Matriarch (34 page)

Shan felt the ice effect again. She'd become used to seeing the Eqbas as invincible. But there was no such thing. Shan began to see Targassat's fears, at least from an economist's point of view. It was a massive commitment to occupy a world twenty-five light-years away from backup.

“You have good relations with her,” said Nevyan. “I think
you should ask to discuss this before we allow Esganikan to take the gene bank, even if there is a duplicate now.”

“Okay. We'll go and see her, then. On Bezer'ej. I'll call her.”

A good reason to go to Bezer'ej.
Shan thought the timing was perfect. Her satisfaction made her feel guilty, because her private war with Rayat and Neville was becoming obsessive. She was just like Esganikan: charging in, and imposing her view of what was best.

Yeah, and I know my own kind, and what'll happen if this bloody thing ever gets loose, and it'll only take one little slip, one small chance…

“Targassat's objection to policing other worlds was partly based on the difficulty of exit strategies without the total annihilation of the dominant species,” said Giyadas, a miniature professor. Shan was speechless. Did wess'har kids ever mess up the place with finger paints? “While they remain, they hate. It requires extermination or constant management.”

It was sobering to hear a child define your own planet's geopolitical history without even knowing it.

But Shan was utterly smitten. No wonder Eddie doted on the kid. Now that the shock of identifying a maternal urge had begun to subside, she saw it as a pleasant but slightly sad thing; but she'd never wanted kids anyway. Giyadas was a one-off, an alien novelty. It didn't mean she was getting broody at all. Shit, she was way too old for that kind of crap anyway. If she had a hormonal reaction, it was as a grandmother, and everyone knew grandmothers loved kids because they didn't have to look after the little bastards.

Grandmother. That's a cheering thought. Thank God Ade doesn't see that in me.

“How about taking Vijissi with us?” said Shan. “I haven't seen him in days. How is he?”

“He stays in my mother's home. He's very distressed, especially now that other ussissi have come to F'nar. He feels very excluded.”

“All the more reason to get him to come with us.” Poor little sod: she should have been spending more time with him. She'd promised to be there but events had overtaken her. “It takes some getting used to,
c'naatat.
” It was time to tell Nevyan in case the same solution had crossed her mind. “For what it's worth, Shapakti tried to remove
c'naatat
from one of Vijissi's samples. Didn't work.”

“He can do this?”

It was all coming out now.
What the hell.
“He removed it from some of my cells, but it didn't work for Aras.”

Nevyan didn't freeze but her flaring pupils betrayed her intense curiosity. “You considered reverting back?”

“Shapakti tried it out of curiosity. Once he said he could do it, I had to think about Aras's chance to be a father.” Shan paused, remembering, and wondered why she had ever been angry with Aras or Ade when they were everything to her. “An antidote to
c'naatat
would have changed the course of events in this system too.”

“You put Aras first. I was wrong to think Esganikan had changed you, wasn't I?”

“Hey, we don't know the removal works on a live subject and I'm buggered if I'm volunteering.”

“But you would have let him go if it had been possible, even to another
isan.
”

“Yeah.”

“That would be distressing for you.”

“Yeah.” Shan was squirming now. Even with Nevyan, who'd seen her at her best and her very worst, the whole love thing embarrassed her to the point of pain. “But if he wanted kids, he could have gone with my blessing.”

She wanted the floor to swallow her. It was everything she was used to suppressing. Nevyan drew Giyadas to her—an adopted child, Shan reminded herself—and exuded the powdery vanilla-like musk of matriarchal contentment.

“You set my
isanket
a good example, my friend,” said Nevyan. “As you also set me.”

Things were getting back to normal, one by one. Mending
fences with a friend was a new experience for Shan, and being able to tick one crisis off her list gave her fresh resolve for the rest of her tasks. She contemplated the meeting with Esganikan with renewed confidence.

Bezer'ej

Rayat found he could walk faster than Lindsay. Once they'd oriented themselves he set off along the beach with her trailing a little behind him, a glass figure of a woman with a solid belt around her waist. If he looked at her a certain way, the belt appeared to be making its own way to Constantine.

Now that they were back on land she seemed to represent all his fears: he didn't want to end up like that, disappearing from humanity.

“Why are you going this way?” Half squid or not, she could still manage to gripe like her old self. “If we go up that cliff, we're due south of Constantine. That's where the grave is.”

“I want to avoid running into the Eqbas patrols.”

“Do you think they know about us?”

“Does Shan?” Oh, that'd stick in her craw. It'd
choke
her. Sometimes hate was a better driver in adversity than the prospect of happiness.
Look on the really black side: there's always someone more pissed off than yourself.
“We know Ade and Aras know, so to speak. Aras will tell the Eqbas if
he's the…man I think he is. He'd warn them to steer clear. He wouldn't want anyone else contaminated.”

“Yes, but the Eqbas are capable of shelling us. Fragmentation, I think Shan said.”

“Afraid to die? You got used to immortality pretty damn fast.”

“Work to do,” said Lindsay.

Me too,
he thought.

The beach route took them to the west of the Constantine site. It wasn't a big island, perhaps less than four hundred square kilometers: if you made an effort, you could walk around the coastline in a day, and definitely in two. He'd hung on to his shoes for this. The excuse that underwater rocks were too sharp for him to walk on seemed to adequately explain to both Saib and Lindsay his insistence on keeping them.

It was why he'd kept his clothing, too, and it was holding up to immersion pretty well. But it was also the last remnant of privacy he had other than his thoughts, and even those were contaminated by the memories of others.

By the time they ventured from the shore to the interior, scrambling over dunes of brown sand interrupted by tussocks of blue-gray grass, the sun was overhead. Lindsay consulted her compass. She'd hung a collection of tools on her belt, including a rock hammer: her primitive compass was proving its worth too. Simple kit sometimes had its advantages over sophisticated technology.

“This way,” she said. “Constantine's about an hour's walk. Find the site, then turn south and we'll reach the grave in about another half hour.”

The grave.
She seemed to be detaching from everything, talking like an officer and not a bereaved mother. Rayat understood.

“I want to stop off at the colony site,” he said.

“Souvenirs?”

“If there's anything useful left there that we can haul back, yes. A bag might be useful. Did you bring a bag?”

Lindsay fumbled in her belt. It had a little tack-zipped
pouch. She drew out a ball of gossamer and shook it like wet laundry so that it snapped out into a string bag of glassy filaments.

“Don't tell me how to go shopping,” she said. “Pili makes these.”

“Could have given me one when we were collecting the bloody maps, couldn't you?”

“Only discovered them a couple of days ago.”

He hoped she wasn't lying. The last thing he needed was to sustain an exhausting and counterproductive feud at a time like this.

He'd thought it was a hot summer day, but it was his
c'naatat
burning extra calories to feed its adaptation activity. The landscape told him it was early spring; he could see short trees like cycads with newly unfurling orange leaves that said
autumn fruit
to his brain and reminded him just how disorienting an alien world could be. A transparent sheet of—

Blue plastic.
Blue.
He knew what it was: it was an
alyat,
another of the carnivorous sheets of membrane that roamed the planet, a flying one this time, but it had always looked colorless to him before. Now he saw it as blue, vivid peacock blue and dappled with faint patterns. His eyes had changed. Somehow that startled him, even though it paled to insignificance alongside the vast changes
c'naatat
was making to him every day.

“The trouble with buried cities,” said Lindsay, taking no notice of the
alyat,
“is that you can't find them.”

They'd always been able to see evidence of Constantine if they looked hard enough. Small domes of glass—barely visible, less than a meter tall—dotted the landscape like blisters and channeled light into the subterranean colony. But the nanites seemed to have done their work in a matter of months. There was nothing.

“Right spot?”

“I think so.”

For the next hour they scuffed around the short violet-gray grass that had overgrown the land since the biobarrier
was shut down. Eventually, Rayat nearly fell into a gaping hole big enough to swallow a truck; the entrance to the colony. He couldn't believe it had been so hard to spot.

“Here we go,” he said.

The last time either of them had been here was when they captured Shan, or at least when the marines had. It seemed a very long time ago: but it was just months. The tunnels could have collapsed by now. The nanites the wess'har had introduced to break down all traces of human settlement and artifact had been devouring the braces and props even while they were down there hunting Shan. He needed to search the warren. He needed to find the mothballed ships,
Christopher
and its remaining shuttle: one shuttle had been airworthy just months ago, because they'd used it to escape to Umeh. The nanites might not have reached them, or they might have found them too big a meal to digest. There was a chance. His job was to exploit every last opportunity.

“I'm going down there,” he said. “You go ahead and find the grave. Meet me back here. Can you find this again?”

Lindsay was checking her compass and looking around the landscape. He read her body movements because he couldn't quite see her eyes. “Getting my bearings,” she said. “Yes, I can. But I'll wait all the same, thanks. I don't think we should separate.”

Smart-arse.
She thought she was being canny; she thought he would sneak off and take the podship, or approach the Eqbas, or whatever. It was a reflex action of mistrust. If she'd thought it through, she'd have realized that there was nowhere he could go and no way she could be stranded on the island.

But if she'd thought about it enough, she'd have remembered the spacecraft.

“I'll try not to take too long,” he said, and started down the overgrown ramp. “I'll bring back anything I can carry.”

“Tools,” she said. “Tools and waterproof textiles.”

Being a squid clarified your priorities.

The underground colony had once been bathed in light and it had been easy to forget that it was excavated into the
rock unless you looked up to the top of St. Francis spire—a church, a Norman-style church here of all places—and saw not sky but a vaulted ceiling. Rayat's eyes compensated for the darkness by feeding him images of density differentials and surfaces mapped by sound and magnetic signature. There was no color, but there
was
astonishing detail.

The caverns and galleries were largely intact. All structures that hadn't been cut from the stone had vanished, and there were piles of fallen masonry here and there where something had been robbed of its supports by the nanites. The carvings, arches and round windows were untouched. And there was the church of St. Francis: no doors, no glass bells, no gilding on the notice board on the front. It looked for all the world like a building that had been carefully bombed into ruin and then scrubbed clean of scorch marks.

GOVERNMENT WORK IS GOD'S WORK
.

The inscription was still crisp and visible on the stonework. They said it was part of the original tympanum constructed by the advance mission of automated bots long before the colonists arrived to take up residence. It had been built on Ouzhari: Aras had moved it here and this was where the colonists had come.

Whose god? Whose government?
It had been an arrogant colonial claim of the British Raj five hundred years ago, but governments had never stopped citing God as their authority, including those who'd once been the colonized. Humans never learned. Shan was right, the bitch.

Rayat didn't go inside the church. He checked occasionally in houses and storerooms as he went, finding nothing, but this was a sideshow. He was after transport. He lost track of time, partly because he had no urge to urinate;
c'naatat
seemed to want to retain as much of his body fluids as it could while he was on land. He followed the route he remembered from last time. There
was
a shuttle down here.

Eventually he reached a series of chambers whose ceilings were progressively higher, and then he stepped through into brilliant light that confused his adapted eyes for a second. He looked up; there was no ceiling and he was looking
at sky again, seeing in the visual spectrum. The weather covering had gone. But this was a hangar.

Yes,
this
was it.
This
was where he'd come.
This
was where Ade Bennett had found the shuttle last time. He carried on to the next connecting doorway.

The roof was blown back when we lifted. The fact that it's not there now doesn't mean the nanites got it. We're a long way from the hub of the colony. They might not have penetrated this far.

He stepped through and the light ahead seemed much less intense.
Intact hangar roof. Oh God, yes, please let it be there…

Rayat found himself staring at the dust-caked but distinctive gunmetal gray hull of spacecraft more than two hundred years old. No, there were two of them: beyond this one, he could see a much smaller shape, a shuttle. This was
Christopher
, the original colony ship, and it was enormous—bigger than three through-deck carriers.
How the hell did they excavate a structure to house this?
The wess'har were more beneficent than Rayat had imagined.

He had no idea how to gain access. He didn't even know how to start the drives. He'd bloody well worry about that when he needed to. Right now, he needed to get
in.

He sprinted down the port side of the vessels, scanning frantically for a ramp access. They were set too high; he couldn't find a gantry or even a ladder. He looped around the stern of
Christopher
to check the starboard side.

But he needn't have worried about access.

The entire side of the ship had dissolved.

Not ripped, not blown apart, not even rusted: the whole starboard hull was just
not there.
He was staring into a vast shell—no transverse bulkheads, no decks—that faded into gloom. It was a tunnel, not escape. It was the carcass of a whale picked clean by scavengers.

He heard himself gulp air and sob once.

That was all he allowed himself. He wasn't giving up now. He stepped over a dune of gray dust and ran the length
of the ship looking for something, anything he could make use of: if he couldn't fly out of here, he could find some comms kit and get a message out, link into the ITX somehow, call base and tell them what had happened.

And what are they going to do about it, then? Send a cab?

Yes, they could. Extraction might be decades away, even centuries, but he could wait that out now. The nanites couldn't have eaten the lot. They'd left the port side, hadn't they? There was a chance.

His eyes gave up searching as he went deeper into the hull, and he slipped back into echolocation and senses taken from the lightless depths of the ocean. But there was nothing. The ship was empty in a way that no wreck had ever been.
Christopher
was a blown, broken eggshell.

Rayat made his way back up the ship, suddenly conscious that he was coughing. He put his hand to his neck and found his gills had clamped shut. The air was thick with dust that he'd kicked up by moving around, and he'd defaulted automatically to breathing through his nose again. When he looked up at the hangar roof that had given him such hope because it appeared intact, he saw that it was simply festooned with thick vines and runners that had somehow made a mesh across the huge void. Almost all the manufactured structure was gone.

There was still the shuttle, though.

Stupid bastard. It's gone too, you know it is.

He walked the length of the shuttle. It seemed intact and he knew how to open the hatches on one of those, so he reached out and took the yellow and black recessed bar of the manual override in both hands, bracing to jerk it up and out.

But as he squeezed tight, his hands filled with powder. He clutched striped talcum. He shook the dust from his hands in a disgusted reflex and as his fingers caught the frame around the hatch, the whole structure crumbled like a sandcastle. The collapse continued along the length of the shuttle leaving him staring across a gap at the starboard bulkhead.

There was
nothing
inside, the absolute scoured nothing of determined invisible destroyers.

“Shit.” He stood with his hands on his hips, head down, crushed. “Shit, shit, shit, shit,
shit!
”

His voice echoed. And he did something he hadn't done in a long, long time: he began crying.

The walk back to the surface felt twice as long. On the way he made a few half-hearted searches for things to scavenge. But the nanites had already swept through. He composed himself at the entrance, not wanting to look an idiot in front of Lindsay, and walked back to her as casually as he could. She was sitting on the grass cross-legged, a weird life-sized ornament.