Crossing the Line Read Online Free Page A

won’t they? I’m a bit hard to kill. You might have noticed.”
    Josh broke into a run to keep up with her. She was a lot taller than the native-born, and now faster on her feet, too. “It’s a big planet,” he puffed. “They’ll never find you.”
    â€œYou reckon? We found you , and we were twenty-five light-years away. Sorry, Josh—I only know one way to deal with this, and that’s to go and meet it. If it takes me, fine, and if I take it, that’s great too, but I won’t spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder. Because that’s going to be a bloody long time.”
    He didn’t know her at all. He should have realized that she would never leave Aras. It was more than the biological links that c’naatat had forged between them: it was every bond of loyalty she had known as a police officer, stronger than family, and then—then there was something more besides, something she hadn’t felt before. It was primeval, foreign, urgent. It was an overwhelming compulsion to defend.
    She wondered if it was a remnant of the Suppressed Briefing. Perhaps there was still stuff that the Foreign Office had drug-programmed into her subconscious to be accessed later that she still didn’t know about. It was as persistently irritating as a half-forgotten name or song, itching away in the back of her mind but refusing to be remembered clearly.
    No, this was different .
    Josh stumbled after her across the frost-hard ruts of soil, sidestepping planted areas despite his panic. Ahead of them the half-buried skylight domes of Constantine shimmered in the weak sunlight; on the horizon, the idyll of a terrestrial farm was shattered. Beyond the biobarrier the wess’har had erected to contain Constantine’s ecology, the silver and blue early spring wilderness of Bezer’ej was a constant reminder that humans were temporary visitors here.
    Out of habit, Shan reached behind her back and remembered she’d left her handgun in her room. She felt the fabric of her bag. Her fingers found the comforting outline of a pack of cartridges and a couple of small grenades that she didn’t like to leave lying around. But in her mind’s eye she could see the gun still sitting on the table beside her bed.
    â€œShit,” she said aloud. She’d assumed you didn’t need a weapon when you were digging. It was the sort of mistake she never normally made. “Shit.”
    â€œI put it inside your grip,” Josh said, suddenly revealing that he knew her a lot better than she thought he did. “I thought you might need it.”
    Neither of them said gun . “Good thinking,” said Shan.
    She had expected to find a full-scale rummage team scouring Constantine. There were certainly enough wess’har troops stationed at the Temporary City on the mainland to provide one. But they were wess’har, and they didn’t think like humans and they certainly hadn’t read the police manual on apprehending suspects. She was surprised to see just three of them ambling round the underground galleries of the buried colony, giving the impression—an inaccurate one, she knew—that they were lost.
    They held lovely gold instruments. Their weapons, like everything else in their functional culture, looked good. Two of the wess’har were males, but the other was a young female, bigger and stronger than her companions, a junior matriarch.
    None of them looked at all like Aras.
    It was easy to forget he was wess’har too. He was still strikingly alien: nobody would have mistaken him for a human. But his face and body had been resculpted by c’naatat with the human genes it had scavenged during his years of contact with the colonists at Constantine. From the relatively slender, pale elegance of a long-muzzled wess’har it had built an approximation of a man—huge and hard, with a face that was at once a beast’s and a