Crossing the Line (15 page)

For some reason, justifying herself to Aras bothered her more than the fact that she was about to teach an alien race how to be efficient terrorists against her own species.

Shan walked up to the nearest fighter and glanced at Mestin for approval to climb up on it. As soon as she laid her hand on it, the canopy opened: a faint, single, pure note ran from discomfort below her threshold of hearing up the scale until she could no longer hear it. It made the back of her throat itch. The cockpit was alive with a soft bluish glow.

“How did I do that?” Shan asked.

“You must have more wess'har genes than you thought.”

Shan stared down into the cockpit, one continuous surface covered with the diagrammatic writing and points of light. The smell of the materials—harshly grassy, like burning tangerine peel—stopped her dead.

She was perfectly aware of where she was but she was also watching her hands—no, Aras's hands—punching rapidly across the controls while a flare of flame wiped out the landscape that was spinning ever larger in the viewplate. Sick physical panic gripped her. Then she smashed into the plate and everything was blackness and pain and heat and her teeth felt as if they had been driven up into her sinuses.

She straightened up and scrambled down the side of the craft, dropping the last meter and landing on her feet with a thud. Around her it was all orderly, soft-lit calm again. She shut her eyes for a moment, and suddenly the drowning dream and all that went with it was vivid and
now
.

“He crashed,” she said at last. “Aras crash-landed in one of those things. I just saw it.”

Mestin took her sleeve carefully and steered her away from the fighter. The gesture surprised her. It was an oddly compassionate act for a matriarch.

“I had heard that
c'naatat
can pass on memory,” said Mestin. “Is it difficult, coping with that?”

“Not any more,” said Shan. No, she could handle it. She prided herself on her professional core of ice. She was the copper who didn't faint at her first autopsy, who never vomited at the smell of decomposition, and who could look at evidence even strong men preferred not to see. It didn't mean she didn't care: it just meant that, after a while, she forgot how to.

She wondered if that was why she hung onto the pain of the gorilla and the blue door, just so she could be in thrall to impotent anger again and reassure herself occasionally that she was alive and feeling.

Shan inhaled deeply through her nose and suppressed the agonizing shock of crashing in enemy territory. “You know what happened to him? What the isenj did to him?”

“No, but I can imagine,” said Mestin. “They were brutal times. Even the isenj admit that.”

Mestin kept steering her away from the craft, the slightest pressure of her hand on her back. Shan wanted to shrug the touch away but decided it might be provocative. If Mestin could scent that she was bothered by the touch, it had not deterred her.

“You think I'm weak, don't you?” Shan said.

“I do not,” said Mestin. “I wonder how I would fare alone in your world. I wonder how I would react to my body being colonized and altered by a parasite. I'm not sure I would acquit myself particularly well.” She tapped her hand against the hard shape of the gun that Shan kept tucked into the back of her waistband. “Do you fear us?”

“Habit. No offense meant.” Shan reached back under her jacket and adjusted the gun again, embarrassed. She wondered why she couldn't recall the borrowed memory of Aras firing that weapon into the skull of Surendra Parekh. She could certainly remember her own oblique view of the execution. Perhaps it hadn't been traumatic enough for Aras to make the same impression as the other events in his life. “I'm a copper, remember. A police officer.”

“I know what police do. And I know what
you
have done. I have seen the record of your conversation with Michallat.”

Ah, the unbroadcast interview. Eddie hadn't quite got her to admit she had aided ecoterrorists, but it was a close-run thing. She hoped Mestin hadn't picked up the implication that Minister Perault had perhaps conned her into accepting her mission. “Yeah. I don't piss about.”

“I think you are very clever, very persistent and very violent.”

Shan almost dropped her gaze. “Whatever it takes to do the job.”

“But only if you think the job is worth doing. That is why we like you.”

Shan was suddenly uncomfortable. She wasn't used to being patted, not by anybody who valued their teeth, and she wasn't expecting to be told she was
liked
. She felt her scalp prickle. Mestin must have smelled her agitation.

“For a physically fearless person you are easily unsettled by small matters,” Mestin said. She sniffed discreetly, as if to say
I know
. “Let me tell you this. If it were not for
c'naatat
, I would be happy for you to be a cousin-by-mating. I trust you. Nevyan respects you greatly.”

Shan wasn't sure she had understood the matriarch right. Cousin-by-mating? Ah,
in-law
. Sister-in-law. Some of her best friends were
c'naatat
but she wouldn't want her brother to marry one, so to speak. It wasn't offensive. Shan knew the risks. They were no different for wess'har, except that they could be relied upon to do the sensible thing with the symbiont—most of the time, anyway.

Mestin walked ahead of her, back towards the exit, trilling wordlessly under her breath. Shan followed the matriarch's rustling steps with her eyes fixed on the neat stripe of tufted gold hair down her nape. It was another moment when her world shivered into semifocus: another moment when she knew that she didn't really understand what wess'har were, and what they did when she wasn't around. It made her feel utterly alone. It made her want the comfort of Aras's company.

She tried to make light conversation to jolly herself along. “I think cousin-by-mating is a nice way of describing someone who marries into your family,” she said. “Wess'u is a very pragmatic language.”

Mestin glanced back at her in a half turn but carried on walking. “It doesn't mean that at all,” she said.

“I don't think I understand.”

“Oursan,”
she said, as if Shan ought to have known what that meant. They were back on the surface again, among irregular strips of red and magenta crops. “Nevyan was supposed to be educating you.”

“Maybe we haven't got to that page yet,” said Shan, feeling unpleasantly embarrassed again but unsure exactly why. There was a niggling awareness at the back of her mind, like a Suppressed Briefing. Whatever scraps of memory were surfacing from Aras, this one was shot with anxiety.

She was pondering the feeling as she walked back up the terraces when she nearly trod on a vine as thick as a ship's cable. It was covered in velvety scales and pink-flushed gold, like a ripe peach. When she crouched to touch it, it shot off at speed and its furred leaves—or what had looked like leaves—scattered in all directions, emitting high-pitched squeals. The surprise made her overbalance onto her backside.

The vine-thing paused at a distance and the leaves scuttled back to it and attached themselves again. She sat in complete humiliation on the flagstones, heart pounding. A male wess'har walked by and stared down at her.

“Genadin,”
he said, nodding in the direction of the creature. “With babies.”

Nothing was obvious here. She sat and gathered her composure for a few moments and started rehearsing how she would tell Aras that she had signed up to help the wess'har war machine.

But it could wait.

She had to sort out her uneasy relationship with him first.

 

Nobody gave a second glance to Lindsay and Eddie while they chatted in a corner of the hangar deck. They were old mates, isolated and lonely. They had personal issues to discuss. There was nothing sinister about it.

Eddie wasn't so sure. She hadn't said a word to him about
Hereward,
and he was now certain every senior officer would have known about the deployment. Well, if that was the game she was playing, fine. It disappointed him, but at least he was now on familiar territory and using a fine-honed skill in which he had complete confidence—pickpocketing the brain of a reluctant interviewee without their feeling a thing.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Bearing up.” She kept fiddling with her right shoulder board, picking invisible specks off the gold braid rings. “Eddie, I need to ask you something.”

He folded his arms. “I'm a journalist. Think of me as your priest.”

“It's serious.”

Ah, maybe she was going to come clean. He hoped so. He didn't like to think of her as prey. “Okay. Ask.”

“If I got you transport, would you be willing to ask for access to the wess'har?”

It was the last thing he expected to hear, and no mention of
Hereward.
He summoned up all his acting skills. “I'd probably bite your arm off in the rush.”

“We need someone to break the ice. You're neutral.”

“They still want to negotiate diplomatic relations with them, eh?”

“I know. Fat chance. But if we knew how they were thinking, we might get the approach right.”

She was lying her arse off. She was an
amateur.
It wasn't the first time Eddie had been approached—obliquely, charmingly—to gather data. In a simpler age they called it spying, and it was the sort of thing that got journalists shot or worse in unsympathetic foreign countries.

“I think this is bullshit,” he said. “It's got nothing to do with diplomacy. What do you really want?”

Her head dropped and she sighed. If she was acting, it was convincing. “Okay, I might as well tell you. You started this biotech rumor running and now I've got to clean up the mess. I need to make sure the pharmaceutical lads don't get hold of it. I haven't a clue what we're looking for, but if you hear anything that would help me keep it out of circulation, I'd be grateful. And so might human civilization, whether it knows it or not yet.”

It hurt. It was true. He wished for the hundredth time that he hadn't gone hunting that story, but it was too late. “Lin, I'm in enough shit as it is. BBChan's under a lot of government and commercial pressure for me to find happy space stories. Seems they hold me responsible for giving people the impression that the Cockroach Cluster is on its way to take over the Earth.”

“Okay, it's not fair of me to dump this on you. Forget it.”

“Now
that's
not fair. The one thing you can't do to a journalist is let me halfway in. You're waging some interagency feud with the Department of Trade or whoever and you expect me to line up as cannon fodder. You tell me the truth, or you can piss off and do your own dirty work.”

“I didn't say this was a departmental power struggle.”

Eddie spread his arms and gave her a theatrically slack-jawed look. “A wild guess. Now for Chrissakes tell me.”
Come on, say
Hereward.
You know I'll get it out of you sooner or later.
“I know you're not giving me the full picture.”

“Okay, but this is between you and me.”

“Whoa. This is where I don't do off-the-record. When people say that, they really want to leak something without taking responsibility for it. And even if I do keep it to myself, once I know something it colors all my decisions from then on, doesn't it? So think hard before you open your mouth.”

Lindsay paused three beats. He counted them. “Okay. Rayat claims he's working for the Treasury and he says he wants to prevent access to the biotech as well.”

“Really?”

“I checked.”

“Makes sense. All we need is a plummeting death rate and we've got an economic crisis that's going to make the pensions collapse of 2136 look like a small overdraft.”

Lindsay seemed diverted by the comment for a moment. “I'm telling you the truth.”

“Maybe, but isn't there something you left out?”

She fidgeted with her shoulder boards again as if her rank was bothering her. “There's always detail, Eddie.”

“Try
Hereward.
”

She looked genuinely blank. “I honestly haven't a clue what you mean.”

“Really. You're a senior officer here and you didn't know that we've diverted a logistics support vessel, probably armed, to this sector?”

“No, I bloody well didn't.” She couldn't fake that reddening face. Okurt was going to get a stream of high-grade vitriol, that much was clear. “How do
you
know?”

“Don't make me say it. It's the one ethic we still hold dear in my trade.”

“Bastard,” she said, but she was looking away and it was obvious she didn't mean him. “What the hell is he playing at? He didn't bother to tell me he was looking for ways to exhume David's body for research either. You'll forgive me if I have a tantrum at being left out of the loop again.”

“You really didn't know, did you?”

“ 'Course I bloody didn't.”

“I don't think the aliens have been told either. Any of them. How to piss off two opposing technologically advanced powers in one go—it's economy of stupidity, anyway. What if they gang up on
us?
”

“
We
might realize that, and I think even Okurt might, but he's not calling the shots, remember. He's on the Foreign Office choke-chain.”

“And what are you going to do when the locals find out?”

“How are they going to hear about it?”

“There's no such thing as monopoly of information. Lots of people have to be involved with diverting a ship. Victualling, fueling, canceling other deployments, you name it. It'll leak Earth-side through families, and then it'll be on the news, and either the wess'har or the isenj will pick it up off an intercepted feed.”