Matriarch (30 page)

Eddie did his maths again about the return to Earth, and it was the numbers that always made his stomach churn. Twenty-five years was a long, long time, and fifty was unthinkable: and that was how long the round trip to Earth would take, plus however long it took for the Eqbas to
complete their restoration—an unknown period that might be anything from a short and catastrophic war to a permanent occupation.

There was no guarantee that it would be a round trip at all. The prospect of permanence on Earth scared him now, standing on a balcony somewhere back home and looking up at the stars, and trying to pick out where he had lived, and where his friends were.

He dreaded waving goodbye to Giyadas and leaving Wess'ej knowing that if he came back, she'd be a grandmother. Nevyan would still be alive: wess'har lived to a good age, longer than humans, but it was a lifetime's separation.

Barencoin stared at the news output, arms folded across his chest. Eddie wondered how it felt to have only a uniform to wear, and for that uniform not to be yours any longer. Everyone who'd made the journey from Earth—whether in
Thetis
or
Actaeon
—was now permanently displaced not only from location but from their culture.

“I'll miss F'nar,” said Eddie. “I like wess'har—the ones here, that is.”

“You got a few years to go here yet, if you're heading back with the Eqbas. What's brought this on? Wangled a private flight or something?”

“Y'know, if I could transport back to Earth instantly right now, I'm not sure I could fit back in.”

“I'm worried about you, Eddie. You used to be gung ho and up for anything.”

“Yeah.”

“What changed?”

“Me,” he said. “Because I used to be able to choose when dangerous adventure was over. If I could get transport, I could go back to a nice, safe home. But there isn't a safe home anywhere now. And I've reached the stage where I'm not sure if I should get morally outraged over biological weapons. If that's not fucked, I don't know what is.”

Barencoin leaned over him, voice dropping to a whisper. “I got one more bit of bad news to break to you, then, mate. There's no hamster heaven either.”

Barencoin could always make him laugh. The marine probably despised him, but he hid it well.

“Mart, if we have a war with the Eqbas, would you fight against them?”

Barencoin shrugged. “If I did, it wouldn't be for long.” He walked to the door. “Beer and small eats tonight at Frankland Towers, okay? Be there. Be festive.”

“I will.”

Eddie spent a while trying to work out why there was so much conflict over Australia's invitation to the Eqbas and yet his reports were slipping further down BBChan's list of priorities. It was like the warnings of environmental disaster over the centuries: somehow they were of more use as an excuse for an international brawl than as a warning to do something before it was too late.

And it
had
been too late.

After a point, nobody wanted to hear unending bad news. And that was the only kind of news he had to offer.

F'nar: December 24, 2376

Eddie looked like shit.

“You need a drink,” said Shan. He slumped past her as she opened the door and there was no smart-arse greeting or any sign of the old Eddie who always had to reduce everything to one-liners. His face was etched. There was no other word for it. Lines she'd never seen before formed a fine net around his eyes.

“I brought one. A large one.”

He reached inside his jacket and pulled out a clear industrial container of equally clear liquid and handed it to her. About two liters, she estimated: she popped the cap and sniffed. It seared her sinuses like cleaning fluid.

“Shall I just put a straw in it for you?” She turned to Aras and tilted the bottle in mute request for a glass. “I take it that this anesthetic is connected to what you wanted to talk about.”

“It's been an educational couple of weeks.”

Aras held out two heavy glass cups, clear deep amber with swirls of purple in them. Shan slopped in a respectable amount of the unidentified spirit and thrust it into Eddie's hand. She poured a little for herself anyway, pointless though it was.

“You should eat something first,” said Aras. “It won't reduce the toxicity of the product, but it might make you feel more comfortable.”

“He never quite got the hang of hospitality training,” said Shan, but Eddie didn't laugh. She exchanged a discreet oh-dear look with Aras. He inhaled by way of comment and went back to join Becken and Qureshi, who were laying out food on the table with all the bowls and plates at a precise distance from each other.

“The whole gang's here, then.” Eddie hung his coat on the nail by the door one-handed with all the unconscious familiarity of a man who'd lived here while she was temporarily dead. “How are you…three?”

“We're fine. You? Okay, bad. I know.”

He took a pull at the glass. Shan couldn't tell from the smell what it had been distilled from and it probably didn't matter: Eddie could do one thing denied her by
c'naatat,
and that was to get as pissed as a handcart. She'd always taken a dim view of getting drunk, but the fact it was now beyond her always made her a little wistful.

“If I blurt all this out it's going to screw the evening. “I'll tell you later.” He looked around. “Well, this is festive.”

“Ade's handiwork.”

Barencoin interrupted by fetching Eddie a plate piled with chunks of cake and flatbreads. “It looks like pita,” he said. “But it doesn't taste like it. And there's a bowl of something suspiciously like dip on the table, but it's beans menaced by a bit of garlic. Oh, and beer. Get stuck in, and for Chrissakes cheer up, you miserable sod.”

“It's such a
convivial
time of year,” said Shan. She steered Eddie over to the door that opened onto the rear terrace, bottle under one arm. However cold the wess'har thought it was, the
weather was mild by human standards, mild enough for a barbecue later. Ade insisted; he'd built that bloody barbecue and he was going to get the most out of it if it killed him. Eddie cradled his glass and stared at it in a way that suggested he wasn't seeing the glowing embers on a jury-rigged trestle of pipes and metal sheet but something else entirely.

“Okay, spill your guts before that stuff destroys too many neurons.”

Eddie transferred his glass to his left hand and fumbled in his pocket to extract his handheld. “That's the rushes. Cued up.”

“Rushes of what?” Shan pressed the pad one-handed, clutching her glass in the other.
“Oh.”

Eddie said nothing. She watched. The images were long sequences of steady shots from a high aerial position. It had to be Umeh, but some of the more conspicuous buildings were a different style of architecture; it might have been from the Maritime Fringe, although she hadn't seen many intact buildings on her brief visit. It definitely wasn't Jejeno, though.

The aerial shots were interspersed with much faster, more chaotic images at low level across gray water and over pale canyon cities that looked like a fly-through simulation. It was only when the point-of-view appeared to do a loop to the right that she realized it was the output from an aircraft recce camera. The craft must have been retracing its flight path because it was passing over towering palls of black smoke and flame. Something white-hot flared to the left hand side—
port,
Ade would tell her, it's bloody
port
—and the ahead view wobbled briefly. Had the craft taken a hit? It was still flying straight at stomach-churning speed.

She was instantly in a cockpit, flying through flame that had burned five centuries before, about to smash her face against the controls. She'd relived this several times: she was seeing through Aras's eyes as he crashed on an island called Ouzhari. She shook the memory aside and concentrated. There was more random footage: vehicles exploded in a firecracker sequence on the ground while tiny scuttling
figures that had to be isenj scattered in all directions and didn't get far.

Shan could watch anything. Coppers often had to sit down and sift through footage that was a few miles beyond a nightmare. After the initial revulsion you could put your shock back in its box and suddenly all you saw was detail, the detail you needed to investigate a crime; movement, injury, spatter pattern, distinguishing features, background that would pin down time or place or vehicle or witness, and any of the scraps of knowledge that made up the jigsaw of nailing some bastard.

Shan imagined that Eddie had grown used to doing the same. Maybe he hadn't. Maybe it was all linked to the trauma of having Ual shot dead standing right next to him, blood spatter and all. Ade's memory was headlined by an incident like that: Dave Pharoah's brains splashing his face at Ankara. If it could mark a veteran Royal Marine, it could mark anyone.

Eddie's swallowing was audible as he stared out over the caldera with his back to her. Shan pressed the key again and the carnage froze on the little screen, a ghastly vidgame. “So what did I just see?”

“Esganikan and chums removing an isenj army and assorted civilian bystanders.” His glass was half empty now. “The Fringe and Tivskur have decided to gang up and launch a strike on Bezer'ej.”

“They must be fucking suicidal. They know what the wess'har will do.”

“Like the last time.”

“They haven't got anything like a credible spacegoing force. They can barely manage enough craft to bomb each other.”

“Maybe genetic memory makes you think you're better than you are.” Eddie held out his glass for a top-up. “What happens if I send that to Earth?”

“Gut feel? Won't make the four
AM
update.” Shan felt disoriented, part of her now having flashbacks of agony and being pulled from a burning cockpit, and part of her running
screaming from white flame rolling at her like a ball. The fragment of isenj in her was reacting: that disturbed her more than developing claws or wings. “It's just aliens killing aliens. About as relevant to the folks back home as a wildlife show.”

Eddie turned and looked slightly bewildered. “Okay, carry on and look at the cut package. Imagine you're sitting eating your cornflakes tomorrow and
that
pops up on the screen.”

Shan pressed the key again. This was the edited piece; it opened with a shot of Esganikan's ship blacking out the sky over Jejeno. Eddie's voiceover began:
“It's a scene from a B-movie: a gigantic alien spaceship looms above a city…”

There was nothing inaccurate in the report as far as she could tell. He made it clear that the Eqbas were effectively guests of the Jejeno cabinet. He had fabricated nothing:
twisted
nothing. Eddie never did. He'd even cut in some of the isenj archive footage of previously “adjusted” planets, the material that Ual had given him and that had so alarmed the Northern Assembly parliamentary meeting.

But it still set her teeth on edge.

“Want a frank answer?” she asked.

“Why do people like you always ask that?”

“All right, the Eqbas ship as a harbinger of doom has a high shock value but it's…misleading. Bit too
War of the Worlds.
”

“Tell me how.”

“You might as well have said that it's all the Eqbas's fault. I think the B-movie line sets the tone.”

“You think I should cut that bit.”

“I don't think anything. It's not my job. I just told you how it made me feel.”

“Is it
scaremongering?
”

“Overall…well, if you're asking if it gives the viewer a true flavor of the Eqbas M.O. then I'd have to say yes.”

“So, given the level of sphincter pucker on Earth right now, what with the tension between the Australasian states and the FEU, would
you
transmit that piece?”

Oh, so that was it. Eddie was losing his nerve again. He saw the direct connection between what he reported and what happened 150 trillion miles away, and he was scared he'd kick off a full-scale war this time, not just riots.

She sympathized. The truth was noble and lovely, but it had consequences just as much as lies and stony silence.
No, your husband didn't suffer. He died instantly. No pain. Wouldn't have known a thing about it.
She'd lied kindly more than once when she was breaking bad news to families. As long as the truth didn't need to come out for an investigation, no harm was done.

“Come on, Eddie, get a grip.” She hadn't seen him quite like this before, not just agonizing aloud but asking advice. “If you haven't worked out your personal limits by now, quit. You either send every bloody scrap of information you've got, or you don't. Once you omit bits, you shape it. You can't fart around about where the line gets drawn. Evidence. It's
evidence.
”

Eddie, still staring out over F'nar into the gathering light-speckled dusk, managed to wag his index finger at nothing in particular with his glass in the same hand.

“See, Shan, that's the problem,” he said. “I'm paid to define that line. I'm paid to interpret without distorting. To make things clear for the viewer.”

“No chance of that,” she said. “Is showing this to the public going to make any difference to what happens when the Eqbas show up? No. Will it make humans behave any better? I doubt it. Does it matter when you send it, then? No. Just sit on it like you've done before. Maybe the decision becomes clear, and maybe it doesn't. But either way you're not solely responsible for what's going to happen down the line. If there's one thing I've learned from wess'har, it's that
everyone
in the chain of consequences has a chance to stop something happening.”

“That's rich coming from you, Shazza.”