Crossing the Line

by Karen Traviss

  “Well, plenty of humans back home take that view too. But we’re only shipping back twenty isenj in Thetis. How much of a problem can they cause? I’m still astonished by the reaction. You’d think people would regard it as a miracle, really.”

  “They breed,” said Aras.

  “That’s plague language.”

  “I heard that word used on the news too.”

  Shan didn’t join in. She’d had enough of debate. They both knew what she thought and she was still wondering at what point she should ask Eddie to do a little job for her.

  “Ual thinks humans have a fixation with vermin,” said Eddie.

  “Define vermin,” said Aras.

  “An animal in an environment where it isn’t wanted and that can breed in large enough numbers to cause disruption to health, agriculture, or commerce.”

  “Ah,” said Aras, and paused for a heartbeat. “Like humans, then.”

  Shan stifled a laugh. Aras had the timing of a stand-up comedian. But it wasn’t funny. It was true.

  “I suppose that’s one way of looking at it,” said Eddie.

  “Every species’ way of looking at it, except yours.”

  “We’re not all like that.”

  “Enough of you are.” Aras leaned across the table and Eddie flinched visibly, but all the wess’har did was clasp his hand around the bottle of wine and tip it at an angle, like a sommelier presenting a fine vintage for inspection by a connoisseur. “Wine could well be an icon for your species. No wonder you base societies and ritual upon it. It’s the fruit of polluted excess. The yeast colony gorges itself on saccharides until it dies poisoned by its own excretion. It doesn’t know how to stop and it consumes itself to death.”

  “We can learn to do differently,” said Eddie.

  “Show me the evidence. Show me in a million years where humans have changed.”

  “Constantine. The colonists.”

  “Their instinctive greed is controlled by their fear. They recognize they have these instincts, and they believe that by suppressing them they will appease their god, but they still have them. And their greed is for time. They want to live forever.”

  A strong citrus waft of agitation underlined his words. Had he been human, Shan would have dismissed the argument as too much alcohol over dinner, the sort of embarrassment that you slept off and that none of the other guests mentioned again, at least not in front of you. But he was sober, as he always would be, and she had never heard him voice the slightest criticism of the colonists. It stood in stark contrast to his fears for them the night before.

  Eddie seemed to have noted that too. “Do I detect a real anti-human movement here?”

  Aras stiffened. “It’s not about species. It’s what you do. Do you know what I despise most about you?” His tone, as ever, was deceptively even, like a priest giving absolution to a monster and trying hard not to let his personal revulsion show. “Your unshakable belief that you’re special, that somehow all the callousness and careless violence that your kind hand out to each other and to other beings can be forgiven because you have this…this great human spirit. I have viewed your dramas and your literature, you see. I have lost count of the times that I have seen the humans spared by the aliens because, despite humanity’s flaws, the alien admires their plucky spirit and ability to strive. Well, I am that alien, and I don’t admire your spirit, and your capacity to strive is no more than greed. And unlike your god, I don’t love you despite your sins.”

  Shan leaned over the table between them. “Come on, you two. Break it up, for Chrissakes.” She began gathering the plates. It cut across the tension. “This isn’t the time or the place for a row. And I’m tired.”

  Aras took hold of the plates with a carefully blank expression and tugged just enough for her to relinquish her hold on them. Eddie couldn’t have noticed, but the wess’har smelled of seething anger. He wandered off and began rinsing the plates. Shan gestured to Eddie to leave the table and sit down on the sofa.

  “Sorry,” said Eddie. “When did he turn into Rochefoucauld?”

  “Maybe I’m a bad influence,” Shan said. “Me and my sunny view of human nature, maybe.”

  “He’s right, though, isn’t he?”

  He was. And something had changed that night, something she had always known was fragile, but it was a cold moment nonetheless. A chill spread from her lower gut and into her thighs, a sensation she had felt before only when she was physically terrified. A sheet of flame spreading down the transparent riot shield she held in front of her as petrol and glass crashed and ignited in her face. It couldn’t touch her then, but it scared her. And it couldn’t touch her now, not even if it really did burn her.

  There were humans, and there were aliens, and she was standing on an ice floe and drifting away from humanity. The gap opening up in front of her would now never close.

  But there was work still to do. “I won’t dress this up, Eddie,” Shan said. “Are you prepared to provide something for me?”

  “Information? Okay. I’ll do my best.”

  “Bit more concrete than that.”

  A pause. “I ought to say no. But try me.”

  “I’ll do a trade. Here’s some information in exchange for material. I’ll give you the wess’har war forecast for the next few months and you pick up a sample for me if you can.”

  “Sample of what?”

  “Isenj DNA. You being so chummy and all that.”

  “Now why does that worry me?”

  “Because you know what a clever and nasty bunch of bastards the wess’har are, and that they’ve got big sisters who are even worse.”

  “Oh, I need more facts than that, Shazza.”

  “Okay. They’re going to seed Bezer’ej with a persistent artificial pathogen that’s selective against humans. They used my DNA to create it. It’s a bloody great keep-out sign.”

  Eddie still had his half glass of wine in his hand, and he was inspecting the contents with unnatural diligence. “And they want an isenj sample to do the same.”

  “Spot on.”

  “And what if the matriarchs decide to use it as an offensive weapon?”

  “Well, Earth will be fucked anyway if we really piss them off, but look at it this way—they could have creamed Umeh ten times over, but the isenj didn’t try to invade them, so they didn’t attack them on their home ground. If humans show the same good sense, I don’t think it’s an issue.”

  “It’s that word think that I don’t like.”

  “Eddie, given time, they’ll find how to extract it from my genome. I’ve got a dash or two of isenj in me. That’s how I acquired a genetic memory, via Aras.” She flashed her illuminated hands. “And a bit of bezeri too. So you might say we’re family.”

  “How did you get c’naatat?”

  “Aras gave me a transfusion of his blood when I was shot. It saved my life. So—are you going to do it or not?”

  “You give me your word it won’t be used as a weapon?”

  “You’d trust me, would you?”

  “Are we going to get a word in between us that isn’t a bloody question?”

  “Deal.”

  “You’re an immensely persuasive woman.”

  “Seriously, Eddie. You’ve got a pretty good appreciation of what’s a threat to these people and what isn’t. Will you help?”

  “I’ll do what I can.”

  “Thanks. I mean it.”

  “Don’t thank me. Like I said before, it’s Falklands time.”

  “I didn’t understand that.”

  “Twentieth century war history. You might want to read it sometime. I’ve seen accounts from British naval officers of how they sat on board warships in the Falkland Islands combat zone listening to the radio. There they were, in a place called San Carlos Water, just waiting for more Argentine air attacks, and the news was broadcasting information on what the British battle plans were. The government briefed reporters about everything. And there were these sailors, listening to t
his, knowing the plans were blown, and just waiting for incoming. Now, I don’t know who was more to blame for making that information public, the politicians or the journalists, but that was the day reporters couldn’t pretend we were neutral observers any longer.” He scratched his cheek as if he were suddenly embarrassed by his impassioned speech. “It’s hard to prove it changed events, and perhaps it didn’t, but I always wondered what I would have put first. There are only so many times that you can stand back and say you were only doing your job.”

  Shan wondered if Eddie were acting. He seemed in his own private world, thinking aloud and wrestling with personal demons. The fact that he was inclined to wrestle at all endeared him to her. But if this was all part of his professional sleight of hand, she would kill him.

  And she realized that she was being wess’har-literal when she thought that.

  The wess’har were at the start of a siege, one potentially more serious than the last isenj war. So few of them, and so many humans and isenj waiting to take their place: but if Eddie needed that knowledge of their growing desperation to ensure his compliance and sympathy, she wasn’t going to give it to him just yet.

  “What do I need to do?” he said.

  “Any biological material. Fluids—”

  “We’re not that chummy.”

  “—or anything they shed.”

  Eddie mouthed a silent ah as if he remembered something. “Why don’t they ask the ussissi to do this? They’re in and out of isenj space like a fiddler’s elbow.”

  “Wess’har would never ask them to compromise their neutrality. They do their own dirty work.”

  “Explains why they need you so much.”

  “I wouldn’t piss around with the ussissi either. I get the feeling it’s like breaking up a pub fight involving soldiers. Take one on, and you’ve got to take them all on.”

  Eddie drained his glass. He studied the nonexistent dregs for a moment and then glanced over his shoulder to check where Aras was.

  “They really are after your arse, you know,” he said quietly. “I know you’re not someone who likes hiding, but I’d keep my head down if I were you.”

  “I appreciate the concern.”

  “They’ve killed the story back home.”

  “What, me?”

  “C’naatat. One minute I had News Desk screaming for a story and I tell them to shove it, the next I hear we don’t talk about the subject. Commercial or government pressure. Sad day for journalism, even if I didn’t want the story to run.”

  “Do you think they believe the threat’s real, Eddie?”

  “In what sense?”

  “We’re 150 trillion miles away. It must look like a movie to them. All the pictures, none of the problems. If the wess’har start on us—and I’m using the term us loosely—you know they won’t stop, don’t you?”

  “Mjat made a big impression on me, Shan. I do know.”

  “You make sure they do, too,” she said.

  Eddie paused and then smiled knowingly. “You know, Shan, you’re bloody good at this.”

  She smiled back. “You know, Eddie, I was being sincere for once.”

  His smile faded and so did hers. They both dropped their gaze. “I’ll sleep out on the terrace tonight,” he said. “Nice warm night. And I’d love to stare up at those stars.” He nodded in Aras’s direction. “Besides, I think you have some diplomatic relations to restore with your old man.”

  “I reckon,” said Shan.

  She waited for him to close the external door behind him. Then she allowed herself a grin.

  Yes, she really was bloody good at it.

  14

  If we believe a thing to be bad, and if we have a right to prevent it, it is our duty to try to prevent it and to damn the consequences.

  Viscount Lord ALFRED MILNER, 1854–1925

  “This is one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do,” said Shan.

  No, it wasn’t; it wasn’t at all, not by a long chalk. The only hard thing about it was standing before the altar of St. Francis in the buried heart of Constantine colony. She could feel the exquisite light from the stained glass window at her back burning right through her. It wasn’t the right place for a Pagan to be, not even a lapsed one like her.

  She looked from face to worried face in the congregation, people she knew and who once trusted her.

  “You have to leave Constantine,” Shan said. “You have to move everybody out.”

  There wasn’t so much as a murmur. She wasn’t prepared for that. All her training and instinct was targeted towards meeting resistance. Right then she wasn’t sure exactly what she was meeting, so she carried on. She could see Josh in her peripheral vision. She couldn’t see Aras.

  “The political situation is extremely tense,” she said. “Earth’s sent another vessel to this system without seeking permission from either the wess’har or the isenj. You know the wess’har even better than I do, probably. They’re taking extreme action.”

  There was a sigh from somewhere near the front. And still there were no questions.

  “They’re going to block landings permanently by the only means they have. Basically, they’re going to seed this planet with organisms that will kill humans and isenj. And that means you too, I’m afraid. The good news is that if you agree to leave, you can start again on Wess’ej. There’ll be a habitat for you.” Their faces were stricken. Maybe I didn’t express that very well. “So, any questions?”

  “How long do we have?” asked a woman in the front pew. It was Sabine Mesevy, the botanist from the Thetis mission who had found religion and opted to stay. Shan hadn’t spotted her, and that was bad, because Shan was used to taking in every detail of a crowd.

  “Two months, tops,” Shan said. “There’ll be plenty of help to get you packed up and shipped out. I’m sorry this had to happen.”

  Mesevy wasn’t giving up. “Won’t our biobarrier protect us?”

  “They’re shutting it down. They don’t want to hand over a potential foothold to either side.”

  “They could land with full biohaz protection.”

  “Maybe, but it’s one thing to work in a sealed lab and another to live in one. This planet would be no more use to them than Earth’s moon.”

  “Is it just the planet that humans might be interested in?”

  Shan hesitated. “I suspect not.”

  Nobody said anything further. Shan found herself irritated and wanting to get on with the evacuation. The silence continued and it had a sound of its own. She began counting a full minute.

  When she glanced at the floor, there was a brilliant shaft of ruby and emerald light from the stained glass window slanting between her boots as she stood with her legs slightly apart. The light from Cavanagh’s Star was somehow channeled down into the colony: every day, the image of St. Francis, surrounded by the creatures of Earth and Bezer’ej and Wess’ej, came to life at sunrise.

  She wondered if they would try to dismantle the window and take it with them to their new refuge. She hoped they would.

  Sixty seconds. She looked up, and it was as if the silent moment had become permanent.

  “I’ll leave you to talk, then,” she said. “You’ll have more questions. I’ll be at Josh’s house when you’re ready to ask them.”

  It was a long walk down that aisle. It felt as long as the walk through the Thetis mission compound to tell the payload that Surendra Parekh had been executed for causing the death of a bezeri infant.

  Parekh didn’t mean to do it.

  And I didn’t plan to give the bastards a stronger incentive for coming here.

  She was almost at the end of the aisle when a man she vaguely recognized stepped out in front of her. Her reflexes said threat. Her c’naatat said no problem.

  “We’re not going,” said the man. “We’re not leaving. This is our home. Don’t you understand that?”

  Shan was taller, harder, and armed. He didn’t seem to care. “That’s too bad,” she said. “You have
no choice.”

  “How can you side with them? You’re human.”

  She’d heard that challenge before. He was an inch too close, and his fists were clenched. “What I do doesn’t matter,” she said quietly. “They’ll do it with me or without me. This is your one chance to go.”

  “We can’t leave all we’ve worked for. We were born here. We don’t know anywhere else.”

  He moved, probably not intending violence, but it was enough for Shan to reach out and seize his forearm with a gloved grip that might have hurt. It certainly rooted him to the spot.

  “You’ll do it,” she said. “Your forefathers did it, and so can you.”

  “You can’t force us.”

  She let go of his arm. They were surrounded by crowded silence. “Look, love, one way or another, you’re not going to be here in three months’ time. You can start again, or you can end up like Mjat.”

  Shan stared at him, unblinking, arms at her sides, until he stepped back and sat down in the pew, shaking visibly. There were kids sitting next to him. They looked transfixed by her.

  She looked back to the rest of the colonists. “Just don’t do anything bloody stupid, okay? No heroics.”

  That was the trouble with people who thought they were going to heaven. They just didn’t take death seriously enough.

  The sight of smoke-blue grassland around the Temporary City was as emotional as a homecoming. Aras was glad to be out of F’nar: Shan might have enjoyed its urban intricacy, but he felt hemmed in by it even now that he could walk its terraces almost as a proper jurej.

  The Temporary City itself was looking less temporary than ever. The reinforcement of the garrison was visible.

  Will we listen to the bezeri if they say something we don’t agree with? He watched a transport vessel landing, settling slowly on yielding legs. Wess’har were capable of trampling benignly over the wishes of others. Sometimes he felt that was right. Sometimes he wasn’t so sure.

  The bezeri had not forgotten their routine. He had only to stand for a while on the cliffs above the bay and ripple a sequence of lights from his lamp for a bezeri patrol pod to half surface. The patrols kept an eye on bezeri who might swim too near to the surface in curiosity and beach themselves. The constant military traffic across the region must have given them a great deal to be curious about.