Matriarch (40 page)

She switched tack. “Yeah, but you'll just injure yourself with that and get pissed off if you don't place it right. Look, it's not going to do the job. Put it down and let me tell you about Shapakti.”

She could do this. It was a basic copper's task.
Talk them down. Get them of the roof. Put the gun down. There's nothing so bad that it can't be sorted out, son.

“Who's Shapakti?”

Got him.
“He's an Eqbas scientist I know. We can deal with that. The Eqbas can even remove
c'naatat
from some species. One day they'll find a way of doing that for you.”
Liar, liar, liar.

“And if they cannot?”

“We're your friends. We'll take care of you.”

He was horribly calm. He'd worked this out. God knows he'd had enough time to think about it and nothing else: and it was one thing to calm a person on the knife edge where they still weren't sure if they were ready to die or not, but quite another to persuade someone who wasn't panicking.

“
Shan Chail,
this is the way
c'naatat
will spread—a concession here, a concession there. I will be one more potential vector. How many more? First there was only Aras. How many now?”

Oh God. I know he's right. Rayat and Lindsay. Who's next? My child.
Vijissi was as good as miles from her. She couldn't even grab him, or blow the blast doors and take the decision out of his hands.

Hands. Jesus holy shit I called them hands for once and not paws and—

“You never thought you were a kind person,” Vijissi said softly. “But you are. And you mustn't blame yourself for what was an accident.”

“Vijissi—”

He hadn't taken any notice when she stood at the airlock and told him not to follow her.

He never did listen to her.

The line fell silent and she hoped it was just a pause before he carried on talking, but the light in the
virin
had gone out. A muffled boom shook the doors and a little dust rained down from the roof of the lobby.

Vijissi never spoke another word.

Maritime Fringe/Northern Assembly border, Umeh: crossroads bomb site

“It's been years since I covered a tree-planting,” said Eddie. “And never in a bomb crater.”

Crater was overstating the case, but the patch of cleared land was definitely concave if you looked at it carefully. The bee cam made a sedate circling movement around the perimeter like a circus horse, pausing at the end of the lap to take static shots. The only thing missing was the great and the good of local society, jostling for their moment of screen time. The isenj who had gathered to watch were there to see, not to be seen. The fighting had died down: there were skirmishes on the border, but the uneasy cease-fire was holding.

Minister Rit had never planted a tree before. She fumbled with the spade, which was more like an apple corer, and
eventually Eddie did it for her. He found the image unpleasant in a way he couldn't pin down; a subjugated people playing happy for the media, except the isenj weren't subjugated, and Rit wanted to do it, and there was no media opportunity in it for anyone except him.

“Minister Rit thanks you,” said Ralassi. “She adds that Ual would have been amused by the spectacle.”

“You should expand this into a park and name it after him.”

When you've cleared a few more isenj out of the way, of course.

Esganikan insisted on being there. Eddie thought it was insensitive given how the land had been cleared, but she was fixed on her mission and she wanted isenj to see a tree in real soil, and focus on what their restored and remediated and Eqbas-approved planet could look like.

The explosion had ripped out paving and exposed dark chocolate soil. Somehow Eddie expected it to be light ochre, an unhealthy pallor befitting a natural world that hadn't seen sunlight in a long, long time. The isenj were fascinated by it, and some of them scraped it with their footpads or lowered themselves to reach down and crumble it between their hands. Food plants grew in nutrient-laden water; the thousand different fungi that isenj cultivated grew in vats and on barklike medium. Earth was a novelty and they seemed to relish getting their hands dirty.

They have hands. Sod zoological accuracy. I have hands, so they do too.

“They say they recall this,” said Ralassi. The isenj were excited, chirping and almost squealing as they tottered around on bare soil. Whatever it meant to them, it was far more than any human dependent on word of mouth or memoirs could ever understand. If they could recall past military glories from their ancestors, then they could also remember what it felt like to cultivate soil; and this was more than human nostalgia. It was reliving the experiences of their ancestors, as vivid and personal as it had been for the long-dead.

Eddie saw their attachment to their colonies in a new light. This might have been how it felt to stand on Bezer'ej, and recall a time when it was called Asht, before the first wess'har had arrived in the Cavanagh system. If a familiar smell or song could catapult a human into the past, he wondered how much more intense genetic memory was for an isenj.

Shan said it was like being that person for a few moments. Eddie could see it was both blessing and curse.

“I've learned something,” he said.

“They are resilient people.”

“Damn, you'd have to be.” The bee cam followed him like a beggar. “Now you've planted it, who's going to look after it?”

Isenj didn't have a good record on horticulture. Ralassi indicated an isenj festooned in dark pink beads who was taking a keen interest in the leaves. There seemed to be a queue forming.

Eddie wanted an aerial shot, a pull-out from the tree that gradually took in the wide shot and showed that the impromptu mini-arboretum was in the middle of a battle wasted neighborhood. It took two attempts but the bee cam returned with a rather poignant shot that made Eddie wonder if he was overdoing the symbolism.

He had no idea of the death toll. He could calculate the area devastated, and the population density, and come up with numbers—a hundred thousand, fifty million, a billion; but like all statistics, that told him far less than the shattered buildings or eerily untouched but empty streets scented with decaying bodies.

It really wasn't much of a tree at all. Botanists might have argued about its taxonomy, but it looked more like a cycad than anything, and as far as Eddie was concerned, any long-lived plant was a tree.

He thought of the dead. “Was it worth it for a tree?”

Esganikan's pupils were black flowers and her head was tilted to take in the scene in as much detail as possible.

“Ask the tree,” she said.

F'nar Wess'ej: Nevyan's home

Eddie leaned back as far as he dared in his rickety square box of a chair and watched the transmissions for a while: Europe, Pacific Rim, Sinostates, Americas. There used to be a cam feed from Mars Orbital, but it was gone now.

When he paged the data, it showed him a report—ten years old—saying that the station had been shut down in a cost-cutting exercise because the pharmacorps who were its main users refused to pay the rental.

“Balls,” he said. He'd never seen Mars Orbital, even though he'd passed through there on
Thetis.
He'd been chilled down at the time. It gave him a pang of regret.

But it was time to talk to Jan, duty news editor in Mick's absence. He rolled the bee cam across the table like a snooker ball and it righted itself to focus on him.

It must have been about two
AM
in the newsroom. Jan was clearly a night person because she looked chirpily alert, and that wasn't hard when you were a child—which was what twenty-something seemed to Eddie right then. A few years on 'Desk would knock that out of her.

“Hi, Eddie,” she said. “Sorry we've not been running your stuff, but it won't be wasted.”

He still hated the few seconds of delay while the signal crawled between the instantaneous ITX node and the final light-speed relay to Earth.
Hey, you used to think delays were normal, remember? Don't take ITX for granted.
“It's not like I'm going anywhere.”

“What have you got for us?”

“I'd run through my possibles but I don't think you're going to want them, are you?”

“Everyone's gone off the hurricanes now. Back on to the new cold war.”

“FEU and…?”

“…everyone. Except the Americas are staying silent. We're waiting for the Sinostates to formally condemn FEU pressure on Australia and the rest of the Australasian states
have put their reserve forces on standby. Statement expected soon.”

“Agenda?”

“What, apart from objecting to aliens landing in the front garden?”

“Jan, there's nothing anyone can do about that. If they think they can, they're dangerously stupid. If they've worked that out, the leverage is about resources or trade territory or access to Antarctica. Sod all to do with aliens.”

“I'm not sure their threat analysis ties in with yours.”

“Didn't I send you some images down the line? You know, the Eqbas Vorhi boot-boys on tour? Coming to a star system near you?” He rubbed his forehead. Did they think he was making this up? He hadn't even sent her all the pictures. If she'd seen the recent stuff…but isenj getting killed wouldn't, bring it home. “And I sent you a big piece about the civil war on Umeh just to illustrate what's coming down the road. Jan, they
erase
cities. You have no idea. I showed you the pictures. What part of
blown off the map
does the government not understand?”

“Probably the bit that says it won't happen on their watch.” She was tapping a screen to one side of her. “And maybe the bit that says surely something will turn up before then.”

“They'll need fucking Captain Atlantis, then. With an upgrade to his superpowers.”

“Okay, give me a doomsday piece.”

“Oh yeah. Like that's going to help the situation.”

“We're not about helping, we're about informing.”

Silly little cow. I was doorstepping ministers before your mother was born.
“Thank you for clarifying that.”

“Tell you what I
would
be interested in, though, Eddie. We've got this row brewing between the Greens and the indigenous peoples about life after the Eqbas arrive. They both stand to gain from environmental restoration, but they're fighting over eating meat.”

“Wow, the cookery slot.” No, it was a pivotal point: because Earth didn't seem to realize how serious wess'har and
their cousins were about not eating your neighbors. The attitude to species was at the core of the conflict. “Okay. Maybe an interview with Esganikan Gai, the mission commander.”

“Didn't you have the undead eco-terrorist cop on your patch?”

“Frankland?”

“I'm assuming they don't come in multiples.”

“Yes.”
Shit, shit, shit. I can't tell them she's alive. I did the story saying she spaced herself and how fucking brave she was. I filed it before I knew she'd survived, or I'd never have mentioned her
c'naatat
at all. Shit.
“What did you have in mind?”

“Her name cropped up a few times in the last few weeks. Some Greens regard her as a martyr to the cause.”

“She spaced herself.” That was inarguable. “It doesn't get much more heroic than that.”

“Well, it might make a nice piece. I mean, I looked at the archive. The Green legend is that she went native when she was a counterterrorist officer, helped some militant tree-huggers evade arrest, and took the fall for it. Better to be busted for incompetence than criminal charges, I suppose.”

Now, how many people knew that? Green Rage must have kept notes. And she'll kill me if I use that name.

“So I heard.”

“Is it true?”

“It fits her M.O., but she would never confirm that on the record—or off it.” He swallowed. “I got to know her pretty well and she struck me as the most competent copper I'd ever met.”

“Real martyr, then.”

“Very committed, our Shazza.”
You have no idea.
“You want to step out an airlock and see what martyrdom feels like? And she…was very adept at not answering questions.”

“What if I can get a Green to stand up the story?”

“It'll mean nothing without documentation. It happened more than eighty years ago.”

“She's dead. She isn't going to sue you.”

I swore I'd never say she helped out Green Rage. Does it matter now? Maybe not, except that I promised her.

Eddie rubbed his forehead. “I can do a piece on her. She…I liked her. For all the nasty violent side of her, she had a streak of really unshakeable decency. She became very committed to the wess'har too.”

“How about the colonists, the Christians? Did she find God?”

“If she did, it's only because he never paid his parking fines.” Where was Jan going with this? He hated news editors who tried to fit the story to the gap in the news agenda. She looked like a woman who wanted a god-bothering, god-fearing angle on a story that was actually about humans being on borrowed time. Yes, like Barencoin had said, the Second Coming: the religious crazies were cranking up on Earth, doing a bit of wailing about the Eqbas and Armageddon or Judgment Day or salvation, according to taste.
Fuck you, lady, I don't do infotainment.
“Tell you what. Let me get you an interview with Commander Gai, and maybe even Curas Ti, the…well, Eqbas defense minister for want of a better word. Tell you what—let me send you a nice little package, saying behold what the Eqbas did to other planets, and what they're doing now on Umeh, and what's heading your way in thirty years. You'd better break out the toilet tissue, because it's fucking scary. And you
had
that material and didn't run it.”

Jan stared back at him, flipping her stylus over and over between her fingers as if she was twirling a baton. It simply reinforced his view of her—perhaps unfairly—as a perky, girlie little cheerleader. It was a shame he couldn't let Shan loose on her, because she'd have disemboweled the kid with her first sour word.

“It's going to have consequences.”

Uh-oh. Chicken, chicken, chicken. Loss of bottle imminent.
“You still being monitored by the ministry?”

“Not since the UN took over the ITX access from them.”

“Wouldn't make any difference. You can't hide this for long.”

“We had some serious riots after the last piece you filed on Eqbas Vorhi.”

“Whoa, I'm responsible? Maybe I am, and I know it could happen again, but what do I do? Let everyone think it'll be like that old movie? The one with the robot where the alien stops the world?”

“The Day The Earth Stood Still.”

“Whatever. I've seen this firsthand. I've been in an Eqbas warship when it took out a city. It's not a special effect. People need to know that.”

Jan seemed to be losing her nerve. Eddie was suddenly aware that he was leaning forward, arms braced on the table as he stared at the bee cam's red focus light.
Why am I doing it? Nobody on Earth can do a bloody thing about this. It'll just cause panic. Why can't I get this straight in my head like I used to?
He had an urge to discuss it with Shan first.

He could still tell her. He had to. She needed to know he wasn't blabbing about Lindsay and Rayat. He could repair some of the damage he felt he'd done, or at least not make matters worse.

Jan stopped twirling her stylus. “Okay. Let's do it. We can package it with the Greens saying ecological judgment day is at hand, and that Inuit guy arguing with the meat-is-murder lobby.”

“Lovely,” said Eddie. “Would you like a bit on a tree planting too?”

Her face was set hard now; unamused, and with that look that said she was trying to work out how to assert her authority over an older and unimpressable seen-it-all hack. “Pardon?”