Crossing the Line (25 page)

“There are things we can take and things we can't. I want to destroy everything in the church that we can't take with us.”

So much for material things having no meaning,
Aras thought. The more he discussed their beliefs with them, the less sense they made. But it wasn't the time to debate with them. Their faith would be the only thing that would keep them going through the crushing misery of being uprooted and having to start again on a world they didn't know.

“I know you have always told us to stay away from Christopher Island,” Josh said carefully. It was another island in the chain that was home to Constantine. Once it had been called Ouzhari. It was all black grass in spring, a plant unique to the island. “And that's the only place
c'naatat
can be found, yes?”

“I didn't realize you knew,” Aras said.

“I didn't,” said Josh. “Not for sure.”

It was the first time—the only time—that Josh had ever tricked him. The sensation was unpleasant. Josh was a decent man and Aras knew he had no reason to doubt his integrity. But it hurt. They sat in silence and busied themselves with the soup.

They had named the island after St. Christopher, another of these not-quite-gods that they made out of men and women. They had beatified all six islands in the chain: Constantine, Catherine, Charity, Clare, Chad, and Christopher. Aras had learned about saints. He still thought it might have been more appropriate for the
c'naatat
island to be named St. Charity, given the nature of her martyrdom. Saints needed to suffer. It was one of those dark needs of humankind.

The first robotic mission to Bezer'ej had landed on Christopher, and Aras had relocated it as far up the chain as possible with the help of wess'har comrades long since dead. The colonists knew exactly what
c'naatat
was. They had no interest in it, almost to the point of dread. Some of them regarded it as the
devil's temptation,
whatever that meant. The kind of eternal life they were looking for involved something called the bliss of God, not resistance to disease and injury until you lost everyone you ever cared for. No, they were no threat. They
pitied
him. He would never go to heaven.

Josh closed his eyes for a second. He might have been praying. Humans thought aloud to God, and Aras had never worked out how they expected their deity to pick its way between their billions of conflicting needs and desires.

He opened his eyes. “You'll hold on to the gene bank, of course.”

“Whatever happens,” said Aras, “I will ensure the species bank is preserved. Whether it will ever return to Earth, I can't say. But we won't hand over any of those people or plants to
Actaeon
.”

“Are you really removing the biobarrier?”

“You know why we have to.”

“They really would wipe us out too, then.”

“Yes.”

Josh looked him in the eye for several long seconds. Aras could see his ancestor Ben in him. Aras felt sorrow and fear for them all, but he didn't feel guilty and he didn't feel repentent. For a moment he thought that Josh had finally seen him for the alien he truly was: neither a miracle nor a guardian nor anything sent by divine providence to help them carry out their task, but an alien with a radically different morality.

“I understand,” Josh said, and Aras knew he didn't. A gulf had opened up between them. It had always been there, paper-thin, but now it was a canyon and widening fast.

Aras stayed in Constantine for two more days. He made sure he visited the school and walked as many of the subterranean streets as he could. The spring crops were sprouting: two of the rats he had liberated from the
Thetis
's pharmacologist had produced a litter because the colony's children hadn't quite worked out how to sex them, never having experienced live animals larger than insects before. It was all normal and full of unspecified hope.

Josh's son James was taking good care of Black and White, two of the lab rats that Aras had taken a particular liking to. Aras played hand-chasing games with them for a while, but they weren't as nimble as they had been. Rats aged fast. Shan had warned him they would die in another year or so, and that he shouldn't get upset because that was normal for rats.

Above ground, all that was visible of the settlement were the discreet domes of skylights and the carefully arranged patches of crops. The air was scented with damp green fertility.

He paid a visit to the church of St. Francis.
GOVERNMENT WORK IS GOD'S WORK
.

The inscription had been one of his earliest memories of the colony. He had watched bots carve it years before any humans arrived on the planet. They had been
gethes
then. He had stopped them using other creatures for food and turned them into acceptable humans.

I had a choice. I was still the custodian of Bezer'ej. It would have been no trouble to kill them before they woke from chill-sleep.

But he hadn't. And he hadn't let Shan die either. He didn't regret either decision. Regret was pointless and human. It had nothing to do with reality.

Aras would have to turn the reclamation nanites loose in the tunnels and galleries. They would reduce all artefacts to dust as efficiently as they had wiped out all traces of the shattered isenj settlements on Bezer'ej. It was a pity about the window, though.

He walked up the aisle of the church and studied the stylized figure in a brown robe. He had assembled most of the image: he could take it apart again. The colonists would need something of this place to take with them, and it was as iconic and representative of their purpose as anything he could imagine.

Shan came up behind him. He caught a pleasant breath of her distinctive skin-scent, a smooth, mouth-filling smell of sawn wood underlaid by a human bittersweet musk.

“You okay?” she asked.

“I am.”

“I'm sorry. I really am. Not for them, but for you.”

He sized up the window, working out how he would dismantle the many leaded pieces of glass and record their positions so he might reassemble them in F'nar. “It will further help them get to their heaven,” he said.

“Are you taking the piss?”

“Not at all. I mean it. The more they have to do things they find hard, the better their god loves them, it seems. I still don't understand the value of suffering.”

“Yeah, it beats me too.”

“I shall stay and help them depart. It's the right thing to do.”

Shan slipped her arm through his and they stood looking at the stained glass saint who had loved all creation, and his entourage of animals, some of which might have eaten him had he fallen into their grasp. Aras suspected an
alyat
would have overlooked St. Francis's respect for it if there had been a lean hunting season.

Shan was looking intently at the window too. Aras didn't have to ask why. It was the areas of blue glass that spoke to her. When she first saw them, they had looked white: humans couldn't see the colors as wess'har did. Then she saw them for the color they were, and knew what he had done to save her. She'd been enraged and terrified.

“It's beautiful,” she said. Clearly the association was no longer painful. “And I still don't know how the sunlight gets down here.”

“I could show you.”

“Later.” Her eyes moved over the image. “You're going to save it, aren't you?”

“Yes.”

“Good. I'm glad.” She squeezed his arm. “I'll hang on here, then. If there's any dissent, I'll handle it.”

“They're taking it hard.” He was glad she would be around. She seemed to relish restoring compliance: he saw it only as a necessity. “It will make it easier having you here.”

“I might have to do things that you'll find hard to accept. I don't want it to drive us apart.”

“Shan, you're my
isan
and I'm bound to you, whatever you do or say.”

He felt all her muscles tense. “You sound as if you wish you weren't.”

“No. I'm perfectly content.”

“Look, when the dust has settled, let's take a few days out of F'nar and get ourselves straight again. Perhaps we could visit Baral.” She reached into her jacket, took out the small red cylinder of her swiss and pressed it into his hand. “No point my carrying this. Nevyan's given me a new communications thing. I don't think I'm ever going to get the hang of it somehow.”

The antiquated swiss was no use to him either. And it was full of details of the demons that drove her, the terrible things that
gethes
did. But he knew how much it meant to her and that she was giving it to him as a gesture. He suspected she would never use the word
love,
but he understood nevertheless.

“I shall take good care of it,” he said.

A pause. “I'd better be off, then.” She gave him a brisk kiss on the cheek and strode back down the aisle, boots echoing.

Yes. A few days of quiet—without matriarchs and Eddie and all the tension that had accompanied them since the day they met—might be good for them both. Aras watched her go and marveled at how unconcerned she seemed. Then he walked to the bell tower and took hold of the long ropes of hemp and
efte
attached to the six glass bells.

Ben Garrod had never believed that bells could be made from glass. Humans had limited technology in that area. But he had been delighted by the sound they made when struck. It was a wavering note rather than a low metallic gong, but it carried for miles and it had an ethereal quality that the humans liked.

It was a sound that generations of colonists had grown up hearing. Aras had no idea why Josh insisted on destroying them now and not leaving them to the nanites.

Aras glanced up into the top of the tower that housed the bells. In daylight the brilliant blue was visible, and if he stood at the right position in the aisle he could look up and see the curved transparent shapes through the beams of the roof. He was still staring up, remembering the effort of making them, when he scented Josh coming through the church.

The man looked tired. “Let's do it,” he said. “One last time.”

“We could remove them,” Aras said.

“No,” said Josh. “No nanites, either. I want to see them gone now. No looking back.”

Josh took one rope in both hands and gave it an all-out downward tug, tipping the bell back on itself and drawing a long, plaintive note from it. Then he stopped and placed another rope in Aras's hand.

“Just pull this when I indicate,” he said.

Aras had never cared to learn the complex sequences of ringing that the colonists took great care to practice. He rang now because Josh wanted him to; that was the least he could do for him, even though their friendship was now feeling strained. Using only two bells, the ringing had none of the magnificent tonal complexity of what they called
plain hunt
or
rounds,
but perhaps the tolling of two bells was more apt than peals that were celebratory in tone.

The sound vibrated in Aras's throat. He felt he could taste it.

Josh paused for breath. “They used to use church bells as an alarm signal,” he said. “There was a war in Europe when they stopped churches ringing their bells for the whole six years of the war, because if the bells rang, it was a warning that England had been invaded.” He stared up the length of the thick beige rope, and Aras could have sworn he was in tears. “It's just material, Aras. We don't need these things to know God.”

They rang solemnly for five more minutes. Then Josh brought his bell to a dead stop and showed Aras how to do the same.

“I've collected the items from the altar,” Josh said. It was a strangely dispassionate way of describing the carved image of his tortured dead deity. Aras still found their fixation with redeeming physical agony a disturbing one. “I'll bar the door behind me so we don't have any accidents.”

“Are you absolutely sure you want me to do this? It seems unnecessary. The nanites will—”

“I want them destroyed here, please.”

“It makes no difference how they are eradicated.”

“Yes, it does. We need a harsh reminder that we have burned our bridges. It makes us move forward.”

Aras gave him time to clear the building. Then he climbed the fragile ladder that led to the top of the tower and squeezed into the gap between the vault of the roof and the headstock to which the bells were attached. He took out his
tilgir.

It had been a pleasure and an education to make those bells. It was fitting that he should now be the last person to touch them.

It took a while to hack through the rope and composite pins that secured the crowns to the headstock. There was creaking. Then gaps began opening, and with a sudden lurch all six bells dropped in close sequence down the well of the tower in a brief, unnatural silence that ended in a cacophony of bouncing shards that churned in a glittering eruption of sapphire and cobalt fragments like a missile piecing the surface of a frozen sea.

The agonizing noise calmed in seconds into tinkling, then into nothing at all. The bells of St. Francis were finally silent.

The erasure of Constantine had begun.

Okurt wasn't unlikable. He wasn't as quietly impressive as the Royal Marines from
Thetis
, but neither was he the sarcastic buffoon that he seemed to have created as a defensive shell. Eddie thought the current situation was a lot to ask of a man who had never been properly trained for alien contact.

He expected to be debriefed as soon as he put one foot through the last of the inner hatches. But there was polite restraint from everyone. It was a full twelve hours before Okurt left a message inviting him to lunch in the wardroom with the senior staff.

Meals were the backbone of the day. Okurt believed that his staff should have one meal where they didn't have to operate a console with one hand and snatch a snack in the other. “We are not a grazing animal,” he told Eddie. “Officers
dine
.” There were disposable napkins and matching shatterproofs. The table itself looked like solid naval oak until you stood up too quickly and caught it with your leg to discover it was tough, feather light blown composite with a convincing grain, and that it stowed up flat into a bulkhead. It was sweetly patriarchal. Okurt sat at the head of the table like a father waiting to carve the Sunday roast.

It would have been a nice ordinary lunch if Eddie hadn't had a long list of unpleasant news he needed to impart to
Actaeon
and her masters.

“You do seem to be getting on well with the isenj,” said Okurt. “Still using an interpreter?”

“Not with Ual,” Eddie said. “Very fluent. It's a struggle for him to make the sounds, but he knows exactly what he's saying.”

“Shout.”

“Eh?”

“ ‘If they fail to understand, shout: and do not dissemble, because God is your authority.' ” Okurt laughed. “Old advice to those taking on the white man's burden in the colonies.”

“Good if you're talking to people with pointed sticks. Bad if they have missiles.”

“We could do with fostering some enthusiasm for the space program, seeing as it pays us.” Okurt passed round sliced protein that might have been soy but could just as easily have been cell-culture chicken. The parallel of bountiful provision by the government's hand was not lost on Eddie. “I hear the views of F'nar raised approval a bit. Staggeringly pretty. Shame the inhabitants would rather blow our heads off than let us visit.”

Lindsay picked at her chicken salad, or perhaps it was a soy salad after all, and looked preoccupied. Eddie thought it was time to put her out of her misery. It was a matter of things being best hidden in plain sight.

“Can I ask you a question, Malcolm?” Eddie liked to give his quarry a sporting hundred-meter start. “I hear from reliable defense sources back home that the
Hereward
has changed course.”

Lindsay looked up at him. It was convincing shock. It was a shock that he had mentioned it, of course, but it did the job just fine. She hadn't told Okurt that Eddie knew about it. Maybe she hadn't even told him that
she
knew. Okurt made a commendable show of looking unperturbed.

“It's true the
Hereward
is being deployed to this sector, Eddie, yes. Your sources are correct. Might I ask how and when?”

“
Sources.
The only item in my professional code of honor. That's all you need to know.”

“How widely have you discussed this?” Okurt asked.

“We haven't reported it yet.” Eddie smiled. Well, that was true. Okurt would know that anyway. “Come on. You don't pay me.”

“Do the isenj know?”

A sloppy admission, very sloppy
. So he was more worried about the isenj than the wess'har, and that was a view Eddie couldn't share after the events of the last week. But then Okurt was just a field officer, not a politician. “Would you like me to ask them?”

Okurt managed a smile and pushed the jug of instant Chardonnay-flavored drink down the oak-alike table. Lindsay fielded it and poured, a study in displacement activity.

“It's only a support vessel,” Okurt said at last. “And it won't be here for twenty-five years.”

“A well cannoned-up support vessel, though. Never mind. Plenty of time to get back in everyone's good books.” Eddie sliced his hydroponic tomato purely as stage timing. “Because the wess'har know about it, and they're mobilizing.”

Okurt and Lindsay both stopped chewing for a split second at exactly the same time.

“I imagine you're going to tell us all about it,” said Okurt.

“Yes, because I'd like to be out of here before they're ready to roll. I'm old-fashioned that way. I like to keep my entrails inside my body cavity.”

Okurt was shunting bits of chicken around his plate with his fork. Despite being lightweight composite, the crockery still carried a gold rim and the ship's huntsman crest. Eddie couldn't help noticing that the huntsman was being ripped apart by his own hounds.

“They interpreted it as a hostile act, and it was bad timing after extracting all the human crew from
Thetis,
” said Eddie.

“Why?”

“The ussissi have gone ballistic. The paranoid little buggers think we're shaping up to destroy the ship because of the opposition back home to bringing isenj to Earth.”

Lindsay said nothing. She took another pull at the glass of not-wine that Eddie now wished were hundred-proof navy rum. He could have done with a real drink.

“Want to see my rushes?” said Eddie.

It wasn't quite the same game he had played before. He liked juggling with information, flushing out who knew what, as much as Shan clearly enjoyed the challenge of interrogation. But he just needed to be clear—in his heart of hearts—why he was playing.

He was helping to avert disaster. He was trying to stop humans making a big mistake and getting into a fight with another species that would actually win, and win well. He was saving the last of a civilization of intelligent squid.

He hadn't abandoned his professional standards at all.

“Yes, we would,” said Okurt.

Eddie unrolled his screen and set it on the console table that ran down the length of the short bulkhead. The assembled senior staff watched the raw footage like they were staring at a road crash.

“I tried to get as close as I could,” said Eddie modestly.

The bee-cam was staring down into the cockpit of a huge and enigmatic fighter craft. If he had sent the cam up its tailpipe it wouldn't have told a human the first thing about how it worked and what it could do. In fact, it didn't even appear to
have
a tailpipe.

“There are a thousand wess'har cities down there, and they've all got a box of kit like this,” said Eddie. He was watch ing faces while they watched his shots: he had hit the spot, and hard. “And I don't want to worry you, but Wess'ej is just the outpost of a larger wess'har civilization about five light-years away. The ones on Wess'ej are the namby-pamby lefty liberals and hippies. The others are a lot less tolerant.”

“What's that?” asked the weapons officer. He was looking at a brightly colored 3-D map of wilderness crisscrossed by regular lines and angles, giving the impression of plans for a rigidly designed road network that someone was hoping to build on a greenfield site. It was Olivier Champciaux's geophys data from Bezer'ej, the material that had made even Shan Frankland nervous and that Champciaux hadn't been willing to let him broadcast for copyright reasons. Eddie didn't give a stuff about copyright now.

“That's a geophys scan of part of Bezer'ej. It was an isenj city. A big one.” Timing was part of the show. Eddie paused and spread butter on a bread roll. “And that's all that's left of it after a visit from the Wess'ej Liberal Party.”

There was a collective murmur of unease. This propaganda business was
easy.
Eddie wondered why he hadn't made it his life's work.

“Do they know you spied on them?” said Okurt.

“They knew. They just didn't give a shit. You can be that confident when you've got an arsenal like theirs.”

“I don't suppose I could ask you for this material to show to the joint chiefs before you broadcast it, could I?”

“If it keeps my entrails in place, you're welcome,” said Eddie. He left the playback running. There was the usual jerk and blur as the recording changed to another session's shooting, and the cam rested on an idyllic wide shot of F'nar's shimmering terraces. Shan, back to camera, walked into frame and stood with hands on hips. Then she turned her head, appeared to notice she was in shot and stepped aside. The mike picked up a brief “Sorry.”

Eddie saw Lindsay's reaction. She leaned forward a fraction, no more.

“Sorry, Lin,” said Eddie.

“No problem,” said Lindsay. “So she lives there, now, eh?”

“Yeah.”

Okurt didn't appear interested in Shan, which was odd given his shopping list. “Is there anything else? Not that you haven't kept us absorbed so far.”

“Yeah, the wess'har are about to plow in the salt.” It was a neat line. Eddie got the attention he had planned, with eight heads all turned towards him in uniformed synchrony. “They've developed a biological agent that's specific against humans and they're about to spread it around Bezer'ej to make sure we're never going to land there. They're really very freaked about the risk to the bezeri. Oh, and they're kicking the colony off the planet. So they took the news about
Hereward
really well, all things considered.”

“
You
told them.”

“And I flushed out a lot about their capability. Better to find out now.”

Okurt gave Eddie the sort of look that made him think he might check under his bunk before turning in each night for the foreseeable future.

“And what about this biotech?” said Lindsay.

“You'll never get it.”

“I didn't think they'd hand it over.”

“I mean that it's a natural organism from Bezer'ej, and you're never going to get there anyway now. A fluke. There's no tech to steal or buy or borrow. The only route to it is a chunk out of Shan or Aras, and I think you can calculate the odds of getting
that.
”

Lindsay's expression didn't flicker. “We could offer to help evacuate the colony,” she said. “Might give us some access.”

“Don't bother,” Eddie said. “Shan's doing it personally. You know what she's like for getting stuck in.”

He thought he saw Lindsay's expression brighten, but he was mistaken. She drained her glass and went on picking at the remains of her salad. Eddie, satisfied that he had drawn a very accurate picture of the risks of provoking wess'har wrath, dubbed the footage across to a chip and handed it to Okurt.

“Knock yourself out, Commander,” he said. “As long as my arse is out of firing range.”

Eddie walked back to his cabin, feeling that he had done the right thing for once, albeit with a little more theater than the fearsomely wonderful Mestin might have thought decent. Shan would have appreciated it, though. They came from the same school of psyching out the opposition. He respected that.

He swung his legs up on his bunk and began wondering if his nerve would hold long enough to get a sample of DNA from an isenj.

 

“How much of this am I supposed to know I've heard?” asked Okurt.

Lindsay wasn't moving. She was leaning against his cabin hatch. If Okurt was going to leave before she'd had her say, he'd have to go through her.

“All you need to know is that I'm detaining a wanted person and that I've requested access to a shuttle. We have a very narrow window for this, and it might be the only one we ever get.”

Okurt spun his coffee cup on the table, looking past it in defocus at the status board but not appearing to see that either. “And even if you can land, how do you plan to get off the planet? We can't retrieve you. You know that.”

“Dr. Mesevy's still down there. We can merge in with the colonists when they're evacuated.” She had the story ready. He had no way of checking it. “She'll help.”

“There are only a thousand or so of them. Don't you think they'd spot a stranger or six, especially rather fit ones with very short hair and palm-bioscreens?”

“Depends how we embark. We can also get access to the original colony mission shuttles and fly out.”

“Just like that, eh?”

“Have you ever worked with Royal Marines before, Malcolm?”

“No, I haven't.”

“If it can be done, they'll do it.”

“Your chances are still close to zero.”

“We're prepared to take casualties. The priority is to get her.”

“I still don't see how you're going to take her. She's effectively on home turf.”

“We don't have to. We just need a good stash of tissue samples.”

Okurt suddenly recovered his focus. “My orders said
alive.
You'll have to have a bloody good reason for bringing her back in kit form, if you get out at all. Unless, of course, Dr. Rayat has overriding orders.”

“He does, but you don't need to know.”

Okurt had his back to her now, refilling his cup. “Okay, next question. Suppose you do get to her and—God knows how—take a chunk. And you can't get the shuttles airborne. How are you going to get the material off Bezer'ej?”

“Remote sample collection bot. Six kilos, self-propelling.” Waiting had paid off. She was cold and detached now, a million miles from the sobbing mother who had heard the news from Ade Bennett that they were going to exhume her baby. “You were looking at that to get a sample from David's body. You must have thought it was feasible too.”

Okurt turned slowly to face her. “I know I should have told you. I'm sorry.”

“But you didn't. Now I'm telling you how it's going to be. I'm landing at Constantine by Once-Onlies with the detachment and we're going to find Shan Frankland, neutralize her and get a sample off the planet. Either we lift clear and you can have a shuttle rendezvous with us at a safe distance, or you can intercept that sample. Job done.”