Crossing the Line (8 page)

And she knew what it was to be isolated and alone. It was a heady combination.

Aras struggled not to dwell on the idea. “Chayyas would have exacted a very high price from you,” he said. “Mestin's will be even higher.”

“I expect I'll get my money's worth out of her, too. Both of us are in over our heads. Level playing field. I find that reassuring.” She made an impatient gesture towards the range. “Come on, dinnertime.
Isan's
orders.”

Ah
. He would have to discuss it. “You don't have to be
isan
if you don't want to.”

“I'm happy to cook.”

“
Isans
don't cook.”

“What are these responsibilities Mestin says I have, then?”

“To make decisions for the household, to participate in the running of the city, and to protect your males.” Mestin seemed to think they had already coupled: it had been the usual way of transmitting
c'naatat
. “The other matters need not bother you.”

“Why?”

“They are of a sexual nature.”

Shan made a noncommittal sound and looked away. He wasn't sure how to interpret that. He was also sure he wasn't going to ask. She watched him prepare the vegetables and tubers, repeating the name of each in wess'u as best she could, and she was an
isanket
again and he stopped thinking of what couldn't be.

Bezer'ej was in its full phase that night, a wonderful pale blue and terra-cotta moon streaked with silver. After dinner, Aras spent a long time on the terrace staring at it and wondering what Josh and his family were doing now. He hoped they would all understand why he had left. He longed to return, but Shan was here, and all his instincts anchored him to where she was.

He tried not to think of Mestin's household, of Chayyas's household, full of children and love and normality, and it hurt. On Bezer'ej there were no reminders of what he had sacrificed. He needed to go back.

Aras went back inside the house. Shan had settled down on a pile of
sek
covers in the corner of the room with her jacket rolled up under her head, one hand gripping it as if she thought someone might snatch it from her while she slept. He could see no lights and no claws:
c'naatat
had tired of the changes for its own inexplicable reasons. Her hands were human again.

Her boots—very clean, shiny from constant buffing, black—were standing neatly against the wall. If she hadn't been resting on the jacket, he would have tried to repair it before she woke. She set great store by being neatly dressed. The bullet hole in the jacket bothered her.

Aras listened to her rhythmic breathing for a while and studied the lines of the muscles that ran over her shoulder and down her arm. Maybe he would work out what to say to her by the morning. A few strands of her hair had escaped from the fabric tie that held it in a tail, and he thought better of smoothing it back from her face.

“Teh chail, henit has teney?”
he said quietly. No, he had no idea how they were going to work this out. “Do you really think of me as a man? Or am I one of your helpless animals like the gorilla?”

He almost wished she hadn't told him that story. But he would have discovered it anyway, along with the flames and the sickened rage that were already surfacing alongside his own memories. The more traumatic and significant the event, the more likely it was to filter through. Failing to help the primate had definitely gouged a permanent scar in her mind.

Shan looked exhausted rather than peaceful. She twitched occasionally in her sleep, making small sounds of nothing in particular.

He wondered if she were having the same dreams as him.

Lindsay fastened the belt on her fatigues and tidied her hair, relying on the distorted reflection in the console screen to check that everything was in order. She felt as she thought she looked: an aeon older.

It was the most useful thing she could do with the screen at the moment. The recreation network terminal was down again, a consequence of her trying to dock her personal unit with it. Life in space certainly wasn't like it was in the movies. There was never a handy universal computing platform around when you needed one.

There were two more serious matters that she couldn't get out of her mind. One was the first cogent thought that consumed her three seconds after waking each day, and that was that David was dead; and the other was that Rayat was back. He was supposed to be on board
Thetis
, on his way home with the rest of the payload, six Royal Marines and the isenj party. He wasn't. He was
here
, and she wanted to know who else was now embarked in
Actaeon
, and why.

She wanted to go and seek him out. But her natural caution told her to establish more facts before she went plunging in. Eddie might know something. He could wheedle information out of anybody, even information Okurt thought he might be keeping to himself. She tried activating the bioscreen but she was still getting flat lines; it looked as if her marine detachment was still on board
Thetis
, long out of range.

Detachment.
There were only six of them. But they were still a detachment, and six Royal Marines—six
Booties
—were a considerable asset.

Eddie appeared to have adapted perfectly well to life on board
Actaeon
. The man settled into spaces as easily and smugly as a cat. He was wandering down the main passage that ran the whole port side of
Actaeon
's main section when she saw him, pausing at every network niche to slot his datacard forlornly into the port. She wondered if she'd crashed the whole rec network.

“Did you know Rayat was on board?” she said without preamble.

Either Eddie wasn't much of a poker player or he was covering a lie. He registered surprise with a frown. “But he was chilled down on
Thetis
. He should be…er…” He stared blankly at the bulkhead for a few seconds, flipping his card over and over between his fingers, but the maths had clearly defeated him. “Well, a few months down the road home now.”

“I thought so too. I saw him about an hour ago.”

“I hear a lot of things on this ship, but not that. Did he say why?”

“We're not exactly chummy. He said hi and he walked away.”

“And you didn't ask him why he was back? Is it all of the payload? The marines? What?”

“Like I said, he just said hi and walked off.”

“You'd make a poxy journalist, doll.”

“I was caught off guard.” She had the feeling that Eddie had delivered the worst insult he could muster. He was the sort of man who'd interview his doctor on his deathbed. She struggled to regain his respect. “I'm seeing Okurt shortly and I intend to ask. If they've brought anyone inboard, one of us should know about it, and it's not me.”

“Paranoia is healthy. Makes you think creatively. So what's he here for?”

“Because they're getting obsessed with that biotech Shan's carrying. He's come back for that, I reckon.”

Eddie looked visibly pained. “Oh shit.”

“You know more about this than you're telling me, don't you?”

“I doubt it. Are you telling me everything
you
know?”

“I don't know who to tell what these days.” She gripped Eddie's forearm discreetly, not sure herself if it were a friendly gesture or one of desperation. “Are you giving samples to the doc?”

“Always do.”

“Well, they're checking for Shan's biohaz.”

Eddie still wore his I'm-your-chum smile, but it was thinning away to transparency. “And if you found you had it, what would you do?”

“Run, I think. Run like hell.” She was starting to wonder if there was anybody who could be trusted with it. She hadn't got quite as far as asking herself how far she would go to stop it falling into the wrong hands—and there were plenty of those grasping around. “If you hear anything, promise me you'll tell me.”

“If that works both ways, I will.”

She just gave him a blank look and went on her way. She didn't find it easy to lie. If he knew what she had in mind for Shan, she had no doubt he would get word to her. He admired the woman: he made no secret of it.

Lindsay settled in the corner of the wardroom for the morning briefing and thought it was an informally sloppy place to do business. But this wasn't her ship; it was Okurt's. She decided to aim for invisibility, a hard task in her out-of-date uniform. She didn't even speak the way the rest of the crew did. Two or three generations of separation from mainstream human culture were audible as well as visible.

And there was the other problem, of course. Nobody knew what to say to a woman who had lost her baby anyway.

Okurt seemed excited. He was spinning his coffee cup in its saucer again and Lindsay wanted to slap his hand away from it. But he stopped of his own accord when his staff of a dozen officers filed in.

Two of them sat either side of her, a little too close for comfort. She found it hard to brush hips with strangers now. She tried to shrink.

“We've received instructions to attempt to reopen negotiations with the wess'har authorities,” said Okurt.

There was silence. None of them were trained in diplomacy, Lindsay thought, and diplomacy as humans understood it wouldn't work on wess'har. She'd dealt with them just enough to know that.

“They don't negotiate,” she said.

“I know it's not going to be easy.”

“How are the isenj going to take this?”

“They're not privy to this.”

Lindsay went back to staring at her hands. There was quite a lot the isenj weren't privy to. There were times in life when alarm bells started ringing insistently in your head and wouldn't stop. She wondered if anyone else could hear them like she did then. Okurt certainly did, but she knew he would follow the orders of politicians who were 150 trillion miles away from the fallout.

“I plan to make contact with F'nar in the next few weeks,” he said. “I have no idea how their political hierarchies operate or even what their geopolitical structures are. Could you help out, Commander?”

Lindsay looked up. “They might prefer to talk to a woman. It's a matriarchal society.”

“Are you volunteering?”

There was a chance it would get her close enough to Shan. She stifled her excitement and paused a beat before saying, “Okay.” Again, she was conscious of Okurt's gaze resting just a suspicious second too long on her and she clung to a facade of professional calm.

I'm going to have the bitch
.

The prospect almost outweighed the reappearance of Rayat, but not quite. The briefing seemed longer and slower than usual. She caught herself carving her stylus into the smart-paper again and made a deliberate effort to take notes until the meeting broke up and she and Okurt were alone in the wardroom.

“Is there something you want to tell me, Malcolm?”

His bemusement looked genuine enough. “Something on your mind?”

“Why is Dr. Mohan Rayat here and not in the fridge in
Thetis
?”

Okurt didn't turn a hair. “We were instructed to retrieve the whole team plus the detachment. Everyone who had any contact with Frankland, just in case they had any contamination.”

It threw her. She really hadn't guessed. She fought the urge to check her bioscreen. “For their own well-being, of course.”

“You know damn well why.”

“Ah, a word from our sponsors, eh?”

“As far as they're concerned, we're just cooperating with their requests. Don't push it.” He glanced over his shoulder, casual, apparently unconcerned, and then lowered his voice. “And if I had the slightest suspicion that they were carrying this thing, I wouldn't be letting the commercial medical team crawl all over them.”

“I'm not with you.”

“If you were chief of staff, what precautions would you take here?”

“Defensive?”

“Political.”

Lindsay didn't need to think that long. “I'd probably want to look at that biotech for our own military purposes before we handed it over.”

“I'm glad to see your strategic common sense is alive and well.”

Lindsay felt she had at least judged Okurt about right. For all his grumbling and cynicism, he was at his core a sailor, an officer, a man who put his ship's company first and looked after his own. So here was another agenda. She wondered how many more there might be, and if Okurt was aware of them all.

“Are those your real orders?” she asked.
No, not that. Don't let Shan be right
. “Cut-and-come-again troops?”

“I still answer to the Defense Discipline Act. Not shareholders.” His almost constant half smile evaporated for a few moments: the lines around his mouth collapsed into worry, into concern, but he snapped them back into place again. “And whatever we do with it, it'll be in the hands of our federal interests, not hawked round the international marketplace by multinationals. That stays within this wardroom. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“We'll take her. Don't worry.”

He didn't need to say who
her
was. Lindsay feigned casual indifference. “Want me to get to work on that?”

“You know how I feel about your involvement.”

“I can get to her. I know better than anyone how to do it.”

Okurt looked into her eyes for a while, no doubt scouring for signs of crazed vengeance. She made sure he didn't find any.

“Okay,” he said. “This place is a sieve. So only you and I know, and that's it. Understood?”

“Never heard you mention a thing,” she said.

“And maybe you're not ideal for diplomatic contact.”

“Fair enough.”

It didn't make her feel brave or clever. She was deceiving a good man. But however decent, sensible, and deserving of loyalty Okurt might be, Shan Frankland had the edge on him: she'd been
right
.

Lindsay knew that if she was going to get to Shan, she'd have to go through Okurt sooner or later. She needed his trust.

“Is the whole payload thawed out?”

“All of them. The only life on
Thetis
now is the isenj and their ussissi support team, and they're still out cold.”

So she had her Royal Marines back on board, and she had Eddie, and Eddie could find out God's unlisted number if he put his mind to it.

Both Eddie and Shan had taught Lindsay a valuable technique common to both journalists and detectives. If you had enough individual pieces of the model—however small, however innocuous, however incomprehensible on their own—you could recreate the picture on the box.

She had a feeling she had been handed the solution to all her problems in kit form, minus the instructions and any idea of what she was making.

It was no problem. She had time.

 

“Go on,” said Eddie. Back in the reserve turbine room, they were a hundred meters away from curious ears. The bridge repeater panels flickered and danced, projecting a rainbow of colors onto the lad's face. “Can't do any harm, can it?”

The young lieutenant—Barry Yun—was that most cherished of finds, a bloke in the know who wanted to be helpful. Yun was bored and he thought Eddie had lived a glamorous and exciting life. It was amazing what you could achieve just by being able to tell a good yarn.

“All right,” said Yun. “They retrieved the
Thetis
crew. The thing's so slow we could catch up and board her.”

“Why?”

“System failure. Safety.”

“Unsafe for humans but safe for isenj and ussissi?”

Yun's lips moved silently for a second. Eddie felt a warm glow of triumph.
Make 'em think you already know the lot
. A couple of real facts, just the right degree of a smile, and a bit of timing, and they usually supplied the rest.

“Okay,” Yun said. “I thought it was a stupid story too. Reliable buzz says it's this biotech. Do you know what some people are offering for this stuff?”

“No. Amaze me.”

“I had to patch the CEO of Holbein through to the boss on his scramble line, not that it's secure on ITX, of course. He wasn't asking what the weather was like on Umeh either.”

“All this on a rumor?”

“Pretty strong rumor if you listen. They're scouring everyone who's been in contact with Frankland. Even you.”

Eddie held out his palms. “Look. No hair.”

“They even unzipped the body bags. No stone left unturned. They were talking about how they could get access to the colonists.”

“And who's
they
?”

“The R and D consortium team.”

“And you know this how, exactly?”

“I cover a lot of comms watches. Plus they're not too careful what they say in front of the stewards, and I'm always nice to the stewards.”

I know
, thought Eddie. “You're a man after my own heart,” he grinned.

Yun proved it. “So what really happened to the two in the body bags, then?”

“Okay…Parekh was executed for killing an alien kid. Dissected it, counter to all orders not to touch specimens. And Galvin went off-camp against express orders too and got caught in the cross fire with the isenj. So the moral of the story out here is to do as you're told.”

“I hope
Hereward
's well cannoned up when she arrives, then. If any of us are still left.”

The thought
don't react
flashed through Eddie instantly. “I thought
Hereward
was a survey ship,” he lied, knowing the vessel hadn't even been on the CAD screen when he'd left Earth.