Crossing the Line

PROLOGUE

O
NE

T
WO

T
HREE

F
OUR

F
IVE

S
IX

S
EVEN

E
IGHT

N
INE

T
EN

E
LEVEN

T
WELVE

T
HIRTEEN

F
OURTEEN

F
IFTEEN

S
IXTEEN

S
EVENTEEN

E
IGHTEEN

N
INETEEN

T
WENTY

T
WENTY
-O
NE

T
WENTY
-T
WO

T
WENTY
-T
HREE

T
WENTY
-F
OUR

T
WENTY
-F
IVE

T
WENTY
-S
IX

T
WENTY
-S
EVEN

T
WENTY
-E
IGHT

T
WENTY
-N
INE

RESOUNDING PRAISE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

BOOKS BY KAREN TRAVISS

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

Constantine Colony, Bezer'ej,
February 2376

It was much, much worse at night.

Night cut you off from any reference, any reassurance, and nights here on Bezer'ej were far blacker than any Shan Frankland had seen on light-polluted Earth.

Once the lights that danced in the blackness were the product of her optic nerve playing electrical tricks. But these lights were real.

They were coming from her hands.

The display was mainly blue and violet, flashing occasionally from her fingertips. It was almost as bad as her claws. And it wasn't something any human should have had, but Shan wasn't any human, not any more.

Don't think of it as a parasite
, Aras told her.
Think of it as a beneficial relationship. It can be.

Aras had five hundred years to get used to carrying
c'naatat
, being
c'naatat
, living with all that
c'naatat
meant; and she had been infected for a matter of months. He meant well. He did it to save her life. But it was hard waking up to a new body every day.

She studied the pattern of lights again and wondered if there was language within it, as there was for the native bezeri. She also wondered if her
c'naatat
had done it to teach her a lesson for hubris, for her contempt for the organic illuminated computer screens grown into the hands of combat troops.

You'll never put one of those bloody things in me
.

But here she was, with that and plenty more. The symbionts had almost certainly scavenged the component genes at random, unaware of her beliefs and her guilt. She was just an environment to be preserved with whatever came to hand. If they had purpose beyond that, she wasn't sure that she wanted to know about it.

Shan put her fingers to her head and felt through the hair. There wasn't the slightest trace of unevenness in the bone, no evidence that her skull had been shattered by an alien weapon.
C'naatat
was efficient. It seemed to enjoy doing a tidy job.

Small wonder that some of her former crewmates from
Thetis
thought she was a paid mule for manufactured alien biotech. The truth was messy and unconvincing, but truth often was, and it didn't matter. The crew knew the broad detail, and so did the colonists of Constantine who gave her asylum, and it would only be a matter of time before the matriarchs of Wess'ej found out what Aras had done to save her.

And then all hell would break loose.

She buried her head under her blanket and tried to sleep, but the lights persisted, and she fell into dreams of drowning in a locked room that was scented like a forest.

“Is it true?”

Eddie Michallat concentrated on the features of the duty news editor twenty-five light-years away, courtesy of CSV
Actaeon
's comms center. The man was real and it was happening
now,
in every sense of the word.

For nearly a year he had been beyond BBChan's reach on Bezer'ej. But the glorious isolation was over. Isenj instantaneous communications technology meant there was now no escape from the scrutiny of News Desk. In the way of journalists, they had already given it an acronym, as noun, verb and adjective—ITX.

“Poodle-in-the-microwave job,” Eddie said dismissively. “Urban myth. People talk the most incredible crap when they're under stress.”

He waited a few seconds for the reply. The borrowed isenj communications relay was half a million miles from Earth, and that meant the last leg in the link was at light speed, the best human technology could manage. The problem with the delay was that it gave Eddie more time to stoke his irritation.

“That never stopped you filing a story before.”

How the hell would he know? This man—this
boy
, for that was all he appeared to be—had probably been born fifty years after
Thetis
had first left Earth. Eddie enjoyed mounting the occasional high horse. He saddled up.

“BBChan used to be the responsible face of netbroadcast,” he said. “You know—stand up a story properly before you run it? But maybe that's out of fashion these days.”

One, two, three, four, five.
The boy-editor persisted with the blind focus of a missile. “Look, you're sitting on a completely fucking shit-hot twenty-four carat story. Biotech, lost tribes, mutiny, murder, aliens. Is there anything I've left out?”

“There wasn't a mutiny and Shan Frankland didn't murder anyone.”
She's just a good copper
, Eddie wanted to say, but it was hardly the time. “And the biotech is pure speculation.”
My speculation. Me and my big mouth
. “We don't know what it is. We don't know if it makes you invulnerable. But you got the aliens about right. That's something.”

“The
Thetis
crew was saying that Frankland's carrying this biotech and that she's pretty well invulnerable to injury and disease, and—”

Eddie maintained his dismissive expression with some difficulty, a child again, cowering at the sound of a grown-ups' row:
it's all my fault
. He always worried that it was. “Oh God, don't give me the undead routine, will you? I don't do infotainment.”

“And I don't do the word ‘no.' Stand up that story.”

The kid was actually trying to get tough with him. It wasn't easy having a row with someone when you had time to count to five each time. But Eddie was more afraid of the consequences of this rumor than the wrath of a stranger, even one who employed him.

“Son, listen to me,” he said. “You're twenty-five years away as the very,
very
fast crow flies, so I don't think you're in any position to tell me to do
sod all
.” He leaned forward, arms folded on the console, and hoped the cam was picking up a shot that gave him the appearance of looming over the kid. “I'm the only journalist in 150 trillion miles of nothing.
Anything
I file is exclusive. And I decide what I file. Now run along and finish your homework.”

Eddie flicked the link closed without waiting for a response and reassured himself that there really was nothing that 'Desk could do to him any more. He was
here
.
Actaeon
had no embeds embarked. BBChan could sack him, and every network on Earth would be offering him alternative employment. It wasn't bravado. It was career development.

Ironically, the stories he had filed months ago were still on their way home at plain old light speed: the stories he would file now, would ITX, would beat them by years. He was scooping himself and it felt wonderful. It struck him as the journalistic equivalent of masturbation.

“I wish I could get away with that,” said the young lieutenant on comms duty. He hovered just on the edge of Eddie's field of vision. “Why didn't you tell him you were on your way to see the isenj?”

“Because all news editors are tossers,” Eddie said. He felt around in his pockets for the bee-cam and his comms kit. “If you tell them what story you're chasing, they decide in their own minds how it's going to turn out. Then they bollock you for not coming back with the story they imagined. So you don't tell them anything until you're ready to file. Saves a lot of grief.”

“Wise counsel,” said the lieutenant, as if he understood.

From
Actaeon
's bridge, Eddie could still see the dwindling star that was EFS
Thetis
, heading back to Earth with the remnant of the Constantine mission, a party of isenj delegates and their ussissi interpreters. So vessels weren't titled European Federal Ship these days, then. A nice bland CSV, a harmless Combined Service Vessel, purged of any reference to territory to avoid offending the recent multinational alliance between Europe and the Sinostates. He had seventy-five years left to amaze the viewing public with the latest in alien contact before the real thing showed up on their doorstep.
Thetis
was a much older, slower ship than the
Actaeon
.

And
Thetis
had been the state of the art just over a year ago. Time was flying obscenely and confusingly fast.

“It's not like he can send someone out to relieve you of duty, is it?” said the lieutenant. He seemed to have badged Eddie as a maverick hero, an understandable reaction for a young man enmeshed in the strict hierarchies of navy life. No, there was nothing News Desk could do out here: Shan Frankland had taught him that. When you were on your own, without backup, you had to make your own decisions and stand by them. “Is Frankland really as bad as they say? Did she really sell you out? Did she let people die?”

“Who's saying?”

“Commander Neville.”

“Look, the commander's been through a lot lately. I'd take some of her observations with a pinch of salt. You can't lose your kid without losing some sanity too.”
I'm just an observer.
No, he wasn't. He was involved in this. He had been involved in it right from the time he had decided there were some stories about Shan that he was never going to file. “Lindsay had a sickly, premature kid. That's what you get if you're not used to low oxygen. You've got to remember the colony's medical facilities are pretty primitive.”

A pause. “But presumably Frankland's aren't.”

“Are you trying to interrogate me, son?”

“Just making conversation.”

“Word of advice. Never try to get information out of a hack. We wrote the book on wheedling. I can't give you any information on Frankland because I don't have any.”
Well, technically, I don't
. It suddenly struck him that he was calling all younger males
son
, just as Shan did, a copper's kind patronage with its edge of threat. “No, Frankland probably saved a lot of lives. But maybe she's proof that it isn't what's true that makes historical record, it's who gets their story in first.”

A blood sample from Shan here, and a cell culture there, and maybe David Neville might have survived more than a few weeks. But releasing that biotech into the human population was a price Shan Frankland refused to pay, regardless of what it cost her. Eddie knew that now.

And he still felt guilty that he believed, however briefly, that she had been carrying the biotech for money. He wondered whether he would have made the same choice if placed in the same dilemma.

“Come on,” he said to the young officer, who was hanging on his pronouncements like a disciple. “Take me down to the shuttle bay. I'm going to have tea with the isenj foreign minister.”

 

Aras crunched down to the cliffs on a paper-thin crust of light snow. He still worried when Shan was out after nightfall. But she could come to no harm. She couldn't freeze to death, and she couldn't drown, and she couldn't die even if she fell and broke her neck.

And neither could he.

But she was uneasy. He could smell that even from a hundred meters away. She was where he had hoped to find her, sitting near the cliff edge again, looking down at the glittering darkness of a sea half illuminated by Wess'ej in its gibbous phase.

He concentrated, willing his visual range to expand. A human would hardly have spotted her. A wess'har's low-light vision would have picked her out. But on top of that, Aras had his infrared sensitivity, gleaned from the isenj by his
c'naatat
, and Shan was at that moment a shimmering golden ghost of bright-hot exposed skin and darker, cooler garments.

The
c'naatat
produced a fever during its active phases. He could see it. She wouldn't be feeling the cold at all.

“Time to eat,” he said quietly. “Still watching for the bezeri?”

She smiled, a brief flash of hotter, whiter light flaring in a mask of amber. “I wanted to wave to them.” She peeled off her gloves, held out her hands and flexed them. Brilliant violet lights flickered briefly under the skin. “I think I can guess where I picked that up.”

She was bothered by it. She feigned calm well enough to fool a human but not enough to evade a wess'har sense of smell. Her expression, her posture, her voice; all said she was fine. But her scent said otherwise.

“It might not be from the bezeri,” he said, as if that made a difference. “
C'naatat
is often unpredictable. I've been around bezeri for many years and never absorbed any of their characteristics.”

“As far as you know, of course. Well, could be worse. At least it's not their tentacles, eh?” She flexed her fingers again and stared at them. The lights, as intense now as anything the bezeri emitted, added to her illuminated image. “Shouldn't I talk to them? I feel I owe them an explanation.”

Aras thought the bezeri probably had all the explanation they needed or wanted. However much Shan thought she could protect them, however ashamed she was of her own species' short history on Bezer'ej, the bezeri themselves were still raw from losing an infant to human violence. Aras wondered how the humans—the
gethes
, the carrion-eaters—who flew into violent outrage themselves at the harming of a child could think another species would behave any differently.

It was just as well that the bezeri were soft-bodied, confined to the sea, and without real weapons beyond their piercing mouth-parts. Shan's apologies would mean little to them.

He held his hand out to her. “Here. They're not coming. They haven't been near the surface for weeks. Let's eat.”

It was like watching a child who was scarred by a fire of your making, a constant rebuke to your carelessness, except that he had done this deliberately. She was trying to cope with her
c'naatat
and finding it hard.
What choice did I have? She would have died if I hadn't infected her
. But he knew how it felt to wake wondering what alterations that the microscopic symbiont was making to your body. He had seen
c'naatat
develop in others, and no two experienced exactly the same changes.

That was the least of her problems. In time—and she would have plenty of that—she would have to cope with the lonely reality of having everyone she knew age and die, leaving her alone, except for him. He knew where his duty lay. He owed her that much.

But she was right. It could have been worse.

She could have found herself reliving other beings' memories.

“I'm starving,” she said.
C'naatat
demanded a lot of energy while it was rearranging the genetic furniture. “I could murder some nice thick lentil soup. And some of those little rolls with the walnut bits in.”

“We'll see what the refectory has to offer.”

They walked back to Constantine across a plain that was starting to push blue-gray grass through the snow. Usually Aras managed to see only what was truly there: tonight, once again, the images of what had once been were intruding on the present.

Shan walked through wilderness. But Aras walked along the vanished perimeter of an isenj city called Mjat and down what had been a main thoroughfare flanked by homes. There was less than nothing left, but he remembered exactly where it had been. He hadn't needed to see the
gethes
' clever geophys images of the ghost of a civilization to recall those roads, because he had mapped them.

And he had destroyed them.

He had washed the cities with fire and cut down isenj and set loose the reclamation nanites that devoured the deserted homes. It had been five hundred years ago by the Constantine calendar, but he remembered it all, and not only from his own viewpoint. Back then he had had no idea that isenj had genetic memory.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “But I had to do it.”

Shan seemed to think he was talking to her. “Stop apologizing.” She thrust her arm through his. “It's okay.”

Apart from a brief, violent escape of contained rage when she had found out she was infected, she had shown neither self-pity nor recrimination. He admired that about her. It was very wess'har. It would make it far easier for her to adapt to her new world.

Could be worse
.

Aras walked the invisible central plaza of Mjat.
Worse
could have been genetic memory, and that was perhaps worst of all, worse than claws or vestigial wings or a million other scraps of genetic material that
c'naatat
had picked up, tried on for size, and then sometimes discarded.

Now he was clear of Mjat and back in the small world of humans, his home for the best part of two centuries. Wess'ej, the planet where he had been born, hung in the sky as a huge crescent moon, and he didn't miss it at all.