Crossing the Line

by Karen Traviss

  He held it out and Nevyan took it.

  “It’s too late for the bezeri,” she said.

  “I know, and I’m sorry. But it’s not too late for the rest of Bezer’ej. The vast majority of life will survive. This is for them.”

  Right answer, thought Mestin. Giyadas craned her neck to peer at the container as Nevyan turned it over in her hands.

  “What is the bead?” she asked.

  “Ruby,” he said. “Corundum. Valuable, where I come from. Keep it. It’s not my color.”

  Nevyan trilled to summon Lisik and handed the vial to him. “Take this to Sevaor,” she said. Then she concentrated on Eddie again. “If you stay here, I would appreciate it if you would provide company for Aras.”

  “How is he?”

  “Grieving.”

  “Sorry. Stupid question. Is he going to want me around?”

  “It will be easier for him to be with a human than with a family here that reminds him of his loss.”

  “Suppose he wants to be alone?”

  “He has spent too long alone. He needs friendship now, even if he doesn’t see that.” She paused. “He has executed Joshua Garrod. I believe that is troubling him too.”

  Mestin, keeping a silent watch on the exchange, couldn’t interpret Eddie’s mood until that point. He was too much of a jumble of emotions and agitation to detect any scent clearly. Then overwhelming panic roiled off him, pungent as human sweat. He swallowed hard and the knobbly lump at the front of his neck moved visibly.

  He seemed to be chewing on unspoken words. His jaw moved. It was a few seconds before sound emerged.

  “Oh,” he said.

  “The soldier called Bennett is here too. He surrendered. He’ll be useful.”

  “I can’t imagine him surrendering.”

  “He claims to have caused Shan’s death. He saw her die.”

  “Ade? Never. He had a big crush on her. He might have screwed up, but—look, can I talk to him?”

  “Ask Aras. You should go to him now. You know where his home is.”

  “Thank you.” Eddie still seemed shaken. “I appreciate your kindness.”

  “And we appreciate your willingness to help.”

  “There’s one more thing I want to ask of you. I need to send back reports. I can’t let that garbage about Actaeon go unchallenged, and I reckon people back home are asking questions now about what really started the conflict. When they let me tell the story, I want to have the stuff ready to file. I owe it to Shan, especially if Ade will talk to me about it.”

  “Professionally neutral,” said Nevyan. “Wasn’t that your claim?”

  “I was lying,” said Eddie. “Sometimes neutrality is just an excuse for being spineless.”

  Eddie had clearly scored highly with Nevyan. She patted his arm. Mestin sent Serrimissani with Eddie, just to make sure he reached Aras’s home in one piece. Humans had poor memories, and she couldn’t rely on him to remember the way. She was also worried he might not cope with the steps and terraces with their sheer drops into nothing. Humans didn’t have good balance, either.

  Giyadas was trilling spineless, spineless, spineless under her breath, trying out the word with overtones and then trying to limit herself to one note. The weight of the last few days settled on the adults while the child delighted in the novelty of new alien words.

  “What a strange language English can be,” said Nevyan. “He’ll never learn wess’u. He’ll never be able to pronounce it, anyway.”

  “It’s English you most need him to speak,” said Mestin. “Because it’s the humans who need to listen.”

  Eddie hesitated before knocking on the lovely pearl door. He knew it was shit, but it didn’t make it any less magical. And knowing Aras well didn’t make it any easier to work out what to say to him.

  The door opened. Aras, grim and huge, filled the opening. He didn’t look any different, but then Eddie wasn’t sure he would show signs of not eating or sleeping.

  And he knew wess’har couldn’t weep.

  “I don’t know what to say to you,” Eddie said. “I’m truly sorry, and I miss her too, and I won’t presume to tell you I know how you must feel, because I don’t.”

  Aras said nothing, but held out his arm in a gesture to invite Eddie inside.

  Eddie stood in the center of the Spartan room, afraid to sit down in case he was taking a seat that had been Shan’s. He waited for Aras to indicate a place on the incongruously human sofa.

  “Thanks for taking me in,” he said.

  “Shan was very fond of you.”

  It was painfully touching. Eddie knew she enjoyed their verbal sparring but he had no idea that the relationship generated any degree of warmth at her end. She was good at holding people at arm’s length. “It’s all my fault,” he said. “If you want to kill me, I wouldn’t blame you.”

  “As always, you confuse knowledge with action,” said Aras.

  “If I had kept my mouth shut, they wouldn’t have known she had the damn thing. I even told them where to find her. And it.”

  “No. If you had kept those things to yourself, they would still have found out in time, and pursued us, but you would have been long dead, and so oblivious of the events.”

  Aras had an accidental talent for making Eddie feel better. Eddie hoped he could return the favor. But he had a feeling that the questions he needed to ask Aras would simply scrape at wounds so fresh and raw that the pain would overwhelm him.

  They didn’t talk much for the rest of the day. Aras busied himself cooking, which Eddie took as displacement activity, but he was glad of it because it was good food. Aras didn’t eat anything. He just gave Eddie a pile of sek blankets, showed him the sofa and went out.

  Eddie thought he might be going into the center of the city on some errand or other, but as he watched from the terrace, taking in a vista that had still not yet palled for him, he saw a figure walking out into the dry plain.

  He hoped Aras wasn’t going to do anything stupid.

  But Aras was c’naatat, and that made killing yourself a very tall order. Eddie still decided he would keep an eye on him.

  The room was stark despite the odd touches of human upholstery—a bed against one wall, the sofa, a padded stool. Eddie looked around. There was almost no storage. It was like being back in the cabins at Thetis camp. He rummaged in the one cupboard and found some glass bowls, Shan’s carefully folded formal uniform jacket, thin-woven hand towels, and two hand grenades. It didn’t really surprise him. She liked to be ready for emergencies.

  It was painful to realize that she wouldn’t come striding through the door and give him a stream of inventive and good-natured abuse. He thought of how she’d taken a laser cutter to Rayat’s desk when he’d argued about some trivia, and he smiled, and it hurt. He’d miss her.

  Aras was going to have a very hard time of it.

  Eddie picked up the grenades, prayed that they were disarmed, and put them in his bag. Fragmentation was the one thing he knew that could kill c’naatat troops. There was no point taking chances.

  He spent the rest of the afternoon playing with the insubstantial-looking translucent console at the far end of the room. He worked out how to get images, sound, and data from the wess’har archives, but the tuning defeated him.

  He was still fiddling around when Aras, silent and unexpected, walked up behind him and showed him where the data streams from Earth could be found.

  “Thanks,” said Eddie. “Are you okay? Want to talk?”

  “No.”

  At least Eddie could watch the news. He wasn’t sure he wanted to. There was nothing worse than being spitting mad and 150 trillion miles away from being able to do anything about it.

  He watched the news anyway, curled up on the eccentric white sofa while Aras disappeared onto the terrace.

  “I can listen,” Eddie called. “And I don’t mean an interview.”

  Aras grunted noncommittally from a distance. Eddie turned back to the screen to wander throu
gh his favorite news channels.

  He was glad he did. The European Federal Union’s junior defense secretary was having a hard time. His boss had gone to ground, leaving him to deal with reporters covering a space war for the very first time. Eddie could sense their excitement.

  People always tut-tutted about journalists being pushy and rude and disrespectful. But Eddie thought there was nothing finer than the sight of a minister being doorstepped and harried all the way from his shiny office door to his overpriced privilege of a chauffeur-driven limo by a pack of reporters.

  It was democracy. He loved it. He could take all the abuse and slammed doors in the world because, when it came down to it, this was what the job was really about.

  It was about being one of the last ordinary people left with enough clout to put those in power on the spot and make them account for themselves.

  Shan would have loved it too.

  Serrimissani had slotted into the gap left by Vijissi without asking or being asked. She wanted to be useful. She sat on the steps of the terrace beside Mestin and Nevyan without comment as they waited for a response from the World Before.

  The wess’har populations no longer spoke the same language, but the ussissi moved between the worlds and could make contact and translate. Shan had found it hard to work out how the ussissi could work with such differing cultures without being a conduit for any of them. Mestin would have sent her out with them to learn and understand, but it was too late now.

  “They’re wess’har, like us,” said Nevyan. “However differently they live, they will share our basic drive for cooperation. And they will not be gethes.”

  “What do you want them to do if they accept our approach?” asked Mestin.

  “To tell us what’s possible in confining the gethes to their own system, and what support they will give us to achieve that.”

  “So we’re back to the policing that Targassat so despised?”

  “She felt we sought out cultures for interference because we believed we were morally superior, and that it would over-stretch us and cost us our own civilization. This is a response to outright aggression.”

  “Outcomes, isanket, not motives. And perhaps she was just wrong.”

  “And perhaps she was right for the times, but not for now.”

  “You don’t need to comfort yourself about betraying a dead woman’s ideals.” It seemed they were being driven by respect for opinionated and exceptional matriarchs who were no longer around to enforce their own philosophies. “You make your own judgments. The will of Wess’ej supports you. It’s time to act.”

  And if it wasn’t, it was too late to step back.

  Nijassi, a member of Vijissi’s pack, came scrambling up the steps. “There is a message,” he said. “It has taken time to find the right people to ask the questions, but we have an answer.”

  “And?” Nevyan stood up and shook down her dhren as if she were heading somewhere to receive a visit.

  “They will arrange a conference by screen as soon as they have spoken to the various cities.”

  “This isn’t an answer. What did they actually say? What were the words?”

  Nijassi sat back on his haunches as if he had forgotten to note the most important part of the message. He seemed to have taken it as understood.

  “They said that what threatens us threatens them. And threat is now. They will come.”

  28

  When our defense personnel die in action, we want to hear the truth. We can handle it. We might even think their lives were worth sacrificing. But what we can’t handle is lies.

  CSV Actaeon was the first vessel to be sunk—if that word can apply—in a war in space. Before we rush to condemn the alien forces that destroyed her, we need to ask what made them attack after living peacefully with humans for nearly two hundred years. Why won’t the government let us hear from the one independent observer who can talk openly to all the parties in this tragic conflict? We challenge the FEU president to let us talk to Eddie Michallat, unedited and unrestricted. If we’re going to live with aliens, we need to understand them before it’s too late.

  Editorial comment, “Europe Now”

  Aras wondered how long it would be before even a c’naatat succumbed to lack of nourishment.

  He really didn’t feel like eating. It was more than simply being off his food. Food was communal: he had cooked for Shan, and Shan was no longer there to enjoy it. She had not been there for nearly seven days now and she would never be there again.

  There were no stages of grieving for wess’har, no denial or bargaining. First they were paralyzed by grief and shock, and then they accepted it. Males remated and the pain was soothed, but not wholly forgotten. So did females. Aras had to find his own solution, and for a second time.

  But he was mired in human anger.

  He spent the morning wondering how many scores he would feel obliged to settle before his life was too miserable to be faced.

  “Aras,” said Eddie. He stood at the door to the terrace and called him. He seemed scared to come within Aras’s reach, as if he would receive a blow. It was a shame. The human was doing his best to support him, misguided though it was. “Aras, Nevyan’s at the door. She’s brought someone to talk to you.”

  It was Sergeant Bennett in his camouflage battle dress, even though there was no longer any point in concealment, and he was wearing that odd flat green fabric headdress that he called a beret. Nevyan gestured the soldier forward silently. He saluted Aras.

  “Sir,” he said. It sounded like sah. “I need to talk to you urgently.”

  Aras stood back and let them walk in. Bennett simply stood in the center of the room with his hands clasped behind his back, legs a little apart. They called it standing easy. It certainly didn’t look like there was any ease about it.

  This man had shot his isan.

  He had also stopped Lindsay Neville from killing her. Aras didn’t know what to make of him, but he had once liked him a lot more than he had liked Josh, and he needed his skills and knowledge.

  “Go on,” said Aras. He didn’t sit down either.

  Bennett put his hand in the expandable pocket on his trouser leg and took out Shan’s gun. He handed it to Aras on the flat of his palm. “She would have wanted you to have it, sir.”

  Aras took it and turned it over in his hands. He’d used the weapon before. He had executed Surendra Parekh with it. It hadn’t done Shan much good. Pain, the real physical pain of grief, gripped at his chest.

  “She asked me to tell you that she was sorry and that she hadn’t abandoned you,” said Bennett. “You would have been very proud of her, sir.”

  Aras wanted to hear it and yet he didn’t. “Tell me what happened,” he said. “Everything.” He turned to Eddie. “And you need to hear it too. Because you will tell the gethes, and I know you will tell the truth.”

  It was a hard story to hear. Bennett kept stopping. He related it like a report, but he was struggling to keep his voice steady.

  “And you shot her,” said Aras.

  “It took nearly the whole magazine to bring her down,” he said. “She wouldn’t give up. It took two of us to restrain her and even then she head-butted me. Hard.”

  “Do you expect sympathy? She admired you. She trusted you.”

  “I mention it simply because she was so bloody brave, sir.”

  “And she—” Aras stopped. He couldn’t say it. He needed to sit. Eddie stepped in smartly.

  “I think we want to know if she really…jettisoned herself of her own free will, Ade.”

  Bennett’s jaw worked silently for a few seconds. “She did, but not that she had much of a choice. She told Commander Neville what she thought of her, and just stepped out into space, and the ussissi wouldn’t leave her.” He swallowed and his whole throat seemed to move. “It was horrible but I’m glad I was there. Some people disappoint you. They’re all mouth. Shan wasn’t. She got on and did it. I just wanted you to know that.”

  There wa
s a silence. It went on for a while, and Nevyan seemed to be having the most difficulty with it. She was almost billowing acid agitation. She stood up and peered into Bennett’s face.

  “Can you give me any location?” she said. “We want to retrieve her body. And Vijissi. They deserve to come home.”

  Bennett held out his hand. The palm was illuminated green, showing flat lines and numbers. “It records a lot. There’ll be a month’s worth of location data in there. You’ll have a job on your hands, though, even with the coordinates.”

  “Then it’s a job I should be getting on with,” said Nevyan.

  “I still don’t understand why you surrendered,” said Eddie. “You didn’t kill Shan. You didn’t help her much, but you know it wasn’t your doing. Had enough of the FEU shunting you around to nursemaid corporations or something?”

  Bennett hadn’t taken his eyes off Aras. He held his hand out to him, palm up, fist clenched. He nodded towards the tilgir on Aras’s belt.

  “Want to take a slice out of me, sir?”

  “That won’t bring her back.”

  “That’s not quite what I meant. Please. Just cut me.”

  Eddie looked completely stunned. No, thought Aras. No, not that. But he took his knife and he caught Bennett’s arm and drew the blade down from the inside of his elbow to the faint blue vessels on his wrist. It was a shallow cut. It was all it needed.

  Blood welled for a moment and stopped. Then the cut settled into a red line, and then a pink one, and then it was as if he had never been cut.

  “Oh shit,” said Eddie. “Here we go again.”

  “See, I told you she nutted me,” said Bennett. “I mean hard, too. Blood everywhere, right across my face and hers, and I thought it was all mine because there wasn’t a mark on her when we looked. It was an accident. She didn’t know she’d infected me.”

  Aras stared. It was one more difficulty he didn’t need. It was the sort of problem Shan would have made him feel better about had she been here to advise him.