Matriarch

by Karen Traviss

  And yet they were loyal. She thought of Vijissi, who wouldn’t leave her side even when she spaced herself, and wondered if they had found his body yet.

  I demand loyalty. But when I get it, it just makes me feel guilty.

  The ship—which had no name, just a pennant code of ten digits—moved slowly towards the dome of Umeh Station and she caught sight of a gaping black crater fringed with shattered stumps of masonry. As her eye moved out along the blast radius, the buildings became more complete and identifiable; but the shimmering river of movement made from living isenj was missing. She tried to estimate the size of the devastated area.

  “Jejeno’s antiaircraft battery, as was,” Eddie said helpfully. “Right in the center of the city. It made the mistake of opening fire on Esganikan when she came in to land last time.”

  “And they’re letting us come back?”

  “You wait till you see the Eqbas countermeasures in action.”

  Ade knelt down on the transparent section of deck and braced his elbows on it to get a better look. Shan squatted down beside him. It was surprising how fast you could get used to the disorientation, especially when you didn’t want to lose face.

  “I don’t see anything in the way of ground defenses,” he said. “But then the wess’har don’t invade, do they?”

  The matriarchs of Wess’ej didn’t: but the Eqbas wess’har did. Shan thought of the number of casualties and the chaos that an explosion of that size would have caused. It had been a long time since she’d done that kind of police work—cordoning streets, evacuating people, searching for body parts, bagging and tagging them—and in a way she missed it. Decisions had been simple and immediate. But her choices now were increasingly complex.

  “Are they too scared to fire on us?” Will Earth be? “What’s happening?”

  “You’ll see,” said Eddie.

  Umeh Station was now almost immediately beneath them. The faceted sections of its dome gave it the appearance of a glittering, wind-whipped lake in the hazy sunlight, and then two bronze blobs like molten metal began falling slowly away from the hull towards it.

  The ship was disassembling itself; it was splitting off sections and landing them. Shuttles. Shan had seen the liquid technology of the Eqbas, but watching a vessel dissolve beneath you was on the bowel-loosening side of fascinating. She thought of the metal hull of Aras’s craft that had crumbled to harmless dust after crashing. It wasn’t reassuring.

  “I thought they’d make us rapid-rope down there,” she said, finally offering Ade an olive branch. She couldn’t stand his quiet misery. Shit, she loved the bastard. She was actually in love, which was new for her and not at all like the more gradual love she’d developed for Aras. Ade was one of the few wholly decent people she’d ever known, and an appealing mix of genuine modesty and solid, textbook masculinity. She found she had no defenses left even if she couldn’t say the words. “Sod that.”

  “If we cut our altitude.” He smiled, all eager gratitude. “I could train you, you know.”

  “It’s not like I can do myself any permanent damage, is it?”

  “Easy. Piece of piss, Boss. Honest.”

  The deck became instantly opaque. Esganikan strode across to them and pointed downwards. “The biodome is crowded. You might prefer to return to the ship’s accommodation to sleep.”

  She ushered the three of them towards the forward bulkhead, Serrimissani and Aitassi following. Shan wasn’t wholly prepared for what happened next. The deck sagged beneath her boots. Her instinct was that she was falling, that something was going horribly wrong, but the logical part of her brain gave the alarmed monkey within a steadying slap that said it’s just the ship reforming, stupid.

  And it did. It deformed and flowed into a well and then engulfed them in a capsule, like tropical fish in a plastic bag, safe but trapped. Ade caught her elbow to steady her.

  Eddie looked slightly shaken but said nothing. Shan imagined he’d had his fair share of close calls.

  “You realize you’re probably going to run into the Thetis payload,” he said.

  “Then it’ll be like old times,” said Shan.

  The last three scientists from her original mission were in Umeh Station now. Surendra Parekh had been executed, and Louise Galvin killed in crossfire with isenj; Sabine Mesevy had found god among the Constantine colonists, and Rayat was with the bezeri. That left Vani Paretti, Olivier Champciaux and the mission’s doctor, Kris Hugel.

  They were the harmless ones, except maybe for Hugel. If Hugel came after her again about bloody c’naatat, she’d slot the bitch this time. Shan slid her hand into the back of her belt and felt the comforting shape of her 9mm handgun. Antique tech worked just fine.

  The bronze globule of shiplet peeled away and ascended back to the main hull, leaving them standing in front of the dome in the shadow cast by the massive ship. A wide access road—a rare open space in Jejeno—ringed the building. For the first time Shan wondered what reception she might get, or if anyone would even know who she was. Too bad. She didn’t give a fuck. She was well used to being the last person anyone wanted to see walk through the door.

  Eddie nudged her in the back. “Look.”

  Above her, the piece of Eqbas ship coalesced with the main vessel. Shan noticed the faint shimmer like a heat haze distorting the cityscape. So that was the defensive barrier. It reminded her of the biobarrier that separated the Constantine colony from the Wess’ej environment.

  “It’s like being under an upturned glass,” said Eddie. “But at least you don’t need a breather mask inside the perimeter. I’m not sure if it makes me feel safe or trapped.”

  “Safe,” said Ade, adjusting his rifle on its sling. “Take it from me.”

  The airlock opened and Shan walked through first, even ahead of Esganikan. It never occurred to her to hang back, even though she wasn’t sure where she was going. Umeh Station was hot and crowded, like an upmarket mall full of people in naval uniforms or coveralls. Vines covered the interior and there was a fountain with incongruously attractive foliage plants in the main plaza area, including a dwarf banana tree with hands of fruit forming on it. Ade seemed very interested in the bananas.

  Umeh Station had been designed for two hundred but now housed three hundred stranded humans, all that were left of the Actaeon mission. Everyone who was not here—everyone who had chosen to stay on board the FEU warship—was dead, killed because the wess’har had destroyed the ship in retaliation for the bombing of Ouzhari and the deaths of Vijissi…and herself.

  Jesus Christ. I’m walking in here alive. And they’re dead.

  It topped the list of bizarre moments in her career. Maybe Actaeon’s crew would find it equally weird. And if she’d doubted they’d know who she was, she was wrong.

  Who else could she have been?

  “Here we go,” said Eddie. He tossed the bee cam a few inches in the air as if he was flipping a coin and it floated obediently beside him. Shan was aware of Esganikan watching with faint curiosity. “Don’t bite anyone’s head off, will you?”

  The silence started a few meters from her and spread, the hum of voices fading in concentric rings like a shockwave traveling out from a detonation. She could almost see it. For a copper, it wasn’t an unusual reception.

  But she was a dead woman. They’d been sure of it. So had she.

  Site contractors and crew stared. Shan stared back as only she could, hands on hips, feet apart, something she’d honed to perfection over the years. Then they suddenly appeared to have something more pressing to do and walked away. The hum of conversation filled the dome again. Ade nudged her. It was only then that she realized he was standing behind her with his rifle in his hands, finger outside the trigger guard but leaving no doubt about his ability to fire.

  “And I thought it was my friendly face,” she said.

  “Might have been, Boss.” He slung the rifle again. “You can look like a bulldog chewing a wasp when you put your mind to it.”

  Shan
waited for Esganikan to make a move. “This doesn’t strike me as an ideal place for your headquarters.”

  “It is not,” said Esganikan. “But it is a neutral point for the isenj, and convenient to contain for the time being. Ual’s replacement is meeting us here for discussions about the environmental readjustment of Umeh.”

  Eddie and Ade glanced at each other and Shan knew exactly what they were thinking. For a species that had never had a need for diplomacy, Eqbas had a curious collection of terms that sounded like euphemisms in translation, a habit they certainly didn’t have. They adjusted planets. They culled and they rolled back ecosystems and they restored, whether the dominant species on that planet wanted it or not—especially if they didn’t want it.

  Ual had invited them to solve Umeh’s environmental problems knowing what he would unleash. This was the Northern Assembly’s territory. The rest of Umeh hadn’t been consulted.

  This was a dry run for Earth’s likely fate. Shan decided to take careful notes.

  “So who replaced Ual?” asked Eddie. “Can’t be Par Shomen Eit. He’s too senior.”

  “I was surprised by their choice,” said Esganikan. “But in the end, it is, as you say, academic. She does not speak English or eqbas’u. Aitassi will interpret.”

  “Bugger,” said Eddie. “I’d rather got used to Ual’s command of language. Poor bastard.”

  Shan was starting to feel conspicuous. She was aware of a few people stopping to look, and one of them was very familiar. It was Olivier Champciaux, the geologist from the Thetis mission; he stopped dead and gave her a strange little-boy wave. She found herself half waving back.

  “Wherever we’re meeting the isenj, let’s go and sit down,” said Shan. “I hate standing around.”

  She followed Esganikan’s bobbing red plume across the dome, with the two ussissi skittering across the smooth composite floor behind the Eqbas commands. They dropped onto their rear four legs to keep up with her. Every time Shan slipped into thinking of ussissi as oversized meerkats, they reminded her that they had three pairs of limbs, and the fragile sense of home and normality she’d built crumbled a little.

  Esganikan had commandeered a site office, a sterile cube of composite walls with a rickety trestle table; it hardly seemed the place for a meeting that would decide the fate of billions of isenj. Ade unfolded a few chairs and set them around the table.

  “Isenj can’t sit on those, mate,” said Eddie. “Let’s find a small crate or something.”

  “Surreal,” said Shan. “Couldn’t we manage a meeting room?”

  “I think they converted all the larger units to accommodation. Don’t worry. Isenj aren’t as touchy as humans about protocol.”

  “What is discussed is important,” said Esganikan, but she didn’t sit down. Shan felt as if the matriarch filled the room, and she wasn’t used to a physical presence that rivaled her own. “And it will not be a long discussion.”

  “Can I record it?” asked Eddie.

  “If you wish.”

  Shan wondered what he would do with the footage. If it turned out the way she imagined, it would hardly make comfortable viewing. Esganikan probably knew that.

  “She’s coming,” said Aitassi.

  Shan had never quite worked out if ussissi had exceptional hearing or smell, or both, but they seemed to have an almost osmotic degree of communication. She looked towards the door and an isenj was walking towards them like an unsteady trolley, tottering on multiple legs. She’d seen isenj before; but that had been seconds before a firefight. She’d never sat down at a table to talk to one in a civilized fashion.

  For a moment, she recalled the smell of wet leaves and fungal forest floor and agonizing pain—Aras’s pain at the hands of his isenj captors. It was as vivid as if it had happened to her. She tried to shake herself out of it, and then Ade caught her eye and she wondered if he was recalling it too. The memories had spread between them like flu and they shared one another’s nightmares. It was too bad that the joyful memories hadn’t surfaced in the same way. There had to be some.

  A ussissi trotted through the door, a small male with a bandoleer of green beaded belts rattling across his shoulders. “Eddie Michallat,” he said in his high-pitched childlike voice. “You’re back.”

  “Hi, Ralassi. Who do you work for now?”

  Well, this is cordial. Shan watched as the isenj trundled through the opening and stood before them. There were no identifiable eyes to focus on and it was covered in dark quills, each tipped with a bead of brilliant blue transparent stone. It rattled like a chandelier and it smelled of forest floor. Shan dug her nails into her palms and noticed Ade swallow hard, eyes fixed on the creature; yes, he had the nightmare memories too.

  But Shan had her own personal recollections. This was the closest she had ever been to a live isenj: the last encounter with them had ended with a round shattering her skull. Spider. Piranha. Porcupine. Her human brain struggled for a comparison, but the small part of her that remembered what it was to be wess’har and isenj and bezeri and God only knew what else via her c’naatat somehow saw enemy and comrade and stranger. It was unsettling to say the least.

  Eddie looked uneasy.

  “I introduce you to Minister Rit,” said Ralassi. “She has been anxious to meet you—especially you, Eddie Michallat. Her mate was Par Paral Ual.”

  5

  The Eqbas Vorhi have invaded my world, to rescue us from our environmental problems. My husband invited them. The rest of Umeh’s states did not. We are now close to war with our neighbors. I know nothing about the humans stranded here, except that they call us spiders, and little more about the Eqbas—but I know Wess’ej. And I know I have to finish the process my husband started, or his death is meaningless. So I claim my ancient legal right to his office, to his ministerial role, and I will do what he would have wanted.

  RIT PAR PARAL,

  widow of former Minister Ual, isenj Minister of State,

  in a message to the Northern Assembly

  It took a lot to reduce Eddie to speechless silence but Ual’s widow had managed it. The word forming on his lips was sorry.

  But she spoke no English.

  “I admired your husband very much,” said Eddie. He had almost learned to look isenj in the nearest place they had to eyes. “And I’m very, very sorry that he was killed.”

  Ralassi paused before exchanging a high-pitched stream of sound with Minister Rit.

  “She says he was fond of you and that she thanks you for helping him to open negotiations with the wess’har.”

  Shit. Don’t make me the fucking hero here. If I hadn’t helped him, he might be alive now. “Do you mind if I record this meeting?”

  “She has no objection.”

  They’d be speaking eqbas’u and isenj. No matter: he could get Serrimissani to translate the soundtrack if he decided to transmit the footage. Eddie had reached the stage where he recorded things anyway whether he planned to send them down the ITX to BBChan or not. History. Yeah, evidence. Whatever. He’d walked a fine line between observing and involvement for years, crossing it first accidentally and then knowingly, and he was now convinced that nobody could observe events without influencing them.

  Quantum journalism. Quite an excuse.

  Shan sat down next to Ade and simply watched. She still had that way of scanning everyone for a fraction of a second too long for comfort, still every inch the detective. He never forgot she’d been a frontline copper. That was what he saw when he looked at her; not some armed drain-sniffer from Environmental Hazard Enforcement, but a woman who’d tackled everything from riots to fraud to terrorism, and who didn’t give a shit what the rules said about suspects’ rights. She’d crossed a few professional lines herself. Eddie found that more reassuring than reprehensible these days.

  “Your first step has to be to reduce your population,” said Esganikan, in English.

  Well, that was something. Eddie wondered if it was in deference to him or because she wanted him to b
e able to show the meeting to the governments back home. She tilted her head on one side for better focus and it gave her the appearance of looking gently concerned, something that he suspected was far from her actual state of mind.

  “Reduce your birthrate, your population and your consumption. Then we can move towards recreating a diverse ecology that can sustain itself.”

  Ralassi’s matte-black predatory eyes flicked to Rit and back to Esganikan, showing a flash of yellow sclera. Eddie wondered what Serrimissani thought of the other ussissi. It was hard to tell: the females always seemed pissed off with everything and everybody.

  “Minister Rit asks how that can be done, because previous attempts to curb the birthrate have failed.”

  “I discussed this with Ual,” said Esganikan. “We have tissue samples of various isenj genotypes and we can develop a…” She seemed at a loss for words. Wess’har had no concept of unplanned births. “A mass contraceptive. Delivered via the water supply, so that all are affected equally.”

  A rattling pause followed the matriarch’s comment. “Minister Rit asks what you mean by all.”

  “Your highly organized water distribution makes it easy to administer and impossible to avoid.”

  “But does that not render everyone infertile?”

  “It can.” Esganikan betrayed no caution or diplomacy. “We can restrict where we distribute it, of course. We can target it geographically, or perhaps by genetic markers.”

  “What kind of genetic markers?”

  “Your land masses have effectively created four distinct islands with some genetic variations between populations. We could attempt to target that way.”