Matriarch

by Karen Traviss

  “Better go and check that out,” said Ade. He fastened his boots and grabbed his rifle. “Even if Esganikan has it covered.”

  He sprinted down the narrow passage between the banks of pipework and up the stairs, Shan right behind him for a change. She had her 9mm in her hand and didn’t even remember drawing it; she couldn’t imagine what use it might be in whatever situation she was about to face, but the muscle memory born of long practice took over. When they reached the ground level, still dimly illuminated with the nighttime safety lighting, a crowd had already gathered and was looking up into the transparent bowl of the dome itself.

  It took Shan a few seconds to realize what they were watching. The next flare of brilliant white light and a muffled crack almost like lightning gave her a clue.

  There was no sign of any Eqbas crew members.

  Oh shit, she’s shelling Jejeno. Esganikan’s started already.

  It was Shan’s immediate thought. Through a gap in the vine that covered most of the interior roof supports, the Eqbas ship was briefly picked out in a white-hot halo, smoothly bronze with pulsing chevrons of red and blue light in a line around its hull.

  “That’s missiles,” said Ade. He made for the main doors and Shan followed. “Christ, what’s Eddie doing?”

  Eddie stood at the doors, face pressed against the transparent sheet as if to get a better view. Shan looked for his bee cam: there was no sign of it.

  “I need to go outside and have a look,” he said. “You coming too?”

  “Eddie, stay put,” said Shan.

  “Okay, then take my bee cam, will you?” Shan was aware of something plummeting towards her from overhead and she ducked instinctively. The bee cam streaked past her and came to a sudden and unnatural halt by Eddie’s head. He didn’t even flinch; he was used to the bloody thing, but she knew that one day she’d fire at it in pure reflex. “It can’t get a decent shot through the top of the canopy. Needs to be an exterior.”

  “Okay.” Ade hit the airlock controls and the inner doors parted. “Just stay where you are.”

  “It’s probably safe outside.” Eddie looked more exasperated than alarmed. Shan now filed him in that select group of people who ran towards trouble rather than away from it. He was one of her own. “None of that is going to get through the barrier. Seen it before.”

  It was only when Shan got a few meters outside and had a clear look at the night sky that she realized what he meant. The Eqbas ship was taking hits and the detonations seemed to be dispersing around it.

  “That’s not triple-A,” said Ade. “It’s air platform. Fighters. Look.”

  Shan let Eddie’s bee cam fly free and shoved her gun in the back of her belt. Now she could pick out streaks of light in the sky, and what had sounded like an explosion was the sound of an aircraft’s weapon discharging. The Eqbas ship was on station at a much higher altitude than she’d thought, perhaps two thousand meters. A narrow shape picked out in faint red light shot towards it and ejected a stream of white plasma that hit an invisible barrier and sprayed in all directions like a starburst firework. There was a second of absolute silence. Then a rumble on the lower threshold of her hearing rose in pitch until it sounded like a distant whining turbine.

  Five small bolts of yellow light spread from one end of the Eqbas ship and there were five scattered detonations. She thought she saw lights streak up from the ground too, but they were swallowed in the peppering of explosions. Where there had been vague black-on-black outlines of fighter craft, there was now flaming, spiraling debris falling towards her.

  She ducked instinctively as Ade cannoned into her and the first chunk struck. His arm was pressed hard across her back, holding her down.

  It was oddly quiet now: just a faint drumming and pinging, far away, like hail on tiles.

  She looked at Ade for a moment, waiting for impact and then realized there wasn’t going to be one. The Eqbas shield—almost invisible, totally impervious—sent the debris skidding and ricocheting across the city.

  Nothing landed on the concrete around them. Flame and glowing fragments rained down on Jejeno, just a hundred meters away, and the smaller chunks that hit the shield simply vaporized and the larger ones bounced.

  Shan knelt back on her heels and watched, flinching despite herself. Hardwired animal fear of fire was hard to shake.

  “Riot shield,” said Ade.

  “What?”

  “Yours. Petrol bombs hitting your riot shield. I’m remembering it too. Jesus what a—”

  He was interrupted by a muffled explosion and a column of flame rising in the city beyond. That was what happened when fighters were shot down over a crowded city. Shan’s training said emergency, casualties, go and sort it, call it in, but she checked herself.

  “So much for the bloody minister’s assurances.” She straightened her jacket. All the blissful postcoital haze had vanished, leaving her edgy and pumping adrenaline. “Stupid bastards. There won’t be much of Jejeno left in the morning.”

  “It wasn’t them,” said Ade. He looked her over as if searching for injury. “Didn’t you see the triple-A go up? That wasn’t aimed at the ship. It was targeting the fighters.”

  “So who started it? What if that’s the Northern Assembly army staging a coup?”

  The Eqbas ship now looked like a rather pretty bronze barrage balloon. The pulsing belt of chevrons had slowed and was almost static. Then a large, sharply defined plume of yellow light—more of an ovoid—emerged from the forward section of the hull and seemed to gather speed as it moved away and then disappeared. Shan didn’t hear it strike anything.

  “I dread to think what that is,” said Shan.

  “Long-range missile,” said Ade.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Just guessing. It’s what we might do if someone launched an air strike from a neighboring territory.”

  “Jesus. Civil war.”

  “Maybe. I don’t know where their borders are. Do you know anything about isenj geopolitics?”

  “No, but I think a crash course is long overdue.”

  There’s a war starting. Oh my god, here we go.

  Shan marveled at how easy it was to stand under a defense shield that was as far beyond her technical comprehension as magic and not panic when parts of the city outside were burning. Ironically, a well-placed explosion could do what drowning, spacing and a bullet through the head couldn’t: it could actually kill her. She wondered if it had now totally distorted her assessment of danger.

  “What’s happening?” Eddie called. He was pacing at the open airlock, clearly in two minds about disobeying her instruction to stay inside.

  “How do I know, for Chrissakes?”

  “Can I go off camp?”

  “Yeah, get your head blown off, Eddie. Go ahead, mate.”

  “Look.” Ade stood staring up at the sky, hands on hips. “They’re shuttling down. Must be all clear.”

  Eddie strode out the doors and his bee cam dropped from the upper level of the shield to hover by his head. Two bronze sections of ship descended and settled on the service road.

  When Esganikan stepped out she smelled faintly of jask. Shan bristled at the unconscious challenge, a matriarchal reaction to the pheromone. But it wasn’t directed at her.

  “What was all that about?” asked Shan.

  Esganikan rocked her head from side to side, a slight movement that always put Shan in mind of a oriental dancer. She had seen Nevyan do it; wess’har annoyance. Esganikan was pissed off.

  “The attack came from the Maritime Fringe. They are prepared to invade Northern Assembly airspace, it seems. That changed my plans.”

  “How?” said Eddie, who seemed to think every conversation was an interview.

  “If the government here is unable to deal with them,” said Esganikan, “we will pacify the Maritime Fringe ourselves.”

  “Pacify,” Shan said carefully. “So you really have launched missiles, then?”

  “The Fringe has a mil
itary base at Buyg, about a hundred kilometers from here.” Esganikan watched Eddie’s bee cam, and Ade watched her. She glanced up at her ship as if calculating. “In a few minutes, much of Buyg will no longer exist.”

  F’nar, Wess’ej

  Aras slept more deeply in his sporadic naps these days but the hammering at the door woke him instantly.

  He’d barred it. Even Shan didn’t attempt to lock the door now. Sometimes he did things at the bidding of a memory that wasn’t his. When he opened the door, a female ussissi stood staring up at him.

  “What are you afraid of?” she demanded.

  “Shan Chail prefers doors secured.” Aras held the door wide open but the ussissi remained at the threshold. His mind raced: had something happened to Shan? Why had they sent a ussissi to tell him? “Why are you here?”

  “We found him. We found Vijissi.”

  Mestin’s dead ussissi aide had been located. They’d been searching for his body for months. He’d done exactly as the matriarch had told him: he’d stayed at Shan’s side, looking after her on Mestin’s behalf until the bitter end. He’d followed her through the airlock to terrible death.

  “I’ll let Shan know,” said Aras. And that wouldn’t be easy. She felt responsible for his death and said he was a silly little sod for trying to protect her, which was her way of saying that his death had upset her greatly. “She’ll be relieved.” A thought crossed his mind. “And he’s dead, yes?”

  “No, he is alive,” said the ussissi. “Why else would I run all this way to tell you?”

  Aras was surprised: not that Vijissi had survived spacing just as Shan had done, and that the aide was clearly infected with c’naatat, but that the news had not stunned him. It had merely depressed him, because now there was one more c’naatat carrier, and the parasite had spread to a third species.

  It only took one impossible return from the dead to inure him to miracles.

  6

  When do you say, “This is how things should be”? At what point in its history do you consider a world to be balanced, to be as it should be? Life evolves, and becomes extinct through meteor strike, through natural disasters, through all manner of events that have nothing to do with the misbehavior of the dominant species. Where do you draw the line between the imbalance caused by one species and the natural course of events? I ask again: How do you decide what should be restored? All we can be sure of is that as long as we exist, we should be aware of those life-forms with fewer choices than ourselves, and tread as lightly and as thoughtfully as we are able. All else is artificial intervention, one opinion set above another. There is no single point of perfect balance.

  Wess’har philosopher TARGASSAT,

  on the policies of Eqbas Vorhi

  Bezer’ej: south of the Mountains to the Dry Above, formerly known as the Ouzhari chain of islands

  The sea around Rayat was growing lighter and greener. Sunlight was penetrating the water: they were nearing the surface. Decompression wasn’t a problem for a c’naatat-infected human.

  He could sense Lindsay ahead of him, keeping pace with the pumping, flashing mantles of the three male bezeri leading them, and she still had the damn signal lamp. If he was going to talk with the creatures then he either had to negotiate with her, take it from her, or hope to God that he developed the same bioluminescence that Frankland had—and that he could learn to use it to communicate.

  So what are you going to say to them, exactly?

  There had to be a way off Bezer’ej, and the one advantage he had now was that time didn’t count for him. He could wait. No other government or corporation could lay hands on c’naatat. He could hold on to it now until they came for him—once he could get word out—or until he found an escape route.

  His fear had started to ebb. There was nothing quite like obsessive focus to keep you going, and he cherished his.

  Lindsay trod water to bring herself to a halt and turned to face him, the signal lamp hooked over her belt. Rayat was suddenly aware that he was now looking at her in the visual spectrum. The density and contour images had faded.

  “Come on,” she said. “Keep up.”

  And he heard her, really heard her. He was more certain of how he was sensing the world now. He concentrated, trying to work out how he had changed in the time he had been submerged. How long had they been down here? He had no watch. He was hungry, but not ravenous—so it wasn’t days, unless c’naatat overrode hunger too.

  So where did I get the ability to sense beyond the visual spectrum? How does this all work?

  “I’m right here,” he said. “What are they doing?”

  “They’re taking us to see something.”

  He’d hoped it was lunch. He resigned himself to watching what they ate and doing the same.

  Am I using sonar? Detecting magnetic fields? Sensing chemicals in the water?

  He’d had no direct contact with the bezeri. The contaminated blood had come from Adrian Bennett, and he must have contracted it from Frankland, and Frankland had the bezeri lights. Aras didn’t seem to have them. Neither did the marine as far as he knew. So how did c’naatat choose which genes to express?

  As long as he concentrated on the science, he could stay calm.

  The sunlight punched shafts through the drifting red weed above them, creating clouds of garnet and ruby, and the bezeri stopped to hang in the water. The largest of them, the patriarch Saib, rippled with scattered pinpoints of light. The lamp spoke in a disembodied genderless voice.

  This is as far as we can go. We want you to retrieve our maps.

  Lindsay aimed the lamp back. “Why can’t you go any further?”

  This is a contaminated area. The poison levels may be too high for us, but not for you.

  Rayat wondered how they worked out the radiation levels. They didn’t seem to have any technology except the podships that Aras mentioned. Maybe they just counted the bodies and drew their own conclusions.

  “There’s a contamination clean-up team from Eqbas there,” said Lindsay.

  Saib rippled. And they are on the largest of the Mountains to the Dry Above. But still the area is too dangerous for us. Do as I ask.

  “Okay,” said Lindsay. “Where will we find the maps?”

  You will see an entrance. There are chambers within. Carry out as many maps as you can and bring them back here.

  Rayat interrupted. “Where are we? We must be somewhere near Christopher Island.”

  “At least call it Ouzhari, you bastard,” said Lindsay.

  That is not our name for it.

  “What is it, then?”

  The Smallest Mountain to the Dry Above.

  “Thank you,” said Rayat. “Very descriptive.”

  Saib and his companions hung back while Lindsay made her way through the submerged reef. Rayat followed her. Are there predators down here? He knew he wouldn’t wander into a cave in a terrestrial sea without checking on the size and appetite of the local wildlife. What happened if the niche equivalent of a shark here contracted c’naatat? Risks occurred to him now that had never crossed his mind before, and the parasite began to look rather different.

  You’ll just have to be bloody careful, won’t you?

  The entrance was as obvious as the bezeri had said. It was ten meters high, and instead of being a natural cave as Rayat had expected it was an excavated opening flanked by carved stone inlaid with colored material. Had the bezeri made this? They were capable of impressive construction, then. He followed Lindsay inside and as his eyes adjusted to the gloom he saw shelves lining the walls, most of them stacked with small flat sheets of what looked like glass.

  And he could taste something unpleasant. It was like inhaling a bad smell, except that it was passing through his mouth and he had an urge to spit it out.

  “There must be thousands,” said Lindsay. She edged forward and then stopped in her tracks. “Oh God…”

  “What?”

  “Oh God, bodies.” She looked down. She must have trodden on th
em. He could only see vague outlines; so that was the source of the foul taste. “Oh no…”

  “Hey, get a grip. Steady.”

  “Do me a favor and shut up, will you? Don’t you feel any sense of remorse for this?”

  “I do, actually. But I don’t regard your ritual wailing as a productive use of energy.”

  “You know, I think Shan had the right idea when she kicked the crap out of you. Shame she didn’t finish the job.”

  “But she didn’t. And now you’re stuck with me.”

  Lindsay turned back to the shelves and drifted along them, picking out plates of what appeared to be resin. They were about thirty centimeters across with beveled edges.

  “They’re glass,” she said. “They’re sand.”

  Rayat didn’t understand her at first but when he took one of the objects from the nearest shelf he found that she was right; they felt like lightweight glass with a layer of colored sand sandwiched between them. The sand was arranged in intricate designs, some of which looked like charts and others which seemed to be abstract symbols. Rayat took as many as he could carry and made his way back to Saib.

  “Extraordinary,” said Rayat.

  Saib simply hung there. Without the signal lamp, there was no possibility of conversation. Rayat laid the maps on the seabed in front of the bezeri patriarch.

  “What are they?”

  Saib’s mantle rippled with swirls of blue and gold light like a wheel rotating. Rayat watched. Damn, didn’t c’naatat have anything that would help him understand this creature? He looked at his own hands and longed to see some glimmer of light in them just like that bitch Frankland had. If the genes were in her, then they would be in him now. He wanted those lights. He wanted them badly.

  “Try this,” said Lindsay, laying a stack of maps on the mud. She held the signal lamp in range but she didn’t relinquish her hold on it. She had to put it down sooner or later. And what powered it? It was going to run out eventually.