Free Matriarch by Karen Traviss Page B

nightmare she had to deal with.
    But it was a fitting punishment for bringing a species almost to extinction. And, unlike those who had wiped out the dodo and the tiger and the orangutan, she was now at the mercy of her victims.
    Shan would have told her that it served her bloody well right.
    Saib seemed impatient. We have many records to gather. They are scattered all over this region. He shimmered with pulsing violet rings of light and began to move away. Three others moved with him, one a constant, unchanging deep blue, the other a slowly changing palette of scarlet and green that lost its red hues as it moved further away. We have to hurry.
    Lindsay didn’t ask why. She began walking behind Saib and his companions as if she was trudging through deep snow, still trying to walk when she should have been swimming. “Come on, Rayat. Do as you’re bloody told.”
    â€œIt’s going to be something like raw shrimp and jellyfish,” he said.
    She swayed a little and then found herself striking out, lifting her legs, swimming.
    â€œWhat is?”
    â€œLunch.”
    Lindsay wondered how she was going to spend eternity trapped with Rayat. Concentrating on familiar loathing stopped her thinking about what she was becoming, and how she would get through the next hour without going insane.
    Jejeno city, Ebj region, Umeh: Eqbas Vorhi ship 886-001-005-6, Ebj airspace
    â€œShit,” said Shan.
    It was the first time she’d seen Umeh and it was every nightmare she’d ever had in Environmental Hazard Enforcement. The Eqbas ship hung about 1,000 meters above the surface of the city. Then its forward bulkhead and part of the deck became suddenly transparent.
    She put her hand out instinctively to steady herself. She felt like she was falling; she’d done this before. She’d stared down through the viewplate of an automated shuttle as it plummeted towards the surface of Bezer’ej for the first time and the sensation made her nearly throw up.
    For a second, she was close to doing that again.
    Tight-packed buildings spread below her. There was nothing else but buildings upon buildings upon buildings, without the relief of greenery or open spaces or bodies of water. She’d seen Eddie’s footage of Jejeno but it didn’t come close to capturing the sheer scale of the urbanization.
    Home, said an uninvited feeling in her chest. Home.
    She tagged it as the scrap of isenj in her that went with the genetic memory. The movement she could see was packed bodies, a black and brown carpet of isenj moving through the impossibly crowded streets of the capital. That was inside her, somewhere.
    â€œShit,” she said again. Crowded cities meant high casualties in any disaster; unthinkably crowded ones like Jejeno set off all her copper’s emergency responses. She braced herself not to attempt to organize things. “Remind me not to apply for a posting here. How the hell do they manage an environment like that?”
    At least the deck was mostly opaque. Where it was wholly transparent, an Eqbas crew member gazed down apparently unconcerned. Shan decided that she could manage that too, and steeled herself to step into the transparent section to look down, overriding all her brain’s hardwired insistence that she would fall.
    Eddie joined her in contemplating the city beneath their feet, as casual as the Eqbas. His bee cam—the size of a small orange—settled a little above the deck, recording silently. Shan wondered if Eddie was putting on a show of bravado when he was actually shitting himself. Looking down on the city, she felt like a tourist in Hell.
    â€œI can remember when this was all fields,” Eddie said cheerfully.
    Ade chuckled. He hadn’t said a word since they embarked. Shan wondered how she could call a truce with him now and waited for Eddie’s reaction.
    â€œWho do you actually know in the isenj government now, Eddie?” You got Ual killed, you