Crossing the Line (18 page)

Shan realized that she still wasn't sure how she thought of him, or how that sat with the sensation she experienced when she touched the hard muscle of his back. It felt just like when she touched Ade Bennett. It felt primevally
good.

But Aras isn't human.

And neither was she.
Not any more
. If you were a sheep-shagger, maybe that was okay provided you were also part sheep.

“Oh, fuck it,” she said, and swept up the dust and shavings from the floor before going in search of him.

There weren't that many places Aras could have gone. She didn't have to search bars for him—not that she would have, of course—and she didn't have to ring round each of his friends to see if he was sprawled on their sofa with a Scotch in his hand, bemoaning the inconsistencies of women and why they were such rotten heartless bitches.

He wasn't human.
But he was terribly alone, and he was her only friend, and she wanted very badly to erase his pain as well as her own.

Aras was working on their patch of allocated land. Shan could see him kneeling among the plants, picking out something and putting it in a pile beside him. He didn't look up as she approached. She knew that he was aware she was there: he could smell her easily at that distance, especially in her current state of mind.

“Okay, sorry,” she said. She knelt down beside him. “Are you still talking to me?”

Aras paused, folded his hands in his lap and looked at her, head still slightly lowered.

“
Oursan
is a sensitive subject for me. I don't handle it well these days.”

“I've been told I have all the sensitivity of a lump-hammer. You might have noticed I'm not good at girly things.”

“You never asked to be put in this position.”

“I know, but I am.” If she didn't say it now, she never would. “Let's try it. I mean, we can avoid reproducing, right? Regard it as a favor for a friend. A bit of normality.”

Normality.
She was twenty-five light-years from home, playing house with an invulnerable alien war criminal and carrying a bizarre parasite that tinkered with her genome when the fancy took it. Just over a year ago she'd packed a bag and set off for a few days' duty at Mars Orbital, expecting to be home by the end of the week, her biggest worry being that the supermarket would deliver early and forget to reset her security alarm.

And now she could never go home again.
Normality.

“It might not make you happy,” said Aras. “There are…anatomical issues.”

“Oh, I noticed. You got a better idea?”

“Knowing you as I do, I fear you will dislike the emotional changes that come with it.”

“Maybe by then I won't care.”

Shan stood up and held out her hand. He stood and took it. She thought for a brief moment of the gorilla, with its leather-glove hands signing a plea for rescue that she never understood until it was too late. The dividing line between human and nonhuman had always seemed arbitrary to her until now.

Aras was both sides of that line, and it kept moving.

If anyone had any doubt about Dr. Mohan Rayat's true calling, his cabin would have dispelled it immediately.

He had commandeered more comms kit and links than a simple Treasury drone or even a pharmacologist would ever need. And he had his own single cabin.

“How did you pass yourself off as a pharmacologist?” said Lindsay. “You fooled the
Thetis
payload pretty damn well.”

“I
am
a pharmacologist,” said Rayat. “It's easier to train a scientist to be an intelligence officer than vice versa. And believe me, there's plenty for a scientist to do in the intelligence services.”

“I'll bet.” Lindsay decided she could always explain away her meeting with him as a shipboard affair. Being caught in the heads with him had at least given her a cover story. But it wasn't one she could use on Eddie Michallat. “Come on. What is it?”

“I don't trust easy,” said Rayat. “But you're a professional and I'm desperate. Take a look at this.”

Lindsay watched the triptych of screens above Rayat's pull-down desk. There was a 3-D chart and two separate cascades of numbers and telemetry. The projection 15cm in front of the central screen was a part-formed globe with latitude and longitude lines. A crust of colored images was forming on it as if an unseen child were coloring the image in a book.

“What am I looking at?”

“The telemetry from both the original pre-colony bot ship that landed on CS2 and from
Christopher
, the manned colonization vessel that followed it a few years later.” Rayat leaned across and tapped the center screen to zoom in on the chart. “And this is Bezer'ej. I think you'll recognize this coastline.”

It was a chain of islands. There was Constantine, if she could call the whole island that, partway down the chain. There were six in all, and she discovered for the first time that they had names: Constantine, Catherine, Charity, Clare, Chad, and Christopher.
Saints.
It had never occurred to her to ask during the year that they were down there. They had never been allowed to leave the island.

She could see the small cluster of dots that indicated the colony. But there was another dot emerging on Christopher, the southernmost island in the chain. She wondered if it was some aberrant data from the geophys scans, a trace of one of the isenj cities that the wess'har had annihilated.

LANDING SITE
appeared on the screen behind the jigsaw section of globe.

Well, that had to be wrong. She knew where the mission vessel had landed, because it was laid up at Constantine. She hadn't seen it, but Josh Garrod had mentioned it and Ade Bennett was counting on it being there.

“I can't guess,” she said at last. “Other than the discrepancy between landing sites.”

“Got it,” said Rayat.

“An error?”

“No, I don't think so. It would have to be a very large, complex error. This telemetry is clearly about two landings in different places.” Rayat prodded the image and it melted around his finger and reformed again. “The bot ship landed—here. It should have built the habitat—here. But the
Christopher
ended up—over here.”

“Why?”

“There's something there on the island of Christopher. They switched landing sites, or it was switched for them.”

Lindsay thought of the ease with which the wess'har had remotely immobilized
Thetis
in orbit when the ship first came to the Cavanagh's Star system. Diverting a vessel would have been simple for them.

“And what do you think
is
on Christopher Island, then?”

Rayat shrugged. “Biotech research facility. Nice and remote, away from the wess'har homeworld in case things go wrong.”

“You're making an assumption that they think like we do. Given their rather negative attitude to our attempt at research activities on the planet, I'd say that's highly unlikely.”

Rayat was so conciliatory that it alarmed her more than his usual dismissive manner. He lowered his voice and counted points on his fingers. “One, they can manipulate environments. Two, they can wipe away every trace of millions of isenj and their cities. And three—I don't have to remind you about Frank- land's astonishing recovery. Trust me, they're quite capable.”

Lindsay wasn't convinced. “Assuming you're right, what are we going to do about it? Walk in? This is a level of incursion we can't back up with firepower.”

If Rayat was losing patience with her, he was showing no sign of it. He must have needed her assistance badly. She knew damn well he despised her as a weakling, a cocktail-party officer; but she also knew that Okurt's orders were at odds with his. They were all scrambling for a piece of the biotech action and anxious to stop the other getting it.

“It's a jigsaw,” Rayat said. “We know, more or less, what it does. We have a good idea of where it is, apart from being in the tissues of our two chums. So every extra piece of the picture counts.”

“And you want some help acquiring it.”

“Eddie's a resourceful man.”

Lindsay tried very hard to lock her expression. Maybe Rayat knew she had already approached Eddie, but she couldn't imagine how. No, he was just thinking the obvious thing. There was nothing like a neutral journalist as a convenient vector for information.

“He won't spy,” she said.

“He just has to do his job as normal. You know how excited reporters get about digging. They're like a dog chasing a car—they love the pursuit, not the capture.”

“Actually, I think Eddie's a lot smarter than that.”

“You're fond of him.”

“He's a friend. And he's good at what he does.”

“Are you prepared to co-opt him?”

Lindsay felt a small pang of guilt and then felt very, very clever.
Rayat didn't know she'd already tried.

“He's got the best chance of all of us of being allowed to land on Wess'ej,” she said. “What are you putting into the pot, apart from a vague location?”

“You know what I am. Let's just say I'm untrammeled by rules of engagement.”

“I think I know what you mean.”
No,
I'll
be the one to shoot her,
Lindsay thought. “Let me think about it.”

Rayat displayed no sign of triumph. He just nodded a few times, looking at the screen. Then he picked up his carton of beans and speared the contents with staccato stabs of his fork, seeming genuinely hungry.

“This seems an enormous amount of effort to expend on so little hard evidence,” said Lindsay, just testing the water.

“You have no idea how much excitement this damn thing has generated,” said Rayat. “And sooner or later, it'll be in the public domain. I—we need to get in and put it out of reach of commerce and foreign governments as early as we can. One contamination, one slip, and God only knows where it might end.”

Lindsay met his eyes and tried to work out who was actually behind them. She hadn't traded anything in the conversation: he had revealed plenty.

If he was telling the truth, of course. And she didn't have Shan Frankland's police gut-instinct for spotting the lies among the facts. She'd have to take her chances. It meant using Eddie. It might even mean harming Eddie. It also meant colluding with a man she loathed and mistrusted.

“Deal,” she said. “Let's do it.”

Mestin got a message she hadn't been expecting.
Actaeon
's senior male, the one called Okurt, had sent a request for Eddie Michallat to be allowed to visit Wess'ej. Mestin knew of Michallat. He wasn't a soldier and he wasn't a scientist. She had no idea what use he was to the
gethes.

The governing matriarchs gathered in the communal kitchen just off the main library, chewing
lurisj
. Nevyan sat with one of her newly inherited children, an
isanket,
on her lap: both of them were watching Shan carefully. Shan had a red glass cup in her hand and was staring down into the contents. She looked very unhappy.

“What's a journalist?” asked Fersanye.

Shan still seemed to be contemplating plunging into the cup. “They find out things and tell everyone about them,” she said. “Especially when you don't want them to.”

Humans had a strange view of information. Mestin tried to engage Shan's interest. “Like the ussissi.”

“That's one way of putting it. Facts are known as news. When new things happen, journalists tell the world about them. They gather and disseminate information, sometimes accurately, sometimes not.”

The concept of not being able—or willing—to relay data objectively was a difficult one for wess'har. Mestin wished Shan would look up. “But should we allow Eddie Michallat to come here?”

“Eddie's good at his job,” said Shan. “But he can cause problems. Not always intentionally, but you don't care about motive, do you? It was his asking questions about
c'naatat
that made it public knowledge.”

“That doesn't matter. Everyone here knows about it.”

“Matters to me,” said Shan, in English. “You're not the FEU's most wanted.”

“Yes or no?” said Nevyan.

Shan glanced up just for a moment as if she were surprised by Nevyan's tone. “Yes, with conditions. You let me talk to him. You don't have any conversations with him without me present, because you can't lie properly. And we control where he goes in F'nar. I reckon he might be useful. I have no doubt Okurt and company had the same thought, hence my caution.”

It seemed an odd catalogue of precautions. Michallat was one unarmed
gethes
who needed a ussissi pilot to land him here and another to transfer him to an isenj vessel to get back to his ship. His capacity for threat seemed limited.

“We can kill him and have done with it if anything seems amiss,” said Fersanye.

Shan was still intent on the contents of the cup, from which she was not drinking. There was something very wrong with her. From time to time she wiped her palm across her forehead. She looked red-faced and shiny. “You don't understand how
gethes
use information,” she said. “We—they conceal things, so they never have a complete picture of a situation. Information is currency. But you don't understand currency either, do you? It has value. If you have it, you have power and you can exchange it for things you want.”

“You know how to use it,” said Nevyan.

“I do indeed. There's not a lot of difference between detectives and journalists. Just the warrant card, the pension, and the right to use force.”

“What's wrong with your beverage?” asked Mestin.

“It's water,” said Shan.

“What else would you drink?”

“A nice cup of tea, proper builders'tea that you can stand the spoon up in.” It was an incomprehensible reply, but Mestin thought the ambiguity was small price to pay for her general clarity of thought. Shan sat up and made a
never mind
gesture with her hand. “Eddie might be coming simply to make a program about wess'har. He might also be coming to gather military intelligence, willingly or not, because the military are as adept as police are at using journalists for their own purposes.”

“Does Michallat know that?”

“Of course he does. It's all part of the game. But we can play that game too. It's called propaganda. What do you want to achieve?”

“For all
gethes
to leave this sector and to stay away,” said Mestin.

“Then you do something called
saber-rattling
. You let him see your armaments and you suggest there are plenty more where they came from. The
gethes
already know you don't lie and you don't bluff.”

“But we
would
be lying and bluffing,” said Nevyan.

“I know. Good, isn't it? Leave it to me.”

Nevyan lowered the
isanket
, Giyadas, to the floor. The child walked briskly over to Shan to stand gazing into her face. It was clear that Shan had no idea what to do with the child and no interest in communicating with her.

Giyadas just wanted to take in every detail of the alien: the
isanket
was responding to Nevyan's intense reaction to her. Shan, defeated by the steady stare, just looked increasingly wretched and began fidgeting. Then those violet lights in her hands started up again, without warning, and Giyadas stood riveted. It was a very impressive show. Even Fersanye was fascinated.

“Oh
shit,
” said Shan. “Not again.” She looked at her hands as if they were covered in filth and then glanced down at Giyadas. “Show's over, kid,” she said, and got up and walked out.

“She can't be ill,” said Mestin. It was extraordinary: this female seemed to have no interest in children at all. “
C'naatat
don't develop diseases. I'll talk to her. Nevyan, respond to
Actaeon
and tell them Michallat may land here.”

Mestin found Shan sitting outside the house beside a water conduit, one hand trailing in the cool water, staring into the distance. Mestin took care to sit down in the exact pose beside her. She had noticed Shan did the same when she was at ease with someone she was talking to, just like a ussissi. She hoped it would soothe her.

“You look unpleasant,” Mestin said. “You seem to be very hot for no reason.”

“That's what
c'naatat
does when it's messing you around. I'm under construction.”

“You don't look very different.”

“It seems to target what troubles you most. Aras obviously had a thing about his external appearance. Seems my problems are all internal.” She flexed her hands, sparking visibly violet lights even in the strong sunshine. “I'm sorry if I was offensive.”

“Will you be able to deal with Michallat when he arrives?”

“Oh yeah. I can handle Eddie. And I've never fouled up yet—not unintentionally, anyway.”

“They'll be able to smell your anxiety across the caldera. What's wrong?”

“Just developing my relationship with Aras.”

“Ah, he's upset you. Now take my advice, a quick cuff—”

“No, I'll never raise my hand to him. He's had enough for one lifetime. We just have some logistics problems to iron out.”

“I don't understand a word you're saying.”

“Good.” Shan turned to face her, suddenly very earnest, and there was a faint waft of dominance coming from her. The ussissi said there was a
gethes
fruit that smelled very similar, called
mango.
Mestin wondered whether Shan realized she could walk into any of the city-states scattered across Wess'ej and take over as dominant matriarch on the strength of that dominance signal alone: but either she didn't know, or she didn't care.

“I'm not at my best right now,” said Shan. “I just have a few things to iron out. And I really don't mean to come between you and your daughter. I know it
pisses
you off.” Shan dropped the word straight into the middle of the wess'u sentence. Mestin had tried to use some of her unique vocabulary herself, but Shan had said it wasn't a good idea. “I'll talk to her about it if you like.”

“Nevyan admires you. Her view of the world is nearer yours than mine. She feels the World Before was not entirely wrong, and that Targassat abdicated responsibility through nonintervention.”

“She likes to
kick arse.
”

“She's very dedicated to ideas.”

“I've been reading up on the World Before. There's not a lot of information, is there?”

“Perhaps the ussissi have more. Ask Vijissi.”

“Poor little sod seems terrified of me.”

“Then ask his pack female. She won't be.”

“If your cousins are what you say they are, you really need to think about talking to them again.”

“There will be a price, and that will be involvement in their policies.”

“It might be worth paying. You're not the only ones with something to lose from human incursion.”

Shan eased herself to her feet as if something was hurting her, smiled unconvincingly and walked off down the terrace. Mestin watched her go, noting that oddly rigid human gait of hers. For a
gethes,
she was an impressive figure, all control and purpose, with a complete confidence she had not lost despite being surrounded by taller, stronger females.

Mestin had come to like her. She accepted her responsibilities. It agitated her to see her own daughter fixing on her for a role model, but there were far worse
isan've
to emulate than Shan Frankland.

In the end, she might be all that stood between Wess'ej and the
gethes.

 

It hurt like hell.

But it was hurting less each time, and that gave Shan hope that
c'naatat
was getting the idea that she would keep doing the damage until it repaired her properly and permanently.

She eased herself up on her elbow and tried to ignore the sticky warmth of blood beneath her. There wasn't that much now, not really. It was her brand new mattress she was concerned about.

“I hurt you again,” said Aras. “I'm sorry.”

“It's not going to kill me, is it?” She didn't want to distress him. For a very big creature, he was doing a credible job of trying to disappear into the
dhren
fabric that served as a sheet. He looked as if he was expecting a slap across the face. Then he turned his back to her, and she wondered for a moment if he was crying, but wess'har didn't have tear ducts, not even an altered wess'har like Aras.

She studied his back. The muscles were not quite as a human's: what would have been the lats inserted much higher in the spine. Down his backbone was a thick dark line with finer stripes radiating from it on both sides, like the markings of an okapi in negative. But it was still an impressive back.

“Come on, buck up,” she said, and leaned on his shoulder to make him face her again. His skin felt like sueded silk, with a slight drag against her fingertips, and a little cooler than hers. “It's no big deal.”

Aras gave her a look of wounded disappointment, like a parent who had caught a much-loved child stealing. “I know how painful it is.”

“I overreact sometimes.”

“My nervous system connects to yours. I feel what you feel. Don't lie to me.”

“No point faking it, then, eh?”

“Sorry?”

“Stupid joke.” She eased herself on to one side and squeezed his hand in hers. “Remember what Ade Bennett used to say—it's only pain.”

Aras looked dubious. It was exactly the same expression she had seen on Sergeant Bennett's earnest face, under vastly different circumstances.

“This isn't right,” he said.

“Hey, we're from different species. It's a miracle we've got enough matching tackle between us to get this far. It's improving, anyway—the bugs have had to reroute a lot of plumbing.” She had no intention of giving up on this now. It was a task: it would be completed, no matter what. “Besides—if you can feel it, it means I've got
oursan
cells now, doesn't it?”

“The more you try to be humorous, the more serious the situation. Remember that
c'naatat
need no
oursan.
Our health doesn't depend on it.”

“You want to spend another five hundred years taking cold showers?” Aras had been deprived of everything that made him wess'har. Shan was determined to give something of it back to him. She was the only female who ever could, and that meant she was obliged. “I didn't think so. And I don't think I do either.”

He kept his eyes fixed on hers as if he were daring her to say
forget it, this is too painful, too difficult, let's just be friends
. But that was all.

“I must tell you something,” he said. “Things burden me, things I have thought but never told you.”

“Okay.” Well, there was plenty she hadn't told him as well, not yet.
Bioweapons.
“What?”

“I was prepared to kill you back on Bezer'ej when I first told you about
c'naatat
. In case you betrayed me.”

Shan shrugged. “I'd have done the same in your position.”

“You're not upset?”

“Not at all. I suggested you do it, remember? Anything else?”

Aras paused as if he hadn't expected that answer at all and was scrambling for a new thread. “I'd like to be kissed,” he said.

It wasn't what she was expecting to hear either.

“Kissed?” said Shan. There. A rebuke for her impersonal technique. “Seriously?”

“Sometimes I'd see Josh and Deborah kiss when they didn't realize I could see them. It seemed very intimate. Wess'har don't kiss.”

Shan reassured herself she'd heard right. As requests for sexual favors went, it was shocking only because it was so harmless. She'd shown a few men the door in her time. They got the wrong idea about a tall, strong girl with handcuffs and a short fuse, and she wasn't into that sort of thing.

She was suddenly so touched by his innocence and desperation that she could feel tears threatening to embarrass her. He really needed someone with a heart. But she'd do the job as best she could. He seemed far more in need of simple intimacy than thrills.