Raen lingered to shake hands with each, and laughed.
Their hands were moist and cold, and their fingers avoided the chitin on her hand where they could.
“Safe voyage,” she wished them one and all.
“Safe voyage,” Warrior breathed, incapable of humour.
No one offered to help them down the ramp. Jim managed the baggage, struggling with the cart which they had tacitly appropriated. They boarded the conveyer and rode it down.
There at the bottom of the ramp stood the Istran pair, inside the security barriers, with a clutch of business types and three other: who might be azi, but not domestics: guards. Raen moved her hand within her cloak, rested it by her gun, calculating which she might remove first if she had to . . . simple reflex. Her hand rested comfortably there.
The moving ramp delivered them down, and there was view of a drab, businesslike vastness, none of the chrome and glitter of Meron, none of the growing plants of Kalind, or the cosmopolitan grandeur of Cerdin station. This station wasted nothing on display, no expensive shielded viewports. It was all dark machinery and automata, bare joinings and cables and every service-point in sight and reach of hands. It was a trade-station, not for the delight of tourists, but for the businesslike reception of freight. Conveyers laced overhead; transport chutes and dark corridors led away into narrow confinements; azi moved here and there, drab, grey-clad men, unsmiling in their fixation on duty.
Raen inhaled the grimness of it and looked leftward, third berth down, hoping for exotic sights of Outsiders, but all docks looked alike, vast ramps, dwarfing humans, places shrouded in tangles of lines and obscured by machinery. A few human figures moved there, too far to distinguish, tantalising in their possibilities. And she could not delay to investigate them.
“Lost,” Warrior complained, touching nervously at her. The air was cold, almost cold enough to make breath frost. Warrior was almost blind in such a place, and would grow rapidly sluggish.
And the Istrans came forward, further distressing it. Raen reached left-handed to comfort it, and gave Merek Eln a forbidding stare.
“I’d keep my distance,” she said.
Ser Merek Eln did stop, with all his companions. His face was ashen. He looked at the tall majat and at her, and swallowed thickly.
“My party is here,” he said. “We have a shuttle engaged would you consider joining us on our trip down, Kont’ Raen? I . . . would still like to talk with you.”
She was frankly amazed. This little man, this beta, came offering favours, and had the courage to approach a majat doing it. “My companions would make that rather crowded, ser.”
“We have accommodation enough, if you would
“Beta,” warrior intoned. “Beta human.” It moved forward in one stride, to touch the strange human who offered it favours, and Raen put up her hand at once, touched a sensitive auditory palp, restraining warrior. It endured this indignity, fretting.
Merek Eln had not fled. It was possibly the worst moment of his life, but he stood still. Her respect for him markedly increased.
“Ser,” she said, “our presence here must be very important to you personally.”
“Please,” he said in a low voice. “Please. Now. The station is not a secure place to be standing in the open. ITAK can offer you security. We can talk on the way down. It’s urgent.”
All her instincts rebelled at this: it was dangerous, ridiculously dangerous, to accept local entanglements without looking into all sides of the matter.
But she nodded, and walked with them. Jim followed. Warrior stalked beside, statuary in slow motion, trying to hold to human pace.
Their course took them along the dock, nearer and nearer the Outsider berth.
Raen tried not even to glance much that way: it distracted her from the general survey of the area, which her eyes made constantly, nervously. But there were Outsiders; she knew they must be such, by their strange clothing and their business near that berth.
“Are such onworld too?” she asked. “Do they come downworld?”
“There’s a ground-based trade mission,” Kest said.
That cheered her. She could bear it no longer, and stopped and stared at a group of men near them on the dock . . . plainly dressed, doing azi-work. She wondered whether they were true men or what they were. They stopped their work and stood upright and gaped . . . more at the majat, surely, than at her.