Home.
She felt more grief than she had yet felt. She had been out of human reference; and now the deaths became real to her again. Mother, cousins, friends…all ashes by now. Ruil would have spared no one, least of all eldest, so that there would be no possibility of challenge to their claim. Even yet the Family had made no move to intervene: Ruil still held here, or the hive would have known, would have told her, Red-hive remained here: of that they were sure.
Bile rose in her throat, bitter hate. She swallowed at it, and wiped her eyes with the back of her left hand, the gun clenched in her chitined right.
“Meth-maren,” Warrior urged her. She scrambled down, reckless on the rocks, half-blind. Her limbs trembled with the strain, but Warrior caught her, its stilt-limbs strong and sure, a single downward stride spanning several of hers, joints bracing easily at extensions impossible for human limbs: its muscles attached to endo- and exoskeletons. Azi too swarmed back up the rocks and took her arms, helping her, handing her down to other Warriors, who urged her on in their turn Worker-fashion: most adaptable of majat, the Warriors, capable of independent judgement and generalised functions.
“This way,” she bade them, choosing her way through the forest, along paths she knew. They went with hardly a crack of brush, walking as fast as she could run.
Red Warrior. It started from cover in the thickets and misjudged its capacity for flight. Blues sped after it, brought it down and bit it. The group of combatants locked into statue like quiet for a few moments, blue bowed over their enemy, mandibles locked with majat patience. Then the head came free, and blue Warriors came to life and stalked ahead, some on the trail and some off, passing taste in weaving contacts, one to the other.
“Strong red force,” Warrior said to Raen, and nervously touched palps to her mouth as they walked, a curious backward dance in the act. It interpreted aloud what taste should have told her, a mere breathing of resonances. “Roil humans. No sense of alarm. They do not expect attack.”
The blue Warriors were elated; their movements were exaggerated, full of excess energy. Some darted back, urging on those who lagged; a dark flood of bodies in their wake tumbled down the rocks and through the trees. The azi, touching each other and grinning with joy, would have loped ahead. Raen distrusted their good sense and hissed at them to hold back. She was hurrying as much as she could. Her side hurt anew. Her bare feet were torn by the rocks and the thorns. She ignored the pain; she had felt worse. An increasing fear gripped her stomach.
I’m too slow, she thought in one moment of panic. I’m holding them back too long. And in another: There are grown men down there, used to killing; There are guard-azi, bred for fighting. What am I doing here?But they were not expecting attack: the blues read so; and they would not be expecting majat. She looked about her at her companions, at creatures whose very instincts were specialised toward killing, and drank in their enthusiasm, that was madness.
They were nearing the end of the woods, where there were only thickets and thorn-hedges. “Hurry,” Warrior urged her, seizing her painfully by the arm. Majat were not like men, who respected a leader: hive-mind was one. She pressed a hand to her throbbing side and started to run, spending the strength she had saved.
There were ways she knew, paths she had run in other days, shortcuts azi workers took to the fields, places where the hedges were thin. She ran them, dodging this way and that with agility that only tine azi matched in this tangle. A wall loomed up, the barrier to the inner gardens by the labs, no obstacle to the Warriors, who living-chained their way up and made a way for the azi. Azi swarmed over, togging and pulling at her to help her after, climbing over their naked and sweating bodies. She made it. The chain undid itself. The last Warrior came over, a stilt-limbed prodigy of balance and strength, pulled by its fellows.
They were pleased with the operation. Mandibles scissored with rapid excitement. Suddenly they broke and raced like a black flood in the dark, majat and azi, moving with incredible rapidity.
More red-hivers. Bodies tangled on the lawn, roiled; the wave-front blunted itself, knotted in places of resistance. There were crashings in the shrubbery, the booming alarm of Warriors, flares of weapons. Raen froze in shadow, panic-stricken, everything she had planned slipping control, Then she adjusted her grip on her gun, swallowed sir and ran, to do what she had come to do.
A Warrior appeared by her, and another, half a dozen more, and some of the azi. She raced for the main door, for an area visibly guarded by red-hive. Fire laced about them, and from them. Warriors beside her fell, twitching, uttering squeals from their resonance chambers. In sanity, she would have panicked. There was nothing to do now but keep running for the door…too far now to retreat. She reached the door and Warriors tangled in combat about her. She burned the mechanism, and struggled with the door; azi and then a Warrior used their strength to move it. Azi and Warriors flooded behind her as she raced into Kethiuy’s halls.
“Exits all covered,” Warrior breathed beside her; and then she realised where all the others had gone—majat strategy, efficient and sudden. The main corridor of the central dome lay vacant before her…what had been home. Rage hammered in her in time to her pulse.
Suddenly, far off down the wings, there was crashing and shrilling of alarms, from every point of the budding: blue. hivers were in. A domestic azi darted from cover, terrified, darted back again, up the stairs—and screamed and fell under a rush of majat down them.
Red-hivers. Raen whipped the gun to target and fired, breaking up their formation, even while blue-hive swarmed after them.
There were human cries. Doors broke open from west-wing: Ruils burst from that cover with a handful of blues on their heels. Raen left majat to majat, steadied her pistol on new targets and fired, careful shots as ever in practice, at the weapon’s limits of speed. Her eyes stayed clear. Time slowed. They fell, one after the other, young and old, perhaps not believing what they saw. Their faces were set in horror and hers in a rigid grin.
Then a baritone piping assailed her ears and the blues in all parts of the corridor signalled each other in booming panic, regrouping to signals she could not read. From east-wing came others, reds, golds, a horde of armed azi.
Raen stood and fired, coldly desperate, not seeing how to retreat. Some of the Kethiuy azi and the surviving blues attempted to rally to her, but fire cut them down and a rush of majat came over them.
Warrior fell almost at her feet, decapitated. The limbs continued to struggle, nearly taking her off her feet. Naked azi sprawled dead about her. She spun then, catching her balance, and tried to run, for there was no other hope. The blues, such as survived, were in full flight.
Something crashed down on her, crushing weight.
viii
A second time Raen lay quietly and waited to live or die; but this time the walls were stark white and chrome, and the frightened azi who tended her kept their eyes down and said nothing.
That was well enough. There was nothing she particularly wanted to hear. She was not in Kethiuy. That told her something. Drugs hazed her senses, keeping her from wishing anything very strongly.
This continued for what seemed days. There were meals. She was fed, being unable to feed herself. She was moved, bothered for this and the other necessity. She said nothing in all this time, and from the azi there was no word.
But finally the drugs were gone, and she waked with a majat guard in the room.
Red-hive. She recognised the badges, the marks they wore for humans, who could not see their colours. Red-hive Warrior.
She knew then that she had lost, lost more than Kethiuy.
The majat gave her clothing, grey, without Colour. She put it on, and found the close feeling of it utterly strange. She sat afterward with her hands in her tap, on the edge of the bed, staring at the wall. The majat guard did not move and would not move while she did not.