The World Before

  Ade knew only too well. He was a complication. He was a dilemma in Shan’s dead straight, old-fashioned right-and-wrong world; he knew without asking that she had never, ever cheated on a man. Her honest loyalty was both one of the qualities he loved and a barrier to getting what he wanted.

  “I’m coming between you two,” he said. He knew it. It broke his heart. He had her back, alive, the impossible fantasy of every bereaved person in history, and now he was about to make her deeply unhappy. He couldn’t bear it. “I’m going to cause you both a lot of pain and I don’t want that.”

  “Not at all. Not at all, sweetheart. It’ll be fine.”

  Shan was the only person he knew who had to work out the moral argument before doing something. She never did what she wanted: she did what was right. It was one of those things that sounded clean and admirable until you were staring it in the face and it was about to say no to you.

  And right then he found himself thinking not about being a moment away from having sex with a woman he worshiped, or complicating her loyalties, but about obeying Lindsay Neville’s order to transport nuclear weapons to Bezer’ej.

  “I’d better put some clothes on,” he said. Guilt was a passion-killer all right. “I’m glad you like the boots.”

  Shan was staring at his shoulder now. “Did you know you’ve developed some bioluminescence?”

  He twisted his neck to look at the top of his left arm. The tattoo he’d had done when he signed up as a marine—the Corps’ globe and laurel, a defiant reminder that he was finally free of his dad’s unpredictable drunken rages—looked backlit. Faint violet flickers escaped from under the dark pigment.

  “Blimey,” he said, desperate to lift the mood. “If it’s in all my tattoos now, at least I’ll be able to find it in the dark.”

  It was a legacy of the bezeri. And it wasn’t funny at all. It just reminded him that he was a fighting man who hadn’t fought when it most mattered: when he should have refused an unlawful, immoral order.

  Yeah, guilt really turned you off.

  Lindsay Neville stood on the Mar’an’cas shoreline and debated how far out she might have to wade before she couldn’t change her mind and scramble back to shore.

  There was nothing she could salvage in her life now. She had started to come to terms with David’s death, and in time she might come to live with the knowledge that she had helped kill thousands of sentient beings. But it had all been for nothing.

  The parasite had survived, and Shan had survived, and bezeri had survived. Now the remnant would remember what she had done, and hate her. That thought bothered her. It disturbed her that she found their survival another blow and not some measure of relief.

  And Shan Frankland hadn’t shot her when she was absolutely, utterly convinced that she would do it without a second thought. The bitch wouldn’t put her out of her misery.

  She’d do it herself, then. She cupped her hand and studied the bioscreen grown into her palm. The living screen was dead, just a patch of shivering green light, and there were no readouts from the marines. They were either out of range or they had deactivated their links, but either way it said the same thing: you’re on your own.

  She checked the cloud formation and the wind direction for a while, still a sailor, and decided now was as good a time as any.

  Lindsay wasn’t a strong swimmer. The cold made her catch her breath and she felt the current buffet her as she waded out into the shallows. Why didn’t you just jump? There’s plenty of cliffs. Why pick this beach? Going to change your mind? All she had to do was strike out and swim until she couldn’t swim any longer. It wasn’t going to hurt as much as living with what she’d become and it would be over, over, over. They said drowning didn’t hurt at all.

  The cold was starting to numb her. Two minutes, maybe five: that was all the time you had in cold water, or so they told you in survival training. She knew people survived a lot longer. It wasn’t as grand a gesture as stepping out into space but it was the best she could do.

  A wave hit her and she gulped in water, coughing and choking. The impulse to turn and head back to dry land was almost overwhelming. But she struck out further, surprised how much she rose and fell with the choppy waves. She was starting to slip from being in control of her environment to being overwhelmed by it, the point at which self-preserving panic would kick in.

  No, she wasn’t Shan Frankland, making a final gesture of sacrifice. She was ending it all, just running away. She could hear her own choking sobs. She didn’t have a single noble thought in her head and she knew she had chickened out of dying the right way once before, but this time she was going to do it.

  Every stroke she took brought her closer to a point where she couldn’t get back. Funny: it seemed so much easier than pulling the pin on a grenade.

  Seawater flooded her mouth again. For the first time she wondered what might swim in these seas. Maybe she wouldn’t drown at all. Maybe she would fall into the transparent maw of a marine version of a sheven or an alyat, or worse.

  She wasn’t all that far out. It just felt like deep sea because the coastal shelf fell away sharply beneath her and the currents changed dramatically.

  Then something grabbed her from behind. Sheven. Don’t be stupid: shevens live on Bezer’ej. But a hand, a human hand with strong fingers, tipped her chin up and forced her onto her back. She lashed out. The hand became an arm round her neck and the next directionless kick she managed was greeted with a crack across the head.

  “Relax or I bloody well will hold you under,” said Rayat.

  “Sod off—”

  “Coward. Bloody little coward.”

  “Let go.”

  “You’re not getting out of this.” He was pulling her backwards and she was running out of fight. “I can’t stand a quitter.”

  “Fine time—”

  “Shut up.”

  “—to play the hero.”

  “Shut up. You’ve got a job to do.”

  Lindsay kicked a few more times. This time he punched her hard, a fist right on the top of her head. She wasn’t sure if she’d changed her mind or not. All she knew was that she didn’t want to be where she was right then, with the things that wouldn’t ever leave her mind.

  Rayat hauled her back inshore, a textbook rescue.

  “Bastard,” she said, and coughed up water.

  22

  TO: the Representative from Eqbas Vorhi.

  FROM: The Right Honorable James Matsoukis MAP, Pacific Rim States Lead Delegate to the United Nations.

  On behalf of our regional government, I invite your delegation to land in our territory. This is a binding agreement on behalf of the Australasian Republic and will be honored by all future administrations. We share your concern for global ecology and we will offer every cooperation. If there is any action we can take now to prepare for your arrival, please inform this office.

  We welcome to your assistance. It is a sad indictment of the ability of our nations to work in partnership when we need to request the arbitration of an external government.

  Rayat made Lindsay a hot mug of broth. She considered checking it for poison because he wasn’t a tea-and-sympathy kind of man, not at all.

  “Coward’s way out,” he said.

  She sipped. “I bet you were great on the suicide helpline. Don’t you have a cyanide capsule you can take?”

  They were huddled in the relative warmth of one of the makeshift greenhouses on Mar’an’cas, but not so close as to touch.

  “Well, you either die well or live well, that’s my motto. Have you heard from Frankland?”

  “What do you think? And how would she call me? She’s probably begging Esganikan to let her disembowel me.”

  “She could have killed you back in F’nar, but she didn’t. That tells me there’s still room for maneuver.”

  Lindsay could see colonists going about their business, blurred into an impressionist painting by the condensation on the transparent sheeting. “I can’t go on wi
th this.”

  “So you’re going to escape from the reality by topping yourself. Heroic.”

  “Well, seeing as I’m not good at rolling back the clock, yes.”

  “I hear the bezeri that survived are struggling. Ever thought of offering them a hand?”

  “I don’t think the Eqbas believe in community service orders,” she said, and slurped the broth. It scalded her lip. “Or maybe I could go scrub Ouzhari clean.”

  “If you want atonement, maybe that’s what you need.” Rayat wiped his nose against the back of his hand. “But you’d need to have c’naatat to do that. It’s a little hot.”

  “Look, I’m going to die,” she said. “And you’re going to die too. What are you playing at?”

  Rayat had a habit of not blinking, just like Shan. Lindsay imagined that he was also as adept as Shan at getting people to do things they didn’t want to do, and not by charm. Every conversation with him left her feeling as if he had done something terrible to her and then erased her memory of it, leaving only the impression that she’d been violated in some way. He was looking for an edge, even on the brink of death.

  “I’m just not good at comforting people,” he said, apparently contrite. “Sorry.”

  He stared into his mug for a moment, facial muscles slackening for a split second. For that instant she saw not a spook, but a man who did a dirty, necessary job that nobody else would do, and had no friends, no lovers, and nobody he could even trust to tell what kind of a day he had really had. Pity almost ambushed her. But she shook it off, knowing now what that feeling of violation was.

  Wretched or not, Rayat was marvelously manipulative.

  “You bastard,” she said. She struggled to her feet and tipped the rest of the broth into the soil bed. “You think you’re sliding out of this? No bloody way. You’ll get whatever’s coming to me too, don’t you worry. I’ll make sure of that.”

  Rayat stared up at her, still unblinking, and shrugged. Lindsay stalked out and walked back up the path to the shore and settled down in the lee of some rocks.

  Atonement.

  The notion kept circling around her mind, looking for a chance to strike. You couldn’t wipe the slate clean of tens, hundreds of thousands of deaths, not by doing a few good deeds. So did that mean she could just shrug and find release in permanent oblivion, and not even try?

  She’d been around the colonists for too long. Perhaps she was worried subconsciously that there really was some higher authority she’d have to answer to. It seemed an imminent prospect. She’d seen crew in extreme danger switch from being openly atheist to begging some god or other to save them; death’s threshold was the one point in your life when you found out whether you really believed or not.

  What could I do, anyway?

  She was a naval officer. Every scrap of training and every thread of her personality was bound up with responsibility and duty. She had to act.

  But the Eqbas didn’t need volunteers. And only Shan Frankland and her ilk could survive under water.

  Lindsay paused.

  It was an insane idea. She dismissed it, but it wouldn’t leave. It came back and settled on her shoulder like a persistent pet bird.

  Eddie didn’t know if the Australasian offer was stupidity, arse-kissing surrender, a cynical PR stunt or enlightened thinking on an unprecedented scale. But he knew it was trouble.

  Giyadas sat staring into his face while he watched the ITX feed, propped on a pile of blankets in Nevyan’s warren of excavated rooms. He didn’t find her gaze distracting now. He worked through the news channels and noted the sliding scale of fighting talk, from the slight regret of the Sinostates to the over-my-dead-body stance of the African Assembly.

  “They’re coming, whatever you say,” he said to the screen.

  Giyadas shifted position, but her gaze was fixed.

  “I’m not going to drop dead,” he said.

  “I’m keeping an eye on you. That is the phrase, yes?”

  “I’m fine. I’ve had worse head injuries falling over drunk.”

  “Yes, but you have emotional injuries too.”

  “Like I said, I’ve had worse.”

  “When will you visit Shan?”

  Eddie wasn’t sure why he blamed Shan and he didn’t know quite what he blamed her for. Ual had gambled and lost. Shan had done what she thought was needed to secure Bezer’ej. It just didn’t feel that way. “I’ll leave it a few days.”

  “Esganikan has agreed not to use bioweapons on Umeh.”

  “Right.”

  “She won’t. Nevyan and Shan made her concede.”

  “Bully for Shan, then.” Eddie reached out and ruffled Giyadas’s tufted mane. “I suppose I feel I let a friend down.”

  “Was Ual your friend?”

  “Close enough to make me feel like a heap of shit for conning him over his DNA.”

  He didn’t know if she understood that, but he imagined she’d be saying shit before too long. He took his rolled-up editing screen from his top pocket and flicked through the list of files waiting to be ITXed back to News Desk if only the UN portal would let him pass.

  He hadn’t looked at the bee cam’s footage from the landing. To be more accurate, he hadn’t looked at the footage from the point where the ramp went down. He was certain the bee cam had done what it was programmed to do and followed the action, which almost certainly meant graphic images of Ual being shot. Would he use it? The boundaries of what could be shown to audiences had been burst open centuries ago. A fat alien spider spraying body fluids wouldn’t even raise an eyebrow.

  But to use it, he had to edit it, and that meant looking at it. And that was what he couldn’t do right then. He knew plenty of colleagues who had calmly cut sequences involving the graphic deaths of people they knew and even liked, and theyconsidered it a duty and an act of respect, but Eddie found he was no longer one of them.

  How many more reminders do you need?

  “Eddie?”

  So if you’re not a journalist, what are you now?

  “Eddie? Eddie, have you decided whether you’ll return to Earth with the Eqbas?”

  You know, it’s not so bad to rethink who you are.

  “I’m not sure, sweetheart. I’m not sure what I’m going to do at all.”

  He’d set Lindsay up to be captured and taken for execution, and not even spoken to her since. He’d pushed propaganda for one alien power and then helped a minister from another one defy his government. He’d helped the wess’har develop a bioweapon.

  Eddie wondered what might be left of him when he put his camera down.

  Shan didn’t like herself much today. She had fewer days like these as the years wore on, but this morning she felt like a woman in the most negative sense she could imagine. She was messing men around. It was silly and girly and she should have known better.

  She leaned against the wall of the washroom and let the single jet of cold water play on the top of her head by way of penance. It wasn’t the physical stuff that bothered her as much as the voice deep in her brain that was still saying slut, slut, slut. She had never thought less of Nevyan for having four males, so why couldn’t she extend that tolerance to herself?

  Because you’re still wired to believe that the best thing you can give a male is your exclusivity.

  It wasn’t. She could see that simply by looking at Aras and Ade eating breakfast, becoming increasingly… synchronized. The brother bond was as almost as important as the male-female relationship, and now she could see that more clearly than ever.

  Watching Nevyan’s household—quarrelsome, affectionate, apparently chaotic—was seeing aliens, interesting but separate creatures however much she admired and liked them. But this bonding was happening in front of her to people whose reactions and attitudes she knew intimately, and they were changing. Aras took some gurut from the range and Ade placed a tray under them as if by reflex. They were an instant team. They knew how to fit in with each other now.

  And all she had to
do was join that team, and everything would be fine. She didn’t want to think the word family. It had no positive connotations for her.

  “You approve of the boots, then,” said Aras.

  “Yes, just the job.”

  “Shapakti has called again.”

  Shan crunched on an overcooked piece of gurut. “Ade, you didn’t bite his head off, did you?”

  “Aras dealt with him.”

  “And I was most respectful.”

  “Okay,” said Shan. “I’d better go and see what he wants. Are you sure there’s nothing else you two want to discuss with me?”

  Aras and Ade glanced at each other and shrugged, and Shan wondered if she was beginning to deal with a double act. They smelled a little agitated. Perhaps that was how wess’har males always behaved; she’d have to ask Nevyan for advice again, if she was in a better frame of mind today. Time was when she could do no wrong in Nevyan’s eyes, or in Eddie’s, come to that; and now she worried she could do nothing right.

  But at least her jurej’ve thought she was okay. And that was what mattered. She gave Aras a playful swat that got no response and left to call on Da Shapakti.

  It was a gray miserable day outside, the sort she actually liked. And it wasn’t just raining. The drops pecked at her face, turning into sleet, a very rare thing indeed for F’nar. The pearl-shit icing on the elegant organic swirls and curves of the city looked like ice. It was the sort of day to come home to an indulgent tea by the fireside, and for a brief moment she actually missed home.

  You must be joking. The apartment had five alarm systems and you only used one side of the bed. Don’t kid yourself that you abandoned a haven.

  Shapakti probably didn’t run to toasted pikelets spread with lavender jelly. Lavender. Aras had planted lavender, and so all she needed was something sugary that would set into a gel. It was a noble project and one she intended to devote herself to when the current situation calmed down. She was still wondering whether jay fruit might be a suitable medium when she walked into the scattered camp of ship fragments in search of Shapakti.