There had been something loose about the station dock all morning, skulking in amongst the gantries and the lines and the canisters which were waiting to be moved, lurking wherever shadows fell among the rampway accesses of the many ships at dock at Meetpoint. It was pale, naked, starved-looking in what fleeting glimpse anyone on The Pride of Chanur had had of it. Evidently no one had reported it to station authorities, nor did The Pride. Involving oneself in others’ concerns at Meetpoint Station, where several species came to trade and provision, was ill-advised—at least until one was personally bothered. Whatever it was, it was bipedal, brachiate, and quick at making itself unseen. It had surely gotten away from someone, and likeliest were the kif, who had a thieving finger in everything, and who were not above kidnapping. Or it might be some large, bizarre animal: the mahendo’sat were inclined to the keeping and trade of strange pets, and Station had been displeased with them in that respect on more than one occasion. So far it had done nothing. Stolen nothing. No one wanted to get involved in question and answer between original owners and station authorities; and so far no official statement had come down from those station authorities and no notice of its loss had been posted by any ship, which itself argued that a wise person should not ask questions. The crew reported it only to the captain and chased it, twice, from The Pride’s loading area. Then the crew got to work on necessary duties, having settled the annoyance to their satisfaction.
It was the last matter on the mind of the noble, the distinguished captain Pyanfar Chanur, who was setting out down her own rampway for the docks. She was hani, this captain, splendidly maned and bearded in red-gold, which reached in silken curls to the middle of her bare, sleek-pelted chest, and she was dressed as befitted a hani of captain’s rank, blousing scarlet breeches tucked up at her waist with a broad gold belt, with silk cords of every shade of red and orange wrapping that about, each knotted cord with a pendant jewel on its dangling end. Gold finished the breeches at her knees. Gold filigree was her armlet. And a row of fine gold rings and a large pendant pearl decorated the tufted sweep of her left ear. She strode down her own rampway in the security of ownership, still high-blooded from a quarrel with her niece—and yelled and bared claws as the intruder came bearing down on her.
She landed one raking, startled blow which would have held a hani in the encounter, but the hairless skin tore and it hurtled past her, taller than she was. It skidded round the bending of the curved ramp tube and bounded right into the ship, trailing blood all the way and leaving a bloody handprint on the rampway’s white plastic wall.
Pyanfar gaped in outrage and pelted after, claws scrabbling for traction on the flooring plates. “Hilfy!” she shouted ahead; her niece had been in the lower corridor. Pyanfar made it into the airlock, hit the bar of the com panel there and punched all-ship. “Alert! Hilfy! Call the crew in! Something’s gotten aboard. Seal yourself into the nearest compartment and call the crew.” She flung open the locker next the com unit, grubbed a pistol and scrambled in pursuit of the intruder. No trouble at all tracking it, with the dotted red trail on the white decking. The track led left at the first cross-corridor, which was deserted—the intruder must have gone left again, starting to box the square round the lift shafts. Pyanfar ran, heard a shout from that intersecting corridor and scrambled for it: Hilfy! She rounded the corner at a slide and came up short on a tableau, the intruder’s hairless, red-running back and young Hilfy Chanur holding the corridor beyond with nothing but bared claws and adolescent bluster.
“Idiot!” Pyanfar spat at Hilfy, and the intruder turned on her of a sudden, much closer. It brought up short in a staggered crouch, seeing the gun aimed two-handed at itself. It might have sense not to rush a weapon; might . . . but that would turn it right back at Hilfy, who stood unarmed behind. Pyanfar braced to fire on the least movement.
It stood rigidly still in its crouch, panting from its running and its wound. “Get out of there,” Pyanfar said to Hilfy. “Get back.” The intruder knew about hani claws now; and guns; but it might do anything, and Hilfy, an indistinction in her vision which was tunneled wholly on the intruder, stayed stubbornly still. “Move!” Pyanfar shouted.
The intruder shouted too, a snarl which almost got it shot; and drew itself upright and gestured to the center of its chest, twice, defiant. Go on and shoot, it seemed to invite her.
That intrigued Pyanfar. The intruder was not attractive. It had a bedraggled gold mane and beard, and its chest fur, almost invisible, narrowed in a line down its heaving belly to vanish into what was, legitimately, clothing, a rag almost nonexistent in its tatters and obscured by the dirt which matched the rest of its hairless hide. Its smell was rank. But a straight carriage and a wild-eyed invitation to its enemies . . . that deserved a second thought. It knew guns; it wore at least a token of clothing; it drew its line and meant to hold its territory. Male, maybe. It had that over-the-brink look in its eyes.
“Who are you?” Pyanfar asked slowly, in several languages one after the other, including kif. The intruder gave no sign of understanding any of them. “Who?” she repeated.
It crouched slowly, with a sullen scowl, all the way to the deck, and extended a blunt-nailed finger and wrote in its own blood which was liberally puddled about its bare feet. It made a precise row of symbols, ten of them, and a second row which began with the first symbol prefaced by the second, second with second, second with third . . . patiently, with increasing concentration despite the growing tremors of its hand, dipping its finger and writing, mad fixation on its task.
“What’s it doing?” asked Hilfy, who could not see from her side.
“A writing system, probably numerical notation. It’s no animal, niece.”
The intruder looked up at the exchange, —stood up, an abrupt move which proved injudicious after its loss of blood. A glassy, desperate look came into its eyes, and it sprawled in the puddle and the writing, slipping in its own blood in trying to get up again.
“Call the crew,” Pyanfar said levelly, and this time Hilfy scurried off in great haste. Pyanfar stood where she was, pistol in hand, until Hilfy was out of sight down another corridor, then, assured that there was no one to see her lapse of dignity, she squatted down with the gun in both hands and loosely between her knees. The intruder still struggled, propped itself up with its bloody back against the wall, elbow pressed against that deeper starting-point of the scratches on its side, which was the source of most of the blood. Its pale blue eyes, for all their glassiness, seemed to have sense in them. It looked back at her warily, with seeming mad cynicism.
“You speak kif?” Pyanfar asked again. A flicker of those eyes, which might mean anything. Not a word from it. It started shivering, which was shock setting in. Sweat had broken out on its naked skin. It never ceased to look at her.
Running broke into the corridors. Pyanfar stood up quickly, not to be caught thus engaged with the creature. Hilfy came hurrying back from her direction, the crew arriving from the other, and Pyanfar stepped aside as they arrived and the intruder tried to scramble off in retreat. The crew laid hands on it and jerked it skidding along the bloody puddle. It cried out and tried to grapple with them, but they had it on its belly in the first rush and a blow dazed it. “Gently!” Pyanfar yelled at them, but they had it then, got its arms lashed at its back with one of their belts, tied its ankles together and got off it, their fur as bloody as the intruder, who continued a feeble movement.
“Do it no more damage,” Pyanfar said. “I’ll have it clean, thank you, watered, fed, and healthy, but keep it restrained. Prepare me explanations how it got face to face with me in the rampway, and if one of you bleats a word of this outside the ship I’ll sell you to the kif.”
“Captain,” they murmured, down-eared in deference. They were second and third cousins of hers, two sets of sisters, one set large and one small, and equally chagrined.
“Out,” she said. They snatched the intruder up by the binding of its arms and prepared to drag it. “Careful!” Pyanfar hissed, reminding them, and they were gentler in pulling it along.
“You,” Pyanfar said then to Hilfy, her brother’s daughter, who lowered her ears and turned her face aside—short-maned, with an adolescent’s beginning beard, Hilfy Chanur presently and with a air of martyrdom. I’ll send you back shaved if you disobey another order. Understand me?”
Hilfy made a bow facing her, duly contrite. “Aunt,” she said, and straightened, contriving to make it all thoughtfully graceful;—looked her straight in the eyes with offended worship.
“Huh,” Pyanfar said. Hilfy bowed a second time and padded past as softly as possible. In common blue breeches like the crew, was Hilfy, but the swagger was all Chanur, and not quite ludicrous on so young a woman. Pyanfar snorted, fingered the silk of her beard into order, looked down in sober thought at the wallowed smear where the Outsider had fallen, obliterating all the writing from the eyes of the crew.
So, so, so.
Pyanfar postponed her trip to station offices, walked back to the lower-deck operations center, sat down at the com board amid all the telltales of cargo status and lines and grapples and the routine operations The Pride carried on automatically. She keyed in the current messages, sorted through those and found nothing, then delved into The Pride’s recording of all messages received since docking, and all which had flowed through station communications aimed at others. She searched first for anything kif-sent, a rapid flicker of lines on the screen in front of her, all operational chatter in transcription—a very great deal of it. Then she queried for notice of anything lost, and after that, for anything escaped.
Mahendo’sat? she queried then, staying constantly to her own ship’s records of incoming messages, of the sort which flowed constantly in a busy station, and in no wise sending any inquiry into the station’s comp system. She recycled the whole record last of all, ran it past at eye-blurring speed, looking for any key word about escapes or warnings of alien presence at Meetpoint.
So indeed. No one was going to say a word on the topic. The owners still did not want to acknowledge publicly that they had lost this item. The Chanur were not lack-witted, to announce publicly that they had found it. Or to trust that the kif or whoever had lost it were not at this moment turning the station inside out with a surreptitious search.
Pyanfar turned off the machine, flicked her ears so that the rings on the left one jangled soothingly. She got up and paced the center, thrust her hands into her belt and thought about alternatives, and possible gains. It would be a dark day indeed when a Chanur went to the kif to hand back an acquisition. She could justifiably make a claim on it regarding legal liabilities and the invasion of a hani ship. Public hazard, it was called. But there were no outside witnesses to the intrusion, and the kif, almost certainly to blame, would not yield without a wrangle; which meant court;, and prolonged proximity to kif, whose gray, wrinkle-hided persons she loathed; whose naturally dolorous faces she loathed; whose jeremiad of miseries and wrongs done them was constant and unendurable. A Chanur, in station court with a howling mob of kif … and it would go to that extreme if kif came claiming this intruder. The whole business was unpalatable, in all its ramifications.
Whatever it was and wherever it came from, the creature was educated. That hinted in turn at other things, at cogent reasons why the kif might indeed be upset at the loss of this item and why they wished so little publicity in the search. She punched in intraship. “Hilfy.” “Aunt?” Hilfy responded after a moment. “Find out the intruder’s condition.” “I’m watching them treat it now. Aunt, I think it’s he, if there’s any analogy of form and—” “Never mind zoology. How badly is it hurt?” “It’s in shock, but it seems stronger than it was a moment ago. It—he—got quiet when we managed to get an anesthetic on the scratches. I think he figured then we were trying to help, and he quit fighting. We thought the drug had got him. But he’s breathing better now.”
“It’s probably just waiting its chance. When you get it safely locked up, you take your turn at dockwork, since you were so eager to have a look outside. The others will show you what to do. Tell Haral to get herself to lowerdeck op. Now.” “Yes, aunt.” Hilfy had no sulking in her tone. The last reprimand must not have worn off. Pyanfar shut down the contact and listened to station chatter in the interim, wishing in vain for something to clarify the matter.
Haral showed up on the run, soaking wet, blood-spattered and breathless. She bowed shortly in the doorway, straightened. She was oldest of the crew, was Haral, tall, with a dark scar across her broad nose and another across the belly, but those were from her rash youth. “Clean up,” Pyanfar said. “Take cash and go marketing, cousin. Shop the second-hand markets as if you were on your own. The item I want may be difficult to locate, but not impossible, I think, in such a place as Meetpoint. Some books, if you will: a mahendo’sat lexicon; a mahendo’sat version of their holy writings. The philosopher Kohboranua or another of that ilk, I’m completely indifferent. And a mahendo’sat symbol translator, its modules and manuals, from elementary up, as many levels as you can find . . . above all that item. The rest is all cover. If questioned—a client’s taken a religious interest.”
Haral’s, eyes flickered, but she bowed in acceptance of the order and asked nothing. Pyanfar put her hand deep into her pocket and came up with a motley assortment of large-denomination coinage, a whole stack of it.
“And four gold rings,” Pyanfar added.
“Captain?”
“To remind you all that The Pride minds its own business. Say so when you give them. It’ll salve your feelings, I hope, if we have to miss taking a liberty here, as well we may. But talk and rouse suspicion about those items, Haral Araun, and you won’t have an ear to wear it on.”
Haral grinned and bowed a third time.
“Go,” said Pyanfar, and Haral darted out in zealous application.
So. It was a risk, but a minor one. Pyanfar considered matters for a moment, finally walked outside the op room and down the corridor, took the lift up to central level, where her own quarters were, out of the stench and the reek of disinfectant which filled the lower deck.
She closed the door behind her with a sigh, went to the bath and washed her hands, seeing that there remained no shred of flesh in the undercurve of her claws—checked over her fine silk breeches to be sure no spatter of blood had gotten on them. She applied a dash of cologne to clear the memory from her nostrils.
Stupidity. She was getting dull as the stsho, to have missed a grip on the intruder in the first place: old was not a word she preferred to think about. Slow of mind, woolgathering, that she struck like a youngster on her first forage. Lazy. That was more like it. She patted her flat belly and decided that the year-old complacent outletting of her belt had to be taken in again. She was losing her edge. Her brother Kohan was still fit enough, planet-bound as he was and not gifted with the time-stretch of jump: he managed. Inter-male bickering and a couple of sons to throw out of the domicile kept his blood circulating, and there was usually a trio of mates in the house at any one time, with offspring to chastise. About time, she thought, that she put The Pride into home dock at Anuurn for a thorough refitting, and spend a layover with her own mate Khym, high in the Kahin hills, in the Mahn estates. Get the smell of the homeworld wind in her nostrils for a few months. Do a little hunting, run off that extra notch on the belt. Check on her daughter Tahy and see whether that son of hers was still roving about or whether someone had finally broken his neck for him. Surely the lad would have had the common courtesy to send a message through Khym or Kohan if he had settled somewhere; and above all to her daughter, who was, gods knew, grown and getting soft hanging about her father’s house, among a dozen other daughters, mostly brotherless. Son Kara should settle himself with some unpropertied wife and give his sister some gainful employment making him rich— above all, settle and take himself out of his father’s and his uncle’s way. Ambitious, that was Kara. Let the young rake try to move in on his uncle Kohan and that would be the last of him. Pyanfar flexed claws at the thought and recalled why all her shoreleaves were short ones.
But this now, this business with this bit of live contraband which had strayed aboard, which might be kif-owned . . . the honorable lord Kohan Chanur her brother was going to have a word to say about his ship’s carelessness in letting such an incident reach their deck. And there was going to be a major rearrangement in the household if Hilfy got hurt—brotherless ; Hilfy, who had gotten to be too much Chanur to go following after a brother if ever her mother gave her one. Hilfy Chanur par Faha, who wanted the stars more than she wanted anything; and who clung to her father as the one who could give them to her. It was Hilfy’s lifelong waited chance, this voyage, this apprenticeship on The Pride. It had torn Kohan’s doting soul to part from his favorite; that was clear in the letter which had come with Hilfy.
Pyanfar shook her head and fretted. Depriving those four rag-eared crew of hers of a shoreleave in the pursuit of this matter was one thing, but taking Hilfy home to Anuurn while she sorted out a major quarrel with the kif was another. It was expensive, curtailing their homeward routing. More, Hilfy’s pride would die a death, if she were the cause of that rerouting, if she were made to face her sisters in her sudden return to the household; and Pyanfar confessed herself attached to the imp, who wanted what she had wanted at such an age, who most likely would come to command a Chanur ship someday, perhaps even—gods postpone the hour—The Pride itself. Pyanfar thought of such a legacy . . . someday, someday that Kohan passed his prime and she did. Others in the house of Chanur were jealous of Hilfy, waiting for some chance to use their jealousy. But Hilfy was the best. The brightest and best, like herself and like Kohan, and no one so far could prove otherwise. Whatever young male one day won the Chanur holding from Kohan in his decline had best walk warily and please Hilfy, or Hilfy might take herself a mate who would tear the ears off the interloper. That was the kind Hilfy was, loyal to her father and to the house.
And ruining that spirit or risking her life over that draggled Outsider was not worth it. Maybe, Pyanfar thought, she should swallow the bitter mouthful and go dump the creature on the nearest kif ship. She seriously considered it. Choosing the wrong kif ship might afford some lively amusement: there would be riot among the kif and consternation on the station. But yielding was still, at bottom, distasteful.
Gods! so that was how she proposed teaching young Hilfy to handle difficulties. That was the example she set… yielding up what she had, because she thought it might be dangerous to hold it.
She was getting soft. She patted her belly again, decided against shoreleave at voyage’s end, another lying-up and another Mahn offspring to muddle things up. Decided against retreat. She drew in a great breath and put on a grim smile. Age came and the young grew old, but not too old, the gods grant. This voyage, young Hilfy Chanur was going to learn to justify that swagger she cut through the corridors of the ship; so, indeed she was.
There was no leaving the ship with matters aboard still in flux. Pyanfar went to the small central galley, up the starboard curve from her quarters and the bridge, stirred about to take a cup of gfi from the dispenser and sat down at the counter by the oven to enjoy it at leisure, waiting until her crew should have had ample time to have dealt with the Outsider. She gave them a bit more, finally tossed the empty cup in the sterilizer and got up and wandered belowdecks again, where the corridors stank strongly of antiseptic and Tirun was lounging about, leaning against the wall by the lowerdeck washroom door. “Well?” Pyanfar asked.
“We put it in there, captain. Easiest to clean, by your leave. Haral left. Chur and Geran and ker Hilfy are out doing the loading. Thought someone ought to stay awhile by the door and listen, to be sure the creature’s all right.”
Pyanfar laid her hand on the switch, looked back at Tirun— Haral’s sister and as broad and solid, with the scars of youth well-weathered, the gold of successful voyages winking from her left ear. The two of them together could handle the Outsider, she reckoned, in any condition. “Does it show any sign of coming out of its shock?”
“It’s quiet; shallow breathing, staring somewhere else—but aware what’s going on. Scared us a moment; we thought it’d gone into shock with the medicine, but I think it just quieted down when the pain stopped. We tried with the way we handled it, to make it understand we didn’t want to hurt it. Maybe it has that figured. We carried it in here and it settled down and lay still . . . moved when made to move, but not surly, more like it’s stopped thinking, like it’s stopped doing anything it doesn’t have to do. Worn out, I’d say.”
“Huh.” Pyanfar pressed the bar. The dark interior of the washroom smelled of antiseptic too, the strongest they had. The lights were dimmed. The air was stiflingly warm and carried an odd scent under the antiseptic reek. Her eyes missed the creature a moment, searched anxiously and located it in the corner, a heap of blankets between the shower stall and the laundry . . . asleep or awake she could not tell with its head tucked down in its forearms. A large container of water and a plastic dish with a few meat chips and crumbs left rested beside it on the tiles. Well, again. It was then carnivorous and not so delicate after all, to have an appetite left. So much for its collapse. “Is it restrained?”
“It has chain enough to get to the head if it understands what it’s for.”
Pyanfar stepped back outside and closed the door on it again. “Very likely it understands. Tirun, it is sapient or I’m blind. Don’t assume it can’t manipulate switches. No one is to go in there alone and no one’s to carry firearms near it. Pass that order to the others personally, Hilfy too. —Especially Hilfy.”
“Yes, captain.” Tirun’s broad face was innocent of opinions. Gods knew what they were going to do with the creature if they kept it. Tirun did not ask. Pyanfar strolled off, meditating on the scene behind the washroom door, the heap of deceptive blankets, the food so healthily consumed, the avowed collapse … no lackwit, this creature who had twice tried her ship’s security and on the third attempt, .succeeded in getting through. Why The Pride? she wondered. Why her ship, out of all the others at dock? Because they were last in the section, before the bulkhead of the dock seal might force the creature to have left cover somewhat, and it was the last available choice? Or was there some other reason?
She walked the corridor to the airlock and the rampway, and out its curving ribbed length into the chill air of the docks. She looked left as she came out, and there was Hilfy, canister-loading with Chur and Geran, rolling the big cargo containers off the stationside dolly and onto the moving belt which would take the goods into The Pride’s holds, paid freight on its way to Urtur and Kura and Touin and Anuurn itself, stsho cargo, commodities and textiles and medicines, ordinary stuff. Hilfy paused at the sight of her, panting with her efforts and already looking close to collapse—stood up straight with her hands at her sides and her ears back, belly heaving. It was hard work, shifting those cans about, especially for the unskilled and unaccustomed. Chur and Geran worked on, small of stature and wiry, knowing the points of balance to an exactitude. Pyanfar affected not to notice her niece and walked on with wide steps and nonchalant, smiling to herself the while. Hilfy had been mightily indignant, barred from rushing out to station market, to roam about unescorted, sightseeing on this her first call at Meetpoint, where species docked which never called at homeworld . . . sights she had missed at Urtur and Kura, likewise pent aboard ship or held close to The Pride’s berth. The imp had too much enthusiasm for her own good. So she got the look at Meetpoint’s famous docks she had argued to have, now, this very day—but not the sightseeing tour of her young imaginings.
Next station-call, Pyanfar thought, next station-call her niece might have learned enough to let loose unescorted, when the wild-eyed eagerness had worn off, when she had learned from this incident that there were hazards on dockside and that a little caution was in order when prowling the friendliest of ports.
Herself, she took the direct route, not without watching her surroundings.
II
A call on Meetpoint Station officials was usually a leisurely and pleasant affair. The stsho, placid and graceful, ran the station offices and bureaus on this side of the station, where oxygen breathers docked. Methodical to a fault, the stsho, tedious and full of endless subtle meanings in their pastel ornament and the tattooings on their pearly hides. They were another hairless species—stalk-thin, tri-sexed and hanilike only by the wildest stretch of the imagination, if eyes, nose, and mouth in biologically convenient order was similarity. Their manners were bizarre among themselves. But stsho had learned to suit their methodical plodding and their ceremoniousness to hani taste, which was to have a soft chair, a ready cup of herbal tea, a plate of exotic edibles and an individual as pleasant as possible about the forms and the statistics, who could make it all like a social chat.
This stsho was unfamiliar. Stsho changed officials more readily than they changed ornament—either a different individual had come into control of Meetpoint Station, Pyanfar reckoned, or a stsho she had once known had entered a New Phase,—new doings? Pyanfar wondered, at the nudge of a small and prickly instinct—new doings? Loose Outsiders and stsho power shuffles? All changes were suspect when something was out of pocket. If it was the same as the previous stationmaster, it had changed the pattern of all the elaborate silver filigree and plumes—azure and lime now, not azure and mint; and if it were the case, it was not at all polite to recognize the refurbished person, even if a hani suspected identity.
The stsho proffered delicacies and tea, bowed, folded up gtst stalklike limbs—he, she, or even it, hardly applied with stsho—and seated gtst-self in gtst bowlchair, a cushioned indentation in the office floor. The necessary table rose on a pedestal before it. Pyanfar occupied the facing depression, lounged on an elbow to reach for the smoked fish the stsho’s lesser-status servant had placed on a similar table at her left. The servant, ornamentless and no one, sat against the wall, knees tucked higher than gtst head, arms about bony ankles, waiting usefulness. The stsho official likewise took a sample of the fish, poured tea, graceful gestures of stsho elegance and hospitality. Plumed and cosmetically augmented brows nodded delicately over moonstone eyes as gtst looked up—white brows shading to lilac and azure; azure tracings on the domed brow shaded to lime over the hairless skull. Another stsho, of course, might read the patterns with exactitude, the station in life, the chosen Mood for this Phase of gtst existence, the affiliations and modes and thereby, gtst approachability. Non-stsho were forgiven their trespasses; and stsho in Retiring mode were not likely filling public offices.
Pyanfar made one attempt on the Outsider topic, delicately: “Things have been quiet hereabouts?”
“Oh, assuredly.” The stsho beamed, smiled with narrow mouth and narrow eyes, a carnivore habit, though the stsho were not aggressive. “Assuredly.”
“Also on my world,” Pyanfar said, and sipped her tea, an aroma of spices which delighted all her sinuses. “Herbal. But what?”
The stsho smiled with still more breadth. “Ah. Imported from my world. We introduce it here, in our offices. Duty free. New cultivation techniques make it available for export. The first time, you understand. The very first shipment offered. Very rare, a taste of my very distant world.”
“Cost?”
They discussed it. It was outrageous. But the stsho came down, predictably, particularly when tempted with a case of hani delicacies promised to be carted up from dockside to the offices. Pyanfar left the necessary interview in high spirits. Barter was as good to her as breathing.
She took the lift down to dock level, straight down, without going the several corridors over in lateral which she could have taken. She walked the long way back toward The Pride’s berth, strolled casually along the dockside which horizoned upward before and behind, unfurling as she moved, offices and businesses on the one hand and the tall mobile gantries on the other, towers which aimed their tops toward the distant axis of Meetpoint, so that the most distant appeared insanely atilt on the curving horizon. Display boards at periodic intervals gave information of arrivals, departures, and ships in dock, from what port and bearing what sort of cargo, and she scanned them as she walked.
A car shot past her on the dock, from behind: globular and sealed, it wove along avoiding canisters and passers-by and lines with greater speed than an automated vehicle would use. That was a methane-breather, more than likely, some official from beyond the dividing line which separated the incompatible realities of Meetpoint. Tc’a ran that side of the station, sinuous beings and leathery gold, utterly alien in their multipartite brains— they traded with the knnn and the chi, kept generally to themselves and had little to say or to do with hani or even with the stsho, with whom they shared the building and operation of Meetpoint. Tc’a had nothing in common with this side of the line, not even ambitions; and the knnn and the chi were stranger still, even less participant within the worlds and governments and territories of the Compact. Pyanfar watched the vehicle kite along, up the horizon of Meetpoint’s docks, and the section seal curtained it from view as it jittered along in zigzag haste which itself argued a tc’a mind at the controls. There was no trouble from them … no way that they could have dealt with the Outsider: their brains were as unlike as their breathing apparatus. She paused, stared up at the nearby registry boards with a wrinkling of her nose and a stroking of her beard, sorting through the improbable and untranslatable methane-breather names for more familiar registrations—for potential trouble, and for possible allies of use in a crisis. There was scant picking among the latter at this apogee of The Pride’s rambling course.
There was one other hani ship in dock, Handur’s Voyager. She knew a few of the Handur family, remotely. They were from Anuurn’s other hemisphere, neither rivals nor close allies, since they shared nothing on Anuurn’s surface. There were a lot of stsho ships, which was to be expected on this verge of stsho space. A lot of mahendo’sat, through whose territory The Pride had lately come.
And on the side of trouble, there were four kif, one of which she knew: Kut, captained by one Ikkkukkt, an aging scoundrel whose style was more to allow another ship’s canisters to edge up against and among his on dockside; and to bluff down any easily confused owners who might protest. He was only small trouble, alone. Kif in groups could be different, and she did not know about the others.
“Hai,” she called, passing a mahendo’sat docking area, at a ship called Mahijiru, where some of that tall, dark-furred kind were minding their own business, cursing and scratching their heads over some difficulty with a connection collar, a lock-ring disassembled in order all over the deck among their waiting canisters. “You fare well this trip, mahe?”
“Ah, captain.” The centermost scrambled up and others did the same as this one stepped toward her, treading carefully among the pieces of the collar. Any well-dressed hani was captain to a mahendo’sat, who had rather err by compliment than otherwise. But this one by his gilt teeth was likely the captain of his own freighter. “You trade?”
“Trade what?”
“What got?”
“Hai, mahe, what need?”
The mahendo’sat grinned, a brilliant golden flash, sharp-edged. No one of course began trade by admitting to necessity.
“Need a few less kif onstation.” Pyanfar answered her own question, and the mahendo’sat whistled laughter and bobbed agreement.
“True, true,” Goldtooth said somewhere between humor and outrage, as if he had a personal tale to tell. “Whining kif we wish you end of dock, good captain, honest captain. Kut no good. Hukan more no good; and Lukkur same. But Hinukku make new kind deal no good. Wait at station, wait no get same you course with Hinukku, good captain.”
“What, armed?”
“Like hani, maybe.” Goldtooth grinned when he said it, and Pyanfar laughed, pretended it a fine joke.
“When do hani ever have weapons?” she asked.
The mahe thought that a fine joke too.
“Trade you two hundredweight silk,” Pyanfar offered.
“Station duty take all my profit.”
“Ah. Too bad.—Hard work, that.” She scuffed a foot toward the ailing collar. “I can lend you very good hani tools, fine steel, two very good hani welders, Faha House make.”
“I lend you good quality artwork.”
“Artwork!”
“Maybe someday great mahen artist, captain.”
“Then come to me; I’ll keep my silk.”
“Ah, ah, I make you favor with artwork, captain, but no, I ask you take no chance. I have instead small number very fine pearl like you wear.”
“Ah.”
“Make you security for lend tools and welders. My man he come by you soon borrow tools. Show you pearl same time.”
“Five pearls.”
“We see tools you see two pearls.”
“You bring four.”
“Fine. You pick best three.”
“All four if they’re not of the best, my good, my great mahe captain.”
“You see,” he vowed. “Absolute best. Three.”
“Good.” She grinned cheerfully, touched hand to hand with the thick-nailed mahe and strolled off, grinning still for all passersby to see; but the grin faded when she was past the ring of their canisters and crossing the next berth.
So. Kif trouble had docked. There were kif and kif, and in that hierarchy of thieves, there were a few ship captains who tended to serve as ringleaders for highstakes mischief; and some elect who were very great trouble indeed. Mahendo’sat translation always had its difficulties, but it sounded uncomfortably like one of the latter. Stay in dock, the mahendo’sat had advised; don’t chance putting out till it leaves. That was mahendo’sat strategy. It did not always work. She could keep The Pride at dock and run up a monstrous bill, and still have no guarantee of a safe course out; or she could pull out early and hope that the kif would not suspect what they had aboard— hope that the kif, at minimum, were waiting for something easier to chew than a mouthful of hani.
Hilfy. That worry rode her mind. Ten quiet voyages, ten voyages of aching, bone-weary tranquility . . . and now this one. The docks looked all quiet ahead, up where The Pride had docked, her people working out by the loading belt as they should be doing, taking aboard the mail and the freight. Haral was back, working among them; she was relieved to see that. That was Tirun outside now, and Hilfy must have gone in: the other two were Geran and Chur, slight figures next to Haral and Tirun. She found no cause to hurry. Hilfy had probably had enough by now, retreated inside to guard duty over the Outsider, gods grant that she stayed outside the door and refrained from meddling.
But the crew caught sight of her as she came, and of a sudden expressions took on desperate relief and ears pricked up, so that her heart clenched with foreknowledge of something direly wrong. “Hilfy,” she asked first, as Haral came walking out to meet her: the other three stayed at their loading, all too busy for those looks of anxiety, playing the part of workers thoroughly occupied.
“Ker Hilfy’s safe inside,” Haral said quickly. “Captain, I got the things you ordered, put them in lowerdeck op, all of it; but there were kif everywhere I went, captain, when I was off in the market. They were prowling about the aisles, staring at everyone, buying nothing. I finished my business and walked on back and they were still prowling about. So I ordered ker Hilfy to go on in and send Tirun out here. There are kif nosing about here of a sudden.”
“Doing what?”
“Look beyond my shoulder, captain.”
Pyanfar took a quick look, a shift of her eyes. “Nothing,” she said. But canisters were piled there at the section seal, twenty, thirty of them, each as tall as a hani and double-stacked, cover enough. She set her hand on Haral’s shoulder, walked her companionably back to the others. “Haral, there’s going to be a small stsho delivery and a mahendo’sat with a three-pearl deal; both are true . . . watch them both. But no others. There’s one other hani ship docked far around the rim, next the methane docks. I’ve not spoken with them. It’s Handur’s Voyager.”
“Small ship.”
“And vulnerable. We’re going to take The Pride out, with all decent haste. I think it can only get worse here. Tirun: a small task; get to Voyager. I don’t want to discuss the situation with them over com. Warn them that there’s a ship in dock named Hinukku and the word is out among the mahendo’sat that this one is uncommonly bad trouble. And then get yourself back here fast—No, wait. A good tool kit and two good welders—drop them with the crew of the Mahijiru and take the pearls in a hurry if you can get them. Seventh berth down. They’ll deserve that and more if I’ve put the kif onto them by asking questions there. Go.”
“Yes, captain,” Tirun breathed, and scurried off, ears back, up the service ramp beside the cargo belt.
Pyanfar cast a second look at the double-stacked canisters in turning. No kif in sight. Haste, she wished Tirun, hurry it. It was a quick trip inside to pull the trade items from the automated delivery. Tirun came back with the boxes under one arm and set out directly in the kind of reasonable haste she might use on her captain’s order.
“Huh.” Pyanfar turned again and looked toward the shadow.
There. By the canisters after all. A kif stood there, tall and black-robed, with a long prominent snout and hunched stature. Pyanfar stared at it directly—waved to it with energetic and sarcastic camaraderie as she started toward it.
It stepped at once back into the shelter of the canisters and the shadows. Pyanfar drew a great breath, flexed her claws and kept walking, round the curve of the canister stacks and softly—face to face with the towering kif. The kif looked down on her with its red-rimmed dark eyes and longnosed face and its dusty black robes like the robes of all other kif, of one tone with the gray skin … a bit of shadow come to life. “Be off,” she told it. “I’ll have no canister-mixing. I’m onto your tricks.”
“Something of ours has been stolen.”
She laughed, helped by sheer surprise. “Something of yours stolen, master thief? That’s a wonder to tell at home.”
“Best it find its way back to us. Best it should, captain.”
She laid back her ears and grinned, which was not friendliness.
“Where is your crewwoman going with those boxes?” the kif asked.
She said nothing. Extruded claws.
“It would not be, Captain, that you’ve somehow found that lost item.”
“What, lost, now?”
“Lost and found again, I think.”
“What ship are you, kif?”
“If you were as clever as you imagine you are, captain, you would know.”
“I like to know who I’m talking to. Even among kif. I’ll reckon you know my name, skulking about out here. What’s yours?”
“Akukkakk is mine, Chanur captain. Pyanfar Chanur. Yes, we know you. Know you well, captain. We have become interested in you . . . thief.”
“Oh. Akukkakk of what ship?” Her vision sharpened on the kif, whose robes were marginally finer than usual, whose bearing had precious little kifish stoop in dealing with shorter species, that hunch of shoulders and thrusting forward of the head. This one looked at her the long way, from all its height. “I’d like to know you as well, kif.”
“You will, hani.—No. A last chance. We will redeem this prize you’ve found. I will make you that offer.”
Her mustache-hairs drew down, as at some offensive aroma. “Interesting if I had this item. Is it round or flat, this strayed object? Or did one of your own crew rob you, kif captain?”
“You know its shape, since you have it. Give it up, and be paid. Or don’t— and be paid, hani, be paid then too.”
“Describe this item to me.”
“For its safe return—gold, ten bars of gold, fine. Contrive your own descriptions.”
“I shall bear it in mind, kif, should I find something unusual and kif-smelling. But so far nothing.”
“Dangerous, hani.”
“What ship, kif?”
“Hinukku.”
“I’ll remember your offer. Indeed I will, master thief.”
The kif said nothing more. Towered erect and silent. She aimed a dry spitting toward its feet and walked off, slow swagger.
Hinukku, indeed. A whole new kind of trouble, the mahendo’sat had said, and this surly kif or another might have seen … or talked to those who had seen. Gold, they offered. Kif . . . offered ransom; and no common kif, either, not that one. She walked with a prickling between her shoulder blades and a multiplying apprehension for Tirun, who was now a small figure walking off along the upcurving docks. No hope that the station authorities would do anything to prevent a murder … not one between kif and hani. The stsho’s neutrality consisted in retreat, and their law in arbitrating after the fact.
Stsho ships were the most common victims of marauding kif, and still kif docked unchecked at Meetpoint. Madness. A bristling ran up her back and her ears flicked, jingling the rings. Hani might deal with the kif and teach them a lesson, but there was no profit in it, not until moments like this one. Divert every hani ship from profitable trade to kif-hunting? Madness too … until it was The Pride in question.
“Pack it up out here,” she told her remaining crew when she reached them. “Get those last cans on and shut it down. Get everything ready to break dock. I’m going to call Tirun back here. It’s worse than I thought.”
“I’ll go after her,” Haral said.
“Do as I say, cousin—and keep Hilfy out of it.”
Haral fell back. Pyanfar started off down the dock—old habit, not to run; a reserve of pride, of caution, of some instinct either good or ill. Still she did not run in front of witnesses. She widened her strides until some bystanders—stsho—did notice, and stared. She gained on Tirun. Almost, almost within convenient shouting distance of Tirun, and still a far, naked distance up the dock’s upcurving course to reach Handur’s Voyager. Hinukku sat at dock for Tirun to pass before she should come to the hani ship. But the mahendo’sat vessel Mahijiru was docked before that, if only Tirun handled that extraneous errand on the way, the logical thing to do with a heavy load under one arm. Surely it was the logical thing, even considering the urgency of the other message.
Ah. Tirun did stop at the mahendo’sat berth. Pyanfar breathed a gasp of relief, broke her own rule at the last moment and sprinted behind some canisters, strode right into the gathering which had begun to close about Tirun. She clapped a startled mahendo’sat spectator on the arm, pulled it about and thrust her way through to Tirun, grabbed her arm without ceremony. “Trouble. Let’s go, cousin.”
“Captain,” Goldtooth exclaimed from her right. “You come back make new bigger deal?”
“Never mind. The tools are a gift. Come on, Tirun.”
“Captain,” Tirun began, bewildered, being dragged back through the gathering of mahendo’sat. Mahendo’sat gave way before them, their captain still following them with confused chatter about welders and pearls.
Kif. A black-clad half ring of them appeared suddenly on the outskirts of the swirl of dark-furred mahendo’sat. Pyanfar had Tirun’s wrist and pulled her forward. “Look out!” Tirun cried suddenly: one of the kif had pulled a gun from beneath its robe. “Go!” Pyanfar yelled, and they dived back among cursing and screaming mahendo’sat, out again through a melee of kif who had circled behind the canisters. Fire popped after them. Pyanfar bowled over a kif in their path with a strike that should snap vertebrae and did not break stride to find out. Tirun ran beside her; they sprinted with fire popping smoke curls off the deck plates ahead of them.
Suddenly a shot came from the right hand. Tirun yelped and stumbled, limping wildly. More kif along the dockfront offices, one very tall and familiar. Akukkakk, with friends. “Earless bastard!” Pyanfar shouted, grabbed Tirun afresh and kept going, dragged her behind the canisters of another mahendo’sat ship in a hail of laser pops and the reek of burned plastic. Tirun sagged in shock—a curse and a jerk on the arm got her running again, desperately: the burn ruptured and bled. They darted an open space, having no choice: shrill harooing rang out behind and on the right, kif on the hunt.
A second shout roared out from before them, another flash from guns, multicolor, at The Pride’s berth: The Pride’s crew was returning fire, high for their sakes but meaning business. Station alarms started going off, bass-tone whooping. Red lights flashed on the walls and up the curve till the ceiling vanished. Higher up the curve of the dock, station folk scrambled in panic, hunting shelter. If there were kif among them, they would come charging down from that direction too, at the crew’s backs.
And Hilfy was out there at that access, fourth in that line of their own guns—laying down a berserk pattern of fire. Pyanfar dragged Tirun through that line of four by the scruff of the neck. Tirun twisted and fell on the plates and Pyanfar helped her up again, not without a wild look back, at a dockside where enemies fired from cover at her crew who had precious little. “Board!” she yelled at the others with the last of her wind, and herself skidded on the decking in turning for the rampway. Haral retreated and grabbed Tirun’s flailing arm from the other side and Hilfy suddenly took Pyanfar’s. Pyanfar looked back again, willing to turn and fight. Geran and Chur were falling back in orderly retreat behind them, still facing the direction of the kif and firing—the kif had been pinned back from advance into better vantage. Hilfy pulled at her arm and Pyanfar shook free as they reached the rampway’s first door. “Come on,” she shouted at Geran and Chur; and the moment they retreated within, still firing, she hit the door seal. The massive steel clanged and thumped shut and the pair stumbled back out of the way; Hilfy darted in from across the door and rammed the lock-lever down.
Pyanfar looked round then at Tirun, who was on her feet though sagging in Haral’s arms, and holding her upper right leg. Her blue breeches were dark with blood from there to the fur of her calf and threading down to her foot in a puddle, and she was muttering a steady stream of curses.
“Move,” Pyanfar said. Haral took Tirun up in her arms and outright carried her, no small load. They withdrew up the rampway curve into their own lock, sealed that door and felt somewhat safer.
“Captain,” Chur said, businesslike. “All lines are loose and cargo ramp is disengaged. In case.”
“Well done,” Pyanfar said, vastly relieved to hear it. They walked through the airlock and round the bend into the main lower corridor. “Secure the Outsider; sedate it all the way. You—” she looked aside at Tirun, who was trying to walk again with an arm across her sister’s shoulders. “Get a wrap on that leg fast. No time for anything more. We’re getting loose. I don’t imagine Hinukku will stand still for this and I don’t want kif passing my tail while we’re nose-to-station. Everyone rig for maneuvers.”
“I can wrap my own leg,” Tirun said. “Just drop me in sickbay.”
“Hilfy,” Pyanfar said, collected her niece as she headed for the lift. “Disobedient,” Pyanfar muttered when they were close.
“Forgive,” said Hilfy. They entered the lift together; the door shut. Pyanfar fetched the youngster a cuff which rocked her against the lift wall, and pushed the mainlevel button. Hilfy righted herself and disdained even to clap a hand to her ear, but her eyes were watering, her ears flattened and nostrils wide as if she were facing into some powerful wind. “Forgiven,” said Pyanfar. The lift let them out, and Hilfy started to run up the corridor toward the bridge, but Pyanfar stalked along at a more deliberate pace and Hilfy paused and matched her stride, walked with her through the archway into the curved-deck main operations center.
Pyanfar sat down in her cushion in the center of a bank of vid screens and started turning on systems. Station was squalling stsho language protests, objections, outrage. “Get on that,” Pyanfar said to her niece without missing a beat in switch-flicking. “Tell station we’re cutting loose and they’ll have to cope with it.”
A delay. Hilfy relayed the message in limping stsho, ignoring the mechanical translator in her haste. “They complain you killed someone.”
“Good.” The grapples clanged loose and a telltale said they had retracted all the way. “Tell them we rejoice to have eliminated a kif who started firing without provocation, endangering bystanders and property on the dock.” She fired the undocking repulse and they were loose, sudden loss of g and reacquisition in another direction . . . fired the secondaries which sent The Pride out of plane with station, a redirection of up and down. Ship’s g started up, a slow tug against the thrust aft.
“Station is mightily upset,” Hilfy reported. “They demand to talk to you, aunt; they threaten not to let us dock at stsho—”
“Never mind the stsho.” Pyanfar flicked from image to image on scan. She spotted another ship loose, in about the right location for Hinukku. Abruptly the scan acquired all kinds of flitter on it, chaff more than likely, as Hinukku screened itself to do something. “Gods rot them.” She reached madly for controls and got The Pride reoriented gently enough to save the bones of those aboard who might not yet be secured for maneuvers . . . warning enough for those below to dive for security. “If they fire on us they’ll take out half the station. Gods!” She hit general com. “Brace; we’re backing hard.”
This time things came loose. A notebook sailed across the section and landed somewhere forward, missing controls. Hilfy spat and curses came back from com. The Pride was not made for such moves. Nor for the next, which hammered against that backward momentum and, nose dipped, shot them nadir of station (the notebook flew back to its origins) and braked, another career of fluttering pages.
“Motherless bastards,” Pyanfar said. She punched controls, linked turret to scan. It would swivel to any sighting, anything massive. “Now let them put their nose down here.” Her joints were sore. Alarms were ringing and lights were flashing on the maintenance board, cargo having broken loose. She ran her tongue over the points of her teeth and wrinkled her nose for breath, worrying what quadrant of the scan to watch. She put The Pride into a slow axis rotation, gambling that the kif would not come underside of station in so obvious a place as the one in line with last-known-position. “Watch scan,” she warned Hilfy, diverting herself to monitor the op board half a heartbeat, to see all the telltales what they ought to be. “Haral, get up here.”
“Aunt!” Hilfy said. Pyanfar swung her head about again. A little dust had appeared on the screen, some of the chaff spinning their way from above. She had the scanlinked fire control set looser than that and the armament did not react. The lift back down the corridor crashed and hummed in operation. Haral had not acknowledged, but she was coming. “We fire on anything that shows solid,” Pyanfar said. “Keep watching that chaff cloud, niece. And mind, it could be outright diversion. I don’t trust anything.”
“Yes,” Hilfy said calmly enough. And then: “Look out!”
“Chaff,” Pyanfar identified the flutter, her heart frozen by the yell. “Be specific to quadrant: number’s enough.”
Running feet in the corridor. Haral was with them. Hilfy started to yield her place at scan; Haral slid into the third seat, adjusted the restraints.
“Didn’t plan to do so much moving,” Pyanfar said, never taking the focus of her eyes from scan. “Anyone hurt?”
“No,” said Haral. “Everything’s secure.”
“They’re thinking it over up there,” Pyanfar said.
“Aunt! 4/2!”
Turret was swiveling. Eye tracked to the number four screen. Energy washed over station’s rim: more chaff followed, larger debris.
“Captain, they hit station.” Haral’s voice was incredulous. “They fired.”
“Handur’s Voyager.” Pyanfar had the origin mapped on the station torus and made the connection. “O gods.” She hit repulse and sent them hurtling to station core shadow, tilted their nose with a second burst and cut in main thrust, shooting them nadir of station, nose for infinity. Pyanfar reached and uncapped a red switch, hit it, and The Pride rocked with explosion.
“What was that?” Hilfy’s voice. “Are we hit?”
“I just dumped our holds.” Pyanfar sucked air, an expansion of her nostrils. Her claws flexed out and in on the togglegrip. G was hauling at them badly. The Pride of Chanur was in full rout, having just altered their mass/drive ratio, stripped for running. “Haral, get us a course.”
“Working,” Haral said. Numbers started coming up on the comp screen at Pyanfar’s left.
“Going to have to find us a quiet spot.”
“Urtur’s just within singlejump range,” Haral said, “stripped as we are. Maybe.”
“Has to be.” Beyond Meetpoint in the other direction was stsho space, with a great scarcity of jump points to help them along, those masses by which The Pride or any other jumpship steered; and on other sides were kif regions; and knnn; and unexplored regions, uncharted, without jump coordinates. Jump blind into those and they would never come back again . . . anywhere known.
She livened another board, bringing up jump-graphs. Urtur. That was the way they had come in, two jumps and loaded—a very large system where mahendo’sat did a little mining, a little manufacture, and licensed others. They might make that distance in one jump now; kif were not following . . . yet. Did not have to follow. They could figure possible destinations by dumped mass and the logic of the situation. O my brother, she thought, wondering how she would face Kohan. He would be affected by this disgrace, this outrage of lost cargo, of flight while a hani ship perished stationbound and helpless. Kohan Chanur might be broken by it; it might tempt young males to challenge him. And if there were enough challenges, and often enough. . . .
No. Not that kind of end for Chanur. There was no going home with that kind of news. Not until kif paid, until The Pride got things to rights again.
“Mark fifteen to jump point,” Haral said. “Captain, they’ll trace us, no question.”
“No question,” she said. Beyond Haral’s scarred face she caught sight of Hilfy’s, unmarred and scant-bearded—frightened and trying not to show it. Pyanfar opened allship: “Rig for jump.”
The alarm started, a slow wailing through the ship. The Pride leapt forward by her generation pulses, borrowed velocity at the interface, several wrenching flickers, whipped into the between. Pyanfar dug her claws in, decades accustomed to this, did that mental wrench which told lies to the inner ears, and kept her balance. Come on, she willed the ship, as if intent alone could take it that critical distance farther.
III
The Pride came in, sluggish, nightmare arrival, pulsed out and in again, a flickering of jump-distorted instruments which showed them far out on the Urtur range, not close enough to pick up more than an indication of a stellar mass.
Near miss. They had stretched it as far as it could be stretched. Pyanfar struggled to move in her cushion, fighting to aim the fingers of her hand, to shut down all scan, running lights, the weak locational and ID transmission, every emission from the ship, forgetting nothing in the mental confusion which went with emergence. Then she started the sequence to bleed off their velocity, an uncomfortable ride, even as nightmare-slow as they were moving on their emergence. She kept her mind focused, trying not to let her thoughts stray to the horror at the back of it, how fine they had cut it.
Hilfy threw up, not an uncommon reaction to the shift. It did not help Pyanfar’s own stomach.
“We’re dumping down to systemic drift velocity,” Pyanfar said on allship. “Possibly the kif stayed to sort through what we jettisoned, but they’ll be here in short order. Or they’re already here . . . with likely more kif here to help them. I’ll be very surprised otherwise. We’ve shut down all transmission, all scan output. No use of the main engines either. Everyone still all right down there?”
There was prolonged delay in response. “Looks to be,” Tirun’s voice came back from lowerdeck op, which had lost most of what it was primarily designed to monitor when the holds blew. “Chur and Geran are starting a check by remote, but it looks like it was a clean separation when we blew it out. All working systems are clean.”
The velocity dump went on. Hilfy moved about, cleaning up in shame. Haral stayed her post. Pyanfar occupied herself with feverish calculations and sorted and calculated on that one arrival image they had gotten before scan shut down, and on what they had on passive recept. She did a delicate attitude adjustment, trimmed up relative to the flow they were trying to enter, to present the least surface and the least delicate portion of them to hazard—put The Pride into synch with the general rotation of the system, one with the debris and the rock and gas which made Urtur, spread out over the orbits of ten planets and fifty-seven major moons and uncounted planetoids and smaller hazards, one of the more difficult systems for the rapid passage of any ship into its central plane. The Pride was picking up decayed signal from a mahendo’sat installation farther in … at least that station should be the origin of it, chatter meaningless not only in the distance but in elapsed time since its sending. Some might be scatter from ships operating in the system, traders, countless miners in ships of all sizes from the great orecarriers down to singleseat skimmers. In due course they themselves ought to announce presence and identity, but she had no intention of doing so. There was an excellent chance that their arrival had been far beyond the capacity of the longest scan from outsystem relay, and she saw no profit in bringing the mahendo’sat of Urtur in on a private quarrel with the kif. The kif could have arrived days ago, bypassing them in the between, which could happen with a more powerful ship—system chatter might reveal that. She kept listening to it with one ear, finished up the dump, pulling them finally into trim, counting to herself and hoping her position was what she thought it was.
The Pride drifted then, still maintaining rotation for g, but nothing else of movement. She kept counting. Debris suddenly rang off the unshielded hull, distant battering, a few crashes and squeals of larger objects. Target dead on: she had it, a mob of rocks a little off their velocity, cold mass swarming about them, a screen between them and the kif s possible arrival. She feathered directional jets and trimmed up again. The battering diminished to an occasional patter of dust. Hilfy, standing by the com console counter, looked about her as if she could expect to see the impacts with all their sensor eyes dark; met Pyanfar’s face and looked then at Haral, who grimly sat her post and kept trying to plot their position; and Hilfy composed her own face, managed not to flinch when another rock shrilled down the forward-thrusting bow.
Pyanfar heaved her aching body out of the cushion, staggered in walking around the dividing console to put her hand on the back of Haral’s cushion. “Put the pagers in link,” she told Haral. “Keep it channel one and see that someone’s always on it. Tie into lowerdeck op: they’ll be working down there a while yet. The kif will show, never doubt it. So we lie still, rest up. We receive signal; we don’t send; we don’t maneuver. We don’t do anything now but drift.”
“Aye.” Haral started making the links, shunting over some of com function, an operation which Hilfy should have done. Her broad, scarred face was without disturbance at this insanity. Haral knew the game; they had done it a time or two, this prolonged dark silence, waiting out a kif or an unknown— but not in Urtur’s debris-cluttered field, not where other ships were likely and collision was possible. Haral knew. It was Hilfy for whom she offered instructions.
Pyanfar took her own pager from the wall by the exit and went back to give one to Hilfy, who was leaning against the counter, nostrils slitted and ears laid back. Pyanfar clapped her on the shoulder and thrust the pager into her hand. “Out. Go. Everything’s about to go under automatic here, and there’s nothing you can do.” She passed by Hilfy and headed out her own way down the corridor outside, with a foul headache, a worry in her gut, and an obsessive desire for a bath.
Her quarters, left unsecured, were not as bad as they might have been. The spring covers had held on the round bed, and the only casualty was a pile of charts now randomized. She gritted her teeth against the throbbing in her skull and picked them up, straightened the edges and slapped the unsorted pile back onto the desk, then stripped off her bloody clothes, brushed dried blood from her fur and a cloud of shed fur, too. She always shed in jump . . . sheer fright. Her muscles were tight. She flexed her cramped shoulders and an arm strained from fighting g, a stitch all the way into her rib muscles; and she picked up the pager again and took it with her into the bath, listening to it, which had nothing but static—set it on the bathroom counter before getting into the shower cabinet.
The shower was pure delight, warm and soothing. She lifted her face to it, lowered ears, shut nostrils and squinched her eyes shut, letting the stream from the jet comb her mane and beard into order, stepped back and wiped her eyes clear, turned her back and let the spray massage the pain out of her tired shoulders.
The pager went off, emergency beep. She spat a curse and flung the shower door open, skidded on the floor and ran out of the bath and out of her quarters naked and dripping as she was. She met Haral and Hilfy on their separate ways back and beat them to the central console.
A ship was out there all right, some ways distant, where no ship had been previously—an arrival out of jump. Pyanfar leaned over the board, wiped a bit of water off the screen and wiped it down her chest, holding her beard and trying to avoid dripping. The newcomer was closer to Urtur than they, a good distance inward and zenith—had actually arrived a while ago: passive recept picked it up from its inherent noise.
“Better part of an hour backtime,” Haral calculated. “I can fine it down.”
‘Do that.”
They watched it a while, while Pyanfar dripped a cold puddle on the decking and the counter. “Going inward,” she pronounced finally on the figures Hilfy passed her, checked against current reception. “If that’s the kif, they overjumped us and now they’ve got a bit of hunting to do. We have a wave just getting to them, but it’s got nothing for them, nothing they’re going to know from all the rest of the junk out here. Good.” She recalled her condition and straightened from bending over the board. “Mop that,” she said to Hilfy, who was juniormost. She strode off, pricklish in her dignity.
“Captain,” Haral’s voice came over the pager, and Pyanfar crossed the cabin in two strides to reach the com by her bedside . . . punched it with a forefinger, comb clenched in the same hand. “Receiving you.”
“Got some chatter that doesn’t sound good,” Haral said. “I think there are kif here, all right. What came into the system a while ago isn’t certain, but it could be mahendo’sat; and I’m getting kif voices and kif signal out of system center.
“Doesn’t surprise me. Pity the mahe who dropped into this pond, if that’s what’s happened. But it might cover any noise we made in entry, if that’s what it is.”
“Might do,” Haral said. “Gods, captain, no telling how many kif there may have been at Urtur to start with. They’re going to swarm all over the mahendo’sat.”
“Gods know how much kif trouble they’ve already had here. That bunch from Meetpoint could have gotten as much as five, six days’ jump on us. Forget it. Let it rest. Our business is our own business.”
“Aye,” Haral said reluctantly.
“Shut it down, Haral. Until they come after us, we’re snug.”
“Aye, captain.”
The contact broke off. Pyanfar drew a long breath and let it go, stood in front of the unit and after a moment punched in the image they could get, from the telescope in the observation dome. Urtur was a glorious sight … at a distance, a saucer of milky light. A shadow passed the image, a bit of rock, doubtless, part of the swarm with which they traveled. She shut it down again. They rolled along blind, getting a tap on the hull now and again from debris, muted this far into The Pride’s core, as they played their part as a mote in Urtur’s vast lens. This silence was an old trick. It worked . . . sometimes.
She continued her combing, and finally, pelt dried, mane and beard combed and silky again in their ringlets, changed to her third-best trousers, of black silk, with green and gold cuffing and belt, a round-the-hips dangle of real gold chains. She changed her pearl earring for an emerald, inspected her claws and trimmed a roughness. A tip had broken. Hard-skinned, the kif. But she had got him, that bastard on the dock. That was at least some consolation for the lost cargo and Tirun’s misery. For hani lives—that was yet to collect.
She strolled out again, into controls, where Hilfy was standing lone watch. They had far more room when they were under rotation, with the ship’s g making the crew’s private quarters and a great deal of storage accessible, as well as that large forward ell of the control area itself which was out of reach during dock. Some of the crew ought to be offshift now, eating, sleeping: they arranged such details among themselves when things were tight, knowing best when they needed rest and balancing the ship’s needs against their own. Hilfy had a bruised look when she turned to face Pyanfar as she came up behind her in the semishadow of the bridge, amid dead screens and virtually lightless panels. She stood there as if there was something she could hope to do, ears pricked up and eyes wide-irised with her general distress.
“Haral left you on watch, imp?”
“Haral said she was going below.”
“I thought I dismissed you.”
“I thought it wouldn’t hurt to be here. I can’t rest.”
“Can’t rest is a cheat on the ship. Can’t rest is something you learn to remedy, imp. It’s going to be too long a wait to wear ourselves to rags up here. Nothing we can do.”
“Com keeps coming in. It’s them—it’s the same kif. They’re asking the mahendo’sat ships where we are and they’re making threats. They call us thieves.”
Pyanfar spat dryly and chuckled. “What tender honor. What are the mahendo’sat doing about it?”
“Nothing. It is a mahendo’sat station, after all; there are other ships … all over the place—there’s help for them, isn’t there? I’d think they’d do something, not just let the kif do what they please.”
“There may be a lot of kif, too.” Pyanfar leaned forward and checked the boards herself, the little data the computer got off passive recept. A rock hit them, a slow scream down the metal; a screen flickered to static and corrected itself, an impact on one of the antennae. “I won’t tell you, imp, just how close we came to losing our referents in that jump. If that kif ship did get here ahead of us, it’s considerably more powerful than we are. All power and precious little cargo room. That tell you anything?”
“It’s not a freighter.”
“Kif runner. Got a few false tanks strapped on, all shell and no mass to speak of, masking what she is. You understand? Ships like that do the kill; the carrioneaters come after, real freighters, that suck up the cargoes and do the dockside trading when they do get to some port. That’s what we’re likely up against. A runner. A hunter ship. They overestimated our capacity . . . overjumped us, more than likely, and incoming traffic may have been good enough to confuse the issue further. If that’s the case we’ve just used up all the luck we’re entitled to.”
“Are we just going to sit here?” Hilfy asked. “Ship after ship is going to come into this system not knowing what they’re running into … all those ships from Meetpoint that don’t go the stsho route—”
“Imp, we’re blind at the moment. We’ve dumped velocity . . . and maybe some of those hunting us haven’t; and maybe some are yet to come. You know what kind of situation that puts us in. Sitting target.”
“If they all stay to centerward,” Hilfy suggested cautiously, “we could just jump out again … be gone before they could catch us, take the pressure off these mahe before someone else gets hurt. Maybe we could get away with it again at the next jumppoint, get to Kirdu . . . after Urtur, couldn’t we maybe make Kirdu in two jumps? Get out of here. After this place, there are other choices. Aren’t there?”
Pyanfar stared at her. “Been doing some research, have you?”
“I looked.”
“Huh.” It was a sensible idea, and one she had had even before the jump; but there were loose pieces in this business. Moves not yet calculated. It remained to measure how upset the kif were. And why. “Possible.” She jabbed a finger at Hilfy. “First we take account of ourselves. We go down, shall we, and see what we have left of cargo.”
“I thought we dumped it all.”
“Oh, not what the kif want, not that, niece.” She leaned over the console, checked the pager link. “I think we can leave it a while. Come along. It’s all being recorded, all the com and scan up here. We’ll check it. Can’t live up here.” She set her hand on Hilfy’s shoulder. “We go ask some questions, that’s what.”
Their uninvited passenger had settled after jump—cocooned in blankets and sedated for the trip, now let go again, to huddle in that heap of blankets in the corner of the washroom. It had curled up in a knot and thrown one of the blankets over its head, showing nothing but the motions of its breathing to prove it was under there.
“The ankle restraint is back on it,” Chur said as they watched it from the doorway. “It’s been docile all along … but let me call Geran and we’ll be sure of it.” Chur was smallest of the crew, smaller than Geran her sister, who was herself of no great stature—with a thin beard and mane and a yellowish tint to her fur: delicate, one might say, who did not know Chur.
“There are three of us,” Pyanfar said, “already. Let’s see how it reacts.” She walked into the washroom and came near that heap of breathing blankets. Coughed. There was movement in the blankets, the lifting of a corner, a furtive look of a pale eye from beneath them. Pyanfar beckoned.
It stopped moving.
“It quite well understands me,” she said. “I think, Chur, you’re going to have to get Geran. We may have to fetch it out and I don’t want to hurt it.”
Chur left. Hilfy remained. The blankets stirred again, and the creature made a faltering effort to get its back into the angle of the corner made by the shower stall and the laundry.
“It’s just too weak,” Hilfy said. “Aunt, it’s just too weak to fight.”
“I’ll stand here,” Pyanfar proposed. “There’s a mahendo’sat symbol translator and some manuals and modules—Haral said she put it in the lowerdeck op; I want the elementary book. Here. Gods forbid someone put it into cargo.”
Hilfy hesitated, cast a look at the Outsider, then scurried off in haste.
“So,” Pyanfar said. She dropped to her haunches as she had before, put out a forefinger and traced numbers from one to eight on the flooring. Looked up from time to time and looked at the creature, who watched her. It reached out of its nest of blankets and made tentative movements of writing on the floor, drew back the arm and watched what she was doing until she stopped at sixteen. It tucked the blankets more closely about itself and stared, from bleak, blue eyes. Washed, it looked better. The mane and beard were even beautiful, silken, pollen-gold. But the naked arm outthrust from the blankets bore ugly bruises of fingered grips. There had been a lot of bruises under the dirt, she reckoned. It had a reason for its attitude. It was not docile now, just weak. It had drawn another line, staked out its corner. The blue eyes held a peculiar expression, analysis, perhaps, some thought proceeding at length.
She stood up, hearing Chur and Geran coming, their voices in the corridor—turned and motioned them to wait a moment when they arrived. She watched the Outsider’s pale eyes take account of the reinforcements. And Hilfy came back with the manual. “It was in the—” Hilfy broke off, in the general stillness of the place.
“Give it here,” Pyanfar said, holding out her hand without looking away from the Outsider.
Hilfy gave it. Pyanfar opened the book, turned the pages toward the Outsider, whose eyes flickered with bewilderment. She bent, discarding her dignity a moment in the seriousness of the matter, and pushed the manual across the tiles to the area the creature could reach. It ignored the open book. Another ploy failed. Pyanfar sat still a moment, arms on her knees, then stood up and brushed her silk breeches into order. “I trust the symbol translator made it intact.”
“It’s fine,” Hilfy said.
“So let’s try that. Can you set it up?”
“I learned on one.”
“Do it,” Pyanfar said; and motioned to Geran and Chur. “Get it on its feet. Be gentle with it.”
Hilfy hurried off. Geran and Chur moved in carefully and Pyanfar stepped out of the way, thinking it might turn violent, but it did not. It stood up docilely as they patted it and assisted it to its feet. It was naked, and he was a reasonable guess, Pyanfar concluded, watching it make a snatch after the blankets about its feet, while Chur carefully unlocked the chain they had padded about its ankle, Geran holding onto its right arm. Pyanfar frowned, disturbed to be having a male on the ship, with all the thoughts that stirred up. Chur and Geran were being uncommonly courteous with it, and that was already a hazard.
“Look sharp,” Pyanfar said. “Take it to the op room and mind what you’re doing.” She stooped and gathered up the symbol book herself as they led it out toward the door.
The Outsider balked of a sudden in the doorway, and Chur and Geran patted its hairless shoulders and let it think about it a long moment, which seemed the right tack to take. It stood a very long moment, looked either way down the corridor, seemed frozen, but then at a new urging—”Come on,” Geran said in the softest possible voice and tugged very slightly—the Outsider decided to cooperate and let itself be led into the hall and on toward operations. Pyanfar followed with the book under her arm, scowling for the cost the Outsider had already been to them, and with the despondent feeling that she might yet be wrong in every assumption she had made. They had paid far too much for that.
And then what? Give it back to the kif after all, and shrug and pretend it had been nothing?
The Outsider balked more than once in being moved, looked about it at such intervals as if things were moving too fast for it and it had to get its bearings. Chur and Geran let it stop when it would, never hurrying it, then coaxed it gently. It walked for them—perhaps, Pyanfar thought sourly, biding its time, testing their reflexes, memorizing the corridors, if it had the wit to do so.
They brought it into the op room, in front of all the boards and the glowing lights, and it balked again, hard-breathing, looking about. Now, Pyanfar thought, they might have trouble; but no, it let itself be moved again and let itself be put into one of the cushions at the dead cargo-monitor console, near the counter where Hilfy worked over the translator, running a series of figures over the screen. The Outsider slumped when seated, dazed-looking and sweating profusely, tucked in its blanket which it clutched about itself. Pyanfar walked up to the arm of the cushion; its head came up instantly at her presence and the wariness came back into its eyes. More than wariness. Fear. It remembered who had hurt it. It knew them as individuals, past a clothing change. That at least.
“Hai,” Pyanfar said in her best friend-to-outsiders manner, patted its hairless, sweating shoulder, swept Hilfy aside in her approach to the translator, a cheap, replaceable stickered keyboard unit linked by cable into one of their none so cheap scanners. She pushed wipe, clearing Hilfy’s figures, then the Bipedal Sentient button, with a stick figure of a long-limbed being spread-eagled on it. The same figure appeared on the screen. She pushed the next which showed a hani in photographic image, and indicated herself.
It understood. Its eyes were bright with anxiety. It clutched its blanket tighter and made a faltering attempt to get its feet back on the floor and to stand, reaching toward the machine. “Let it loose,” Pyanfar said, and Chur helped it up. It ignored them all, leaned on the counter and poised a trembling hand over the keyboard. The whole arm shook. It punched a button.
Ship. It looked up, its eyes seeking understanding.
Pyanfar carefully took its alien hand, oh, so carefully, but it allowed the touch. She extended its forefinger and guided it to the wipe button, back to the ship button again. It freed its hand and searched, the hand shaking violently as it passed above the keys. Figure Running, it keyed. Ship. Figure Running. Ship again. Hani. Wipe. It looked about at her.
“Yes,” she said, recognizing the statement. Motioned for it to do more.
It turned again, made another search of the keys. Figure Supine, it stated. It found the pictorial for kif. That long-snouted gray face lit the screen beside the Figure Supine.
“Kif,” Pyanfar said.
It understood. That was very clear. “Kif,” it echoed. It had a voice full of vibrant sounds, like purring. It was strange to hear it articulate a familiar word . . . hard to pick that word out when the tongue managed neither the kif click nor the hani cough. And the look in its eyes now was more than apprehensive. Wild. Pyanfar put her claws out and demonstratively rested her hand over the image. Pushed wipe. She put the hani symbol back on, punched in voice-record; hani, the audio proclaimed, in hani mode. She picked Up the cheap mike and spoke for the machine’s study-tape, with the machine recording her voice. “Hani.” She called up another image. “Stand.” A third. “Walk.”
It took a little repetition, but the Outsider began to involve itself in the process and not in its trembling hysteria over the kif image. It started with the first button . . . worked at the system, despite its physical weakness, recorded its own identification for all the simple symbols on the first row, soberly, with no joy in its discovery, but not sluggishly either. It began to go faster and faster, jabbed keys, spoke, one after the other, madly rapid, as if it were proving something. There were seventy-six keys on that unit and it ran through the lot, although toward the end its hand was hardly controllable.
Then it stopped and turned that same sullen look on them and reached for the seat it had left. It barely made it, sank down in the cushion and wrapped its blanket up about its shoulders, pale and sweating.
“It’s gone its limit,” Pyanfar said. “Get it some water.”
Chur brought it from the dispenser. The Outsider accepted it one-handed, sniffed the paper cup, then drained it. It gave the empty cup back, pointed at itself, at the machine on the counter, looked at Pyanfar, correctly assessing who was in charge. It wanted, Pyanfar read the gestures, to continue.
“Hilfy,” Pyanfar said, “the manual, on the counter. Give it here.”
Hilfy handed it over. Pyanfar searched through the opening pages for the precise symbols of the module in the machine at present. “How many of those modules do we have?”
“Ten. Two manuals.”
“That ought to carry us into abstracts. Good for Haral.” She set the opened book into the Outsider’s lap and pointed at the symbols it had just done, showed it how far the section went. Now it made the connection. It gathered the book against itself with both arms, intent on keeping it. “Yes.’ Pyanfar said, and nodded confirmation. Maybe nodding was a gesture they shared; it nodded in return, never looking happy, but there was less distress in its look. It clutched its book the tighter.
Pyanfar looked at Hilfy, at Geran and Chur, whose expressions were guarded. They well knew now what level of sentient they had aboard. How much they guessed of their difficulties with the kif was another matter: a lot, she reckoned— they picked up things out of the air, assembled them themselves without having to ask. “A passenger compartment,” she said. “I think it might like clothes. Food and drink. Its book. Clean bedding and a bed to sleep in. Civilized facilities. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be careful with it. Let’s move it, shall we, and let it rest.”
It looked from Chur to Geran as the two closed in, grew distressed when Chur took its arm to get it on its feet. It pointed back at the machine . . . wanted that, its chance to communicate. Perhaps there was more it planned to say, in the symbols. Surely it expected to go back to the washroom corner. Pyanfar reached and touched its shoulder from the other side, touched the book it held and pressed its hand the tighter against it, indicating it should keep the book, the best promise she could think of that might tell it they were not done with talking. It calmed itself, at least, let itself be drawn to its feet and, once steadied, led out.
Pyanfar looked at the machine on the counter, walked over and turned it off. Hilfy was still standing there. “Move the whole rig,” Pyanfar said. “We’ll risk the equipment.” She unplugged the keyboard module, which was no burden at all, but awkward. “Bring the screen.”
“Aunt,” said Hilfy, “what are we going to do with him?”
“That depends on what the kif had in mind to do with him. But we can hardly ask them, can we?” She followed after the Outsider and Chur and Geran, down the side corridor to one of the three rooms they kept for The Pride’s occasional paying passengers, up the curve into the area of the crew’s private quarters. They were nicely appointed cabins. The one Chur and Geran had selected was in fresh greens with woven grass for the walls and with the bed and chairs in pale lime complement. Pyanfar counted the damage possible and winced, but they had suffered far worse in the cause than torn upholstery.
And the Outsider seemed to recognize a major change in its fortunes. It stood in the center of the room clutching its book and its blanket and staring about with a less sullen expression than before . . . seemed rather dazed by it all, if its narrow features were at all readable. “Better show it the sanitary facilities first,” Pyanfar said. “I hope it understands.”
Chur took it by the arm and drew it into the bath, carefully. Hilfy brought the screen in and Pyanfar added the module as she set it on the counter and plugged it into the auxiliary com/ comp receptacle. From the bath there came briefly the sound of the shower working, then the toilet cycling. Chur brought the Outsider back into the main room, both looking embarrassed. Then the Outsider saw the translator hookup sitting on the counter, and its eyes flickered with interest.
Not joy. There was never that.
It said something. Two distinct words. For a moment it sounded as if it were speaking its own language. And then it sounded vaguely kif. Pyanfar’s ears pricked up ad she drew in a breath. “Say again,” she urged it in kif, and made an encouraging motion toward her ear, standard dockside handsign.
“Kif. . . companion?”
“No.” She drew a deeper breath. “Bastard! You do understand.” And again in kif: “Who are you? What kind are you?”
It shook its head, seeming helpless. Evidently who was not part of its repertoire. Pyanfar considered the anxious Outsider thoughtfully, reached and set her hand on Chur’s convenient shoulder. “This is Chur,” she said in kif. And in hani: “You do me a great favor, cousin: you sit with this Outsider on your watch. You keep him going on those identifications, change modules the minute you’ve got one fully identified, the audio track filled. Keep him at it while he will but don’t force him. You know how to work it?”
“Yes,” Chur said.
“You be careful. No knowing what it’s thinking, what it’s been through, and I don’t put deviousness beyond its reach either. I want it communicative; don’t be rough with it, don’t frighten it. But don’t put yourself in danger either.—Geran, you stay outside, do your operations monitor by pager so long as Chur’s inside, hear?”
Geran’s ears—the right one was notched, marring what was otherwise a considerable beauty—flicked in distress, a winking of gold rings on the left. “Clearly understood,” she said.
“Hilfy.” Pyanfar motioned to her niece and started out the door. The Outsider started toward them, but Chur’s outflung arm prevented it and it stopped, not willing to quarrel. Chur spoke to it quickly, gingerly touched its bare shoulder. It looked frightened, for the first time outright frightened.
“I think it wants you, aunt,” Hilfy observed.
Pyanfar laid her ears back, abhorring the thought of fending off a grab at her person, walked out with Hilfy unhurried all the same. She looked back from the doorway. “Be careful of it,” she told Chur and Geran again. “Ten times it may be gentle and agreeable . . . and go for your throat on the eleventh.”
She walked off, the skin of her shoulders twitching with distaste. Hilfy trailed her, but Pyanfar jammed her hands into the back of her waistband and took no notice of her niece until they had gotten to the lift. Hilfy pressed the button to open the door and they got in. Pressed central; it brought them up and still without a word Pyanfar walked out into the bridgeward corridor.
“Aunt,” Hilfy said.
Pyanfar looked back.
“What shall we do with it?”
“I’m sure I don’t know,” Pyanfar said tartly. Her ears were still back. She purposely put on a better face. “Not your fault, niece. This one is my own making.”
“I’d take some of the slack; I’d help, if I knew what to do. With the cargo gone—”
Pyanfar frowned and the ears went down again. You want to relieve me of worry? she thought. Then don’t do anything stupid. But there was that face, young and proud and wanting to do well. Most that Hilfy knew how to do on the ship had gone when cargo blew and scan shut down. “Youngster, I’ve gotten into a larger game than I planned, and there’s no going home until we’ve gotten it straightened out. How we do that is another question, because the kif know our name. Have you got an idea you’ve been sitting on?”
“No, aunt—being ignorant about too much.”
Pyanfar nodded. “So with myself, niece. Let it be a lesson to you. My situation precisely, when I took the Outsider in, instead of handing it right back to the kif.”
“We couldn’t have given him to them.”
“No,’ Pyanfar agreed heavily. “But it would certainly have been more convenient.” She shook her head. “Go rest whelp, and this time I mean it. You were sick during jump; you’ll be lagging when I do need you. And need you I will.” She walked on, into the bridge, past the archway. Hilfy did not follow. Pyanfar sat down at her place, among all the dead instruments, listened to the sometime whisper of larger dust over the hull, called up all the record which had flowed in while she was gone, listening to that with one ear and the current comflow with the other.
Bad news. A second arrival in the system . . . more than one ship. It might be kif, might be someone else from the disaster at Meetpoint. In either case it was bad. The ones already here were on the hunt beyond question—kif were upset enough to have dumped cargo to get here from Meetpoint: no other ships had cause to hunt The Pride, or to call them thief. They were the same kif, beyond doubt, upset enough to have banded together in a hunt. Bad news all the way.
Urtur Station was into the comflow now . . . bluster, warning the kif of severe penalties and fines. That was very old chatter, from the beginning of the trouble, a wavefront just now reaching them. Threats from the kif—those were more current. The mahendo’sat ship . . . harassed, made its way stationward. The kif turned their attention to the new arrivals, to other things. They would begin to figure soon that the freighters last arrived had jumped behind The Pride. That The Pride had to have tricked them and gone elsewhere into stsho territories, or had to be here . . . doing precisely what they were doing; and very probably a nervous kif would play the surmise he had already staked his reputation on. They would start hunting shadows once they reached that conclusion, having questioned a few frightened mahe. They would fan out, prowl the system, stop miner ships, ask close questions, probably commit small piracy at the same time, not to waste an opportunity. The station could do nothing—a larger one might, but not Urtur, which was mostly manufacturing and scarcely defended. No mahendo’sat ship would be willing to be stopped— but there was no hope for them of outrunning that hyped kif ship, no chance at least which an ordinary mahendo’sat captain was equipped to take.
And there was no chance that one of those ships incoming from Meetpoint would turn out to be hani, and relieve them all of that weight of guilt. Handur’s Voyager was gone, beyond hope and help. Not even proximity to Meetpoint was likely to have saved anyone in that attack. The kif were nothing if not thorough: they practiced bloodfeud themselves, and left no survivors.
Kif—had somehow missed killing one another off in their rise off their homeworld and into space. They had done it, hani had always suspected, in mutual distrust; in outright hatred. They had contested themselves into space, and hunted each other through it until they found easier pickings.
Not The Pride, she swore, and not Pyanfar Chanur.
That kif who was in command out there—she was certain beyond question that it was Akukkakk of Hinukku, who had come ahead to stake out Urtur to be waiting for them—once that kif knew they had gotten through, he would be checking all his backtime records, sniffing through everything hoping to catch some missed trace of The Pride’s arrival. They had left very little of a wavefront ghost to detect; but there might be something, some small missed flicker.
Running—now—had its hazards. As long as some of the kif shuttled the system at relatively high velocity, those ships could run down on them while they were trying to build theirs back from virtual dead stop. Their chances of breaking cover and running depended on the position of the kif ships, whether they had that critical time they might need to get their referent and to come up to position to jump. Blind as they had made themselves, the only way to find out where those ships were was to try something; and the only way to find out how many there were, was to keep an ear to the kif chatter and see if they could pick out individual ships.
This Akukkakk would not likely be so careless. It was certain enough they were not outputting ID signal, which itself brought protests from the station; no ID signal and no locational signal from any of them. Only from miners and legitimate residents—if those signals were what they ought to be.
So, so, so. They were in a bottle, and it was too much to hope that the kif would not ultimately coerce mahendo’sat help in the hunt for them. Station and miners could be intimidated as the kif put the pressure on. What was more, hani ships came and went at Urtur, and those ships would be vulnerable to the kif, unsuspecting of atrocity such as the kif had committed at Meetpoint. They would come into confrontation with the kif having no idea of the stakes involved here. The kif might act against them without warning, to draw The Pride out. Such tactics were not hani practice; but she had been many years off Anuurn and among outsiders, and she knew well enough how to think like a kif, even if the process turned her stomach and bristled the hairs on her nape.
And then what do I do? she wondered to herself. Do I come out meekly to die? Or let others? Her crew had no more or less right to life than the crew of any other hani ship which came straying into the trap. There were their lives involved. There was Hilfy’s. And thereby—all of Chanur.
Next time home, she vowed, / get that other gun battery moduled in, whatever it costs.
Next time home.
She frowned, cut off the recording, which had come to the point at which she had come in. The present transmissions were few and terse. Someone should be up here directly and constantly monitoring the comflow and the rest: Hilfy was right on that score. But they were not a fighting ship and they had no personnel to spare for such. Six of them, with ordinary duties and a prisoner to watch: there was course to plot, there were checks to be run after their jump under stress, systems they had to be sure of; and there was the chance that they might have to move, defend themselves and run at any moment, which meant three crewmembers had to be mentally and physically fit to take action at any instant, whatever the hour. The automations which ran The Pride in her normal workaday business had nothing to do with their situation now, systems overstressed from a jump the ship was never designed to make, makeshift security on an alien and possibly lunatic passenger. Gods. She double-checked the pager operation, which was transmission activated, advised the crew on watch that she was taking over monitor for a while, to give them rest from the responsibility.
“He’s all right,” Geran reported on the Outsider. “Resting awhile.”
It was good, she thought, that someone could.
She went finally to the galley, up the curve; the reason of that large ell in the control section—no appetite in particular, but her limbs were weak from hunger. She heated up a meal from the freezer, forced it down against her stomach’s earnest complaints, and tossed the dish into the sterilizer. Then she walked back to her private quarters to try to rest.
She fretted too much for sleep, paced the floor pointlessly, sorted the stack of charts into order and sat down and plotted and replotted possible alternatives, which she already guessed, against odds she already knew. At last she shoved all that work aside and used the console by her bed to link in on the Outsider’s terminal, via main comp and access codes. It was active again: she heard the Outsider’s voice as well as saw the symbols called up by the translator keys. He was using them one after the other, and when she keyed in on com as well, she could pick up Chur’s voice in the room, quiet assistance— sounds which might go with pantomime. Occasionally there was a pairing of symbols the machine did not do—Chur’s interference, perhaps, trying to get a point across. Pyanfar cut off com and the translator reception, stared at the dead screen. The chatter from Urtur system continued from the pager at her belt, subdued and depressing in content. Mahendo’sat ships were being advised by their own station not to run, to submit to search if singled out by the kif, to hug station if they were already there and hope for safety.
A hani voice objected a question.
Hani!
Pyanfar sprang from the bedside, the walls of her cabin immaterial before her vision of that station with a hani ship at dock; with kif able to move on it at will. The hani spoke . . . had spoken long ago, in the timelag. Whatever would happen . . . had long since taken place. Time as well as space lay between The Pride and that hani ship and the kif, and there was nothing she could do, blind, from a dead drift, to help it.
“Gods!” she spat, and hurled the desk chair forward on its track with a crash. It was a Faha vessel in port; Faha’s Starchaser, and that was a house and a company allied to Chanur. Her brother Kohan’s first wife was Huran Faha. Hilfy’s mother, for the gods’ sakes! There were bonds, compacts, agreements of alliance. . . .
And Hilfy.
The mahendo’sat at Urtur Station urged the hani ship to keep calm. The mahe had, they avowed, no intention of becoming involved in a kif quarrel, and they were not going to let a rash hani involve them.
The hani demanded information; kif hunted a Chanur ship: the Faha had been listening and fretting under restraint this long, and wanted answers—knew this was going out over com, as the station knew what the Faha were doing, making vocal trouble, making sure information got out into the dark where Chanur ears might pick it up.
O gods, o gods. There was an ally, doing the best for them that could be done at the moment . . . and they were both helpless to come at the enemy.
Pyanfar pulled the chair out again, sat down, lost in listening for a while. There was no further information. They had gotten that spurt on the station’s longrange or on Starchaser’s . . . information like a beacon fired off into outsystem, deliberately. If they had it figured The Pride was here . . . then so did the kif.
There were echoes, repetitions of the message: com was sorting them out, transmissions of differing degrees of clarity, and the hair prickled on Pyanfar’s neck, sudden, grateful realization: ships all over the system had begun relaying that message, letting it off like multiple ripples in still water, massive defiance of the kif—and the kif had not ordered silence … on this timeline. They could not enforce such a demand, at the present limits of their aggression at Urtur: but those limits could change. The information was going out like a multiplied shout . . . had gone out, long ago, and was still traveling.
She found Hilfy for once where she was supposed to be, in her own quarters, asleep. She hesitated when the sleepy voice answered the doorcom hail, no more than hesitated. “Up,” she said into the com. “I’ve somewhat to tell you.”
Hilfy was quick to the door. It whipped opened and Hilfy hung there, disheveled from bed and grimacing in the full light of the corridor. She had not paused for clothes.
Pyanfar walked in past her, waited while Hilfy brightened the interior lighting, and held up a restraining hand, that the brightening need not be permanent or full. It was a room Hilfy had made her own, a great deal of Chanur style in this cabin, more than in her own quarters, mementoes affixed to the walls, pictures of homeworld’s mountains and the broad plains of the Chanur holdings … the Holding itself, gold stone, shaded with vines. Pyanfar looked about her, and looked at Hilfy. “Briefly,” Pyanfar said, “I have to tell you a thing; and there’s nothing can be done about it, I’ll tell you that first. We’ve picked up signal from a Faha ship docked at station. They’re in the middle of the kif, and they fired a message off for station that I think they meant we should hear: noisy chatter. I think they know we’re out here and in what kind of trouble. But there’s the kif between us, and there’s no way we can do much for each other. You understand?”
Hilfy’s eyes had stopped flinching at the light. She stared, amber-rimed about the black, and her ears flattened and pricked up again with effort. For a young woman and roused naked out of sleep, she acquired a quiet dignity in getting her wits collected. “Do you know which ship, aunt?”
“Starchaser. That’s Lihan Faha in command.”
Hilfy nodded. The ears flinched, ringless. Her face stayed composed. “They’ll be in danger. Like Voyager. And they won’t know it. No one would expect that kind of attack.”
“Lihan’s no tyro, imp, believe it. We don’t play their hand; they don’t interfere in ours. Can’t. Nothing we can do out here.”
“We could throw them a warning and run.”
“I don’t take that as an option at the moment. We send it from distance and the kif will have it before Starchaser has a chance. And public defiance, involving Starchaser in our leaving—the kif would be obliged to react. Revenge is part of their mindset. You have to calculate that into it. No. Starchaser’s riding her own luck. I don’t plan to push it for her. So go back to bed, hear?”
Hilfy stood a moment without moving. Nodded after a moment, her dignity still about her.
“Good,” Pyanfar said tightly, and walked out. She heard the door close after her, and walked the upcurving corridor which led from Hilfy’s quarters to her own, across the main topside corridor and down a short distance.
So she might have cost Hilfy her sound sleep, and the meal she had eaten lay like lead at her own stomach; but Faha involvement in the hazard was not something for Hilfy to find out later, like a child, spared adult unpleasantnesses. Hilfy’s face stayed before her; the pager unit at her hip kept up its static babble, dying echoes of the message, occasional-spurts of closer transmission, but rarer and rarer. A stsho ship had come into the system. The kif disdained to harass it; it begged instructions of Urtur Station, anxious to scud in before the storm.
A lot of mahe in the system might have the same idea, miners who had already reckoned it time to head for port, getting themselves out of the way of the kif s hunt.
It was a vast system out there. Most of the ships in it were incapable of jump, insystem operators only. So far, everyone was keeping remarkably calm, even the hani at the eye of that storm.
Gods grant a great many ships pulled inward . . . and afforded the kif a harder target if they wanted to raid Station in search of one hani ship. That was one hope. Lihan Faha of Starchaser was too old, too wary to rush out to mismatched battle. Lihan would not expect stupidity of The Pride. The Faha would expect them to fend for themselves and above all not touch anything off prematurely. The Faha needed time: there was a chance that they could offload cargo and strip that ship down for speed, given time, shed mass without the need to lose a cargo. They would not expect help more than that.
That was logic speaking.
But it hurt.
IV
She sat and listened a time in her cabin, finally contacted Geran belowdecks and turned over the monitoring to her. “Faha,” was Geran’s only comment.
“Hilfy knows,” Pyanfar said.
“So,” Geran murmured. And then: “I’m on. I’ve got it.”
Pyanfar signed off and sighed heavily, sitting on the edge of her bed, arms on her knees—finally took a mild sedative and undressed and curled up in the bowlshaped bed for a precious while of oblivion, trying not to think of emergencies and contingencies and the horde of kif prowling about the system.
That did not work, but the sedative did. She went under like a stone into a pond and came out again startled by the alarm— but it was only the timer going off, and she lay in the bedclothes with her heart slowly stepping back down to normal.
“Any developments?” she asked lowerdeck op by com from her bedside, not even having crawled from beneath the sheets, but thrusting an arm out to push the bottom on the console. “Anything happened while I was off?”
“No, captain.” Haral’s voice answered her. A shift change had occurred in her off time. “The situation seems to be temporary stalemate. Station is broadcasting only operational chatter now. We aren’t getting much from the kif. Nothing alarming. We’d have waked you if there was news.”
So their orders ran. Interpretations of emergency varied; but Haral was the wisest head in the crew, the canniest. Pyanfar lay there staring at the ceiling a moment and finally decided she might take her time. There was nowhere to rush. The rib muscles she had strained in g force had stiffened. “What about systems check? Has anyone had time to get to that?”
“We’re still running the board, captain, but it looks good all the way. The blowout was absolutely clean and the recalibration was right almost to the hair.”
“Better luck than we deserve. What’s the Outsider up to?”
“Back at work at the keyboard. Chur and Geran are off now, and Tirun’s on, but I didn’t feel, by your leave, captain, that Tirun belonged in there with him in her condition, and I’ve had all I can do with visual checks on the separation readouts—again by your leave.”
“You were right.”
“He’s slept a bit. He hasn’t made any trouble . . . gods, he worked till he nearly dropped over, Chur said; and he’s back at it again this shift, shaky as he is. We fed him right away when he woke up, and he ate it all and went back to his drills, polite as you please. I’ve got his roomcom and his comp monitored from the op station, so we’ve at least got an ear toward him.”
“Huh.” Pyanfar ran a hand through her mane and scowled up at the brightening room light. The alarm had started the day cycle in the room. “Let the Outsider work; if it falls over, then let it rest. How’s Tirun making it?”
“Limping, sore, and working with the leg propped up. She’s still white around the nose.”
“I’m all right,” Tirun’s voice cut in, usurping the same mike.
“You go off,” Pyanfar said, “anytime you feel you ought to. We’re dead drifting, and someone else can take up the slack if those first checks are run. You see to it, Haral. Anything else I should know?”
“That’s the sum of it,” Haral said. “We’re all right so far.”
“Huh,” she said again, got out of the spring-held sheets and cut the com off, pulled on her black trousers and put on her belt, her bracelet, and her several earrings—shook the ear to settle them and gave her mane and beard a quick comb into order. Vanity be hanged. She left the cabin and paid a short visit to the galley, ate a solitary breakfast, feeling somewhat better. She turned the pager to the monitor channel in the meanwhile, listened to the chatter which was reaching them and found it much what Haral had said, a lull in events which in itself contained worrisome possibilities. By now the kif had surely figured out what had happened, and by now they would be hunting in stealth—hence the quiet. The Pride had undergone a great deal of lateral drift from their entry point, but if she were that kif captain, trying to reckon the arrival point of a cargoless fugitive on a jump almost too much for the ship . . . she would calculate a fringe area jump on a straight string from
Meetpoint’s mass to that of Urtur. And that would fine the hunting zone down considerably, from the vast tracts of Urtur’s lenslike system—to a specific zone on the fringe, and the direction of systemic drift, and certain places where a ship seeking cover might move. Time was the other factor; time defined the segment of space in which they might logically be drifting, two points-within-which, which then might be fined down tighter and tighter.
Time, time, and time.
They were running out of it.
She shut off the pager, went back to her cabin, spread out the charts of the last effort and picked up a comp link of her own, started as precise calculations as she could make on the options they had left.
From the hani ship—she interrupted herself to query Haral and Tirun on the point—there had been nothing during the past watch. No transmission at all. Starchaser would be feverishly busy at her own business, stripping down, not provoking anything at this juncture.
Waiting. All incoming transmission indicated that ships of all kinds were moving toward Urtur Station with all possible haste, a journey of days for some ships, and of weeks for others of the insystem operators . . . but even the gesture spoke to the kif, that the mahe would defend Urtur Station itself, abandoning other points to whatever the kif wished to do. The incoming jumpships had long since made it in, snugged close: armed ships, those . . . but one at least was stsho, and its arms were minor and its will to fight was virtually nonexistent.
Again, she reckoned, if she were that kif in command, those insystem ships would not go in unchallenged. For all those incoming from the suspect vector where a hani ship lay hidden, there would be closer scrutiny—to make sure a clever hani did not drift in disguised with the rest of the inbound traffic. ID transmission would be checked, identifications run through comp; ships might be boarded … all manner of unpleasantness. Most of them would pass visual inspection: there was precious little resemblance between a gut-blown jump freighter with its huge vanes, and a lumpy miner-processor whose propulsion was all insystem and hardly enough to move it along with its tow full.
Only the miners who might have had the bad luck to come in from the farthest edge of The Pride’s possible location . . . they might be stopped, have their records scanned, their comp stripped—their persons subjected to gross discomforts until they would volunteer information, if the kif were true to nature.
“Someone’s jumped, captain.”
Tirun’s voice, out of the com unit. Pyanfar dumped a complex calculation from her mind and reached for the reply bar, twisting in her chair. “Who? Where?”
“Just got the characteristic ghost, that’s all. I don’t know. It was farside of system and long ago. No further data; but it fits within our timeline. That close.”
“Give me the image.”
Tirun passed it onto the screen. Nadir range and badly muddled pickup: there was too much debris in the way.
“Right,” she said to Tirun. “No knowing.”
“Out?” Tirun asked.
“Out,” Pyanfar confirmed her, and keyed out the image as well, stared morosely at the charts and the figures which, no matter how twisted, kept coming up the same: that there was no way to singlejump beyond Urtur, however reduced in mass they were now.
That jump-ghost which had just arrived might have been someone successfully running for it. More ships than that one might have jumped from here, lost in the gas and debris of Urtur’s environs.
But quite, quite likely that ship was kif, a surplus ship moving on to arrange ambush at the most logical jump point that they might use.
Rot Akukkakk. She recalled the flat black eyes, red-rimmed, the long gray face, the voice very different from the whining tone of lesser kif. A bitter taste came into her mouth.
How many of them? she wondered, and pulled the scattered charts toward her on the desk and again thought like a kif, wondering just where he might station his ships remaining at Urtur, having figured now, as he must have figured, what they were up to.
That inward flight which was making the station safer—was also giving this Akukkakk a free field in which to operate. There were a finite number of opacities in the quadrant where the sweep of debris might be concealing The Pride. A diminishing number of other fugitives to confuse him . . . just them and him, finally, along with whatever other kif ships he had called in.
Four kif ships had been at Meetpoint. Some or all might have come with him. There might have been as many more at Urtur when Hinukku came in. Eight ships, say. Not beyond possibility.
She made her calculations again, flexed an ache from her shoulders, and pushed back from the desk, combed her beard with her fingers and flicked her ears for the soothing sound of the rings.
Huh. So. She at least knew their options—or the lack of them. It was a thoroughly bad game to have gotten into. She levered her aching body out of the chair it had occupied too many hours, stretched again, calculating that they must be about due for Chur and Geran to come on again. And Hilfy: there had not been a word out of her. Possibly the imp had been late getting to sleep after the news which had broken in on her rest. If she had been sleeping, so much the better.
Pyanfar walked out into the corridor and down it, into the dim zone of the bridge, beyond the archway, where most of the lights were out and the dead screens made areas dark which should have been busy with lights. There was one unexpected bright spot, a counter alight in that ell nook of the bridge around the main comp bank. Someone had come back and left it on, she thought, walking up on it to turn it out; and came on Hilfy there, seated with her attention fixed on the translator, left hand propping her forehead and her right hand poised over the translator keyboard. The screen in front of her was alive with mahendo’sat symbols. Audio brought in a pathetic Outsider-voiced attempt at speech. Pyanfar frowned, walked closer, and Hilfy saw the movement and half turned, turned back in haste to close off the audio from the bridge. Pyanfar leaned on the back of her chair to observe the strings of symbols on the screen, and Hilfy got up in haste.
Go, the Outsider was trying to say. That was the symbol on the screen at the moment. / go.
“I thought you were supposed to be resting,” Pyanfar said.
“I got tired of resting.”
Pyanfar nodded toward the screen, where the Figure Walking was displayed. “How’s it doing?”
“He.”
“It, he, how’s it doing?”
“Not so good on pronunciation.”
“You’ve been cutting in on his lessons? Talking to him?”
“He doesn’t know me from the machine.” Hilfy had her hands locked behind her, ears flat, wary of reprimands. “You can’t work the second manual without help: it’s sentences. He has to have prompts. I’ve got more vocabulary filled in with him. We’re well into abstracts and I’ve been able to figure something about the way his own sentences are built from what he keeps doing wrong with ours.”
“Huh. And have you perchance gotten a name out of him amid these mistakes? His species? An indication what he comes from? A location?”
“No.”
“Well. I didn’t expect. But well done, all the same. I’ll check it out.”
“Seven hundred fifty-three words. He ran the whole first manual. Chur demonstrated changing the keyboard and the cassette and he ran it all, just like that; and got into the second book, trying to do sentences. But he can’t pronounce, aunt; it just comes out like that.”
“Mouth shape is different. Can’t say we can ever do much with his language either; like trying to talk to the tc’a or the knnn . . . maybe even a different hearing range, certainly not the same equipment to speak with—gods, no guaranteeing the same logic, but the latter I think we may have. Some things he does make half sense.” She lowered herself into the vacated chair, reached and livened a second screen. “Go talk Tirun out of her work down in op, imp; she’s been on duty and she shouldn’t be. I’m going to try to run a translator tape on your seven hundred fifty-three words.”
“I did that.”
“Oh, did you?”
“While I was sitting here.” Hilfy untucked her hands from behind her and hastily reached for the counter, indicated the cassette in the slot of the translator input. “I pulled the basic pattern and sorted the words in. Sentence logic too. It’s finished.”
“Does it work?”
“I don’t know, aunt. He hasn’t given me a sentence in his own language. Just words. There’s no one for him to talk his own to.”
“Ah, well, so.” Pyanfar was impressed. She ran some of the audio of the tape past, cut it, looked up at Hilfy, who looked uncommonly proud of herself. “You’re sure of the tape.”
“The master program seemed clear. I—learned the translator principles pretty thoroughly; father didn’t connect that so much with spacing. I got to start that study from the first; but / knew what I wanted it for. Like comp. I’m good at that.”
“Huh.—Why don’t we try it, then?”
Hilfy nodded, more and more self-pleased. Pyanfar rose and searched through the com board cabinets, pulled out the box of sanitary wrapped audio plugs and dropped a handful of those into Hilfy’s palm, then located a spare pager from the same source. She sat down at main com and ran the double channels of the translator through bands two and three of the pagers. She took her own plug and inserted it in her ear, tested it out linked to the Outsider’s room com for a moment, and got nothing back but bursts of white sound, which were mangled hani words that part of the schizoid translator mind refused to recognize as words. “We’re two, he’s three,” she said to Hilfy, shutting the audio down for the moment. “Bring him up here.”
“Here, aunt?”
“You and Haral. This Outsider who tries to impress us with his seven hundred fifty-three words … we find out once for all how his public manners are. Take no chances, imp. If the translator fails, don’t; if he doesn’t act stable, don’t. Go.”
“Yes, aunt.” Hilfy stuffed the audio units and the other pager into her pockets, hastened out the archway in a paroxysm of importance.
“Huh,” Pyanfar said after her, stood staring in that direction. Her ears flicked nervously, a jangling of rings. The Outsider might do anything. It had chosen their ship to invade, out of a number of more convenient choices. It. He. Hilfy and the crew seemed unshakeably convinced of the he, on analogy to hani structure; but that was still no guarantee. There were, after all, the stsho. Possibly it made the creature more tragic in their eyes.
Gods. Naked-hided, blunt-toothed and blunt-fingered. … It had had little chance in hand-to-hand argument with a clutch of kif. It should be grateful for its present situation.
No, she concluded. It should not. Everyone who got hands on it would have plans for this creature, of one kind and another, and perhaps it sensed that: hence its perpetually sullen and doleful look. She had her own plans, to be sure.
He, Hilfy insisted at every opportunity. Her first voyage, a tragic (and safely unavailable) alien prince. Adolescence. Gods.
From the main section of the com board, outside transmission buzzed, whined, lapsed into a long convolute series of wails and spine-ruffling pipings. She jumped in spite of herself, sat down, keyed in the translator on com. Knnn, the screen informed her, which she already knew. Song. No recognizable identity. No numerical content. Range: insufficient input.
That kind frequented Urtur too, miners who worked without lifesupport in the methane hell of the moon Uroji and found it home. Odd folk in all senses, many-legged nests of hair, black and hating the light. They came to a station to dump ores and oddments, and to snatch furtively at whatever trade was in reach before scuttling back into the darknesses of their ships. Tc’a might understand them . . . and the chi, who were less rational … but no one had ever gotten a clear enough translation out of a tc’a to determine whether the tc’a in turn made any sense of the knnn. The knnn sang, irrationally, pleased with themselves; or lovelorn; or speaking a language. No one knew (but possibly the tc’a, and the tc’a never discussed any topic without wending off into a thousand other tangents before answering the central questions, proceeding in their thoughts as snake-fashioned as they did in their physical movements). No one had gotten the knnn to observe proper navigation: everyone else dodged them, having no other alternative. Generally they did give off numerical messages, which the mechanical translators had the capability to handle—but they were a code for specific situations . . . trade, or coming in, a blink code. There was nothing unusual in knnn presence here, a creature straying where it would, oblivious to oxygen-breather quarrels. There still came the occasional ping or clang of dust and rock against The Pride’s hull, the constant rumbling of the rotational core, the whisper of air in the ducts. The deadness of the instruments depressed her spirits. Screens stared back in the shadow of the bridge like so many blinded eyes.
And they were out here drifting with kif and rocks and a knnn who had no idea of the matters at issue. “Captain,” Tirun’s voice broke in. “Hearing you.” “Got a knnn out there.”
“Hearing that too. What are Hilfy and Haral doing about the Outsider?”
“They’ve gone after him; I’m picking that up. He’s not making any trouble.”
“Understood. They’re on their way up here. Keep your ear to the outside comflow; going to be busy up here.”
“Yes, captain.”
The link broke off. Pyanfar dialed the pager to pick up the translator channel, received the white-sound of hani words. Everything seemed quiet. Eventually she heard the lift in operation, and heard steps in the corridor leading to the bridge.
He came like an apparition against the brighter corridor light beyond, tall and angular, with two hani shapes close behind him. He walked hesitantly into the dimness of the bridge itself, clear now to the eyes . . . startlingly pale mane and beard, pale skin mottled with bruises and the raking streaks of his wound, sealed with gel but angry red. Someone’s blue work breeches, drawstring waisted and loose-kneed, accommodated his tall stature. He walked with his head a little bowed, under the bridge’s lower overhead—not that he had to, but that the overhead might feel a little lower than he was accustomed to—he stopped, with Hilfy and Haral behind him on either side.
“Come ahead,” Pyanfar urged him farther, and rose from her place to sit braced against the comp console, arms folded. The Outsider still had a sickly look, wobbly on his feet, but she reached back to key the lock on comp, which could only be coded free again, then looked back again at the Outsider . . . who was looking not at her, but about him at the bridge with an expression of longing, of—what feeling someone might have who had lately lost the freedom of such places.
He came from a ship, then, she thought. He must have.
Hilfy stood behind him. Haral moved to the other aisle, blocking retreat in that direction should he conceive some sudden impulse. They had him that way in a protective triangle, her, Hilfy, Haral; but he leaned unsteadily against the number-two cushion which was nearest him and showed no disposition to bolt. He wore the pager at his waist, had gotten the audio plug into his ear, however uncomfortable it might be for him. Pyanfar reached up and tightened her own, dialed the pager to receive, looked back at him from her perch against the counter. “All right?” she asked him, and his face turned toward her.
“You do understand,” she said. “That translator works both ways. You worked very hard on it. You knew well enough what you were doing, I’ll reckon. So you’ve got what you worked to have. You understand us. You can speak and make us understand you. Do you want to sit down? Please do.”
He felt after the bend of the cushion and sank down on the arm of it.
“Better,” Pyanfar said. “What’s your name, Outsider?”
Lips tautened. No answer.
“Listen to me,” Pyanfar said evenly. “Since you came onto my ship, I’ve lost my cargo and hani have died—killed by the kif. Does that come through to you? I want to know who you are, where you came from, and why you ran to my ship when you could have gone to any other ship on the dock. So you tell me. Who are you? Where do you come from? What do you have to do with the kif and why my ship, Outsider?”
“You’re not friends to the kif.”
Loud and clear. Pyanfar drew in a breath, thrust her hands into her waistband before her and regarded the Outsider with a pursed-lip smile. “So. Well. No, we’ve said so; I’m not working for the kif and I’m no friend of theirs. Negative. Does the word stowaway come through? Illegal passenger? People who go on ships and don’t pay?”
He thought that over, as much of it as did come through, but he had no answer for it. He breathed in deep breaths as if he were tired . . . jumped as a burst of knnn transmission came through the open com. He looked anxiously toward that bank, hands clenched on the cushion back.
“Just one of the neighbors,” Pyanfar said. “I want an answer, Outsider. Why did you come to us and not to another ship?”
She had gotten his attention back. He looked at her with a thoughtful gnawing of a lip, a movement finally which might be a shrug. “You sit far from the kif ship. And you laugh.”
“Laugh?”
He made a vague gesture back toward Hilfy and Haral. “Your crew work outside the ship, they laugh. They tell me no, go ####no weapons toward me. ### I come back ###.”
“Into the rampway, you mean.” Pyanfar frowned. “So. What did you plan to do in my ship? To steal? To take weapons? Is that what you wanted?”
“##### no ####”
“Slower. Speak slower for the translator. What did you want on the ship?”
He drew a deep breath, shut his eyes briefly as if trying to collect words or thoughts. Opened them again. “I don’t ask weapons. I see the rampway . . . here with hani, small afraid.”
“Less afraid of us, were you?” She was hardly flattered. “What’s your name? Name, Outsider.”
“Tully,” he said. She heard it, like the occasional com sputter, from the other ear … a name like the natural flow of his language, which was purrs and moans combined with stranger sounds.
“Tully,” she repeated back; he nodded, evidently recognizing the effort. She touched her own chest. Pyanfar Chanur is my name. The translator can’t do names for you. Py-an-far. Cha-nur.”
He tried. Pyanfar was recognizable … at least that he purred the rhythm into his own tongue. “Good enough,” she said. She sat more loosely, linked her hands in her lap. “Civilized. Civilized beings should deal with names. Tully.—Are you from a ship, Tully, or did the kif take you off some world?”
He thought about that. “Ship,” he admitted finally.
“Did you shoot at them first? Did you shoot at the kif first, Tully?”
“No. No weapons. My ship have no weapons.”
“Gods, that’s no way to travel. What should I do with you? Take you back to what world, Tully?”
His hands tightened on the back of the cushion. He stared at her bleakly past it. “You want same they want. I don’t say.”
“You come onto my ship and you won’t tell me. Hani are dead because of you, and you won’t tell me.”
“Dead.”
“Kif hit a hani ship. They wanted you, Tully. They wanted you. Don’t you think I should ask questions? This is my ship. You came to it. Don’t you think you owe me some answers?”
He said nothing. Meant to say nothing, that was clear. His lips were clamped. Sweat had broken out on his face, glistening in the dim light.
“Gods rot this translator,” Pyanfar said after a moment. “All right, so somebody treated you badly too. Is it better on this ship? Do we give you the right food? Have you enough clothes?”
He brushed at the trousers. Nodded unenthusiastically.
“You don’t have to agree. Is there anything you want?”
“Want my door #.”
“What, open?”
“Open.”
“Huh.”
His shoulders sagged. He had not expected agreement on that, it was evident. He made a vague motion of his hand about their surroundings. “Where are we? The sound. . . .”
The dust brushing past the hull. It had been background noise, a maddening whisper they lived with. Down in lower-deck, he would have heard a lot of it. “We’re drifting,” she said. “Rocks and dust out there.”
“We sit at a jump point?”
“Star system.” She reached and cut on the telescope in the observation bubble, bringing the image onto the main screen. The scope tracked to Urtur itself, the inferno of energy in the center of the dusty lens-shaped system, a ringed star which flung out tendrils the movement of which took centuries, ropy filaments dark against the blaze of the center. The image cast light on the Outsider’s face, a moment of wonder: Urtur deserved that. She saw his face and rose to her feet, moved to the side of this shaggy-maned Outsider—a calculated move, because it was her art, to trade, to know the moment when a guard was down. “I tell you,” she said, catching him by the arm—and he shivered, but he made no protest at being drawn to his feet. He towered above her as she pointed to the center of the image. “Telescope image, you see. A big system, a horde of planets and moons—The dark rings there, that’s where the planets sweep the dust and rocks clear. There’s a station in that widest band, orbiting a gas giant. The system is uninhabited except for mahendo’sat miners and a few knnn and tc’a who think the place is pleasant. Methane breathers. But a lot of miners, a lot of people of all kinds are in danger right now, in there, in that center. Urtur is the name of the star. And the kif are in there somewhere. They followed us when we jumped to this place, and now a lot of people are in danger because of you. Kif are there, you understand?”
“Authority.” His skin was cold under her fingerpads, his muscles hard and shivering, whether from the relative coolness of the bridge’s open spaces or from some other cause. “Authority of this system. Hani?”
“Mahendo’sat station. They don’t like the kif much either. No one does, but it’s not possible to get rid of them. Mahendo’sat, kif, hani, tc’a, stsho, knnn, chi . . . all trade here. We don’t all like each other, but we keep our business to ourselves.”
He listened, silent, for whatever he could understand of what she said. Com sputtered again, the whistles and wailing of the knnn.
“Some of them,” Pyanfar said, “are stranger than you. But you don’t know the names, do you? This whole region of space is strange to you.”
“Far from my world,” he said.
“Is it?”
That got a misgiving look from him. He pulled away from her hand, looked at her and at the others.
“Wherever it is,” Pyanfar said in nonchalance. She looked back at Haral and Hilfy. “I think that’s about enough. Our passenger’s tired. He can go back to his quarters.”
“I want talk you,” Tully said. He took hold of the cushion nearest, resisting any attempt to move him. “I want talk.”
“Do you?” Pyanfar asked. He reached toward her. She stood still with difficulty—but he did not touch. He drew the hand back. “What is it you want to talk about?”
He leaned, standing, against the cushion with both hands. His pale eyes were intent and wild, and whatever the precise emotion his face registered, it was distraught. “You #### me. Work, understand. I stay this ship and I work same crew. All you want. Where you go. # give me ####.”
“Ah,” she said. “You’re offering to work for your passage.”
“Work on this ship, yes.”
“Huh.” She thrust her hands within her waistband and would have looked down her nose at him, but it was a matter of looking up. “You make a deal, do you? You work for me, Outsider? You do what I say? All right. You rest now. You go back to your cabin and you learn your words and you think how to tell me what the kif want with you—because the kif still want this ship, you understand. They want you, and they’ll come after this ship.”
He thought about that a moment. Almost he looked as if he might speak. His lips shaped a word and took it back again, and clamped shut. And something sealed in behind his eyes when he did that, a bleakness worse than had ever been there.
It sent a prickle down her spine. This creature is thinking of dying, she thought. It was the look from against the wall, from the corner in the washroom, but colder still. “Hai,” she said, in her best dockside manner, and set her hand on his bowed shoulder, roughly but careful with the claws. Shook at him. “Tully. You aren’t strong enough yet to work. Enough that you rest. You’re safe. You understand me? Hani don’t trade with kif.”
There was a glimmering then, a sudden break in that seal. He reached out quite unexpectedly and seized her other hand, his blunt fingers both holding and exploring it, the furred web he lacked, the pads of the tips. Pressure hit the center of her hand and the claws came out, only slightly: she was careful, though her ears flattened in warning. To her further distress he set his other hand on her shoulder, then let go both holds and looked about at Haral and Hilfy, then back at her again. Crazy, she judged him; and then she thought about kif, and reckoned that he had license for a little strangeness. “I’ll tell you something,” she said, “for free. Kif followed you across the Meetpoint dock to my ship; they followed my ship here to Urtur, and right now we’re sitting here, just trying to be quiet so the kif don’t find us. Trying to decide how best to get out of here. There’s one kif in particular, in command of a ship named Hinukka. Akukkakk. …”
“Akukkakk,” he echoed, suddenly rigid. The sound came as names must, from the other ear, his own voice. His eyes were dilated.
“Ah. You do know.”
“He want take me his ship. Big one. Authority.” “Very big. They have a word for his kind, do you know it? Hakkikt. That means he hunts and others pick up the scraps he leaves. I lost something at Meetpoint: a hani ship and my cargo. So did this great hakkikt, this great, this powerful kif. You escaped him. You ran from him. So it’s more than profit that he wants out of this. He wants you, Tully, to settle accounts. It’s his pride at stake, his reputation. For a kif, that’s life itself. He’s not going to give up. Do you know, he I tried to buy you from me. He offered me gold, a lot of gold. He might even have kept the deal straight and not delayed for piracy afterward. He’s that desperate.” Tully’s eyes drifted from her to the others and back again. You deal with him?”
“No. I want something for dead hani and lost cargo. I want this great hakkikt. You hear me, Tully?”
“Yes,” Tully said suddenly, “/want same.”
“Aunt,” Hilfy protested in a faint voice.
“You want to work,” Pyanfar said, ignoring her niece’s disquiet. “There’ll be the chance for that. But you wait, Tully. You rest. At shift change, I’ll call you again. You come eat with us. Meal, understand? But you get some rest first, hear? You work on my ship, you take orders first. Follow instructions. Right?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Go, then. Haral and Hilfy will take you back down. Go.”
He nodded, delivered himself over to Haral and Hilfy together: not a backward look from either of them as they took him out. Or from him. She watched them go, found herself rubbing the hand that he had touched.
The knnn song wailed out again. Neighbors to the kif, the knnn. That bore remembering. That one was uncommonly talkative. No one was ever sure what knnn senses were, or what motivated their migrations from star to star.
She turned to the com bank, pushed Record, and sent the song again to the translator. It gave her no more information than the last time. The song ceased, and there remained only the whisper of the dust. Urtur system everywhere had grown very still.
The translator still carried white sound, Haral’s voice or Hilfy’s. The Outsider was saying nothing in being taken back to his quarters. She was marginally uneasy about having him out of sight. Perhaps he was mad after all. Perhaps he would suicide and leave them with nothing to show for the encounter but a feud with the kif. Up to a point she could not prevent him killing himself, except by taking measures which would not encourage his good will.
But revenge was something of purpose, something to make life worthwhile. She had offered him that.
She thought of his face close at hand, lively, crazed eyes, a hand as cold as something an hour dead—a creature, she reminded herself, who had been fighting alone an enemy which would have turned a stsho to jelly.
She grinned somewhat, a drawing back of the lips and wrinkling of the nose, and stared thoughtfully toward the telescope image.
No disengagement possible. Not with this kif prince, this hakkikt Akukkakk, whose personal survival rode on this Outsider business. His own sycophants would turn on him if he lost face in this matter. He had lost this Outsider personally . . . likely by some small carelessness, the old kif game of tormenting victims with promises and threats and shreddings of the will. An old game . . . one which hani understood; irresistible to a kif who thrived on fear in his victims.
Akukkakk had to make up that embarrassment at Meet-point. He would have been obliged to revenge if it were so much as a bauble stolen from him at dockside. But this Outsider Tully was far more than that. A communicative, spacefaring species, hitherto unknown, in a position to have come into kif hands without passing through more civilized regions. The kif had new neighbors.
Possible danger to them.
Possible expansion of kif hunting grounds … in directions which had nothing to do with hani and mahendo’sat. Those were high stakes, impossibly high stakes to be riding on one poor fugitive.
Urtur would swarm with kif, before all was said and done.
She delved into the com storage and started hunting components for a transmitter of some power, roused out Chur and sent her hunting through the darker areas of The Pride’s circumference for other supplies.
V
It was a monster, like Tully, this thing that they constructed in the spotlit, chill bowels of The Pride’s far rim. It had started out hani-shaped, a patched and hazardous EVA-pod which they had stripped for parts and never succeeded in foisting off on another hani ship. Its limbs had just grown longer, sectioned off and spliced with tubing, and it was rigged with a wheezing lifesupport system.
“Get Tully,” Pyanfar said applying herself to the last of the welding which should get the system in order. “Rouse him out.” And Chur went, bedraggled as herself with the dust and the grime of The Pride’s salvage storage.
Pyanfar worked, spliced and cursed when the system blew in another frustrating curl of smoke, unhitched that component and rummaged for a new one, sealed that in and congratulated herself when it worked, a vibration and a flicker of green lights on the belt and inside the helmet. She grinned, wiped her hands on the blue work breeches she had put on for this grimy task … a long time since she had practiced such things, a long time since she had worn blue roughspun and gotten blisters on her hands. In her youth, under another of The Pride’s captains, she had done such things, but only Haral and Tirun could recall those days. She licked a burn on her finger and squatted on the deck, content with the operation of the unit. Let it run a while, she decided: see if it would go on working. The suit stared back, stiff and gangling on its huge feet, reflecting her in distant miniature off its curved faceplate. It stood like some mahendo’sat demon, two limbs shy of that description, but ghastly enough in its exposed hoses and its malproportioned height, against the dark of the surrounding machine-shop. A reek of blood mingled with the singed smell of the welding. A bucket on the deck caught the occasional drip from the skinned carcass which hung beyond it under the light.
It was a little more than hani-sized, chained up to the hoist-track above, long-faced head adroop on a longish neck, to thaw and drain. It had begun to reek under the lights. The long limbs were coming untucked, and the belly gaped. Uruus. Sweet meat and a fat one: the best steaks had already headed galleyward, in this raid on their private larder. It had wounds this carcass, but that only lengthened the limbs, letting the haunches drop.
The door unsealed and sealed in the dark distance; steps whispered along the metal flooring. Pyanfar adjusted her translator and got nothing, but she could see the lights go on in the far dark expanse, illusionlike and high because of the upward curve of the deck in the vast storage chamber, picking out two figures, one gangling tall and pale. She sat and waited as the lights turned themselves on and off in sequence along the walkway, bringing the two nearer and nearer where she sat.
Tully and Chur, of course. The Outsider came willingly enough, but he stopped dead when he came close, and the light went out on him, leaving him and Chur in the dark outside the area where Pyanfar sat. She stood up, making him out clearly enough in the shadow. “Tully, it’s safe. Come on. it’s all right, Tully.”
He did come, slowly, alien shadow in the rest of the strangeness, and Chur had hold of his arm in case. He looked at the vacant suit, and at the hanging carcass, and kept staring at it.
“Animal,” Pyanfar said. “Tully. I want you to see what we’re doing. I want you to understand. Hear?”
He turned toward her, eyes deep in their shadowed sockets, the angled light glancing off a pale mane and planes of feature decidedly un-hani. “You put me in this?”
“Put that in the suit,” Pyanfar said cheerfully. “Transmitter sending signal hard as it can. We tell the kif that we’re throwing you out and we give them that, you understand, Outsider. Make them chase that. And we run.”
It began to get through to him. His eyes flickered over the business again, the vacant suit, the frozen carcass “Their instruments see in it,” he said.
“Their instruments will scan it, yes; and that’s what they’ll get.”
He gestured toward the carcass. “This? This?” “Food,” she said. “Not a person, Tully. Animal. Food.”
Of a sudden his face took on an alarming grin. His body heaved with a choking sound she realized finally for laughter. He clapped Chur on the shoulder, turned that convulsed face toward her with moisture streaming from his eyes and still with that mahendo’sat grin. “You # the kif.”
“Put that inside,” she told him, motioning toward the carcass. “Bring it. You help, Tully.”
He did, with Chur, his rangy body straining against the half-frozen weight, an occasional grimace of what might be disgust at the look or the feel of it. Pyanfar shut down the pod’s lifesupport, opened up their work of art, and wrinkled her nose as the Outsider and Chur brought the reeking carcass over. There was trim work to do. She abandoned fastidiousness and did it herself, having some notion how it might fit. The head could be gotten into the helmet, a bit of the neck to stuff the vacant body cavity of the carcass, and a little scoring and breaking of the rib cage, a sectioning and straightening of stiff limbs.
“Going to smell good if that drifts a while with the heater on,” Chur observed. Tully laughed his own choking laugh and wiped his face, smearing his mustache with the muck which coated his arms to the elbow. Pyanfar grinned, suddenly struck with the incongruity of things, squatting here in the dark with a crazed alien and a suit full of uruus carcass, the three of them in insane conspiracy. “Hold it,” she ordered Chur, trying to get the belly seam fastened. Chur held the sides together at the bottom and Tully helped at the top, and there it was, sealed and Tully-shaped.
“Come,” Pyanfar said, taking the feet, and Tully and Chur energetically got purchase on its shoulders, lumbering along with it as the lights recognized their presence and began to go on and off as they traveled.
“Cargo dump?” Chur asked.
“Airlock,” Pyanfar said. “Should passengers leave a ship by any other route?”
It was no light weight. They staggered along the walk with the body of the pod dragging at this and that point, got it onto a cargo carrier at the next section and breathed sighs of relief as it lay corpsewise on the carrier, mirrored faceplate staring up at the overhead. Tully was white and trembling from the exertion: sweat stood on his skin and he held onto the carrier’s endrail, panting, but bright eyed.
“You’re Pyanfar, right?” he asked between breaths. “Pyanfar?”
“Yes,” she owned, wiped an itch on her nose with a dirty hand, reckoning she could get no dirtier, nodded at Chur and gave him Chur’s name again.
“I #,” he said, nodding affirmative. He pushed enthusiastically when they pushed, and they got the thing moving easily down the aisle through interior storage, past the hulking shadows of the tanks and the circulating machinery, out again into the normal lighted sections of belowdecks, under a lower ceiling, and through ordinary corridors to the lock.
“# he go #?” Tully asked, staggered as he helped them offload the pod, looked anxiously leftward as the lock’s inner hatch opened. “Go quick out?”
“Ah, no,” Pyanfar said. She carried the feet through and braced them as Chur and Tully got the upper body through and upright. “There, against the outer hatch. We blow that, and he’ll go right nicely.” She set the feet down and added her weight as they heaved and braced it, stood back and surveyed her handiwork with a grin and a thought of the kif. She powered up the lifesupport with a touch of the buttons on the belt, and it stood a little stiffer, on minimum maintenance. She shut it down again, not to waste a good cylinder.
And for the moment Tully stood staring at it too, panting and sweating, arms at his sides and a haggard look suddenly in place of the laughter, an expression which held something of a shudder, as if after all he had begun to think about that thing and his situation, and to reckon questions he had not asked.
“Out,” Pyanfar said, motioning Chur from the lock, including Tully with that sweep of her arm. He hesitated. She moved to take his arm in his seeming daze, and he suddenly hung his hand on her shoulder, one and then the other, and bowed his head against her cheek, brief gesture, quickly dropped, hands withdrawn as swiftly as her ears flattened. She caught herself short of a hiss, deliberately patted his hairless shoulder and brought him on through the lock into the corridor.
Thank you, that act seemed to signify. So. It had subtler understandings, this Tully. She flicked her ears, a look which got a quickly turned shoulder from Chur, and shoved the Outsider leftward in Chur’s direction. “Go clean up,” she said. “Get showered, hear? Wash.”
Chur took him, indicated to him that he should help her with the carrier, and they went trundling it past and down the corridor to put that back where it belonged. Pyanfar blew a short breath and closed the interior lock, then headed for the common washroom where she had left her better clothes—did a small shudder of the skin where the Outsider’s hand had rested on her shoulder.
But it had understood what they were doing, very well understood what they were up to with the decoy, and that in fact it was not all a matter of humor.
