The World Before

by Karen Traviss

  Ual had to think about that request for a few seconds to make sense of it.

  “What Eqbas vessel?”

  “The one that has just made itself known to us.”

  Ual had known they were coming, but the reality of arrival—and the speed—was a shock. “I had expected the wess’har to board us.”

  “Unless I have misunderstood the ussissi on board, the commander means to take this entire vessel inboard.”

  Ual had planned to admit a boarding party as an act of good faith. “Are you correct?”

  “She said vessel.” The ussissi beckoned him forward. “Minister, look at this display. This is a hazard system.” He passed a hand across a smooth white surface and shapes welled up from it, three-dimensional and subtly colored. “It detects objects and hazards. The small object here is us.”

  There was a bead-sized lump on the surface. Close to it was a curved raised area that ran off the edge of the screen. Lindsay edged up behind Ual to look.

  “That is the Eqbas vessel,” said the ussissi.

  “Oh shit,” said Lindsay.

  Ual began to wonder if he had made a very grave error of judgment. But perhaps it didn’t matter which wess’har nation he met first; one thing he did know about wess’har—from both his ancient memory and his own experience—was that they meant what they said.

  Humans didn’t.

  “Follow the Eqbas commander’s instructions,” said Ual.

  8

  Targassat taught us that a minimal life-style is a prudent one, not only because it is right but because it is pragmatic. If you require little, then hardship will present no challenge to you; you will survive. The history of the gethes confirms this. Without the trappings of civilization they believe they must have, they degenerate into chaos. Their pursuit of excess destroys them and their world. Unfortunately, Earth is not their world alone.

  SIYYAS BUR

  matriarch historian of F’nar

  She could see lights. She could see red and green and gold and violet and something she didn’t have a name for.

  She didn’t even have a name for herself or a sense of her shape or substance. But she could see.

  She could taste something familiar yet alien, earthy, alive, and then it was gone again. She was moving fast through water. Then she was on dry land, tight-packed with others she knew, enveloped in familiar smells and dryness. And then she was looking down on black grass.

  It was all familiar and yet completely strange. She wasn’t afraid any more. She simply had a sense of urgency.

  She had to do something.

  The things she could see and feel and taste were inside, but she couldn’t define how: they just were. There was nothing outside. She was vaguely aware of the form of herself, but she couldn’t feel anything that told her where she ended and the rest of the universe began.

  Then she could see, and she was aware that what she saw was something outside; a brilliantly clear night sky without horizon. Its clarity was impossible. For a few moments—and she had no idea how long those were—she couldn’t make sense of it.

  When she did, she wished she hadn’t.

  It was indeed a sky; but it was an infinite field of stars, and she was in it. She tried to turn to look over her shoulder but she couldn’t move. Animal panic began to rise from the pit of her stomach and something said get a grip and she tried to control her breathing.

  Then she realized something.

  She wasn’t breathing.

  When Shan opened her eyes again, the star field was gone.

  She was clear who she was, and for some reason she was very pleased about that. Warm, soft fabric touched her palms. Something appetizingly spicy wafted on the air.

  I’m Detective Superintendent Shan Frankland, Environmental Hazard Division. For a moment she wondered if she’d overslept and she tried to remember what shifts she was working that week, and then she recalled that she hadn’t worked shifts since… since…

  She tried to reach out for her swiss.

  “She’s not breathing. Fuck it, she’s not breathing.”

  Oh shit.

  I’m not on Earth. I’m twenty-five light-years away. I’ve got a parasite. I’m not—

  There was something in her nose; no, it was in her throat, and she tried to swallow. Whatever it was, it hurt like hell. A tube? Sod that. She grabbed it instinctively and pulled, feeling something rip from her face and scrape the back of her throat. She gagged. Her stomach rebelled. She rolled to the edge of the bed and vomited.

  Someone took her shoulders. She tried to push them away out of embarrassment but she couldn’t. A voice was calling, “Get Aras! Now!” and she still struggled to get that damn thing out of her mouth.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa, steady.” A man held her down—yes, she could smell it was a male, it was all flooding back—and the tube pulled clear of her throat with a painful jerk. “There. All gone now. Take it easy.”

  She was staring down at her stomach contents. “I don’t remember eating that,” she said, but her voice cracked. The face looking down at her was one she knew. She just couldn’t place it. “Sorry… sorry…”

  “Don’t you worry about that, Boss. Do you know where you are? Do you know me?”

  She had to think about it. It took a while. He wiped her face with a cold wet cloth.

  “Ade?”

  “Well done, Boss. Yes, It’s Ade. How do you feel?”

  I had a row with you. Her skin burned. “Too hot.”

  “Let’s clean you up.”

  It was more than a row. She’d hit him, shot him, something like that. “Sorry… what’s wrong with me?” She couldn’t understand why tears were streaming down his face. Maybe she was coming round from a major anaesthetic, although she couldn’t imagine why. She knew she said stupid, embarrassing things when she was regaining consciousness even though they sounded sensible at the time. Shut up. “Can I have a cup of tea? Sorry I threw up.”

  “You throw up just as much as you want. Hold still.” She felt the sudden chill as he took the cover off her and a lovely iridescent white one went in its place. Dhren. She recognized that. “Yeah, you bet you can have a cup of tea.”

  Then she managed to concentrate on her hands and forearms. They didn’t look like hers. They were just bone. “Oh God, what’s happened? What’s—”

  “It’s okay… sshh … sshh…” He put his hand on her shoulder and she wanted to shake it off, but she couldn’t. “You’re home now.”

  “Jesus, look at the state of me.” She struggled to put her hand to her head. Where’s my hair? She could see her own outline under the dhren but she was just peaks of bone, nothing at all. “How long have I been out?”

  “Don’t you worry about that. You just rest.”

  A wonderful scent like sandalwood hit her, rich and oily, and she knew instantly who had entered the room and what he meant to her. The memory was vivid, clear, and shocking.

  “Aras. Aras.”

  “Isan.” There was that hint of an alien double-tone resonance in his voice. She looked up into the face of a creature that was almost human but still reminded her of a heraldic beast. “Do you recognize me?”

  “Course I do, you silly sod,” she said. “Isn’t some bastard going to tell me what happened?”

  “She’s back all right,” said a third male voice.

  Eddie.

  The gaps began filling in, first a couple of flash frames and then a torrent of disjointed images: a shuttle cabin, farms, a church window. She’d have to write them down. She’d have to get some order restored. That was her job.

  But few images kept returning. At first they were hazy. But then she was absolutely certain about them, and she didn’t like them at all.

  One was a painfully vivid memory of being slammed to the cool gold ground of Constantine, meters underground yet bathed in light, and being handcuffed. The other was of hearing a hatch close behind her and seeing open, raw blackness speckled with impossibly sharp stars filling her
field of vision as the shuttle bay opened to space and the escaping air tore past her.

  I stepped out—

  The pain of cold and vacuum was worse than she could ever have imagined but she recalled it anyway, accurately enough to make her gasp.

  I’m dead oh God it hurts I can still see oh God let me die let me die let me—

  Aras Sar Iussan, the final thought in her mind as she was dying, folded her in his arms and the comforting vibration rumbling from his chest almost made the images fade.

  “You’re right,” said Aras. “She’s not breathing.”

  F’nar Plain, November 1, 2376.

  The Eqbas ship was huge. Eddie didn’t know much about wess’har traffic control, but he could tell from the size and color of the symbols on the projected screen that the target was a whopper. The reactions of the wess’har around him confirmed it: they locked into position and didn’t even twitch, that freeze-and-wait reaction that was typical when they were assessing a potential threat.

  “When will we be able to see it?” said Eddie.

  “Very soon,” said Nevyan.

  Nevyan’s mother, Mestin, and the other senior matriarchs of F’nar had gathered in the Exchange of Surplus Things to watch the progress of the inbound vessel on the screens. Eddie had always thought of them as unassailable military muscle but seeing them transfixed by the arrival of the Eqbas worried him. He remembered cowering beneath the shadow of huge wess’har ships as they swept over Bezer’ej, feeling like a baffled caveman. And this vessel was a magnitude greater than that.

  The giant ship waited for clearance. Eddie had spent a sobering hour looking through the images that Ual had given him, pictures of the worlds where Eqbas Vorhi had intervened before; worlds that were now orderly, and peaceful, and invaded. The Eqbas could walk in whenever and wherever they wanted.

  “Are you glad you’re not running the show any more?” he said.

  Mestin blinked. “If you’re asking if I have confidence that Nevyan will handle this more effectively than I could, then yes. She’s far more dominant in a crisis. She has much more jask.”

  “Is it a crisis?”

  “Wess’har are a cooperative species,” she said. “But we prefer this agrarian way of life, and it’s evident they do not. The adjustment may be disconcerting for both.”

  Eddie wasn’t sure if she was saying that the Eqbas would have to get used to walking everywhere or that it was the end of civilization as they knew it. He took out his bee cam and checked its status. Giyadas watched his hands with the intensity of someone trying to work out how a conjuring trick was done. It was one shot he couldn’t miss. He’d been denied two headlines of a lifetime—DISGRACED HALF-ALIEN COP CHEATS CERTAIN DEATH, ALIEN MINISTER KIDNAPS HUMAN WAR CRIMINALS—but he was buggered if he was going to let this one pass by doing the decent thing.

  Besides, Earth needed to know what was coming. It would focus a few minds. He was clear about that now: he had done the right thing—probably. Those riot scenes from Southern Africa wouldn’t leave his mind even when he tried to make them.

  My fault. It’s all my fault again.

  Nobody needed to walk far out onto the plain to see the craft. Eddie heard it long before he saw it, a steady low-frequency throbbing right on the threshold of his hearing that made the back of his tongue itch. Then it dropped slowly through the cloud a good five kilometers away, and it was colossal.

  F’nar fell uncharacteristically silent.

  “Holy shit,” said Eddie. “And don’t you dare repeat that, Giyadas, you hear?”

  Some shots didn’t need commentary, and this was one of them. The bronze ship hung in the sky and waited while the small party of matriarchs approached. Then its airframe began to alter.

  Eddie thought his eyesight was playing up; but the outline wavered and the cylinder thinned at two points like a bubble of hot blown glass being twisted by a craftsman, creating another bubble on either flank. The belt of red and blue chevrons faded and then reformed perfectly on each separate vessel.

  Eddie was mesmerized. He’d seen ships and aircraft on Earth that could separate into independent sections but the technology was one of hydraulics and bulkheads: this sleight of engineering hand appeared to be utterly fluid, even organic.

  The bee cam recorded it faithfully. The Eqbas cruiser—it helped Eddie to think of it in those terms—was now a large ship with two escorts, two destroyers. The smaller sections drifted away from the main section and rose out of sight through the clouds in a tooth-shaking rumble. Where were they going? He’d ask.

  “Well, this gets the top slot for the next bulletin,” he said, as much for self-comfort as anything.

  “Most impressive,” said Nevyan. Giyadas clung to her legs.

  It was just a ship, a visiting ship. But it felt like an invasion. If this was one routine vessel diverted simply because it was closest to Wess’ej, he didn’t want to think about what was waiting on Eqbas.

  The ship settled on the plain and the sound of its drive dropped an octave as it powered down. The bee cam hovered, motionless. Then a huge Eqbas stepped out of the airlock onto the ramp and stood looking around before walking with an easy rolling gait towards Nevyan.

  It could only be a dominant matriarch. Her long multi-jointed hands were clasped in a prayer-like grip as she walked and a spectacular mane of tufted copper red hair extended in a line down her forehead. Eddie was immediately put in mind of a muscular and angry cockatoo. He didn’t fancy asking her if she wanted a cracker.

  “Esganikan Gai,” said Nevyan.

  “Big girl,” said Eddie, awed. “Wow. Big girl.”

  Esganikan, like all wess’har, didn’t appear to know much about personal space. She came close enough for him to smell her slightly spicy breath and stared into his face, then looked to Nevyan and trilled in a double-voice contralto. He could smell a pleasant scent of fruit. Her ussissi aide, Aitassi, settled beside her.

  “She greets you and says she has several more of these on board,” said Aitassi, indicating Eddie.

  Nevyan trilled back and Esganikan cocked her head both ways sharply. Eddie had never seen that before. He assumed Nevyan had spoken eqbas’u and that her fluency had come as a surprise. Or maybe she’d told Esganikan to watch her lip because she was the boss woman round here; it was hard to tell with wess’har. But at least neither of them had started throwing punches.

  Esganikan turned towards the ship and more females emerged, equally formidable, wearing ornately quilted knee-length tunics in various shades of green and gray. There were males in the crew, too. Eddie was struck by the fact that the gender split seemed more equal. If there was one thing he had come to think of as normal on Wess’ej, it was that there were many more males than females.

  “Extraordinary,” said Nevyan.

  “I thought so too,” said Eddie, and assumed they were noticing the same thing.

  “I thought you understood no eqbas’u.”

  “I don’t.”

  “She said the detached craft had been sent to Bezer’ej and Umeh.”

  “Blimey, they’re not starting a war already, are they?”

  “They’ll carry out a reconnaissance of Umeh from orbit and an environmental damage assessment on Bezer’ej. What did you find extraordinary, then?”

  “Lots of females,” he said. “Didn’t you?”

  Nevyan made a head-rocking gesture like an Indian dancer and didn’t reply; Esganikan walked back to the ramp and waited, warbling to someone inside the hatch.

  Then Ual appeared on the brow and there was a collective ssssss from the assembled matriarchs of F’nar.

  They froze. Then they tilted their heads, riveted. Ual was the first isenj ever to set foot on Wess’ej, and Eddie let the bee cam loose for posterity.

  And right behind Ual was Lindsay Neville.

  She trooped down the ramp with Rayat, herded by the three marines, but Nevyan didn’t react. Her eyes were on Ual. Out of the context of his crowded but intensely orderly city, he
looked shockingly sinister.

  But he’s almost a friend. I like him.

  Eddie tried to steer Nevyan back to the subject of the prisoners. “Beelzebub and his lovely assistant,” he said helpfully, nodding in their direction. Nevyan knew what a Royal Marine uniform looked like so it should have been a simple process of elimination. “What are you going to do with them for the time being?”

  “Kill them,” she said calmly. “What is Beelzebub?”

  Oh boy. But this wasn’t Earth, and there were plenty of places back home where they would have opted for summary execution with equal ease. It was none of his business. “Just a name. Can I interview them first?”

  “If you feel it might be useful.”

  Ual moved towards them with all the grace of a drinks trolley with one broken wheel. Nevyan held out both arms and for one awkward moment Eddie thought she might actually give this old enemy a hug, but she was simply indicating that she was the one he had to talk to. There was no reason for him to pick her out from a group of apparently identical aliens.

  “Thank you for not opening fire,” he said, in perfect but gasping English. “So this is where you choose to live, Mr. Michallat. Matriarch Nevyan, you now have custody of the two humans.”

  Nevyan paused, perhaps baffled by the use of the honorific matriarch. Wess’har weren’t much on protocol. “I hadn’t expected you to bring the prisoners personally. But if you think you will return with Aras Sar Iussan, we will never hand him over.”

  “I realize that. The risk I’ve taken is not what will happen to me here but what happens when I go home after defying my own government.”

  “And empty-handed.”

  “That depends on what I came for.”

  “We don’t bargain. You have nothing that we want.”

  “Ah, but you have something we want.”

  Nevyan could do the silent routine as well as any interviewer. She waited, gaze fixed. Eddie wondered at what point he should do the diplomatic thing and break the impasse.

  But Ual spoke at last. “I want a sustainable peace. I want wess’har to come to Umeh to help us resolve our environmental crisis.”