Judge Read Free Page B

realized what every world the Eqbas visited realized sooner rather than later: once invited, once their attention was focused, Eqbas didn’t turn around and go home.
    â€œShit.” She wandered over to Aras and put her hand on his back. “I wish I’d stayed out of the cryo. Lots of catching up to do now.”
    Aras indicated an interior bulkhead. It formed into a viewing screen at a gesture from him, and suddenly she was looking at a vaguely familiar logo and a scene she almost recognized. It took her a few seconds to work out that it was the latest incarnation of BBChan; the setting was familiar.
    â€œJejeno,” said Aras. “I’ve been catching up on Eddie’s broadcasts over the last twenty-five years. He’s been prolific. And Jejeno has…changed.”
    It was all coming back too fast. Shan found herself looking at the once-crowded isenj homeworld of Umeh, the city of Jejeno, where every meter of land had been covered with high-rise buildings, every living thing that wasn’t isenj or a food crop obliterated, every natural system destroyed and replaced by an engineered climate—until the Eqbas had shown up, and millions of isenj had died. By now, it was probably billions.
    Aras was right: it had changed.
    In shot, Eddie—a much older Eddie—was walking around an open area in the city that looked as if it was grassed parkland. On Earth, that would have been totally unremarkable. On Umeh, it was a miracle.
    Isenj, black and brown egg-shaped bodies on spider legs, mouths fringed with small teeth like a piranha’s, tottered through the background. They were an orderly people who looked nothing like humans, but who had far more in common with them than with their neighbors in the Cavanagh system, the wess’har. Some of them paused to watch Eddie doing his piece to camera, just like humans. The audio was muted, but the normality of the scene was shocking.
    â€œWhat happened?” Shan asked. But she knew: Jejeno wasn’t the dystopian urban landscape she recalled because most of the isenj population had been removed the hard way. “God. So they really did it.”
    But it wasn’t the outcome of the war she’d walked away from that really shattered her composure. It was seeing Eddie Michallat now pushing seventy years old. He’d been younger than her when she’d last seen him.
    Time was a bastard. It took everyone in the end, and this was somehow harder than first leaving Earth on a moment’s notice and knowing everyone she cared about would be dead or senile by the time she was revived again.
    But that’s what c’naatat ’s like, too. It’ll keep you going, repair you indefinitely, while everyone you know—everyone without the parasite—ages and dies.
    She’d known from the start that was how the bloody thing worked. It was a simultaneous curse and blessing.
    Now, for the first time, she really felt it.
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    Eqbas Vorhi, office of Varguti Sho, senior matriarch of Surang: 2401 in the calendar of the gethes.
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    â€œIf you don’t act now, ” said Mohan Rayat, “Esganikan Gai is going to play right into my government’s hands and give humans c’naatat. She’s infected. And she’s on Earth .”
    Varguti Sho, the most senior matriarch of the city-state of Surang, was new to the job. That meant she might be persuaded more easily than her predecessors, who seemed to think that while it was irregular for a commander to dose herself with a biohazard and fail to tell her own government, it wasn’t a cause for alarm. They had done nothing in the intervening years despite his warnings. He had to make them understand.
    Wrong. It’s everything you want to stamp out. It’s everything I’ve come to fear. It’s a potential disaster. Didn’t all this trouble with humans start there?
    â€œCuras Ti trusted Esganikan to treat the parasite as an experiment,” said