Matriarch (5 page)

Shan tilted her head very slowly, just a fraction. For a moment Esganikan wondered if she was developing wess'har pupils and needed to incline her head to focus better. But it seemed to be only a mannerism.

“I'd never abandon him,” said Shan. She made a move towards the exit and paused at the hatchway. “He's been through enough.”

“Commendable. Will you come to Umeh tomorrow?”

“Do you need me to?”

“You want to see what might take place on your former homeworld. You may bring your
jurej've.
”

Shan remained impassive, unreadable. “How long?”

“As long as you wish.”

“Okay. A few days. I'll front up tomorrow morning. I assume you're still going to have access here.”

This was delicate politics. The F'nar matriarchs didn't want a long-term Eqbas base on Wess'ej. Esganikan was withdrawing to Bezer'ej, where Shapakti's team had begun decontamination procedures of the irradiated area.

“We will maintain contact with the colony on Mar'an'cas, and we will visit F'nar,” said Esganikan. “Eddie is coming to Umeh.”

“I bet he's in a feeding frenzy,” said Shan, making no sense. “See you tomorrow.”

Aitassi watched her leave, head tracking like a cannon turret. Esganikan waited for the data to transmit from the Earthside ITX node. She would examine it later with Shapakti and the rest of the environmental interventionist team.

“Do you have plans for Shan Frankland, Commander?”

“I need a neutral human to accompany us,” said Esganikan. “The Constantine colonists have their own agenda
on return to Earth. Shan Frankland sees matters more from the universal perspective.”

“She's unwilling.”

“Everything I know of her tells me she was an
isan
long before she acquired wess'har genes. She'll do a matriarch's duty when the time comes.”

“She won't leave her males.”

“She can bring them with her.”

“But she fears
c'naatat
entering Earth's population.”

“I doubt that she understands the level of our biohazard precautions.” Esganikan decided she could utilize Eddie Michallat if it came to it, but she far preferred Shan Frankland. She had the measure of her commitment: she didn't put her own species above all others. And she was a sister matriarch. “Perhaps she doesn't want to return to Earth anyway.”

“Perhaps she has had her fill of responsibility,” said Aitassi.

Esganikan doubted it. If there was one thing she understood about Shan, it was that she couldn't get enough of it. She would tire of not being the decision maker. She seemed to think the universe was her personal responsibility.

If all humans thought that way, the task ahead would be far easier. Only those who did could be allowed to survive.

The Exchange of Surplus Things, F'nar

“You hiding from Frankland?” asked Mart Barencoin.

Ade glanced up from the fan of playing cards in his hand, conscious of the stares of the rest of his Royal Marine detachment. The five men and women had embarked with him in
Thetis
what seemed like a lifetime ago, when he was still a regular human being; they'd been as good as family.

There was Jon Becken, a blond kid in his twenties, and the two engineer-trained commandos Sue Webster and Bulwant Singh Chahal. Martin Barencoin was a good bloke for all his mouth, and Ismat Qureshi, who had to cheat a bit to make the minimum height and weight to pass selection, could drop a man twice her size. They were a solid team. It felt as if they'd been here forever and not just two years.

“No,” Ade lied, thinking of the here and now again. “I just want to play cards with my oppos. Got a problem with that?”

Barencoin shrugged and went back to studying his hand. They might have been kicked out of the Corps but they still behaved like marines, and he was still their bloody sergeant. He could shut Barencoin up.

The air was cool and scented with wet green scents of vegetables that didn't grow on Earth. Wess'har went about their business around them, depositing produce and other items they didn't need and selecting items left by others; they were totally communal and greed didn't seem to cross their minds. They took no notice of the six human soldiers
who had set up an informal mess deck in the nearest thing F'nar had to a formal public building.

Yes, they were
alien.
And Ade had their genes inside him now. He checked every day for changes to his body but so far all he had developed was an absence of body hair and bioluminescence around his tattoos. It made taking a piss a truly surreal experience.

“You going to tell us about it, Sarge?” Qureshi kept her eyes fixed on her cards. “How did Commander Neville take it in the end?”

Oh shit.
It. Death; or
not
death in this case. At least he could tell some kind of truth, but he had no idea how he would ever tell them exactly what he had done.

“Calmly,” he said.

“And Rayat?”

“Same.”

Ade thought they looked disappointed. None of them had liked Rayat from day one, and when he turned out to be a spook their mood of told-you-so was overwhelming. There was an unspoken assumption that he wouldn't die well. Ade wondered if he should have told them otherwise; but that was shabby. The bastard could take it. Like Shan, he could face
worse
than death.

You were ready to take that dive, weren't you? And now you're bloody relieved Rayat and Neville did it for you. You're a coward, like Dad always said.

Ade closed his eyes as firmly as he could, pressing down his lids for a moment to shut out the shame and his father's voice. Qureshi laid her cards on the makeshift table of an upturned crate, starting with the ace of spades. She seemed to have taken his expression as a sign he had a crap hand.

“Twenty-one,” she said. “Anyone stupid enough to play me again? Sue? You up for it?”

“Yeah,” said Webster, and passed her hand to Chahal for shuffling. “What are we going to play for this time?”

“I'm out of chili sauce.”

“Awww,
shit.
”

“It lasted
three years.
”

“Izzy, you can eat
anything
as long as you've got chili sauce. How long before we can harvest the habañeros?”

“Four months. Even with Shapakti's lighting.”

They'd sneaked a few chili plants into the experimental rainforest habitat that the Eqbas biologist had created to test the resurrection process of the gene bank. He had two blue and gold macaws in there, real ones. They could even speak eqbas'u now. Shapakti didn't mind the marines sticking a few pots of seedlings in the habitat because he knew they missed home comforts just like he did. The make-believe forest was a nice place to retreat to—underground, sealed, and oddly full of the smells and sounds and textures of Earth.

But I don't belong on Earth any more.

“What we going to do, then?” Becken scratched the scar on his nose. “We're not much use here, apart from gardening.”

“Got to eat,” said Qureshi. The terrestrial crops took time and effort, even within the biobarrier that Aras had created for them. It was sobering when you had to grow everything you ate. “Got to get more chili sauce on line.”

“Anyone fancy asking the colonists if they want us helping out on Mar'an'cas?” Webster, engineer-trained, like Chahal, was still set on getting running water and heat exchangers set up in the refugee camp. “We can try again.”

“The ungrateful fuckers told us to piss off, remember?” said Barencoin. “You know, when we arrested their mate. They're touchy like that.”

“They might have calmed down now they've got a date for going home,” said Qureshi. “And there's this Christian forgiveness thing, right?”

“Izzy, we handed what's-his-face over to Esganikan for execution.”

“Jonathan,” said Webster.

“Yeah, Jonathan. I think that's all we've done in three sodding years, isn't it? Arrested some bastard or other for someone else to deal with. Frankland, Jonathan, Neville, Rayat. Oh, but Ade managed to slot Dr. Galvin all on his own. That's something.”

“Silly cow shouldn't have got in the crossfire,” said Qureshi sourly. “Ade and I slotted some isenj too. So you can shut it.”

Ade had never lost sleep over Galvin. That surprised him. But she'd ignored the curfew and every safety warning; somehow, she didn't fall into the category of women he should have protected, and he wasn't sure why.

“It's not home,” Ade said. “Earth isn't their home. They've been here for generations.”

“Bezer'ej,” said Chahal. “Not here. Not Wess'ej.”

“Okay,
Bezer'ej,
then.” If Ade looked outside now, he might have seen the cloud-marbled crescent of Wess'ej's twin planet. “They always planned to go back one day. It was their mission. But if we're going to feel like spare pricks at a wedding back home, how are
they
going to cope?”

“I didn't think you were going back,” said Qureshi.

“No, I'm not.”

“Then what's this
we
?”

Whatever the court martial back on Earth had decided in their absence, they clung to their routine and discipline—and identity. That was something no government could take away from them. And Ade found it very hard not to think of himself as
we.

“Shan says she's going to see if she can get the court martial finding quashed,” he said. “A pardon. Back inside.”

“Well, hoo-fucking-ray.” Barencoin leaned a little to the left so a wess'har could get past him with a large crate. He didn't glance up from close inspection of the hand he had been dealt. “The Defense Ministry listens to her, do they?”

“Watch your mouth. She's the only person who gives a fuck what happens to us.” Ade bristled. That was
Shan
he was talking about, his missus, the love of his life, the Boss: he wouldn't tolerate disrespect from
anyone.
“And when you get back home, it'll be the Eqbas who'll be looking out for you, not the frigging FEU.”

They could handle anything; they were all Extreme Environment Warfare Cadre. They'd skydived from orbit, camped out on ice floes, and fought in jungle and city. But
being dismissed the service along with Lindsay Neville for the Bezer'ej bombing was the one thing that upended them.

“It was a lawful order,” said Barencoin. “At least transporting the stuff was, so don't go all bloody guilty again. The fireworks were all Commander Neville's doing. She never even gave us any orders about that—and she did it herself, so there was at least one scrap of decency in the bitch.”

“Yeah, you argued, Mart.”

“So did you.”

“Should have done more than argue.”

“And then what does that make you? We've got rules. That's
why
we've got rules, so that we don't decide to do stuff we've not been asked to do by the elected government, and turn into some fucking uniformed mob like some banana republic's army storming the Parliament building.”

“Okay.”

“No,
not
okay. The way it is. Thinking for yourself is one thing, having an opt-out army is another. It might look principled to you, but it's asking for fucking chaos.”

“Loads of people have made a stand in the past.”

“For Chrissakes, Ade, there was no stand to make. How would you have stopped Neville, and why? Slotted her? Really? Is that lawful? Once you sign on the line, the overall objective isn't your call.”

Shan thought the same as Barencoin, but Ade couldn't hide behind…well,
sophistry.
That was what Shan called bullshit excuses. If the marines hadn't helped land the devices on Bezer'ej, Lindsay Neville wouldn't have been able to do it on her own. Nor would Rayat.

It was the kind of call you could only make in hindsight. He still felt he should have made it.

The wess'har didn't, though. They had weird ideas about guilt and responsibility. They'd blown up
Actaeon
and wiped out entire isenj colonies on Bezer'ej in retribution, but as far as they were concerned the marines were innocent and Lindsay Neville and Mohan Rayat were guilty. Wess'har didn't think like humans.

“You want the court martial finding overturned too?” said Chahal. “If they quash it, you've got to go back, haven't you?”

“I'll settle for resigning. I can't go anywhere.” There was no point telling them the technicalities of removing
c'naatat
and why—
c'naatat
or not—he had to stay with Shan and Aras. He took his fighting knife from his belt and drew the blade down the inside of his forearm, letting blood well from the cut. It hurt like hell. He
needed
to do this, to show them what it did until they really thought it through just the way he had night after night. “Take a good look at this and ask if you want a dose getting loose on Earth. 'Cos I don't think you do.”

Sometimes even
he
needed to see it for himself to believe what had happened to him. The marines simply stared, and he was aware they were looking at his face rather than the rapidly healing wound on his arm.

“Yeah, you're not going anywhere, are you?” said Barencoin. “Just as well you've got Frankland to keep you warm.”

I wish. I've blown it now, I reckon. She'll never let me touch her now. She's fucking furious.

“Yeah,” said Ade.

Webster turned away and fanned out her cards in her hand, looking unimpressed. “We've got a few years to sit out before we can head home. I'd rather concentrate on getting through that first. It's not a given.”

“We could go back to Umeh,” said Chahal.

“They're kicking off a civil war by all accounts.”

“That's what we do best.” Chahal inspected his cards. “War and stuff.”

Qureshi looked more in need of a square meal than ever. She was getting too thin. “Whose side? It's not our war. And what use are we going to be to them? The Eqbas have kit that makes the ESF670 look like a water pistol.”

So that was what was gnawing at them now; they weren't the top of the military food chain any longer. Ade considered that. It hadn't struck him before. He still clung to his professional pride because it made him who he was, but getting kicked out didn't dent that half as much as realizing you weren't the best any longer.

Morale needed boosting. He was still the bloody sergeant.

“Buck up, you buggers,” he said. “Pound for pound, a Royal can still show them how it's done.”

Qureshi managed a grin. Even Barencoin, the miserable bastard, seemed placated.
When did Mart get so sour?
Ade laid down his cards and stood up.

“I'm going for my run.”

“Suit yourself,” said Barencoin, all disbelief.

Ade wasn't lying. He really
did
run each day, through the center of the city and the alleys that threaded through the bottom of the caldera and out onto the plain itself. He ran every day because routine mattered. Routine gave you discipline and structure, two lifelines he clung to.

The wess'har were used to him now; they knew he ran for no purpose other than to stay fit even though
c'naatat
didn't need to worry about that. But today he was running to catch Shan as she returned from visiting Esganikan's camp.

He stopped at the pearl-coated pillars of basalt at the city boundary, running his fingertips over the polished surfaces. The fine drizzle was still falling. For F'nar, this was a cold winter, and there had even been snow for a few days. Sometimes the place felt like home as long as he didn't look at the alien vegetation and wildlife, and even then he found some echoes of familiarity in them. Maybe that was the legacy of Aras's memories, carried on the blood that Shan had mingled with his when she head-butted him.

You shot her. You helped capture her for Lindsay and Rayat. Jesus, if she can forgive you for that, maybe she can forget you infected them.

Eventually Shan appeared in the distance, striding in that piss-off way that defied anyone to stand in her path. Ade decided she must have been a fearsome presence in uniform when she patrolled Reading Metro. She was still bloody scary now.

Shit, he loved her. He loved her
because
she was scary and always knew what to do when things went pear-shaped. She had a nice arse, too.

He wondered how angry she could get with him; she'd
kicked the shit out of Rayat, but it wasn't physical pain he dreaded, just rejection. Whatever it took to get back in her good books, he'd do it.