Injured azi moved themselves; the betas she left to betas, and made the slide to safety, into the arms of her azi below, steadied herself and looked about: the hold chute was deployed, and men were exiting there. She staggered across the grass, angry that her knees so betrayed her, found Merry, whose battered face wept blood along a scraped cheek. “The hold—many dead?”
“Six. Some bad, sera.”
So few hours, from the null of the pens, and to die, after eighteen years of preparing. She drew a deep breath and forced it out again. “Get them all out.” She sat down on the grass where she was, head bowed against her knees, pulled up the sunsuit hood, adjusted her gloves, small, weary movements. They had to get clear of the ship. The ship was a target. They had to move. She shut her eyes a moment and oriented herself, slipped the visor to a more comfortable place on her nose, adjusted up the cloth about her lower face, as anonymous as the azi.
Warriors living-chained down from the hatch, hale and whole. She called to them and rose, bared a hand to identify herself. They came, humming and booming in distress at their experience, offered touch. “Life-fluids,” they kept saying, alarmed by the deaths.
“Watch,” she said, gesturing at all that empty horizon of fields, thinking of raided depots and murdered azi. “Let no majat come on us.”
“Yess,” they agreed, and hovered never far away.
An azi brought her luggage, her battered brown case, and she laughed with the touch of hysteria for that, extracted her kit of lotions and medicines and jammed those in her side pocket, cast the rest away.
The azi were all out, she reckoned. She walked among them, saw that Merry had taken her at her word, for the dead lay in a group, half a dozen not counting the one above, on the bridge; and a little apart from them were four with disabling injuries; and apart from them was a large group of wounded; and a group which bore virtually none. She looked back that course again, suddenly understanding how they were grouped, that the wounded, huddled together, simply waited, knotted up as she had seen Jim do when he was disturbed.
Waiting termination.
She cast about in distress, reckoned what would be the lot of any left in beta care. “We carry those that can’t walk,” she told Merry, and cursed the luck, and her softness, and turned it to curses at the hale ones, ordering the emergency litters, ordering packs made, until men were hurrying about like a disturbed hive.
And the beta captain limped to her . . . she recognised the greying brows through the mask. “Stay with the ship,” he urged her.
“Stay yourself.” Her head throbbed and the sun beat through the cloth; she forced herself to gentle language. “Take your chances here, ser. Kontrin feud. Stay out of it.”
And seeing her own folk ready, she shouted hoarse orders and bade them move.
North.
Toward Newhope, toward any place with a computer link.
xi
Morn Hald paced the office of the ISPAK station command, waited, settled again at the console.
Such resources as the Family had at its command he called into use; a code number summoned what vessels waited at Meron, and long as it would take for the message to run via intercomp, as long as it would take those ships to reach Istra—they were as good as on their way.
He relied on the Hald for that.
The Meth-maren had provided the overt provocation the Movement needed, the chaos she had wrought at station, that elevated the matter above a feud of Houses. Panicked Outsiders were running, refusing all appeals to return—had fired on a Kontrin vessel. Morn’s thin hands were emphatic on the keys, violent with rage.
His witness, under his witness the Meth-maren had managed such a thing; and he was stung in his pride. Outsiders were involved. He had hesitated between destroying them and not; and the thought of embroiling himself with that while the Meth-maren found herself escape and weapons—for that he had pulled away, to his prime target, to the dangerous one. There was no knowing in what she had her hand, where her agents were placed by now.