Crossing the Line (14 page)

The inscription read
TEMPLATE CRAFT
.

“Each wess'har city has something like this,” said Mestin. “I think you would call it insurance. And I felt you needed to see it to understand why we're so alarmed by the
gethes.
”

The underground hangars almost explained how an apparently agricultural society managed to mount such an impressive reinforcement of the garrison on Bezer'ej, the Temporary City.

“Where's your industrial capacity? I've seen nothing but agriculture.” Shan reached out and put her hand on the blue-gray hull nearest to her. It was as clean and impressive as an exhibit in a military museum. “This takes scale and urbanization.”

“You ask interesting questions for a police officer.”

“I was planning to be an economist before I was drafted into the police. Manpower shortage, you see. But I sort of stayed. Where does this all come from?”

“The World Before.”

“I don't understand.”

“Our ancestors came to this planet ten thousand years ago. We did not arrive empty-handed.”

If you could ever get used to shocks, then Shan was becoming accustomed to them. Just as she thought she had a complete picture of the wess'har, just as she was confident she had the measure of them,
knew
them, they would drop a bombshell into the conversation.

“You never told me you weren't native to this planet,” she said.

“You never told me you were the descendants of apes.”

“It just didn't occur to me.”

“Nor me. I brought you down here to show you the limited defenses at our disposal, not to give you a history lesson.” Mestin walked ahead, glancing from side to side as if she were in a market doing her shopping. There were enough cans of serious beans here to make somebody very uncomfortable indeed. “I realize you're not a soldier, but you can understand force as well as anyone.”

“But where do you build these ships?”

“
Grow
is probably the more accurate description. Many came with our ancestors and we have modified them. This is the same base technology as
dhren
. But it isn't inexhaustible.”

Shan thought of the first time she had metAras. It hadn't been a happy meeting: her military support team had managed to shoot down his craft. But he had walked away from the crash—her first clue that he had an extraordinary physiology. And when she went to inspect the wrecked metal airframe the next day, it had crumbled and scattered like dust beneath her boots. It was a rare instance of a pilot being repaired and the aircraft dying and decomposing.
Smart metals
.

And there was
Actaeon
, knocking herself out to get hold of
c'naatat
when there were these industrial riches to be plundered.

Mestin looked as if she was scanning Shan's face for a reaction.
And?
Shan took the hint.

“Are you telling me that you're running out of kit?”

“Correct,” said Mestin. “But we can adapt what we still have to counter the isenj. They're limited by their population problems. We're limited by the inverse—we are too few. But if you add an extra enemy to that, you can see our dilemma.”

Shan thought of the annihilated, erased, utterly destroyed city of Mjat that had once stood coast-to-coast on the wilderness of an island that now housed Constantine. And these machines—or their originals, anyway—were older than the first human cities. “You're not doing too badly for your size,” she said.

“We will be too thinly stretched if
gethes
come in large numbers.”

“Well, they won't.”
They?
Assimilation had ambushed Shan and it hadn't met much resistance. “Economics meets physics. Too far, too expensive, and too bloody hard for that much heavy lift. But a few with a foothold in this system could expand over the years, and you do think long-term, don't you?”

“Bloody.”
In Mestin's mouth, the word was softened by a chord of multiple notes.
“Bloody.”

“And then there's the Sarajevo factor. It can take just one human to destabilize local politics.”

“We noticed.” Mestin might have been capable of irony, or she might not. Either way, it stung. “What is Sarajevo?”

“Forget it,” said Shan. She felt for a moment that the whole situation was her fault. If only she had—no, that was stupid. The real damage had been done two centuries ago when Constantine was settled; and contact with the isenj had happened seventy-five years after she left Earth. Whatever she'd done or hadn't done, it couldn't have prevented this moment. The two women now stood staring at the smoothly curved fuselage of a craft that was so gently blue, so much like the skin of a grape, that Shan imagined it would feel moist and velvety to her touch.

“So what else can you do?” she asked. “Reclamation nanites, biobarriers—that implies you have some sort of biological engineering capability.”

Mestin inclined her maned head and looked even more disturbingly like a Spartan soldier; and Shan now knew that the two cultures also shared an unforgiving attitude to warfare as well as their mutual frugality and iron discipline. “Yes, our ancestors were skilled at bioweapons. We have never used the technology in that capacity. Not yet.”

“Ah,” said Shan, mindful of the word
yet,
and feeling that she had found the snake in Eden that Josh always talked about. “But you could.”

“Potentially,” said Mestin.

They walked a little further down the passage in silence. Shan reasoned that even snakes were entitled to defend themselves. But bioweapons went beyond her all-encompassing view that it didn't matter much how you died in battle. Bioweapons smacked of secret labs and all the terrible things she knew went on behind locked doors.

It disturbed her; Mestin must have smelled that, because she froze.

“Doesn't sound very wess'har, creating bioweapons,” said Shan. “The ultimate interference with the natural order.”

“A weapon of last resort,” said Mestin, wafting citrus. Shan had to remind herself that she was still the ranking female, hormonally speaking. Mestin seemed to be finding it hard not to defer to her. “The pathogens themselves come to no harm. Just the targets.” Wess'har morality had a seductive logic all its own. “Did
gethes
give that much thought to the fate of cavalry horses?”

“I'm not arguing. I'm just trying to make sense of this. So you all left the World Before and came here, then.”

“No, some left. Most stayed.”

Bang. Another bombshell. Why hadn't she realized that?
Because she hadn't asked.
Because she didn't know the question needed asking. It was probably all sitting in the massive wess'har archive that she was struggling to read. She was working backwards in the timeline, and slowly.

“You're going to have to spell this out,” said Shan.

“Spell?”

“Explain in detail. Please.”

“We are Targassati. We wanted to lead a simpler life and we no longer wanted to take part in what you call international politics. It was an obligation we did not feel we could justify. So we left.”

Shan waited. Mestin just looked at her.

“Come on. And?”

“And?”

“The World Before is still…er…going strong?”

“Yes.”

“So you have contact with them. What do they—”

“No. No contact. The ussissi move between worlds, but we remain separate.”

“Hostile?”

“Irrelevant.”

“I would have thought they'd be handy reinforcements, at the very least.”

Mestin's eyes—darker than Chayyas's, more like amber bead—showed narrowed crosshairs, mere slits of pupil. “If we need to ask for help, there might be a price, as you say. We do not welcome interference or change.”

“I understand,” said Shan, who had seen more change in fifteen months than was decent, and quite liked the idea of stagnation for a while. She tried to imagine what the World Before might be like if the wess'har here represented the ecowarriors. “Look, if you're short on manpower and arms, conventional warfare isn't sustainable. You know that. That's why you used
c'naatat
troops in the past. I think you might have to look at unpalatable choices again. And I'm not just talking about germ warfare.”

“From what you have seen here, do you think we have a problem?”

“I'm not a military analyst, but if you can't replace hardware at the rate you're losing it, then you're stuffed.”

“Do you recall Chayyas said more might be asked of you than you were capable of giving?”

“It was a hard conversation to forget.”

“Then I'm asking you to help us find an immediate solution to the
gethes
problem.”

“Boy, that phrase has an unpleasantly familiar ring to it.”

“I don't understand.”

“Just as well. Look, this is years away. You have time to come up with some ideas.”

“But what would
you
do, Shan? What would you do if you perceived a genuine threat to your world?”

“I'm not the best person to ask. I'd only give you a gut reaction, not a considered political option. I'm not known for my restraint.”

“What is war but emotional response backed up by weaponry?”

It wasn't a bad point. Shan started seeing the gaps in the hangar, the places where ships were no longer stored. There were a lot more gaps than there were occupied berths.

She thought about it. “Personally, I'd pop round their house and give them a bloody serious warning. And maybe a demonstration of how very unreasonable I could be if they
really
pissed me off.”

“We would wish to deal with the threat directly too. But we have such limited military resources these days. We need to make it impossible for
gethes
to get a foothold in this system.”

It seemed a very benign discussion. They were actually talking about killing humans. It didn't feel that much of a chasm to cross. “Come on, you're not going to be able to send a task force to Earth without help from someone, are you?”

“No. The other option is what you would call bioweapons. If we have enough intact human DNA, we can create a barrier weapon. It need only be created and deployed once.”

“Poison Earth?”

“Poison Bezer'ej.”

“Ah.” Shan wondered what was happening to her brain. It was suddenly obvious. “You want my DNA.”

“Yes.”

“Why didn't you extract it from Aras?”

“
C'naatat.
A dangerous organism to handle, and we have found no way of separating it from its host. If we could have done so, things would be very different now, would they not? We would also have isenj DNA. We would be able to use
c'naatat
at will.”

“Well, I'm not exactly a regular human any longer. I'm not sure what help I can be.”

“But you
were
normal a matter of a season or so ago. Do you have any material that predates your contamination?”

Now that was science that Shan understood only too well.
Forensic evidence.
Hair, saliva, GSR, semen. She could do as thorough a job on crime scene as any SOCO. “Let's have a look through my grip,” she said. “I keep my kit clean but I'd bet there are some hairs hanging around.” She hadn't used her cold-weather suit since she first landed on Bezer'ej: they could scour that for cells.

“You give this up easily under the circumstances.”

“I'd like to think of it as razor wire. If you don't climb over it, you won't get hurt.”

“You're a pragmatic woman.”

“And you really don't have any isenj DNA?”

“We don't take prisoners,” said Mestin.

“What about asking the ussissi to acquire some?”

“We will not compromise them by asking them to act for us aggressively.”

Shan tried to conceive of a society where the entire defense industry could be halted by the desire not to embarrass an ally. The challenge with wess'har was to understand that they had just two settings—completely benign and psychotic—with nothing in between. “It's not how we'd handle things back home.”

“The ussissi are neutral.”

“God, you really are going to need some help to deal with
gethes,
aren't you? Okay. Count me in.” She paused. “What happens to the colonists in Constantine if you flood the planet with antihuman pathogens or whatever?”

Mestin cocked her head a few times. “I would rather remove them
all.
”

It was Josh and Deborah and James and Rachel, not a seething mass of anonymous faces. Shan tried to adjust to her new kinship.
There's no reason why they have to share your morality. Stay out of it.
“What about moving them here? Like you did the gene bank?”

Mestin looked genuinely thoughtful, her long muzzle and sharply tilted head reminding Shan too much of a baffled Afghan hound. “Yes, if they represent a strain of acceptable humans, it might be wise to propagate them. There might be no other
gethes
left in time, after all.”

Shan had to think about that last sentence.

She wasn't entirely sure she had understood it. Then she knew she bloody well had, and that small expression of a monumental threat was more chilling than a wess'har battle fleet heaving into view.

“What if they won't move?”

“Then they die,” said Mestin, as if Shan would be equally unmoved by the prospect.

Shan could almost smell her own citrussy waft of anxiety. “Maybe I can put the relocation idea to them in due course.”

Something told Shan she was going to have trouble explaining this to Aras. It wasn't a topic that had ever cropped up in conversation. He had warned her about the matriarchs and how she would be
enslaved,
but she had taken it as an expression of his bitterness about exile.