Crossing the Line Read Free

recall those roads, because he had mapped them.
    And he had destroyed them.
    He had washed the cities with fire and cut down isenj and set loose the reclamation nanites that devoured the deserted homes. It had been five hundred years ago by the Constantine calendar, but he remembered it all, and not only from his own viewpoint. Back then he had had no idea that isenj had genetic memory.
    â€œI’m sorry,” he said. “But I had to do it.”
    Shan seemed to think he was talking to her. “Stop apologizing.” She thrust her arm through his. “It’s okay.”
    Apart from a brief, violent escape of contained rage when she had found out she was infected, she had shown neither self-pity nor recrimination. He admired that about her. It was very wess’har. It would make it far easier for her to adapt to her new world.
    Could be worse .
    Aras walked the invisible central plaza of Mjat. Worse could have been genetic memory, and that was perhaps worst of all, worse than claws or vestigial wings or a million other scraps of genetic material that c’naatat had picked up, tried on for size, and then sometimes discarded.
    Now he was clear of Mjat and back in the small world of humans, his home for the best part of two centuries. Wess’ej, the planet where he had been born, hung in the sky as a huge crescent moon, and he didn’t miss it at all.
    The biobarrier crackled slightly as they passed through into Constantine’s shielded, controlled environment. Aras trod carefully to avoid the overwintering kale that was shrouded in snow-like sculptures.
    Wess’har had no sculpture, no poetry, no music. He almost understood those concepts now, but not entirely. There was a great deal of human DNA in him: c’naatat had probably found it in shed skin cells and bacteria and taken a fancy to it, but it had not helped him grasp the human fondness for what was clearly unreal. He had often wondered why the symbiont had devoted so much energy to altering his appearance and fashioning a makeshift human out of him.
    It took him some time to realize that it had given him yet another refinement to help him—its world—survive. It was trying to help him to fit into human society. It seemed to know he was outcast from his own forever.
    It knew how badly he needed to belong.
    Â 
    Malcolm Okurt had not signed up for this. He told Lindsay Neville so. He took it as a personal slight, he said, and it was bad enough having to crew a vessel with civilians without getting dragged into politics as well. He was the only person Lindsay knew who could spit the words out like that. At chill-down, his orders were to follow up the Thetis mission. Nobody mentioned anything about aliens, especially not four separate civilizations.
    â€œI thought you’d want to get out of here as fast as you could,” he said.
    Lindsay paused, and not for effect. “I’ve got unfinished business. I lost my kid here.”
    Okurt knew that well enough. She just wanted to remind him that she needed a wide berth at times. She didn’t feel the pain at all, not right then. She made sure she didn’t because if she did then she would fall apart, and as she told Okurt, she had a task to complete.
    She steadied herself and glanced at her bioscreen, the living battlefield computer display grown into the palm of her hand. She couldn’t switch off the light, but she had disabled the monitor functions because it depressed her to see the unchanging bio signs of her comrades in chill-sleep. It made them look as if they were dead.
    Okurt must have been watching her gaze. “They phased those out years ago,” he said. “Unreliable.”
    So nobody had them any more, nobody except her and a few Royal Marines who were on their way home. She turned her hand palm down on the table.
    When Okurt was agitated he had a habit of spinning his coffee cup in its saucer, and he was doing it now. “We might have been