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MATRIARCH

KAREN TRAVISS

For Lyn Graham, Martin Welsford, and all those who put truth before convenience

Contents

Prologue

Recycling won’t save the Earth, and neither will prayer.

1

Mohan Rayat gave up the reflex struggle to stop his…

2

“She’s going to fucking well skin us when she finds…

3

Mohan Rayat fought to stop trying to breathe. He thought…

4

“You hiding from Frankland?” asked Mart Barencoin.

5

It took a lot to reduce Eddie to speechless silence…

6

The sea around Rayat was growing lighter and greener. Sunlight…

7

Lindsay stared at the squirming translucent tubes clutched in one…

8

“Where is he?” said Shan.

9

Sand castles. They’re sand castles.

10

The eggshell domes of the ussissi settlement just outside F’nar…

11

Shan sat and stared at the ESF670 rifle on the…

12

President Pirb repeated his call to arms as the Eqbas…

13

The podship was a far simpler vessel than Rayat had…

14

Rayat found he could walk faster than Lindsay. Once they’d…

15

Lindsay laid the glass petals on a slab of stone…

16

Shan sat next to her own grave and realized that…

17

If you were pregnant, you couldn’t get any more pregnant…

18

“It’s been years since I covered a tree-planting,” said Eddie.

19

“Funny how the moral high ground tends to flatten out…

20

The Eqbas could have been any human biohaz team as…

21

Aras decided the crops could do without him for one…

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Praise

Other Books by Karen Traviss

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue

F’nar, Wess’ej: November 2376

Recycling won’t save the Earth, and neither will prayer.

The Eqbas are coming. It might be a few decades away, but they’re still coming, and I know them. They’re very hospitable, they love their kids, and they can kill millions without losing a second’s sleep.

You can reach shock overload pretty quickly.

After the first headlines and the protests and the panic, human beings tend to settle into apathy if it’s not their life that’s on the line. News is about now and here and me.

When we wandered into a war zone in the Cavanagh’s Star system, that was news. When we got greedy and nuked a neutral world out here, that got plenty of attention too; and so did the fact that the wess’har blew our warship—Actaeon—out of the sky.

But we’re twenty-five light-years away from Earth, and domestic crises edge alien wars well down the running order now. When there’s fighting and suffering on your own doorstep, do you care that we’ve pretty well exterminated an entire alien race ourselves? Do you care if a woman spaced herself rather than hand over the parasite she was carrying—and survived? Does it matter that the local wess’har are so pissed off with humans that they’ve called in the big guns to visit Earth and teach us a lesson?

If you don’t, you probably will in thirty years’ time. Because that’s roughly when the Eqbas Vorhi fleet will reach Earth, and they’re not visiting to say they come in peace or any uplifting shit like that. They’re coming to punish us for

genocide. And while they’re at it, they want to restore Earth to a state of environmental balance. In brief: a lot of humans are fucked. Most of us, probably.