Judge by Karen Traviss Page B

but…do you know what happened to Mohan Rayat?”
    Transparent as a glass of piss. What an amateur. “Not really.” Well, that was true. He hadn’t heard from him since the Eqbas left. “Why?”
    â€œYou must be aware that the Eqbas want to know who gave him clearance to use nuclear devices on Bezer’ej. I just wondered if he might still be alive and willing to say. Clear it up without the need for nastiness.”
    â€œI haven’t seen him since…oh, 2376? He’s not here, that’s for sure. He’d be in his late seventies now if he’s still alive.”
    â€œThank you anyway. Please, get back in touch when you’re ready to go ahead.”
    â€œI will.”
    Eddie closed the link with a sense of completely inappropriate elation. Why the hell has that given me a buzz? It was just the old juices flowing, being pivotal, knowing he was being set up and pulling a flanker on a smart-arse. All the old buttons were being pushed. Erica really would go nuts and lecture him about not being able to let go either of Earth or his old status, but that wasn’t why he asked for time.
    So Zammett wants Rayat—still. He wants Shan—still. Nothing’s changed. Now, if you think your population is going to be wiped out like the isenj, what would you want more than anything?
    C’naatat.
    Eddie would have been surprised if Zammett hadn’t worked out what he’d do next, but he had to do it anyway. He needed to warn Shan. The ITX wasn’t encrypted; neither wess’har nor isenj cared much about secrets.
    Giyadas would be delighted to help him contact Aras and cover his tracks. The little seahorse princess who’d wanted to be a reporter just like Eddie had grown up into a fearsome matriarch in her own right, wise to the ways of gethes.
    Eddie grabbed his bee cam and headed for the pearl terraces to find her. He didn’t need a poxy president to make him feel important. His best buddy was a wess’har warrior queen.
    Â 
    Earth, Australian Republic: Eqbas temporary camp.
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    The most alien trees Aras had ever seen weren’t the cycadlike dalf of Umeh, or the efte of Bezer’ej, but the synthetic ones he was now looking at in the middle of a red desert so arid, so baked, so inhospitable that no real tree could ever have survived there.
    In the relative cool of dusk, the trees looked unnaturally white, their rectangular upper paddles and rigidly straight lines at odds with the natural curves of the landscape.
    They weren’t decorative—humans used artificial plants for enjoyment, he knew that—but devices for carbon dioxide capture, trapping CO 2 and pumping it as liquid sodium carbonate for separation and routing to vast underwater gas injectors to bury the gas forever in the sea bed.
    Forever was a very flexible word. Forever was, in this technology, millions of years. That wasn’t forever at all. Aras could envisage forever, and now it was troubling him. He thought of Umeh, of visiting the city of Jejeno that he’d never seen but that he recalled from the memories of his isenj captors more than five hundred years before.
    What was I before c’naatat? What mattered to me? What gave me joy?
    It was as if the intervening centuries hadn’t happened; long lonely years of self-imposed exile on Bezer’ej, where every day was the same except for the changes of garrison personnel, followed by fewer than three years of the most bittersweet joy, agony, war, and deaths that completely changed his life and the future of both Earth and two other star systems.
    I can count my time with Shan in single years, and my time with her as my isan in months. I executed my best friend. I mourned Shan’s death and then she came back to me. I have a house-brother again, at last. And still…I dwell on what I was, because I can hardly recall it, but I need to. I need to know who I really am.
    Aras preferred to do his thinking