Betas, crowds of betas, and nowhere did panic start in that horde. Adults and rare children stared at them and at Warrior…stared long and hard, it might be, but there was no panic at such presence. It was insane, that on this world a majat Warrior could be so ignored; or a Kontrin, evident by Colour.
They were not sure, she thought suddenly. Downworlders. No one of them had seena Kontrin. They perhaps suspected, but they did not expect, and they were not in a position, these short-lived betas, to recognise a Colour banned in inner-worlds for two decades. It was even possible that they did not know the Houses by name; they had no reason to: no beta of Istra had to deal with them.
But a majat needed no recognition. Betas elsewhere had died in panic, trampling each other…until majat in the streets became ordinary. She had heard that this had happened in places she had left.
Her nape-hairs prickled with an uncommon sense of a whole world amiss. She scanned the displays they passed, the garish advertising that denied economic doom, but most of all she regarded the crowds, free-walking and those standing by counters who turned to look at them.
The hands, the hands: that was her continual worry. And she could not see behind her.
“I read blue-hive,” Warrior intoned suddenly. “I must contact.”
“Where?” Raen asked. “Explain. Where are you looking? Is there a heat-sign?”
It stopped, froze. Mandibles suddenly worked with frenzied rapidity, and auditory palps swept back, deafening it, like a human stopping his ears. Raen whirled to the fix of its gaze, heard a solitary human shriek taken up by others.
Warriors.
They poured forward out of an intersecting corridor, a dozen of them, almost on them, and the sound they shrilled entered human range, agony to the cars. Blue Warrior moved, scuttled for a counter, and the attackers pursued with blinding speed, more pouring out from another hall, overturning displays of clothing. Men screamed, dashed to the floor by the rash, trying to escape the shop.
Raen had her gun in hand…did not even recall drawing; and put a shot where it counted, into the neural complex of the leading Warrior, whirled and took another. She stumbled in her retreat, hit a solid wall, stood there braced and firing.
Reds. Hate improved her aim. Her mind was utterly cold. Three went down, and others swarmed the counter where betas and Warrior scattered in panic. She fired into the attackers and swung left, following Warrior’s darting form, into several reds. She took out one, another. Warrior leaped on the third and rolled with it in a tangle of limbs, a squalling of resonance chambers. Raen caught movement out of the tail of her eye and whirled and fired, no longer alone: the azi guards had decided to back her. Betas had lifted no hand against majat, dared not, by their psych-set; but humans were dead out on the floor. One body was almost decapitated by insist jaws. Blood slicked the polished flooring in great smears where insist feet had slipped. Other humans were bitten.
Surviving reds tried to Group; her fire prevented it. She saw other insist crowded in the corner down at the turning, Grouped and thinking. Not reds; they would have come into it. The reds which survived were confused. Azi fire crippled them; Raen sighted with better knowledge of anatomy and finished the job. Blue Warrior was up, excited.
Then came the flare of a weapon from the farther group, several of them. Warrior went down, limbs threshing, air droning from resonance chambers.
“Stop them!” Raen shouted at the azi. The insist charged, ran into their concentrated fire: five, six, seven of them downed One scuttled off, slipping on the floor, a limb damaged. Two shielded that retreat with their own bodies. They were the sacrifices. Raen took one. The azi butchered the other with their fire.
They were alone, then. Humans lay tangled with dead majat. She looked about her, at majat still convulsing in death-throes: those would go on for some minutes…there was no intelligence behind it. Merek Eln and Parn Kest were down, along with their companions from ITAK, and one of the guard azi. Bystanders were dead. A siren began to sound. It was already too late for the victims of bite: they had long since stopped breathing.
Blue Warrior still moved. She left the wall and the two living azi guards and went out into the center of the bloody floor, where Warrior lay, in a seeping of clear majat fluids. She held out her hand and it knew her.
Air sucked into the chambers. Auditory palps extended, trembling.
“Taste,” it begged of her.
“Reds didn’t get it,” she said. “We took them all.”
“Yesss.”
Someone cried out, down the corridor. More tall shapes had entered, moving in haste: she flung up her hand, forbidding the azi to fire.
“Blues have come,” she said. Warrior attempted to rise, but had no control of its limbs. She gave it room, and the blues scattered human medical personnel and what security forces had arrived. They crossed the last interval cautiously, stiff and sidling, until Raen showed her right hand, and they recognised her for blue-hive Kontrin.
Then they came in a rush. Some went at once to the fallen reds, taking taste, booming to each other in majat language, and two bent over Warrior.
Taste passed, long and complex, the mandibles of living and dying locked. Then the first Warrior drew back, seeming disoriented. The second took taste, in that strange semblance of a kiss. Other blues came. Somewhere a human wept, audibly. Medical personnel tried quietly to drag victims away from the area. Raen stood still. A third, a fourth Warrior bent over the fallen Kalind blue. The message was being distributed as far as Warrior’s fluids could suffice.
The fifth one breathed something in majat language; Warrior sighed an answer. Then the Istran blue’s jaws closed, and Warrior’s head rolled free.
“Kontrin,” another intoned, facing her.
“I am Raen Meth-maren. Tell your Mother so, Warrior. This-unit was from Kalind. Mother will know. Can you reach your hill safely from here?”
“Yesss. Must go now. Haste.”
It turned away. Separate Warriors gathered up the head and body of Warrior, lest other hives read any portion of its message. Grouped, they turned and scuttled out.
Two remained.
One came forward, Istran blue, auditory palps extended in sign of peaceful approach. It bowed itself and opened its mandibles. It was Istra’s gift, the fifth Warrior, the one who had tasted and killed. In a sense, it wasWarrior: the thread continued.
Raen touched its scent-patches, accepted and gave taste in the insist kiss. It backed, disturbed as Warrior had been disturbed; but it had Warrior’s knowledge of her, and Grouped, with a delicate touch of the chelae.
“Meth-maren,” it breathed. Its fellow came forward, and likewise desired taste; Raen gave it, and saw distress in the working of mandibles and the flutter of palps. It resolved its conflict after a moment, touched at her.
They were hers. They followed, as she crossed the littered floor. The two guard azi were still standing against the wall; no one had claimed them, and they seemed in a state of shock. They had lost their employers. They had failed. Merek Eln and Parn Kest were dead, both bitten. One of the businessmen was decapitated; the others had been bitten. So had the third guard azi, and a number of bystanders.
The luggage carrier had been thrust back into a recess beyond the counter. Raen walked that way, and found Jim, jammed within that recess, sitting with his knees tucked up and both hands clutching a gun set upon them. His face was white; his teeth chattered; he had the gun braced and stable.