Judge

Prologue

St George, Eastside Australia, inside the exclusion zone: January 2401.

1

Shan Frankland rolled over, stomach heaving in disoriented protest, and…

2

Eqbas flagship: Earth orbit.

3

F'nar, Wess'ej.

4

Australian PM's flight, en route for the Eqbas camp: next…

5

Yarralumla, Kamberra: early evening.

6

Nazel Island, Bezer'ej.

7

Immigrant Reception Center, south of Kamberra: next morning.

8

Immigrant Reception Center, Shan Frankland's quarters

9

Immigrant Reception Center's airstrip, late afternoon.

10

F'nar, Wess'ej.

11

Reception Center's landing area: six hours later.

12

En route to police headquarters, Kamberra.

13

Immigrant Reception Center grounds.

14

Reception Center storeroom.

15

Rabi'ah: one week after the change of Eqbas command.

16

F'nar, Wess'ej.

17

F'nar, Wess'ej: March 2406.

18

F'nar, Wess'ej: 2426: twenty years later.

19

F'nar: upper terraces.

20

F'nar, Mestin's home: three days later.

21

Baral Plain, northern Wess'ej landmass.

22

Jejeno, Umeh: August 19, 2426.

23

F'nar Plain; memorial cairn.

Epilogue

Michallat Butte, outside F'nar: January 30, 2429.

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Praise

Other Books by Karen Traviss

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

St George, Eastside Australia, inside the exclusion zone: January 2401.

 

“Shitty death, PM,” said the driver. “Look at the
size
of that bloody thing.”

Den Bari, Prime Minister of Australia, and Kimbell McKinnon craned their necks as far as they could to take a look at the spacecraft from inside the vehicle. In the end, they had to get out and stand in the morning sun, a shocking, breath-stopping 52 degrees of blast-furnace heat after the comfortable chill of the car.

And the ship was huge. It hung high in the sky over a desert of abandoned buildings, a smooth cigar shape, and when Bari took a look through the scope, it resolved into gently gleaming bronze metal with what seemed to be lights or sunlight flashing off it. Even without any real sense of scale or distance, he could see that it was bigger than anything Earth had ever constructed. But that wasn't what was most shocking. It was the fact that it seemed to be changing shape as he watched it.

And it was
alien.
It was from another solar system, the very first to visit Earth—unless all those nutters claiming they had probes up their backsides hadn't been hallucinating after all.

“Is that heat haze?” said Bari. “The thing looks like it's warping.”

Kimbell shielded his brow with his hand. “No, sir, it's changing shape, all right. Look.”

The cigar was thinning out at one point like a sausage of modeling clay rolled between a kid's palms. Where the metal was deforming—
was
it metal, did these creatures even
use
metal?—it was changing color, too, turning from bronze to the powdery blue bloom of a grape. Then the smaller section broke away and flew off, a perfect little rugby ball of a ship, silent and speed-blurred. It was just as if the damn thing had given birth.

“I suppose that's why they call it the mothership,” Kimbell said. It was funny how he often drew the same parallels that Bari did. “You have to see it to believe it, I suppose. That's some tech.”

The two of them watched the alien ship for as long as they could stand the heat. It wasn't alone. The rugby ball had vanished but more dark shapes, the same bronze color, appeared in the sky but with pebbled hulls as if they'd gathered barnacles on the journey.

It was a fleet.

Bari had known it was coming for the best part of thirty years. His teen years had been spent worrying about the aliens who were coming to punish Earth for nuking an alien world and to sort out its dirty, wasteful ways—hoping that Australia's cooperation would save his country. The Eqbas Vorhi fleet—the consequences of hubris, the judgment of godlike aliens—always seemed to be around an unspecified corner but never arriving, like the paperless office or peace on Earth. But it was here and happening. It was
now.

And he was now the prime minister of the country playing host to them, while the rest of Earth held its breath.

How did we ever think we could pull this off? What the hell did we think we were doing?

It was the end of everything he knew and had taken for granted. Somehow, the images that he'd been studying for years hadn't prepared him for this moment.

Kimbell batted away a solitary fly. It was too hot even for them, most of the time.

“If they're a million years ahead of us or whatever, how can they even begin to understand us?” he asked.

“You think they even
have
to?”

“Well, at least we'll understand our other guests.”

“They might as well be aliens themselves.” Bari couldn't take his eyes off the ship. He was ready to believe that it was just an expensive advertising stunt “The colonists have never seen Earth either.”

They were going to have a bloody hard time finding other Christians like themselves in this area, too, but if they'd volunteered to come back to a world that was baking to death, then maybe they knew something he didn't. Faith was a wonderful thing.

“At least they're used to living underground,” Bari said. “They say they built an underground city with a church, everything carved out of rock. I saw it on that BBChan documentary. Michallat.”

A lot of Australian cities had also moved underground when the temperatures got too high. All that was left on the surface now was a flat wilderness of a land once filled with ranches and wheat. The seas had reclaimed large parts of the south. There would be humans on that ship who wouldn't recognize the coastlines they'd left.

“Just as well they're used to roughing it, then.” Kimbell opened the car door and stood in the draft of cold air that rushed out, arms held away from his sides. “And Michallat's a know-all ponce, PM. Can't stand him. I bet the Eqbas won't be anything like they are on the telly.”

But Bari couldn't take his eyes off the Eqbas ship. It moved slowly east as if it was tracking them, and then it
fragmented.

There was no other word for it. Chunks flew off, more mini rugby balls of molten-to-solid bronze, not in a random explosion but in a controlled burst like a fireworks display, spreading fragments in a uniform radial pattern. The parts dispersed, streaking across the sky in different directions, and the largest part lifted higher into the sky.

“Fireworks.” Bari wondered how the Eqbas did that. “I always forget my cam when there's something amazing to see.”

“Fireworks all right, sir,” Kimbell said. They got into the vehicle; the cool relief of the aircon was one of the purest animal pleasures left in life. “The fireworks display to mark the end of the bloody world.”

Shan Frankland rolled over, stomach heaving in disoriented protest, and found herself staring at the curved surface of a marbled planet from space.

She'd been here before, without a suit.

Shit, shit, shit, I've been spaced again, I'm spaced again…

Thin watery vomit came to a spattering halt in front of her face as it hit something solid, and she knew she wasn't treading vacuum this time—not drifting in the void, freeze-dried, yet alive and conscious—but on an Eqbas ship with its deck in transparent display mode. It wasn't the most reassuring thing to see when you were struggling to surface from cryosuspension.

“Shit,” she said again. “Shit, you said I'd
sleep
through this.”

Her voice came out as a rasping whisper as she inhaled the distinctive scent of an agitated Eqbas. The ship was alive with the noise, and smells of three species—Eqbas crew, ussissi aides, human payload. Then she fell the rest of the way out of the cryo pod, wondering why she wasn't lying in a pool of vomit. The deck was smooth and clean again, and also mercilessly transparent. When she managed to turn her head, she could see Eqbas crew gazing down at the planet below like tourists.

“Shan Chail
—”

Shan was more focused now. “It's Earth. It's
Earth,
isn't it?”

“Have you been conscious for the whole journey?”

“Enough of it.” Shan was on her hands and knees, trying to tell her instincts that she wasn't falling, her body returning rapidly to its normal temperature.
C'naatat
could do that. “Why didn't you check on me, for Chrissakes? Couldn't you see I wasn't unconscious?”

“We
did
check.” The Eqbas crewman wasn't like a Wess'ej wess'har at all except for his scent. His flat brown face wasn't as striking as the elegant seahorse head and citrine eyes of his cousins, but he had the same citrus smell when agitated. “You triggered no alarms,
chail.
Perhaps
c'naatat
caused this. Perhaps we misjudged the bio-indicators for humans.”

How long had it been? Five months?
Five months.
Five relative months to span twenty-five light-years. If the cryo hadn't put her out completely, then Ade Bennett might also have been trapped in that cold paralyzed limbo, drifting in and out of consciousness and unable to do anything about it, breathing and heartbeat so slow that it felt like death, and maybe Aras had as well.
Poor sods.
She had to find them and make sure they were okay.

It was just like that, being spaced. Only worse.

C'naatat
had altered all three of them enough to make all kinds of unpleasant experiences possible. The parasite had kept her alive in vacuum when she'd stepped out of an airlock to keep it from human exploitation: she couldn't die. She hadn't even begun to scratch the surface of what the damn thing could do when it came to preserving and modifying its host organism, and that still worried the shit out of her. It had already showed her enough of its tricks to convince her it should never fall into the hands of those who would have the most use for it.

And here she was
bringing it back to Earth,
after she'd tried to kill herself to prevent exactly that.

You're fucking insane. Why didn't you stay on Wess'ej?

Because you've got a job to finish. Because you wanted to bring the gene bank home. Because you think the bloody Eqbas are going to wipe out humans like they culled the isenj on Umeh. Because Ade and Aras are right, and you really are an interfering bitch who thinks she can run the world better.

She couldn't recall ever worrying about humans before, and Earth could have done with a lot less of them.
Filthy, shitty things. We are, we really are.
Whatever had made her change her mind and come back eluded her now. Maybe this was part of thawing out, and in a while she'd have her old clarity back again. She tried to recall what it had been like to be revived from the mummification of three months in space, and remembered bizarre out-of-body moments when she didn't even know
what
she was, which one of
c'naatat
's previous hosts, let alone
who.

“I need to see Ade.” It was Ade she thought of first, a microsecond before she worried about Aras, and she felt a little guilty about that as if she had betrayed him: but if you had two partners, one had to be first in the queue. She got up and steadied herself against a bulkhead. The structure of the Eqbas vessel was disorientingly translucent in some places but solid and impregnable in others, and it was hard enough to negotiate its shifting layout at the best of times. “Is he conscious yet? What about Aras?”

The Eqbas's two-toned voice had a placatory note, but she was probably imagining that. “Both of them have been revived and made no mention of being conscious during suspension. They've gone to locate the other marines.”

Shan stared at the deck but still couldn't see where the vomit had gone. There was nothing. The hull material—liquid to solid, solid to liquid, whatever was required of matter to make a ship that could become a fleet and a squadron of fighters at a moment's notice—appeared to have disposed of it.

“So where's Eddie?”

Eddie Michallat, as permanent a fixture as her
c'naatat
parasite, was going to be a busy man. He could forget reporting. He had a proper job to do. He could handle all the bloody media wanting to know every cough, spit, and fart about the Eqbas, who had come on a far-from-unanimous invitation to put Earth's environment back together. Eddie would argue all that shit about his neutrality as usual, but he'd play the spokesman in the end. Esganikan Gai, the Eqbas commander, seemed to know how to press his buttons to get him to do what she wanted.

“Eddie Michallat is not on board,” said the Eqbas officer.

Typical: he'd wangled an early disembarkation. “What do you mean,
not on board
?”

There were a lot more Eqbas milling around now, the females with that plume of hair down the center of their skulls like angry cockatoos. They glanced at her as if she was behaving oddly. Maybe she was.

The Eqbas officer—Cirvanali, Cirvenuli, she couldn't recall his name right then—smelled even more acidic, as if he was waiting for her to lose her temper. They were a totally undiplomatic people, so his hesitation was telling.

“Eddie Michallat chose to stay on Wess'ej,
Shan Chail.
”

It took Shan a few moments to process the enormity of that statement. Eddie—the embedded BBChan journo she'd never wanted on the original mission, the cause of many of her woes, but also the solution to many of her problems—was twenty-five years in the past, 150 trillion miles away. He was as good as dead.

The last she'd seen of him…he was saying he'd be on board, and that he'd be in demand when he got back. He was planning on claiming his back pay from BBChan, 103 years of it.

“How could the bastard just
stay behind
?” It wasn't a question. She felt more bereaved than betrayed. “What did he say? Jesus, didn't he even give a reason? I need to talk to him. Get me an ITX link.”

“I know nothing of his reasons,” said the Eqbas, ignoring her demand. “But if you're arguing, then you must be well, and Esganikan has more urgent matters for you to attend to. There is nothing you can do to retrieve Eddie Michallat now.”

The brutal simplicity of the statement stung. Shan still found it hard to accept that there really were things that she simply couldn't do.
C'naatat
had done little to disabuse her of the idea.

“Do Ade and Aras know?” But her gut felt hollow, and not just because she'd just emptied what little there was in it over the deck.
Eddie wasn't here
. “I'll find an ITX node. You go and do whatever you have to. When are we landing?”

“When Esganikan has completed her initial discussions with the
gethes.
And yes, your males do know that Eddie stayed behind. They seem equally displeased.”

Gethes:
carrion eaters. Sometimes it was descriptive, sometimes pejorative. But it always meant humans, because the wess'har species didn't eat other animals. They didn't touch them, exploit them, or get in their way. Eqbas just brought down civilizations that crossed their line of ecological morality, playing the galactic policeman. Shan wondered whether the humans on Earth had yet grasped the full implications of highly militarized vegans.

No, they probably hadn't.

“Okay,” Shan said. “It's not like I'm going anywhere, is it?”

She made her way through the ship, fretting about Eddie. Jesus, he was just a journalist. The Eqbas could invade Earth without him. But she was damned if she was going to do his job and act as their liaison.
Stupid bastard.
What was he playing at?

No, it'll be twenty-old years before I see him again, and that means
—

She'd already lost everyone she ever knew on Earth, jerked seventy-five years out of time by the mission that took her to Bezer'ej nearly three years ago. Now she was facing it again.
No Eddie.
No, worse than that: an Eddie in his nineties by the time she got back. And Nevyan, her friend, the wess'har who saved her life, who never gave up looking for her body when she was adrift in space—she'd be decades older too. But wess'har lived longer than normal humans. A
lot
longer.

Nevyan was staying on her homeworld. It was her duty, just as Shan felt hers was returning to Earth with the Eqbas fleet. She had to be here.

To do what, exactly? You think one poxy human, even you, can make a difference to a fleet that pretty well leveled Umeh?

The shifting bulkheads always made her feel like she was negotiating a hall of mirrors. She almost tripped over the communications officer as an apparently solid sheet of material thinned and parted in front of her, disorienting her enough to make her think she was falling again.

“Shan Chail.”
The Eqbas put his thin spider of a hand out to stop her but he didn't actually touch her. They were all scared of catching her parasite, unlikely though that was. “
Shan Chail,
you must adjust more slowly. You'll injure yourself.”

That was the very least of her worries. Almost any injury or illness she could think of was simply temporary pain;
c'naatat
could repair anything except fragmentation. She wondered if all the Eqbas understood what the parasite could do quite as well as Esganikan did.

“I'm fine,” she said. “Where's Ade?”

The Eqbas pointed the way with an awkward human gesture. Shan followed the line of his finger to in the accommodation decks, neat rows of body-sized chambers stacked at a slight angle like tilted honeycombs. There were still dark shapes in some, but the two individuals who mattered most to her—a Royal Marine sergeant and a five-hundred-year-old alien war criminal—weren't among them. She couldn't pick up their respective scents in the melee of smells flooding the ship, and she had to stop a passing ussissi to ask for directions. The meerkatlike creature, chest-tall and—to use Eddie's description—like a foul-tempered Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, indicated aft with a jerk of his head.

She found Ade and Aras leaning against a patch of transparent bulkhead and gazing down at the planet beneath them just as she had, like a couple of kids who were desperate to go out and play in some exciting new place. They struck her as oddly alike despite the fact that Ade still looked like a regular man and Aras—however much human DNA his
c'naatat
had scavenged—would never pass for a human.
C'naatat
liked tinkering and rearranging its host's genome, sometimes visibly, sometimes not.

“So we made it back.” Ade managed a smile, looking her up and down. “Jesus, Boss, you look rough.”

“The sodding cryo didn't put me out for the count.” Shan was too self-conscious to greet either of them with a kiss. Somehow being the Guv'nor and showing affection in public still didn't mix. “I've been awake on and off for most of the bloody journey. You?”

“Dead to the world. Out like a light.”

Aras seemed more interested in the spectacle below. “I recall nothing of being in suspension.”

“So when did you find out that Eddie had stayed behind?”

Aras turned to look at her, eyes neither wess'har nor human but charcoal-black and sad like a dog's. “When I went to look for him. I checked on everyone I knew in cryo.”

“Didn't you think of thawing me out and telling me?”

“Why? What could you have done? There was no going back.”

Wess'har were scrupulously pragmatic. In a human, that behavior would have been riddled with ulterior motive, the kind of thing that corroded trust; but in Aras it was exactly what he said, no more and no less. He had occasionally lied by simple delay, but for all the changes that
c'naatat
had made to him over five centuries, his core was still wess'har—literal, uninterested in deception, and nose-bleedingly honest to the point of offense.

He was right, of course. She'd just have been impotently angry. Ade snapped back into sergeant mode and distracted her.

“How long do you think we're going to be here, Boss?” He still called her that, as if she was his senior officer, and she found it touching now rather than embarrassing. “Just asking. Stuff I need to do.”

It was a reminder that he had a life that she knew little about beyond the memories that
c'naatat
had transferred to her. She found it odd to be that intimate with another person—there was no relationship closer than one between
c'naatat
hosts—and relive his most traumatic moments as vividly as if she were him, and yet have no idea where he grew up or what he'd regretted leaving behind. She'd have to find out. It mattered.