Matriarch (16 page)

Esganikan paused for a second. It always took her a little longer to convert to Earth metric. “Twenty thousand meters.”

Shan stood with her feet slightly apart as if bracing for impact, looking down, turning the ring around on her finger. She didn't seem used to wearing rings; Ade had never seen her wear any jewelry. But she hadn't taken it off yet, and that was reassuring.

“Looks lower,” said Ade.

The ship suddenly seemed to drop. Buyg loomed much larger, closer. Shan's intake of breath was audible and she put her hand on the nearest bulkhead. Ade's gut flipped and Eddie jerked back onto his heels. The ussissi nearby didn't move a muscle: Ade always kept an eye on them.

“Shit,” said Eddie. “What was that?”

“Magnification of the image,” said Esganikan wearily.

The deck behaved almost like a lens, then. Ade's brain had told him he was falling.

Shan seemed reassured. “This is the same technology as that electron microscope sheet you had on Ouzhari, isn't it?”

“The image projection is similar,” said Esganikan. “But that was a particle-force scope.”

It meant little to Ade. Shan raised an eyebrow. “If you ever want to raise capital when you get to Earth, auction that tech.”

“Do we need to?” asked Esganikan.

“No.”

“Good. Giving technology inappropriate to the user causes problems, I find.”

Ade was starting to form a picture of how they handled knowledge. They didn't have secrets. They didn't shove information down anyone's throat, either, but they had no concept of confidentiality and they didn't encrypt their comms. But even if you knew they were coming, there was sod all you could do about it. Stealth was redundant when you had overwhelming force.

Even a ship like this wasn't enough to hammer a planet on its own, though. That was interesting.

“So would you
tell
humans how to make one of those particle things?” asked Ade.

“We would answer questions.” Esganikan seemed totally unwary of interrogation. “There would be no reason not to.”

“But you wouldn't give them the kit.”

“Probably not.”

“So what if they asked you how to make one of those dispersing missiles?”

“We would ask
if
they could make it.”

“And?”

“If we decided they could, we would refuse to tell them.” Esganikan cocked her head and her vivid red plume bobbed. Eddie was right: she reminded him of a parrot, as capable of taking a chunk out of you as Shapakti's macaws.
“No, Sergeant, we are not as secretive as you, but neither are we stupid.”

Ade felt his face burn. Shan put her hand on his back, reassuring and protective. He liked that. So she hadn't switched off completely after all. “He's got a point. Your relaxed attitude to security concerns me sometimes, too.”

“It's sufficient.”

Eddie, still on his hands and knees on the transparent deck, chuckled to himself. “You missed your vocation, Ade. The art of political semantics.”

“I learned weasel-speak from you, mate.”
Yeah, I know what
semantics
means.
Eddie knew better than to patronize him, but Ade was still conscious of being undereducated. But at least he'd diverted Eddie from the subject of Lindsay Neville.

Esganikan pointed down through the deck. “The blast area is nine square kilometers and the firestorm damage extends to twice that.”

“Jesus. Not nukes, though.” She'd already said they didn't use them. “I mean, it's not like I can tell what you were firing last night—”

“The nearest equivalent appears to be your fuel-air device. Destruction without persistent contaminants.”

“Depends what your fuel is.”

“The explosive is nearly all combusted. And nontoxic. There is little we can do to stop debris being ejected into the atmosphere, but this can be cleaned up too.”

Shan snorted. “Well, it looks pretty bloody toxic from here. If you tried that on Earth you'd release so many pollutants from the built environment that you'd poison the place anyway.”

“That may well occur here, of course. Bioremediation will be necessary anyway.”

Ade made a note to look up
bioremediation
later. He could guess for the time being.

“You getting all this, Eddie?” Shan squatted down and fixed the journalist with her listen-to-me stare, oblivious of
the bee cam. She seemed to ignore it now, and Ade remembered what Eddie said about people eventually becoming far too comfortable with a fly on the wall. “What do you think the folks back home will make of this, eh?”

“It
ought
to have a highly laxative effect,” said Eddie. “But it's
not
back home, and it's not now. And it's not happening to them.”

“This is not our usual mode of operation.” Esganikan seemed a little offended. “But there's no other species or natural environment here that we need to avoid harming.”

“You're going to be a sucker for the fluffy bunny shield, then,” said Eddie. “Or the strategically placed tree.”

Esganikan appeared to understand
bunny.
“That's why we prefer species-specific measures. Your distaste for some weapons and not others seems almost irrational.”

She said it mildly, as if explaining to a particularly dim child. Ade thought bioweapons sounded tidier. He'd seen the aftermath of enough fuel-air bombs and other conventional ordnance with huge overpressures; it was ugly. But, like Shan always said, dead was dead, and shoving a knife in someone was pretty ugly too if you were on the sharp end of it.

This wasn't his war. He couldn't stop it happening. It made him think of things he wanted to keep out of his mind, memories he wished would just leave him alone, and so he switched off.

The ship moved towards the coast. Ade had worked out that the illuminated display on the bulkhead was a chart and he started to marry up the colors and symbols with ground features; the meandering yellow line was the coast. The Maritime Fringe seemed to be precisely that, a corridor all along the southern edge of the continent. No wonder they were paranoid. They looked as if they had their backs to the ocean, ringed on three borders by the Northern Assembly.

The ship passed over undamaged city made up of buildings without end that were light gray, cream and ochre. They ran right up to the edge of a rusty coastline and a dirty pink-tinged sea.

Esganikan clicked audibly. Ade wasn't sure if that was annoyance or regret. “They had more land before the ice caps receded.”

“That sounds familiar.”

“And as on your world, they found the climate change could be unpredictably rapid. It saddens me that we see this repeated so often.”

They were a long way into Maritime Fringe airspace now and nobody had opened fire on them. Maybe the Fringe had learned its lesson last night. But Ade was sure they hadn't, because people who felt that threatened tended to carry on lashing out. And isenj were definitely people. Once you looked past the quills and the absence of eyes, the English-speaking ones were very…human.

Esganikan was
much
more alien.

She turned to one of the bridge crew, who sat in niches as if they were dozing, glancing at lights in the bulkhead. Ade tried to find parallels with the ships he knew; maybe if an Eqbas had walked into the citadel of an FEU vessel they would have thought the crew was watching entertainment as they stared unmoving at bright fast-changing displays. Esganikan warbled in eqbas'u in her double-voice, just like Nevyan's, and one of the crew began touching lights on the bulkhead with long multijointed fingers. Sometimes he could see they were cousins of the Wess'ej wess'har, and sometimes they looked totally different, as if they had no common roots. He wondered how they looked to Nevyan.

“Hayin, open communications with the Maritime Fringe government,” said Esganikan, leaning over a crewman at his station. She beckoned to Aitassi. “Interpret for me.”

Hayin handed a
virin
to Aitassi, who settled back on her haunches and held the communication device in front of her. Shan looked as if she was concentrating hard.

“
Pirb,
” said Hayin, nodding.

“Minister Pirb,” Esganikan said carefully, in English. “Minister Pirb, this is Esganikan Gai, commander of the Eqbas Vorhi adjustment mission, and I require your cooperation.”

Ade wondered if the English was for Eddie's benefit again, but maybe she just wanted to be fluent by the time she had to have the same surrender-or-else conversation with Earth. They were good at picking up languages. He was certain that she could have spoken the isenj language if she'd had the right throat to make the sounds.

The sound of isenj rattles and whirrs filled the bridge. Aitassi turned her head slowly to the commander as if choosing her words carefully.

“Pirb says he is
President,
and that he cannot cooperate with an invading army.”

“Tell him that any of his citizens who want to cooperate with the new environmental measures should present themselves at the border with the Northern Alliance for instructions.”

“He tells you to remove your ship from his airspace, and that you have a minute to withdraw.”

Esganikan seemed utterly relaxed and unmoved. Ade had been around wess'har long enough to read their body language—the freeze reaction when startled—and now he knew their scent signals. No, Esganikan really
didn't
give a damn. She had her objective and she was going to stick to it. Sometimes her kiss-my-arse attitude was so much like Shan's that he almost liked her.

“Tell President Pirb,” she said, “that if he attempts to carry out his threat to attack Wess'ej and Bezer'ej, I will respond in kind. Tell him, too, that I am
not
a Wess'ej wess'har, and my definition of balance is not as liberal as theirs. I will destroy his cities, and kill his citizens, and those of his allies if they attempt to threaten our kin.”

Esganikan was totally calm. There were people who made threats, and people who made promises, but Esganikan was just telling Pirb what was going to happen. It was much more chilling. Ade felt a surge of familiar adrenaline and caught Shan's eye. She didn't even raise her eyebrows.

But there was no answer from Pirb. Esganikan didn't seem concerned and exchanged conversation with crew at
another station on the bridge. Lights danced across the port bulkhead and on the chart. “Aitassi, are any ussissi still operating vessels within the Ebj region?”

“No. After the attack on this ship they suspended commercial duties here.” Ussissi took a threat to one of them as a threat to all. Ade approved of that degree of camaraderie. “But all ussissi across the planet are stopping work.”

Esganikan kept her eyes on those bulkhead lights. Ade was still looking down at the terrain beneath his feet when a brilliant white light and a trail of vapor streaked up to fill his field of view and exploded in a blinding sheet as if it was filling the bridge.

Incoming—

His instinct was to throw himself flat. He crashed into Shan, cracking his temple against her head and all he could see for seconds was a dark green disk across everything while his seared retina tried to cope with the overload of light.

“Jesus Christ.” Shan sat up awkwardly and rubbed her head. “That's not funny.”

Eddie nodded, apparently calm. “It's not, is it? I've seen incoming before, and it makes me nearly shit myself every time.”

Esganikan gestured to them to get up. Ade wasn't sure if she was amused or baffled, but none of the Eqbas looked as if they'd reacted to the attack. “You
know
that the defense shield will hold. The missile exploded fifty meters beneath us.”

“Yeah, but we're pretty basic models,” said Ade irritably. “We've got reflexes. We normally say
missile incoming brace brace brace,
just so nobody has a nasty surprise like
that
one.”

“The target light was illuminated.” Esganikan indicated the bulkhead array. “Pay attention next time. There is clearly no point talking further with Pirb, so now we withdraw.”

Only an Eqbas could make
withdraw
sound so ominous.

Shan got to her feet and made a conspicuous point of standing right in the middle of the transparent section of deck. Warbling chatter passed between two of the Eqbas
crew at bulkhead consoles. Streaks of light flared beneath the deck like tracer rounds and Ade watched the ground lift visibly with the chain of explosions, flame and gray clouds rising until all he could see was a billowing carpet beneath his boots.

“You okay, Boss?” He caught Shan's arm again.

“Fine.” The shock just seemed to make her more aggressive and determined to force herself into a show of strength. She
had
to be the bloody alpha female. She had no scent at all now. “Esganikan, what did you just do?”

“Returned fire. What would
you
do under the circumstances?”

“Jesus, how big a chunk have you taken out?”

The Eqbas commander tilted her head as if calculating. “The entire ground battery and roughly a thousand meters around it.”

“But they can't damage your ship.”

“They fire upon us. We fire back. We will continue to suppress attacks.”

“But a thousand meters covers a lot of civilians too. You're going to trigger a surge of refugees. They'll self-evacuate across the border, and that's bad enough where I come from, let alone in a place this crowded. Did you think about that?”

“Your priority as a police officer was probably to ensure that as many of them survived as possible. Mine is not. My task is to restore the ecology of this planet as far as anyone can, given that all non-food species have been driven to extinction, and that is not a task for the squeamish.”