Matriarch Read Free

that made him feel like a particularly retarded amoeba fresh out of the primordial slime.
    The warship had almost completely assembled itself. He looked around for the small survey vessel that had been the vanguard, Da Shapakti’s ship, and noticed it wasn’t there any longer. Maybe the destroyer had swallowed and absorbed it too. How did they route the services and the controls? How did they keep it vacuum-tight in space? He found he had a thousand questions whose answers would almost certainly be something along the lines of forget it, chimp.
    Esganikan Gai strode towards him. He could always ask her; it was her ship. She was the boss-woman.
    The visiting Eqbas wess’har might have looked different to their native Wess’ej cousins, but the females still had that same ability to make you crap yourself. No wonder Shan fitted in with them so well. Esganikan’s brilliant copper-red plume of hair bobbed as she stared down at him and cocked her head to get a better focus, four-lobed pupils snapping from open flower to tight cross-wires and back again in an instant, just like all the wess’har. Looking any of them in the eye was still hard. There was no single point to focus upon—just the uneasy sense of being the center of their aim.
    And Esganikan was tall. Eddie felt like a little kid lost in a towering forest of adult legs again.
    â€œWhat do you want?” She lacked charm but, unlike Shan, she was incapable of even feigning it. “We leave soon for Bezer’ej and Umeh.”
    â€œI know.” You owe me one. He’d lent her his database to learn English. He wasn’t sure yet of the Eqbas approach to repaying favors, but if it was the average wess’har one, it was unpredictable. “Can you take me to Jejeno?”
    â€œWe have a presence to maintain.”
    â€œSo can I get a ride with you?”
    The Eqbas matriarch—flat-faced compared to the elegant, long-muzzled wess’har he’d grown used to—glanced over her shoulder at the embarkation going on behind her. “Why?”
    Eddie found himself detaching from a recent, raw memory. “Now that Minister Ual’s dead, I need to make contacts within the government again.”
    â€œSo do we.”
    â€œYes, but can I come too? ” You had to be direct with them; they had no concept of being abrupt. Eddie wondered if his natural diplomatic touch was being corrupted by close contact with species who were as outspoken as five-year-olds. “Please?”
    She cocked her head again. “Be here tomorrow when we leave.”
    â€œThank you.”
    â€œAt your own risk.”
    It always was. “I get it.”
    Esganikan turned and swept back to the ship. Eddie watched her go, still feeling sweaty and uncomfortable from running, and reminded himself what she was—an alien , the commander of an alien warship, a warship that was stunning in its size and technology and was just a small part of a much, much bigger fleet.
    Earth had nearly thirty years left to prepare for the invasion. The fact that the Australian government had invited the Eqbas guaranteed no happy endings. Eqbas wess’har were the guests who never knew when it was time to go.
    Eddie made his way back to F’nar at a sedate pace this time. He was used to the higher gravity, but it was still a long walk across the rolling plain of rock and tufts of sage green vegetation to the point where the terrain became lava buttes and the city was suddenly visible. Homes and terraces were carved into the cliff walls of a long-dead volcano. Whatever the weather, whatever the light, it was always beautiful, coated in a shimmering layer of nacre. It was, as the human Christian colonists called it, the City of Pearl.
    The pearl happened to be insect shit deposited by billions of tem flies, but Eddie didn’t let the reality spoil his sense of wonder one bit.
    Nor did he let the equally accurate word invasion sully his