Matriarch

by Karen Traviss

  How long have we been down here now?

  She had a sense of it being the first day, maybe the second. Her watch had stopped. Her hunger didn’t mark time by telling her when she had missed regular meals: it was constant.

  Ignore time. Just keep moving.

  She stacked up the azin shell maps and records, passing Rayat in a silent relay. It must have taken an hour, maybe two—maybe three. The podship Saib had referred to turned out to be a five-meter translucent gel sac that maneuvered by pulsing jets of water. At first Lindsay wondered if it was a living creature. But it had a hatch that opened, a hatch with unnaturally straight edges, and a bezeri emerged from it to gather up the shell documents and place them in the craft.

  The next time she returned to the cache of shells, she found Saib waiting with something in his tentacles. Rayat settled on the silt beside her, staring.

  Saib was carrying a small body.

  My kin, he said. His light display pulsed deep blue, almost purple in its intensity. He is recently dead.

  Lindsay had no idea whether kin meant son or nephew or grandson; but she knew exactly how Saib felt. She could still taste the pain of David’s death, such an unfairly short life after months of carrying him. Without the numbing influence of the mood enhancers she’d been taking, the grief was now rushing back to fill the voids, triggered by seeing that small body.

  Let’s get the poor thing tidied up. Lindsay could hear Shan’s voice even now. Lindsay was instantly back in the Thetis camp on Constantine, standing over the dissected corpse of an infant bezeri after Shan had punched Surendra Parekh to the floor for disobeying the order not to take organic samples. It had been the start of the chain of slowly unfolding disasters.

  Take what you need, said Saib. Will he live on in you?

  “Let’s see,” said Rayat.

  There was no bioluminescence in the body. But that didn’t mean the cells were useless. It was worth a try. And if Rayat could develop the lights faster, then Lindsay wanted them too.

  Saib laid the body on a rock and Rayat fumbled in his pockets, growing more impatient. Then he found a piece of plastic—a tag of some kind—and scraped it along the inside of his wrist.

  “Don’t look,” he said to Saib.

  Rayat kept scraping until he drew blood. Lindsay hoped there weren’t predators with the senses of sharks in these waters.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s try it with the body. The photophores are between the skin and the mantle muscle in terrestrial squid. You know how complex they can be? Lenses, reflectors, even color filters. Amazing.”

  Lindsay gathered up the child’s body—a child, a life like David’s, whatever the species—and was surprised by how heavy it felt. Rayat hesitated before hacking into the mantle and scooping out chunks. Then he braced his arm and gouged into his own skin, working in the bezeri’s tissue like a paste. That was the problem with c’naatat: it healed wounds almost instantly so it was hard to keep the blood flowing. Rayat pounded away at his arm making little grunts of effort for a period that felt like long minutes. It was hard to tell. He opened up three wounds. By the time he stopped, there wasn’t a mark on his skin.

  “My turn,” said Lindsay. She held out her arm.

  “You sure?”

  “Of course I’m bloody sure. This might be the only chance we get to try this.” She stared at him. Oh my God I’m living under water and I’m trying to develop bioluminescence and I have to stop thinking about this—“Oww—”

  Rayat stabbed into her arm. The edge of the plastic was blunt and it hurt like hell, shocking her out of her thoughts. Did it matter that he was working photocytes into her bloodstream? Wouldn’t any tissue do the job? Maybe he knew something she didn’t. It was as good an idea as any.

  “Okay.” Rayat picked up the lamp and turned to Saib. “How do you dispose of your dead?”

  Under stones.

  “Is this place appropriate?” Rayat laid the child’s body down on the seabed in a space between outcrops of rock. Then he gathered some stones. “I’ll do it.”

  Saib said nothing, but he coiled one tentacle around a rock. The other bezeri followed him. Lindsay joined in the burial party and they covered the body a stone at a time, forming a cairn between the outcrops.

  I will make a memorial later, said Saib.

  Yes, they carved stone: Lindsay remembered that. They had memorials at the high-water line on Constantine, single carefully-shaped stones with inscriptions commemorating podship pilots who had breached the barrier to the Dry Above, a place as remarkable to the bezeri as space once was to humans.

  “You do have some decency in you, then,” said Lindsay.

  “One thing you need to learn about monsters,” said Rayat, “is that we’re not monochrome. Saints aren’t, either.”

  He swam back to the repository. Lindsay paused to grab some red weed and chewed it. It tasted like wet salty leather, but it was better than chasing plants that might have been worms.

  She looked up towards the sunlight, filtering through the water in shafts like a woodcut from a family bible. That was an image she couldn’t shake now, not since she’d seen it on Christopher Island. And she knew where she was; she was close enough to Christopher—Ouzhari—to find Constantine, or what was left of it.

  She wanted to see David’s grave. She wanted to mourn properly for her child. Aras had made a glass headstone that threw brilliantly colored light on the grave in the sunshine.

  She would find it. She knew she would.

  But she had time, and these aging bezeri didn’t. She had to do her duty first. She had to look for more survivors.

  Umeh: Maritime Fringe airspace

  “They don’t piss about, do they?” said Shan.

  Ade stared down between his boots at a fire-blackened, shattered landscape that had been part of a Maritime Fringe city called Buyg. Shan was back to being the detached copper again, and he wondered if the kind of violence she was used to seeing before she went to EnHaz made it easier to deal with this war. It was hard to tell. She’d just switched off; it was more than just her scent signals. She’d battened down all the hatches. Even her eye contact felt like a stranger’s.

  The devastation extended as far as he could see from the transparent deck of the Eqbas ship. He was almost used to walking on nothing now: as long as he concentrated he felt perfectly safe. But the minute he let it slip from conscious thought, the primitive part of his brain took over and he jerked back as if he was falling into a deep, deep pit. Eddie seemed to have solved the problem by kneeling on all fours and resting on his folded arms. Maybe he was just getting a better look, though. Sometimes he looked as if he had no sense of danger at all, as if he shut down simply to cope.

  We all do it sooner or later.

  “I’m glad Lin’s dead,” said Eddie. “I don’t think she’d cope with knowing she started all this.”

  Ade decided not to even breathe. Shan didn’t meet his eyes. “Yeah.” Then she glanced at Esganikan and warbled in eqbas’u. Ade took a guess that she was telling her Eddie didn’t know Lindsay was alive, and to keep her mouth shut about it. Judging by Esganikan’s rapid head-tilting, she had.

  Eddie could never leave anything alone. “How did she go in the end?”

  “Calm,” said Ade. He had that down pat now.

  “Rayat?”

  “Same.”

  “Did she say anything?”

  “Eddie, shut the fuck up about her, will you?” Jesus, everyone wanted to know how people died. Sometimes it was better not to. It definitely was this time. Change the subject. “Was that a single missile?”

  Ade avoided Eddie’s eyes but he glimpsed his startled expression. Esganikan took no notice of the spat and seemed engrossed in studying a mist of small lights that shimmered in the bulkhead.

  She prodded one and the display changed. “Yes, with twenty dispersing warheads.”

  “And how many do you carry?”

  “Fifty,” she said. “But we make more on deplo
yment.”

  Make more. Ade wasn’t used to that. It skewed his sense of logistics and supply chains, chains that could be broken to cripple an enemy. He was glad he wasn’t fighting them.

  “I bet that got their attention.” It was hard to get a sense of scale because the buildings—or at least the stumps of them—had no familiar ratios that he could latch onto. “What’s our altitude?”

  Esganikan paused for a second. It always took her a little longer to convert to Earth metric. “Twenty thousand meters.”

  Shan stood with her feet slightly apart as if bracing for impact, looking down, turning the ring around on her finger. She didn’t seem used to wearing rings; Ade had never seen her wear any jewelry. But she hadn’t taken it off yet, and that was reassuring.

  “Looks lower,” said Ade.

  The ship suddenly seemed to drop. Buyg loomed much larger, closer. Shan’s intake of breath was audible and she put her hand on the nearest bulkhead. Ade’s gut flipped and Eddie jerked back onto his heels. The ussissi nearby didn’t move a muscle: Ade always kept an eye on them.

  “Shit,” said Eddie. “What was that?”

  “Magnification of the image,” said Esganikan wearily.

  The deck behaved almost like a lens, then. Ade’s brain had told him he was falling.

  Shan seemed reassured. “This is the same technology as that electron microscope sheet you had on Ouzhari, isn’t it?”

  “The image projection is similar,” said Esganikan. “But that was a particle-force scope.”

  It meant little to Ade. Shan raised an eyebrow. “If you ever want to raise capital when you get to Earth, auction that tech.”

  “Do we need to?” asked Esganikan.

  “No.”

  “Good. Giving technology inappropriate to the user causes problems, I find.”

  Ade was starting to form a picture of how they handled knowledge. They didn’t have secrets. They didn’t shove information down anyone’s throat, either, but they had no concept of confidentiality and they didn’t encrypt their comms. But even if you knew they were coming, there was sod all you could do about it. Stealth was redundant when you had overwhelming force.

  Even a ship like this wasn’t enough to hammer a planet on its own, though. That was interesting.

  “So would you tell humans how to make one of those particle things?” asked Ade.

  “We would answer questions.” Esganikan seemed totally unwary of interrogation. “There would be no reason not to.”

  “But you wouldn’t give them the kit.”

  “Probably not.”

  “So what if they asked you how to make one of those dispersing missiles?”

  “We would ask if they could make it.”

  “And?”

  “If we decided they could, we would refuse to tell them.” Esganikan cocked her head and her vivid red plume bobbed. Eddie was right: she reminded him of a parrot, as capable of taking a chunk out of you as Shapakti’s macaws. “No, Sergeant, we are not as secretive as you, but neither are we stupid.”

  Ade felt his face burn. Shan put her hand on his back, reassuring and protective. He liked that. So she hadn’t switched off completely after all. “He’s got a point. Your relaxed attitude to security concerns me sometimes, too.”

  “It’s sufficient.”

  Eddie, still on his hands and knees on the transparent deck, chuckled to himself. “You missed your vocation, Ade. The art of political semantics.”

  “I learned weasel-speak from you, mate.” Yeah, I know what semantics means. Eddie knew better than to patronize him, but Ade was still conscious of being undereducated. But at least he’d diverted Eddie from the subject of Lindsay Neville.

  Esganikan pointed down through the deck. “The blast area is nine square kilometers and the firestorm damage extends to twice that.”

  “Jesus. Not nukes, though.” She’d already said they didn’t use them. “I mean, it’s not like I can tell what you were firing last night—”

  “The nearest equivalent appears to be your fuel-air device. Destruction without persistent contaminants.”

  “Depends what your fuel is.”

  “The explosive is nearly all combusted. And nontoxic. There is little we can do to stop debris being ejected into the atmosphere, but this can be cleaned up too.”

  Shan snorted. “Well, it looks pretty bloody toxic from here. If you tried that on Earth you’d release so many pollutants from the built environment that you’d poison the place anyway.”

  “That may well occur here, of course. Bioremediation will be necessary anyway.”

  Ade made a note to look up bioremediation later. He could guess for the time being.

  “You getting all this, Eddie?” Shan squatted down and fixed the journalist with her listen-to-me stare, oblivious of the bee cam. She seemed to ignore it now, and Ade remembered what Eddie said about people eventually becoming far too comfortable with a fly on the wall. “What do you think the folks back home will make of this, eh?”

  “It ought to have a highly laxative effect,” said Eddie. “But it’s not back home, and it’s not now. And it’s not happening to them.”

  “This is not our usual mode of operation.” Esganikan seemed a little offended. “But there’s no other species or natural environment here that we need to avoid harming.”

  “You’re going to be a sucker for the fluffy bunny shield, then,” said Eddie. “Or the strategically placed tree.”

  Esganikan appeared to understand bunny. “That’s why we prefer species-specific measures. Your distaste for some weapons and not others seems almost irrational.”

  She said it mildly, as if explaining to a particularly dim child. Ade thought bioweapons sounded tidier. He’d seen the aftermath of enough fuel-air bombs and other conventional ordnance with huge overpressures; it was ugly. But, like Shan always said, dead was dead, and shoving a knife in someone was pretty ugly too if you were on the sharp end of it.

  This wasn’t his war. He couldn’t stop it happening. It made him think of things he wanted to keep out of his mind, memories he wished would just leave him alone, and so he switched off.

  The ship moved towards the coast. Ade had worked out that the illuminated display on the bulkhead was a chart and he started to marry up the colors and symbols with ground features; the meandering yellow line was the coast. The Maritime Fringe seemed to be precisely that, a corridor all along the southern edge of the continent. No wonder they were paranoid. They looked as if they had their backs to the ocean, ringed on three borders by the Northern Assembly.

  The ship passed over undamaged city made up of buildings without end that were light gray, cream and ochre. They ran right up to the edge of a rusty coastline and a dirty pink-tinged sea.

  Esganikan clicked audibly. Ade wasn’t sure if that was annoyance or regret. “They had more land before the ice caps receded.”

  “That sounds familiar.”

  “And as on your world, they found the climate change could be unpredictably rapid. It saddens me that we see this repeated so often.”

  They were a long way into Maritime Fringe airspace now and nobody had opened fire on them. Maybe the Fringe had learned its lesson last night. But Ade was sure they hadn’t, because people who felt that threatened tended to carry on lashing out. And isenj were definitely people. Once you looked past the quills and the absence of eyes, the English-speaking ones were very…human.

  Esganikan was much more alien.

  She turned to one of the bridge crew, who sat in niches as if they were dozing, glancing at lights in the bulkhead. Ade tried to find parallels with the ships he knew; maybe if an Eqbas had walked into the citadel of an FEU vessel they would have thought the crew was watching entertainment as they stared unmoving at bright fast-changing displays. Esganikan warbled in eqbas’u in her double-voice, just like Nevyan’s, and one of the crew began touching lights on the bulkhead with long multijointed fingers. Sometimes he could see they were cousins of the Wess’ej wess’h
ar, and sometimes they looked totally different, as if they had no common roots. He wondered how they looked to Nevyan.

  “Hayin, open communications with the Maritime Fringe government,” said Esganikan, leaning over a crewman at his station. She beckoned to Aitassi. “Interpret for me.”

  Hayin handed a virin to Aitassi, who settled back on her haunches and held the communication device in front of her. Shan looked as if she was concentrating hard.

  “Pirb,” said Hayin, nodding.

  “Minister Pirb,” Esganikan said carefully, in English. “Minister Pirb, this is Esganikan Gai, commander of the Eqbas Vorhi adjustment mission, and I require your cooperation.”

  Ade wondered if the English was for Eddie’s benefit again, but maybe she just wanted to be fluent by the time she had to have the same surrender-or-else conversation with Earth. They were good at picking up languages. He was certain that she could have spoken the isenj language if she’d had the right throat to make the sounds.

  The sound of isenj rattles and whirrs filled the bridge. Aitassi turned her head slowly to the commander as if choosing her words carefully.

  “Pirb says he is President, and that he cannot cooperate with an invading army.”

  “Tell him that any of his citizens who want to cooperate with the new environmental measures should present themselves at the border with the Northern Alliance for instructions.”

  “He tells you to remove your ship from his airspace, and that you have a minute to withdraw.”

  Esganikan seemed utterly relaxed and unmoved. Ade had been around wess’har long enough to read their body language—the freeze reaction when startled—and now he knew their scent signals. No, Esganikan really didn’t give a damn. She had her objective and she was going to stick to it. Sometimes her kiss-my-arse attitude was so much like Shan’s that he almost liked her.

  “Tell President Pirb,” she said, “that if he attempts to carry out his threat to attack Wess’ej and Bezer’ej, I will respond in kind. Tell him, too, that I am not a Wess’ej wess’har, and my definition of balance is not as liberal as theirs. I will destroy his cities, and kill his citizens, and those of his allies if they attempt to threaten our kin.”