Matriarch (35 page)

He should have been thinking of alternatives, of other plans to implement. Instead he just nursed numb defeat. It would pass. But not yet.

“You look pissed off,” she said. She stood up. “No joy?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Bloody
nothing.
”

“It was a long shot anyway.” Lindsay began walking south. “I'm bracing myself to find the gravestone eaten, too. But I need to see.”

David Neville, thirty-one days old, lay in a grave outside the colony boundary in the unspoiled wilderness. Aras had made him a headstone of stained glass because Lindsay didn't want the body left for the rockvelvets in the same way the colonists disposed of their dead, and Aras was a skilled glassmaker who saw no harm in marking the grave.

They reached the top of a hummock. Lindsay pointed. “Oh my God, it's still there.”

She broke into a strange rolling run. Did she still have bones? Rayat jogged after her.

It was amazing how bright the colors were even at a couple of hundred meters. The slab was beyond the reach of the nanites and the glass shapes looked as piercingly vivid as gems in sunlight. Aras was a master craftsman.

Rayat didn't know what to do with bereaved people so he stood at a discreet distance while Lindsay knelt down and
placed her hands on the grave, caressing the ground and then the headstone—head
glass
—itself. He wasn't in a hurry. He sat down to avoid skylining himself in case Eqbas troops had orders to solve the human
c'naatat
problem the hard way, and occupied himself by racking his brains for a Plan B. It displaced his embarrassment too.

You really ought to feel some sympathy for the poor bitch.

Eventually she sat back on her heels. It was odd how she didn't
look
naked; there were none of the hard-wired visual cues in a jellyfish shaped like a human female.

“I have to take something back,” she said.

Oh no.
This was getting uncomfortable now.

“Lin, tell me you're not thinking of…exhuming the body, are you?”

“No.” If she was crying, he couldn't see it. Could she lacrimate any longer? She sounded as if she was, but it was hard to tell in a transparent woman. “As long as I'm here, he stays here too. I just want something to take back below with me, something to remember him by.” She stood up and unhooked the stone hammer from her belt. “Sorry, Aras. You did a beautiful job.”

She grasped the hammer in both hands and swung it, an excessive amount of force to break glass. But this was wess'har glass and it was tough enough to make the church bells in St. Francis. The colored panes flew apart, scattering in a rainbow storm. Two thirds of the panel—peridot and emerald terrestrial grass, topaz daffodil, ruby poppy, amethyst
chirte
—remained standing. Lindsay bent down and gathered up the other pieces. None of them had broken: it was the leading that had yielded to the hammer blow, releasing pink and red fragments of roses.

“That'll last under water,” she said. She separated out the pink petals and folded them in a sheet of clear membrane that might have been a flat piece of weed. “That'll do. Let's go.”

Rayat wished the metal of
Christopher
or one of its shuttles had lasted quite as well. He followed her back to the
shore for the long walk back to the podship, bereft and wholly without a Plan B.

Temporary City, near Constantine island, Bezer'ej: January 1, 2377

The good thing about visiting Bezer'ej was that the anti-human pathogen made it off-limits to Eddie.

Ade was fond of the bloke but there were things that were best kept away from him. It wasn't that he couldn't be trusted: he hadn't gone public on Lindsay and Rayat, and he hadn't even mentioned their names since that Christmas Eve session. But, like Shan said, once you knew things, it couldn't be undone. Even if you never mentioned them, you still
knew
them and they ate and nagged and clawed at you, sometimes until they drove you to do something about them. It wasn't fair on Eddie to expose him to the possibility of new stories that he couldn't tell or live with.

Ade scanned the horizon. “This takes me back.”

He folded his arms and superimposed a memory—his own, nobody else's—on the landscape. He'd looked for bezeri survivors among the corpses washed up on the Ouzhari beaches: he'd tracked isenj infiltrators on Constantine with Aras, and he found out that wess'har didn't take prisoners, quite literally. Their military code of conduct was nothing like his. But he saw nothing wrong in what they did. This was their society and they could play by their own rules, and if he said he'd never wanted to slot some bastard there and then instead of taking them prisoner, he'd have been lying. Aras did okay. Ade had no complaints.

Shan and Aras contemplated the heathland with him. “You can go exploring while Nev and I do the business with Esganikan,” said Shan. She jerked her head in the direction of the discreetly plant-shrouded entrance to the half-buried Eqbas garrison. Only the occasional solid outline of a blue blob of shiplet gave the game away. “No need to sit in unless you want to.”

“I want to,” said Aras.

Ade got the impression that Shan was finding it hard to get used to taking her men around with her. “I think we ought to have a nice walk,” he said. “Frankly, Boss, I'll be bored shitless, and anyway, I haven't had my run today.” He gave Aras what he hoped was a meaningful look. “Come on, mate. Let's thin out.”

He set off at a brisk walk and then broke into a run, his rifle shuddering on his back at each pace. He knew the terrain: he remembered it better than he thought, and it might have been Aras's memory of the place he was drawing on. He'd been around here for five hundred years, after all. A steady thud-thud-thud behind him told him that Aras was close on his heels. After a couple of hundred meters he slowed to a stop and Aras paused with him.

“She needs a bit of space, 'Ras.” Ade watched the Eqbas troops wandering around the blue heathland like tourists. “We'd put her off.”

“I would have liked to have heard what Esganikan had to say about developing a bioagent for the isenj.”

“Shan will tell us.”

“And I want to know if Esganikan encourages her to return to Earth.”

“Jesus, mate, she said she isn't going, okay? It's over. She's done what she came to do, and we're all
hors de combat
now.”

“What does that mean?”

So Aras's knowledge wasn't encyclopedic. “Means we're out of the game. Not our fucking problem any more.”

“I would like to visit Constantine.”

Wess'har jumped from one subject to the next without warning. Ade was used to it. He changed gear with equal speed now. “Let's blag a raft off the Eqbas, then.”

“You miss the sea.”

“I'm a marine. Can't take that out of me.” Ade had seen more land engagements than anything, but he liked ships and boats. He certainly missed the exhilaration of skimming up a river or slipping into an enemy harbor in a rigid
inflatable with the spray peppering his face. There was something about quiet speed across the face of the water that was more thrilling than flight or freefall. “Come on, let's go and charm a vessel out of our chums over there.”

“If you spoke wess'u or eqbas'u, you could do the charming.”

“I'm too thick to learn a language.”

“You talk complete
bollocks
sometimes.”

Ade burst out laughing. He was never sure if Aras was playing the naive alien or having a laugh too.
No, you're the alien here, not him.
They trotted over to a group of Eqbas and Aras warbled at them. A few minutes later they hauled out a white cube on straps, about thirty centimeters square, and dumped it in Aras's arms.

“Boat on a rope,” said Ade. “Just add water. Bloody handy.”

“
Niluy-ghur.
” Aras repeated it carefully as they jogged towards the shoreline carrying the cube between them like a picnic basket. “
Nee-loor-ee-khoor.
”

“I can't do two voices.”

“Try.”

“Can't.”

“Try or I'll be angry at your lack of interest in culture.”

Ade didn't even know where to start. He hated looking stupid. He was totally confident in his soldiering skills and what his body could do but he was going to screw this up and Aras would know he was a thick useless bastard after all. He found he was licking his lips nervously. He broke the seal on the raft—
nee-loor-ee-khoor, nee-loor-ee-khoor
—and dropped it into the shallows, hanging onto one of the straps to stop it making a getaway.

The cube unfurled and flattened into a clear sheet as it settled on the water. A column rose out of it like a snail extending eyestalks. The edge—he couldn't call it a gunwale—extended to form a solid platform with the shingle so they could just walk on board. It was
brilliant;
Ade was as mesmerized by it as he'd been with his first handheld as a kid. It had been stolen property, and his dad smashed it against the wall in a drunken
rage as usual, but he still remembered the sense of amazement for the short time he had it.

Aras let him take the con. “You're thinking about your father,” he said.

That shook Ade. He felt suddenly naked. “You're not telepathic, are you?”

“No, but you always look the same way when you think about him. Hatred and fear. You never have that expression at any other time.”

“No shit?”

“If that's a request for verification, yes. It's true.”

Ade contemplated the fact that he was an open book to Aras and that his dad still haunted him. The raft—
nee-loor-ee-khoor
—skimmed towards Constantine at what must have been fifty knots and yet there was no sensation of wind or spray or even movement: it was like he was in a simulator.
Shame.
He liked the raw experience of a wess'har powered craft, which was pretty well an old inflatable Raider except for the controls, with a proper solid hull where you couldn't see the water and weed churning in some weird air pocket beneath your feet.

The raft was just like the see-through deck of Esganikan's ship. He settled for a different kind of thrill. Aras nudged him.

“Say it.”

Ade took a breath.
“Nee-loor-ee-khoor.”
It was just a single tone, his only voice.
“Nee-loor-ee-khoor.”

“Hum.”

“What?”

“Hum. One note.”

Ade felt like a complete pillock but he did it anyway.

“Now say the word and keep humming.”

“Yeah. Okay.” He was going to crash and burn.
“Nee-loor-ee-khoor.”

The sensation made his ears ring and for a moment he wasn't sure what was happening. He did it again. He could hear—no,
feel
an overtone. He giggled helplessly.

“You can learn,” Aras said grimly. “You just fear you won't
be as excellent at language as you are at warfare. You don't enjoy being average.”

Being average was all Ade had ever thought he might aspire to. He was happy that he managed that, and when the Corps had shown him he could excel, he fell in love with the approval it showered upon him. Yeah, maybe Aras was right. He could hardly stop grinning as he kept up the overtone all the way to Constantine.

Aras nudged him in the back. “I think it's urgent that you learn some new words, if only for my sanity.”

Ade tried to beach the raft but it clung doggedly to the shoreline and gave every sign of waiting for their return. He wanted to learn more words now and impress Shan, and by the time they reached the site of Constantine colony, he could manage a few basic phrases. He was too embarrassed to ask Aras to teach him the one he most wanted to learn.

Aras went unerringly to the entrance to the buried colony, now almost hidden by grass. “I want to have a look around.”

“Mind if I stay here?” Ade's memory of the complex was unhappy, one of emptying his clip into Shan to drop her. It wasn't the kind of thing a man wanted to recall about the woman he loved. “Seen enough.”

“I know,” said Aras. “I've experienced your flashbacks of the event.”

C'naatat
could give you complete understanding of another person. Sometimes it made Ade feel invaded, but occasionally it was a comfort. He didn't have to articulate difficult things. The worst stuff did him a favor and explained itself in Shan's or Aras's mind.

“Good,” he said.

He stretched out on the grass, completely at ease with the fact that it was a dusty blue, and practiced wess'u unselfconsciously. Part of his mind rambled through past events and things he was planning while he surrendered himself to the resonance vibrating through his skull.

Umeh Station. Best thing we can do is help them evacuate. I'll be okay, but Barkers and Izzy and…fuck it, why should they bother? Bastard government.

He sat up and rummaged in the pouches on his belt. He still had his camo kit so he opened the tin and looked in the small mirror to check that he still didn't need to shave.
C'naatat
had taken a dislike to body hair for some reason. It had its advantages. Then he was looking at someone he didn't know, like catching his reflection of a shop window and wondering who the hell it was. The sensation didn't go away.

For several seconds he was looking at himself through Shan's eyes—yeah, it was her, he
knew
it—and wasn't seeing ordinary Ade Bennett at all, but some bloke he would have given anything to be: capable, respected, attractive, desired, and heroic.

And
loved.

Ade snapped the camo tin shut and felt as if someone had walked over his grave. It scared him because it was alien in every sense, but it also left him feeling secure in a way he never had in his life; he knew, absolutely
knew,
how Shan felt about him without the filter of wondering if she really meant it. He found himself sitting with the fingertips of both hands resting on his lips, shocked by the intensity.