Matriarch (3 page)

Sod it.

Maybe the prisoner handover was too distressing even for Aras to discuss, and wess'har weren't squeamish. Neither was she. Ade—well, Ade had seen terrible things in combat and coped with it, but his violent father had left him struggling when it came to hurting women. Lindsay had been his commanding officer. It must have been hard to watch the bezeri take her, even if she'd helped Rayat detonate the bombs.

Shan took the container out of Aras's hand and tipped the seeds into her palm.

“Okay,” she said, patience expired. “What the fuck really happened?”

Aras and Ade both flinched at the same time.

“We delivered them—” said Ade.

Aras interrupted. “This is
my
responsibility, not Ade's. The bezeri were
always
my responsibility.”

It was another of his wess'har non sequiturs. They had their own logic, switching topics instantly. Shan wondered if he was establishing a pecking order as senior male in the household and putting Ade in his place.

“Look, I'm sorry if it was traumatic. I just want to know so that I'm not treading on eggs the whole time.” She patted his arm and felt him lock his muscles in that alarm reflex. “I'll find out anyway, won't I? All your other bad memories surface in me sooner or later.” She glanced at Ade. “And so will yours.”

Sooner or later. Yeah, I have to do something about that. Ade's your old man too, remember that.

She could lean on Ade, she knew it. She could scratch away at his guilt about shooting her, about abandoning his mother, about the bezeri, about his dead comrades, about always feeling that he let people down; but she was determined not to fall prey to expedience, because none of it was true. She couldn't do it to him.

“They're not dead,” he said suddenly.

Oh God.
A switch threw somewhere and she defaulted to Superintendent Frankland, the unshockable copper, the persona that could cope with this. “But you handed them over. Didn't you?”

“Yes.”

“Well, between the anti-human pathogen that's been spread around Bezer'ej, and the bloody ocean, I'm having trouble with the
not dead
bit.”

Oh God. Tell me you didn't chicken out.

Ade held up a warning finger as Aras opened his mouth to interrupt. “The bezeri wanted someone to help them rebuild so we—I gave them Neville and Rayat.”

“I'm missing something here.”
No, you're not. You just don't want to think that they did something so bloody stupid.
“How?”

“It was my idea,” said Ade.

You might be wrong. Calm down.
“What was?”

“Infecting them with
c'naatat.
”

Shan was inured to shock after a lifetime in the police force, but disappointment in the few people she trusted still had the power to make her stomach churn. Her skin felt as if it was tightening and freezing across her body from her scalp to her hands.

Oh shit. No, no, no.

Ade was silent, eyes wide, teetering on that edge of admission that she'd seen far too often in interrogations.

“You deliberately
gave
them a dose?”

“Yes. I did.”

“You gave
Rayat
the fucking thing?”

She tried to take it in. She'd sacrificed
everything
to keep it away from the likes of that bastard. She'd committed suicide—or she'd stepped out the airlock, anyway.
C'naatat
had had other ideas. That should have given Ade a clue about how she'd react if they just
handed the frigging thing over—

“Yes,” said Ade. “Both of them, Boss. I'm sorry.”

“
Sorry?
I fucking
spaced
myself rather let Rayat get a chunk of me. He's a spook, for Chrissakes. Have you any idea what a bastard like that can do with this stuff?”

“Boss, I—”

Her pulse pounded in her ears. “
Have
you?”

“The bezeri wanted someone down there with them. He isn't going anywhere. Neither is she.”

Steady. Think, think, think.
“Who else knows about this?”

“Nobody. Just us.”

“Tell me exactly what happened. Where did you leave them?”

“We took them out above the continental shelf. It's well over five hundred meters deep. I saw them go into the water and the bezeri came up to meet them. They've got them down there.”

“'Course, with
c'naatat,
they could just
walk
back to shore.” It was no good: she had to alert the Eqbas now stationed on Bezer'ej, and she had no idea how they'd react. The wess'har matriarchs had once been on the brink of executing Aras for infecting her. “I'd better warn Esganikan. What the fuck were you
thinking?
”

Aras cut in. “
Isan,
this was my idea and if Ade had not prevented me, I would be with the bezeri now. They wanted me and I was ready to join them.”

It was a slap in the face. Shan leaned back a little and
fought to separate the reality of yielding
c'naatat
to Rayat and Lindsay from her hurt feelings.

You're my
jurej.
Wess'har males are supposed to be loyal. You aren't supposed to put the bezeri's needs above mine.

The selfish, petty thought caught her unawares. She folded her arms.

“Terrific. It's always good to know I can rely on you.” She knew he understood sarcasm, even if most wess'har—literal, eye-wateringly honest—didn't grasp it. “Thanks. Thanks a lot.”

“Da Shapakti could remove your
c'naatat
and you could return to Earth with Ade if I weren't here.”

“Do you ever listen to a word I say? I told you I would
never abandon you.
”

“You did that when you spaced yourself.”

“Yeah, and I didn't want to.” A voice in her head reminded her she was a hypocrite, because she hadn't put Aras's needs before her duty. Keeping
c'naatat
from Rayat overrode everything. “But you knew why I had to do it.”

“And I felt I had to act for the bezeri. But both Ade and I are here now, and the bezeri are as satisfied as they ever can be. That's all that matters. Intentions are irrelevant.”

That was the wess'har way; action counted and motive didn't. Apologies were worthless to them, because events were a reality that couldn't be erased by mitigating circumstances or genuine regret.
Dead's dead.
She said it herself most days, and long before she'd even heard of Cavanagh's Star.

“Well, actually,
matey,
that's
not
all that matters.” She found her attention fixed on Aras's charcoal eyes; they were all iris and almost no sclera, just like an animal's, not a gold wess'har cross-hair gaze at all. Her face burned and the pressure in her ears felt close to explosion. Ade's restless movement caught her peripheral vision. “What
matters
is that we don't have this bloody parasite under our control any longer. A
government agent
has it. You know what he'll do with it?”

“He's not—”

“Supersoldiers. Then they flog it off to the pharmacorps, because no government can resist money in the end. Or it gets out into the wider population by accident.
Pandemic.
You can spread it by sex, by body fluids, by wounds. You can do the maths, Aras. Wasn't that why you quarantined Bezer'ej to start with? Because you saw what happened in the isenj colony there?”

“This is
one man,
trapped on Bezer'ej.”

“No, this is a
spook,
a very competent spook, and Lindsay Neville too, and even that idiot bitch can be trouble.”

“How can they leave? How can they pass it on? The bezeri never caught it from me, and I moved among them for nearly five hundred years.”

“There's no such thing as
can't
in this universe, Aras. Even the bloody dead come back to life.” Shan could feel her own voice becoming thin and compressed in her own skull. “And Rayat
will
find a way, trust me. I would if I were him.”

You lost the will to live when you thought I was dead. But you were ready to run away and live with the bezeri.

She tried to shake that thought out of her head. It was a selfish thought, a woman's reaction without consideration of anything beyond her own hurt feelings. It wasn't professional. She tried to slap it down.

Ade moved. She saw him reach out cautiously, slowly. He laid his hand on her forearm and she concentrated on not jerking it away. His expression was the utter dejection of a beaten child.

“There's another way of looking at it, Boss.”

“Really?” She was fond of Ade to the brink of falling in love, but right then she wanted to punch the shit out of him. The impulse appalled her. He usually brought out the vestige of her protective urge, but she'd vented her anger on him before. “Forgive me if I haven't spotted it.”

“The little shit's stuck on the seabed with a bunch of aliens who hate him.
Forever.
So's she. That probably even beats hanging them.”

If Shan had been looking for vengeance for the near extinction of the bezeri, then Ade had a point: it was extreme
punishment, as extreme as it got. Shan wondered what changes
c'naatat
would make to the two of them to keep them alive in the deep ocean and knew that whatever it was, it might be a lot more traumatic than the largely invisible tinkering that the parasite had carried out on her.

And I know what it's like to drown. And to drift in space. Oh yes,
that's
fucking bad. Living with the squid might be too good for Rayat.

“You'd better be right,” she said. “Because I'm going to have to spend the rest of my life making sure they don't pass it on. Or hunt the fuckers down and fragment them.”

A well-placed detonation was the only way to disrupt
c'naatat
's lightning defenses of its host organism. It was the way the wess'har
c'naatat
troops—accidental hosts, thinking their malleable genome had picked up just a handy adaptation for fast healing—had ended their lives when not aging or dying became too much to bear.

Ade managed to look her in the eye. “I've let you down, haven't I?”

“Bloody right you have.” Shan stood up and walked over to the deeply hollowed stone set under the water spigot, the nearest that wess'har had to a sink. She couldn't stop herself raging. “How could you do such a frigging stupid thing? After all that's happened?”

“I had to make a decision there and then. We never planned to let them live.”

“Jesus, am I the only one here who can think beyond the next five minutes? I pretty well
died
to stop anyone getting hold of this, but you two just hand it over, good as gold. I suppose Rayat made a really good case, did he? Talked you into it?”

“No, Lindsay did,” said Aras. “This satisfied the bezeri, and stopped either of us taking their place. Because somebody had to help the few still left. Or at least give them some semblance of justice.”

Shan recalled the last time the bezeri had called for justice; a scientist had been executed over the death of one of their young. And Aras had carried it out, whatever she'd told
the
Thetis
camp. Even then, Shan felt it was her responsibility. She'd been in command for far too long and it was an inextricable part of her. She hated standing on the sidelines.

“Either?” she asked. “What do you mean by
either
of you?”

Ade closed his eyes for a moment and it disturbed her. She found no satisfaction in making a brave man cower. “Yeah, well…it was a case of both of us trying to do the decent thing. We…persuaded each other out of it.” He paused and adopted that I-wish-I-hadn't-said-that expression. She realized that she didn't know him as well as she thought, and that meant she didn't have control of the situation. Control mattered. “I wanted you to be
happy.
”

“Ade, for fuck's sake, having you two end up as squid-men isn't going to make me
happy.
” This was why she didn't trust relationships. They weakened you. She hated herself for feeling wounded because for the first time in her life she had become used to being the center of a man's world—two men's worlds, in fact. She wouldn't make that mistake again. “Did it occur to you that I have to tell Esganikan? This is a major biohazard, in case you've forgotten.”

She took her jacket from the hook on the wall and fastened it, trying hard not to descend further into diatribe and profanity, But Aras had broken the taboo of centuries to save her life with the bloody thing in the first place. Maybe the crazy god-bothering colonists were right; maybe it really was the ultimate temptation of the devil, to be eradicated once and for all.

“Where are you going?” asked Aras.

“To catch Esganikan before she leaves for Umeh. She needs to hear this from me. I don't want either of you telling anyone about this. Okay?”

It wasn't true: she could have sent a message to Esganikan. Eqbas didn't stand on ceremony and a call would have done the job. But she needed to walk away, because the Superintendent Frankland part of her was welling up and demanding to be let out to give her underlings a thorough, foul-mouthed bollocking and maybe a thump in the ear for failing her.

But that wasn't really what the Shan at the core of her felt.

That Shan was
hurt.
She'd believed them when they both said they were devoted to her. They'd put something else before her—and that was what she'd always done herself to anyone who might have been close enough to love.