Free Matriarch by Karen Traviss

less hostile view when she’s bonded with you.”
    Ade winced. There was crude, and then there was cold. Aras was still wess’har at heart, and they were now in the odd world of wess’har genetic transfer, where females and males passed DNA across membranes and changed each other at the cellular level. C’naatat was almost made for wess’har. But Ade didn’t see sex like that at all. He just wanted Shan, and the idea that she would be bonded to him simply because they swapped genes felt grim and soulless. He wanted her to choose him. He wanted her to love him.
    â€œI’ll let you know if I come back with my nuts intact,” said Ade. “That’s probably the best I can hope for.”
    â€œI expect c’naatat could grow them again,” Aras said, and Ade was—as ever—unsure if he was joking or being scrupulously wess’har-literal.
    Ade didn’t have Eddie’s gift of the gab, and Shan was immune to flattery anyway. He had to deal with her like a bloke. No crap. Just the facts. She’d eat him alive if he tried to cajole her.
    The bedroom door opened. Shan stood with her fists on her hips and for a moment Ade braced for a broadside. She’d heard them. Coppers had some uncanny natural radar. Her lips parted.
    â€œThere’s one thing I want to say to you two,” she said. Her face was drained of blood, made even whiter by the contrast with her black hair, and she’d obviously been chewing over the earlier conversations. “ Loyalty. You can do what the fuck you like, but there’s one thing I demand from you two and that’s loyalty. You do not go behind my back. You do not decide what’s best for me. Is that clear?”
    Ade nodded, silent. “Yes, isan, ” said Aras.
    She didn’t have to say she was the Guv’nor. Ade was gladshe was, and he knew Aras liked it that way too. Wess’har matriarchs ran the show. A female who could punch her own weight and then some was normal here; but it was still both sobering and arousing to stand within striking distance of that kind of dominance.
    Shan stared at them for a few moments as if she was going to say something else, then turned and went back into the bedroom, where she packed audibly. Given how little she carried with her, she took a long time doing it.
    â€œâ€™Ras, show me how to do that soybean thing,” said Ade, looking for diversion. A Royal Marine could do anything. He’d make soy milk and tofu and even bloody cakes if he had to. “Might as well be useful.”
    It was a silent and awkward day, and an uncommunicative evening.
    That night, Shan slept on the sofa.
    Bezer’ej: continental shelf, Ouzhari
    Lindsay Neville fumbled with the signal lamp, kneeling in the cold mud, now able to detect everything around her for some distance.
    She couldn’t call it seeing. She could detect light and she could see a lot better than she should have been able to in these black depths, but she could also visualize contours and densities and movement. She had no idea how; she had an urge to open her mouth wide, and somehow images were forming in her mind. At first they had reminded her of grainy reproductions of carved reliefs, but now they were much sharper. She could detect fine detail.
    She could see Mohan Rayat, sitting on the seabed and groping around him as if he wasn’t sure where he was.
    Oh my god oh my god oh my god I’ve changed into something else and I’m not me anymore and—
    Rayat put his hand to his neck.
    He had gills.
    Lindsay had to know. She knew before she touched herthroat but it was still a shock when her fingertips—cold, but not numb—felt soft unfamiliar spaces under her jaw.
    She felt her lips part in a reflex that would have been a yelp of shock but it never emerged. She let her arm drop to her side and found she was still clutching the signal lamp. Would she always need it to talk to the bezeri? Might