Crossing the Line (35 page)

“Ready,” said the ussissi pilot. “Pressure equalized.”

Lindsay wondered why Bennett was so preoccupied with his face. Then he peeled off the dressing from the bridge of his nose, starting carefully at his left cheekbone. And he raised two fingers to her in the gesture of defiance that had been Albion's way of saying
fuck you
since Agincourt nearly a thousand years before.

There wasn't a mark on him: no hint of swelling eyes or deviated septum or even a split lip to show that he'd been smashed in the face.

And the dressings weren't
that
effective.

She'd missed something. Shan had been cut, or Shan had healed instantly, but Lindsay had missed a critical break in her skin.

“Oh no,” said Lindsay. “You bastard.”

“You'll pay for Shan,” said Bennett. “Don't you worry about that, ma'am. You'll pay, one way or another.”

She tried to force the hatch manually. He watched her for a couple of seconds and then held a cigar-sized tube to the glass: foam sealant. He'd jammed the wheel.

“I'm a regular gadget shop,” he said. All she could do was watch him as he climbed the ladder and disappeared with something she wanted to destroy more than anything else in creation.

Rayat turned to look. Lindsay bit her lip so hard that she could taste hot, wet saltiness. She didn't want him to know what she'd just seen, ever. It would all start again.

“What a complete balls-up,” Rayat hissed, and turned away again. “I
told
you we should have taken samples.”

Bennett was right, though. They couldn't even swear like Shan Frankland.

Mestin had been thinking about the outrage for half a day. People came and went in the Exchange of Surplus Things and glanced at her briefly. They were more distracted by the terrible images of Ouzhari on the public screen that spread the full width of the end wall.

The island had always been black. The unique grass there made it so. But the land was a different black now, the dull dirty charcoal aftermath of a huge fiery explosion. The sky looked hazy and overcast.

“Destroy them,” she said at last, more to herself than the matriarchs beside her.

It wasn't a huge task. The
gethes
had one ship: but it was in orbit around Umeh, and that meant ignoring an ancient courtesy. Wess'har had never breached the isenj homeworld. The isenj had been in the Ceret system before wess'har arrived, and for a very long time.

Fersanye and Chayyas waited with Mestin, but every so often they glanced at Nevyan. She was all acid agitation, tugging at her
dhren
occasionally, more like a nervous
gethes.
She was examining a pannier of ripe
jay
but appearing not to see them.

“What about those in the ship who are
not
responsible for this attack?” said Fersanye.

“It's a warship,” said Mestin. “But we will give them warning to disembark the uninvolved.”

“But
Actaeon
is orbiting Umeh.”

“Then we shall ask them to withdraw from orbit to a safe distance first.”

Nevyan turned very slowly from the
jay
and stood over her mother. “You simply don't understand
gethes.
They won't be polite and move themselves to be killed more tidily.”

Her scent had started to shift. It made Mestin uneasy, and Fersanye sat utterly still.

“If
Actaeon
is destroyed that close to Umeh, there will be debris,” said Mestin. “This is not the doing of the isenj.”

“That is irrelevant,” said Nevyan. “I say they should take the consequences of their ill-chosen alliance.”

The silence around the matriarchs—and Nevyan, formally or otherwise, had entered that cadre—was total. Those wess'har bringing in produce and taking it away were halted in their tracks. Matriarchs seldom wrangled: rapid consensus was embedded in their genes.

But Mestin stood up. Nevyan was shorter, smaller. She was still her
isanket
in many ways.

“It's wrong to punish the isenj, even by accident,” she said.

Nevyan stood her ground. “You never spend enough time learning from
Shan Chail.
We can't defend ourselves with our hands bound. This is a
gethes
trick—a
human shield,
they call it. Like
hostages.
A reliance on the niceness and
decency
of your enemy, their fear of what will happen to the innocent.” And suddenly her rasping sour-leaf scent was swamped by a massive, throat-closing burst of dominance. Mestin stepped back.

It was over. She was no longer senior matriarch of F'nar. It had been a brief duty.

Nevyan jiggled her head, realizing what she had done, but she was now fully dominant and didn't seem uncomfortable with it. Mestin saw a stranger for the first time. “I have to contact Shan,” she said. “We have heard nothing from her for many hours.”

“Vijissi was supposed to look after her,” said Mestin. “If there had been problems, he would have let us know.”

“I still need to talk with her. I need
her
knowledge.”

A
gethes
mother might have taken offense, but Mestin was proud that her daughter was pragmatic enough to take her lessons where she could. She had long suspected the girl would be a better matriarch than she could. It was sad to know she couldn't teach her enough for the changing times, but Shan could fill the gaps, and she resented the human not one bit.

They returned to Nevyan's home to sit in the main room and wait for news.

And it came.

They heard a ussissi running down the terrace outside, a rapid scrabbling over stones, and when he burst into the room Mestin watched Nevyan freeze for a brief moment. Then she stood. The ussissi came to a halt at her feet, looking up.

“
Shan Chail
is dead,” he said. “And Vijissi too. The
gethes
took them.” His lips were pulled back and all his teeth were visible. “We want balance. We want revenge.”

Nevyan took the news in silence and walked out slowly to stand on the terrace, Mestin a little behind her. The new matriarch of F'nar looked down on her new responsibility and let out a piercing territorial cry that rang round the caldera, note over note, for a count of ten. The sound echoed off the walls of the basin: the disembodied voice continued for a while after Nevyan closed her mouth and lowered her head.

Then she turned round, looking past Mestin, and beckoned the ussissi forward with one gesture of her arm. Even without that heavy, overwhelming scent, she was suddenly the most extreme, most dominant female her mother had ever seen.

“Make contact with the World Before,” said Nevyan Tan Mestin.

“They will pay for this,” said Nevyan.

Mestin said nothing. In the past three seasons, the blockade of Bezer'ej had fallen to the isenj, and a
gethes
—no, an
isan
—she thought of as invincible had made the greatest error of all.

It didn't surprise her that
Shan Chail
had sacrificed herself to thwart the
gethes.
Right or wrong, she always liked to have the last word.

And it broke Mestin's heart, as she knew it had broken Nevyan's. That was another English phrase that was worthy of acceptance into wess'u because it was perfect in its description of agony.

The Exchange of Surplus Things, the largest single room in F'nar, was packed with utterly silent matriarchs and ussissi from at least half the city states of Wess'ej. Nevyan walked to the front of the hall. Mestin remained where she was with Fersanye, Chayyas, Siyyas and Prelit.

Nevyan trailed a scent of pungent dominance through the crowd. It was what Vijissi had called
mangoes.
Mestin would miss him more than she could say.

“We have no choice now,” said Nevyan. “Will you commit your males with ours?” She was standing on a crate so she could be seen; despite her great courage and drive, Nevyan was shorter than the average female. She was Shan's height. “I have work for them to do. And I have called on the World Before to help us deal with this threat once and for all.”

Wess'har didn't respond as a mob even though they were communal. There was a quiet murmur. A ussissi scrambled onto a crate to peer through the forest of tall females.

“Think carefully before you call for assistance,” she said.

“We can't deal with
gethes
alone,” said Nevyan. “Not while they have allies in the isenj.”

“We know the World Before through our kin there. You don't. They are very different to you.”

“They are still wess'har.”

“Indeed they are, but they're far stronger even than Wess'ej, and if you're wrong, and if they don't behave as you would, you may end up paying a high price for their aid.”

Nevyan did appear to consider the ussissi's words carefully. “Have you an alternative?”

“No.”

“And neither have I.”

And the room began to empty.

Shan would have said that they didn't do it that way on Earth. There would have been intrigue, skirmishes, riots, angry mobs, and headlines in the news.

But it had taken only a few moments earlier in the day for Nevyan Tan Mestin to depose her mother as senior matriarch of F'nar. She had now launched the first assault on the
gethes
and broken millennia of isolation from the World Before.

There was no pain in it for Mestin. She was proud. It was the only warm thing in her at that moment to ease her mourning and fear. Nevyan stepped down off the crate as if she were embarrassed at having needed it. But her scent of dominance was stronger than ever.

“I told Aras,” she said.

Mestin felt relief and dread simultaneously. The two
isan've
stood in the center of the empty hall and silently accepted everything that had happened.

“I would have found that hard,” said Mestin.

“As did I,” said Nevyan. “You can't imagine his grief.”

Mestin followed her from the hall and into a late summer evening that was perfectly beautiful and scented with the fragrance of
aumul've.
The
tem
flies were swarming on the last warm stones left after Ceret's setting: they would be moving further south now to follow the warm weather.

The deaths of tens of thousands of bezeri and
Shan Chail
and Vijissi would take a great deal of balancing. Mestin wondered if Nevyan would start with the displaced colony or even the human base on Umeh.

No. She would begin with
Actaeon.

The isenj would learn to pick their friends more carefully.

 

It was an old long-range fighter, but it was serviceable. Nevyan had watched it climb into the clear sky the day before and now she was tracking its advance towards the gethes ship
Actaeon.

The pilot was one of her
jurej've,
Cidemnet. Mestin didn't think it was kind to send one of her new family into battle so soon after accepting them, but Nevyan said it was important that she demonstrated she would commit her own males to the war. She sat down in front of the screen and Lisik brought them bowls of
tea.
It was unpleasantly bitter, and Mestin couldn't understand what Shan had found so desirable about it. She would still have drunk it gladly if Shan had been there to share it. She missed her already.

“We could have sent a drone missile and destroyed the ship by now,” said Mestin.

“And we would have lost the opportunity to add an important message,” said Nevyan. “Besides, they have had time to disembark more
noncombatants and civilians
, whatever that distinction might mean. We'll deal with them in due course.”

Unlike
gethes,
whose wars were fought in secret, any wess'har could access the channel and follow Nevyan's conduct of the mission. They could watch what Nevyan was seeing; they could hear her conversations with the fighter. They would also be able to hear any exchange with the
gethes.
They had nothing to hide.

Mestin knew they were as baffled by her tactics as she was. It didn't matter. Nevyan seemed grimly confident of the lessons she had learned from
Shan Chail.

She touched the console. The screen showed Cidemnet's forward view from his cockpit, just the ochre disk of Umeh. The
gethes
ship in orbit around it wasn't even a speck but the display in front of Cidemnet across his field of view showed a moving constellation of lights, ussissi and isenj vessels and the larger target that was CSV
Actaeon.

“Contact
Actaeon,
” she said. “Let me speak to the commander.”

It took a while. When Malcolm Okurt's voice crackled into the chamber, it sounded surprised. There was no image. The disembodied voice was disturbing. Then it was joined by a shimmering image of a
gethes
with a thin face and every fidgeting sign of agitation.

“Am I speaking to the wess'har chief of staff?” he asked. He was expecting a soldier.

“I am Nevyan Tan Mestin, matriarch of F'nar. Shan Frank- land was my friend.”

Mestin thought it was an odd way to identify yourself. Okurt paused too. “Ma'am, we're genuinely sorry for the events of the last forty-eight hours. I can assure you we had no knowledge of the intent to use such extreme measures.”

“But you brought them here, so you must have considered it.”

“Purely defensive, ma'am. If there's anything we can do to help deal with the contamination, we're at your disposal.”

“Are you
taking the piss?
” Nevyan asked.

Okurt looked completely stunned by her sudden command of colloquial English. “Sorry?”

“Don't lie to me. You sent troops to Bezer'ej with aggressive intent. The bezeri are dying in great numbers. Two of my friends are dead. And you talk of helping us to clean up.”

“Our mission was to detain Frankland, not to kill her, and certainly not to cause devastation to the environment. My colleague exceeded her orders. I believe we can come to some understanding if we can meet and talk this through.”

Nevyan cocked her head in amazement and shot Mestin a glance. The
gethes
really hadn't understood them at all. “No discussion,” said Nevyan. “Who's responsible?”

Okurt paused again. “As commanding officer, I am.”

“Responsibility is personal.”

“The individuals who carried out the attack will be disciplined when they return to this ship, but the buck stops with me. You understand that phrase, I take it.”

“I do.”

“I'm really very sorry about Superintendent Frankland.”

“And so are we. But only actions matter, and I regret what I must do just as you regret what you have done, and the end will not be altered by either.”

Mestin was getting agitated too. Why was Nevyan spending so long talking with this creature? Cidemnet didn't need time to maneuver. His missiles were aimed and locked: this was entirely superfluous. It was a game. Wess'har didn't play games.

Okurt's face stopped moving and his voice sounded a little higher in pitch although it was steady. It was a sign of nervousness.

“I know you have a small vessel on station observing us, ma'am.”

“Yes, a single fighter. It's more than five thousand years old. It still works.”

Clearly he didn't think one ancient, distant fighter was more than a gesture, but he was confused, that was clear. “Ma'am, are you threatening us?”

“No. I'm targeting you. This is the act of balance for your crimes.
Launch.
”

Cidemnet let loose three warheads. Okurt's transmission cut off halfway through words that sounded like
stand to
and Mestin saw the three trails of light spread in the sudden image of Cidemnet's viewplate.
Actaeon
now had less than the time it took to boil two cups of water to make that strange, bitter
tea.

Nevyan had not only launched an attack on the
gethes
, but had also sent them a message that she could do so with the least of her arsenal. Mestin now understood the game her daughter had learned to play, taught by Shan Frankland and Eddie Michallat.

A tiny pinpoint of white light flared briefly against the disk of Umeh, then another, and another.

“You can come home now, Cidemnet,” said Nevyan.