Matriarch (12 page)

Yeah, I'm trapped under an upturned glass. Like a spider.

Eddie couldn't shake the analogy. Spiders seemed to form a sizeable chunk of his mental imagery at the moment. Isenj were spiders with piranha mouths, and he was a spider too, a soft pink one, and he wasn't sure who was outside the glass or within it, and whether the glass was a trap or a haven.

But there was one significant improvement in his situation: and that was a negotiated time slot on the ITX, thanks to Esganikan, or—to be more specific—thanks to the efforts of the Australians at the UN. He could guarantee getting hold of the BBChan news desk at least once a day. In
Jejeno, that meant sunrise for the time being. It was nauseatingly early and his stomach churned with fatigue.

Silly bastards.
Anyone in the FEU with three brain cells should have realized that he was the only neutral out here and attempted to sweet-talk him into a spot of informal intelligence gathering. It wouldn't have been the first time. But they hadn't even tried. He had his price ready if they ever did; unlimited ITX access.

He opened the ITX link that Livaor had managed to build into his handheld and comforted himself with the knowledge that he could at least conduct his business in private now—or at least as private as a shared comms link could ever be. None of the species in the Cavanagh's Star system had any concept of secrecy or encryption.

“'Morning, Mick.” Eddie doubted if the duty news editor slept much these days. He was gray-faced and unshaven. “You doing double shifts?”

“Might as well make the most of it.” Behind Mick, the newsroom looked as if the cleaning staff hadn't been around for a while. Cups and other detritus littered the desks. “I'll be retired by the time the Eqbas show up. Dead, even.”

“You're always so upbeat.”

“Have you been watching the output at all?”

“I've been a bit busy with an air raid.”

Mick rolled over his comment, oblivious. “We had another hurricane. We lost backup power for six hours and the roof came off the staff restaurant.”

“Okay, you win. That trumps my personal disaster.” It was a few weeks before Christmas back home. The climate had shifted an awful lot since he'd left Earth. “Look, things are going pear-shaped. Are you up to speed with the geopolitics here?”

“I have a hard time keeping up with the Earth side of things at the moment, mate.”

“Well, it looks like we've got a real shooting war. One of the neighboring states took exception to the Eqbas arriving in Jejeno and sent fighters into Northern Assembly airspace to take a crack at them.”

“And?”

“I've got the footage. And in retaliation the Eqbas wiped a town off the map. Buyg.”

“You got footage of that?”

“No, just the dogfight over Jejeno, but—”

“Oh.” Mick's personal amazement threshold seemed to have racked up a few notches overnight. Alien dogfights in the skies of exotic distant planets weren't big enough to shift his needle now. “Okay, send it down the line.”

It was a challenge. “If I can get some footage of Buyg…”

“Great.”

“Mick, are you listening? The Eqbas are heading our way in a few years and it'll be sobering to show the viewer what they can do.”

“We had anti-European riots over that last Eqbas piece we ran.”

“Are you being leaned on by the Foreign Office again?”

“Not anymore. It's just that we've got an immediate killer weather story with a domestic body count and something that might happen in thirty years is way down the menu today.”

“Point taken,” said Eddie, teeth gritted.
Sod you, mate.
But it had taken decades for the media to get excited about climate change, too, and by then it was too late: the seeds of inevitability were sown early. The Eqbas were coming. Nothing would divert them. “Look, the new Defense Secretary is going to want to see this. You might be able to trade it for a favor sometime.”

Eddie had done this before; he'd shared footage of wess'har vessels with the FEU. Somehow they felt they were getting something useful beyond a warning, but he doubted it after what he'd seen last night. It was just a reminder that they had thirty years to catch up technologically on a million-year-old civilization.

Mick's mind obviously wasn't set on
receive
today. “Are you okay, Eddie? Generally, I mean.”

“Well, if I'm not, you can't exactly send a car for me, can you?”

“Just checking. Manager's duty of care and all that.”

“I'm fine.”
I'm scared and I'm lonely and I'm excited and I wouldn't want to be anywhere else right now.
“Don't worry about me. I'm a local celeb. They even give me decent coffee. Do you want this footage or not?”

“Check in tomorrow. Jan's on duty.”

Eddie closed the link and marveled at how short the attention span of a news editor could be. But the isenj war was 150 trillion miles away, and its consequences decades in the future, and the problems of Europe were happening to Mick right now.

Eddie would have made the same call.

He recalled the bee cam and tracked it all the way back to the dome, watching what it could see via his handheld. He caught a glimpse of blackened buildings. The cam was programmed to search for specific shots, matching them against typical templates—large areas of certain colors and shapes—so it was a relief to find that bomb damage looked the same across the galaxy. The cam knew what to go for.

But it wasn't bomb damage. It was the destruction caused by a military vessel exploding and sending debris, hot metal and undischarged ordnance ripping through a heavily populated city.

It was an academic point. It was a
politician's
point.

The bee cam appeared in the distance, a dull gray sphere streaking head-on towards him through the heat haze tunnel of the defense shield, looking disturbingly like an incoming missile trailing turbulence. It slowed and he caught it in a practiced move.

“Well held, that man,” said a woman's voice.

It was Sofia Cargill from
Actaeon,
a lieutenant who was now the ranking officer in Umeh Station. The senior officers had died when Nevyan had launched the attack on the ship: Lindsay was dismissed the service for her actions on Bezer'ej. That left Cargill, a conspicuously young, sturdy redhead who had accepted responsibility without a murmur.

“I'm up for the first eleven if we can make enough room to play a game,” said Eddie.

“The lads are talking about clearing some space in the dome.” “Lads” was a unisex term they all used. Cargill stood at the airlock and squinted against the rising sun, Ceret, a star the isenj called Nir, and humans, in their erasing way, called Cavanagh's Star. The politics of names fascinated Eddie. He opted to call it Nir for the time being. “So what's happening out there?”

“Aftermath.” He thumbed the bee cam's controls and tilted his handheld for her to look at the screen. “But it just bounced off us.”

“Bloody hell.”

“Better to have the Eqbas on side than not.”

“I hate sitting here not knowing what's going on.”

“I'd lie low and say nothing, love. Leave it to Shan and Esganikan.”

“Not much choice.”

“Anyway, you've got more to worry about—keeping that dome in order.”

“Only for a few more months.”

“Something you're not telling, me?”

Cargill shrugged. “No secret.
Thetis
picks us up in ten months and fifteen days. We turned her back by remote.”

“Oh, that. You're going home, then?”
Thetis,
the ship that had brought him to Bezer'ej, was much slower than
Actaeon,
which had been built nearly fifty years later. “Bit of a disappointment for the ussissi and isenj embarked in her when they wake up.”

“They decided to cancel the Earth trip anyway. We're evacuating—well, some of us.”

“But it'll take seventy-five years to get back. You know what home is going to be like then, after the Eqbas have finished with it?” Eddie calculated, boggled by relative velocities and light-years. “They'll still get there more than forty years before
Thetis.
”

“Might be better.”

“Might be
worse.
”

“Whatever it is, it'll all be
over.
” Cargill looked remarkably cheerful. It seemed to be the navy way of coping. “Seventy-five years, twenty-five. We'll sleep through the lot, and it's a case of ten months here or nearly five. A lot of people have opted to go sooner rather than later.” She rubbed her eyes. “And it'll relieve the pressure on the station's systems. Good compromise all round.”

It removed leverage, too. But Eddie suspected the public didn't give a shit what happened to a few hundred FEU and Sinostates citizens out here. They were old news. They were a long way from practical assistance: a minimum of twenty-five years, in fact.

“I'm going for a walk,” said Eddie.

“You be careful, then,” said Cargill, and Eddie regretted that she was not his type.

He began walking down the invisible corridor, crossing the service road that ringed Umeh Station like a moat, and glanced up to check that the incongruously pretty Eqbas vessel was still on station above him. It gleamed bronze in the early morning sun, a little lower than it had hovered last night when it batted away incoming missiles like a casual pre-game badminton knockabout. Jejeno looked unnaturally deserted.

The last time he'd walked alone in this city, he'd nearly been killed in the crush. There were traffic rules for pedestrians here, and very few vehicles. That was a measure of the crowding. He paused on the perimeter that shimmered faintly like a very clean sheet of glass in front of him, only visible as a hint of substance at certain angles.

Eddie slipped on his transparent breather mask and reached out cautiously. He wasn't sure what he'd touch. But his fingers penetrated the barrier with a slight resistance, like pressing through water.

“Ah, sod it.” He stepped through.

When he crossed the first block and turned the corner, he found himself among crowds of isenj; not as tight-packed as he had seen before, but busy and moving fast enough for
him to have to match their pace and stick to the pedestrian traffic rules.

Isenj had quills. That made him careful, too. But he had walked much more dangerous streets on Earth, feeling somehow safer than he really was because he had a camera and a tabard marked
MEDIA
.

He stood at least a head taller than everyone else, looking down on dark heads. Isenj were subtly different shades of chocolate and umber and charcoal, and the clicking and whirring sounds—conversation, or just movement?—made him strain to hear patterns and understand them. Their scent of damp wood and the continuous movement only served to reinforce the impression of a living, dark forest floor alive with insects.

Eddie went with the flow of pedestrians, mindful not to make a sudden change of direction this time, and recorded a few landmarks to help him find his way back. A run of burned-out buildings and a deep crater that ran fifteen meters at an angle across the road told him exactly where last night's debris had landed. In the blackened rubble, water still fountained from a burst pipe, surrounded by isenj clutching tools.

Could the Eqbas protect the whole of Jejeno? Would they even want to? He hadn't worked out their mindset yet. If they were anything like their wess'har cousins, he suspected he might get a few unpleasant surprises.

This is not your species, and it's not your morality. Stop judging them. You intruded here.

Ahead of him, isenj started moving to the sides of the road, crowding together with sporadic shrill sounds, but the pace remained constant. He couldn't see why they were parting. Then he risked a glance behind him—no simple feat while trying to keep pace—and saw the top of an official isenj ground car just visible above the carpet of dark velvet heads.

The vehicle managed to make progress. As the sea of isenj parted, Eddie was suddenly aware that the road surface wasn't a uniform color, but covered in intricate, vivid
designs like the ones that covered many of the buildings. Just as he was wondering if it was some kind of traffic sign or merely decoration, the vehicle drew level with him and he heard,
“Eddie!”

It almost stopped him in his tracks, or it would have done if isenj hadn't started crushing into the back of his legs.
Shit.
He tried to step clear and get to the cleared space in the road, but he lost his balance. Hands grabbed his jacket and he was jerked off his feet and into the car so hard that his shins scraped along the running board and he swore loudly.

“Daft sod,” said Ade, and hauled him into a sitting position. “What are you doing off-camp without an escort?”

Eddie rubbed his leg ruefully. Shan and a masked Serrimissani stared down at him, somehow with matched expressions of disapproval despite the huge species gulf. It was the narrowed eyes that did it: two stroppy women.

“I can handle it, Ade.”

“Not on my watch.”

“I've been an embed before. I know the drill.”

“Yeah, and I've scraped people into body bags before.” Ade's expression was more intense than angry. Eddie noted that he was wearing gloves. “I don't want anything happening to you, mate. I haven't got a clue who regards us as targets and who doesn't, and neither have you.”

Yes, they
were
mates; Eddie, Ade and Aras. They'd shared a house after Shan's apparent death. They were his friends, the last left alive in the universe. And he hadn't worried much about catching
c'naatat.
Funny, that. Every time he shaved with a simple razor told him he was still mortal.