Crossing the Line (32 page)

“What are you doing, ma'am?”

“We can't hand her over. Surely you can see that.” Lindsay didn't want to meet Shan's eyes again. It was one step too far. She had never killed anyone face-to-face: she'd given orders to
launch,
to
take,
to
open fire,
but she had never done a soldier's job, never this close up. “We'll all end up like her. Get shot up, then back in the fight. Over and over. And that's just the start. She has to die, Ade. She went to a lot of trouble to keep
c'naatat
out of our hands, and for once I agree with her.”

“That's government property,” said Rayat. “You can't. You've got orders.”

“I couldn't give a toss,” Lindsay said. “Come on, Ade. Get back to the shuttle. I'll be with you right away.”

Bennett looked remarkably calm. He was a man who had always grappled with physical fear, and overcame it anew each time. It was one of the things Shan had said she liked about him. He had guts.

Now he raised his rifle and aimed at Lindsay. She looked just past the barrel and into his eyes, because he wasn't a big man, and all she could see was dried and drying blood from his eyebrows down to his chin. The dressing across his nose looked almost comical, a racoon's mask: his determination didn't.

“Disarm the grenades, please, ma'am.”

“That's an order, Sergeant. Leave us.”

“No ma'am. You put the grenades down and you put your rifle down on the ground and back away. Or I'll fire.”

“Bennett, don't be stupid. Back off. It's an order. Last chance.” Lindsay tried to stare him out. It wasn't working. The grenades felt uncomfortable in her hands. “I have to do this.”

“Ma'am, I won't let you murder an unarmed civilian. Not even if it was Rayat.” There was an ominous whirr from his rifle as the automatic targeting tried to accommodate the close range, and he showed no sign whatsoever of lowering it. “You can't order me to breach the convention. So help me, I'll slot you right now if you don't put those bloody things down and step away from her.”

“I don't think he's joking,” said Rayat. “And we don't have all day.”

“Piss off, sir,” said Bennett without breaking his gaze. But Rayat was right. The sergeant wasn't backing down. It struck Lindsay that they might just have been waiting for an excuse to shoot her. And then Shan would be free.

Lindsay thought briefly of pulling the pins anyway, right now. She had factored that into her plans too. It was a sacrifice worth making.

She looked at the small, dull metal levers and thought,
yes, now, on the count of three.

But she didn't.

She tried to move her hands, but she just stared at the grenades.

She had visualized it so many times. But when it came to it, she couldn't do it, not even for David. She wanted to
live.

“Okay,” she said, and lowered both devices to the floor. Barencoin limped forward and picked them up. For an ill-advised moment, Lindsay let herself look at Shan; and her expression, even with a length of tape over her mouth, said it all.

You don't have the guts.

Shan would have pulled the pins. Lindsay knew that. But she wasn't Shan, and now she knew she never would be, not even when it really, really mattered. It was a moment of self-revelation that she would never forget however hard she tried.

“Let's get her in the shuttle and put some distance between us and the wess'har,” Lindsay said, trying to sound brisk and efficient. “Because when they find out, they're going to be furious.”

“More furious than they'll be for torching Christopher?” asked Barencoin, without using the word
ma'am.

It wasn't working out as she planned.

She would have to come up with something else, and fast.

 

Ussissi were like journalists. They had osmotic communication. If something was happening, they knew all about it at a cellular level, and they seemed to know about it all at once. If there was any more instant form of communication than entangled photons, it was the collective consciousness of ussissi—and journalists.

Eddie suspected the ussissi knew something now.

He watched them as they huddled by the site manager's office at Umeh Station. The office was another pastel green cube that you could snap together anywhere, anytime. The ussissi—about ten of them—were agitated, bobbing their heads and darting in and out of the little pack. Eddie decided to ask them outright. That was his job: he didn't have to apologize for it. But he'd keep clear of the teeth. He stood up slowly from his relatively comfortable perch in the cab of an idle forklift and walked towards them with deliberate strides so they wouldn't feel he was stalking them.

He hoped that being a lot taller than them didn't bring out their defensive instincts. Crouching near to them always seemed to be asking for trouble. “I hate to fall back on cliché, lads, but what's going on?”

A female with the same cheerful demeanor as Serrimissani rounded on him. “We hear you have used bombs on Bezer'ej. Are we your next target?”

“Shit,” said Eddie. This wasn't an interview. This was diplomatic contact. He didn't think he was equipped for that. “This is the first I've heard of it. Do you want to tell me what happened?”

“Your troops invaded Bezer'ej and set bombs to destroy an island.”

Constantine.
The stupid bastards had tried to take Constantine. He couldn't imagine why: it was a stupid way to get a foothold on a planet that was going to be made uninhabitable by humans anyway.

“Anyone killed?”

“We have no numbers. It is serious,
gethes.
The wess'har will have those who did this.”

“What else?”

“Why did you use weapons that poison the world?”

“Chemical weapons?” Christ, that was over the top. Maybe he should have returned to
Actaeon,
and then he wouldn't have been caught on the hop like this. “That's banned under—”

“Radiation.”

“Nukes?”

“The whole island of Ouzhari is devastated. We hear you did it to destroy
c'naatat.
”

Eddie was suddenly lost in a maze of references. He was also very, very scared. Nuking a militarily superior nation—or its buddies—seemed a good way to end up as charcoal. “Ouzhari is what you call Constantine?”

“No, Ouzhari is the island to the very south, the one where none may land. And you will die for that.”

Eddie spread his hands. “I haven't got a clue what you're talking about.” He wished he did. One part of his brain was chattering
great story, great story, great story
in an insistent reflex, and another part was saying
run, run like hell.

“The wess'har are searching for your Commander Neville.”

Oh God.
Lindsay.

“I think we've really fucked up this time,” said Eddie. “I'm sorry. Really I am. Are Shan and Aras okay?”

“Aras is looking for bezeri to see how badly affected they might be. I know nothing of Shan Frankland.”

Eddie stood back, utterly helpless and ashamed. The ussissi bared their teeth and then scattered, glancing back at him as if they might change their minds and fall on him like a pack after all, acting out the
Actaeon
myth.

He was caught or the wrong side of a border crossing, and he could see it closing before his eyes like the doors of an elevator he had just missed. He would never be going back to
Actaeon
again. His stomach was churning and he could feel the pulse in his temples through his teeth.

But he wasn't so sure he was on the wrong side of the line.

Actaeon
definitely wasn't the safest place to be right now.

The first bezeri to be washed up on Chad Island—to the north of Christopher—was a juvenile female.

The cobalt in the
gethes'
bombs had poisoned the air and the land—and the sea. It was an especially filthy weapon. It was designed to poison for many years to come, a grotesque twist on the sleeping pathogen that his wess'har comrades were spreading. It killed indiscriminately.

Aras knelt down and laid his hand on the gelatinous mantle of the bezeri. There were already tiny
keteya
swarming over it, seizing the chance of a meal. And his heart broke.

He had never understood what humans had meant by that, but he knew now. There was a definite sensation of pain deep in his chest, a pressure that made breathing unpleasant, and it ran all the way up the back of his throat into his mouth.

Why did they do this?

He stood up and looked out across the bay. The cloud cover meant that he should have been able to see some light from bezeri near the surface, but there was nothing. He had walked into the water several times and used the signaling lamp, but they didn't come.

Aras knew how vulnerable they were to poisons in the water. Their settlements were clustered near landmasses. The slightest chemical changes were dangerous: isenj pollution had nearly destroyed them. It was very easy to kill bezeri without planning to.

Aras battled with the pressure of sorrow that threatened to crush his chest and thought of all the years he had spent watching the bezeri recover their numbers, never as great as before the isenj arrived, but a recovery nonetheless. The isenj hadn't planned to kill bezeri any more than the
gethes
had.

Surendra Parekh hadn't set out to kill bezeri either.

He had balanced that crime with two shots from Shan's old but efficient hand-weapon. He wondered what it would take to balance this crime, and he began to see it would take a great deal of balancing indeed, and more than he could carry out alone.

And then there was Josh. Aras was staring at the water but not seeing it.

Why did he betray me?

Josh was another
gethes
who probably hadn't planned to kill bezeri. He never
meant
to do it. Aras could almost hear him now. He would
repent.
He would seek
forgiveness
from God. But it was none of his god's business to forgive this.

Aras wasn't minded to leave Josh's punishment to his god. He'd do it himself. He had forbidden the ussissi and the Cetekas clan to touch him.

Find him. Hold him. Wait for me to get back.

After nearly two hundred years of living alongside them, Aras had finally understood a fundamental aspect of humans. For a moment he feared it had become clear because the Shan-parts of him had clarified it.

Difference made others invisible to
gethes.

Was
she
like that? No. She behaved differently, whatever went on in her mind.

The sea was still dark gray and lightless. There were no bezeri to be seen.

Aras recalled a game he used to play with little Rachel Garrod. She called it hide and seek. Sometimes he would find her huddled in a corner with a garment over her head, and she was astonished that he could see and find her, because she could not see him. Adult
gethes
behaved similarly. They believed other species had no individuality, no sense of self, simply because they couldn't see it, measure it, or experience it; and if they could not conceive of it, it could not exist. Perhaps wess'har, used to feeling fleetingly what another felt through
oursan,
could stretch their imaginations a little further.

Aras knew that the bezeri female who now lay rotting at his feet had felt and feared, because that was what all life did in one way or another. And even if she had neither complex language nor the ability to conjure up abstract concepts—and she did, he
knew
she did—then her life would be no less valid because of that.
That
was what separated his kind from
gethes.

Gethes
thought their imaginary god had made them unique, both as individuals and as a species, even if they no longer believed in him.

The
keteya
were leaving visible holes in the bezeri's mantle now. Aras wondered what would happen to them, too.

For a moment he wished the
gethes
had succeeded in grabbing
c'naatat
for themselves. He would have delighted in seeing them reach extinction in their own filth and excess.

But many others would have died with them, and he shook the vengeance away. It was a uselessly violent thought, and he hadn't lavished one like that even upon the isenj. The thought felt like Shan's. He understood her various angers a lot better now.

He stood over the bezeri until she started to fall apart under the small but persistent assaults of the
keteya
. It was getting dark. He had been there on the shore for hours, and it occurred to him that Shan would be worrying about him. She would be back by now. She would have found Lindsay Neville and killed her. The marines wouldn't touch her. He was sure of that.

Shan could always imagine what it was like to be behind someone else's eyes. He thought of the gorilla, and was glad that she could still feel pain for the being, and for all things that were even less like her than the ape. He hadn't misjudged her at all, not from the very first time he had met her. He would go back to Constantine and find her, and then he would seek some comfort from the one human who had ever justified his affection and loyalty.

A light caught his eye.

It was faint, and green. He had never seen that single, unchanging color before: it defied the signal lamp's translation. The device stayed silent. Then the light was joined by others.

Aras scrambled back up the cliff as fast as he could to get a better vantage point. When he turned and looked down onto the darkening water, he could see light upon light, all green, all unchanging, but growing in intensity and number

His signal lamp started to crackle. He couldn't make out any words.

The lights flared. They were brighter than he had ever seen now, even brighter than the communal songs that rippled through the water for weeks at a time; and still he didn't understand them.

The sea was on fire with green light. He stared at it, lost, remembering the wess'har who saw the lights many years before and who first understood when the bezeri were calling out
help us.

The signal lamp spat out a stream of loud static, and his own moment of revelation was terrible. The bezeri weren't calling for help this time.

They were screaming.