“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.”

“Go now,” she bade it. “Tell all you know to Mother. And tell Mother these azi and I are coming to blue-hive’s Hill, to the new human-hive nearest it. Let Warriors meet us there.”

“Know this place,” Warrior confirmed. “Strange azi.”

“Tell Mother these things. Go as quickly as you can.”

“Yess,” it agreed, bowed for taste, that for its kind was the essence of message. She gave it, that gesture very like a kiss, and the majat drew back. “Kethiuy-queen,” it said. And strangely: “Sug-ar-water.”

It fled then, quickly.

“Sera.” Merry came running up behind her; she turned, saw him, saw his partners sorting men from truck to truck.

“We have casualties?”

“Eight dead, no injured.”

She grimaced and shook her head. “Leave them,” she said, and walked back to supervise, put several men on watch, one to each point, for the headlights showed only grass about, and that not far. The glow was still bright over the hills.

The dead were laid out by the road, neatly: their only ceremony. Units organised themselves, all with dispatch.

“Sera!” a lookout hissed, pointed.

There were lights, blue, floating off across the grass.

“Hive-azi,” she exclaimed. “We’re near something. Hurry, Merry!”

Everyone ran; men flung themselves into one truck or the other, and Raen dived behind the wheel of her own, slammed the door, passed Merry in moving out: she had the map. The truck, relieved of half its weight, moved with a new freedom.

And suddenly there was the promised paving, where the depot road joined the Great South. Raen slammed on the brakes for the jolt, climbed onto it, spun the wheel over and took to it with a surge of hope.

Behind them, reflected in the mirrors, the fire reached the fields.

vi

The sound of hammering resounded through the halls of ITAK upstairs. Metal sheeting was going into place, barriers to the outside. The hammer-blows echoed even into the nether floors, the levels below. In the absence of air-conditioning and lights, the lower levels assumed a strange character, the luxury of upstairs furnishings crowded into what had been lower offices, fine liquor poured by the lighting of hand-torches.

Enis Dain lifted his glass, example to the others, his board members, their families, and the officials, whoever had been entitled to shelter here. There was still, from above, through the doors still open, the sound of hammering.

Some had fled for the port. Unwise. There was a Kontrin reported there, the Enemy that the Meth-maren had warned them would come. Likely they had met with him, to their sorrow. Dain drank; all drank, the board members, his daughter, who sat by Prosserty—a useless man, Prosserty, Dain had never liked him.

“It’s close in here,” Prosserty complained. Dain only stared at him, and, remembering the batteries, cut off the handtorch, leaving them only the one set atop the table. He began calculating how long a night it would be.

“About sixteen days of it,” he said. “About time for Council to get a message from the Meth-maren. We can last that long. They’ll do something. Until then, we last it out. We’ve comfort enough to do that.”

The hammering stopped upstairs.

“They’re through up there,” Hela Dain said. “They’ll be sealing us in now.”

Then glass splintered, far above.

And someone screamed.

The lights were out. 117-789-5457 sat tucked in the corner on her mat, mental null. The lights had been out what subjectively seemed long, and the temperature was up. Sounds reached her, but none were ordinary. She knew a little unease at this, wondering if food would come soon, and water, for water no longer came from the tap, and it always had, whatever cubicle she had occupied.

Always the lights had been above, and the air had been tolerable.

But now there was nothing.

Sounds. Sounds without meaning. The quick patter of soft feet. 117-789-5457 untucked and looked up. There was a strange glow in the blackness, blue lights, that wove and bobbed above, not on the catwalks, but on the very rims of the cells. Faces, blue-lighted; naked bodies; wild unkempt hair; these folk squatted on the rim of her own cell, stared down, grinning.