They hurried off at a run. She went inside with Jim as her shadow, unsealed the gate from the comp center when she saw the trucks by remote: they bore the Labour Registry designation. She kept watching, while the trucks disgorged azi and supplies, while Merry and Max called off numbers and ranged the men in groups of ten. The men stood; the boxes formed a square in the front garden. As each truck emptied, it pulled out, and when the last vehicle cleared the gate, Raen closed it and set the alarm again.
“They’ll not like the majat at all,” Raen said. “Jim, go find one of the quieter Warriors and ask it to come to the front of the house with you—alone. Better they see one before they see all of them”
He nodded and went. Raen put the outside lights on and went out the front door, walked out into the midst of the orderly groups, two hundred six men, by tens.
Max and Merry were checking numbers as she had said, a process the brighter lights made easier. Each was read, not by the stencil on the coveralls, but by the tattoo on the shoulder; and each man passed was directed into military order over by the portico. Neat, precise, the team of Max and Merry; and the two hundred were minds precisely like theirs . . . all too precisely, having come from the same tapes.
Every figure stiffened, looked houseward. Raen glanced and saw Jim with his unlikely shadow slow-stepping along in close company. “There are many such here,” Raen said before panic could take hold. “I hold your contracts. I tell you that you’re very safe with these particular majat. They’ll help you in your duties, which are to protect this house. Understood?”
Each head inclined, the fix of their eyes now on her. Two hundred men. In the group were many who were duplicates, twin, triplet, quadruplet sets, alike even to age. There were two more Maxes and another Merry. They could accept.
They would accept her and the majat as they would accept anything which held their contracts. It was their psych-set. Like Max and Merry, they fought only when they were directed, only when their contract-holder identified an enemy. But for their own lives, they would scarcely put up resistance. Did not. Until things were clear to them, they were docile. Warrior exercised curiosity about them, stalked down near them. They bore this: their contract-holder was present to instruct them if instructions were to be given.
Guard-function.
Specificity, Itavvy had called it.
“Warrior,” she said, “come.” And when it had joined her, with Jim shadowing it, she soothed it with a touch and kept it by her, an act of mercy.
The process continued. But by one man both Max and Merry delayed, looked closely at the mark, disputed. “Sera,” Max called.
The man bolted. Warrior moved. “No!” Raen yelled, but Warrior was deaf to that, auditory palps laid back, a blur of motion. Azi scattered
But it was Max and Merry who had the fugitive; Raen raced through the chaotic midst, calmed the anxious Warrior. Jim stayed with her. Other azi stayed about, sober-faced, stunned, perhaps, that one of their number had done violence.
The azi in Maws grip stopped fighting, gazed past Raen’s shoulder and surely understood what he had narrowly escaped. He was a man like the others, shave-headed, grey clad, a number stencilled on his coverall; but Merry pulled back the cloth from his shoulder and showed the tattoo as if there were something amiss.
“It’s too dark, sera,” Merry said. “Papers say twenty-nine, but the mark’s bright.”
The man’s eyes shifted back to Raen, a face rigid with terror.
Such things had been done . . . a beta highly bribed, Promised protection. “I’d believe a fluke of the dye,” Raen said softly. “But not an azi who’d break and run. Who sent you?”
He gave no answer, but wrenched to free himself.
“Not an assassin,” Raen said, though the hate in that face gave her pause to think so. “Betas don’t go for that. Or—” she added, for the expression was nigh to madness, “maybe not beta at all. Are you?”