Crossing the Line

by Karen Traviss

  “No, some left. Most stayed.”

  Bang. Another bombshell. Why hadn’t she realized that? Because she hadn’t asked. Because she didn’t know the question needed asking. It was probably all sitting in the massive wess’har archive that she was struggling to read. She was working backwards in the timeline, and slowly.

  “You’re going to have to spell this out,” said Shan.

  “Spell?”

  “Explain in detail. Please.”

  “We are Targassati. We wanted to lead a simpler life and we no longer wanted to take part in what you call international politics. It was an obligation we did not feel we could justify. So we left.”

  Shan waited. Mestin just looked at her.

  “Come on. And?”

  “And?”

  “The World Before is still…er…going strong?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you have contact with them. What do they—”

  “No. No contact. The ussissi move between worlds, but we remain separate.”

  “Hostile?”

  “Irrelevant.”

  “I would have thought they’d be handy reinforcements, at the very least.”

  Mestin’s eyes—darker than Chayyas’s, more like amber bead—showed narrowed crosshairs, mere slits of pupil. “If we need to ask for help, there might be a price, as you say. We do not welcome interference or change.”

  “I understand,” said Shan, who had seen more change in fifteen months than was decent, and quite liked the idea of stagnation for a while. She tried to imagine what the World Before might be like if the wess’har here represented the ecowarriors. “Look, if you’re short on manpower and arms, conventional warfare isn’t sustainable. You know that. That’s why you used c’naatat troops in the past. I think you might have to look at unpalatable choices again. And I’m not just talking about germ warfare.”

  “From what you have seen here, do you think we have a problem?”

  “I’m not a military analyst, but if you can’t replace hardware at the rate you’re losing it, then you’re stuffed.”

  “Do you recall Chayyas said more might be asked of you than you were capable of giving?”

  “It was a hard conversation to forget.”

  “Then I’m asking you to help us find an immediate solution to the gethes problem.”

  “Boy, that phrase has an unpleasantly familiar ring to it.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Just as well. Look, this is years away. You have time to come up with some ideas.”

  “But what would you do, Shan? What would you do if you perceived a genuine threat to your world?”

  “I’m not the best person to ask. I’d only give you a gut reaction, not a considered political option. I’m not known for my restraint.”

  “What is war but emotional response backed up by weaponry?”

  It wasn’t a bad point. Shan started seeing the gaps in the hangar, the places where ships were no longer stored. There were a lot more gaps than there were occupied berths.

  She thought about it. “Personally, I’d pop round their house and give them a bloody serious warning. And maybe a demonstration of how very unreasonable I could be if they really pissed me off.”

  “We would wish to deal with the threat directly too. But we have such limited military resources these days. We need to make it impossible for gethes to get a foothold in this system.”

  It seemed a very benign discussion. They were actually talking about killing humans. It didn’t feel that much of a chasm to cross. “Come on, you’re not going to be able to send a task force to Earth without help from someone, are you?”

  “No. The other option is what you would call bioweapons. If we have enough intact human DNA, we can create a barrier weapon. It need only be created and deployed once.”

  “Poison Earth?”

  “Poison Bezer’ej.”

  “Ah.” Shan wondered what was happening to her brain. It was suddenly obvious. “You want my DNA.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you extract it from Aras?”

  “C’naatat. A dangerous organism to handle, and we have found no way of separating it from its host. If we could have done so, things would be very different now, would they not? We would also have isenj DNA. We would be able to use c’naatat at will.”

  “Well, I’m not exactly a regular human any longer. I’m not sure what help I can be.”

  “But you were normal a matter of a season or so ago. Do you have any material that predates your contamination?”

  Now that was science that Shan understood only too well. Forensic evidence. Hair, saliva, GSR, semen. She could do as thorough a job on crime scene as any SOCO. “Let’s have a look through my grip,” she said. “I keep my kit clean but I’d bet there are some hairs hanging around.” She hadn’t used her cold-weather suit since she first landed on Bezer’ej: they could scour that for cells.

  “You give this up easily under the circumstances.”

  “I’d like to think of it as razor wire. If you don’t climb over it, you won’t get hurt.”

  “You’re a pragmatic woman.”

  “And you really don’t have any isenj DNA?”

  “We don’t take prisoners,” said Mestin.

  “What about asking the ussissi to acquire some?”

  “We will not compromise them by asking them to act for us aggressively.”

  Shan tried to conceive of a society where the entire defense industry could be halted by the desire not to embarrass an ally. The challenge with wess’har was to understand that they had just two settings—completely benign and psychotic—with nothing in between. “It’s not how we’d handle things back home.”

  “The ussissi are neutral.”

  “God, you really are going to need some help to deal with gethes, aren’t you? Okay. Count me in.” She paused. “What happens to the colonists in Constantine if you flood the planet with antihuman pathogens or whatever?”

  Mestin cocked her head a few times. “I would rather remove them all.”

  It was Josh and Deborah and James and Rachel, not a seething mass of anonymous faces. Shan tried to adjust to her new kinship. There’s no reason why they have to share your morality. Stay out of it. “What about moving them here? Like you did the gene bank?”

  Mestin looked genuinely thoughtful, her long muzzle and sharply tilted head reminding Shan too much of a baffled Afghan hound. “Yes, if they represent a strain of acceptable humans, it might be wise to propagate them. There might be no other gethes left in time, after all.”

  Shan had to think about that last sentence.

  She wasn’t entirely sure she had understood it. Then she knew she bloody well had, and that small expression of a monumental threat was more chilling than a wess’har battle fleet heaving into view.

  “What if they won’t move?”

  “Then they die,” said Mestin, as if Shan would be equally unmoved by the prospect.

  Shan could almost smell her own citrussy waft of anxiety. “Maybe I can put the relocation idea to them in due course.”

  Something told Shan she was going to have trouble explaining this to Aras. It wasn’t a topic that had ever cropped up in conversation. He had warned her about the matriarchs and how she would be enslaved, but she had taken it as an expression of his bitterness about exile.

  For some reason, justifying herself to Aras bothered her more than the fact that she was about to teach an alien race how to be efficient terrorists against her own species.

  Shan walked up to the nearest fighter and glanced at Mestin for approval to climb up on it. As soon as she laid her hand on it, the canopy opened: a faint, single, pure note ran from discomfort below her threshold of hearing up the scale until she could no longer hear it. It made the back of her throat itch. The cockpit was alive with a soft bluish glow.

  “How did I do that?” Shan asked.

  “You must have more wess’har genes than you thought.”


  Shan stared down into the cockpit, one continuous surface covered with the diagrammatic writing and points of light. The smell of the materials—harshly grassy, like burning tangerine peel—stopped her dead.

  She was perfectly aware of where she was but she was also watching her hands—no, Aras’s hands—punching rapidly across the controls while a flare of flame wiped out the landscape that was spinning ever larger in the viewplate. Sick physical panic gripped her. Then she smashed into the plate and everything was blackness and pain and heat and her teeth felt as if they had been driven up into her sinuses.

  She straightened up and scrambled down the side of the craft, dropping the last meter and landing on her feet with a thud. Around her it was all orderly, soft-lit calm again. She shut her eyes for a moment, and suddenly the drowning dream and all that went with it was vivid and now.

  “He crashed,” she said at last. “Aras crash-landed in one of those things. I just saw it.”

  Mestin took her sleeve carefully and steered her away from the fighter. The gesture surprised her. It was an oddly compassionate act for a matriarch.

  “I had heard that c’naatat can pass on memory,” said Mestin. “Is it difficult, coping with that?”

  “Not any more,” said Shan. No, she could handle it. She prided herself on her professional core of ice. She was the copper who didn’t faint at her first autopsy, who never vomited at the smell of decomposition, and who could look at evidence even strong men preferred not to see. It didn’t mean she didn’t care: it just meant that, after a while, she forgot how to.

  She wondered if that was why she hung onto the pain of the gorilla and the blue door, just so she could be in thrall to impotent anger again and reassure herself occasionally that she was alive and feeling.

  Shan inhaled deeply through her nose and suppressed the agonizing shock of crashing in enemy territory. “You know what happened to him? What the isenj did to him?”

  “No, but I can imagine,” said Mestin. “They were brutal times. Even the isenj admit that.”

  Mestin kept steering her away from the craft, the slightest pressure of her hand on her back. Shan wanted to shrug the touch away but decided it might be provocative. If Mestin could scent that she was bothered by the touch, it had not deterred her.

  “You think I’m weak, don’t you?” Shan said.

  “I do not,” said Mestin. “I wonder how I would fare alone in your world. I wonder how I would react to my body being colonized and altered by a parasite. I’m not sure I would acquit myself particularly well.” She tapped her hand against the hard shape of the gun that Shan kept tucked into the back of her waistband. “Do you fear us?”

  “Habit. No offense meant.” Shan reached back under her jacket and adjusted the gun again, embarrassed. She wondered why she couldn’t recall the borrowed memory of Aras firing that weapon into the skull of Surendra Parekh. She could certainly remember her own oblique view of the execution. Perhaps it hadn’t been traumatic enough for Aras to make the same impression as the other events in his life. “I’m a copper, remember. A police officer.”

  “I know what police do. And I know what you have done. I have seen the record of your conversation with Michallat.”

  Ah, the unbroadcast interview. Eddie hadn’t quite got her to admit she had aided ecoterrorists, but it was a close-run thing. She hoped Mestin hadn’t picked up the implication that Minister Perault had perhaps conned her into accepting her mission. “Yeah. I don’t piss about.”

  “I think you are very clever, very persistent and very violent.”

  Shan almost dropped her gaze. “Whatever it takes to do the job.”

  “But only if you think the job is worth doing. That is why we like you.”

  Shan was suddenly uncomfortable. She wasn’t used to being patted, not by anybody who valued their teeth, and she wasn’t expecting to be told she was liked. She felt her scalp prickle. Mestin must have smelled her agitation.

  “For a physically fearless person you are easily unsettled by small matters,” Mestin said. She sniffed discreetly, as if to say I know. “Let me tell you this. If it were not for c’naatat, I would be happy for you to be a cousin-by-mating. I trust you. Nevyan respects you greatly.”

  Shan wasn’t sure she had understood the matriarch right. Cousin-by-mating? Ah, in-law. Sister-in-law. Some of her best friends were c’naatat but she wouldn’t want her brother to marry one, so to speak. It wasn’t offensive. Shan knew the risks. They were no different for wess’har, except that they could be relied upon to do the sensible thing with the symbiont—most of the time, anyway.

  Mestin walked ahead of her, back towards the exit, trilling wordlessly under her breath. Shan followed the matriarch’s rustling steps with her eyes fixed on the neat stripe of tufted gold hair down her nape. It was another moment when her world shivered into semifocus: another moment when she knew that she didn’t really understand what wess’har were, and what they did when she wasn’t around. It made her feel utterly alone. It made her want the comfort of Aras’s company.

  She tried to make light conversation to jolly herself along. “I think cousin-by-mating is a nice way of describing someone who marries into your family,” she said. “Wess’u is a very pragmatic language.”

  Mestin glanced back at her in a half turn but carried on walking. “It doesn’t mean that at all,” she said.

  “I don’t think I understand.”

  “Oursan,” she said, as if Shan ought to have known what that meant. They were back on the surface again, among irregular strips of red and magenta crops. “Nevyan was supposed to be educating you.”

  “Maybe we haven’t got to that page yet,” said Shan, feeling unpleasantly embarrassed again but unsure exactly why. There was a niggling awareness at the back of her mind, like a Suppressed Briefing. Whatever scraps of memory were surfacing from Aras, this one was shot with anxiety.

  She was pondering the feeling as she walked back up the terraces when she nearly trod on a vine as thick as a ship’s cable. It was covered in velvety scales and pink-flushed gold, like a ripe peach. When she crouched to touch it, it shot off at speed and its furred leaves—or what had looked like leaves—scattered in all directions, emitting high-pitched squeals. The surprise made her overbalance onto her backside.

  The vine-thing paused at a distance and the leaves scuttled back to it and attached themselves again. She sat in complete humiliation on the flagstones, heart pounding. A male wess’har walked by and stared down at her.

  “Genadin,” he said, nodding in the direction of the creature. “With babies.”

  Nothing was obvious here. She sat and gathered her composure for a few moments and started rehearsing how she would tell Aras that she had signed up to help the wess’har war machine.

  But it could wait.

  She had to sort out her uneasy relationship with him first.

  Nobody gave a second glance to Lindsay and Eddie while they chatted in a corner of the hangar deck. They were old mates, isolated and lonely. They had personal issues to discuss. There was nothing sinister about it.

  Eddie wasn’t so sure. She hadn’t said a word to him about Hereward, and he was now certain every senior officer would have known about the deployment. Well, if that was the game she was playing, fine. It disappointed him, but at least he was now on familiar territory and using a fine-honed skill in which he had complete confidence—pickpocketing the brain of a reluctant interviewee without their feeling a thing.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Bearing up.” She kept fiddling with her right shoulder board, picking invisible specks off the gold braid rings. “Eddie, I need to ask you something.”

  He folded his arms. “I’m a journalist. Think of me as your priest.”

  “It’s serious.”

  Ah, maybe she was going to come clean. He hoped so. He didn’t like to think of her as prey. “Okay. Ask.”

  “If I got you transport, would you be willing to ask for access to the wess’har?”


  It was the last thing he expected to hear, and no mention of Hereward. He summoned up all his acting skills. “I’d probably bite your arm off in the rush.”

  “We need someone to break the ice. You’re neutral.”

  “They still want to negotiate diplomatic relations with them, eh?”

  “I know. Fat chance. But if we knew how they were thinking, we might get the approach right.”

  She was lying her arse off. She was an amateur. It wasn’t the first time Eddie had been approached—obliquely, charmingly—to gather data. In a simpler age they called it spying, and it was the sort of thing that got journalists shot or worse in unsympathetic foreign countries.

  “I think this is bullshit,” he said. “It’s got nothing to do with diplomacy. What do you really want?”

  Her head dropped and she sighed. If she was acting, it was convincing. “Okay, I might as well tell you. You started this biotech rumor running and now I’ve got to clean up the mess. I need to make sure the pharmaceutical lads don’t get hold of it. I haven’t a clue what we’re looking for, but if you hear anything that would help me keep it out of circulation, I’d be grateful. And so might human civilization, whether it knows it or not yet.”

  It hurt. It was true. He wished for the hundredth time that he hadn’t gone hunting that story, but it was too late. “Lin, I’m in enough shit as it is. BBChan’s under a lot of government and commercial pressure for me to find happy space stories. Seems they hold me responsible for giving people the impression that the Cockroach Cluster is on its way to take over the Earth.”

  “Okay, it’s not fair of me to dump this on you. Forget it.”

  “Now that’s not fair. The one thing you can’t do to a journalist is let me halfway in. You’re waging some interagency feud with the Department of Trade or whoever and you expect me to line up as cannon fodder. You tell me the truth, or you can piss off and do your own dirty work.”

  “I didn’t say this was a departmental power struggle.”

  Eddie spread his arms and gave her a theatrically slack-jawed look. “A wild guess. Now for Chrissakes tell me.” Come on, say Hereward. You know I’ll get it out of you sooner or later. “I know you’re not giving me the full picture.”