The World Before

by Karen Traviss

  “Forget Umeh Station. You file a fucking story on an alien invasion and eternal life, then piss off for a day?” Counting to five evidently didn’t help Mick’s temper any more than it did Eddie’s. “No follow-up?”

  “I got the piece across,” he said slowly. “No mean feat.”

  “Yeah, and—”

  “Did you run the frigging story?”

  “You want to see? Here.” Mick switched him through to an output channel. Eddie expected to see his own brief bombshell against a backdrop of Surang’s skyline but it wasn’t that at all.

  The segment started with a long shot of flames licking through the shattered windows of an office building ringed by a high wall, or at least it would have been ringed if the wrought-work gates weren’t hanging off their hinges and the wall hadn’t been breached in one place by a truck. The crawler caption said FEU DIPLOMATIC CENTER HEADQUARTERS, TSHWANE, AFRICAN ALLIANCE. The stone-throwing, looting crowd provided a better commentary than any voice-over or textlink.

  “Europe isn’t flavor of the month in some parts of the world now,” said Mick.

  “Just on the strength of my piece?”

  “Just on the strength of our diplomatic correspondent asking the Rim States embassy in Brussels whether the FEU had discussed the Eqbas Vorhi with them. We’re in melt-down here. The emergency debate in the UN is still running. If we’re lucky, it’s sanctions.”

  “Not much they can do apart from sanctions.”

  “Oh, there is. The Sinostates are talking about taking over the ITX-router uplink in a neutral capacity to defuse the situation.”

  “Jesus.” War: it meant nothing else. “They knew, Mick. They bloody knew.”

  “You can confirm that, can you? Because they’re denying it pretty vigorously.”

  Eddie’s mouth opened on a reflex to explain that he could, but then he thought of Ual. All his rules of engagement about on and off the record had flown out the window. Did it matter? If Eddie confirmed it, would that make matters worse on Earth, or would it make them worse for Ual, or both? Wess’har didn’t have any problem with information. Eddie envied them. Knowledge was the heart of his guilt.

  But the denial was a lie, and lies were there to be exposed. It was pure instinct. “Yes, Minister Ual told them. And either way, the buggers are coming. Does it matter?”

  “It does if everyone thinks that’s not all they’re being told. I need something down the line from you fast.”

  “You’re being monitored.”

  “I don’t give a fuck. You think the FEU’s going to pull the plug now?”

  Eddie was usually so focused on a story that it ate him alive. This time he had another story, closer to home, and one in which he was equally mired. Both had started tumbling like an avalanche. He had to get to Nevyan and tell her what Ual was planning: and he had a responsibility to events he had helped unleash on Earth.

  It never used to be this hard.

  “Okay, I’ll see if Ual will talk to me about Eqbas Vorhi on camera. Meanwhile, get a talking head. Haven’t you got a tame biologist to interview?”

  “I want it live from the spot, Eddie.”

  “You want to come 150 trillion fucking miles out here and do it yourself? I’ve got a war starting up here.”

  “So have we.”

  Eddie made the hardest decision of his life, one that stripped him of his identity more surely than Ade’s discarded stripes had erased him as a sergeant.

  “Later,” he said. “I’ve got something to do that’s more urgent than a story.”

  And Eddie Michallat ceased to be a reporter, not in name, but in the core of his being. He closed the relay and left.

  Ade regretted that his best blues and his white Wolseley helmet were seventy-five years in the past on a planet he could never return to, Earth. It would have been nice to turn out really smart for the Boss one last time.

  He made another attempt to press a sharp crease into his DPM combat trousers and reassured himself that under these circumstances it was the effort that counted. You couldn’t press crease-proof kit properly with the heated blade of a fighting knife.

  He pulled on the trousers, made sure they were tucked neatly into his calf-high combat boots, and adjusted his beret. Then he reassembled his ESF670 rifle and slid the magazine into its catch.

  Aras wandered up behind him. “You won’t need that.”

  Ade checked the scope and flicked through the settings. If he had to fire, it would be at close quarters. The calibration didn’t matter.

  “They want a chunk of her? Well, they’re going to have to go through me.”

  “They know how strongly you feel about it.”

  Ade didn’t trust the Eqbas. He knew how wess’har thought; fragments of Aras’s memory gave him a definite emotional sense of the wess’har mind. They didn’t mess around with life. But he didn’t know how different the last ten thousand years had made the Eqbas. The fact that they asked to do a post mortem at all worried him.

  Aras showed no sign of emotion at all, and that worried Ade more than the self-destructive rage and grief that had brought the wess’har to the brink of using a grenade on himself. That was how you made sure c’naatat didn’t try to put you back together again. Eddie had talked Aras out of it. He could really use words, that bloke: Ade envied him.

  Aras put his hand gently on the rifle. “Shooting is unnecessary.”

  “You stick to your job, and I’ll stick to mine.”

  “Ade, I know how hard this is.”

  “You can’t know. You ever caused the death of someone you cared about?”

  Aras made a small huff that could have been contempt. “I’ve lost many, many people.”

  “It isn’t the same. I’ve had my mates die on me more than once, but I handed Shan over to die. You think about that. I can’t ever put that right, but I can bust my arse trying to make sure she actually does rest in some sort of peace.”

  Sometimes he didn’t feel comfortable talking to Aras. He liked him a lot and counted him as a mate, but Aras always seemed to be thinking things that Ade couldn’t even imagine. He made him cautious, afraid of looking stupid. And he had been Shan’s choice, and Ade hadn’t. It put things in perspective.

  “Ade, let me talk to Shapakti.”

  “You think I’m some knuckle-dragging grunt looking for a fight, don’t you?”

  “No, I think you’re a man who has been through a great deal of stress. It’s not unreasonable to be agitated.”

  “I’m trained to talk to people. When the talking fails, I shoot. But I talk first. You ever done urban peacekeeping? You want to know what you do when you’re being stoned by women and children?”

  “You threw the stones back, if I recall correctly,” said Aras. “But I’m sorry. I’m not handling this well.” He indicated the door. “Go on. Do what you feel you have to.”

  Ade was instantly reduced to shame and embarrassment by the wess’har’s soothing tone. Shit, Aras had lost his wife. His own grief blinded him to that.

  “Sorry. I was well out of order there.”

  “We’ve all been well out of order in recent weeks. It would be insulting to Shan if we were not diminished by her death.”

  Aras seemed suddenly calmer for finally knowing where Shan was. “I’d better be off, then,” said Ade.

  F’nar was like one of those housing estates they built to cut down on crime. With its single frontage of curved inward-looking terraces, everyone could see you come and go; and everyone knew where Ade was going.

  “It’s cold,” said Lisik, one of Nevyan’s four husbands. He had picked up a little English from Nevyan or maybe even his daughter, Giyadas. He didn’t seem intent on learning more than he had to. “Vehicle, not walking. I take you?”

  Ade thought it was just a pleasantly crisp day, but wess’har felt the cold. “Thanks.”

  “No Aras?”

  “Aras is preparing the grave.”

  “What is grave?”

  “Never m
ind.”

  F’nar didn’t have a shuttle port. It wasn’t the way wess’har built, not here anyway, although the pictures of Eqbas Vorhi seemed to suggest that they once did. The jungle of pipes, conduits and service buildings needed to handle its few flights was somewhere underground where it didn’t spoil the scenery. Lisik stopped the vehicle apparently in the middle of nowhere.

  “You sure this is the right place?” said Ade.

  “We wait,” said Lisik.

  Ade picked specks off his lovat pullover. He’d wanted a body to grieve over and so had Aras, but now that it was a reality it was also a reminder—if he needed one—that he’d fired at least twenty rounds into Shan’s body. He’d taken enough gunshot wounds to know how much pain they caused.

  And she’d head-butted him. She’d sworn at him, called him a frigging idiot, despised him in her final moments because he had failed her. He didn’t protect her. He hadn’t protected his mum from his father either, not once. No wonder his dad had called him a gutless little bastard. He was.

  People said they would give everything if they could spend just five minutes again with someone they’d lost, but what Ade had never known was just how powerful and painful that feeling could be until now.

  There was no sign of Shapakti or his crew. If they wanted a sample of c’naatat, they could take it from him. He didn’t care any more.

  “Not long,” said Lisik.

  A muffled boom like shelling in a distant war broke the silence. A craft was beginning its descent. The small point of reflected sunlight became a blue disc and then resolved into a blunt-nosed cylinder that spiraled lower and then descended vertically, kicking up a skirt of dust.

  How are they going to bring her out?

  The hatch remained closed.

  Wess’har don’t give a shit about bodies. No coffins, no body bags. Oh, God.

  The clicking of cooling metal gave way to the chunk-chunk-chunk of securing bolts being withdrawn. The three-part hatch door cracked open and the lower section peeled out into a ramp. Serrimissani scuttled down it and Ade stepped forward, rifle shouldered, stomach churning, wanting it all to be over and hating himself for his haste.

  “I want you to remain calm,” said Serrimissani.

  Oh, God, no. It was going to be bad. He made himself look towards the open hatch. It felt like every moment before the first shell landed, before the shooting started, before the ramp went down on the assault craft, except he didn’t feel trained and armed against this at all.

  “Get inside,” she said.

  The shuttle smelled of panic. Ade had never consciously noticed scent before, and he realized that his senses were changing just as Aras had said. He wondered if his bowels would let him down. He knew it happened to plenty of people—plenty of seasoned combat troops—but he wished it wouldn’t happen to him. There was something about harmed women that triggered it badly. He thought of his father knocking seven shades of shit out of his mother.

  You could have saved her.

  Ade didn’t recognize what was lying wrapped in a piece of iridescent fabric on the bench. Nevyan was leaning over it. He passed through that familiar split second where the rest of his field of vision was gray fog and he could see just one awful detail: and this time it was the back of a skull, two cords of tendon flanking a knob of vertebra.

  “Oh God.” Don’t turn the body. I can’t cope with seeing her face. Don’t—

  Nevyan’s head jerked round, eyes vividly yellow like an animal’s. “She’s alive,” she said. “We didn’t dare send a message. Nobody must know.”

  Everything was playing back to him delayed by a second. She’s alive. Ade heard the sound but the meaning didn’t sink in. Then there was absolute silence.

  The skeletal, hairless head moved slightly.

  Ade felt his legs start to buckle under him. He could hear himself saying, “How? How? How?” over and over again. But his training kicked in and he seized it gratefully, blind to what he was looking at because it was too awful to dwell on.

  “Is she conscious?”

  “No,” said Nevyan.

  He couldn’t call for medical support. And whatever Shan’s body was doing, it was well beyond the skills of anyone trained to deal with ordinary humans. If c’naatat had kept her alive through all that, then there wasn’t much else to be done except to give it some energy to draw on. It looked as if it had already eaten her alive.

  “Get her back home.” Ade couldn’t work out why his hands weren’t shaking. “Just get her back home. Now.”

  Aras didn’t want to bury the swiss with Shan’s body. While he understood the human need behind Ade’s request, Shan had no use for it.

  But I do. It was a comfort to him.

  Shapakti watched while he hacked out the grave, turning occasionally to look out from the cliff across the plain.

  “A corpse can’t see the view,” he said unhelpfully.

  “This is an act for the living, not for the dead.”

  “Burying it will obstruct the scavengers.”

  Aras laid down his tools and stood up. “It was my isan,” he said. “And if you make any attempt whatsoever to touch her body I will personally kill you, and if I do not, then Ade Bennett will. Confine your curiosity about c’naatat to me. Do you understand?”

  It was unthinkable for one wess’har to even consider threatening another. They were a species built on consensus, but Aras’s humanity had swept that aside in its pain. Shapakti cocked his head, suitably chastened.

  “Sir,” he said.

  “This medication you take. Does it reduce your emotional longing for your isan?”

  “A little.”

  Aras had wanted to hear the word completely. But it was unlikely the drug would have breached his c’naatat’s robust defenses anyway. Perhaps trying to forget his pain was an act of betrayal. He knelt down and sat back on his heels, waiting.

  “What is the red object?” asked Shapakti.

  “A swiss. A device for communications and data gathering, among other things. It belonged to Shan Frankland and she valued it greatly.”

  “May I examine it?”

  “No.”

  It wasn’t Shapakti’s fault. He was simply being wess’har—pragmatic, exact, unsentimental. The position of the grave didn’t matter and neither did the swiss; nothing of Shan would be here to enjoy the vista, and Aras had embedded memories of his isan more vivid than those in the swiss. But the modest ritual mattered. That much of him was human, he realized.

  So he waited. Shapakti said nothing and waited with him.

  Irregular scrambling footsteps and tumbling pebbles announced an approach. Aras expected Ade to appear with the body, and he braced himself for the moment, ashamed of dreading it, but it was Serrimissani. She was running. The wind was in the wrong direction to smell her state of mind but Aras needed no scent cues to tell she was extremely agitated.

  He feared the worst, but under the circumstances he was at a loss to think what worse could possibly be.

  Maybe they hadn’t found Shan after all. The thought was agonizing. He had prepared himself for this and it had not been easy. He stood up.

  “What is it?”

  Serrimissani stood panting. “This will be hard for you to understand,” she said. “You must come with me. Shan is alive.”

  She wasn’t making sense. “Don’t. Don’t do this to me.”

  “She is alive.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  Serrimissani turned to go back down the slope but Aras grabbed her by her decorative belts, jerking her back. Shapakti was forgotten for the moment. “She cannot be alive. Unless Ade lied.”

  “He didn’t.”

  Shapakti didn’t appear to understand the conversation but he had certainly reacted to the excitement. He was standing absolutely wess’har-still, alarmed: Aras was seeing more similarities than differences in the Eqbas now. He beckoned to him.

  “Go back to your crew,” Aras said carefully. “We have no body t
o bury.”

  “Were the ussissi mistaken?”

  “That’s not your concern. Go.”

  Serrimissani was wrong. There was a rational explanation for this, and it would be heartbreaking. Aras prepared himself for the distress and waited until Shapakti was well out of earshot. He turned on her, angry in anticipation of having his hopes dashed.

  “Not even c’naatat can survive in space.”

  “But she has. We can argue about the mechanism later. Come. But prepare yourself—her appearance will upset you.”

  Aras struggled. Over the years he had picked up the human habit of suppressing his reactions. “And this is not a shock? That she has survived in space?”

  “She’s not conscious.”

  Aras didn’t want to hear any more. He wanted to see. He set off at a run and eventually he couldn’t hear anyone behind him. He didn’t look back.

  7

  Shapakti, I don’t understand. Why do humans say they were only following orders? Don’t they understand that it is even worse to obey a bad order than to give one? I suspect that they delight in being loathsome.

  SARMATAKIAN VE,

  adviser to the council of matriarchs of Eqbas Vorhi,

  commonly known as the World Before

  Eddie sprinted along the terraces. His lungs were screaming for air but he needed to find Nevyan. She wasn’t responding to the virin.

  He headed for Aras’s home. He needed not to be alone with what was now in his head. Wess’har going about their business took no notice of him, probably thinking he was like Ade, just running for fun.

  Fun. What the fuck’s happened to me in the last two years? How did I get to be a go-between? His lungs struggled and he envied Ade his fitness. Maybe that’s all I ever was, a fucking messenger boy.

  One wess’har stepped out and stopped him, catching him roughly by the shoulder. “Body is home,” he said. “Understand? Body is home.”

  Eddie understood all right. They said things came in threes. Ual was kicking over the traces, the FEU was under siege, and now Shan Frankland’s body had been brought back for burial. However urgent his problems, Ade and Aras would be in far worse shape than he ever would.