Matriarch

by Karen Traviss

  She only spotted a packed patch of corpses, but she had seen enough fighting to extrapolate from that to the full scale of carnage. No, she didn’t take this casually at all. She glanced at the repeater panel showing the battle chart that Joluti controlled. The attack concentrated on the head and the tail of the column, the textbook method of stopping an armored advance. The armor behind the lead section couldn’t move forward and it couldn’t reverse past the burning wrecks of the rearguard: it couldn’t turn around either, although some units might manage to work their way between buildings.

  She didn’t look at the routes where the troops on foot had packed in ranks. She knew what that would look like, more or less. And she could calculate the casualties in the buildings that flanked the routes, but she didn’t—not yet.

  A single tight-packed city where the national boundaries were simply deep conduits and high walls meant high casualties. She was relieved that she was fighting this from the air and not trying to subdue the area house-to-house on the ground.

  Now she’d seen enough. She left the bridge crew staring at the screens and made her way back aft to the hangar deck. Aitassi trailed after her in silence. Joluti indicated a group of icons clustered on the tracking screen moving away at high speed from the ten kilometers of destruction.

  “Two targets we would be advised to take out immediately,” he said. “Vessels tracked from Tivskur are landing troops at two points of the Fringe coast.”

  If the Eqbas—and the Northern Assembly—hadn’t been at war with Tivskur before, they would be now.

  “Let’s give Shomen Eit an overview of the situation,” said Esganikan. “If he hasn’t worked it out from his own intelligence people.”

  She fought every engagement as if she risked losing. She never took an enemy for granted. The smoke took hours to clear from the streets, and the main section of the ship took up station over the area to survey it. She’d seen worse, but only once.

  “It’s probably best that Eddie Michallat wasn’t on board to see this,” said Aitassi.

  “I was going to give him images,” said Esganikan.

  “Would he understand them?”

  Esganikan tried to imagine how a human, with his rules and concept of what was fair in war, would come to terms with obliteration on that scale. Humans always had wars somewhere in their world, he told her. Perhaps their rules were why they never settled anything.

  “We have no secrets, apparently.” Esganikan stared through the transparent section of the bridge deck. Beneath her, a group of fighters looped back to return to the hangar. There was a shallow crater about a hundred meters wide at a crossroads, probably where an armored vehicle and its ordnance had taken a direct hit. “He finds our openness odd.”

  She could see bare soil in the crater; she was sure of it. She came from a world where open space made up most of the planet, but here there was almost none, and she felt the emergence of this little scrap of the natural planet for the first time in probably centuries was a landmark moment.

  “Look, ’Tassi,” she said, and pointed. The ussissi dropped onto her four hind legs to peer down to the ground. Esganikan tapped the bulkhead to magnify the image. The transparent hull now brought the ground to fifty meters instead of five thousand. She found her eyes drawn to the chassis of a groundcar with half a body still sitting in the driving seat as if the whole top half of both vehicle and driver had been sliced horizontally.

  Soil. Earth. Esganikan pulled her attention back to the commonplace that had suddenly become exotic here.

  “They still have native trees on Tasir Var.” Smoke was still rising from lumps of rubble but the dark velvety patches were definitely soil. Whatever had been blown up hadn’t had deep foundations. “Detach a vessel and see if we can acquire one to plant here. We can remediate this site as soon as we secure the area.”

  “Why start here?” said Hayin.

  “It creates an open space. Show the isenj something they haven’t seen for generations, a patch of soil with a living tree growing in it that isn’t solely for their benefit. Something they have to learn to share their world with on its own terms. We’ll see how they react and if they can be motivated by seeing things that are achievable.”

  Hayin jiggled his head in dissent, but he despatched a section of ship to Umeh’s moon. The isenj there were far more cooperative, but then they had a much more pleasant lifestyle and far more to gain—and lose.

  “I’ve never heard of this before,” Hayin muttered. “Haphazard restoration.”

  “It is new,” said Esganikan. “I learned it from the gethes. It’s an area of plants where nobody can build, something pleasant and unspoiled for those who live in sterile cities. They call it a park.”

  11

  If you believe everything you read, then better not read.

  Japanese proverb

  F’nar, Wess’ej

  Shan sat and stared at the ESF670 rifle on the table.

  It was an interesting piece of kit. It did a lot of different things, but she wasn’t sure if it did any of them really well. She knew her handgun better than she’d known some men; and it was a lot more reliable. But the kind of target she now had in mind needed a lot more than stopping power.

  C’naatat needed fragmentation.

  “Shit,” she muttered. “Shit.”

  Her only experience of a 670 was waiting one shaving of a second too long on the brink of blowing a hole in Lindsay Neville’s head and getting taken down herself. Did Ade open fire, or Mart Barencoin? She still wasn’t sure, and even if she used it spitefully against Ade in arguments, she felt no real anger or betrayal at being shot. It was drilled reflex rather than deliberate violence; God knew she’d done it often enough herself, and it was—c’naatat excepted—why she was alive today.

  The 670 had a grenade launcher, and high yield grenades fragmented very well indeed. But if she couldn’t get Lindsay or Rayat out of the water, then she needed an explosive harpoon. And that was beyond her right then.

  She was still trying to clip the launcher attachment onto the barrel when the door swung open and Ade strode in, breathless from his morning run. He leaned on the table, charmingly disheveled. Sweat welded his lovat T-shirt to him and he wiped a drop from his nose with the back of his hand.

  “It’s not waterproof, Boss.”

  Shan leaned back and fixed Ade with a glare. “Have I got no fucking private thoughts left?”

  “I promised you I’d sort some kit out for you, remember? Besides, I don’t need to absorb your memories to know what you’re thinking.” Ade peeled off his shirt and began washing it in the sink. His routine rarely varied. “Does it bother you?”

  “What, every bastard knowing what I think?”

  “Not every bastard. Me.”

  “No. Actually, it doesn’t. Not at all. But I know you’re humoring me. Stop pissing me about and let me get on with it.”

  Ade rubbed the misshapen bar of soap on his shirt with slow deliberation. He ran in boots and sometimes even with his Bergen loaded, with full fighting order as they called it; it was a mad Royal Marines kind of thing and sometimes their insistence on ferocious training and discipline made her feel inadequate, which was no mean feat. Right then she felt ashamed of her amateur transparency and short temper.

  “Sorry. I’ve got to go to Bezer’ej sooner or later. You know I have.”

  “Well, you can immerse the 670, but then you might as well just lob the grenade in as an underwater charge. Explosive harpoon, that’s what you really need.”

  “I know.”

  “Fresh out.”

  “You’re taking the piss now, aren’t you?”

  “I’m just thinking it through with you.”

  Don’t take it out on him. You were the one who took your eye off the ball. “I have to tie up the loose ends. Once I neutralize the risks we can get on with our lives.”

  “Boss, what are you going to do if the bezeri say they need them down there?”

  She’d thou
ght about that. It tested her ethical logic to the limit. The copper in her said to finish the job, but if the wess’har weren’t subject to her morality, then the bezeri definitely weren’t. Shan found herself constantly locked in a loop that said c’naatat was bloody dangerous and would lead to terrible consequences.

  But for whom? Humans.

  Rayat was evidence enough. Government departments wanting to control it, pharmacorps gagging to exploit it: and every last fucker on earth never wanting to die. But so far she hadn’t found another species that didn’t dread it or treat it with wary indifference—just like the isenj, whose colony on Bezer’ej had picked up the parasite by accident.

  “The war was over genocide,” she said. “Never c’naatat. The bezeri called in Aras and his troops to wipe out the isenj for killing them with pollution. The isenj wanted Aras tried for war crimes and they wanted their territory back. But they didn’t want c’naatat. None of them.”

  “Yeah. Looks like it’s us that’s the problem.”

  “Does stopping humans getting hold of it and shitting everything up with it outweigh the wishes of the bezeri?”

  “Why are you asking me?”

  “Because you always have a different take on things.”

  Ade wrung the water from his shirt as if he was strangling it and shook it out with a whiplash snap. “On their turf, it’s their business.”

  “But the complication’s Rayat.”

  “Last time I looked, he couldn’t fly.”

  “Let’s not rule out anything, shall we? This is a highly resourceful spook with c’naatat we’re talking about.”

  Ade pegged his shirt on the rail above the heating vent and disappeared into the washroom. The bath itself was more or less a sheep-dip but the toilet was the real deal, aquamarine glass, custom-made to human plan by an obliging wess’har when Shan simply couldn’t stand trying to use a wess’har latrine any longer. A vent halfway up the wall took some using for anyone with human anatomy. Ade emerged fastening his fly.

  “I know you’re right,” he said. He sat down astride the bench next to her, frowning slightly. His eyes weren’t the mid-brown she had once thought but deep honey-gold flecked with chocolate and olive; she couldn’t imagine why she had ever thought of him as forgettable. “But work this through with me, will you?”

  “I just hate uncertainty.”

  “What about Vijissi?”

  “What about him?”

  “Do we frag him too? And then what about us? Where does it stop? Maybe it never will.”

  Ade had a talent for asking truly demanding questions. He cut the crap and asked the basic stuff, copper’s stuff: in a way, a child’s questions. She admired both the clarity and the courage needed to ask them. “Okay, perhaps Shapakti can remove c’naatat from Vijissi.”

  Ade’s gaze flickered over her face. “Here’s the deal. I’ll sort something to do the job if you promise me not to go yomping off on some half-arsed crusade without me.” He paused. “And Aras. And that you ask the bezeri what they want, ’cos this is about them.”

  For a moment Shan had that out-of-body moment when she looked down on herself as a stranger and saw an obsessed woman planning a cold-blooded assassination. Is that me? Is that what I am? She wanted to be sure why she was doing this, even if motive was irrelevant.

  “Okay,” she said. “Deal. You reckon a harpoon will do it?”

  “Depends on the charge, I suppose.”

  “What injuries do you get with underwater explosions?”

  “Lots. Ruptured guts and stuff, but that won’t even slow down a c’naatat, will it?”

  “Right.”

  “Look, I said I’d sort something out for you, didn’t I?”

  “Does it bother you that I’m planning to liquefy Lin and Rayat?”

  Ade pursed his lips. “If it did, that wouldn’t stop you.”

  “I’m that much of a selfish cow, am I?”

  “I’d never call you selfish. Inappropriately independent, maybe.”

  She forced a laugh. It stung her a little because like all painful revelations, it was true. “Didn’t take me long to fall from walking on water to just being the missus, did it?” Ade looked suddenly mortified. She realized how vulnerable he still was in relationships: even now he walked a knife edge, trying not to provoke his dead, hated dad and never quite knowing what would earn him a good hiding. He seemed to treat his women with the same fearful reverence. “I’m sorry. I always snap at you. About time you saw me for what I am, though.”

  “Oh, I see you just fine. So, how about a bit of training before Aras gets back?”

  “Okay.” Ade liked doing things as a couple. She doubted if he’d ever had a woman whose idea of shared fun was combat training. “But let’s try not to break anything. And no ten kay runs.”

  “How about knives? Know how to use one?”

  Shan shrugged. “I know how to disarm someone armed with a blade, if that’s what you mean. Basic training.”

  “No, I mean use it as a weapon.”

  She reached down the back of her belt and took out her 9mm. “What, when I can blow someone’s brains out with this from a nice safe distance?”

  “But what if you needed to do the job quietly?”

  “Silencer.”

  “Come on.” He gestured to the door, instantly the experienced sergeant sorting out a new junior officer. “Out on the terrace, Boss.”

  It kept him happy, and for all she knew she might even need the skills one day. Ade bounced his knife in his hand a couple of times by the ribbed handle; it was a timeless design, a keen edge both sides of a plain, tapering blade that was designed to kill and not much else.

  Shan considered the knife and Ade’s expression. The combination of the little boy desperate for approval and the sheer killing power of a commando disarmed her every time. The reaction told her something about her original species that wasn’t flattering, but there was no mystery in what she’d found so instantly attractive; he looked good, he looked fit, and he would look out for her.

  “Now, class,” he said. “Just because we can’t be killed, doesn’t mean we can be careless. Okay?”

  “I’ve had a few blades stuck in me before. So your dagger—”

  “Fighting knife, Boss. Not a dagger.”

  “Okay. Fighting knife.” She stood with her arms loose at her sides, not sure how an elite commando went about teaching someone to kill, and feeling that little fizz of adrenaline that went with preparing to square up to someone. “Have you done it? Have you ever killed someone with that thing?”

  “Yes.” Now his eyes weren’t quite fixed on hers but focused slightly past her. He was remembering. “Three. Two textbook. One not.”

  Stabbing someone wasn’t a quick way to kill them, not unless you got a good deep slice across the trachea and took out the jugular or carotid, and then it was messy. She’d investigated too many stabbings. “I’m not judging you, Ade.”

  “You have to be decisive or they make too much bloody noise.” He wasn’t a violent man. He was just prepared to do the job, and she admired that. She didn’t want him plagued by yet more nightmares just because a squeamish society expected him to do its dirty work.

  “Okay, grips and stance.” He demonstrated with the knife, flicking between styles. “Reverse…ice-pick…fencer…and hammer. There’s only one correct answer as far as we’re concerned, and that’s hammer. Then we’ll do stances—”

  “What about walking up behind the bloke and cutting his throat? Shoving the blade in the base of the skull and—”

  “You get the basics right first and then you can try the figure skating.” He’d snapped back into role as the instructor sergeant. This was another Ade, the man who really, really knew his business, a man at the top of a hard game, not the heroic victim that Shan saw him as a little too often. “And forget all that police shite with your free hand out in front. This is to kill or disable, not arrest.” He slapped the knife in her hand and fumbled in his pouch bel
t for something. It turned out to be a pocket knife. “Okay, shield hand—free hand—close to your vital bits and knife held like so.”

  And it was an education. Shan had dealt with a lot of bastards carrying knives in her career, but if they’d been marines her career might have been a lot shorter. It was just as well that most of the lowlife she came across had learned their technique from the vids.

  I can’t cause permanent damage. Neither can he.

  Stab wounds felt like a punch. She knew that. She had a long knife scar in her calf from a man she’d brought down with her baton in a riot. It was odd: she had no sensation of being punctured, just hit.

  “Come on,” said Ade, beckoning with his free hand. “Do your worst.”

  She’d never get past his guard to his torso. Face. Facial injuries demoralize. She went for it. He jerked back and—oh shit—she spun around to grab his blade with her free hand as he aimed for her torso. She hung on to it for grim death; he tried to drag it from her. Then he slackened his hold on it and stepped well back. If he’d been trying, she was sure the blade would have been embedded somewhere serious by now.

  “You do all right for a civvie.” He took her hand and looked at the wound. It stung. Blood welled briefly in a line the width of her left palm and the cut faded to a pink line. “Well done. Right instincts. You okay?”

  “They trained us that it was better to have a cut hand than a blade in your guts. Fine as long as you keep a tight grip.”

  “Just remember to keep your hand in front of your vital bits. It’s not called your shield hand for nothing.”

  “Can I try again?”

  “I don’t like seeing you hurt.”

  “It’s only pain.”

  “That’s my line.”

  Shan didn’t like seeing Ade hurt, either. She fought her instinct to win—blind, indiscriminate and sometimes embarrassing—and concentrated on him. She was so engrossed in learning something new that she didn’t catch Aras’s scent as he walked onto the terrace. She didn’t even hear him. She certainly hadn’t smelled Shapakti. The two males stood staring at the spectacle.