Crossing the Line (10 page)

Tlasias gathered his tools and walked off towards the city. Shan brushed her hands against the leaves of the tea plants, disappointed that they didn't emit that elusive, tarry perfume of the fermented leaf. She could wait. It was a singularly thoughtful gift.

Guilt had never been a defining emotion for her, except for the gorilla and all the other victims she couldn't—no,
hadn't
—saved. She'd never felt guilty about anything she had done. It was things not done that ate away at her.

She felt guilty now. She was guilty of impatience with Aras and of taking miracles for granted. There wasn't a human being alive—or dead—who cared about her well-being as much as one misfit alien with a stack of problems of his own.

When she walked back up the winding terraces to the house the sun was nearly overhead, and ferociously hot. Wess'har going about their business stopped to splash themselves with water from the open conduits that ran everywhere from terrace to terrace. Then they shook themselves unselfconsciously like dogs, spraying water everywhere and attracting a cloud of
tem
flies to the fresh puddles. The flies, for all their magnificent droppings, were insignificant, drab gray things with dull wing membranes. It didn't seem right somehow.

Shan didn't think she could do that canine shake, but the cold water looked like a good idea. She stopped and stuck her head under the torrent. For the merest fraction of a second it was bliss.

Then it was a dark room and every moment of misery and fear she had dreamed and half remembered on waking for the past few months. And she knew suddenly what it was.

Like those optical illusions that only formed an image out of a random pattern when you stopped trying to focus on them, she could now see her newly inherited memories. She was in an isenj prison as clearly as if she had been there herself. Although she was aware it wasn't happening to her, she was being held head down in water, trying not to gulp it into her lungs but unable to resist succumbing to the reflex to
breathe.

She knew what was coming next. She put her hands flat on the burning pearl wall to stop herself pitching forward as a ripping sensation tore up her back and forced a surprised cry from her.

They said you couldn't recreate pain in your memory. They were wrong.

Someone stopped to trill concern at her but she waved them away without looking up. It took her a long time to draw herself together sufficiently to carry on walking. She couldn't understand why she hadn't made sense of it before. It was everything in Eddie's interview, the material he cut and kept for her alone, except it was detailed and personal. She knew now exactly what the isenj had done to Aras while he was their prisoner.

Her first instinct was to find the bastard who did it and sort them. But that bastard would be long dead by now. The second wave of emotion was to go to Aras and crush him to her chest and promise she'd make it right for him, just as she'd wanted to make it right for the mutilated rabbits and the kitten she'd stumbled on in that house behind the shabby blue door. But it was too late for them. And the unimaginable time stretching ahead of her was suddenly something she would have gladly traded for time stretching back to change the past.

If she forgot the caged gorilla signing a mute plea for help and the house with the blue door and a thousand other things she had seen, then she wasn't Shan Frankland any longer. It was time to come to terms with them. But it was hard. She wondered how Aras was going to handle the shit churning up from the mud in her memories. It wasn't as if he didn't have enough of his own.

F'nar looked incongruously glamorous through the filter of her nightmare. It was full of unforgiving creatures who would wipe out a planet without debate but she knew that there was nothing to fear behind the few doors they had. The relief of that thought was so sudden and intense that it felt like finding something precious you were sure had been lost for good.

Shit.
Aras had her swiss. It was the first time it had left her hand or pocket in nearly thirty years except for repairs. It was like letting him browse through her soul, but he could do that anyway whether he wanted to or not, the poor sod. She'd make him a good strong cup of tea and get him to talk about his experiences. After five hundred years he probably needed catharsis more than she ever would.

It was a bugger how things stuck in your mind.
Don't be such a fucking girl. You'll see a lot worse.

But she never had. She was sure of that.

 

Lindsay didn't need to look at the bioscreen in her palm to see that some of her Royal Marine detachment were up and about on board
Actaeon
.

Adrian Bennett was standing at the back of the huddle of officers chatting over their drinks at the wardroom bar, trying to catch the steward's attention. He was a sergeant. Sergeants, even Extreme Environment Warfare Cadre commandos like Bennett, did
not
drink in the commissioned officers' wardroom. The
Thetis
party had been barred from the other messes to slow the rumor machine, and his discomfort at being on unfamiliar social terrain showed as he shuffled his boots and folded and unfolded his arms.

Lindsay wanted to rush up and hug him. He was familiar and safe and reliable. He was from her world. Instead, she paused long enough to think what Shan Frankland might have done, and then stepped forward through the braying group of lieutenants and lieutenant commanders, who should have had the plain bloody good manners to clear the service area.

“Steward,” she said loudly over their heads. The man looked up, startled. She had never used her three gold rings as imperiously before. “Would you get Sergeant Bennett a beer? And one for me please.” No movement from the junior officers at the bar: she stared at one of them, a victim picked at random. “I'd write for you all too, but you're obviously just finishing your drinks.”

There was a second's silence. It took them a while to understand. Then the officers parted as if a downdraft had hit them and left.

“Yes, ma'am,” said the steward. For a brief and glorious moment Lindsay understood what it was to be Shan, to have
presence,
and it felt good.

She reached out for the glasses on the mock-mahogany bar and put one in Bennett's hand. “I can't tell you how good it is to see you.”

“They told us we were restricted to the wardroom and Juliet deck.”

“You don't have to explain yourself. Get that beer down you.”

He raised the glass, looking bemused. “Cheers, Boss.”

The informal title caught her off guard. Bennett didn't use it when addressing her very often: she was normally
ma'am.
But he called Shan Frankland
Boss
all the time, even though she was a civilian and had no authority over him other than the flimsy mandate handed to her by a politician too many years in the past.

Lindsay responded anyway.

“Cheers, Ade.” It wasn't the done thing to address a non-commissioned rank by first name, but she didn't care. This wasn't her navy any longer. He was one of seven people in the universe who she could almost regard as a friend. There could have been eight, but she put that idea out of her mind. “I never got the chance to thank you for stopping me getting myself killed.”

Bennett looked blank. “Not with you, Boss.”

“You didn't start a firefight when the wess'har kicked us off Bezer'ej.”

“Prudence.” It wasn't a word he normally used. She wondered if he were raising his verbal game to fit better into the wardroom. “No point dying when you can wait and fight another day.”

“I didn't think you were bottling out of a fight. Really I didn't.”

Bennett just gave her a nervous half smile and busied himself with his beer. “They'd have torn us up for arse-paper anyway,” he said quietly.

That was one of Shan's eloquent assessments of threat. Lindsay wondered if that was where Bennett had picked up the phrase; he'd taken a lot of ribbing from the detachment about his obvious affection for Shan. But she doubted it had gone further than a thought. Shan was too focused and too unforgiving to do anything as messy or weakly human as screwing a subordinate.

No personal discipline
. That was Shan's verdict when she found out Lindsay was unexpectedly pregnant. The comment still hurt.

“So you're not immortal, then,” Lindsay said. Bennett's expression was blank. She tried again. “You haven't picked up Frankland's biotech.”

“None of us have.”

“They're not leaving any stone unturned.”

“I thought as much.” Suddenly his expression wasn't I'm-a-simple-soldier, the studied lack of political art that he normally wore. Faint lines creased the bridge of his nose. “So you're coming back to Bezer'ej with us.”

“Sorry?”

“I wasn't told
not
to tell you, Boss.”

Shan dropped that sort of oblique information a lot better. But Bennett had made his point, however inelegantly. It was clear he didn't like keeping things from her, and Lindsay struggled to think of some way to repay that loyalty. He'd answer a direct question from a superior officer.

“Okay, what return trip to Bezer'ej, Ade?”

“We've been tasked to find a backdoor route back to the surface if the front door approach doesn't work.”

“To do what, exactly?”

“Retrieve samples.”

“What samples? And if you manage to get down to the surface without being blown to kingdom come, how are you going to get off again?”

“Haven't got down to that level of detail yet, and I'm not sure that extracting us features in the CO's plans.”

“Let's talk about the samples. What? Where?”

“Colony.”

“Jesus, you can't just walk into Constantine and ask them for specimens, Ade. You'll have wess'har all over you like a rash. The colonists don't want us there either, remember.”

Bennett said nothing. He looked embarrassed and stared down into his beer. He might have had a modest education, but he was no fool.

Oh God. He's trying to tell me something.

She waited for him to look up again and reveal what he was struggling with, but he just kept his eyes down.

He said colony, not colonists.

“Spit it out, Ade.”

“Exhumation,” he said.

It was another word she never thought he used. He probably thought it was a kind way to say it.

There was only one body buried at Constantine; the colonists preferred to leave their dead for consumption by rock-velvets, the slow and beautiful black sheets of plush tissue that lived on carrion. She hadn't wanted that end for David. Aras had made a stained glass memorial to stand at her son's grave.

“I'm sorry, Boss,” said Bennett. “I thought you ought to know.”

The harder Lindsay tried not to hear, the less she could see of the black and yellow chevrons of a fire escape hatch on which she had fixed her gaze. She couldn't feel her stomach or legs. What little progress she had made through her grief was now reversed and she was staring over a precipice.

“Why?” She wasn't sure if she had actually said the words aloud. “Why dig up my baby? For God's sake, can't they—”

“They're just checking everyone they can get to who might have been contaminated,” said Bennett kindly. “Honestly, they really haven't a clue what it is or where they can find it, other than Superintendent Frankland and maybe Aras. Neither of them is going to hand out samples.”

The chevrons assumed a more normal focus but Lindsay was still fixed on them. She had to control this. She could
not
fall apart now.

“They seem convinced about accidental contamination as a vector,” she said. She fell back on dispassionate words to buffer the pain. “Come on. Let's work this through. What do we know?”

“Hugel says she called it a plague. And nobody who knows Shan would buy the idea that she'd carry biotech for money.”

He'd slipped and called her Shan. Lindsay noticed, but she was more preoccupied with replaying the painful memory of the last time she had seen Shan. She'd been screaming at her, demanding to know why she hadn't used whatever she had to save David, to help. And Shan's refusal came back to her—measured, detached, the words of a copper giving a relative the bad news.

I have an infection. It would run riot in the general population.

Shan might just have been lying, of course, but Lindsay doubted it. If she had set up anything, she would have also set up a route to hand over the biotech or whatever it was to her masters. She wasn't a woman who left things to chance. But she was stranded, in exile among aliens. No, she hadn't planned this.

Lindsay shook herself out of it. She forced a smile. It hurt so much she thought Bennett might hear her tearing apart inside. “Let's have another beer, Ade.”

“I'm so sorry. I really am. It's sick. We could refuse, Boss, really we could.”

“No, we'll do it,” she said. The pain fell away: the shivering ice in her gut was starting to feel like a comfort, a beacon. “We'll do more than that. We'll actually find whatever this is. And when we do, we won't be handing it over to any corporation. This isn't a recreational drug. This is a
weapon
.”

Bennett hadn't finished his beer. He liked his beer, she knew, so he wasn't enjoying being the bearer of bad news. “Commander Okurt will rip me a new one for telling you.”

“You leave me to worry about him.” She gave his arm a squeeze, another little familiarity that wasn't allowed between ranks. He stared at her hand as if it had burned him. “One way or another, he's letting me in on this.”

Lindsay managed to maintain her collected façade until she got back to the cabin she shared with the civilian engineer overseeing the construction of the habitat at Jejeno. Natalie Cho wasn't there. She heaved herself onto her bunk, pulled down the soundproofed shutter, and let go of the sobbing that had been threatening to overwhelm her for the last half hour.