Matriarch
Chapter One
You detonated cobalt bombs on Ouzhari in your greed to keep c'naatat to yourself. The bezeri who died were collateral damage—that is your phrase, is it not? Now Earth will learn what collateral damage really means.
Curas Ti,
senior Matriarch of the Eqbas Vorhi,
in a response to the Foreign Secretary of
the Federal European Union
Bezer'ej, Cavanagh's Star system: continental shelf off Ouzhari island, December 2376
Mohan Rayat gave up the reflex struggle to stop his lungs filling with water, drowned—which was nowhere near as painless as they claimed—and plummeted into the crushing black depths where the light of Cavanagh's Star never penetrated.
You bitch, Frankland.
And he wasn't dead.
You sanctimonious bitch.
He was shaking uncontrollably and convulsing, but he wasn't dead.
Rayat was aware of the kaleidoscopes of colored light rippling above him in the mantles of the last surviving bezeri. He was a living corpse, a man imprisoned ... read full excerpt from: Matriarch ebook
