It took time to load baggage in, to have the azi and the two majat settled in the available space in the rear of the transport. “We can find a car,” an officer said; Raen shook her head. She did not trust being separated from her belongings. She still feared majat, a solving shot; their vision could hardly tell one human from another, but they were stirred enough not to care for such niceties.
The majat must go in last. Warrior fretted, nervous at so many humans it must not touch. Raen touched the sensitive palps, held it attentive an instant. “You must not touch the azi in the vehicle, Warrior. Must not frighten them. Trust. Be very still. You-unit tell the other Warrior so.”
It boomed answer, protest, perhaps; but it boarded, its partner with it. The officer slammed the door. Raen hurried round and flung herself in beside the driver. A man slammed the door. She set her drawn gun comfortably on her knee in plain sight as they moved out, watching the shadows of the pillars as they whipped past the terminal entry for the exit ramp.
They were clear. She gave the officer driving the address she wanted and relaxed slightly, trying not to think of Warrior and its companion and the azi in the rear, behind the partition, and what misery they were severally undergoing, two Warriors forbidden to touch and three azi pent up with majat in near darkness.
Night-time city whisked past, lines of domes marching out into dark interstices of wild land, asterisk-city, mostly sealed or underground. The flavour of the air was coppery and unpleasant. The stormclouds boiled above them, frequent with lightnings, and a spattering of rain hit the windshields and windows, fragmenting the lights. Then they were underground again, locked into the subway track, whisking in behind a big public carrier. Raen hated these systems, this projectile-fashion passage through public areas; but it was, perhaps, the safest means of travel this night.
Majat hives did not have communication equipment—no links with station—but majat had been ready for them: red. hive, with ambush prepared. Humans had participated in it almost certainly.
And more than Warrior had died: two beta envoys were gone two who had been in prolonged contact with a Kontrin, who had perhaps talked too much.
She was not about to trust ITAK, She doubted, at least, that they would move against her openly: it might be-if they knew she was alone, that there was not behind her an entire Kontrin sept and House—
But one bluffed. It was all, in fact, that Kontrin had ever been able to do among betas, in one sense—for the armed ships that rested solely in Kontrin hands were inevitably far away when one might need them; but the ships did exist. So did the intimate knowledge of the psych-sets with which the original beta culture had been created. So did the power to license and embargo, to adjust birth quotas, to readjust any economic fact of a beta’s existence, individually or by class.
The beta beside her did not attempt friendliness, did not speak, did not acknowledge her: stark fear. She had seen the reaction elsewhere. She remembered the port, the salon of the ship . . . reckoned what her coming might mean to Istra, which had not seen Kontrin onworld in centuries, many beta lifespans; the veil jerked rudely aside, a whole world subjected to what she had done to the folk of Andra’s Jewel.
In her present mood, her band clenched and sweating on the grip of the gun, with the reaction of the ambush finally overtaking her, she little cared.
iii
The car disengaged from the tube-system and nosed up the ramp into a residential circle. It was an area of lighted paving, with space for greenery—or something similar—in the centre. A high wall encircled them, gates 41, 42, 43 . . . the rain-spattered windshield showed the glare of more lights, vehicles clustered at the area of 47. A guard let them through the open gate; they eased up the curved drive. Floodlights from the cars had the grounds in garish clarity: twisted tree-forms, dappled trunks and tufts of tiny leaves. The garden was all rocks and spiky plantings, and the house was a white, tiered structure, contiguous with the neighbouring houses, so that the whole would form a cantilevered ring, like one vast apartment, each groundlevel with its own walled garden. The driver wove past two obstructing vehicles and stopped the car before a well-lit entry, a portico with uniformed officers aswarm about the door.