Merry bailed out, staggering, felt his way around to the back. Warrior was dancing in impatience beside the truck. The two men in the cab edged out and followed Merry.
“How far?” Raen asked. Warrior quivered very rapidly. Near, then. She felt the truck lighten of its load, eased off the brake and set it in gear, not to waste precious fuel. Merry’s door was open. She left it so; he might need it in a hurry. “Warrior—hear me: you must not fight. You’re a messenger. Understand?”
“Yess.” It accepted this. It was majat strategy. No heroism, she thought suddenly, not among majat: only function and common sense, expediency to the limit. Warrior was very dangerous at the moment, excited. It paced the slow-moving truck as the men did. “Give message.”
“Not yet. I don’t want you to go yet”
The road curved, took a small decline, rose again. Then blockish shapes hove up in the starlight, among the distinctive structures of collectors.
The depot. The road went through it, that cluster of buildings that likely spelled ambush. Raen kept the truck rolling, watched the fuel that was registering just slightly: enough to carry them through—maybe.
Then the shrilling of Warriors erupted from the left of the road. She began to feel the jolting of the truck, men climbing aboard in haste. She kept it slow.
“Warrior,” she said, “don’t answer them.”
“Yes,” it agreed. “I am very quiet, Kethiuy-queen.”
“Can you—” The wheels jerked into a rut and she wrenched it over again. “Can you tell their hive?”
“Goldsss.”
That made sense. Golds even on Cerdin had chosen the open places, the fields, avoiding men. Once reds had done so too.
The headlights picked out girders, the frame of a collector, the wall of a weathered building, with barred and broken windows. The light flashed back off jagged glass.
Objects lay in the road, where it widened to include the buildings. Corpses, she realised, avoiding one. Human forms, desiccated by heat and sun, scattered in a pattern of flight from the central building. Another shape hove up, brown metal—the rear of a truck, with open doors.
Merry darted past, running to it, a group of men with him. Her eyes picked out something better: pumps, a fuel delivery in the shadow of the truck, a spidery tantalus with lines intact.
She pulled in, braked, bailed out and ran round to the side; Merry was before her, the nozzle in.
“It needs a pump,” he said, anguished; and then flicked a glance up, at the collectors. She had the same thought. “Go,” she said to the man nearest. “Should be a switch in the building. It ought to work.”
The azi ran. All about them now, the shrilling was ominously louder.
“Golds,” Warrior boomed. “Here, here, watch out!” It moved, swiftly, dancing in its anxiety. Fire spat in the building.
“Watch it!” Raen cried, ran for the door of it; Merry was in the same stride with her.
A Warrior sprang out at them; she fired from the hip and crippled it, as Warrior pounced. Two others were on them: azi-fire raked past and took them. Raen clutched the rifle and kicked the door wider, on a dark room and an azi convulsing on the floor, majat-bitten. There were no others; Warrior shouldered past her, and she was sure by that. Merry found the comp, called out, and she punched POWER-ON. Lights came on, inside and out, blinding…local reserve, from the collectors.
“Works!” she heard an azi call from outside. “Works!”
And the shrilling was moving in on them.
“We could use that other truck,” Merry said.
“Don’t be greedy.”
“Less load, better time.”
“Try it,” Raen said. “Hurry.”
He left, running. She walked out after. They were no clearer to majat eyes in the lights than in the dark; but the heat of the lights themselves was an advertisement. The golds knew beyond doubt now, perhaps delayed in the process of Grouping.
Warrior had darted out again; it rose from the corpse of a gold, mandibles clicking. “Other blues,” it translated for her. “Both dead. Gold-hive killed blue messengers. Lost. Message in gold-hive now. Bad, Kethiuy-queen, bad thing. This-unit goes now.”
“Wait,” she said. It would not get through, not with golds ringing them. She bit her lips and kept scanning beyond the lights, reckoning how blind they were to the land outside the circle of them.
And the majat were cut off by the cluster of buildings; that was why there was no rush as yet. Majat sought them visually, and the buildings were between. The group-mind had to be informed, to make nexus.
Quickly now she passed among the azi still outside, touched shoulders, ordered them into the truck with the tank most full. Warrior danced about in her wake, quivering with anxiety, wanting instruction. “You too,” she told it. “Get inside, inside the front of the truck, this side, understand? Merry, we may have to give up on the second.”
“First is full.” Merry snatched the nozzle from the first truck and passed it to another man, who swung the tantalus over to the second. Ire put the cap on. “We can make it, sera. And if one should break down on the road—”
“I’m putting most of the men in my truck. We’ll sort things out if we both get out of here.”
“Good, sera. Leave me two men, that’s all.”
“Get up there and be sure this thing starts,” she yelled at him, over a rising in the majat-sound. She hastened then, saw that Warrior had contrived to work its unyielding body into the cab. She slammed the door on it, raced round the back, giving last orders to the men jammed inside, vulnerable with the rear of the truck open to the air. “Get the tanks when we’re clear,” she shouted at them. “Pick your time and do it.”
“Sera!” several cried suddenly.
She looked over her shoulder. A glittering tide swept under the lights and the girders, with speed almost too great for the eye to comprehend.
“Merry!” she screamed, and ran, flung herself into her seat, slammed the door, rolled the window up as she started the motor. It took. She slung the truck back and around, screening Merry for the instant, saw him and his partners dive for the cab and get the doors closed. The truck rocked, and all at once majat were all over them, tearing at the metal and battering at the glass. Some had weapons, and sought targets for their vision.
Merry’s truck started moving, lurched forward at full; she hit the accelerator hard behind him. The tantalus ripped loose and raked the majat clinging to the front; Warrior, tucked beside her, squirmed and shrilled in its own language, deafening, itself blind by reason of the glass about it. “Sit still,” Raen shouted at it, trying to rake majat against the corner of a building.
Suddenly everything flared with light.
The tanks. One of the men had gotten them. Majat dropped from the truck; rear-mirrors showed an inferno and majat scattering across the face of it, blinded in that maelstrom of heat. Red fire laced in their wake, and open road and grass showed before them, the whole area alight with that burning. Buildings caught, and blazed red.
She sucked in a breath, fought the wheel to keep in Merry’s wake, down the road, her own vehicle overladen, but free. A sound pierced her ears, Warrior’s shrill voice, passing down into human range. “Kill,” Warrior said, seeming satisfied.
The road smoothed out. They began to make time, blind as they were in Merry’s dust cloud.
And when the light was out of sight over several hills she punched in the com and raised Merry. “Good work. Are you all right up there?”
“All right,” he confirmed.
“Pull off and leave the motor running.”
He did so, easing to a comfortable stop. She pulled in behind and ran round the front to open the door for Warrior before it panicked. It disentangled itself, climbed down, grooming itself in distaste, muttering of gold-scent.
“Life-fluids,” it said. “Kill many.”