She wasn’t a small woman, but they dwarfed her. Aisha and Rama were not taken prisoner, exactly, but while Aisha was distracted with her aunt, they acquired their own large and imposing escort. Instead of marines they had Psycorps—and that made Aisha’s skin crawl and the sun inside her shoot out a flare that she hoped blinded any of them who tried to spy on her mind. They were herded onto a transport, quite a comfortable one if she had been in any mood to notice. Rama was perfectly calm, inside as well as out. He still refused to see any danger in these psionic amateurs, no matter how hard Aisha tried to convince him to be careful. He watched the city go by outside the transport’s screens, taking it all in with wide clear eyes. She knew where Psycorps headquarters was. It was the first thing she’d looked for on the worldweb after she left the Leda. They were not going toward it. That didn’t reassure her as much as it might have. They were humming down a clean and open street, for a port city, with barriers up to keep the squatters out, and not too many people loitering on the corners and trying to look as if they belonged there.
