Matriarch Read Online Free Page A

blinking, doll.
    The Wess’ej wess’har just wanted the humans punished and put back in their box, confined to quarters on the speck of rock at the galaxy’s edge, and no more: the Eqbas wess’har wanted to sort out Earth’s environmental excesses as well.
    â€œThat means I can go to Jejeno,” said Giyadas, evidently satisfied. “I want to see it for myself.”
    â€œI made a right little reporter of you, didn’t I, doll?”
    â€œKnowing is very important.” Giyadas was more speculatively curious than any other wess’har Eddie had met. “And finding out for yourself is more important still. You taught me that I could only trust my own eyes.”
    Eddie worried what else he’d taught her without realizing it. He also worried how he had shaped her view of humans, because she would be a matriarch herself before too long, one with access to armies.
    â€œSometimes you can’t even rely on that,” said Eddie.
    Humankind had kicked over an anthill far from home, and found that the ants were smarter, bigger and far more technologically advanced than they could ever imagine.
    And, like disturbed ants, the wess’har were pissed off at the brutal intrusion. They would head for the source of the irritation and deal with it: and the source was Earth.

3
    â€œLook, forget the bloody aliens. That’s thirty years away. I’m more worried about this government surviving the next thirty months. Australia and the rest of the Rim States aren’t going to pose any kind of threat unless they suck in the Africans by playing the Moslem card. Canada—well, I don’t know which way they’ll jump. Depends on what the Americas do. So leave the Foreign Office to deal with Eqbas Vorhi.”
    M ARGIT H UBER ,
newly appointed Secretary of State for Defense,
Federal European Union
    Bezer’ej: the Ouzhari shelf, depth unknown
    Mohan Rayat fought to stop trying to breathe. He thought of space for a long time, and concentrated on all the advantages of being at crush depth for humans instead of floating in hard vacuum in zero-g.
    He was far better off than Frankland had been.
    I’m oriented. I’ve got gravity. I can move.
    And I’m not alone.
    C’naatat had invaded his cells, and if he had any thoughts of suicide then he had no idea how to carry it out. He’d lost any sense of how long he had been submerged, but it couldn’t have been long. A few minutes; a few hours. Not days, not weeks, not years.
    Look around. Focus on something.
    What? There was no light except the bioluminescence of his captors, apparently waiting overhead. He concentrated hard on his arms as they rested on the satin-cold mud, spreading his fingers and raising one hand a few centimeters, thenletting it fall back. The silt billowed up in slow clouds—he could taste it—and it dimmed the bezeri’s rainbow light-talk for a while.
    But…he had moved. He was oriented and he wasn’t actually in pain. He wasn’t dying: he was changing.
    He could feel it. The searing cold had now been replaced by real heat, a fever burning within him, and all his reflexes to breathe and struggle for his life had faded. They had been replaced by a desire to open his mouth and…almost swallow. He raised his head a little.
    And now he could see.
    But he could see in ways that he hadn’t thought possible. As he got to his knees, he found he was aware of tall funnel structures spaced around a clear area of seabed, extending up the slope of a submerged cliff, almost a sonar map in his field of vision. Whatever he was seeing was beyond light. He felt buzzing in his sinuses—had they repaired themselves, or had they metamorphosed?—and an inexplicable urge to press his tongue to the roof of his mouth.
    And he could hear. The sound flooded back in as if someone had turned up the volume.
    His hearing had returned, new and alien, and the chatter of the ocean’s