Matriarch Read online

  MATRIARCH

  KAREN TRAVISS

  For Lyn Graham, Martin Welsford, and all those who

  put truth before convenience

  Contents

  Prologue

  Recycling won’t save the Earth, and neither will prayer.

  1

  Mohan Rayat gave up the reflex struggle to stop his…

  2

  “She’s going to fucking well skin us when she finds…

  3

  Mohan Rayat fought to stop trying to breathe. He thought…

  4

  “You hiding from Frankland?” asked Mart Barencoin.

  5

  It took a lot to reduce Eddie to speechless silence…

  6

  The sea around Rayat was growing lighter and greener. Sunlight…

  7

  Lindsay stared at the squirming translucent tubes clutched in one…

  8

  “Where is he?” said Shan.

  9

  Sand castles. They’re sand castles.

  10

  The eggshell domes of the ussissi settlement just outside F’nar…

  11

  Shan sat and stared at the ESF670 rifle on the…

  12

  President Pirb repeated his call to arms as the Eqbas…

  13

  The podship was a far simpler vessel than Rayat had…

  14

  Rayat found he could walk faster than Lindsay. Once they’d…

  15

  Lindsay laid the glass petals on a slab of stone…

  16

  Shan sat next to her own grave and realized that…

  17

  If you were pregnant, you couldn’t get any more pregnant…

  18

  “It’s been years since I covered a tree-planting,” said Eddie.

  19

  “Funny how the moral high ground tends to flatten out…

  20

  The Eqbas could have been any human biohaz team as…

  21

  Aras decided the crops could do without him for one…

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise

  Other Books by Karen Traviss

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  F’nar, Wess’ej: November 2376

  Recycling won’t save the Earth, and neither will prayer.

  The Eqbas are coming. It might be a few decades away, but they’re still coming, and I know them. They’re very hospitable, they love their kids, and they can kill millions without losing a second’s sleep.

  You can reach shock overload pretty quickly. After the first headlines and the protests and the panic, human beings tend to settle into apathy if it’s not their life that’s on the line. News is about now and here and me.

  When we wandered into a war zone in the Cavanagh’s Star system, that was news. When we got greedy and nuked a neutral world out here, that got plenty of attention too; and so did the fact that the wess’har blew our warship—Actaeon—out of the sky.

  But we’re twenty-five light-years away from Earth, and domestic crises edge alien wars well down the running order now. When there’s fighting and suffering on your own doorstep, do you care that we’ve pretty well exterminated an entire alien race ourselves? Do you care if a woman spaced herself rather than hand over the parasite she was carrying—and survived? Does it matter that the local wess’har are so pissed off with humans that they’ve called in the big guns to visit Earth and teach us a lesson?

  If you don’t, you probably will in thirty years’ time. Because that’s roughly when the Eqbas Vorhi fleet will reach Earth, and they’re not visiting to say they come in peace or any uplifting shit like that. They’re coming to punish us for genocide. And while they’re at it, they want to restore Earth to a state of environmental balance. In brief: a lot of humans are fucked. Most of us, probably.

  They don’t see us as special, you see. That’s just our view of the universe. It’s not widely shared.

  The Eqbas Vorhi fleet is on its way, and there’s nothing we can do about it. My news desk is losing interest by the day.

  It all feels so far in the future.

  But I know it’s not.

  Private journal of Eddie Michallat, BBChan correspondent on Wess’ej, Cavanagh’s Star system: the only independent observer, 150 trillion miles from home.

  1

  You detonated cobalt bombs on Ouzhari in your greed to keep c’naatat to yourself. The bezeri who died were collateral damage—that is your phrase, is it not? Now Earth will learn what collateral damage really means.

  CURAS TI,

  senior Matriarch of the Eqbas Vorhi,

  in a response to the Foreign Secretary of

  the Federal European Union

  Bezer’ej, Cavanagh’s Star system: continental shelf off Ouzhari island, December 2376

  Mohan Rayat gave up the reflex struggle to stop his lungs filling with water, drowned—which was nowhere near as painless as they claimed—and plummeted into the crushing black depths where the light of Cavanagh’s Star never penetrated.

  You bitch, Frankland.

  And he wasn’t dead.

  You sanctimonious bitch.

  He was shaking uncontrollably and convulsing, but he wasn’t dead.

  Rayat was aware of the kaleidoscopes of colored light rippling above him in the mantles of the last surviving bezeri. He was a living corpse, a man imprisoned with his victims, a man who couldn’t die.

  Hold on to that. Whatever the parasite does to you, you’re still a man.

  He had no air supply and no suit. He could taste blood in his mouth: or maybe it was just something in the silt billowing around him. He sank down on the seabed, facing upwards, crushed by pressure and a searing agony in his head beyond any pain he’d ever experienced. For a moment he wondered if his survival was the result of a primal diving reflex, and not the intervention of an alien parasite.

  He’d never told anyone how scared he was of water. Now he never had to fear it again.

  Somehow he could still see: green, violet, blue. Coils and fractal patterns of ludicrous fairy-lights danced overhead, the chatter of the bezeri—the few who had survived the irradiation from bombs he had detonated.

  I never meant to kill you. You just happened to be in the way.

  But the bezeri couldn’t hear him. He couldn’t even hear himself. The silence was overwhelming, but although he could still reason, and he knew his eardrums were ruptured, he still expected to sense the sounds of his own body. It was surprising how much you noticed the absence of your own heartbeat.

  His heart had stopped. He had no idea how he could still be conscious.

  So Frankland must have gone through this when she stepped out the airlock: dead and not dead, aware that her whole body had ceased to function and existed solely by the grace of a microscopic parasite called c’naatat that was worth destroying worlds to capture.

  You bitch, I beat you. I got your precious parasite in the end. Suck on that, bitch.

  No sunlight: he could have been at least a thousand meters down, then, below the depth where light penetrated. When silent screaming panic overtook him—screams he couldn’t force out of his airless lungs—he concentrated on numbers to stay sane.

  I should be dead. A thousand meters…maybe one hundred atmospheres…ten thousand kilospascals…

  But his mouth opened in a panting reflex anyway, because he couldn’t take in what c’naatat was doing to keep him alive at this depth. The cold burned him. He should have looked around for Lindsay Neville but all he could think of right then was Frankland, drifting in the vacuum of space without a suit. She’d spaced herself to stop him getting hold of the c’naatat she carried. And
—bitch, bitch, bitch—it had all been for nothing, because no matter how bad things were now, he’d got what he’d come for, and a small sane part of him rejoiced.

  I beat you, you bitch. And your precious bloody Ade and your pet wess’har helped me do it. I hope you find out, oh shit yes I pray you do, you bitch.

  It was amazing what you could hang on to when you needed to pass beyond death. God, numbers, vengeance: whatever it took. He seized them all.

  Shan Frankland had survived. And so would he—somehow.

  And he could wait.

  2

  We’ve had our environment screwed for centuries by the Americas and Europe and the Sinostates. They shat out their crap and we paid the price. Now it’s our turn to fuck them. We can invite anyone we please into our territory. And that includes aliens who can bomb them back into dodo country.

  The Right Honorable JAMES MATSOUKIS MAP,

  Pacific Rim States lead delegate to the United Nations, in private conversation with the Canadian and

  Indigenous Peoples delegates

  F’nar, Wess’ej: December 2376

  “She’s going to fucking well skin us when she finds out,” said Ade Bennett.

  The soldier kept pace with Aras all the way up the steeply carved steps to the top of the terraces, no mean feat for a short human male. Aras wondered if he would have managed it before his physiology was altered by c’naatat, and suspected that he would. He was a Royal Marine: he prided himself on his fitness.

  “We’ll find a way to tell her,” said Aras. “And she may not understand our reasons at first, and she’ll swear at us like she always does, but in time she’ll calm down and life will go on.”

  It will go on, yes. That’s the one thing a c’naatat host can be sure of. But not as before.

  As soon as he said it, Aras knew things wouldn’t be that simple. How did you tell your isan, your wife, your matriarch, that you’d thrown away her sacrifice? Shan Frankland had spaced herself rather than let Mohan Rayat get a sample of c’naatat. And now Aras—or Ade, whoever felt bravest—had to tell her that they had willingly infected the man with it.

  And Commander Lindsay Neville.

  That would probably infuriate her most of all. The woman she called Lin had tried to be a pale imitation of her and succeeded only in disappointing her. Aras knew Shan well enough to guess that: if you survived unimaginable pain and terror, drifting for months in space, unable to die, you didn’t easily forget that kind of ordeal or forgive its necessity.

  Ade paused at the top of the steps to catch his breath, hands on hips. Stretching nearly two hundred meters directly beneath them, the city of F’nar covered the slopes of the caldera, an amphitheater of pearl-coated terraces carved into the rock.

  “I’m the one who did it.” Ade wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “So I’ll explain it to her.”

  “No. I’m—”

  “Yeah. You’re her old man and I’m not.”

  “You’ll be her old man too, as you put it.”

  Ade shook his head and began walking along the terrace to the far end of the caldera where the home they shared was cut into the stone.

  “If I don’t tell her and then I sleep with her, she’ll pick it up from my memories. And then she’ll kill me.” He speeded up a little to the pace he described as a yomp. Aras had never worked out what that meant. “And if I tell her first, she’ll kick me out anyway. So either way—I’ve lost her. I might as well face it like a man.”

  Aras had lived with c’naatat for centuries by human reckoning, and its ability to manipulate genetic material and keep its host alive still surprised him. It seemed able to do very nearly anything; it tinkered, it borrowed, it scavenged, it rearranged, it remodeled, and it defended. One set of genes that had taken its fancy was genetic memory—a legacy from his isenj captors when he was a prisoner of war. And, as c’naatat crossed membranes from host to host, in blood or in the act of copulation, memories surfaced in other minds.

  Sometimes the memories it picked up were terrible. Sometimes it simply showed you how other people truly saw you. And sometimes they were both the same thing.

  “Ade, it’s not the memory transfer that you fear.”

  Ade didn’t look round. He was a compact, muscular human with a distinctively upright posture. His rifle bounced a little, slung across his back. “No, it’s trying to hide it from her, mate. I can’t do that.”

  Aras had always been sure of his duty until the gethes, the carrion eaters, the secular humans, had come to Cavanagh’s Star in pursuit of a lost colony and commercial gain. Shan had changed his life out of all recognition. He wondered if he now resented her for that, but no—he had infected her. Without c’naatat, she could have gone home again; and Ade could have gone with her. Aras found himself back in the circular argument, wondering if he should have gone to live among the bezeri remnant to help them rebuild instead of letting Lindsay Neville and Rayat take his place.

  He had never had such cyclical, dithering thoughts before. A wess’har accepted reality and dealt with it, never glancing back. Humans fantasized about alternate realities to avoid the only one they could actually influence. He realized he was becoming too human.

  “We’ll tell her together,” said Aras. Ade is my housebrother. We share genes now. We’re committed. “The bezeri wanted them alive. We’ll explain that to her, and face the consequences.”

  “You talk a good game.” The clop-clop-clop of Ade’s boots echoed off the flagstone terrace. “And I’ll be right there when she hands you your balls on a skewer.”

  “I have no balls,” said Aras.

  Ade snorted. It sounded like bitter amusement. “Neither will I after today.”

  The marine was right. Shan would be more than furious; she would feel betrayed. Loyalty and honesty seemed to matter more to her than love.

  But if they had no other choice but her, then she was confined to her own infected kind as well. If she rejected them, she had nobody.

  Aras felt shame—real human shame—at thinking so manipulatively. A female was a precious and scarce gift, one a c’naatat carrier could never have expected. He could never be allowed to father offspring and pass on his condition; but he could at least have an isan to love and look after. Unlike him, though, Shan Frankland didn’t fear being alone. She dreaded doing what was wrong. Loneliness alone would not bind her to him—or Ade.

  Ade paused at the pearl-coated door, slipped his rifle onto his shoulder, and listened as if he was about to storm the house.

  “She’s not back yet.” He put his hand on the latch and pushed it open. There was no need for locks among wess’har. “Got time to rehearse our excuses.”

  They could hide nothing in the end. Shan had developed a wess’har isan’s olfactory system, and she could smell the pheromones of agitation, anger, fear. She would certainly smell something was wrong.

  At least I’ll still have a brother.

  “Perhaps she’ll see why we did it.”

  Ade laid his rifle on the shelf next to the door and hung up his jacket. “I don’t think so somehow.”

  “She forgave you for shooting her. She forgave me for infecting her with c’naatat.”

  “Let’s hope she works in threes, then.”

  They stared at each other for a moment, knowing the answer. Shan cared about consequences. She cared about how things fitted into the bigger picture, and what she feared most—what the wess’har feared most—was that c’naatat would get into the wider human population somehow, with all its attendant disasters.

  Perhaps Shan would see the contagion as Rayat’s punishment. Aras considered the irony: Rayat had been sent to seize it for the FEU. Whether he really was a Treasury agent or military intelligence didn’t matter now. He had it. But he wasn’t going anywhere, because there was no way off Bezer’ej, not without wess’har or Eqbas assistance. It was the ultimate punishment—a cold dark eternity trapped with your prize and no way of using it, confined with the bitter remnant of the sp
ecies you helped kill.

  Aras wished he had Eddie’s gift for presenting unpalatable information with selective grace. He was sure he could make it seem like a triumph.

  “Your turn to cook dinner,” said Ade.

  They stood side by side at the table, slicing evem and the last peppers that had ripened on the windowsill. Ade always seemed to seek refuge in dull routine, as if he could refashion and erase the brutal and chaotic world that had made him by mimicking the uneventful lives of lesser men. He was very precise about the thickness of the slices.

  “Bugger,” he said quietly. He examined his fingertip, crowned with a welling blob of dark red blood. “Cut myself.”

  C’naatat still seemed to be a novelty to him. He licked the blood away and watched the cut as it closed and faded, then resumed his task.

  Half an hour later, Aras heard the distinctive thud of Shan’s footsteps approaching the door. He wished that he could suppress his scent the way she did. Ade looked at him and shrugged.

  “Here we go,” he said.

  The door creaked slightly before it swung open and brought in a gust of cool, damp air.

  “Hey, you two,” said Shan. She forced a smile, and that wasn’t like her at all. “I’m home.”

  F’nar plain, Wess’ej: Eqbas Vorhi camp

  They were leaving.

  Eddie Michallat gasped to a halt in the center of the Eqbas camp. The bronze bubble habitats clustered on the plain were rolling together and coalescing like mercury, metamorphosing from little globe-like tents into a huge tapered cylinder of a warship, a belt of brilliant red and blue chevron lights pulsing along its length.

  For a moment Eddie forgot his straining lungs and stared at the technology that made him feel like a particularly retarded amoeba fresh out of the primordial slime.