Max looked at him. He thrust his hands into the pockets of his bathrobe and looked nervously about. “Everything goes on as usual,” he told Max. “Guard the house.” And he went inside then, closed the door after him…saw huge shapes deep in the shadows, the far reaches of the hall, heard sounds below.
He was alone with them. He crossed the hall toward the stairs and one stirred, that could have been a piece of furniture. It clicked at him.
“Be still,” he told it, shuddering. “Keep away!”
It withdrew from him, and he fled up the stairs, darted into the safety of the bedroom.
One had gotten in. He saw the moving shadow, froze as it skittered near him, touched him. “Out!” he cried at it. “Go out!”
It left, clicking nervously. He felt after the light switch, trembling, fearing the dark, the emptiness. The room leapt into stark white and green. He closed the door on the dark of the hall, locked it. There were noises downstairs, scrapings of furniture, and deeper still, at the foundations. He did not want to know what happened there, in that dark, in that place where the strange azi were lodged.
He was human, and they were not.
And yet the same labs had produced them. The tapes…were the difference. He had heard the man Itavvy say so: that in only a matter of days an azi could be diverted from one function to another. A born man put in the pens had come out shattered by the experience.
I am not real, he thought suddenly, as he had never thought in his life. l am only those tapes.
And then he wiped at his eyes, for tears blinded him, and he went into the bath and was sick, protractedly, weeping and vomiting in alternation until he had thrown up all his supper and was too weak to gather himself off the floor.
When he could, when he regained control of his limbs, he bathed repeatedly in disgust, and finally, wrapped in towels, tucked up in a knot in the empty bed, shivering his way through what remained of the night.
vi
The freight-shuttle bulked large on the apron, a dismal half-ovoid on spider legs, glistening with the rain, that puddled and pocked the ill-repaired field and reflected back the floodlights.
There were guards, a station just inside the fence. Raen ordered the car to the very barrier and received the expected challenge. “Open,” she radioed back, curt and sharp. “Kontrin authorisation. And hurry about it.”
She had her apprehensions. There could be delays; there could be complications; ITAK could prove recalcitrant at this point. The azi with her were untried, all but Merry. As for Mundy, in the truck behind…she reckoned well what he would do if he could.
The gates swung open. “Go,” she told Merry.
Her own aircraft, guarded by ITAK, was at the other end of the port. She ignored it, as she had always intended to ignore it, simply giving ITAK a convenient target for sabotage if they wished one.
It was the shuttle she wanted. Beta police and a handful of guard-azi were not sufficient to stop her, if her own azi kept their wits about them.
Shuttle-struts loomed up in the windshield. Merry braked and half-turned, and the truck did go too, hard beside them. Raen contacted the station again. “Have the shuttle drop the lift,” she ordered. There were guards pelting across the apron toward them, but her own azi were out of the truck, forming a hedge of rifles, and that advance slowed abruptly.
Evidently the call went through. The shuttle’s freight lift lowered with a groaning of hydraulics that drowned other sound, a vast column with an open side, lighted within.
“Crew is not aboard,” she heard over the radio. “Only ground watch. We can’t take off. We’re not licensed—”
“Merry,” she said, ignoring the rest of it. “Get a squad aboard and take controls. Have them call crew and ground service to get this thing off, and take no argument about it. Shoot as last resort…move! My azi,” she said into the microphone, “will board. No resistance and there’ll be no damage.”
Merry had bailed out of the car and gathered the nearest squad. She opened the door, the gun in one hand, microphone in the other. Other figures exited the truck, dragging one who resisted: Mundy; stilt-limbed ones followed. The police line disordered itself, steadied.
“Kontrin,” a voice said over the radio, “please. We are willing to co-operate.”
Rain blew in the open door of the car, drenched her, slanted down across the floodlights, hazing the stalemated lines. Mundy fought and cursed, disturbing the momentary silence: nuisance, nothing more. Police would not move for so slight a cause, not against a Kontrin; policy would work on higher levels.
There was a sound of machinery inside the open cargo lift: the lights were extinguished… Merry’s orders. They would make no targets.
Shadows passed the car: the three Warriors skittered over the wet pavement and into the lift, following their own sight, that cared nothing for darkness.
No one moved. An inestimable time later she heard Merry’s voice over the radio advising her they had the ship.
She left the car. “By squads,” she shouted. “Board!”
She went with the first, that drew Mundy along with them—reached the dark security of the lift. Mundy screamed at the police, a voice swiftly muffled again. The next ten started their retreat.
“Be still,” she said, annoyed by continued struggles from the outsider. “They’ll do nothing for you. Don’t try my patience.”
The last squad was coming in, rifles still directed at the police. Her attention was fixed on that. And suddenly there was another truck coming. She expelled a long breath of tension, held it again as the truck scattered bewildered police, as it came straight for the cargo lift and jolted up within, rain-wet and loud, the azi with her dodging it. More of her men poured from it, dragging prisoners.
Tallen. They had got him, and all his folk. She found her heart able to beat stably again, and shouted orders as the truck backed out again. It almost clipped the hatch, missed. The azi driver bailed out while it was still moving and raced for the hatch, pelted aboard.
She hit the close-switch, and the lift jolted up, taking them up, while the ITAK police gazed at the diminishing view of them. Just at total dark, she hit the lights, and looked over the azi and the Warriors and the shaken prisoners.
“Ser Tallen,” she said, and nodded toward Tom Mundy, who had no joy to see his own people. Pity took her, for Mundy turned his face away as far as he could, and when she bade Tallen released to see to him, Mundy wanted only to turn away, a shaven ghost in grey.
“You’re going home.” she said to Tallen. She had no time for other things. She gave brief orders to an older azi, setting him in charge, and set herself in the personnel lift, rode it up to more immediate problems.
A nervous pointing of weapons welcomed her above; she waved them aside and looked past Merry to the watch crew, who huddled under the threat of guns, way from controls, in the small passenger compartment.
“Kontrin,” the officer-in-charge said, and rose: the azi let him. He was, she noted, ISPAK, not ITAK. “We’ve done everything requested.”
“Thank you. Come forward, ser, and run me some instrument checks; I suppose that you can do that, until the crew shows.”
The ISPAK beta wiped at his face and came with her, well-guarded, showed her the functioning of the board; it was exceedingly simple, lacking a number of convenient automations. Outside, there was the ministration of ground-service. That, she reflected, simply had to be trusted: one simply minimised the chances.
She settled into the nearest of the cushions, folded her arms and closed her eyes as the first touch of dawn began to show, for she was robbed of sleep this night, and she reckoned that this frightened beta would hardly risk anything with so many armed azi at her back.