Crossing the Line

by Karen Traviss

  “You’re a doll,” Eddie said, and meant it. Yes, they were loyal, dog-loyal. But Serrimissani didn’t understand, and nor did it appear that she was interested in doing so. She stared at the vessel filling up with ussissi. So did Eddie.

  “Sinking ship,” he said.

  “It will fly,” said Serrimissani.

  “I meant—never mind. Rats leaving sinking ships—they’re supposed to be the first to know when a ship is in trouble.” He was gibbering. He always did that when fighting down emotions that threatened to overwhelm him. “Doesn’t matter.”

  “What are rats?” she asked.

  Eddie thought hard. “Another kind of people.”

  His mind was a mess of fragments, personal fears, professional worries, loss, confusion. But he centered on what he was at his core—a reporter. It anchored him again and he felt calmer. If Ual’s link was denied to him, he could ask the matriarchs of F’nar to hack into the ITX link. He had to get that story filed: it was the least he owed Shan Frankland.

  He had once made a mistake and thought she was like everyone else, available at the right price, but he’d been wrong. And he was glad he had the chance to tell her so.

  Everyone needed heroes. He still had his, intact and immutable, and now he always would.

  Aras suddenly realized he was kneeling on the floor, and he had no idea how long he had been there. His forehead was on his knees, his hands tucked in under his chest.

  It hurt too much to move. It certainly hurt to think.

  “Actaeon has been destroyed,” said Nevyan gently. “I made certain of it.”

  He knew he was back on Wess’ej. He heard her but the pressure in his throat had taken over. He had forgotten about Josh and he had forgotten about the bezeri and he had forgotten about his failure to protect Bezer’ej after so many, many years of standing sentinel.

  They had taken his isan. Shan was gone. He couldn’t move for grief.

  He tried to focus on the pain. It was a trick he had learned when he was a prisoner of the isenj, when he couldn’t die but wanted to very badly, when every second was infinite. He found that if he concentrated on the pain, on the moment, the enormity of the unspecified void ahead of him was pushed to one side.

  “Can he hear us?” It was Mestin’s voice.

  “I think so. Leave us. I’ll stay with him for the while.”

  Aras tried not to think of Shan and failed. She consumed him. And he thought of Askiniyas, and he hadn’t seen her or held her for centuries. There had been a time when he couldn’t summon up her face or scent despite his perfect wess’har recall, but now she was vivid—and astonishingly alien. But he wanted Shan. He wanted to hold her.

  They had even denied him the comfort of cradling her body one last time.

  Wess’har males who lost their isan remated or else they died. He could do neither. And he didn’t want to. He never wanted to move beyond this grief even though it was burning him alive.

  “You can come and stay with us,” said Nevyan.

  He couldn’t form any words. Even breathing was an effort.

  “Or we can bring you whatever you need. You need not see anyone until you want to.” Nevyan moved, sending a cloud of very dominant scent into the air, and knelt down beside him. The smell triggered a primeval urge to placate her, but he felt as if he would fall apart, limb from limb, if he tried to move. “We have had messages from their leaders. They want to talk and apologize. But I have sent word to the World Before. I await their reply.”

  Nevyan waited an uncharacteristically long time for a senior matriarch. She waited, kneeling, but Aras was frozen.

  She’s gone. She’s dead.

  “Eddie has asked to live in F’nar. He’ll be alone here. I doubt he will ever get home.”

  Aras struggled to think. His mind was trapped in a loop of reliving the first realization that Shan was gone. He could not imagine the pain ever stopping. It kept rolling over him again and again.

  “I think you and Eddie could be a great comfort to each other,” Nevyan persisted. “Shall I tell him he’s welcome?”

  Aras wanted oblivion. If he could have moved, he would have gone and taken the grenades Shan kept as bizarre souvenirs and laid upon them and died.

  He forced his head up.

  “She’s c’naatat,” said Nevyan. “You must not lose hope. We have no idea what the parasite’s limits are.”

  Aras hated Nevyan suddenly for that suggestion. C’naatat was remarkable: but it could not bring back the dead. That was a conjuring trick for the humans’god. He managed to pound his fists on the stone floor. He felt the skin tear and the blood flow, albeit briefly. The pain helped.

  They always seemed to think a c’naatat couldn’t feel pain. They were wrong.

  “We’ll bring her body home,” Nevyan said. “We’ll find her. Every wess’har has the right to return home to the cycle. She’ll be taken back into the world, however long we have to search.”

  Aras thought how much it would have meant to Shan to be spoken of as a wess’har. He wanted to see her body. He wanted to hold her one last time. He didn’t give a damn about the cycle. He wanted his isan.

  Nevyan was still staring at Shan’s few personal items on a shelf that was rapidly taking on the appearance of a human shrine. She put her hand out towards an imperfect emerald glass bowl but stopped short of touching it.

  “I would like something of her,” she said. “She made this, yes?”

  Aras couldn’t form the words, but he didn’t feel the urge to stop her. He still had more of Shan than anyone would ever touch. He had her memories, the very fabric of her, genetic material he had not even begun to see expressed yet.

  Nevyan placed the bowl in the folds of her dhren and clutched it to her like a child. “She shaped me, Aras. She was my friend. She taught me that you can’t withdraw from the world and you can’t run from threats. You must engage them and not spend your life in dread of their coming. And this view will guide me now that I have succeeded Mestin.”

  What will I do without her? How will I carry on?

  “Aras, I know you can hear me,” said Nevyan. “I shall send Eddie to you. And then there are the other humans. There’s the soldier, Bennett. He asks to talk to you.”

  Bennett would never have harmed Shan. Whatever he claimed, he would never have killed her. Aras knew it. He needed to talk to him. But it would have to wait.

  He sat back on his heels. It was the most effort he had managed to muster in days. It was a primeval survival reflex gone haywire, from the tunnel-dwelling past when keeping still when faced with an unseen threat might be the difference between living and dying for the proto-wess’har. Aras was always surprised when it caught him out like this. The last time had been when Askiniyas took her own life.

  He now had two isan’ve who had been suicides in extreme circumstances. It was too much to ask of a wess’har male.

  “Bring them here,” he said.

  Bennett was a soldier. Eddie was a soldier too, except he could fight with words, and gethes were very vulnerable to those.

  He would need them both if he was going to exact his own balance for the death of Shan Frankland.

  27

  A spokesman for the FEU Foreign Office said they regretted the incident and would revise the guidelines for future missions. But the spokesman declined to comment on whether any formal protest would be lodged over the fate of CSV Actaeon.

  Meanwhile protests continued against the planned landing of isenj delegates from the EFS Thetis. The veteran ship is still more than seventy years away from the solar system but the Sino-European Space Commission admits it has carried out a feasibility study into whether a mission can be launched to retrieve the vessel and speed its journey home with modern propulsion systems.

  “We have so much to learn from the isenj, and bridges to build,” said technology minister Francois Teilhard. “We would rather that happened as quickly as possible.”

  BBCHan bulletin.

  “Co
me on,” said Eddie “You can patch me through to my News Desk, can’t you?”

  He had drilled down as far as the Defense Ministry comms control desk, and he suspected he’d only made it that far because he was on Minister Ual’s private link. Ual was proving to be a reliable and valuable friend. Eddie was laboring under no illusions that it was his witty repartee ensuring the minister’s cooperation.

  “Mr. Michallat, this is a military communications channel,” said the woman on the other end of his precious and fragile life-line. She was very chic and dark, a little too exotic for the drab uniform of an army major. She reminded him of Marine Ismat Qureshi. “We don’t feed into the entertainment networks from here.”

  “You did all the time it suited you, though.”

  “I appreciate your frustration.”

  “I need to let my people know I’m alive. They think I was on—in—Actaeon when she was hit.”

  “And it’s clear you’re still on Umeh.”

  “It’s clear to you, but not to them. Maybe you could make it clear.”

  “Wait one.”

  The screen flicked to the holding menu of warnings about confidentiality, federal security and dire penalties if any one of a thousand rules and regulations was breached.

  Eddie didn’t want to be polite at all. He wanted to scream that the news they were currently broadcasting was bollocks, less than half a story because it didn’t mention why the wess’har had fired on Actaeon with three massive missiles that shattered her backbone and broke her into fragments in minutes.

  He knew that because the wess’har had provided the information via Serrimissani. He also knew the Defense Ministry didn’t have all the data because there were no survivors from Actaeon to file a sitrep or take part in a wash-up. All they had were the last transmissions from the ship and reports from the surface of Umeh about the magnificent fireworks display that meant all hands were lost.

  That meant 106 out of nearly 500 men and women, civilians and service personnel. Everyone else had been evacuated to Umeh Station during what the military delicately called the period of tension, as if the threat of war was some sort of minor back pain.

  Someone back at BBChan had to be asking why the wess’har attacked. He knew they wouldn’t swallow whatever pat answer they had been fed. But one thing reassured him. The news about Actaeon had leaked fast, in hours rather than days or months. It was the price of ITX. Once the routine of instant messages and telemetry between remote stations and Earth had become established, a lot of people in dull support jobs noticed when they suddenly stopped. And those people talked, both to their contacts at Umeh Station and to their chums back on Earth.

  Eddie had been afraid that ITX’s exclusivity would mean all news would be suppressed. He should never have underestimated the power of the human mouth.

  The warning menu dissolved and the glamorous but inflexible major was back in frame again.

  “Mr. Michallat, I can certainly pass on a message to your employers. You’ll appreciate that we have quite a bit on our hands at the moment.”

  Eddie’s brain started scrambling for a message that would let News Desk know that the information the Defense Ministry spokesweasels were pumping out was incomplete. Okay, they knew that anyway. It was part of the game. But they didn’t know exactly what they were omitting and—unlike on Earth—the opposing forces’ view from the Cavanagh system would be channeled through the Cerberuslike DM liaison desk. They couldn’t just call the wess’har for a comment.

  He hadn’t been this cut off even during the Greek war. He had been able to buy the protection of a militia minder, complete with armored car, and drive the damn story over the nearest safe border.

  Now that was a thought. He’d have to work on that as a backup plan.

  “Thank you,” said Eddie. Inspiration suddenly struck him so hard that he had to squeeze his nails into his palm to stay dead-pan. “Can you tell them I have a Belgrano to file?”

  “Spell that.”

  “Bravo Echo Lima Golf Romeo Alpha November Oscar.” Eddie hoped his gambling wasn’t visible. He was banking on nobody being familiar with three-hundred-year-old incidents during a war even the military had forgotten. But News Desk would look it up. Think. Think. “Bloody Expensive Living, Gratuities, Research And Nobbling Officials. I’m out of barter items, love. I want to file my expenses to replace them for when I get home.”

  There was a pause. Major Gorgeous was making notes, lips moving slightly as she keyed in the acronym. Then she smiled coldly. “You journalists,” she said. “You really are callous bastards, aren’t you?”

  Eddie managed a convincingly guilty shrug. “Not the first war I’ve been in,” he said. “How about you?”

  “I’ll see this is relayed immediately and get back to you. Good day, Mr. Michallat.”

  Eddie held his aw-don’t-be-hard-on-me expression until he was sure the connection was cut. Then he punched the air in brief triumph. That was one fucking amazing God-given stroke of genius. He had no idea that he could bluff that well or lie that fast. Belgrano? Jesus. It was as if everything he had ever done, however minor, had been designed to lead up to that point in time.

  Serrimissani was at his shoulder immediately. “We have to go.”

  “One more hour.”

  “We can return when the wess’har have finished with Umeh Station.”

  “What if they don’t attack?”

  “Then we come back and find it intact.”

  “I need to know if News Desk got the message.”

  “What is Belgrano?”

  “It was a ship, but I made up the acronym on the spot. Nothing to do with my expenses.” Oh, he was pleased with himself. “Provided the teenage morons running News Desk spot that I’ve sent a spoof message, they’ll know something’s wrong.”

  “More wrong than one of their warships being destroyed?”

  “Spare me the sarcasm. This is journalist maths. If they spot the problem, they’ll look up Belgrano. I’m just hoping the Defense Ministry is sufficiently ignorant, badly educated, and European enough not to have any knowledge of an event in an obscure British war.”

  “Which is?”

  “An Argentine warship that was sunk by a British submarine, HMS Conqueror, and there was a big row over whether or not it represented a threat to the British forces. That’s irrelevant. What matters is that it started a major bust-up between the military, the government and the media of the day about what really happened. If my colleagues make the connection, that ought to be enough to let them know there’s an even bigger fucking story behind this one.”

  He was going to wait until the walls came crashing down, even if that meant making Serrimissani leave without him. For foul-tempered ferrets, they had an unshakable sense of devotion. He liked them. Right then, he liked every species except Homo sapiens.

  Just like Shan.

  The thought caught him unawares and his spirit sank briefly before he dragged it back up by its collar again, assuring it he was going to do right by her. He owed it to her to fight.

  The Defense Ministry was cutting it fine.

  Serrimissani had already started circling him like an impatient sheepdog when the FEU menu screen appeared and paged him. He waited three seconds and hit the control.

  It was Major Gorgeous.

  “Mr. Michallat,” she said, “I have a message from a Mr. Chetwynd at BBChan Foreign Desk. He says your expenses claim gives them some cause for concern and he wants to know if you’re trying to claim for…” She looked down, apparently at a screen. “…more Conqueror brand whisky, given the argument you had over it last time. He’ll be back in touch when he can, but in the meantime not to hand out too many more bribes.”

  Eddie felt relief wash over him like a warm shower.

  “What a tight-fisted bastard,” he said grimly, and convincingly.

  “As are you all,” said the major, and the menu screen replaced her lovely but unlovable face.

  Serrimissani was at eye
-level with him. “We go now,” she said. “Do you have your answer?”

  “Oh, I do,” he said, and began cramming his text pad and editing screen in his bag. “Thank God for BBChan researchers.”

  Yes, they now knew damn well what he had meant.

  Conqueror.

  Round about now, fellow journalists he had neither known nor worked with would be calling contacts and harassing media spokespersons and challenging ministers.

  They would be asking what the hell they hadn’t been told about how CSV Actaeon came to be blown to kingdom come while in apparently friendly space. And they wouldn’t rest until they had heard from the BBChan man on the scene. Him.

  “Ready when you are, doll,” said Eddie.

  Nevyan was settling comfortably into the role of senior matriarch. Mestin watched the expression on Eddie Michallat’s face as he came into the large kitchen and looked expectantly at her, only to be waved towards Nevyan.

  “Don’t be embarrassed, Mr. Michallat,” said Mestin. “Political power here is not the same commodity as it is for gethes. My daughter has precedence now, and we’re all content with that.”

  “You really ought to invade Earth sometime,” said Eddie. She knew enough of humans now to realize he was being flip- pant. “It would make our life a hell of a lot simpler.”

  Nevyan had Giyadas with her. Isanket’ve needed to learn how to conduct themselves, and there was no reason not to start early. The child sat patiently on the floor at Nevyan’s side with her head against her legs, watching Eddie with unblinking eyes. He was trying not to watch the child, and not succeeding.

  “You have asked for asylum here,” said Nevyan. “Is that the correct word?”

  “Yes. I don’t want to live among the human community, either here or on Umeh.”

  “Are you going to find it difficult living among us and remaining on good terms with the isenj?”

  “I’m a journalist. I’m professionally neutral. But if you’re asking if I’m going to be a spy in your camp, try this for size.” He put his hand inside his garment and took out a small transparent container. He held it at the level of his ear and rattled it. “A quill. Ironically, from the seat of government.”