Judge by Karen Traviss Page A

Ade would turn back their own clock if they could.
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    Eqbas ship 886–001–005–6: command center module.
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    Esganikan studied Da Shapakti’s message again with a mix of relief and apprehension. He’d done it; he’d managed to remove the c’naatat organism from Mohan Rayat, not once but a number of times.
    The parasite’s capacity to adapt and resist removal had its limits. Shapakti had found a way to beat it—in humans, at least, there was.
    Esganikan found herself looking past his recording on the screen set in the bulkhead of her cabin, straining to see something of her home city, Surang. She missed it: the longing was sharp, sharper than she had ever known on previous missions, a craving for a normal life and a clan of her own. She knew his words well enough by now. She didn’t need to listen, just to see.
    She’d talk to Shapakti tomorrow. Her life depended on it: c’naatat would have to be removed one day, or she would have to be removed from it by fragmentation. She had no intention of ending up like Aras, alone for unthinkable periods.
    And then there was Rayat.
    Could she allow him to return home now? She’d once told him he could come back to Earth. What harm could he do once c’naatat was removed? Without the parasite in his possession, nothing he knew could help humans to find it and exploit it. And they would never reach Bezer’ej again, she’d see to that.
    Is that Rayat’s voice persuading me?
    Shan would fight to stop him returning; she’d try to kill him again, Esganikan was sure of that. Shan thought knowledge was dangerous and needed to be controlled, one of her few blatantly human failings.
    Esganikan searched as best she could in the jumbled memory that wasn’t wholly hers, trying to test Mohan Rayat’s motives. She felt the passing touch of an isolated child who wanted to please his grandfather. The memories of the humans through which c’naatat had passed emerged with a fragmented but surprising clarity. The wider picture eluded her, but she saw snapshots, as Shan called them, frozen moments of great detail. She felt his intense devotion: family, nation, but no wife, no child, and a conscious, aching gap where they should have been.
    How similar all creatures are, deep down.
    Esganikan could feel Shan’s desperate dread of c’naatat, a fear that had drowned out her own needs—a nightmare of supersoldiers, uncontrolled population growth, wars over the privilege of owning the biotech, a battleground between the haves and the have-nots, the destruction of the fabric of the ecology, the economy and society. There would also be something called stupid, wasteful bloody beauty treatments derived from it without a thought of the long-term consequences, although Esganikan was still working out what that meant.
    All life was meant to end. Humans were far too obsessed with stagnant permanence—in mortal or spiritual form—in a universe already predestined to end and begin anew.
    Esganikan distracted herself by catching up on the latest climate modeling that the ecosystem analysts had produced in the last few hours. It would probably upset the gethes that she’d taken information from their systems rather than waiting to be given it, but this was not their timetable to dictate. They were squabbling among themselves just like the isenj had done, except that their wars would damage other species, and so they had to be managed.
    If Shapakti failed to find a way to remove c’naatat from Esganikan, she would face the same choice as the wess’har once had—at what point to give up her unnatural life.
    Stop this. You’ve been on Earth less than twenty-four hours. Deal with that when you have to. You knew the risks.
    The climate changes on Earth weren’t as extreme as the first Eqbas model had predicted: humans had tried to mend their ways again, but it was never enough and they always