The World Before

by Karen Traviss

  “Yeah, you bet I’d use it,” she said, anticipating his question and silencing it.

  The colonists were about their business, mainly digging and shifting soil around in small barrows. They glanced up at Shan’s party and then went back to their tasks. They were making deeper soil beds for crops, gathering up the thin top-soil of Mar’an’cas.

  “It’s a lot calmer,” said Ade, but he still cradled his rifle and checked around him as he walked. “They can focus on going home now.”

  “Sooner the better,” said Shan. “I’m going to find Rayat. Shapakti, you stick with me and we’ll get you some samples.”

  “I’ll stick around too,” said Ade.

  “Look, you know you wouldn’t shoot an unarmed civilian.” She couldn’t be angry with him for being stiflingly protective. Nobody had ever given a shit about her safety before, not even when she was vulnerable to injury. It felt good. “But I can, believe me.”

  But Ade still trailed behind her, just the way she’d seen little wess’har boys trailing after an isanket, happy to submit to matriarchy.

  Rayat was working when she found him. He’d never struck her as a man who liked getting his hands dirty, but then he’d never seemed to be a spy either; and she didn’t usually get it that wrong. He was in one of the transparent composite crop tunnels, shoveling the contents of an old latrine over freshly dug soil. Ade stood at the entrance like a sentry and Shapakti followed her inside. The enclosed space concentrated the aroma wonderfully.

  “You got five minutes?” said Shan.

  Rayat looked up, still scattering the dark, crumbling mass. “I was expecting you to make some humorous comment about shit and my presence.”

  “I don’t have a sense of humor. Fancy helping out a fellow scientist?”

  “How?”

  “Skin sample. Won’t hurt a bit.” She beckoned over her shoulder. “This is my chum Da Shapakti. Hold your arm out for him.”

  “What’s in it for me?”

  “Unbroken legs.”

  Shapakti put on his forensic glove and held up his forefinger like a proctologist; Rayat rolled back his sleeve. Maybe he didn’t want to lose face in front of her.

  “I’m glad your little EVA experience didn’t affect your charm.” Shapakti touched his arm and withdrew. Rayat looked slightly surprised. “Is that all you came for?”

  “Here’s your handheld.”

  “Found what you were looking for?”

  “No.” She was up against a pro in the interrogation game here. Rayat was even sharper than Eddie so she prepared a feint. “But in the absence of a named individual who gave you orders to cobalt Ouzhari, the Eqbas will probably fry the whole FEU when they get there.”

  It wasn’t like that at all, but she lied anyway.

  “I can see why you identify with them so strongly.”

  “Don’t try playing the conscience card. It just pisses me off.”

  “And don’t try to shock a name out of me. I don’t much care what happens to politicians, especially ones who haven’t even been elected yet.”

  Shan caught sight of her reflection on the taut-stretched surface of the composite, slightly distorted but all too detailed: not quite herself yet, too thin, too weak. She braced her shoulders. It was time to lob a pebble into the information pond, a trick she’d seen Eddie play too. She knew Perault. She could guess that if someone knew about c’naatat enough to brief Rayat, then Perault might know about it, and Perault’s religious views would give her a very interesting take on microscopic eternal life. Shan had seen how the colonists behaved when confronted with it.

  “I wondered if Perault thought c’naatat was her Christian afterlife.” She gambled in her best throwaway tone, keeping her eyes fixed on Rayat’s handheld. His scent said he was anxious. “Perhaps the idea of seeing God in a culture dish didn’t quite do it for her, though.”

  She flickered her gaze as if she was trying not to look at the handheld. Rayat said nothing.

  “Come on. Anyone you name is going to be long gone by the time the Eqbas get to Earth. Esganikan really wants to know.”

  I’m just thinking aloud.

  “Nice try,” said Rayat.

  Ouch. “Can’t blame a girl for trying.”

  “Like you said, it won’t make any difference who authorized what.” He smiled to himself, but it wasn’t aimed at her. Either way, it was the sort of smile she liked to knock off people’s faces the hard way. “You know Perault. She was obsessed with c’naatat. But she also understood that it was dangerous.”

  No, I had no idea she even knew it existed. She conned me. Fucking bitch. Shan felt abandoned, used, violated. “Did she really want it destroyed, though?” Steady. Don’t blow this. His scent’s getting stronger. “I reckon she lost her nerve.”

  “Yes, the gene bank ploy was clever, especially given the time she had to set it up. I really thought that was the genuine mission for a while and that mine was the bluff.”

  Your priority is Constantine and its planet, nothing else. Perault, pious and intense, gave her the briefing anew.

  Doubt wasn’t just nibbling away at Shan. It had started gulping down whole chunks. This was the point at which she threw in her real fears, suddenly grateful for her wess’har capacity to stand very still. “She knew I’d go for it. It was just a way of getting me here to make sure nothing happened to her Christian buddies. She didn’t give a shit about Bezer’ej.”

  Rayat shrugged. “You’ve played this game before, just as I have. I wonder what elaborate cover briefing she’d have made up if the nearest foot soldier to hand hadn’t been you?”

  Shan found she could now control the involuntary dilation of her pupils. She concentrated on the sensation in her throat and jaw. She had to. Her stomach fell like a trapdoor opening on a scaffold.

  “That’s politicians for you,” she said.

  This was the onion-skinned conversation: Rayat knew she was interrogating him. Both were aware of the bluff and counterbluff but neither was sure where the layer of reality might be. It was distraction questioning, trying one topic to ease the suspect into answers before you switched to what you really wanted to know and they fell into the pit. He knew she did that. He probably thought he was smarter than her, though. He was probably enjoying telling her how Perault had set her up.

  “Sure you don’t want to name Cobalt Man?” said Shan, struggling with betrayal. “Last chance.”

  “Some things I take to my grave,” he said. Spies had long been proven to be the most accomplished liars, able to control their reactions. But she was part wess’har, and she smelled the relief roll off him. He’d swallowed her line. “Talking of which, you’re probably thinking up a suitable denouement for me.”

  “No, I’ll leave that to Esganikan. Or the bezeri.” She revealed it on a whim, but like all her gut reactions it had its roots in practiced strategy. “Yes, they found a few survivors.”

  Rayat’s scent reaction was acid surprise. Good. Ade wandered up to her and stood in front of Shapakti, who looked welded to the spot.

  “Want to go now, Boss? I can’t stand the smell of shit any more.”

  “Wait outside, Ade.” She’d found out what she needed to know. And she wanted to show Rayat that she could beat him at his own game. Childish: but she was a child again right then, hurt and lied to by the grown-ups. Perault had conned her, just as everyone said she had: but for entirely different reasons, for trivial, make-believe, religious reasons.

  There was no government plan to break the agricorp cartel on patented food crops. She had been uprooted and sent 150 trillion miles from home because she was convenient and expendable.

  It didn’t even have anything to do with keeping Perault’s terrorist sister, Helen Marchant, out of the frame.

  But Shan still had the gene bank. And now she had powerful alien friends who could do something with it, so it was going back to Earth to bust the agricorps and their ilk. Her only regret now was that Perault was long dead and she’d never b
e able to see the shock on her face when she actually completed the mission. People who thought she was just another plod always got a nasty surprise.

  And that included Rayat. Now suck on this, you smug bastard.

  “I might as well tell you,” she said. “C’naatat survived on Ouzhari too, and Ade’s got a dose. I’m sorry your journey was wasted.”

  A scent-burst of anxiety. Oh, this is good. “I know about Ade.”

  “Okay, ask Shapakti about what he found on Ouzhari. Wess’har aren’t very good liars.”

  Shapakti, ever literal, opened his mouth to speak but Rayat held up his hand to silence him. “Jesus, Frankland, I hope you’ve got a bloody good plan for keeping this thing out of human reach.”

  “I haven’t, but Eqbas Vorhi has,” she said. “And I’ll go along with theirs.”

  She didn’t stop to study Rayat’s face. She walked out of the tunnel, reassured that she still had the edge and ashamed at giving in to professional vanity. Operation Green Rage was fresh in her mind again: she had kept her collusion with the eco-terrorists to herself, playing the incompetent right to the end, even when she was busted for letting them get away. She’d swallowed the humiliation. You did it because it mattered, not so you could let everyone know how fucking noble you were. She still felt cheated. That was what she didn’t like. She realized that she didn’t like being made to look a fool, and she wanted so much to be above those petty concerns.

  Terrible events were sweeping whole worlds. Shan Frankland’s personal anxieties meant nothing.

  Ade caught her arm hard enough to jerk her back. “Whoa, Boss. What’s wrong?”

  “Just doing a bit of growing up.”

  “Does it really matter why Perault sent you here? Isn’t it what happens that matters?”

  “Very wess’har. That obvious, is it?”

  “I know when you’re upset.”

  “The bitch lost her nerve about the Suppressed Briefing she’d given Rayat and she used me to salve her conscience over the fucking colony, to make sure they weren’t touched. She manipulated my green sympathies to get me out here. I fell for it.”

  “She SB’d you.”

  “A Suppressed Briefing isn’t brainwashing, remember. You can say no. She needed me to say yes because there was nobody else she could send at the time, when she had to.”

  “So what’s pissing you off? Just getting picked because you were the nearest thing to hand, and not because you were better than anyone else? Or being lied to by a politician? Happens to us all the time.”

  Ade was right on both counts. Soldiers lived with cynical exploitation: and she’d automatically thought she’d been chosen because she was so bloody perfect. So this is your come-uppance for conceit.

  She shrugged, humbled by his courage in telling her what she really didn’t want to hear. “You’re right. It really doesn’t matter any more. Let’s finish the job.”

  Shapakti tugged cautiously at her sleeve, clearly impatient with what he saw as a superfluous debate on motivation. “May we take more samples please?”

  Shan nodded, and Ade steered Shapakti into the camp. She went to sit on the beach and wait for them.

  Bezer’ej was a huge crescent moon in the late afternoon sky, as shockingly exotic as Wess’ej had been when Josh Garrod had first pointed it out to her and told her that it was inhabited. Ade and Shapakti returned about fifteen minutes later, talking quietly. Shan turned to smile at Ade, seeing him for a moment as the man she’d taken a fancy to rather than a test of her fidelity, but he looked shaken.

  He was unusually quiet all the way back to the mainland. It was only when they had been picked up by the transport—more like a mattress on a hovercraft than a vehicle—that he spoke.

  “If Shapakti can stop humans catching c’naatat,” he said, “where does that leave us?”

  Shapakti said nothing. Shan wondered what he had been discussing with Ade: but Ade was an open book. He never kept secrets, nor from her anyway.

  “We’d be safer, Ade,” she said. “A lot safer.”

  Things were not going as planned.

  Eddie checked the fit of the ballistic vest again. The Eqbas ship had landed but it hadn’t yet lowered its ramp. He stared in carefully controlled horror at the bulkhead image as wave after wave of what he could only describe as gunfire hit the outer hull from the perimeter of the landing strip. He could understand how useful a see-through hull could be but that was scant comfort for his nerves.

  It didn’t seem to bother the Eqbas crew any more than it bothered the mindless bee cam. The camera wove slowly from angle to angle, taking its pick of the image: the Eqbas simply watched.

  Ual was a Christmas tree of shivering ornaments, his quills almost at right angles to his bulky oval body.

  “Please cease firing,” said Esganikan. Ralassi repeated her request in isenj and Edie realized the message was being relayed outside the hull.

  The barrage continued. Esganikan shifted on her seat and repeated the cease-fire request. Eddie had the feeling it was the Eqbas equivalent of a police officer’s warning before firing; two of the bridge crew were taking great interest in a control panel.

  “Very well,” said Esganikan. “Cease firing immediately or we will respond. We wish only to meet your administration and to return Minister Ual.”

  There was a pause. Then the firing increased in intensity, peppering the illusion of a glass hull with thousands of exploding pinpoints of light.

  “Suppress the fire,” said Esganikan.

  “Is that necessary?” said Ual.

  Esganikan didn’t even move her head. “We can sit here and wait for your people to run out of ammunition, or we can leave, or we can disembark and face the barrage.”

  “I would rather talk to them. Let me leave the ship.”

  “We are under fire.”

  “I’m an isenj minister of state. Whatever abuse my colleagues might heap upon me, it’s simply words. I can walk out there and persuade them to hear you out.”

  “You’re not our prisoner and you’re free to leave, but I still think this is foolhardy.”

  Esganikan was a soldier. Eddie suspected she’d met quite a few welcoming committees like this one, because it didn’t seem to bother her at all. “Why don’t you let me talk to them? I’m human. I’m neutral.”

  “I’ll do this,” said Ual. “Tell them I’m coming out.”

  Esganikan’s long hands were clasped in front of her chest and she was absolutely immobile. “Go, then. It will not alter what happens in the longer term.”

  Eddie got up and followed Ual to the hatch. “I’m still coming with you,” he said, but he didn’t know why. It was a reflex: something was happening and he had to rush to see it. He had a ballistic vest. There was no point scrawling MEDIA across the chest because the isenj behind the guns almost certainly didn’t read English. If they did, he had no guarantee that his status would afford him any protection. It was like any foreign war.

  “You have no protective headwear,” said Ual.

  The interior of the ship was as fluid and malleable as the external hull, an adaptable ship for a rigid people. They were now standing in a space that felt enclosed but there was only a thin transparent membrane around them, and Eddie’s gaze was fixed on the exterior view that still filled the bulkhead.

  It was like walking into a movie. “We can see them. Can they see us?”

  “No,” said Esganikan. “When you have composed yourself, we will create an opening.”

  “I will leave now and you will walk behind me,” said Ual.

  I should have asked Ade how to do this, thought Eddie. The bee cam was close to his head. This is a beachhead landing. The front goes down and out you go. Oh God oh God oh God. Where’s my breather mask?

  The bulkhead parted. It wasn’t an image any longer. Eddie could smell burning and he inhaled dust. He was right behind Ual, close enough to notice his wet forest scent. The minister’s beads were rattling as he made his inelegant way down t
he ramp that was forming in front of them.

  There was absolute silence. The firing had stopped.

  Ual let out a stream of high-pitched sounds. Was anyone close enough to hear him? Eddie didn’t know what to look for at the perimeter fence and in the port buildings but he knew it was a battlefield and his instinct scanned for movement or any cue to duck or run.

  Ual moved forward one slow pace at a time. Eddie followed. His feet were still on the ramp when Ual trod on the dusty landing field of Jejeno and a loud crack of expanding air and shrill noise deafened him.

  Something straw-colored hit his vest. Something threw him flat on his back and the last thing he saw was the bee cam hovering above him. Something had gone badly wrong.

  He had no idea that isenj blood looked like thin yellow plasma.

  20

  I now believe we can extract the c’naatat organism from human tissue. This will reduce the risk of severe environmental consequences if more gethes were to become carriers of the symbiont. But we should still regard it as a life-form to be protected by quarantine.

  DA SHAPAKTI

  biologist-physician, Wess’ej mission

  Nevyan knew now that her gut feel, as Shan called it, had not been wrong.

  And she had one question, a selfish one.

  “Is Eddie hurt? What happened to him?”

  Giyadas clung to her legs. Lisik and Livaor watched the communications link in silence. Cidemnet had gone to fetch their fourth house-brother Dijuas and the other children.

  “He is alive,” said Esganikan. The image showed calm routine behind her on the ship’s bridge.