giving up. Eddie thought that if he’d been shanghaied by his masters, he’d be wary too. “And are they treating Ade okay? Why’s he separated from Izzy and Chaz?”

  Barencoin showed no sign of knowing that Ade had c’naatat, even though he had been with him when Shan was captured. Eddie, surprised that Lindsay had kept her mouth shut this long, skimmed the surface of a lie. “He’s fine. They’re just keeping him in F’nar with Aras for a while. I promise you he’s okay.” Shit, I’m losing this. “Look, are you going to do the fucking job or not?”

  Barencoin was no more a fool than Ade was. Eddie wondered why the FEU didn’t just dispense with officers and let the enlisted troops run the show. They’d have made a better job of it.

  “You’re not telling me something,” he said.

  “Ade’s in a bit of a state about Shan.” Well, that wasn’t even a lie. It was simply a fragment of reality from which you couldn’t identify the rest of the picture. “Yes or no?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll let Ual know, then, and he’ll contact you when he’s ready to roll.” He gave them a shrug. He didn’t know what else to say. Shit, what did you say when you’d just trampled over the democratic will of a nation? This didn’t feel at all like the game back home. “I ought to see Lindsay now. I have to do it sooner or later.”

  Eddie stood outside the site office for a full minute. He’d doorstepped everyone in his time. He’d banged on the doors of gangland bosses and disgraced government ministers; he’d thrust a cam in the faces of parents and asked how it felt to know that their child’s body had been found. He believed that after twenty years in the game, there was nothing that could raise his pulse rate or dry his mouth.

  He was wrong. His stomach churned.

  Lindsay Neville weighed just fifty kilos, a woman emotionally wrecked by the death of her baby, a moderate and mediocre naval officer. She’d been a friend. But he was scared. This wasn’t an interview; it was a rebuke. What did you say to an old friend who had personally deployed nuclear weapons when there was no war to fight?

  “Hello, Lindsay,” said Eddie.

  She rested her forehead on one hand while she scribbled on a pad. She wasn’t thirty yet but she could have passed for a lot older. Events had taken their toll. “Hi, Eddie. Slumming it?”

  Well, that sets the tone. “Working.”

  “I’ve seen. Exclusive from the Cavanagh system. It’s made your career.”

  “Oh, didn’t it meet with your approval?”

  She laid the stylus down with exaggerated care and meshed her hands in front of her.

  “Why didn’t you say why we did it? Why didn’t you mention what we had to destroy?”

  “Because immortality tends to knock murdered squid off the news agenda, Lin. They had to concentrate their minds on that first. And nobody can hurt Shan any more. Trust me, I’m running the story. Soon.”

  “What was it you said? It isn’t what’s true that counts, it’s who gets their story in first.”

  “I know this is going to sound harsh, but if you nuke a neutral planet you’ve got to expect some criticism.”

  “I didn’t bloody well know that Rayat had salted the warheads with cobalt.”

  “Silly me. Of course. There’s nothing wrong with detonating ordinary high-yield neutron devices. It’s adding a side order of cobalt that makes them bad.”

  Lindsay
’s pupils were wide and black. Just above her neat collar her throat was flushed. “In the last couple of months I’ve heard every variation of that line you can imagine. I can’t change what happened. If I could rerun time I’d still destroy that parasite but I’d do it differently. Do you think your smart-arse armchair analysis can make me feel any worse than I do? I’m at rock bottom now. I’ve got nothing left to lose. Now sod off.”

  He had to ask. It was a reflex. “Do you want to talk about it on camera and put the record straight?”

  “It’s too late for that. Ask Rayat.”

  Eddie turned to go. It was amazing how little you could know about someone even after you’d lived in their pocket for nearly two years. There were now fewer than ten people alive in his entire world that he knew well enough to count as friends and he’d just lost one more.

  “I have to ask you this, Lin. Shan really did die the way Ade said, didn’t she?”

  The anger that sealed Lindsay’s expression crumbled for a brief moment into something that looked like real regret.

  “Yeah,” she said quietly. “She just stepped out the airlock. A real Titus Oates job.” She started writing again, ticking items off a list. He imagined it was some rota or other: she always found comfort in order. “When are they coming for me, Eddie?”

  “I don’t know.” He felt his plans were tattooed on his forehead for all to read. He concentrated on reducing his blink rate but it was very, very hard. “But they’re not going to forgive and forget, are they?”

  “I know that. Just tell them when they do to make sure they take Rayat as well. I won’t carry the can for this alone.”

  Eddie reminded himself there was no reason for him to feel guilty; he wasn’t the fool who’d wiped out a fragile species. But Lindsay really did seem to think that it was the act of salting the devices with cobalt that had catapulted the event from essential asset denial to an act of war. She couldn’t see that any destruction on Bezer’ej would have provoked the wess’har to retaliate.

  And the FEU hadn’t told anyone else that it had attracted the attention of a massively powerful military civilization. What did these people use for brains?

  His priority now was to get to an ITX relay and send that bloody report, something he should have done there and then. Sod it. The transport back to the shuttle was waiting for him at the entrance along with Ralassi.