The World Before Read online

  KAREN TRAVISS

  THE

  WORLD

  BEFORE

  For the Brigade of Gurkhas

  Contents

  Prologue

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY ONE

  TWENTY TWO

  TWENTY THREE

  TWENTY FOUR

  TWENTY FIVE

  TWENTY SIX

  TWENTY SEVEN

  TWENTY EIGHT

  RESOUNDING PRAISE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  BOOKS BY KAREN TRAVISS

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  Prologue

  Ouzhari, once known as Christopher Island,

  on Bezer’ej: 2376 in the calendar of the gethes.

  “What am I, then?” asked Sergeant Bennett.

  Aras walked ahead of the human, picking a path between the decaying bodies on the shoreline. A conversation among the dead felt unseemly, but Aras knew that Ade Bennett had seen many battlefields and had learned to handle the horror. He wasn’t irreverent. He was simply trying to cope.

  “If you’re asking if your appearance will change as mine has, I can’t answer that.”

  “Am I still human?”

  Aras turned and looked hard into the soldier’s eyes for a sign of greedy excitement. There was nothing, not even fear, although that would have been reasonable. Ade—he insisted Aras use his nickname—was what Shan Frankland had called “a good bloke,” a solid professional soldier known as a Royal Marine. There was no monarchy any more, and he was twenty-five light-years from his own seas, but humans clung to those ancient identities. They even gave their warships names.

  Judging by his unwavering gaze, Ade was still waiting for a fuller answer. Aras understood the mix of dread and desperate curiosity all too well.

  “Mostly human,” said Aras. “But a little isenj, a little bezeri, a little wess’har. A little of whatever host that c’naatat passed through.”

  “And what will kill me, exactly?”

  “For all practical purposes, almost nothing. How your c’naatat achieves that and adapts you will depend on what you experience and what it takes a fancy to. You may simply find the changes…a little disconcerting.”

  Ade nodded as if he understood, and wandered away to check something at the waterline. The sand had once been white. Now it was blackened and vitrified in places by the blast of cobalt-salted nuclear devices.

  And every few meters there were more decaying bodies of bezeri beached by the tide.

  Without their bioluminescence, the corpses of the bezeri were a colorless translucent gel. There were four or five in a cluster at Aras’s feet. It was hard to count because the mantles were decomposing and the outlines merging, but it looked to Aras like a family group—two five-meter males with their great tentacles coiled back, a female distinguishable by her narrower shape, and a smaller, possibly juvenile male.

  “Whoa, over here,” called Ade. He slung his rifle across his shoulder and crouched down. Aras went to see what he had found.

  There was a faint flicker of green light in a small shape on the waterline. It was another juvenile. And it was still alive.

  Ade bent closer. “Is there anything we can do?”

  Aras took out the signaling lamp that he had always used to communicate with the bezeri in their language of colored lights.

  “No,” he said.

  There was nothing much they could say, either. Sorry: sorry I failed to protect you. Sorry I didn’t wipe out all the carrion eaters, all the gethes, when I first had the chance.

  He said what little he could and the lamp translated.

  I’m sorry. I let you down.

  The response was a small flicker of that same green light, incoherent, barely enough to raise a faint breath of sound from the lamp. It was just a cry. It was fading.

  Aras squatted close to the dying juvenile and comforted it as best he could in words of light.

  I’m here, little one.

  Ade’s brow furrowed briefly. The creature’s tentacles looked as if they were already rotting. “Have you got Eddie’s camera?”

  “You can’t make education or entertainment out of this.”

  “People back home need to know what we’ve done.” Ade held out his hand for the small device that the journalist Eddie Michallat had given them. “I think this says it all.”

  He aimed the camera, still looking detached but emitting a scent of agitation that Aras could detect even through the powerful ammonia stench of rotting flesh around them.

  Aras remembered a human scientist called Surendra Parekh who he had executed for killing a bezeri infant, and wished again that he had executed all the gethes when he had the chance.

  Except Shan Frankland.

  The juvenile bezeri flickered again, this time an unusually deep blue.

  Can you see me? asked Aras. Did any of you escape?

  There was no response. Ade glanced at him and they waited long minutes, but the bioluminescence had gone forever.

  Ade stood up and panned the camera across the beach, capturing more devastation. There were no lights in the water any more.

  “So this is collateral damage,” he said.

  Aras checked himself again, examining his skin for signs of lesions. He was unmarked. Apart from his all-consuming grief and anger, he was fine. C’naatat could handle gamma radiation. But the microscopic symbiont had existed in the soil of Ouzhari, and it couldn’t have withstood the temperatures of a nuclear blast.

  It was no threat to anyone here. There was no need for the gethes to destroy it.

  There were two things Aras knew c’naatat couldn’t do. It couldn’t save its host from fragmentation; that was the way all the wess’har troops infected with c’naatat had eventually ended their lives.

  And it couldn’t save a host exposed to the vacuum of space.

  Aras looked up at a hazy sky where Wess’ej appeared as a crescent moon. She was out there somewhere, Shan Frankland, not wholly human, and so determined to stop humankind taking her c’naatat that she chose death instead. Ade wouldn’t discuss it any longer. But Aras knew that spacing yourself was a terrible way to die.

  “How long?”

  Ade looked away from the camera. “What?”

  “How long does it take a human to die in vacuum?”

  “Stop it, Aras.”

  “How long?”

  Ade paused. “About twelve seconds. At most.”

  Aras thought about it, counting. He closed his eyes. Ade had witnessed it and he hadn’t. Ade had—

  “No, I can’t stop seeing it,” said Ade. His voice was suddenly hoarse. “And I know bloody well that you blame me for it, so let’s just agree that I’m the bastard who let her die.”

  Aras stifled urges to punish Ade. He also pitied him. His scent said brother: he had Shan’s genes now, just as Aras did. He couldn’t—wouldn’t—harm him.

  He would save his balancing vengeance for Commander Lindsay Neville, who had detonated the bombs here even if she hadn’t known the full consequences of her actions. And he would spare some for her accomplice, Mohan Rayat. Rayat was a spook, as Ade called it. Neville was a fool. And Ade was a victim of circumstances they had created.

  “I suggest we get decontaminated and return to Wess’ej,” said Aras.
“Eddie will be impatient for his pictures.”

  Aras was mired in his own bereavement as he walked among the bodies. For all the foreign genes his c’naatat had acquired over the years, he was still wess’har, but the human components within him were screaming me, me, me. In that brief moment, he would have sacrificed all Bezer’ej and even Wess’ej itself to bring Shan back.

  She was his isan. He could hardly function without her.

  But he would have to learn.

  1

  The Federal European Union greatly regrets the loss of life on Bezer’ej and the deaths of Superintendent Frankland and her ussissi aide. We condemn the actions of Commander Neville. Let me restate our position: we did not and would not sanction first-use of nuclear devices. As we have no effective military structure left on Umeh, there is no direct disciplinary action we can take against Commander Neville or the troops under her command; but they are now dismissed the service, and in the absence of FEU enforcement, they fall properly within the scope of your own judicial system as the protectors of the bezeri. Our representative Dr. Mohan Rayat will offer every cooperation.

  BIRSEN ERTEGUN,

  Foreign Minister, Federal European Union,

  in a statement to the matriarchs of F’nar

  F’nar, on Wess’ej, August 2376

  Ade Bennett clung to his schedule twenty-five light-years from home in an alien city that was coated entirely in pearl.

  He ran ten kilometers every morning at dawn and there was no reason to stop doing it just because the sun was now a different star and he was a prisoner of war. He pounded along the terraces of F’nar and down its stepped slopes.

  Wherever the sun warmed smooth stone, the tem flies would congregate and deposit a thin layer of nacre. The iridescence was insect shit: Shan had found that funny, Aras said. She liked irony.

  And she’s dead. And it’s all your fucking fault. You let her die.

  Ade wanted to erase the final picture of her standing in the airlock, seconds from death. But it was the last scrap of her that he could still grasp, the memory of a woman he had never expected to love and to whom he had left everything unsaid. Something in him wouldn’t let it go. He had decided to confront it instead.

  The native wess’har paused to stare at him as he made his way down the terraces. Some acknowledged him with stiff nods of their sea horse heads. He was a POW in a city where he was regarded as a hero, but every day he was here served only to remind him that he was alive and Shan wasn’t, and that he’d failed the basic heroic qualification of saving what you loved.

  Sweat prickled its way down his back. He made his way through the alleys that honeycombed the lowest level of the city at the bottom of the encircling caldera. Beyond the city lay the irregular mosaic of fields and allotments that blended into the natural landscape, and beyond them were the plains that were arid in summer and covered with quick-growing vegetation in the brief, wet winter. F’nar had been built where it would have least impact rather than the most convenient location. Wess’har didn’t seem to have the same priorities as humans.

  Ade’s route took him south of the caldera and up the rock face of a volcanic plateau that looked down onto the fields and the city itself. He liked climbing: it was one of the basic mountain warfare skills he had learned as a Royal Marine, and he could lose himself in absolute concentration. Free-soloing—climbing without a partner or equipment—was what he did best. That was just as well. There was no other way to climb on Wess’ej.

  The rock face was smooth enough in places to attract the attention of tem flies and it was embossed with the pearly shit they’d laid down in the summer. If he half-closed his eyes, the reflected glare made it look like a snow-streaked peak back on Earth. He felt above his head with his right hand for a secure hold and locked his fingers into a horizontal crevice.

  For a few moments he hung with his full weight on one hand, face against the cool gold rock, looking up at another hold thirty centimeters beyond his normal reach.

  Combat boots were lousy for climbing. He jammed a toecap into a pocket of rock and transferred his weight, lunging upwards to grab hold of the outcrop above him. He knew every hold on the ascent now. He could climb it blindfolded.

  What he really needed now was a good, solid hex to jam into the fissure above him to take a rope. He wondered if the wess’har might be able to make him some kit for the harder climbs. But for now he was reliant on his free-climbing skills alone, and he reached for another hold. The crevice accepted his fingers. It felt secure.

  And the moment he hung all his weight on that hand, he knew that it wasn’t.

  The rock came away from the face and suddenly there was no sense of pressure under his fingertips at all.

  He flailed, grabbing instinctively. He felt his right humerus snap as his arm clipped an overhang and he landed flat on his back with an involuntary shout as the air was slammed out of his lungs. He couldn’t breathe. His head was filled with a single high note like a tuning fork’s. For a second he wondered if it was his own scream of pain, but then he realized the noise was somehow inside his head, probably triggered by a shattered spine.

  He’d been told that happened. It was funny how you could think rational things when you were dying.

  Shit, shit, shit—

  It occurred to him that he deserved to die anyway. Shan was dead, so if he died too, then at least he’d never have to wake up to that realization again. The pain filled his mouth. He had no idea how long he lay there paralyzed and wondering when the sky would go dark.

  You can’t die. Aras said so. But he was dying, he was sure of it: and now he wanted it over with.

  Instead of being filled with creeping cold, he felt he was burning. Then the searing pain ebbed and he found himself breathing, first reflex, shallow gasps while he tested his ribs, and then deep breaths.

  Eventually he eased himself up on his left arm. His right arm was throbbing, but he could move it. It took him a few more minutes to recover enough to stand up and understand what had happened to him.

  So this was c’naatat at work. A fall that would have killed or crippled him was now a temporary but painful—and terrifying—inconvenience. It didn’t take a genius to work out how valuable c’naatat was or how open it would be to abuse. It was just a shock to experience it so spectacularly.

  “Shit,” he said. “You couldn’t give me a way out, could you?” But that wasn’t fair. Aras needed him now. Somehow, they had to get each other through the bleak days ahead that were all Ade’s fault. There might even come a time when he could go for hours without thinking of Shan and what he had done, but that wasn’t now.

  He stood staring at the backs of his hands for a few minutes to see if anything else was changing, and when he was satisfied that nothing was happening he looked up at the rock face to work out a new route to ascend.

  At the top he stood and scanned the landscape. The secluded cairn he had built looked out over an idyllic vista; without a grave—without even a body—he desperately needed a place where he could commemorate Shan. He needed somewhere to apologize and grieve. Maybe he’d bring Aras up here one day, but not yet. Now was too soon. And he preferred to cry on his own.

  It wasn’t as if they’d even had a relationship.

  If Shan ever belonged to anyone she had belonged to Aras. But she was the Boss, even if she was a police officer and so not part of his chain of command, and for Ade she always would be. He ought to have called her the Guv’nor as coppers did. But she had never seemed to mind.

  He knelt down and added a few pearl-coated stones to the mound.

  “There you go, Boss.” The word hurt. He took his medals out of his pocket and folded the brightly colored ribbons around them before easing them into a gap between the chunks of rock and the fine pearl pebbles. “All tidy. Sleep tight.”

  He paused for a few moments, entirely incapable of prayer because he had seen too many things that no reasonable god would allow, and turned to start his descent. His palm itche
d and he glanced down at it. Right to receive, left to pay away; that was what his mum used to say. Beads of green liquid were welling up from his skin and he wiped his hand on the leg of his battledress, but the fluid emerged again like one of those miracles that was supposed to happen to the statues of saints.

  It was no miracle and he felt as far from sainthood as any man ever had. It was the bioscreen being removed a cell at a time. C’naatat was purging him of all his implants and the organic battlefield computer grown into his palm. But it hadn’t touched his tattoos, and Ade thought they were the sort of thing c’naatat would have wanted to tidy up. Aras had warned him that the parasite wasn’t predictable.

  “Sergeant?”

  He thought he was alone. He wasn’t. “Oh, Christ,” he said. His heart pounded.

  Nevyan Tan Mestin was standing right behind him and he should have heard her approach. He was a commando, for Chrissakes; she shouldn’t have been able to ambush him. The wess’har matriarch cocked her head and looked past him at the cairn with four-lobed pupils dilating and contracting visibly in bright yellow eyes. Sea horses. Eddie’s description was unnervingly accurate.

  “Why do you not walk up the slope to this summit?” she asked. Wess’har voices were weird, tone and overtone like a chorus, each word made of two simultaneous components. Will I sound like that one day? “You choose a hard route.”

  “I like climbing, ma’am. I need to keep active.”

  “What are the stones for?”

  “To remember. It’s a memorial.”

  “To Shan Chail?”

  “Yes.” Wess’har didn’t even bury their dead, let alone erect monuments. They left them for the scavengers. “It helps.”