Chanur 04 – Chanur’s Homecoming – Cherryh, C. J.

Chanur’s Homecoming

by CJ Cherryh

(Chanur book #4)

 

In our last episode…

 

Two years previous, the aggressive kif, natives of Akkht, had a hakkikt, a leader so fearsome he united more than the usual number of kif behind him in a pirate band. This hakkikt, Akkukkak, had seized a ship of a hitherto unknown species, humanity; and acquired ambitions beyond the usual kifish banditry against other species. With a species to prey on which was without the protections of the Compact, he might grow powerful enough to gather the whole kifish species under his influence, sweeping down on the Compact in a wave of conquest unprecedented in history.

But his human prey escaped him. While the hakkikt was docked at Meetpoint starstation, the last surviving prisoner ran to shelter aboard The Pride of Chanur, a hani merchant ship captained by one Pyanfar Chanur, who in no wise solicited this refugee.

Still Pyanfar and her crew as a matter of policy refused to surrender the human to Akkukkak’s demand. This was a two-fold calamity for the kif: first the loss of the human and all the information he held about his species; and then this defiance from a mere hani merchant-who continued to elude the great hakkikt in a multi-star chase. Akkukkak was suddenly fighting not only for his prey but for his life, for a kif who loses face rapidly loses followers, and becomes the target of other kif with ambitions. Akkukkak was compelled to seek vengeance on a scale sufficient to cover this humiliation; and this humiliation involved an ambition large enough to shake worlds.

He took the unprecedented step of moving on the hani homeworld, seeking first the humiliation and removal of Pyanfar Chanur and all her clan, in what may have been a kifish misapprehension of the importance of any single hani; he was thinking as a kif, and interpreted Pyanfar’s moves as aggressive ambition. He also demanded the return of his property. In all these demands he seriously misjudged the hani, for no action he could have taken would have rallied the hani against him more than this intrusion on hani home territory and the demand to surrender a living being who had taken shelter within a hani clan. Hani resisted in a battle at Gaohn station, and they received mahen help in the persons of two hunter captains, known to Pyanfar (mahendo’sat names are not easy for outsiders) as Goldtooth and Jik. This firefight would have been serious enough; but the hostilities disturbed yet another species of the Compact, the methane-breathing knnn, aliens of direst reputation and the highest technology in known space. The knnn, intervening, took Akkukkak away to a fate unguessed. And that settled that. The human Tully went home to his people. Pyanfar Chanur looked forward to a new era of trade and prosperity in which not only Clan Chanur, but all hani-kind would profit from human contact.

She reckoned, unfortunately, without the stsho, whose station at Meetpoint was the hub of all trading routes of the Compact. Total xenophobes, the stsho withdrew Chanur’s trading permit. More, Akkukkak had indeed caused a profound disturbance in hani affairs by the manner of his demise. Chanur was forced to defend itself against challenge by hani enemies who took advantage of popular fears of the knnn, and though Lord Kohan Chanur held on, Chanur lost valuable allies whose support in council Pyanfar and other women of the clan very greatly missed.

To add to the difficulties, no one kept their promises. The humans did not return and the mahendo’sat withdrew into isolation.

Two impoverished years later, Pyanfar Chanur was doing all she could to keep The Pride running, and she was not the only Chanur captain in deep trouble.

Then by some unforeseen miracle her papers cleared and she was invited back to Meetpoint to recover her trading license.

She pulled into Meetpoint with the last cargo she could afford to buy, and fell right into the welcoming arms of Goldtooth the mahendo’sat, who handed her a courier packet with the human Tully as a secret passenger and told her to run for her life: the kif were hunting him.

Now among Pyanfar’s other troubles, she had defied hani custom. Hani males were traditionally a protected class within hani society, the few who made successful challenge becoming clan lords, ceremonial heads of clans, who in fact had no meaningful authority at all, the real legal and financial power resting with the clanswomen who conducted exterior business. The rest of the males lived and died in rural exile, excluded from all society but their own; and to this pool of males a defeated clan lord must retire, to a short and wretched life among younger, ambitious males practicing their combat skills. Pyanfar’s husband Khym Mahn was defeated by their son Kara, and deposed; but he postponed his exile to help her in her fight against the kif, and became one of the few hani males ever to leave the planetary surface-by interstellar agreement, they were in fact barred from doing so, since they had a reputation for berserker rages dangerous to life and property.

But Pyanfar, faced with the prospect of sending Khym down world again to die, defied treaty and custom and took him aboard The Pride; more, she secured working papers for him by bribing a mahendo’sat official, and listed him as crew. Having traveled and worked with alien males, Pyanfar has begun to see in her own husband traits no hani has ever looked for in a male of her species; she conceived the idea in her heart of hearts that the berserker rages might be due more to upbringing than biology, and yet- and yet she is hani; and to doubt something out of all folk wisdom, something built into all language and custom and tradition, is very difficult, the more so that Khym himself doubts her theories; he is, after all, a product of his culture too, and all the complex of beliefs which encourage him to be a man also foster his aggressive impulses and his doubts about his faculties. It is not, in sum, a comfortable situation for The Pride’s crew either, who still cannot figure out whether they ought to treat Khym as a man or try to ignore that handicap and treat him as one of themselves-in which case modesty and custom and language are in the way: female humor and traditional curses involve sons and males; pausing to dress in shipboard emergencies is not practical; ship facilities are not designed to accommodate a man’s larger stature; and male thinking is traditionally given to be hasty and imprecise, not the sort of thing anyone wants to rely on in any use of hazardous machinery.

But Khym once-lord of Mann acquired the unprecedented (for a hani) designation of crewman aboard The Pride of Chanur.

The worst happened forthwith: Khym was involved in a riot that heavily damaged Meetpoint station. Pyanfar escaped a second loss of her license only by charging the entire bill to the mahendo’sat, who had given her a credit slip for quite different purposes-to aid her with the transport of the human, Tully.

Unfortunately this riot happened under the disapproving witness of one Rhif Ehrran, an agent of the hani government.

Now Rhif Ehrran had come to Meetpoint on quite different business. So many of the spacing clans of the hani had taken heavy damage at Gaohn that the groundling clans had seized control of the han, the hani senate. Meanwhile the xenophobic stsho, wealthiest species of the Compact, had bribed certain hani politicians, wanting to subvert hani politics from the inside for fear of two other species: first, humans, who had trespassed stsho borders and might do so again; second, the kif, because two of Akkukkak’s erstwhile lieutenants, one Akkhtimakt and one Sikkukkut, had risen to declare themselves hakkikktun. These two kif were currently battling it out between themselves, but they had already polarized kifish society into a frighteningly few predatory bands. From a fragmented piratical species, kif had suddenly achieved unity to a degree Akkukkak himself never effected.

The burning issue, among kif as elsewhere, was humanity; and the persistent rumors held that humanity was the Compact right through methane-breather space, to unite with the mahendo’sat, which meant trouble for the kif. The rumors happened to be true. And the stsho, who, incapable of fighting, had long relied on mahen guards for protection, suddenly suspected they could no longer trust mahendo’sat. Hence the sudden coziness with the groundling hani clans and the flood of stsho money to certain hani pockets.

The han had heard rumors too; and heard rumors, moreover, of one hani actively cooperating with the kif-the hani pirate Dur Tahar of Tahar’s Moon Rising. That was the ship Rhif Ehrran had gone out there to hunt. But Ehrran was also there on secret business: negotiating with the stsho on behalf of certain of her own political patrons. Certainly Ehrran was interested when Pyanfar Chanur involved herself in a major riot aboard Meetpoint, entangled with both mahen secret agents and a high-ranking kif. So when Pyanfar paid a huge bribe to the stsho stationmaster, Stle sties stlen, and made a hasty departure from Meetpoint with the human Tully aboard, Rhif Ehrran followed, smelling political blood and seeing in this move of Pyanfar’s a threat to all she stood for.

Akkhtimakt headed Pyanfar off by occupying Kita Point, strategic gateway to mahen and hani space, forcing all traffic to detour into the Disputed Zones along the kifish/mahen border. With The Pride damaged enroute, Pyanfar had no choice but to go to Kshshti Station in the Zones, seeking repairs and help. Her intended destination was Maing Tol, the mahen regional capital; her aim, to deliver Tully and his message from humanity into the hands of Goldtooth’s superiors. But on her arrival at Kshshti, she ran into Rhif Ehrran, the kif Sikkukkut, and the hani trader Ayhar’s Prosperity, which had lost its cargo at Meetpoint thanks to her: its captain Banny Ayhar was not pleased.

Rhif Ehrran demanded Tully’s surrender to her; and her attempt to take custody of Tully resulted in a dock fight which put Tully and Pyanfar’s young niece Hilfy Chanur into the hands of their enemy Sikkukkut. Sikkukkut left, leaving Pyanfar the message that she could recover the hostages at Mkks, a station right on the kifish border. It was too obviously a trap.

In the midst of all this, Goldtooth’s partner Jik (whose true mahen name is Keia Nomesteturjai) showed up at Kshshti with his powerful hunter-ship Aja Jin; and sent the hani captain Banny Ayhar on to Maing Tol with the message Pyanfar had brought this far. He supported Pyanfar in her decision to go to Mkks: he went along and somehow argued Rhif Ehrran into joining them.

At Mkks, Sikkukkut returned Hilfy and Tully in a negotiated settlement. He also gave Pyanfar a gift of kifish esteem-a slave named Skkukuk.

And all they had agreed to do in return was to cross into kifish territory and help Sikkukkut take Kefk station, the main kifish link to Meetpoint, in an act of outright piracy.

Jik agreed, to Pyanfar’s consternation. Moreover, Rhif Ehrran did, after listening to Jik’s persuasion.

They made the jump and they succeeded. Their ships occupied Kefk kifish-fashion, by superior bluff and with very little damage.

Goldtooth showed up then, furious with his partner Jik, for Goldtooth had been lying silent just off Kefk monitoring the situation. He had been off a time fighting Akkhtimakt, trying to open the way for a human fleet now enroute to Compact space, and now Jik had made a deal which would effectively bring Sikkukkut into alliance with the mahendo’sat against Akkhtimakt, emphatically not the situation Goldtooth was working toward. Humans were headed into Compact space in great number, and Goldtooth’s whole plan for human-mahen alliance now was jeopardized by the taking of Kefk and its delivery to Sikkukkut, who consequently would bring the kif into unity under one hakkikt much faster then Goldtooth’s plans called for.

Pyanfar meanwhile received a second gift of esteem from Sikkukkut, the person of her old enemy Dur Tahar the pirate, who had been a respectable hani merchant captain before she opposed Pyanfar at Gaohn and accidentally ended up in alliance with the kif, her reputation ruined. Now a prisoner of Sikkukkut, captured along with Akkhtimakt’s partisans on the station, Tahar had reached the nadir of her fortunes and begged Pyanfar to intercede with the kif for the lives of her cousins still in Sikkukkut’s hands.

Tahar. Pyanfar refused, having nothing but disgust for Ehrran’s secret police methods and police state mentality. Tahar would go home to hani justice, but aboard The Pride of Chanur. It was a direct slap at Ehrran and a threat to her prestige; and a countermove against her patrons’ ambitions. It served notice that Chanur, instead of bowing to political force, was going to exercise the ancient authority of a clan to take its own prisoners and administer its own justice before turning the offender over to the han. This effectively meant that Rhif Ehrran’s superiors and political allies could not touch Tahar without dealing with Chanur as a head-of-cause in open council, and without bringing the whole* foreign policy issue into debate in the han with Chanur as the chief spokeswoman for the opposition, precisely the situation Chanur’s enemies did not want.

Then, while Pyanfar went to negotiate with Sikkukkut, Goldtooth secretly met with Ehrran. And some unknown agency started a riot on the docks, which set Akkhtimakt’s hitherto cowed partisans on the station to attacking Sikkukkut’s forces. Pyanfar and the Tahar crew, whose freedom she had just negotiated from Sikkukkut, were caught in the middle of the firefight, as Goldtooth and Rhif Ehrran both took advantage of the confusion to break dock and run for Meetpoint- together.

The slave Skkukuk saved Pyanfar’s life in the riot, to her profound distress at the debt.

But Jik, also attempting Pyanfar’s rescue from the firefight, fell into the hands of Sikkukkut, who had some new and hard questions to ask of Jik regarding Goldtooth, mahen ambitions, and the whereabouts and course of human ships.

 

Chapter One

 

The Pride’s small galley table was awash in data printout, paperfaxes ringed and splotched with brown gfi-stains, arrowed, circled, crossed out, and noted in red and green ink till they were beyond cryptic. The red pen made another notation and another snaking arrow; and the bronze-pelted hani fist that held it flexed claws out and in again in profoundest frustration. Pyanfar Chanur sat in this sanctuary gnawing her mustaches and drinking cup after cup of lukewarm gfi amid her scribbles on the nav and log records.

Pyanfar was not her usual meticulous self-rough blue spacer-breeches instead of the bright red silk she favored, and not a single one of the bracelets and other gold jewelry she usually wore, just the handful of spacer rings up the sweep of her tuft-tipped ears. Her best pair of red silk breeches had gone for rags, perished of the same calamity which had stiffened her joints, left several knots on her maned skull, and made small puncture wounds all over her red-brown hide, Her niece’s deft fingers had tweezed out the metal splinters down in sickbay, with the help of the magnetic scanner, and patched the worst cuts with plasm and sticking-plaster. Haral, her second-in-command, had suffered the same, and limped about her duties on the bridge, running printouts and sitting watch in her turn, while the rest of the crew was in scarcely better shape, hides patched, manes and beards singed, with bandages here and there about their persons. That had been a memorable fight on the docks, indeed a memorable fracas; but Pyanfar could have recalled it with more pleasure if it had come to better success.

Scritch-scratch. Another note went down on the well-worn starchart. She studied it and restudied it, gnawed her mustaches and refigured, though all but the finest decimal exactitudes of current star-distances were in her memory. There were surely answers in that map; and she racked her wits to find them, to discover what the opposition planned and what her allies (treacherous though they be) might be figuring to do, and to juggle all the variables at once. The answer was there, patently there, in the possibilities of that starmap and in the self-interests of eight separate and polylogical species.

Knowing all the options, all those self-interests, and all the capabilities of the ships involved, a hani merchant might conceivably manage to think of something clever. She needed something clever. Desperately.

She sat at Kefk, inside kifish space where no hani of right mind would ever consent to be, allied to kif no hani in her right mind would ever trust; she sat in the same space station with nervous methane-breathers (tc’a and chi) who had lately been raided (reprimanded? attacked? congratulated?) by an intruding knnn ship, which had carried off a tc’a vessel. Gods knew what was in the tc’a’s multipartite minds; the chi had no minds that any oxy breather had ever proved; and as for the knnn, no one had any least idea what they were up to. Wherever those black hair-snarls on thin black legs intruded their influence (and the power of their strange ships), things bent. Fast. But the knnn had withdrawn and Kefk occupied itself with its own affairs, like repair of its fire-ravaged docks and placating its new master, the hakkikt Sikkukkut, whose ships now numbered thirty-two (the count was rising). It occupied itself with the hani pirate Dur Tahar, lately at liberty by the hakkikt’s grace; with the mahen hunter-ship Aja Jin, lately outside the hakkikt’s good graces, and still at dock, sitting beside The Pride and not daring send a compromising query across the dockside communication lines. Kefk had a great deal to worry about, not least of which was the missing hunter-ship Mahijiru and its captain, one Ana Ismehanan-min, aka Goldtooth, and the hani ship that had run with him.

Along with major structural damage, a breached sector, fire, disruption of the lifesupport systems, the remnants of a revolution and other nagging difficulties.

Another flurry of figures and pen-corrections. There was, number one, the mahendo’sat territory to reckon with: a wide sprawl of stars into which at least one message had gone and might have gotten through, knnn and the gods willing. Banny Ayhar would have done her best to get it through, as much as any merchant captain could do: she might have lived to get it to Maing Tol, if the knnn had not stopped her or if the kif had not been laying for her. The mahendo’sat, tall black-furred primates with enough double-turning motives involved to baffle a tc’a’s multipartite brain (but antagonism toward their neighbors the kif was always high among them), might have made a move if that message had gotten through. Down the line via Kshshti and out to Mkks might be a good course of action for the mahendo’sat to take, if they hoped to forestall any kifish breakout along that border; but Meetpoint station or Kita Point, critical to all trade routes, was most likely the object of any major push from the mahendo’sat. That effort would have to come via Kshshti if Kita was still blocked; while Kefk, in kifish territory, was not a likely route for them. Not impossible, given the current state of borders in the Compact, just less than likely.

Also reckoning mahendo’sat moves, it was very likely there were one or more mahen hunter-ships escorting the human ships; and they were coming in toward Meetpoint from Tt’a’va’o and tc’a/chi space.

With human ships and human captains; still another set of motives and self-interests, on gods-knew-what orders from their own authorities. (Or lack of them-who knew what human minds were like?)

Further complication: kifish forces under the rival hakkikt Akkhtimakt had likely moved in to take the mahen/tc’a station at Kshshti. That might stand off any mahen flanking move to Meetpoint, if Akkhtimakt’s forces still controlled Kita as well. Akkhtimakt might have Kita, Urtur, Kshshti, or all three, and advance from any or all of those points against Meetpoint and/or Kefk itself, if the report Goldtooth had brought was true and the stsho had been fools enough to invite Akkhtimakt in as hired help.

There was, lure to Akkhtimakt, his greatest enemy Sikkukkut, sitting here at Kefk gathering to his control every ship that came into port. And revenge was always high on any list of kifish motives. Pukkukkta, they called it. Advance retaliation was better than revenge after the fact. Having an enemy know his calamity before he died was best of all.

Yet another move of the pen, another arrow, lurid green: one could not exclude interference from the methane-breathers, whose motives no oxy breather could guess.

And, certainly not to be forgotten, there were the stsho who owned Meetpoint, congenitally noncombatant, but hiring alien, aggressive help right and left and forming reckless associations.

While the han-gods, the hani senate was up to its nose in politics as usual, and Rhif Ehrran was on her way to Meetpoint with evidence enough to outlaw Chanur once and for all.

The Pride of Chanur sat at a kifish dock six to seven jumps from homestar, no matter which way she figured it. Six or seven jumps was a long way, a very long way, measured in stress on ship and on body; and gods knew what would follow on her heels, if she did what she would gladly do now and broke dock at Kefk and ran for their lives, withdrawing herself like a good law-abiding hani from all the affairs of kif and mahendo’sat and multifarious aliens.

But the trouble would surely follow her home; she knew beyond a doubt that it would. She had involved herself in the affairs of kifish hakkikktun and she had acquired their notice. She had made herself a name in kifish eyes. She had gotten sfik, face. And that meant that kif would never let her alone so long as she lived.

Her uneasy partner Sikkukkut an’nikktukktin would never forget her; certainly (gods forbid he should replace Sikkukkut in power) her personal enemy Akkhtimakt would not.

Pyanfar scribbled, flicked her ears, and the rings of forty years of voyages chimed in her hearing. A pearl swung from her right ear, a Llyene pearl from the oceans of the stsho homeworld; she still wore that gift, regardless of the perfidy

of the giver, who was Goldtooth, friend, traitor, flatterer and tenfold liar.

Curse him to his own deepest hell.

Goldtooth was bound for Meetpoint with Rhif Ehrran, beyond a doubt he was, the conniving bastard. He was dealing with the stsho and anyone else who offered his species an advantage, and he was betting opposite to the alliance his own partner Jik had made-to which maneuver Sikkukkut took strongest and understandable exception.

Another scribble.

A quick movement caught her eye, a black blot speeding across the floor, sinuous, small, fast.

She leapt to her feet. “Haral!” she yelled, while paper cascaded off the table and the black thing paused for one beady-eyed stare before it skittered on, faster than her limping dive to stop it.

Haral appeared, hobbling in by the short bridge-galley corridor, and did a fast skip and wince as it dived between her feet and vanished.

Pyanfar snatched up a handful of jumbled papers. “Fry that thing!”

“Sorry, captain. We’re setting traps-“

“Traps be bothered, they’re breeding, I swear they are! Get Skkukuk on it, they’re his by-the-gods dinner. Let him find ’em. Gods-be mess. Vermin!” The hair stood up on her shoulders and she stared at her first officer in bleakest despair. No one in the crew was up to more orders, more duty, or more trouble.

“The things might get into something vital,” Pyanfar said. Common sense, covering absolute revulsion. “Gods, get ’em out!”

“Aye,” Haral said, in a voice as thin and hoarse as hers. And Haral limped away, to get their own private kif to ferret his dinner out of The Pride’s nooks and crannies before something else went wrong. That took a guard, to watch Skkukuk; and gods curse the luck that had set the things free on the ship in the first place. She had heard the story, inspected the burned patch on The Pride’s outer airlock seal. And she blessed Tirun Araun’s quick hand that had gotten that door shut-vermin and all.

Gods knew how those black slinking pests had gotten up from lowerdeck.

Climbed the liftshaft? The airducts?

The thought of a myriad little slinking black bodies loping along the airshafts and into lifesupport lifted the hairs at her nape.

What were the gods-be things eating?

She scooped up a last couple of papers with a wince and a grimace and sat down again. Rested both elbows on the table and rested her aching head in her hands.

She saw within her mind a dark kifish hall; sodium-light; and a table surrounded by insect-legged chairs-her partner Jik sitting there with one of Sikkukkut’s minions holding a gun to his head, and that bastard Sikkukkut starting to ask closer and closer questions.

She had not had a way to help him. She had been lucky to get her own crew out of there alive; and to keep herself and her ship as free as it was, under kifish guns at a kifish dock.

Send another appeal to Sikkukkut to ask for Jik’s release? Sikkukkut’s patience with her was already frayed. Perhaps it was personal cowardice not to send another message. Perhaps it was prudence and saving what could be saved, not to push Sikkukkut into some demonstration of his power-at Jik’s expense. Kifish heads adorned the stanchions of Sikkukkut’s ship-ramp. That image haunted her rest and her sleep. A moment’s off-guard imagining set Jik’s head there beside the others.

She opened her eyes abruptly when that vision hit, focusing instead on the maps and charts and printout, where the answer had to lie, where she was convinced it was, if she could cudgel her aching skull and battered brain just a little farther through the maze.

Jik had left them another legacy: a coded microfiche which even Soje Kesurinan, in command of Aja Jin, might not know existed. And The Pride’s computers had been running on that, trying to break that code, ever since they had gotten back to the ship and had a chance to feed it in.

 

“Again,” said Sikkukkut an’nikktukktin, hakkikt and mekt-hakkikt, lately provincial boss and currently rival for ultimate authority among his kind; while Jik, Keia Nomesteturjai, kif-hunter, captain, and what other rank among mahendo’sat this kifish pirate would earnestly like to know-focused his eyes with difficulty and managed a twisted grin. That tended to confuse hell out of the kif, who knew facial expressions were a second and well-developed language especially among mahendo’sat, and who had never quite learned to interpret all their nuances.

“Again,” said Sikkukkut, “Keia, my old friend. Where are the human ships? Doing what? Intending what?”

“I’ve told you,” Jik said. He said it in mahensi, being perverse. Sikkukkut understood that language, though many of his listening subordinates, standing about their table in this dim, sodium-lit hall, were not as educated. Sikkukkut, on the other hand, had a good many talents.

Interrogation was one of those. Sikkukkut had performed that office in the service of Akkukkak, of unlamented memory. All these questions, each pacing and each shift of mood Sikkukkut displayed, were calculated. It was, at the moment, the soft touch. Have a smoke, my old friend. Sit and talk with me. But now the frown was back, a slight drawing-down of Sikkukkut’s long black snout. Hooded and inscrutable he sat, on his insect-legged chair, in the baleful light of the sodium-lamps, while Jik smoked and stared at him eye to eye. There were numerous guards about the shadowed edges of the hall, always the sycophants and the guards. In a little time the order would come to take him back to lowerdecks; and they would try the harder course again. Constant shifting of strategy, the hard approach and the soft, Sikkukkut usually the latter. Usually.

Jik kept himself mentally distant from all these changes, observed the shifts and absorbed the punishment with a professional detachment which was Sikkukkut’s (surely, Jik reckoned) intention to crack. And he looked Sikkukkut in his red-rimmed eyes with the sure feeling that the kif was analyzing his every twitch and blink, looking for a telling reaction.

“Come now, Keia. You know my disposition, how patient I am, of my kind. I know that you had ample time to consult with your partner before the shooting started. We’ve been over these questions. They grow wearisome. Can we not resolve them?”

“My partner,” Jik said, silken-slurred: Sikkukkut afforded him liquor, and he pinched out a dead smokestick and took a sip from the small round footed cup, and drew a long, long breath. Pleasures were few enough. He took what he could get. “I tell you, hakkikt, I wish / knew what my partner’s up to. God, you think I’d have been out on that dock if I’d known what he was about to do?” He fumbled after his next smoke and his fingers were numb. Doubtless the drink was drugged. But there were enough of them to put the drug into him another way, so he took his medicine dosed in very fine liquor and quietly gathered his internal forces. He was deep-conditioned, immune to ordinary efforts in that regard: he knew how to self-hypnotize, and he was already focused on a series of mantras and mandalas into which he had coded what he knew, down paths of dialectic and image no kif could walk without error. He smiled blandly, in secret and bleak amusement that Sikkukkut’s methods had incidentally eased the aches and the pains of previous sessions. His thoughts swayed and wove, moved in and out of focus. The docks and fire. His crew. Aja Jin. Friends and allied ships were just down the dock and as good as lightyears away. “Let me tell you, mekt-hakkikt, I know Ana’s style. Think like a mahendo’sat who knows kif, hakkikt. If he’d asked you for leave to operate on his own you’d never have given it.”

“Therefore he wrecks Kefk’s docks.”

Jik shrugged and drew in a puff, blinked and stared at the kif beneath heavy lids. “Well, but independence is Ana’s way. I’ve known him for years. He’s damn stubborn. He thinks he sees a way and he takes it. Agreements to this side and that- sure, he’s working the mahen side. And maybe the human side too. Most of all he’s gathering assets-” (Careful, Keia, the brain’s fogged; stay to the narrow, the back-doubling path and lead us all round again.) Jik drew in smoke and let it out again in a shaky exhalation. “He’ll negotiate with you. Eventually. But think like a mahendo’sat. He has to get something in hand to negotiate with, something to offer you, hakkikt, to demonstrate his worth.”

“Like Meetpoint? You weigh upon my credulity, Keia.” Silk, silk and soothing-soft. “Try again.”

“Not Meetpoint. But some matter of substance he can come to you with. I think he means to come back to talk. But he will bring something.”

Sikkukkut’s snout twitched in a dry sniffing, kifish laughter, which came for many reasons, not all of which were civilized. “Like a million human ships and a great number of guns?”

“Now, that is possible, hakkikt.” Jik blinked and narrowed his focus still tighter on what he had resolved to say, never on what he was hiding. Find the threads of the story and stay to them, walk the narrow path, while the drug and the alcohol and the stimulants in the smoke flowed through his veins. “That is remotely possible; but the advantage would be too onesided for the humans. What good to mahendo’sat, to exchange one powerful neighbor for another of unknown potential?”

“Unknown, is it?”

“You speak excellent mahensi. Far better than I speak your language. Mechanical translators are hardly a substitute for living and fluent brains. The best human translator we know can ask for a cup of water and say he wants trade. Now, what does that tell us about human motives, human government, human minds, a? Friend, they say. You say friend, I say friend. Do we mean the same thing? What do humans mean with that word? Assuredly Ana doesn’t know; and I much doubt he means to upend the Compact as long as he doesn’t know.” Jik held up a blunt-clawed forefinger, to maintain attention to a point. “Goldtooth, our esteemed Ana, takes orders. He also interprets them freely. This is the danger in him. The Personage who sent us both knows this. Therefore he sent me to restrain Ana from his excesses. I have failed in this. But I know Ana’s limits. I am saying this to you, and you speak such excellent mahensi; but I don’t know whether you know the meaning of this word limits in the way we do. It implies the edge of Ana’s personal assumptions. Ana still obeys the Personage at Maing Tol. As I do. And I tell you that negotiation with you is in the Personage’s interest and human ships running freely through Compact is not in those interests. Therefore I make alliance with

you, as I would have made it simultaneously with Akkhtimakt it he were not the fool he is.”

This pleased Sikkukkut, perhaps. The dark eyes flickered. Sikkukkut picked up his cup and the thin tongue exited the v-form gap of his outer teeth and lapped delicately at the petroleum-smelling contents. “I have known mahen fools,” Sikkukkut said.

“Don’t number Ana among them.”

“Or yourself?”

“I hope not to be.”

“I have a notion what you might have been doing out on that dockside, Keia, my friend. Ana Ismehanan-min wanted confusion behind which to depart. And someone fired the shot that touched off the riot.”

“Rhif Ehrran.”

“The hani? Come now, Keia. Hani gave no orders to the mahendo’sat.”

“It’s not certain that they take them either, your pardon, hakkikt. Myself, I look for a fool to do a fool’s work; and Ehrran is the greatest fool I know.”

“Ehrran isn’t sitting here at this moment.”

Jik drew in a long breath of smoke and let it go again. “It did give her the diversion she needed. And indeed, she isn’t sitting here at this moment. At cost to me, to Chanur-in fact, hakkikt, expensive as it may be to her in the long run, in the short, it served her very well. And what my partner is thinking of in her regard I wish I could tell you. I wish I knew. I think he has use for that hani he took with him, use he couldn’t get out of Chanur-Chanur being no fool.”

“Perhaps he has made use of all the hani. Perhaps he has secured his retreat from among us, and that is all he hoped to do-might that not be, Keia? I only wonder what you are doing here.”

“Perhaps he only followed her because he saw no way to stop her.”

“His ship has armaments,” Sikkukkut said dryly. “He was close behind her before her ship reached velocity.”

“I mean within his intentions he had no way to stop her.”

“And those intentions are?”

Jik spread his hands. “I keep my agreements, hakkikt. And if he has abrogated our partnership-” It was his best argument, his most desperate. His brain fuzzed and the drug meandered through his veins with the force of a tidal bore. “If he has cast me off, hakkikt, I still keep my agreements with you. That’s my job to do; and if I fare better than he does, then that will prove to my Personage which agreement is the better to keep.”

“Mahen mentality.”

“I tell you: it’s very like sfik. Give me status and I’ll outweigh him with the Personage at Maing Tol. It’s that simple. It’s not unknown that the mahendo’sat conclude conflicting treaties. And if my course looks wiser than Ana’s, mine will be honored and his will be set aside. If both of us look like fools, our Personage will lean on other agencies- nor can either of us know if our Personage is not concluding a third treaty with the stsho. If all fail him, he will fall and another Personage’s agents will be to deal with. The mahendo’sat is easy to predict and reasonable to deal with. It will always go for its greatest advantage.”

“Kk-kk-t. And will this Personage of yours stir forth in action or wait for events?”

“Outcome from the subordinates is always the deciding factor.”

“Where has Ismehanan-min gone? Where is this human fleet? What agreements has he made with the methane-breathers? What of your own?”

They returned to old questions, the same questions, bringing the interview in its usual circle. “Again, mekt-hakkikt, I don’t know. They may aim at Meetpoint. It’s not impossible the humans might come here. And I don’t know of any agreement with the knnn. I asked the tc’a to come here to assure that there was no panic on methane-side-“

“Why did the knnn take your tc’a?”

“I don’t know. Who knows the knnn? Who can make an agreement with them-“

“Except the tc’a. Except the tc’a, Keia. Tell me what dealings you have had with them.”

“God help me, none.” He held up a protesting hand. “I never deal with knnn.” And carefully, with his sense in rags from drugs and drink: “That’s Ana’s department.”

“You wish to alarm me.”

“Hakkikt, I am alarmed. I don’t know whether Ana is in control of it, or whether the knnn are doing something independent.”

“In control of it.”

It did sound stupid. Jik blinked slowly and took another drag at the smoke. “I mean maybe he’s in consultation with them.” The hakkikt feared the methane-breathers. Their irrationality, their technology, their vapors and tempers or whatever it was that sent them into frenzies, made the methane-folk a force no one sane wanted to stir up. “‘Or they approached him.” That was enough to send the wind up Sikkukkut’s back. “I don’t know, hakkikt. I swear. God witness. I don’t know. I did send a message to Maing Tol. So did Goldtooth. What was in his packet I don’t know.”

“What was in yours?”

Jik shrugged. “My deal with you. My urging they accept this treaty. I tell you, hakkikt, I’d urge you-all respect, hakkikt, you let me go back to my ship. I have a personal interest in seeing this agreement of ours flourish. It’ll make me a very powerful man at home.”

Give the kif something he understood, an ambition within kifish comprehension.

“You’re attempting to use psychology on me,” Sikkukkut said.

“Of course I am. It also happens to be true.”

“What happened to friendship! You know I know words like this. I am not stupid, Keia; I can study up on a concept without having the-internal circuitry to process it. Friendship means that you work in concert with Ismehanan-min. Loyalty means that you might become a martyr-I learned that word of ker Pyanfar. An appalling concept. But there it was in the mahen dictionary. I was curious. Martyr. Martyrdom. The whole of mahen history teems with martyrs. You place value on them. Like the hani. Have you wish to become one, Keia?”

Jik lifted his brows. “Martyr is another word for fool.”

“I found no such cross-reference. Tell me: Keia: I want to know this: where do the knnn fit into Ismehanan-min’s

arrangements? What arrangements has he made with the stsho?”

“He would betray them.”

“And your opinion of them?”

“They would betray us.”

“They have. Stle sties stlen is a deadly creature. For a grass-eating stsho. Is he dealing with this person?”

“I don’t know. No. Yes.” God help him, the drug was fuzzing up his mind again. For a panicked instant he lost all the threads and got them back again, remembering his story. “But not at depth. Ana doesn’t trust the stsho. It’s mutual. Of course. The humans will come to Meetpoint- eventually. I think they’ll come there. And Stle stles stlen will Phase when gtst sees it. No sts-stsho can withstand that kind of blow to gtst reputation. Ana will take advantage of the confusion and seize the station. If he can.”

“And Akkhtimakt will allow this.”

“Ana will have to anticipate him there. Perhaps-perhaps, hakkikt, Ana moved so quickly because he knows something of Akkhtimakt’s intentions. That there was no more time-in Ana’s estimation.”

“And why would he go with the hani?”

“Look for advantage.” That questioning made him nervous. It was a new tack; he tried to think his way through it and in desperation went back to old answers. “I think-think he hopes to use Rhif Ehrran to get into Meetpoint itself without having stsho techs Phase and bring the systems down. Now you doubt this. I well know. But stsho react badly to surprises; from kif, they expect threats. Even from hani. But mahen threats unbalance them. They’re unaccustomed. Ehrran has a treaty with them. That’s all I can guess about it. She’s a key. That’s all. A fool and a key.”

“To do what?”

“Hakkikt, I’m not privy to his plans.”

Upon that, they were back to old matters. He sat and smoked while Sikkukkut thought that reply over once more, hunched faceless within the hooded robe, on his insect chair, the silver emblem of his princedom among kif shining on his breast stained with sodium-glow. Now and again from the shadows about them came the rustling of other robes, the restless stirring of subordinates who waited on their prince’s pleasure.

In a moment Sikkukkut would negligently lift his hand and those waiting about the room would close in, to bear their prisoner back downship and belowdecks to a different sort of questioning, now that he was sufficiently muddled and drugged. Jik did not let himself doubt that. He did not let himself hope that his argument might sway the hakkikt; least of all did he hope that his hani allies on The Pride of Chanur and his own crew back on Aja Jin would effect a rescue. That was the core of his defense here among the kif, the hard center to his resistance that let him sit here so placidly taking his smokestick down to a stub and watching heavy-lidded while Sikkukkut an’nikktukktin meditated what next to do to him; it was the center of all secrets he held, that he counted himself already dead, from which position it was possible to be quite patient with all manner of misery, since, dead, he was enjoying a degree of sensation and occasional pleasant interlude no one dead had a right to. Even when the pain was extreme, it was better than not feeling anything at all. Ever.

Besides, he was mahendo’sat, and curiosity was second nature to him: he was still picking up information, skilled as Sikkukkut was. He had learned, for instance, that Aja Jin, The Pride of Chanur, and Tahar’s Moon Rising were all at dock and all seemed free: that was very pleasant news. That Pyanfar Chanur was at hand to lend her experience to his own second in command was very good news; that Pyanfar still had credit enough with Sikkukkut to keep Dur Tahar’s throat uncut was excellent news as well, and if there was still enough hani left under Tahar’s red-brown hide, the pirate would adhere to her old enemy like burr to fur: hani paid their debts, if nothing else; and Tahar owed Chanur enough to Stick to hell and back.

All of this he had learned in these sessions, as he knew that the human Tully was indeed safe aboard The Pride of Chanur, so Sikkukkut evidently valued Pyanfar more than he wanted the human to question and for other purposes, which was a mighty great deal of value for any kif to put on a non-kif. This was a double-edged benefit, of course: knowing kifish mindset, value-as-ally could turn with amazing swiftness to

high-status-target. Friend in a kif s doubletoothed mouth had no overtones of loyalty or self-sacrifice at all, was in fact nearly the opposite. Ally-of-convenience, rather. Potential rival, rather. Or poor fool.

The hani knew these things; and he knew well that his second in command knew. So they would both keep one finger to the wind; and he hoped that heads would stay cool if, as seemed possible and even likely, portions of himself turned up as decoration on Sikkukkut’s ship-ramp. He loathed stupidity, himself; he had sinned in that regard or he would not be here. But he truly abhorred the thought that he might singlehandedly serve as trigger to the undoing of the Compact. That was the one thing even a dead man could fear, the legacy he might leave the living for generations to come. That thought was the crack in his defense: Sikkukkut, being kif, taking no thought to posterity, was not capable of reaching that chink without a strong hint.

It was very easy for species to misunderstand each other, particularly when it came to abstracts.

It was possible, for instance, that he and Pyanfar had persistently misinterpreted Sikkukkut’s lack of metaphysics as a lack of emotional abstracts and irrational desires. He had come to know the kif with unwanted intimacy, and now suspected Sikkukkut of a kifish sentimentality, a preference for intimate targets for his most personal satisfaction, while Akkhtimakt was less personal in his mayhem, and more catholic in his attacks.

Akkhtimakt operates with the fist, Sikkukkut was wont to say, and I with the knife.

It was kifish poesy; it was also a profound statement of styles which might, if a mahendo’sat were well-educated in kifish mentality, say more than its surface content, and delve into those deep things language barriered away from translation between species.

He smoked the butt down to the last possible remnant, and carefully pinched it out instead of stubbing it, spacer’s affectation. Fire never hurt if one’s moves were definite and one’s mind was set firmly on the extinguishing and not on the fire. Spacer’s affectation, because when the fingers could bear it comfortably, it was safe to put away. He dropped the butt

into the side of the pouch reserved for that and laid the pouch on the table. They never let him keep it. The pouch, with the liquor and Sikkukkut’s good humor, was delivered only in this room. So he let it lie, and met Sikkukkut’s eyes with lazy amusement.

Perhaps he perplexed the hakkikt with his attitude, a coolness between defiance and alliance and certainly not the behavior of a kif; perhaps that was what kept his head off the spikes outside. Sikkukkut gazed at him a moment in what seemed interest, then lifted his hand as he had done before, and signaled his removal.

 

“There it goes,” someone cried down the hall, and footsteps went thundering past Chur Anify’s door, disturbing her convalescence. “Kk-kk-kt, something else called out, and that brought Chur’s eyes open and set a little quicker pulse into her heart, so that needles jumped on the machine to which she was bound by a large skein of tubes, indicating an increase in pulse rate; in response to that, a flood of nutrients and appropriate chemicals came back into her bloodstream, automatically supplied.

Living bound to a machine-extension which thought it knew best what a body ought to feel was bad enough; lying there while riot went on in the corridor was another thing, and Chur edged her way off the bed, carefully (the spring extensions on the skein of tubings made it possible for her to teach the bathroom and saved her some indignities). In this case she gripped the various tubes in one fist to keep the extension from jerking painfully at the needles and padded over to the bureau where she had her gun, hearing the kifish clicking going on out there. Her head spun and her heart raced and the gods-cursed machine flooded her veins with sedative when it sensed her elevated pulse, but she made it to the door and pushed the button with the knuckle of her gun-hand.

The door shot open. She slumped lazy-like against the wall and stared at a kif who turned up directly opposite her and her pistol; then her eyes went strange-focussed and her mind went here and there again, so that she had difficulty recalling where she was or why there should be a kif in The Pride’s corridor looking as horrified as a kif could look (not extremely) and why the peripheries of her vision informed her there were her cousins and a human standing there in shock and in company with this kif. It was a great deal to ask of a drugged hani brain, but the kif had its hands up and she was not crazed enough to go firing off a gun in a ship’s corridor without knowing why.

And while her brain was sorting through that crazy sequence, something small and black ran right over her foot on its way into her room. “Hyaa!” she yelled in revulsion, and the kif dived for the wall beside her as she swung to keep a bead not on the thing but on the kif. A hurtling mass of her friends overtook her from behind-not to help her, to her vast bewilderment: they grabbed her and the gun, while the kif flinched and pasted himself tight to the wall, making himself the smallest possible target.

“Chur,” her sister Geran was pleading with her, and she supposed that it was Geran prying the gun loose from her fingers: she was dizzy and her vision fuzzed. She heard her cousin Tirun’s voice, and human jabber, which was her friend Tully; and she dazedly let herself be dragged one step and another into the room, someone else taking the skein of tubes. A bell was going off: the infernal machine was telling off on her, that she was stressed.

“Gods rot it,” she cried, remembering. “There’s something in here.” And then she remembered that she had seen little black things before, on the bridge, and could not remember whether they were hallucinations or not, or whether her sister took her seriously. It was embarrassing to see hallucinations. And the cursed machine kept pouring sedative into her, so that they were going to leave her alone in here and drugged, with whatever-it-was: she did not want that either.

“Look under the bed,” Geran said, while Geran was putting her back into it, and she could not remember where the gun had gotten to, which was against ship’s rules, which was against all the regulations, to lose track of a firearm; and there was a kif trying to crawl under her bed. A sweat broke out on her, cold on her ears and nose and fingertips. “Where’s my gun?” she asked hazily, trying to sit up again; and “There it is!” someone shouted from the floor.

“My gods,” Chur murmured, and her sister put her flat on her back again. She blinked, blinked again in the crazed notion that there was a kif on his hands and knees at her bedside and people were trying to get her hallucination out from under her bed.

“Sorry,” Geran said fervently. “Stay down. We’ve got it.”

“You’re crazy,” Chur said. “You’re stark crazy, all of you.” Because none of it made sense.

But something let out a squeal under her bed, and something bumped against the secure-held braces, and there was an ammonia smell to the room which was no illusion, but a kif’s real presence.

“He got,” said Tully’s voice, and he loomed up by her bedside. “Chur, you all right?”

“Sure,” Chur said. She remembered at least where she was now, tied to a machine in na Khym’s cabin because she was, since the kif had shot her on a dock at Kshshti, too sick to be down in crew quarters; and Goldtooth had given them this fine medical equipment when he had met them here at Kefk, which was before the docks blew up in a firefight and she had been holding the bridge singlehanded when the little black things started coming and going like a nasty slinking nightmare. There was a kif aboard, his name was Skkukuk, he was a slave and a gift from the hakkikt and he stood there with his black snout atwitch and his Dinner clutched in both bony hands as he stared at her. She curled her lip and laid her cars back, head scantly lifted. “Out!”

The kif hissed and clicked and retreated in profound offense, teeth bared, and Chur bared hers, coming up on her free elbow.

“Easy,” Geran said, pushing her back; and Tirun chased the kif on out, Haral’s sister Tirun, big enough to make a kif think twice about any argument, and owing that slight limp to a kifish gun some years back: Chur felt herself safe if Geran was by her and Tirun was between her and the kif. She looked up at Tully’s gold-bearded face and blinked placidly.

“Gods-be kif,” Geran said. “Readout jumping like crazy- Tully, here, get this gun out of here.”

“No,” Chur said. “Drawer. Put it back in the drawer, Tully.”

“Out of here,” Geran said.

“Gods rot,” Chur yelled, “drawer!” Living around Tully, a body got to thinking in pidgin and half-sentences. And the voice came out cracked. Tully hesitated, looking at Geran.

An even larger figure showed up in the doorway, filling it. Khym Mahn, male and tall and wide: “What’s the trouble?”

“No trouble,” Geran said. “Come on, close that door, everyone out before another of the gods-be things gets in. Who’s watching the godsforsaken kif?”

“Put the gun in the drawer,” Chur said firmly. “Tully.”

“You leave it there,” Geran said, getting up, as Khym vanished. She stood looking down a moment, while Tully did as he was told. Then the two of them stood there, her sister, her human friend; if there was ever truly such a thing as friendship between species. And the gods-be kif down the hall-Was that thing a friend, and did they have it running loose on the ship now? Had the captain authorized that?

“O gods,” Chur murmured, too tired and too sick for thoughts like loose kif, and for uncharitable thoughts toward Tully, who had done his unarmed best to save all their hides more than once. But it was in her heart now that she would not see home again, and that this was her last voyage, and she wanted to go home more than anything, back to Anuurn and Chanur and to have this little selfish time with things she knew and loved, familiar things, uncomplicated by aliens and strangeness-wanted to be young again, and to have more time, and to remember what it was to have her life all in front of her and not behind.

Wanted, gods help her, to see even her home up in the hills, which was purest stupidity: she and Geran had walked out of there and come down to Chanur when they were kids as young as Hilfy, because a young fool of a new lord had gotten himself in power up there over their sept of clan Chanur, and she and her sister had pulled up roots and left for Chanur’s main-sept estate with no more than the clothes on their backs.

And their pride. They had come with that intact. The two of them.

“Never looked back,” she said, thinking Geran at least might understand. “Gods be, odd things were what we were looking for when we came down the hills, wasn’t that it?”

Geran made a desperate motion at Tully that meant get out, quietly, and Tully went, not without a pat at Chur’s blanketed leg.

Chur lay there and blinked, embarrassed at herself. She looked like something dead. She knew that. She and Geran had once looked a great deal alike, red-blond of mane and beard and with a sleekness and slimness that was the hillwoman legacy in their sept; not like their cousins Haral and Tirun Araun or their cousin Pyanfar either, who had downland Chanur’s height and strength, but never their highlands beauty, their agility, their fleetness of foot. Now Geran’s shoulders slumped in exhaustion, her coat was dull, her eyes unutterably weary; and Chur had seen mirrors. Her bones hurt when she lay on them. The sheets were changed daily: Geran saw to that, because she shed and shed, till the skin appeared in patches, all dull pink and horrid through her fur. That was her worst personal suffering, not the pain, not the dread of dying: it was her vanity the machine robbed her of, and her dignity; and watching Geran watch her deteriorate was worst of all.

“Sorry,” Chur said. “Gods-be machine keeps pouring sedative into me. I don’t always make sense.”

Rotten way to die, she thought to herself, drugged out of my mind. Scaring Geran. What kind of way is that?

“Unhook me from this thing.”

“You said you’d leave it be,” Geran said. “For me. You told the captain you’d leave it be. Do we need to worry about you?”

“Asked, didn’t I?” The voice came hoarse. The episode had exhausted her. Or it was the sedative. “We letting that gods-be kif loose now?”

“Khym’s got an eye on him.”

“Uhhn.” There was a time that would have sounded crazy. Men did not deal with outsiders, did not take responsibility, did not have any weight of decision on their shoulders, on their berserk-prone brains. But nothing in the world was the

same as it had been when she was a girl. “We left home to find strange things,” Chur said, bewildered that she ended up trusting a man’s good sense and an alien human’s good will, a hillwoman like her. “Found ’em, didn’t we?” But she saw that pained drawing about Geran’s mustaches, the quivering flick of Geran’s ears, well-ringed with voyages. She saw how drained Geran was, how her maundering grieved Geran, had a sure instinct that if Geran had one load on her shoulders, she had just put another there, almost unbearable for her sister. “Hey,” she said, “I was pretty steady on my feet. Machine helps. Think I’ll make it. Hear?”

Geran took that in and the slump left her shoulders and the grief left her eyes so earnestly and so trustingly it hurt.

Gods, Chur thought, now I’ve done it, I’ve promised her, haven’t I?

Stupid to promise. Now I have to. I’ll lose. It’ll hurt, gods rot it. I’ll die somewhere in jump, O gods, that’s an awful way, to go out there, in the dark between the stars, all naked.

“Not easy,” Chur murmured, heading down to sleep. “Easier to go out, Gery. But I’ll get back up there, b’gods. Don’t you let the captain assign me out. Hear?”

“Chair’s waiting.”

“You want to fill me in, treat me like I was crew?” It was hard to stay interested in life, with the sedatives drawing a curtain between herself and the universe. She remembered her promise and fought to keep it. “What f’godssakes is going on out there?”

“Same as before. We’re sitting at dock waiting for that gods-rotted kif to make up his mind to go left or right, and so far nothing’s worse.”

“Or better.”

“Or better. Except they’re still talking. And the hakkikt’s still real polite.”

“Jik hasn’t cracked.”

“Hasn’t cracked. Gods help him.”

“How long are we going to sit here?”

“Wish we all knew. Captain’s figuring like mad, Haral’s laying in six, seven courses into comp. We may get home yet.”

“Doublecross the kif? They’d hunt us.” Her voice grew thick. “Meetpoint’s the only way out of here. That’s where we’ve got to go.”

Geran said nothing. The threads grew vague, but they always came to the same point. Goldtooth had left them and his partner in the lurch and run for Meetpoint, and Tully’s folk were headed into the Compact in numbers, all of which meant that a very tired hani who wanted the universe to be what it had been in her youth was doomed to see things turned upside down, doomed to see Chanur allied with kif, with a species that ate little black things and behaved badly on docksides, and did other things an honest hani preferred not to think about.

Gods-rotted luck, she thought; and thought again about the hills of home, and the sins of her youth, one of which she had left with its father; but it was only a gods-be boy, and not a marriage anyhow, and she had never written back to the man, who was no happier at getting a son than she was at birthing one (a daughter would have done him some good in his landless station), but his sisters would treat the boy all right. Rest of the family never had known much about it, except Geran knew, of course; and it was before she had joined The Pride. The kid would have come of age and gone off to Hermitage years ago; and probably died, the way surplus males died. Waste. Ugly waste.

Wish I’d known my son.

Maybe I could find him. If his father’s still alive. If he’s like na Khym, if- Maybe, maybe if I could’ve talked to him he’d have sense like na Khym.

Never asked that man-never much talked to him. Never occurred to me to talk to him. Isn’t that funny? Now I’d wonder what he was thinking. I’d think he was thinking. I’d find me a man and make love to him and gods, I’d ask him what he was thinking and he’d-

-I’d probably confuse him all to a mahen hell, I would; aren’t many men like Khym Mahn, gods-rotted nice fellow, wished I’d known him ‘fore the captain got him. If he was ever for anybody but her. If a clan lord like him could’ve ever looked at an exile like me. I’d like to’ve loved a man like him. I’d have got me a daughter off him, I would’ve.

But what’s the captain got of him? Gods-rotted son like Kara Mahn and a gods-forsaken whelp of a daughter like Tahy, no help there, gods fry ’em both, no sense, no ears to listen, no respect–doublecrossing gods-be cheats.

Want to find me a man. Not a pretty one. A smart one. Man I can sit and talk with.

If I ever get home.

She pursed her lips and spat.

“You all right?”

“Sure, I’m sleeping, get out of here. I’m trying to get my rest. What in the gods’ name are those black things?”

“Don’t ask. We don’t.”

 

The lift opened belowdecks, and Hilfy Chanur, coming back onshift, stepped back hastily as the doors whisked back and gave her Skkukuk all unexpected, Skkukuk clutching a squealing cageful of nasty black shapes, which apparition sent her ears flat; but Tirun and Tully were escorting the kif, which got Hilfy’s ears back up again and laid the fur back down between her shoulderblades. She stepped aside in distaste to let the kif out and stood there staring as the door waited to her hold on the call button.

“We think we got ’em.” Tirun said.

“They got,” Tully said, amplifying his broken pidgin with a gesture topside. “Eat fil-ter. Lousy mess.”

“Good gods, what filter?”

“Airfilter in number one,” Tirun said. “Sent particles all over the system: we’re going to have to do a washdown on the number two and the main.”

“Make electric,” Tully said.

“We made it real uncomfortable in that airshaft,” Tirun said.

“Kkkkt,” Skkukuk said, “these are Akkhtish life. They are adaptive. Very tough.”

The creatures started fighting at the sound of his voice. He whacked the cage with his open hand and the Dinner subsided into squeals.

“Gods,” Hilfy said with a shudder of disgust.

“Two of them are about to litter,” Tirun said. “Watch these gods-forsaken things. They’re born fighting.”

“Tough,” Skkukuk said conversationally, and hit the Dinner’s cage again, when the squeals sharpened. There was quiet, except for a hiss. “Kkkt. Excuse me.” He clutched the cage to him and headed off down the hall with the Dinner in his arms, happy as ever a kif could be.

Hilfy’s lip lifted; an involuntary shiver went through her as Tirun turned and went to keep an eye on the kif. Tully stayed, and set a hand on her shoulder, squeezed hard.

Tully knew. He had been with her in the hands of the kif, this same Sikkukkut who was their present ally; who sent them this slavish atrocity Skkukuk to haunt the corridors and leave his ammonia-stink everywhere in the air, a smell which brought back memories-

A second time Tully squeezed her shoulder with his clawless fingers. Hilfy turned and looked at him, looking up a bit; but he was not so tall, her Tully, that she could not look him in the eyes this close. Those eyes were blue and usually puzzled, but in this moment there was worry there. Two voyages and what they had been through together had taught her to read the nuances of his expressions.

“He’s not bad kif,” Tully said.

That was so incredible an opinion from him she blinked and could not believe she had heard it.

“He’s kif,” Tully said. “Same I be human. Same you hani. He be little kif, try do what captain want.”

She would not have heard it from anyone else. She had her mouth open when Tully said it. But this was a man who had been twice in their hands; and seen his friends die; and killed one of them himself to save him from Sikkukkut: more, he had been there with her in that kifish prison, and if Tully was saying such an outrageous thing it might have any number of meanings, but emptyheaded and over-generous it was not. She stared at him trying to figure out if he had missed his words in hani: the translator they had rigged up to their com sputtered helpless static at his belt, constant undertone when he spoke his thickly accented hani or pidgin. Maybe he was trying to communicate some crazy human philosophy that failed to come through.

“Little kif,” Tully said again. She had lived among kif long enough to know what he meant by that, that kif were nothing without status, and that kif of low status were everyone’s victims.

“If he was a big kif,” she said, “he’d kill us fast.”

“No,” Tully said. “Captain be Pyanfar. He want be big, she got be big.”

“Loyalty, huh?”

“Like me,” Tully said. “He one.”

“You mean he’s alone.”

“He want be hani.”

She spat. It was too much. “You might be.” And not many hani in space and certainly none on homeworld would be that generous, only a maudlin and lonely young woman a long way from her own kind. “Not a kif. Ever.”

“True,” Tully admitted, twisting back on his own argument in that maddening way he had of getting behind a body and leaving them facing the wrong way. He held up a finger. “He kif, he same time got no friend with kif, he be little kif. They kill him, yes. He want not be kill. He lot time wrong, think we do big good to him. You watch, Hil-fy: crew be good with him, he be happy, he got face up, he be brave with us, he talk. But we don’t tell truth to him, huh? What good truth? Say him, ‘kif, you enemy’, he got no friend, got no ship, got no hakkikt. He don’t be hani, he die.”

“I can’t be sorry for him. He wouldn’t understand it. He’s kif, gods rot him. And I’d as soon kill him on sight.”

“You don’t kill same like you be kif.” He patted her arm and looked earnestly at her, from the far side of a language barrier the translator never crossed. “He makes a mistake,” the translator said as he changed into his own language for words he did not have. “He’s lost. He thinks we like him more now. We ask him go die for help us, he go. True, he will go. And we hate him. He doesn’t know this. He’s kif. He can’t understand why we hate him.”

“Well, let’s not confuse him,” Hilfy snarled, and turned and stopped the lift door which had started to close on auto when she let go the button. It recoiled, held for another wait. She looked back at Tully, who looked back, aggrieved and silent. She knew his shorthand speech better than anyone else aboard: ship’s com officer, linguist, translator, she had helped set up his translation system and help break through to him

when they first met him. And what he was saying now made more sense than she wanted it to-that a kif, cold-blooded tormentor and killer that it was, was also a helpless innocent in their hands. If a kif saw another kif in his way, he killed; his changes of loyalty were frequent but sincere and self-serving. And if the captain’s subordinates treated him better, it was because the captain had accorded him more status: it was all a kif could think, it was all a kif knew how to imagine. Pyanfar let Skkukuk loose more often, Pyanfar cared to feed him, the crew was civil to him: his place in the universe was therefore improving. Gods help them, the kif became conversational with them. Two and more centuries of contact and the kif had never let slip any casual detail about their homeworld, which no one visited but kif; and here Skkukuk, bragging on his nasty little vermin as Akkhtish and adaptive, hinted at more of kifish life and kifish values than kif had said about themselves in all of history.

And what would a man know about anything? was her gut reaction, staring into Tully’s eyes. She did not think of Skkukuk as male, gods knew; hardly thought of Jik or Goldtooth as anything but female and rational, despite the male pronouns which were ordinary in pidgin and otherwise in hani: but Tully was definitively male to her, and stood there saying crazy things about an enemy, talking to her about self-restraint, which was a female kind of thought, or Pyanfar was right and males had a lot of hidden female about them: it was an embarrassing estimation. But the sense that it made also reached somewhere inside and found a sore spot, that Tully had found some kind of peace with the thing that had happened to them among the kif, where a sane, technically educated woman failed.

Because he’s older, Hilfy thought. She had always thought of him as near her own age: and suddenly she thought that he must be, of his kind, old as Khym, whose years had burned the tempers out of him and given him self-control and lost him his lordship over Mahn. Suddenly she suspected that she had always been wrong about Tully, that he was wiser than a young man could possibly be, and cooler-headed: and there was something still he had not been able to tell her. There was something still bottled up in him, she could almost read it, but it was too alien an expectation; or too simple. She could not guess it. The lift door hit her in the shoulder again and gave up, and she reached out and gently touched Tully’s face with the pads of her fingers.

“If you were hani,” she said, “we’d-” But she did not say that. It sounded too foolish; and hurt too much, without an answer that resulted in anything but both of them being fools. Laughable fools.

“Friend,” he said in a small voice, and touched her face. While the lift door hit her again, on shorter and shorter reminder. “Friend, Hilfy.” With a peculiar stress in his voice, and a break, as it would do when he was grieved. There were things he did not commit to the translator. More and more he tried to speak hani. And to be hani. And he grew sadder and more wistful when he would look at her and say a thing like that, making fools of them both.

Gods, Hilfy Chanur, she thought, what can you do? When did you go crazy? When did he? When we were alone and we were all we had, with kif all about? I want him.

If he’s older than me, why doesn’t he have an answer for this?

Then an alarm went off. For a moment she thought she had tripped it by holding the door, and Pyanfar was going to skin her.

“Priority, priority. We’ve got a courier at the lock,” Haral’s voice said then from com, from every speaker in the hall. “All secure below. Hilfy, Tirun, arm and stand by: looks like you’re the welcoming committee, captain’s compliments, and she’s staying topside. Protocols. You get that?”

“I got it,” Hilfy said.

Lock up the kif, that meant. Fast.

“Tully,” she said, and motioned to the lift. Panic had started a slow, hysteric beat in her heart; habit kept her face calm as she stepped aside and held the door with her arm for Tully.

I could help, that look of his said; I could be down here, I want to be here. I want to help you-

It was not the kif’s feelings he had so laboriously described: you make him part of the crew, you let him believe it, you don’t know how cruel you are to let him believe you.

He’d go out and die for you, Hilfy Chanur. Because he believes you.

No. It was not true of the kif. It was what he felt in himself.

“Up,” she said. “Bridge. Haral needs you. I got enough down here.”

And, gods, why put it that way? She saw the pain she caused.

He went into the lift, and turned and pushed the Close, so that the door jarred her obstructing arm and she drew it back in confusion. She opened her mouth to say something like you can’t help in this, which was no better than she had already said; but the door closed between their faces, and left her speechless and harried in recalling that it was an emergency Haral had just sent her on-kif, and trouble, and gods knew what.

The whole situation could be unraveling. Jik might have talked, might have spilled something; it might be the beginning of the attack they had feared; it might be anything, and gods help her, she had just fouled it up with Tully and there was no time, no time, never time to straighten it out between them.

Gods, gods, gods, I hurt him. I never wanted to hurt him, we can all die here and I can’t get past that gods-be translator.

Why is it all so complicated?

 

Chapter Two

 

It was not a situation Pyanfar enjoyed, sitting on the bridge and watching on the vid as a pair of armed kif headed toward her airlock. They wore no suits, only the hooded black robes universal with their kind. That meant the kif put some reliance on the jury-patches and the repressurization of this zone of the dock, more than she herself would have liked to put on it-kifish repair crews had been thumping and welding away out there, motes on vid, getting a patch on those areas the decompression had weakened.

So finally the hakkikt seemed to have settled accounts with the rebels inside his camp to the extent that now he could send a message to the friends of the mahen and hani traitors who had made such a large hole in his newly-acquired space station, who had disturbed the tc’a into riot on their side of the station, and incidentally sent over five hundred unsuspecting kif out into space on the wind of that decompression.

Sikkukkut had a very legitimate grievance; even a hani had to admit as much. Though the kif that had gone on that unscheduled spacewalk were many of them Sikkukkut’s enemies, a good many had been partisans of his, and while no kif had ever been observed to grieve over the demise of any other kif, and while the incident might even have contributed to stopping the rebellion, still it had embarrassed him-and embarrassing a kifish leader was a very serious matter. It was not an accustomed feeling, to have a sense of wrong on her side when she was dealing with the kif; and to know, the while those black-robed figures cycled through the lock, that The Pride was not in a position, nose to a wrecked dock and outnumbered ten to one in ships and multiple thousands to one in personnel, to negotiate anything at all, not regarding what this mass of ships chose to do, not regarding their own position within the kifish power structure, not even regarding (heir safety or their lives.

So bluff was still the game, status and protocols, which was why she was sitting up here gnawing her mustaches and having her crew meet with an armed delegation that neither they nor she had power to negotiate with. She tried to use kifish manners, which kif understood, and she hoped to the gods the kif did understand the gesture she was making, which meant that Pyanfar Chanur had just abandoned her inclination to meet the hakkikt’s messengers on hani protocols, with hani courtesies: now she withdrew to a remoteness which to a kif (she hoped) signaled not fear (a frightened kif would show up to placate the offended party, and thrust himself right into the presence of his potential enemy to try to patch it up) but rather signaled that the captain of this hani freighter turned hunter-ship considered herself risen in the hakkikt’s favor, to the extent that she intended henceforth to receive her messages through subordinates. She sensed that self-promotion was the way things worked with kif: she sensed it by experience, and kifish manners, and Skkukuk’s inside-out advice: their own much-bewildered kifish crewman alternately shrank and flourished in every breeze of her tempers, crushed by a moment’s reprimand, bright-eyed and energetic on her next moment’s better humor; and jealous and paranoid in his constant suspicions the crew would undermine him-as he tried to undermine them, of course, but less zealously of late, as if he had finally gotten it through his narrow kifish skull that that was not the way things worked on a hani ship; or that the crew was too firmly in the captain’s favor to dislodge; or perhaps the crew’s own increasing courtesy with him had sent his mind racing on a new stratagem down some path thoroughly mistaken and thoroughly kif: it was enough to give a sane hani a headache. But Skkukuk had shown her a vital thing: that a kif took all the ground he could get at every hour of every day, and if he made a mistake and got a reprimand, he did not, as a hani would do, cherish a grudge for that reprimand: where a hani would burn with shame and throw sanity and self-preservation to the winds, and where a hani who chastised another hani knew that she was asking for bloodfeud to the second and third generation, involving both clans and affiliate clans to the eighth degree, a kif just accepted a slap in the face with the same unflappable sense of self-preservation that would make him go for his own leader’s throat the moment that leader looked vulnerable, at the very moment a reasonable hani might stand by her leader most loyally. Pyanfar had puzzled this out. In a total wrench of logic she could even understand that kif being dead as they were to any altruistic impulse, had to move to completely different tides, and the most urgent of those tides seemed to be the drive to inch their way up in status at every breath if they could get away with it.

It was a good question whether Sikkukkut understood hani half that well, despite his fluency; and upon that thought a logical gulf opened before her, whether a kif could ever truly understand the pride of the lowliest hani hill woman, who would spend the last drop of blood she had settling accounts both of debt and bloodfeud with anyone at all, headwoman or beggar; the kif had not the internal reflexes to feel what a hani felt; and how, good gods, could a hani know the compulsion that drove a kif, lacking whatever-it-was which was as natural to kif as breathing.

Gods help us, if I had enough credit with him to get Jik loose-if anyone did-if I could crack that gods-be code of Jik’s, over there in comp, if I knew what Jik was holding out against Sikkukkut, what kind of craziness he passed me at Mkks-is it his will and testament? Something for his Personage? Some gods-cursed plan of attack?

Goldtooth’s plan of action?

What do the kif want down there, why come in person, why not use the com?

While the kif arrived in their fire-scarred airlock and prepared to deal with her niece and her cousin, both of whom had gotten scars before this at kifish hands.

Don’t foul it, Hilfy, don’t give way-Gods, I should have called her up and sent-

-Geran? With Chur shot and Geran in the mood she’s in?

-not Haral, I need her.

Not a place for the menfolk down there either. Hilfy’s all right, she’s stable, she’ll carry it off all right- she knows the kif, knows them well as anyone-knows how to hold herself-

O gods, why’d I ever let her and Chur go off the ship at Kshshti? It was my fault, my fault and she’ll never be the same-

-isn’t the same, no one’s ever the same; I’m not, the ship isn’t, Chur isn’t, none of us are, and I brought us here, every gods-be step along the way-

Haral cycled the lock and two unescorted kif walked into The Pride’s, lowerdeck; while Geran powered the airlock camera about, tracking them, and Khym and Tully hovered over separate monitors. Haral kept cycling her own checks, keeping an eye to the whole godsforsaken dockside, screen after screen at Haral’s station shifting images so that they were never blinder than they had to be.

No way they were going to be caught in distraction, even if, gods forbid, the kif tossed a grenade through the lock.

“Record,” Pyanfar said. “Aye,” Geran said, and flicked a switch, beginning to log the whole business into The Pride’s records. Then:

“Those are rifles,” Geran muttered.

The kif carried heavy weapons, besides the sidearms. The dim light and poor camera pickup had obscured those black weapons against the black, unornamented robes. But the rifles were slung at the shoulder, not carried in the hand. That much was encouraging. “Polite,” Pyanfar said through her teeth, while below, from the spy-eye:

“Hunter Pyanfar,” one kif said as he met The Pride’s welcoming committee.

”Tirun Araun.” Tirun identified herself-scarred old spacer with gray dusting her nose and streaking her red-gold mane. She had a way of holding herself that seemed both diffident about the gun she held (surely civilized beings ought not to hold guns on each other) and very likely to use it in the next twitch (there was not the least compunction or doubt in her eyes). “/ trust you’ve come from the hakkikt,” Tirun said. ”Praise to him”-without the least flicker, kifish courtesy.

”Praise to him,” the kif said. ”A message to your captain.” It took a cylinder from its belt, with never an objection to the leveled guns or Hilfy’s flattened ears. “The hakkikt says: the docks are secure. The matter is urgent. I say: we will stand here and wait for the Chanur captain.”

Tirun reached out and took the cylinder. And delayed one lazy moment in a gesture that could not have been wasted, especially on a kif. “Be courteous, Hilfy.”

With fine timing, with a little flattening of the ears that might be respect and might be something else again, ambiguous even to hani eyes-Tirun delivered her signal to Hilfy and turned with authority and walked off, at a pace both deliberate and fast enough.

While Hilfy stood there with the gun in her fist and two kif to watch.

Steady, kid. For the gods’ sakes, Tirun’s done it right, don’t wobble.

No one said a thing on the bridge. It remained very, very quiet until the lift worked, back down the corridor from the center of the bridge. Then Pyanfar got out of her chair and went to wait for Tirun, who came down the corridor at a much faster clip than she had used below. While at the boards, Haral and Geran kept to business, monitoring everything round about the ship and inside it and everything coming from station.

“Captain,” Tirun said by way of courtesy, and handed over the cylinder.

The cap stuck when she pulled at it. For one awful moment Pyanfar thought of explosives; or deadly gas. “Wait here,” she said, left Tirun standing on the bridge, and stepped outside into the corridor, pushing the door switch to close it between them.

She hooked a claw into the seal then and gnawed her lip and pulled the cap. Nothing blew. Nothing came out. It was a message, a bit of gray paper.

The door shot open again in the same instant, which was Tirun; and Tirun stood there aggrieved in the tail of her eye while she fished the paper out and read it.

Hunter Pyanfar: you have made requests. I will give you my response aboard my ship at 1500, expecting that you will came with ranking personnel of allied ships.

“Captain?” Tirun said.

She passed the letter over and cast a second look up at the chrono in the bridge display: 1436.

“It’s a trap,” Tirun said.

On the bridge even Haral had taken one quick look around.

“Invitation from the kif,” Pyanfar said. “Ranking personnel of allied ships. On his deck. Fast.”

“My gods,” Khym exclaimed.

“Unfortunately,” Pyanfar said, and thought of Hilfy down there in the corridor with two kif alone. “‘Unfortunately we haven’t got a real choice. Get Tahar and get Kesurinan. I’m not taking any of you-“

Mouths opened.

“It’s a trap,” Khym said, his deep voice quivering with outrage. “Py, Tirun’s right, listen to her.”

“Not taking any of you,” she said carefully, “except our friend the kif. Get to it, Geran, get our friends out there.”

“That dock,” Geran said.

“We got worse risks than a leaky dock, cousin; one of ’em’s being late and one of them’s missing a signal with that kif. I’m going down there, I want Tahar and Kesurinan just the way the kif asked, and about the time I clear the lock down there I want The Pride powered up and held that way till I get back again. Make the point with ’em we still got teeth, hear? And that my crew’s on full alert.”

“Aye,” Haral muttered, far from happy.

Neither was Pyanfar happy. She went and pulled one of their APs out of the locker by the bridge exit and headed back down the corridor, with the heavy sidearm and its belt in hand.

Not to the lowerdeck straightway.

First came a stop in her own quarters, for a fast exchange: for a bit of glitter, because appearances counted, a psychological weapon as essential as the gun at her side.

Sikkukkut meant to move now. In some regard.

She clenched her jaw and started cataloging things, fast, things that wanted doing. In case she had just said goodbye to her crew and her husband.

Gods, Khym had just stood there and took an answer for an answer. Her heart did a little painful thump of pride when she realized belatedly what that had cost him: he was not the gentle ignorant she had married, not the feckless man who had walked out on the docks at Meetpoint and run straight into a kifish trap. If she died today at kifish hands he would not act the male; would not rush out there like a lunatic to take the kif on hand to hand-he had grown a lot on this voyage, had Khym, when he was no longer a boy and no longer young at all. He had finally found out what lay outside his limits and what the universe was like-had found friends, b’gods, female friends and one who was even male, friends which she suddenly realized in grief that Khym had never had in all his adult life, excepting her and his other wives, and I them but scarcely: clan-lord, shielded from all contact with the world by his wives and his sisters and his daughters, he had finally come out into the real world to find out what it was, and he was not just her Khym anymore; or even Khym lord Mahn; he was something more than that, suddenly, long after he should have gone to die in Hermitage, outworn and useless-he grew up and became what he always could have been; discovered the universe full of honest folk and scoundrels of all genders, and learned how to win respect, how to ignore the barbs and become ship-youngest and work his way out of a second youth, with utterly different rules. That was more change than most women had the fortitude to take in their lives; but by the gods he had made it complete back there; he would do his fighting from that bridge and that board, under Haral’s command if something went wrong, part of the crew that drove a ship of mass enough and internal power enough to turn Kefk and Sikkukkut and all his ambitions into one briefly incandescent star.

 

The docks were the shambles she had expected, gray metal still supercooled under her bare feet, with a good many of the lights out-blown when the pressure went and when this dock had opened to space. Gantries loomed up down the righthand side of the docks, subtly tilting in the positive curvature of

the deck, which was the torus-shaped station’s outermost edge, to anyone who saw it as a wheel, from the outside. Here that rim was down, and floored in bare metal-Kefk had mining, metal-rich in the debris that floated around its double stars; therefore Kefk was gray and dull, except for the dirty orange of the sodium-lights kif preferred-because it never occurred to the colorblind kif to paint anything for decorative purposes, only for protective ones: they literally had to use instruments to determine what color a thing was, and gods knew whether their homeworld Akkht had ever offered them dyes other than black-though it was rumored that they had learned their color-taste from the pastel opalescent stsho, who disparaged the riot of color which hani and mahendo’sat loved about themselves; having discovered a range of distinctions beyond their senses, having the pale example of the stsho before them, and flinching before the stsho’s concept of value (such affluent consumers they set the standard for the whole Compact’s economy) and further daunted by the stsho’s disparagement of species who put strong color with color, the kif were all very insecure in their own dignity before the stsho and before others: above all no kif wanted to be laughed at. True black was one distinction they could make, true black and true white: so they naturally chose the dark that matched their habitat and their desire to move unseen, and became aesthetes of only one color, the blackest black. They valued silver more than gold because to their eyes it shone more; and they valued texture above other things in aesthetics, because they were more tactilely than visually stimulated in their pleasure centers: in fact they must be virtually blind to sight-beauty, and loved to touch interesting surfaces-that was what she had heard from an old stsho once upon a time, when the stsho had gotten quite giddy on a tiny cupful of Anuurn tea (it had a substance in it which reacted interestingly with stsho metabolism, which did nothing at all to a hani: such were the oddities of vice and pleasure between species). The kif in earliest days, this stsho said, had been victims of mahen practical jokes, who sold them clashing colors; and the kif did not forget this humiliation.

Kif were vastly changed, that was the truth, even from a few years ago: then they had been scattered and petty pirates, dockside thieves a hani could bluff into retreat, kif whose style was to whine and accuse and frequently to launch lawsuits in stsho courts which might make a freighter pay out of court settlement just to get the matter clear. That was the style of kifish banditry before Akkukkak.

Now she walked onto this dock in the company of a prince’s escort, and had her own bodyguard-Skukkuk walking along with her, armed with the gun he had taken from a kif in the fighting, looking like every other kif in his black robe and his hood and the plainness of his gear: if she looked about and if Skkukuk and one of her escort had changed places, she would not be able to tell them apart at any casual glance. That was another effect of kifish dress: of black hoods that deeply shaded the face and left only the gray-black snout in the light; it made targets hard to pick.

And from Aja Jin’s berth-nothing of that ship was visible nor any of the others, only the tangle of lines and gantries that held those lines aloft to the several ports that valved through to the ship-from behind that tangle came another pair, mahen, one of them male. The other was Soje Kesurinan, Jik’s second in command. Kesurinan was a tall black mahe, scarred and missing half an ear, but handsome in the way she carried herself-dour as Jik was cheerful, but she lifted her chin as she saw Pyanfar, and her diminutive mahen ears, whole and half, flicked in salutation.

“Kesurinan,” Pyanfar said quietly, as Kesurinan walked up to her. And: “Kkkkt,” from her kifish escort. “Tahar is on her way. An escort is going to pick her up; we can go on down.”

“Got,” Kesurinan said, which was agreement, economical and expressionless in a woman who had to be worried. Very worried. But they had to play everything to the kif who watched them, and give away nothing. Pyanfar nodded to the escort, and they started walking then, along the dock, the belt of the AP gun heavy about her hips, a pocket pistol thumping against her leg on the other side. Kif went armed to the teeth and so did she and so did Kesurinan, and, kifish taste and kifish eyesight notwithstanding, she had used that trip to her room to put on a pair of dress trousers, silk and not the coarse crewwoman’s blues she had taken to wearing aboard; silk

trousers, her best belt, the cord-ends of which were semiprecious stones and ui, polyp skeletons from Anuurn seas, and worth more than rubies off Anuurn: hani were not divers, as a rule, but they were traders, and knowing the substance, had suspected the stsho would prize this pale rarity-quite correctly, as it developed. In this splendor and with a couple of gold bracelets and a silver one, not mentioning the array of earrings, she headed for a meeting with the self-appointed prince of pirates, in all the arrogance a hani captain owned.

She had gotten out the door in good order, had gone down the lift, joined Hilfy in the short lock corridor and informed the kif that she was expecting her own escort, while Haral used the intercom and the central board’s unlock-commands to release Skkukuk from his prison and to direct him to the lift by the farside corridor, where Tirun brought his gun to him-all managed so that it saved Skkukuk’s dignity. The ammonia-smelling rascal had come strolling up on them from the direction she had come, armed and suitably arrogant with his fellow kif: after all, his captain had an appointment with the hakkikt and he had just been chosen over all the other crew as her escort: he was positively cheerful.

Hilfy, on the other hand-

Hilfy’s ears had gone flat when she saw what was toward, and there had been starkest horror in her eyes, which the kif might well have attributed to seeing herself shunted aside for a kifish escort-correct; but for the wrong reasons.

But the kid, in fact, had kept her mouth clamped shut and taken it all in grim silence. Gods knew Hilfy would probably say something considerable when she got topside, which was probably where she had gone the moment that lock shut, topside so fast the deck would smoke.

A strobe light began to flash behind them, pulses hitting the gantries and the girders; she knew what it was, knew when Kesurinan turned, and when the kif turned in one move- “Kkkt,” one said, “kkkt–“

And looked back at her again as the others did, head lifted in threat, tongue darting in nervousness: his rifle slid to his hands.

Pyanfar only stood there. Grinned at him, which was not humor in a hani as it was in a mahendo’sat or a human; but which at this moment approached it. The Pride of Chanur had just powered up and the sensors on the gantry-fed power lines had just shut off the flow and triggered an alarm, the same alarm that would have sounded when Goldtooth’s Mahijiru and Ehrran’s Vigilance had powered up to leave dock-if the station had not been too occupied for anyone to react to it. “We’re not leaving,” she said to the kif quite cheerfully. “It’s honorific. So you know who you’re dealing with-Praise to the hakkikt.”

Kif might be blind to a great many things: not to sarcasm and not to arrogance and not to a gesture made to the whole of Kefk station and the whole of the hakkikt’s power. They would not rally to their hakkikt in the sense that hani would rally round a leader; she bet her life on that; he was just The Hakkikt and there might arise another without warning. Kif would not defend him against someone of status enough to make that kind of gesture to him: such a status only made them uneasy, in the absence of orders which might have told them how the hakkikt would play the matter. They could anger the hakkikt by creating him a problem, too. She faced a pair of very uneasy kif. And grinned in something very like primate humor as she turned and walked down the dock as she had already done, with the kif at her back, with Kesurinan at her side and Skukkuk guarding her flank, armed and deadly. That was perhaps another very worried kif: his own hakt’-mekt, his great captain, had just defied the highest power in local space.

She had just served notice to that Power what the stakes were, by the gods; and what her life was worth to her crew.

That was power of a sort no kif wielded, of a sort no kif could easily foresee.

Martyrdom was a concept that had gotten a shiver even out of Sikkukkut.

 

“Word from Harukk,” Hilfy said, coldly and calmly as she could, though her hand trembled as it hovered over the com console: “Quote: We demand cause for this violation of regulations.”

“Reply:” said Haral Araun, her low voice quite calm, “We have obeyed instructions from our captain.”

The hair rose on Hilfy Chanur’s spine. She was more fluent in main-kifish than most hani, than most communications officers far senior to her, in fact. And what Haral was telling the kif was precisely the correct response, a very kifish thing to say, whether or not the old spacer knew it: Hilfy would have bet her scant possessions that Haral had calculated it, not by book-learning, but by decades of dockside give and take with the kif. She punched in and rendered it in main-kifish to the hakkikt’s communications officer, who let a considerable stark silence ride after it.

Click.

“Harukk-com just went offline,” Hilfy said, still calmly, though her heart was slamming away at her ribs. Beside her, Tully and Geran and Khym sat keeping an eye on scan, on the limited view they had with their nose into station and the scan output from station. Tirun Araun ran Haral’s copilot functions from her post over by the aft bulkhead, the master-alternate, acting as switcher and sequencer, Haral’s usual job; and Tirun had armaments live back there too. In case.

“Haa,” Khym muttered suddenly.

“We just lost station output,” Geran said.

Sikkukkut’s officials had just blinded them, at least insofar as station could. Doubtless someone was on the com to Sikkukkut personally, to tell him that there was a hani ship live, armed, and with its powerful nose stuck right into Kefk’s gut.

Not mentioning what those engines back there could do if they cycled the jump vanes sitting at dock. Some of their particles would stay in realspace, mightily agitated; others, in their random way, would enter hyperspace, and stream for the depths of the local gravity wells, the greatest of which was Kefk’s main star. Everything would part company in a rather irretrievable fashion, either turning into a bright spot or a failed attempt at a black hole, stripping its own substance down, since it had no directional potential except the station and the star’s own motion through the continuum. Probably not enough to prevent implosion. Hilfy activated a keyboard in her idle moment, fed in The Pride’s mass and her best guess at total station mass, adding in the number of ships tied into the station, a moment of black self-amusement, filling her mind with numbers and schoolbook calculations.

It was significant that the kif had not immediately demanded that they shut down the internal power: the kif knew they had no power to enforce that until they had Pyanfar in their hands.

And Hilfy did not want to think about that at the moment. She simply ran the numbers on their own possible dissolution, and whether they would actually form the hyperspace bubble, and whether with all those ships and that station and all that mass, they might actually have a hyperspatial effect on the largest star when they plowed into it.

She sent it into Nav, since the bubble variables resided there in standard equations; and of a sudden her comp monitor blinked, beeped, and came up with output too soon to have responded to that complex query: TRLING/PR1, it read, PSWD.

Password?

Nav query?

Those were the two thoughts that hit her brain while her eyes were in motion back to the top of that screen where the program name was listed: they found that PRIORITY ONE code and the Linguistics Path Designator as the implication suddenly hit like a wash of cold water.

YN she typed, which was the shortest city name on Anuurn and the standard password for their lightly coded systems: fast keys to hit.

Syntax achieved, the screen said. Display/Print?/Tape?/All?

She hit D and P; the screen blinked text up, full of gaps and mangled syntax: it was running a code-cracker set in the assumption it was mahensi, but it was not mahen standard, it was some godsforsaken related language, though the computer was making some sense of it on cognates. Jik’s message. The coded packet he had dropped in their laps back at Mkks.

Dialect. Which?

She punched more buttons, desperately, asking for the decoded original. It came up, vaguely recognizable as mahen phonemes. “Gods be,” she muttered, “Haral, Haral, the comp just spat out Jik’s message but it’s still hashed up, it’s

got a string of words together but it’s still sorting-we got a breakthrough here.”

The screen blinked with a red strip across the top, which was Tirun using her keyboard to snatch information across to her board and probably to Haral’s. “Keep on it,” Haral said. “Tirun, monitor com.”

“Aye,” Tirun said, and “Aye,” Hilfy muttered, punching keys, with the hair bristling on her neck and her ears flicking in half-crazed vexation with the computer, which had thrown her a half-solved problem in her own field here on the very edge of oblivion.

Kif could call our bluff any second now. Haral could push that button.

We could go streaming for that sun and the gods rot it what language is he using that comp hasn’t got? O gods be! when’s that alarm going to come? We’re going to die, gods rot it, and it’s giving me something to chase, and gods rot it, Haral, let me finish this gods-be silly problem before you push the godsforsaken button, it’s a rotten thing to die with a question in your head, if this thing’s got the whole why and wherefore of it, all Jik’s conniving, all his secrets-hold off the button, Haral, tell me when we go, I don’t want to die till I get this-

The computer beeped and sorted and ticked away, launched on a new hunt with a little hani shove in a certain direction for its research. It blinked away to itself and Hilfy clasped her hands in front of her mouth and stared at the screen in mindless timestretch.

Probably a letter to his wife. Gods know. Has he got a wife? Kids?

We’re going to die here and this stupid machine can’t go any faster and what can we do anyway? Pyanfar’s already out there with the kif. And we can’t get to her. Whatever happens.

 

Harukk occupied a berth well around the rim, beyond the weakened section, but not beyond the damage: wreckage lay about them, walls and decks were fire-blackened and pocked with shells and laser-hits.

And the approach to the hakkikt’s ship was more ghastly than before, hedged with a veritable forest of poles and stanchions on which he had put the heads of enemies and rebels against his power.

Pyanfar had seen the display before; so had Kesurinan. Hope he changes them off, was the wisp of thought that leapt into Pyanfar’s distressed mind. M’gods, putrefaction. The things life-support has to put up with on this station-filters must be a gods-be mess.

-in a distracted, callous mode because she had gotten used to such horrors, and only her heart flinched in a forlorn, pained recollection that there were places where such things did not happen, where naive, precious folk went about their lives never having seen a sapient head parted from its body and hung up like a traffic warning.

This kif is going to expand beyond Kefk. Going-gods know how far. Gods help the civilized worlds.

A sneeze hit her. She stifled it, turned it into a snarl and wiped her nose. She was allergic to kif-had taken another pill when she changed clothes, but the air was thick hereabouts. Her eyes watered. Lives rode on her dignity and she was going to sneeze, the very thought that she was going to sneeze made her nose itch and the watering grow worse. But she squared her shoulders and put the itching out of her mind, eyes fixed on the ramp, on the access which lay open for them.

 

“It’s coming, it’s coming,” Hilfy murmured, as the screen came up with more and more whole words, as it broke the code on a few key ones and spread the pattern wider: a makeshift job of encoding, a kind of thing one ship’s computer could do and another one could unravel, if it had a decoding faculty; and The Pride’s did. The Pride’s fancy-educated communications officer had taken her papa’s parting-gift in the form of the same system she had studied on by com-net back on Anuurn; it cost; and it worked, by the gods, it sorted its vast expensive dictionaries for patterns, spread its tentacles and grabbed every bit of memory it could get out of the partitionings, and sorted and cross-checked and ran phonemic sorts, linked up with the decoder-program in the fancy new comp-segment the mahendo’sat had installed in The

Pride back at Kshshti-gods knew what all it did. While no one who wanted to keep a document in code was going to be fool enough to drop proper names through it or use telltales like /’ or -to, or -ma extensions, it had the advantage of that mahen code program it sorted in as a crosscheck. The result was coming out in abbreviated form, truncated, dosed with antique words and code phrases no machine could break, but it was developing sense.

Prime writes haste* not * runner/courier accident* eye/see.

Events bring necessity clarify actions take* prime/audacity….

She added a hani brain’s opinion what the choice ought to be in two instances. The computer flicked through another change.

Number one writes hastily {?} Do not hold this courier or risk disclosure. Events compel me to clarify actions which Number One has taken–

“Haral,” she said, and felt a shiver all over as she added another suggestion to comp.

. . . since {ghost?} is not holding to agreements support will go {to?} opposition all efforts supporting candidacy-

“We got some stuff here,” Tirun muttered. “Jik’s talking doublecross of somebody.”

“Who’s Ghost?” Hilfy said. “Goldtooth?”

“Akkhtimakt?” Tirun wondered in her turn.

“Ehrran?” Geran wondered, which possibility of double-dealing sent a chill down Hilfy’s back.

“Maybe some human,” Haral said, and the hair bristled all the way down.

O gods, Pyanfar needs to know this.

And may never know it.

If they lay a hand on her; if we blow this place; gods know what we’re taking out-if we have to. If they make us do that.

Good gods, we’re talking about conspiracy all the way to Maing Tol or wherever-Candidacy, who in creation has a candidacy anyone out here worries about-

-except the hakkikt.

 

The corridors of Harukk would haunt her dreams-ammonia-smelling and dim, with none of The Pride’s smooth pale paneling: conduits were in plain view, and bore bands of knots on their surfaces that, Pyanfar suddenly realized in a random flash, must be the kifish version of color-coding. The codings added alien shadows to the machinery, shadows cast in the ubiquitous and horrid orange of sodium-light and the occasional yellow-green of a coldglow. Tall robed shadows stalked ahead of them and others walked behind, as a door opened and let her and Kesurinan and Skkukuk into the hakkikt’s meeting-room.

Sikkukkut waited for them, in a room ringed with black kifish shadows. Two incense-globes on tall poles gave off curls of sickly spicy smoke that curled visibly in front of the sodium-lights mounted to the side of the room, while another light from overhead fell wanly on Sikkukkut’s floor-hugging table, himself and his chair, the legs of which arched up about him like the legs of a crouching insect. Sikkukkut sat where the body of the insect would be, robed in black edged with silver that took the orange light, with the light falling on his long, virtually hairless snout and the glitter of his black eyes as he lifted his head.

“Hunter Pyanfar,” he said. “Kkkt. Sit. And is it Kesurinan of Aja Jin?’

“Same, hakkikt,” Kesurinan said. And did not say: where is my captain? which was doubtless the burning question in her mind.

Pyanfar settled easily into another of the insect chairs and tucked her feet up kif-style as one of the skkukun brought her a cup, one of the ball-shaped, studded cups the kif favored, and another poured parini into it. Kesurinan had hesitated to sit: “You too,” Sikkukkut said, and as Kesurinan took another of the chairs, next Pyanfar, he looked in Skkukuk’s direction. “Kkkkt. Sokktoktki nakt, skku-Chanuru.”

A moment’s hesitation. It was courtesy; it was invitation to a kifish slave to sit at table with the hakkikt and his captain. “Huh,” Pyanfar said, sensing Skkukuk’s crisis; and her flesh shrank at the sudden purposeful grace with which Skkukuk came around that table and assumed the chair beside her-he slithered, on two feet: was, she suddenly recognized those moves, not skulking, not slinking-but moving with that fluidity very dangerous kif could use; very powerful kif; kif whose moves she instinctively kept an eye to when she saw them dockside and met them in bars. This was a fighter, among a species who were born fighting. And all hers, for the moment.

She sipped her parini. Sikkukkut sipped whatever he was drinking while a skku served the others in turn.

“Tahar,” Sikkukkut said, “is on her way in. And your ship is live, hunter Pyanfar. Have you noticed this?”

“I’ve noticed,” she said, and kept all her moves easy.

Sikkukkut’s long tongue exited the v-form gap of his teeth and extended into the cup, withdrew again. “So have I. Your crew claims they’re following orders. Is this so?”

“Yes.”

“Kkkt.” Silence a moment. “While you are on the dock.”

“I hope,” Pyanfar said ever so softly, “that nothing’s been launched toward my ship-bearing in mind there might be agencies still on the station that would like to damage the hakkikt’s ally. I hope the hakkikt will protect us against a thing like that.”

Deathly stillness. At last the hakkikt lapped at his cup again and blinked with, for a kif, bland good humor. “You have been foolish, hunter Pyanfar. There’s far too much opportunity for error. And you have delivered far too much power into the hands of subordinates. We will talk about this.”

Another weighty silence, in which perhaps she was expected to reply. She simply sat still, having achieved a position in which she could sit and stare thoughtfully at the hakkikt.

Eggsucking bastard, she thought. Where’s Jik, you earless assassin?

She tried not to think of what kind of demonstration Sikkukkut was capable.

“We will have a discussion on the matter,” Sikkukkut said; and there was the subtle, soft whisper of arrival in the outer corridor. “Is that Tahar? Yes. Alone except for my escort. I wonder at this new tactic.”

Tahar hesitated in the doorway, then ventured close-a quiet step, a quiet settling into place when the hakkikt gestured her to sit at the table: a rippled-maned, bronze-pelted southern hani with a black scar across her mouth that gave her a grim and raffish look.

“So all the ships in your hand,” Sikkukkut said, looking at Pyanfar, “are in mine.”

“/ am in your hand,” Pyanfar said, with as steady a voice as ever she faced down a dockside official bent on penalties. But never suggest I don’t control those ships, no, not to a kif. Status, Pyanfar Chanur. Status is all there is with him. “It’s a complex situation, hakkikt. Hani minds are not, after all, kifish. But that’s my value to you.”

 

“Godsawful gibberish,” Haral said from her station. The printout was ten pages long, and full of code words that only Jik and his Personage might know. Hilfy Chanur stared at the same set of papers and flipped this way and that, trying to get some idea what they applied to.

-Ghost is proceeding on the course suggested in her previous report.

Pieces and bits of information depending on other information.

-reports from inconvenience/Inconvenience? are negative.

“I think Inconvenience is another codename,” Hilfy said.

“We knew,” said Tirun, from the end of the consoles, “that that son was in connivance up to his nose.”

“Who are we?” Haral wondered. “Could we be that Ghost?”

“Inconvenience,” Hilfy suggested. “If-“

“Priority,” Geran exclaimed, atop a sound from Tully. “Priority, engine live, coming over station rim vicinity berth 23-“

Harukk’s neighborhood. Kif ship.

 

“I am glad to know your value to me,” said Sikkukkut carefully. “It’s always helpful to have those things explained.” His fingers moved delicately over the projections on the cup he held, restless, sensual movement. “I have held such a discussion with my friend Keia. He has tried to explain. I’m not sure with what success.”

“He’s very valuable,” Pyanfar said, her heart thudding the harder against her ribs. Careful, careful, don’t tie the crew and all we’ve got to him. “He’s a force we’d miss. Against Meetpoint.”

“You assume Meetpoint.”

“Hakkikt, I’ve expected the order hourly.”

“Is that why your ship’s engines are live?”

She grinned, honest hani grin, a gentle pursing of the mouth. “I’m quite ready to go.”

“Kkkt. Skku of mine.”

“Congruent interests.”

And do your subordinates share your enthusiasm?”

“They’ll follow.”

“They’ve followed you here. Meetpoint might be far more dangerous.”

“They’re well aware of that.”

“What is their motive, do you suppose?”

“Self-interest. Survival.”

“They think then that your guidance will advance them.”

“Evidently they think that. They’re here.”

“You see outside my ship the results of miscalculation.”

“I noticed, hakkikt.”

“You still consider Keia Nomesteturjai a friend, hunter Pyanfar.”

“Hakkikt, when you use that word it makes me nervous. I’m not certain we understand each other.”

“When you say subordinate I suffer similar apprehensions. What is that ship of yours doing?”

“Following my orders.”

“Which are?”

“Are we to Iater? I’m willing to discuss it if we are.” In the hakkikt’s stony silence she sipped at the cup. “On the other hand, we were talking about Meetpoint. That is where we’re going.”

“Do be very careful, hunter Pyanfar.”

She lowered her ears and pricked them up again. But a kif might not read that hani apology; and galling as retreat was: “I retract the question then.”

“Nankt.” The kif waved a hand; a door opened and someone moved; it was a name he had called. It sounded like one. The hand flourished and took up the cup again from the table. “Well that you learn caution, hunter Pyanfar.”

 

“It’s holding stationary,” Geran said, and Hilfy watched the development on her own number two monitor, where the limited sweep of their scan picked up a ship which had risen to station zenith, hanging where it had a free shot at everything.

“That’s Ikkhoitr,” Haral said. “One of the hakkikt’s oldest pets.”

“If they’re not talking,” said Tirun, “and they’re not moving, that means they’re at the limit of their orders.”

“Move and countermove,” Haral said.

Hilfy flexed her claws out and in again with an effort at control. Her stomach hurt. She felt a shiver coming on at the thought of that button near Haral’s hand. You going to tell us before you push it? Or just surprise us all, cousin?

With a mental effort she shifted her eyes back to the translation problem and got herself busy, leaving the ship over their heads to Haral’s discretion.

From Khym and Tully, not a word; silence; Chur had not cut in her monitor: Geran had gone back to Chur’s room briefly when it all started, and pushed a button on the machinery, ordering sedative, putting her sister out cold before it got to the noise of locks opening and the ship powering up. Or other things Chur might want to listen in on; and learn too much of situations that she could do nothing about. Geran quietly put her sister out, turned her back and walked back to the bridge to do her job, which she sat doing, businesslike and without a shake or a wobble in her voice or a trace of worry on her face.

Gods-be coward, Hilfy Chanur, do your own job and quit thinking about it.

 

It was Jik they brought into the hall-Jik, a dark, dazed figure between two kif who held him by either arm: who had to go on holding him on his feet after they brought him to the table. Jik lifted his head as if that took all his strength. Pyanfar’s stomach turned over; her ears twitched against her determination not to let them flatten, and then she let them down anyway: any hani smelling that much drug-laden sweat and pain would wrinkle up the nose and lay the ears down, even if it was not a friend held there in such condition before her eyes.

“Keia,” said Sikkukkut. “Your friends have come to see you.”

“Damn dumb,” Jik said thickly; and Kesurinan climbed slowly to her feet, stood there with her hands at her sides, a bolstered pistol brushing one of them. Kesurinan had the cold good sense to go no farther than that. Tahar tensed in her seat, but she made no further move either, and Pyanfar nodded in Jik’s direction.

“You don’t look too good.”

“Lot drug,” Jik said, head wobbling. “You damn fool. Go ship. Private, huh?”

“It is the drug,” said Sikkukkut. “I forgive his discourtesies. Do you want to cede him your place in our council, Kesurinan? Or not, as you please.”

Do you repudiate your captain? Do you want his post?

Perhaps Kesurinan had no idea what was being asked. She moved and took Jik’s arm from the kif who held it, flung her arm about him and gently eased him down onto the chair.

“Kkkt. Mahen behaviors.” Sikkukkut lapped at his drink while Jik leaned on one of the upraised insect-legs of the chair his first officer had yielded him and stared through a pair of them at Pyanfar.

“H’lo,” he said. “Damn mess.”

“Godsrotted mess for sure. What’ve you been telling the hakkikt, huh? You going to go with us to Meetpoint?”

“I dunno,” he said. He shut his eyes as if he had gone away a moment and opened them again. They shone dark and desperate in the orange light, spilling water onto his black skin and black fur. His nostrils widened and sucked in air. “Go ship, Pyanfar.”

“You see,” said Sikkukkut, “we are moving at some deliberate speed. Kesurinan, Tahar, I tell you what I have told my other captains: follow your orders. You came here, which is very well. Now you will go to another room; and you will stay there. Until I release you. Tell them they will do this, hunter Pyanfar; and dismiss this skku of your own ship.”

“Do it,” Pyanfar said. It was protocols. Or a demonstration of power. There was no choice, not even with all of them armed. She looked at Tahar as the scar-nosed pirate got upkand stared back at her with that expressionless calm that had carried her through two years of close dealing with kif. Skkukuk got to his feet on the same order.

And:

“You go,” Jik murmured on his own, speaking to Kesurinan.

“A,” Kesurinan agreed.

“Kkkt,” Sikkukkut said, not missing that little distinction, it seemed, of control in that exchange. He waved his hand: kif cleared a way and one of the ranking skkukun motioned to Tahar and to Kesurinan and Skkukuk. There was, Pyanfar noted with some relief, no question about the weapons they wore, and Skkukuk had not signaled any warning. If he had not changed sides altogether when he sat down at that table.

“Would you,” Sikkukkut said, when the others had gone, “like something to drink, Keia?”

“No,” Jik said thickly.

“He still has his wits,” Sikkukkut said, turning his head slightly to Pyanfar. “And he still has all else he was born with, by my strict order. In consideration of an old friendship, kkkt, Keia? But you don’t then order Aja Jin, hunter Pyanfar. Nor order this one. He makes that quite clear, doesn’t he?”

“He’ll do what I ask him. As an ally.”

“If he does what you ask, as an ally, do you then do what he asks?”

“I have in past. I think he owes me one.”

“Merchants. But Keia professes not to be a merchant at all. I don’t think he will trade. Will you, Keia?”

Silence. Long silence.

“Stubborn. He is very stubborn.” Another lap at the cup. “Tell me, Chanur-skku, what am I to think about that ship of yours?”

“That we’re ready to go to Meetpoint, hakkikt.'”

Sikkukkut’s long jaw lifted. It was not a friendly gesture, that shift of the head that stared more nearly nose-on: that was threat, the eyes glittering cold black with the sulfurous highlights of the lighting. “Ismehanan-min went to Meetpoint, skku of mine: now, I am not patient of this. By now there is a ship of mine over the station axis with its guns aimed at your ship. And we are at impasse.”

“Hakkikt, when I go back to my ship I’ll power down. My crew has its orders until then.”

“That’s a very stupid bluff, hunter Pyanfar “

“I’m not bluffing. We can all die here. You’re not dealing with a kif, hakkikt. I’m hani. Remember?”

There was a stir all about the hall. Clicks and subsequent red gleams of weapons ready-lights. And Jik pushed his hands against the insect-leg and lifted his head slightly.

Your ship isn’t moving on mine,” Pyanfar said, “since you don’t want your station damaged. And mine won’t move. Leaving dock isn’t what I ordered them to do. I told them if I die here, or if they’re attacked from your side, to cycle the jump vanes.”

 

Chapter Three

 

There was stark silence in the hall.

“Cycle the vanes,” Sikkukkut repeated, and rested his hands on the legs of the insect-chair. “That would be a curiously futile gesture for them.”

“What should I care,” Pyanfar said, “if I were dead? But never doubt that my crew is prepared to do that.”

“Martyr,” Jik said in his hoarse voice, and hauled himself by his arms on the chair to face Sikkukkut: he rested there leaning on the upraised arch of the chair legs, head on forearms and a grin on his face. “She hani. She tell crew blow us all to hell, they do it. You deal with damn fine hani crew. Same be lot brave for you. You got use right.”

More profound silence. Then Sikkukkut lifted his cup and lapped at it delicately. “Bravery. This is another of those words which sounds kifish until one looks more deeply at the mindset. I distrust it. I distrust it profoundly.”

“Just consider it,” said Pyanfar, “a longrange survival plan. But don’t consider it.” She waved her hand. “What I’m truly interested in, what I’m sure we’re all interested in, is what we do about Meetpoint, hakkikt. You want Jik’s cooperation: I can get it for you.”

“I remind you that you failed miserably with Goldtooth. We assume that you failed there. In certain moments I wonder.”

“In certain moments / wonder, hakkikt; and I still don’t know what he’s up to. I’m more concerned what the humans are up to; and I can tell you plainly-” she held up a forefinger, claw extended,-“Tully doesn’t know. I’ve questioned him closely on it, and I know when that son is lying and when he isn’t. He was a courier who didn’t know his own message; Goldtooth used him and dumped him, which is a little habit of Goldtooth’s that I want to talk to him about. Goldtooth doublecrossed Tully, doublecrossed Jik. Double-crossed me. And to confuse it all he gave me help, in the form of medical supplies we needed. / don’t know how to read his signals. I’m being perfectly frank with you. I can tell you that Ehrran and I aren’t friendly; and she’s dealing with the stsho, which I trust even less. That’s where I stand. I want Jik back. Under my command, hakkikt.'”

“Damn,” Jik said. “Hani-“

“He’s honest,” Pyanfar said. “If you do that favor to him, at my request, he’ll be caught in a moral tangle his government won’t like at all. But we don’t need to tell them that, do we? And we don’t need to leave Goldtooth alone to represent the mahendo’sat. Jik supports your side. And if you lose him, hakkikt, you’ll have no chance in a mahen hell of getting the mahendo’sat to make any treaty. Give him to me. I can handle him.”

“Prove it now. Get the truth from him. Have him say where the humans are going, what Ismehanan-min said to him before he left, and what agreements he knows of with the methane-folk.”

Pyanfar let go her breath slowly. Her laboring heart found a new level of panic.

Fool. Now you get what you bargained for. Don’t you, Pyanfar?

But what else is there to do? How do we win anything without this kif?

She looked toward Jik as he shifted his hold on the chair to face her direction. A fine dew of perspiration had broken out around his eyes, running down into his black fur; his eyes glittered in the orange light and the darkness, and there were lines about them she was not accustomed to see there. “Jik,” she said. “You heard him. You know what he wants.”

“I know,” Jik said, with no intimation he was going to say a thing.

“Listen.” She reached out and took hold of his arm where it rested on the chair; she smelled the sweat and there was the stink of drugs in it; drugs and raw terror. “Jik. I need you. Hear? Hear me?”

Jik’s face twisted, showed teeth, settled again in exhaustion. His eyes shut and he got them open again. “Get hell out. Hear?” And he meant more than get out of Harukk: she read that plainly.

“If the hakkikt fails,” she said, “what does that leave us with? Jik. Jik-” There’s a reason I can’t tell you. She tried to send that with her eyes, with the sudden force of her hand; and with her thumb-claw, dug in so hard he winced.

“Damn!” he cried, jerking back; she held on.

“Listen to me. If the hakkikt fails, where are we? That bastard Akkhtimakt-” She tensed the thumb-claw again. J-i-k. In the blink-code. “Do you hear me? Do you hear?”

He no longer pulled back. His hand twitched. “I hear,” he said in a hoarse, distracted voice. “But-“

“You’ll take my orders. Hear?” And: h-u-m-a-n-t-r-e-a-c-h-e-r-y she spelled into his flesh. The sweat ran in rivulets past his eyes, in the thin areas of his facial hair. “Jik. Tell him everything.”

A long moment he hesitated. She felt the tremor of muscles in his arm. The fear-smell grew stronger. The look on his face was a thing to haunt the sleep: he poured all his questions into it, and there was nothing she knew how to send back-let one kif note that hidden move of her thumb on the underside of his hand and they were both in it. But:

T-r-u-s-t, she signaled him. D-o.

He broke away from her eyes. He leaned himself on the other side of the chair, facing Sikkukkut. “Ana say-humans come Meetpoint. Truth. They go fight Akkhtimakt. Gather hani, make fight ‘gainst kif. Then got-” His voice broke. “Got-hani, stsho, human, mahendo’sat, all fight kif.”

“And it’s your task,” Sikkukkut said quietly, “to see that I reach Meetpoint to engage my rival Akkhtimakt-all while being attacked by all the others. Is that what your partner told you to do?”

Prolonged silence.

“Answer,” Sikkukkut said.

“He not tell me what he do. He say-say I got go Meetpoint, wait orders.”

“To turn on me at the opportune moment. Kkkkt. And now what will you do?”

“I think he damn fool, hakkikt.” Again Jik’s voice cracked. “I think I first time got better idea, help you take out Akkhtimakt.”

“And then to turn on me.”

“Not. Not. I think Ana got wrong. I damn scared, hakkikt, he got number one bad mistake. I don’t think he do what he do, damn, I come on dock, try get Pyanfar out lousy mess, I don’t know my damn partner going to blow the damn dock, I don’t know he going outsystem, I don’t know he got deal with Ehrran and the damn stsho-What happen? I get shoot at, I get caught, I get lousy drug and beat up, you think I be damn fool, hakkikt, come outside if I know what he do? Hell, no. Maybe Ana same time got smart idea, but he don’t know I be out there, I don’t know he be going to leave the dock- lousy mess. Ehrran be the one break dock, she be the one kill you people; I don’t think he know what she do.”

“They met. They talked. We know this.”

Jik’s head dropped, his shoulders slumped. He looked up again, leaning on his arms. “I think they talk stsho deal. I think Ana not know, not know what she do-He just got move fast. He plan go, yes. Not then. No so fast. He think got time. Ehrran make him move. Maybe he think I be dead, I don’t know; maybe he think we all be on that dock, maybe he think The Pride crew be gone, maybe think ever’thing be gone to hell-I don’t know, hakkikt. I don’t know.”

“You contradict yourself.”

“Not lie. Don’t know. I don’t know.”

“And the methane-folk? What dealings with them?”

Jik’s head dropped again onto his arms. For a moment he was utterly still, and a kif moved closer at his side. Pyanfar sat quietly, forcing a calm over her nerves from the outside in, till it got to the depth of her mind.

We’re talking about the whole gods-be Compact going up in smoke.

We can take him, at any time, we can take this kif bastard, if we’re willing to die-and we’re both dead now, Jik and I.

It doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter that he’s in pain, it’s nothing, nothing in the balance, nothing that really matters. I’m sorry, Jik; I can’t care, can’t afford to care, can’t stink of fear, I daren’t. Not if we’ve got a chance. And I’ll take it wide and high, Jik, if I have to. You’re a professional, you know what I’m doing, you know I can’t do anything else, drug-drunk as you are. We can settle it later.

“Answer him, Jik.” And gods, come up with a good one.

I need you, Jik.

I can’t play this throw alone.

He moved. He lifted his head again. “Tc’a,” he said thickly.

“What about the tc’a?” Sikkukkut asked.

“I talk with. Lot scare’.” His hands slipped. He caught himself and lifted his head with an effort. “Knnn lot disturb. Humans come through knnn space. Maybe shoot at knnn ship.”

“Kkkkt.”

“Damn fool. Tc’a want keep knnn quiet. They want mahendo’sat make all quiet, quick. Tc’a lot mad with Ana. Talk me-talk me-want make knnn be quiet. I say tc’a- tc’a, you got help Sikkukkut. Fine fellow, Sikkukkut. So tc’a come with us to Kefk. But knnn-“

“The knnn took it.”

“Took. Don’t know why. Maybe want ask why come with us. Maybe want ask what we do. Knnn lot crazy. No know knnn mind. I tell Ana-he be crazy want talk to knnn. Make quiet, I tell Ana, you got make quiet. Knnn be disturb, I don’t know, don’t know, don’t know-“

Both hands went. He hit the arch of the chairlegs and hung there.

Pyanfar carefully took up her cup and sipped at it. Don’t think, don’t react, he’s not in pain now. Be cold and careful and don’t care. There’s no guarantee what the bastard’s going to do with either of us now he has what he wants. “That, I think, was the truth. It jibes with other things he’s said. Mahendo’sat have their own ways. And it’s very likely that Goldtooth is pursuing some contrary course, giving his Personage a second option. Unfortunately that course seems to involve helping Ehrran ruin me-friendship is worth something, hakkikt, but species-interest in Goldtooth’s case is a great deal more potent. He’ll be sorry to see me ruined and my influence broken-I was useful to him once; we even had a personal debt. But sorry is as far as it goes. Ehrran seems to him to have what he wants right now: influence in the han. Jik is pursuing a totally different course for the Personage they both serve-so Goldtooth wouldn’t work directly against Jik, in the interest of giving the Personage that double choice; but he’ll by the gods cut Jik’s throat when he thinks it’s come to crisis. And it will be crisis at Meetpoint, when we all go in there. That’s how Goldtooth will deal with the methane-folk: kill Jik and remove the one person who can deal with the tc’a-because Jik does work with them.” She took a second sip. “You told me back at Meetpoint, that one day I’d want revenge on my enemies. Pukkukkta. I had to look that word up. I know now what you offered me. You said at the same time that if I didn’t want it then, I’d want it later. That was before I knew my enemy was a bastard of a hani who was out to get me from the start. I’ll give you a hani word. Haura. Bloodfeud. Ehrran’s got that now, with me, with Chanur, with Geran and Chur Anify; and Haral and Tirun Araun have a grudge or two themselves. And I’ll get Rhif Ehrran if I have to go through Goldtooth and the stsho and the mahendo’sat and the humans to do it. Pukkukkta’s a cold emotion; haura’s a hot one; but that doesn’t mean it can’t last years. Am I making clear sense? However long it takes, I’ll get her.”

“You make sense, hunter Pyanfar.”

“Tahar also has a bloodfeud with Ehrran. And Tahar interests are linked to mine. I’m her only hope of recovering her reputation. And her power.”

“That also makes sense.”

“I also have a certain matter to settle with Goldtooth. A personal matter. And Jik is the best leverage on that. That’s why I want him.”

“No kif would be as forward.”

“No kif can offer you what I do.”

There was a soft clicking about her, a stirring; and the guns were still live.

“What do you offer?”

“An alliance with non-kif.”

“Kkkt.” Sikkukkut placed his hands on the chair, lifting his jaw. “Where is it?”

“Lying in that chair; and sitting in this one. And neither’s inconsequential. Neither’s without ties that go far beyond one ship and a small authority. Give me Jik and give me Aja Jin, and I’ll use him to settle with Goldtooth and Rhif Ehrran. A weapon in my hand is a weapon in yours.”

“Is it?”

“Since we have common interests. A hani is very easy to understand. Look for clan interest. And Rhif Ehrran is out to destroy my clan, with Goldtooth’s help. I told you I’d go through all the others to get her. And that’s exactly what I’ll do.”

Sikkukkut leaned his long chin on his fist, the silver-bordered sleeve fallen back from a thin and muscular arm, the light gleaming on his eyes. “I well tell you, hunter Pyanfar, you will have the chance to make good what you say.” The forefinger lifted. “You will have everything you ask.”

O gods, the thought hit her then. Too easy. Too fast. Too complete.

“You will take Aja Jin and Moon Rising and you will take Meetpoint.”

“Hakkikt-“

“You claim a great deal for yourself. Can you deliver more than words? Or perhaps-will you defect to my enemies?”

“To Ehrran?” Her ears went flat. It took no acting at all. “No.”

“You encourage me.” A second finger lifted beside the first. “So I will give you Keia. On condition.”

“That being, hakkikt?”

“He will go aboard The Pride. In your charge.”

“He’s the best pilot-“

“I know his skill. I know Kesurinan’s, which is considerable. But she has less recklessness. I tell you how I will arrange things and you will accept them for your own good, hunter Pyanfar. Keia would betray your interests, left free to follow those he serves. Instead I give him to you, and you will use him wherever it profits you, but most of all where it profits me. I insist on this point. Do you understand me?”

Her ears twitched again, and it was not acting either. “You’re very clear. And you may be absolutely right. I agree.”

“I may be right. How generous of you. Is that the word-generous?”

“I’m taking your orders. Those who know me would be shocked to hear that. I’m a bastard, hakkikt, and a graynosed old bastard at that, and I’m not in the habit of taking orders, but I’m taking yours.” You don’t back me up, son. You don’t treat me like one of your rag-eared lot. “You impress me and your opinions make absolute sense to me. You give me Jik here, I’ll keep Kesurinan in line. And him. I know what you’re saying, and yes, you’re right. You want me to take Meetpoint, I can’t do that. Even with Jik for a wedge. But if you’re coming in behind me and want the stsho all dithered–” Which is what you plan, isn’t it, you son? “-I can by the gods keep them busy.”

Sikkukkut sipped at his drink. “You’ll have to be more than that, skku of mine. I have a ship to spare. Do you know what a single hunter-ship can do to an inhabited world?”

O my gods.

“No warning would travel faster than that ship. It would strike and go. And hani would be removed from the question. The power I give you would be removed, skku of mine. Always remember I can take it away. I can remove Anuurn from consideration as an inhabited world. Do you understand me?”

“Entirely.” Bastard. Thanks for the warning. Haura, bastard. You know how long Akkht itself would survive a move like that? Let’s talk about life in the Compact. Let’s talk about wiping out species. “When do I go?”

“I have a packet for you. You’ll have it. With the person of my friend Keia. Treat him gently.” Sikkukkut’s nose twitched. “And under no circumstances set him free. I have uses for him myself: he’s a loan, not a gift.” Another lap at the cup. And a wave of Sikkukkut’s hand, at which several kif near him stirred forth from the shadows, passing in front of one of the lights and casting long shadow over the table.

The shadow enveloped her, enveloped Jik as they laid hands on him and gathered him up with soft clickings and chatter among themselves. Jik lolled limp, in a way that said he was not shamming: his arm swung down, his head fell back when they lifted him, and there was no muscle tone in the arm they grasped-kifish fingers bit deep when they swung him up to carry him.

“Your leave,” Pyanfar murmured, set her drink down, and stood up. She bowed, as carefully and formally as ever before the leadership in the han. She kept her ears up and her face calm as she glanced aside to their handling of Jik, and looked again to Sikkukkut for instruction.

He waved his hand again. A second time she bowed, and walked out the door, into the dim corridor outside, into the presence of lesser kif who gave way to someone of her evident status, who edged out of her path, lowered their faces and made themselves shadows against the walls and the conduits.

Her knees were going to be weak. The ammonia smell dizzied her: she had not sneezed, thank the gods, she had snuffled once or twice and covered it; but of a sudden her stomach felt queasy and her heart which had exhausted itself in terror, labored away in slow, painful beats.

The nightmare was not going away. They were bringing Jik, she had to pick up her three companions, mahe, hani, and kif, on her way out; and she had to get down that dock and observe whatever the kif sent her in the way of instructions.

Had to.

“I got him,” she said curtly to Kesurinan when the kif brought her companions to her in the exit corridor. “He’s staying in my custody.”

And it hurt, somewhere dimly and at the bottom of her soul where she had put all her sensibilities-the quick lift of Kesurinan’s ears, the dismay, the instant smothering of all reaction, because Kesurinan was not a fool, and knew where they were and who was listening, and then that they would have to do everything the kif insisted on to get her captain out of Harukk. Kesurinan thought she was talking to an ally.

Sikkukkut was absolutely right: the mahendo’sat would be an ally right down to the point their own species-interest took over. And then Jik would save his own kind.

So, she discovered, would she.

 

They made slow progress down the unstable docks-a gang of kifish skkukun carrying a stretcher with Jik strapped tightly to it; Jik’s First Officer walking along by him, anger and concern in every line of her back: and with a gun on her hip. Pyanfar walked to the side and a little behind, with Dur Tahar on her right and Skkukuk at her left, Tahar inscrutable as Tahar had become in her life among kif, while Skkukuk gave few signals either-except in squared shoulders, except in less nervousness than he had ever shown; except in every subtle move that said here was a kif whose status was no longer that of an outright slave, a kif whose captain had just dealt with the hakkikt and won. He carried a weapon beneath his outer robes and gods knew what ambitions in his narrow skull. If ever a kif was pleased, this one positively basked in his change of fortunes, inhaled the chance in the air, savored the sight of the hakkikt’s slaughtered enemies, his dreadful signposts-and the sight of his captain rising in that service.

Cold in all the warm places and fever-warm in all the cold ones, gods, a hundred eighty degrees skewed. Alien. The kif are that thing in doubles and triples.

Stay cold, Pyanfar Chanur. Save it. Jik’s a piece of meat. Tahar an ally-of-fortune, Kesurinan’s potential trouble, and this gods-be son of a kif is a convenience.

Kesurinan’s not going to make trouble, not yet. She’ll let us take Jik aboard.

Gods, don’t let Jik come to out here.

Slowly, slowly they walked up the dock past the section seal, into that area where there were no pedestrians. Where there was no traffic at all but themselves.

And there was The Pride’s berth ahead, still flashing with those warning lights. She took her pocket com out, within range of the pickup now: “This is the captain. I’m coming in.”

“Aye,” Haral’s voice came back to her, thin with static: that formality she had used was warning, and Haral took it: I’ve got company, Haral; don’t get easy with me.

Another eternity, walking that fragile dock: and gods help them, Tahar and Kesurinan had farther still to go. “Skkukuk,” Pyanfar said, and the kif beside her was all attention. “Tell the skkukun-hakkiktu I want Tahar escorted to her ship by the quickest and safest route. Through the central corridors if they can.”

“Hakt’,” Skkukuk said, acknowledging the order; and walked up with the litter-bearers and gave that instruction with all the kifish modulations of a superior’s relayed instructions and his own high status with that superior. Then he fell back a step or two and lifted his face in satisfaction.

She said not a word to Tahar, and Tahar offered not a word to her; that was the way of things.

Toward The Pride’s open accessway, then. “Wait here,” Pyanfar said to Tahar and Kesurinan, and with a special coldness in Kesurinan’s direction, when they reached that gateway: her flesh crawled in that earnest look of Kesurinan’s scar-crossed face. “Aye, captain,” Kesurinan said, all unknowing.

And betrayed her own captain into foreign hands.

 

“Chanur-hakto,” the foremost kif said, when they had deposited Jik on his litter in The Pride’s airlock. That kif took a packet from within his robes and offered it.

Skkukuk intercepted it in one smooth move. And waved his hand, dismissing the other kif out the airlock.

“Seal us up,” Pyanfar said to the air and the crew watching on monitor.

The lock shot closed, hissed and thumped into electronic seal.

“Power down,” Pyanfar said.

“Aye,” Haral’s voice came to her. All business, even yet. Pyanfar took the packet Skkukuk offered her officiously, with the stretcher lying on its supports at her feet. Now the shivers wanted to come, but she kept her ears up and looked her own kif in his watery, red-rimmed eyes.

“Good job,” she said to Skkukuk.

“Kkkkt,” the kif said. “You need me, hakt’. Who else of your crew has manners?”

Her gorge rose. She swallowed and tucked the small packet into her pocket, squatted down by Jik’s stretcher and patted his face gently. It was cold and there was no reaction.

“This is an ally?” Skkukuk asked.

“This is a complicated situation,” she said, trying to tell a kif the truth; and then a second thought ruffled the hair down her back. Gods, this is a killer I’m talking to. With hairtrigger reflexes. “Yes. An ally.” She moved her hand down to Jik’s neck and felt the pulse there. “Haral. Get Khym down here. We got Jik to move. He’s still out.”

“On his way, captain. You all right?”

“Fine. I’m fine. We got out in good shape. Open that door.” She patted Jik’s face again. “Hey. Friend. Come out of it. You hear me? You’re all right.” Friend.

He was under. Deep. She heard the lift work: Khym had either been on his way or he had run that topside corridor. And The Pride was proceeding with power-down, a series of subtle noises that her ear knew in every nuance. “Skkukuk. You’ll help Khym. You’ll do what he says.”

“Kkkt. This is your mate.”

She stood up and looked flat-eared at Skkukuk, with the ammonia-stink in her nostrils and the antiallergents drying her mouth. Something about the asking crawled along her nerves. This alien, this unutterable alien, was feeling out who was to consider among the crew, who he could displace, who he could get around and who not.

That’s one job you can’t work your way into, you slithering earless bastard. You keep your mouth off my husband’s name. You better figure that, fast.

A thousand thousands of years of hani instinct ran up her spine. And Skkukuk read that look and took on one of his own. Caution.

Footsteps in the lowerdecks corridor. Rapid ones, more than one set.

Don’t run, Khym. Dignity, Khym. In front of the kif, gods rot it, Khym.

She was still standing squared off with Skkukuk when Khym showed up in the doorway with Tully close behind.

“You’re all right,” Khym said.

“I’m just fine. Take Jik to sickbay. Get Tirun onto it. Skkukuk-“

The kif was still waiting. Armed. Their ex-prisoner, possessing a gun that could blow a hole in armor plate. And expecting in his aggressive little kifish soul that he had just won his freedom.

“You’re offduty,” she told Skkukuk. “You’ll keep that gun in your quarters. You’ve got a lowerdecks clearance. You understand me.”

“Kkkt. Absolutely.”

“Move.”

Everyone moved. Skkukuk got himself out of her sight, correctly reading her temper. Khym and Tully got to either end of the stretcher, got it lifted with its not inconsiderable dead weight of tall mahendo’sat, and maneuvered it out the hatch.

“Tirun’s on her way to sickbay, captain.” That from her niece. While the powerdown proceeded.

“Understood,” Pyanfar said calmly. And stood there a moment staring at the wall. With a kif’s orders in her pocket. She fished them out and broke open the brittle seal to look at the written portion.

“Departure at 2315,” was the center of that detail. It was, at the moment, all she was interested in. The kif gave them time enough to get organized. Barely. With precise course instructions, aborting one that they had laid in.

“Hilfy.”

“Aye,” the subdued voice reached her.

“Message to Kesurinan and Tahar: stand by departure; they’ll have a bit over six hours. So will we.”

A pause. “Aye.”

Silence after. The Pride was at rest again. The crew on the bridge could see her, where she stood. The camera was live. She looked up at it. “Things could be worse,” she said glumly. “I can think of one way right off. But we got Jik in our custody, we got Tahar and Aja Jin with us, and we’ve got the hakkikt’s orders: it’s Meetpoint. His way.”

A longer pause.

“Aye,” Haral said simply, as if she had given a routine order.

The largest space station in the Compact.

And a forewarned one.

“Clear the boards, stand offduty; I got Jik to see to.”

“Aye, captain.”

She walked out of the airlock. And only then it occurred to her, like the ghost of an old habit that no longer meant anything, that she had just packed her husband and another crewman off to tend another man, knowing beyond the last twitch of instinct, if it was ever instinct, that Jik was safe with them, safe as that kif was safe to send down the corridor in the other direction, because even the kif was a rational mind and sane and sensible, while the universe quaked and tottered on al! sides of them.

She walked down the corridor and into the open door of sickbay, their little closet of a facility. Tirun had beaten her there. Khym and Tully were taking Jif off the stretcher and laying him on the table.

“He’ll have some bruises,” Pyanfar said. “You’d better run a scan on him. He may have more than that.” She went to the med cabinet, keyed the lock with a button-sequence and sorted through a tray of bottles- hani-specific; hani drugs did strange things with some mahendo’sat. No telling what the kif had given him even if she ran a query into Library, and it was better to stick to the simple things. She pulled out an old-fashioned bottle of ammonia salts and brought that over to hold under Jik’s nose.

Not a twitch.

“Gods-be.” She capped the stinking bottle and slapped Jik’s chill face. “Wake up. Hear me?”

“What did they give him?” Tirun asked, lifting Jik’s eyelid, peering close. “He smells like a dopeden.”

“He’s a hunter-captain, gods rot it, his own precious government’s got him mind-blocked, gods know how far down he’s gone.” She turned around, shoved her way past Khym and got to the intercom. “Bridge! Get Harukk on, tell ’em I want to know what they dosed Jik with, fast.”

“Aye,” Haral’s voice came back.

Tirun was counting pulsebeats. And frowning.

“Gods, he doesn’t know where he is.” Pyanfar crossed the deck again, shoving roughly past both the men, to grab at Jik’s shoulders. “Jik, gods fry you, it’s Pyanfar, Pyanfar Chanur, you hear me? Emergency, Jik, wake up?”

Jik’s mouth opened. His chest moved in a larger breath.

“Come on, Jik-for the gods’ sake, wake up!” She yelled it into his ear. She shook at him. ”Jik! Help!”

Tension began to come back to his musculature. His face acquired familiar lines. “Come on,” she said. “It’s me, it’s Pyanfar.”

Help, she said. And the great fool came back to her. He hauled himself out of whatever mental pit his own people had prepared for him, the way he had run out onto that dock to fight for her and her crew, when an absolute species-loyalty had dictated he save himself. Help. More strangers handled him, dumped him from stretcher to table, gods, not unlike what the kif must have done to him, and he went away from them, deeper and deeper, only knowing at some far level that he was being touched.

Knowing now that there was a hani cursing him deaf in one ear and asking something of him, but nothing more than that.

O gods. Gods, Jik.

His eyes slitted open. He was still far away.

“Hey,” she said. “You’re all right. You’re on The Pride. I got you out. Kesurinan’s gone back to Aja Jin, you hear me, Jik, you’re not with the kif anymore. You’re on my ship.”

He blinked. His mouth worked, the movement of a dry tongue. He heard her, she thought, at some level. He was exploring consciousness and trying to decide if he wanted it.

“It’s me,” she said again. “Jik,” She patted his arm and stooped with a sick feeling at the gut when he flinched from her touch. ” Friend.”

“Where?” he said, at least it sounded like that.

“On The Pride. You’re safe. You understand me?”

“Understand,” he said. His lids drifted down over the pupils. He was gone again, but not so deeply gone. She hesitated a moment, then turned in a blind rage at two fool men who had not sense enough to clear out of sickbay’s narrow space and give them room to work.

She found herself staring eye to eye with Tully-with Tully who had been twice where Jik had been, and whose face was stsho-white and his eyes white round the edges. She had been about to shout. The look on Tully’s face strangled the sound in her throat.

“Out,” she said, and choked on the word. “Clear out of here, you’re not doing anything useful.”

Khym flattened his ears, thrust out an arm and herded Tully away; Tully went without seeming to notice it was Khym who had touched him. The human was a shaken man.

So was she, shaken. The hair was standing up all down her back.

“Captain,” Haral’s voice came, “it’s sothosi. Library’s sending to labcomp right now.”

“We’re on it.”

Tirun was on it, a quick move for the comp unit; a glance at the screen and a dive for the medicine cabinet. She broke open a packet, grabbed an ampule and art astringent pad and made herself a clean spot on Jik’s arm.

The stimulant went in. In another moment Jik made another gasp after air, and another, a healthier darkness returning to his nose and lips. “There we go,” Tirun said, monitoring his heartbeat. “There we go.”

Pyanfar found herself a chair and sat down, before her knees went. She bent over and raked her hands through her mane, conscious of the uncomfortable weight of the AP at her hip and the prodding of the gun in her opposite pocket. She stank. She wanted a bath.

She wanted not to have done what she had done. Not to have made the mistakes she had made. Not to be Pyanfar Chanur at all, who was responsible for too much and too many mistakes. And who had now to think the unthinkable.

“You all right?” Tirun asked.

She looked up at her cousin, her old friend. At a crewwoman who had been with her from her youth. “Tirun.” She lapsed into a provincial hani language and kept her voice down. “He’ll stay here. I want this room safed, I want him left under restraint-“

She tried to keep the cold distance she had had on Harukk. It was hard when she looked into an old friend’s eyes and saw that natural reaction, that dropping of Tirun’s ears.

“Tirun,” she said, though she had meant to justify nothing; she found herself pleading, found a shiver going through her limbs. “We got a problem. I’ll talk about it later. Do it. Can you? Stay with him till he wakes up and make sure he’s breathing all right. And for godssakes leave those restraints on him. Can you do that?”

“Yes,” Tirun said. No doubt. No question, from an honest hani who handed her captain every scruple she had and expected her captain was going to explain it all. Eventually.

“Tell him I’m going to come back down. Tell him it’s because we’ve got a few hours, I want him to rest and I can’t think of any other way to make sure he does.” She still spoke in chaura, a language no mahendo’sat was going to understand; and that was statement enough how much truth she was handing out. Tirun stared at her and asked no questions. Not even with a flick of her ears. Lock up a friend who had saved their lives and come back in this condition from doing it. Lie to him.

If she could knock him cold again without risking his life she would do that too.

She got up and walked out, raked a hand through her mane and felt the stinging pain of exhaustion between her shoulders, the burn of cold decking on her feet. Kif-stink was still in her nostrils.

 

She flung the kifish packet onto the counter by her own station on the bridge.

No one had left post; or if Geran had left to check on Chur she had come back again in a hurry. Solemn faces stared at her: Hilfy, Geran, Khym and Tully; Haral kept operations going.

“Leave it, Haral,” Pyanfar said.

Haral swung her chair about, same as the others.

“You know the way we came in here,” Pyanfar said, “and took Kefk. We got orders to do it again. At Meetpoint.”

Ears sank. Tully sat there, the human question, hearing what he could pick up on his own and what garbled version whispered to him over the translator plug he kept in one ear.

“You’ve heard bits and pieces of it,” she said, and sat down on the armrest of her own cushion, facing all of them. “We’ve got to follow orders the way they’re given. Or we’ve got to blow ourselves to particles here at dock. And that takes out only one kif faction. It leaves the other one the undisputed winner. And by the gods, I’d rather they chewed on each other a while and gave the Compact a chance. That’s one consideration. But there’s another one. Sikkukkut’s threatened Anuurn.”

“How-threatened?” Haral asked.

“Just that. One ship-if he thinks we’re getting out of line. He’s not talking about an attack at Gaohn. Nothing like it. He means an attack directly on the world. That’s the kind of kif we’re dealing with. One large C-charged rock, hitting Anuurn, before Anuurn can see it coming, gods know. It was a threat. I hope it was a remote threat. We’re dealing with a kif who knows too gods-be much about hani and too gods-be little: he was a fool to tell me that and maybe he doesn’t imagine what we’d do to stop him-before or after the event. But I don’t think he’s the only kif who’d think of it. I hope they chew each other to bloody rags. We arrange that if we can-but we’ve got to do what we’re told right now or we find ourselves looking the wrong way at one of Sikkukkut’s guns, und we don’t get the chance to warn anybody, or work our way around this, or save a gods-be thing.”

“Captain,” Haral said, “we got a kif up there at zenith. He’s got position on us.”

“I know about it. We’re not going to take ’em on. We just get out of here. We’ve got six hours, we’re dropping into a Situation at Meetpoint, and the Compact may not survive it in any form we understand it. That’s what we’ve got. That’s what we’re up against. I don’t know what we’re going to find at Meetpoint. Tully-are you following this? Do you understand me?”

“I understand,” he said in a faint voice. “I crew, captain.”

“Are you? Will you be, at Meetpoint?”

“You want me sit with Hilfy at com, speak human if humans be there.” His voice grew steadier. “Yes. I do.”

With all he could and could not understand. She gazed on him in a paralysis of will, as if putting off deciding anything at all could stop time and give them choices they did not have.

Jik, they had locked up below. A kif and a human were loose among them. The human sat in their most critical councils.

But Tully had given them the warning she had passed to Jik, a warning blurted out in one overcharged moment that Tully had stood between her and Hilfy and she had questioned his motives.

Don’t trust humans, Pyanfar.

On one sentence, one frightened, treasonous sentence in mangled hani, they bet everything.

Gods, risk my world on him? Billions of lives? My whole people? My gods, what right have I got?

“I’ll think on it,” she said. “I haven’t got any answers.” She picked up the packet and flung it down again. “We’ve got our instructions. We’ve got Tahar with us. We’ve got Jik’s ship. And we’ve got orders to keep Jik with us and keep that ship of his under tight watch.”

“There’s something else,” Hilfy said. And took up a piece of paper and got up and brought it to her. It trembled in Hilfy’s hand. “Comp broke the code. Maybe he meant us to break it. I don’t know.”

 

She hesitated in the dim doorway of sickbay, with that paper in her pocket; Jik was awake, Tirun had said.

He was. She saw the slitted glitter of Jik’s eyes, saw them open full as she walked in, quiet as she was. She went and laid her hand on his shoulder, above the restraint webbing. Tirun had put a pillow under his head and a blanket over his lower body.

His eyes tracked on her quite clearly now, gazed up at her sane and lucid. “Come let me go, a? Damn stubborn, you crew.”

But she did not hear the edge of annoyance that might have been there. It was all too quiet for Jik, too wary, too washed of strength. It was-gods knew what it was.

Apprehension, comprehension-that he might not be among friends?

That for some reason she might be truly siding with the kif-or that she was operating under some other driving motive, in which they were no longer allies?

He had for one moment, in that kifish place, drugged and on the fading edge of his resources, answered questions he had held out against for days, answered because she got through his defenses with a warning his mind had been in no

shape to deal with, and because she had signaled him that he had to do this.

Now he was clear-headed. Now he knew where he was, and perhaps he recalled, too late, what he had done. That was what came through that faint voice, that failing attempt at humor.

“Hey,” she said, and tightened her hand. “You got nowhere to go, do you?”

“Aja Jin.”

“Told you about that. Kif’ll shoot your head off. We’re clear. Got it all patched up with Sikkukkut. You passed out on me. Missed the good part. I need to talk to you.”

“I got talk to my ship.”

“That can wait. You’ll fall on your nose if you try to get up. Don’t want you trying it, hear? Tirun fill you in?”

“Not say.”

“Your ship’s fine; the dock’s patched; I got you clear and got everything fixed up with Sikkukkut: he’s a gods-be bastard, but he does listen. He’s still suspicious, but he’s put you aboard The Pride, says you’ve got to ride out the next move aboard my ship and let Kesurinan handle Aja Jin. That was all I could get. We’ve got to live with that.”

“I got damn itch on nose, Pyanfar.”

She reached and rubbed the bridge of it. “Got it?”

“Let me go. I walk fine.”

“Haven’t got time. We’re moving. Going to Meetpoint. You’re going to have to ride it out where you are. I’m sorry about that, but we haven’t got another cabin we can reach till we undock. And then things are going to go pretty fast.”

He was quiet a heartbeat or two. Then: “Pyanfar-“

“I got a question for you. I want to know what we’re headed into. What did Goldtooth tell you before he left us, huh?”

A silent panic crept into his eyes. He lifted his head and let it fall back against the pillow, still staring at her. “Not funny.”

“/ need to know, friend. For your sake, for that ship of yours, gods know, for mine. What are we headed for? What’s he doing?”

“We talk on bridge.”

Bluff called, she stared at him and he at her and there was a knot at her gut. “You know how it is,” she said.

“A,” he said. “Sure.”

“I got this thing to ask you. I want to know the truth. You understand me.”

He ran his tongue over his lips. “What this deal with humans?”

“Tully told me-told me flatly not to trust them. You know Tully; he’s not too clear. But what he said, the way he said it-I think they’re going to doublecross your partner. I think they’re not the fools Goldtooth thinks they are. And they’re not taking his orders.”

“Maybe you do better talk to Tully.”

“I have. We’ve got a problem. Sikkukkut wants Meetpoint. He wants us three to go in first, The Pride, Aja Jin, and Moon Rising. You see how much he trusts us. He wants us to go in there and shake things up and crack Meetpoint so he can walk right in easy.”

“Akkhtimakt maybe be there.”

“So’s everyone else. Aren’t they? I got one more question. What about the methane-folk? What’s the real truth?”

“Lot-lot mad.” Another pass of Jik’s tongue across his lips. “I try talk to tc’a. They want keep like before. Knnn- different question. Goldtooth said-said got maybe trouble.”

“Who’s Ghost?”

Jik blinked. His eyes locked on hers, pupils dilated.

“When you were in trouble,” Pyanfar said, “I hauled out that little packet you gave me at Mkks and started it through comp. We got a number one good linguistics rig. The best. Mahen make, a? Why’d you ever give me that packet, huh?-to carry on for you. In case something happened here at Kefk? So I could get through to Kshshti or Meetpoint? Gods-be careless job of encoding if we could break it-but then, then it might have had to go to a mahen ship way out from your Personage, mightn’t it? Someone like Goldtooth, maybe? And the real code’s in the language- isn’t it?”

“Maybe same-want you to have.”

“You knew gods-be well we’d have to go to mahen authority to read it? You by the gods knew we’d have to run to your side when it got hot-we’d be held to being your courier again, that’s what you knew, that’s what you set us up for, rot your conniving, doublecrossing hide?”

He lay there and blinked at her.

“Was it because you thought something might happen to you, Jik? Or did you already plan to do what Goldtooth did for you here at Kefk? Blow the docks and run and leave me to get anywhere I gods-blessed could, with your confounded message? Was it you who gave Goldtooth the orders to break dock?”

“Hani, you got damn nasty mind.”

“I’m dead serious, Jik.”

“You crazy.” He gave a wrench at the restraints. “Damn, Pyanfar?! walk fine.”

“Answer me.”

“What you think, I run out on you, leave you talk to kif? / on that damn dock myself!”

“You weren’t in the zone that blew! That’s by the gods close timing, Jik!”

“I not do!”

“Didn’t you? I think you knew with Chur sick I wasn’t free to run for it. That it’d kill her and I wouldn’t move if I had a chance in your coldest hell. Goldtooth gave us that med unit-fine, so I could run. You gave me that gods-be packet back at Mkks before we knew we’d find him here-you gave it in case something happened to you, a packet we’d have to take to mahen authorities. And what does it talk about? People reneging on agreements, that’s what; it talks about contingencies, talks about supporting some candidacy-whose? Sikkukkut’s? What agreements?”

“Sikkukkut. Same. You know agreement.”

“You’re lying, Jik. By the gods, you show up at Kshshti and help me out of one mess, then you help me all the way here, deeper and deeper you helped me, you and your godsforsaken partner, you and your gods-be deals-“

”I come out on that dock save you damn neck!”

“Where were you planning to ditch us? Where, huh? Here? Or later, at Meetpoint? Where was it I was supposed to find this gods-be packet was the only currency I had, where was I supposed to go? Kshshti? Back through kif territory, get my ship and my crew shot up one more time, end up on mahen-charity because there’s no gods-be help else when you’ve got through using me and mine for every gods-be gods-rotted piece of mahen politics you’ve got going? Or maybe I get to Meetpoint and find you’ll drop me to politic with the stsho to save them from the kif-some mahen squeeze play, throw one kif at them from Kefk, another from Kita and Kshshti, catch them between your ships and the humans and haul the whole gods-be Compact into your lap, with me and the han left the way you left us the last time, out in the cold with our ships shot up, our station in ruins, and nothing this time to do but come crawling to your gods-be charity! Is that the way your favors go? Am I what you think you’re buying with this little packet that tells your authorities how to deal with me?”

”I not do!” Jik fell back from a convulsive shout, breathing hard, and they stared at each other for a moment.

“Then who’s this Ghost? What’s the rest of it?”

Silence. Jik only stared and breathed.

“It’s another doublecross. Isn’t it? They’ve threatened my world, you hear me?”

He blinked. That was all.

“Gods rot you-” She snatched the paper from her pocket and waved it in his face. “What’s this thing mean? What’s this gods-be message worth if the humans doublecross you?” And when his mouth only clamped the tighter: “Jik-“

“My nose itch, Pyanfar.” Quietly. With full self-possession. And when she lost the breath to shout with: “Damn miserable, Pyanfar, damn ridic’lous situation, you and me. You come get me. Now what we do? What you think do?”

She took the paper and folded it, absorbed in that meticulous task.

“You got too good heart deal with kif,” Jik said.

“What’s our choice? What gods-be choice have we got? Your whole plan’s blown up, we’ve got the Compact coming apart around our ears-“

“Same you, me, a?” He made a grimace, blinked sweat and strained to see her. “What we do, a? How far we want go, you, me?”

“I don’t know.” She shoved the message into her pocket and leaned into his view, close, ears flat and a shaking in her knees. “How far do I go, huh, Jik? How far’d you go? This

mess you put in motion is threatening to take my world out. We talk about friendship now? We talk about what you’d do in mahendo’sat interests? About two mahen bastards who’d doublecross every friend they got, all for the Personage?”

“You want try drug next?”

“Don’t push me.”

“What we got, huh? Damn Anuurn hani sit and wait, good friend? You longtime got mind like rock, Pyanfar, whole damn han got own interest, let mahendo’sat fight kif pirate, let mane do, hani too damn busy make politic-“

“Why blame us? You created the han, take the poor hani bastards, teach ’em spaceflight, shove ’em into your own gods-rotted politics with the stsho, and to a mahen hell with the clans-“

“What you want? Sit on world, be sit there when politic in the Compact roll over you heads like wave in the sea? Be sit there when kif eat our heart and come find hani? Maybe all time you like sit on world, Pyanfar, maybe you get old, want go sit in damn dirt and wait for kif?”

“So what d’we get? The kif or you?”

“You got choice.”

“Gods blast you!”

“If we want you damn world, Pyanfar, we one time got, first time we land on Anuurn you got nothing but point’ sticks. You forget? You ask us leave, we go.”

“Sure, you went. You never turned loose of us. Manipulate our trade, shape our government, let us here and let us there and don’t let us get beyond ourselves-“

“Fine. You make fine deal. Maybe you like kif lot better. Wish you luck, Pyanfar. Or you got trust me-“

“Trust you!”

“Damn, you come, I crazy drunk, talk kif, you say; I do, I do, Pyanfar, I got so much trust in you, I do. All diff rent, you say; got human louse things up, got bad trouble-‘Talk, Jik: tell the kif what he want, I get you out-‘ God! what kind fool I be with trust?”

“I should let you loose on my ship? Let you loose with my crew? Jik, I got you out of there. I did that for you. If you trusted me you’d tell me what’s in this paper, but you won’t do that. You can’t do that, and I know why, like you know why I don’t dare let you go. I’ve got to survive. I have to stay alive in this gods-rotted mess you handed me. I’ve got to hold a position where I can still do something. You understand me? I’m going to do something.”

“I tell you paper.” Jik’s voice came faintly, almost inaudible. “You know mahendo’sat-know I got power to make agreement for my Personage. I make now-with you. With hani.”

“Same as you make with Sikkukkut, huh? Same as you make with Akkhtimakt and set them at each other’s throats.”

“Same I keep. Same I give him Kefk, same I fight with. You same know mahendo’sat. I keep agreement. I don’t say Personage keep. But-” Jik blinked again and licked his lips, eyes lively as if he had already won his point. “-if. you get this kif, we got deal with you fair, a?”

“Tell me the paper.”

“Let go first.”

“Oh, no, friend. You listen to me. You listen good. We’re going out of here, going to come kiting blind into whatever you set up over at Meetpoint, and Kesurinan’s going in there on my directions. It’s your ship. Your crew. I’d think you’d be a little concerned.”

“Damn kif heart, you got kif heart, Pyanfar.”

“I got a hani one, same as you’re working for your own.” She laid her hand on his shoulder, even knowing it was unwelcome. “Listen, you bastard, you and I had rather deal with each other. I take your agreement. I’ll sleep with your gods-be Personage if it gets us out of this, but the first thing I got to do is get us into Meetpoint in one piece. And I want those code names and I want every godsrotted thing you’ve been holding out on me. Right up front, I want to know what’s in that message, and what kind of a deal you and Goldtooth have already made.”

He shut his eyes, blinked at the sweat. “Paper say-most this you got to know already: the stsho betray us; the human maybe ally; hani-hani not reliable; I make deal with Sikkukkut to make him hakkikt, I got also deal with tc’a-Pyanfar, you say this wrong ear, you blow Compact to hell.”

“That’s real fine. What of it we’ve got left. Keep talking.”

“Tc’a long time take knnn orders: why they change now, I don’t know. Got some crazy input from chi, damn lunatic chi got notion want go out from Chchchcho, want expand-“

“You mean the chi are pushing the knnn? Good gods, those-“

“Not sure. Maybe tc’a idea. Methane-breather be lot crazy. But knnn-we not be sure, think maybe knnn got eye on chi. Also human got lot planetaries, got lot thing knnn want, maybe; also got human-ity, number one problem. Long time problem. Stir up kif. Stir up methane-folk. Big trouble. You not know.”

“The Akkukkak business?”

“Before Akkukkak.” Jik explored a cut on his lip with his tongue and drew a deep breath. “Old hakkikktun be small stuff; lot little hakkikktun be lousy neighbor, lot trouble, steal you cargo, do little pirate stuff, easy we keep lanes clear-few hunter-ship take care these bastard number one good. Then we get fellow name Afkkek, nasty lot trouble. He go down, we get ‘nother, name Gotukkun. He got own authority, take what belong Afkkek too. After Gotukkun be Sakkfikktin. Kasotuk. Nifekekkin. Each more big.”

“Each adding his own followers to what he’d taken.”

“You got. Long time kif be fight at Akkht, lot internal stuff. Long time we know kif got more big and more big hakkikt. So we try-try push hakkikktun make difficulty with methane-folk. Sometime work good. Now-we got mistake. Big mistake. We been get human signal, longtime.”

“You asked them in? Gods blast-!”

“Not ask. We try take quiet look, see what be this kind. Lose ship. Lose two ship, we think be knnn, maybe kif take those ship. Maybe knnn same time got curiosity ’bout humanity. I think, me, I think Akkukkak set up trap, bring human, take. But we not know this: he be dead; maybe no one know.”

“Of course you didn’t share this information with anyone.”

“Who we tell? Stsho? Hani You got Tully. We don’t know what else you got. We don’t know what he tell you-I tell you, Pyanfar, you come mahen station, bring human- you trust us damn too much. ‘Cept we be friend, a? We don’t tell you all thing we know. But we fight with you keep kif off Anuurn. Lot thing then we don’t know. We got find out. You

know when Tully ‘scape kif? Lot time kif operate at Meetpoint, make trade with stsho. They got Akkukkak, got couple kif be rival-lot trouble with kif. Ana try-not know what that ship got; he know one kif ship chase ‘nother, Akkukkak come there ’cause he got no safe route else. Then he not be real happy find my partner Ana come in port. He ‘fraid stay, got other kif; ‘fraid go, ‘fraid Ana get on his tail, he got tail in vise number one good. So he sit at dock. He so damn busy watch Ana he forget watch other kif. One kif inside ship make snatch Tully; Tully run like hell down dock-you got rest. Now Ana lot worry, not know what this be, not know if this be species we know about, or be something lot different. He try find Tully. Kif try find. Tully go you ship and start damn lot trouble. Now you got stsho go crazy, all scare’ ’bout knnn, scare’ ’bout humans come, damn mad ’bout you damage station-Mahendo’sat work hard, bribe lot stsho, make so hani come back to Meetpoint. We need hani. Need balance with kif, damn sure stsho no good, tc’a and knnn lot disturb. We get hani back to Meetpoint, go try make careful new contact with humanity, try find out what they be, how big, what they minds be like-find out what knnn want.”

“And the kif took offense at it.”

“Kif damn busy big fight on Akkht. We know we got worry ‘nother hakkikt grow up; so we got make opposition, hit here, hit there, try make lot little hakkikktun. Then we got Sikkukkut. My mistake. Sikkukkut.”

“Who already had his hands into Akkhtimakt’s organization. He got that ring, Jik, that ring Tully has on his hand. He got it from a human prisoner in Akkhtimakt’s hands-Sikkukkut was already poised with his spies and his organization before we ever got to Kshshti, before you dealt with him at Mkks. This wasn’t a little provincial boss we were dealing with, this was a kif already on his way to being what he is. Sikkukkut knows humans. He was Akkukkak’s interrogator, he killed all of Tully’s crew except the one Tully killed himself, when it got that bad, Jik, and you know better than I do what it could get to. This is the gods-be kifish expert on humanity we’re dealing with, and if kif have anything like a security organization, I’m guessing some of Akkukkak’s old staff that got swept up into Akkhtimakt’s organization-never were Akkhtimakt’s. They were Sikkukkut’s partisans all along. Am I wrong?”

Jik stared at her. “You got damn good ears.”

“I’m an old trader and I know how to add. You knew this. You knew some of it; and you went right ahead and you promoted this kif of yours at every step. The wrong gods-be kif. I didn’t see it. You didn’t see it till Kefk. Jik, I could lake this dock out. I could stop this one. And that still leaves Akkhtimakt-“

“Same damn bastard. I be right, Pyanfar, still be right ’bout that one. Akkhtimakt got no bottom. Swallow everything. Sikkukkut want use everything. Ana-Ana got this idea he use human for break the kif. But if they got motive-”

“Tully’s got no reason to lie. They’re big, Jik. You’re not dealing with one human government. There’s their homeworld, but there’s two other powers. Tully’s from their homeworld. It’s fighting the other two and it wants to beat them-you tell me how. They’ve shot at the knnn. The knnn are putting up with it for reasons the gods and the knnn only know; we’ve got one human planet out there at odds with every other human in space, and there’s gods know how many worlds the other side of their homestar from us. Their homeworld is cut off, isolate, having bloodfeud with its own outposts-what in the gods’ name can you imagine we’re dealing with? What’s this lot after, when they’ve got a dozen worlds in the other direction and all of them are shooting at each other?”

“Tully say this?”

“By bits and pieces. Yes. That’s what he’s told me. We’ve just got the tail of the creature. When it turns around-“

“God.”

“If you and your earless Personage had told the same truth twice in a day we might not be in this mess. You understand me?”

“If we not got damn hani traitor, if we not got the han screw up-we both got damn fools, Pyanfar, both kind. We got be fools too? Let me go. You got one of you crew sick. You want damn good pilot, you want me sit boards, you got. You want chain me to damn chair, you got. Pyanfar. I don’t want lie down here in dark!”

She stood there on yea and nay, reached as far as the release and took her hand back. “Agreement?”

“You got.”

She pulled the first release; and the second.

And stood there remembering the power there was in a mahen arm. And the wit there was in this mahendo’sat, and all his twists and turns: make a simple move against her he would not-until it was profitable.

Fool, a small voice said, while Jik slowly lifted his hands to his face and wiped the sweat, while he groped for the edge of the table and gave every indication of weakness and disorientation. He looked apt to pitch onto his face. She made a grab for him and steadied him as he got his feet over the edge and sat there blinking and grimacing as if his head hurt considerably. He put a hand up to his brow, wiped his eyes and looked at her.

As well admit Skkukuk to the bridge during jump. Much rather admit Skkukuk-who was on their side.

Of all the things I’ve done, she thought to herself, staring into Jik’s alien eyes, this is the one I’ll deserve to die for. I know I’m making a mistake. I’m wrong. I’m going to foul up and the kif’ll launch that ship, that ship no one can stop and no one can catch, and there won’t be hani left except those of us who happen to be in space, that the kif will hunt down one by one. All because there’s this chance that we need him, and Tully, and that gods-be kif who thinks I’m his ticket to kifish glory; because I’m an old fool of a hani who’s been out in the dark too long and I can’t shake if off and think clear of it any longer.

“Pyanfar,” he said gently, “you be damn bastard.”

“Got you out, didn’t I?”

“You got.”

“You know you’re not sitting a post on this ship.”

“What you want?” He held out his hands together. “Chain to chair? Do! I want be on bridge. Want talk to my ship. Want hear my ship.”

“Hear them, I’ll give you.”

Fool, Pyanfar. This isn’t Anuurn. He isn’t hani. Parole means nothing to him weighed against his orders.

And how do I treat him like this and trust him again, ever?

“Agreement, Jik. You put this one in my hands. You stay on the bridge, but you keep your mouth shut and you keep your hands off controls.”

He turned his hands, showed blunt mahen claws which nature had never made retractable, or fine enough for the smaller controls on hani boards; and they were broken and bloody, the fingertips swollen and coated with plasm from Tirun’s caretaking: it was sure the kif had done no good for them.

She felt a cold shiver inside, a sympathetic twitch of her own claws in their retractile sheaths. But she set her face all the same. “Is that all the answer I get? Or do you give me those codewords and give us some honest help?”

He looked at her straight from under his dark brow, a hard glitter in his eyes. “I do, Pyanfar. Now you got believe what I say, a?”

 

Chapter Four

 

I am writing this in haste at Mkks. Do not hold or compromise this courier. Present crisis compels me to clarify the actions which I have taken in support of Ismehanan-min, since his lines of operation have crossed mine. I trust his report has reached you, but have placed a duplicate in the care of the Personage at Kshshti should the courier have failed. Since Stle stles stlen is not holding to treaty agreements both Ismehanan-min and I are taking measures to support other candidates and to prevent replacement of mahen personnel with hani. Here at Mkks we have retrieved all hostages and have suffered no damage at present. We are requested by Sikkukkut to add support to his candidacy by moving on Kefk. I am not apprised of Ismehanan-min’s whereabouts and do not speculate. I advance on Meetpoint by that route. All reports from tc’a sources indicate that Stle stles stlen is proceeding as in the previous report, and reports from our contact inside stsho space are not encouraging. . . .

Tc’a contacts report knnn agitation in urgent terms. . . .

I have given Ehrran a false packet. Evidently this is a stsho agent and I dispense only disinformation into this outlet. Her willingness to participate I am certain is only a means to gather information on our activities which I am sure she has gained through stsho contacts of her own and which she has twice attempted to relay through furtive contact with stsho agents, some of which have eluded the net. Our movements are reported through an efficient system of couriers and I maintain a close watch over Ehrran’s transmissions.

Thus far Chanur remains reliable. Support for this agent must be managed with extreme discretion on all levels. I would send her on to Maing Tol but I see no means to do this over Sikkukkut’s objections and considering Ehrran’s present state of mind. Therefore Chanur remains with us, under utmost priority of protection. Particularly alarming is Sikkukkut’s courting of Chanur. Leverage will have to be arranged to counter this. . . .

Pyanfar looked away from the translation on screen, and Jik, sitting in a ring of Chanur at the bridge com station, gave a pained shrug as she flattened her ears. “What kind of leverage?”

“Money,” Jik said faintly. “Debt. Like maybe-a, Pyanfar, I not arrange these thing. This gover’ment stuff. They also help. Who repair you ship, a? Who bribe Stle stles stlen get you license back?” He looked around him, at face after face, looked again as Khym leaned a huge hand on the back of the cushion, and gazed up at Khym’s glowering countenance before he thought otherwise and turned back to Pyanfar. “No good this read message,” Jik said. “Damn, you read mail you going find stuff don’t got all the truth. Truth, truth I can’t say in letter- What you want, I write to Personage say I want help friend, I say I want them do good to you? No. I do quiet. I push make Personage you friend, I push keep you out trouble, I down on knee ask Personage treat Chanur right-” I le reached and made a backhanded gesture toward the screen. “This, this be evidence in law. You know what I mean say. You don’t write down some thing. No want enemies get, not kif enemy, not hani enemy, not mane, not stsho. God, Pyanfar, you know what I try say.”

She stared at him bleakly, saw the tremor in his hand and (he pain etched around his eyes and his mouth, saw-maybe she wanted to see past the damning words on the screen.

“I know,” she said, and saw the tremor grow worse in his arm before he let it down. Proud Jik, vain Jik, pressed to give accounts he would not have given, not for any threat, except lot hope of help from the friends he had doublecrossed, with Ins ship held hostage and more than his freedom and his reputation at stake. What she saw hurt.. And rang clearer than any protestations. “I know, gods rot it, we both got a mess. Haral, what’s status on our allies out there?”

“Aja Jin and Moon Rising both report on schedule. I reported ourselves the same, all well aboard.”

“So we’ve told Kesurinan you’re fine,” Pyanfar muttered to Jik. “So what was the hope-send me off sideways about the time you made the jump with Sikkukkut to Meetpoint?”

“We not want lose you,” Jik said.

“I ought to be flattered,” she said in her throat, and looked up at the others. Tully was on the bridge with them. Everyone but Skkukuk. Tully as usual lost all of it. He looked confused. So did the crew, confused and on the edge of anger. “We got a value to the mahendo’sat,” she said. “They like their friends to survive. Gods know what else they want. It’s fair, I guess. We have certain mahendo’sat we favor more than others. No great wrong in that, as far as it goes. You’re offshift. Whole crew. Get a good meal in your stomachs: we got gods know what coming up. We got more than Meetpoint laid into Nav. If we have to.”

She looked toward Jik. Jik leaned back in his chair, folded his hands across his stomach with something more like his usual ease. His eyes were tired. But the gesture at least looked like Jik, bedraggled as he was and lacking his usual finery.

“You too,” she said. And for a moment the lids half-lowered on his eyes, the faintest of warnings.

Don’t give me orders, that was to say. I’ve had enough.

Well, it was Jik, and he was only trying to recover a bit of his dignity. She let her ears dip: all right.

Then he unfolded his arms, pried his stiffening frame out of the chair and gave himself up to Tirun Araun, who indicated the galleyward corridor.

Fool, she told herself again. It was not just Jik she was trusting. It was a mahe the mahendo’sat put ultimate confidence in, one of a few who were turned loose in the field to make decisions across lightyears too many for the central government to be consulted on every twitch and adjustment of policy-places where agents had no time to consult, and a hunter-captain like Jik had to make up his own law and make treaties and direct local ships with the authority of the whole mahen government behind him.

Personage was more than an individual back in Maing Tol and another at Iji. It was the whole concept on which the mahendo’sat concluded anything: when a mahe was right he was right as law, and when he made a mistake he fell from power. His superiors would disown him. And if he made too great a mistake the superior who appointed him might fall: so there might be more than one agent in the field making contradictory arrangements.

The most viable would be acknowledged, the agents who stood too visibly for the nonviable policies would fall from power, and the mahen government went smoothly on.

Doublecross was the standard order of business. Betrayal of each other, of everyone but the superior. That he protected his own agents was Jik’s saving honesty, and Goldtooth’s, who had run and left Jik because he had to. It took this many years in space for an old hani to understand how it worked and to understand that it worked.

And there was still the question whether Jik might turn back on an agreement he had made, and repudiate it himself.

He had made a hard one, gods knew, with Sikkukkut.

And a contradictory one with her.

She frowned, and walked on the way others had gone, into the galley, where Tirun had gotten Jik seated at table and where Haral and Hilfy and Khym and Tully were all delving into the cabinets and the freezer hunting quick-fix edibles. There was the bitter odor of dry gfi in the air: Tirun was filling a pot. There was the rattle of plastic: disposables. Pyanfar leaned on the table with both hands and looked Jik in the eyes.

“Got a question for you. Say you got two agreements, you, yourself. And the people you made them with-get at odds. How do you resolve that?”

Jik frowned. His eyes still wept. His sweat smelled of ammonia and drug even yet. “You, Sikkukkut?”

“Me and Sikkukkut.”

“I keep best agreement.”

“The one that serves the mahendo’sat best.”

“A.” He blinked and gazed at her like a tired child. “Always.”

“Just wondered,” she said. “In case.”

Something else occurred to her, when she turned to the cabinet and took a packet of dried meat out of the storage.

Jik had just, for whatever reason, told the truth. Against his own Personage and all those interests. Which made him, in mahen terms, a dishonest man.

Gods, what’s gotten into us on this ship? We got nobody aboard who hasn’t gone to the wrong side of her own species’ business-Tully, Skkukuk, all us of Chanur and Malm: now Jik’s sliding too.

Treason’s catching, that’s what it is.

She got a cup, wrinkled her nose as Khym dosed his gfi with tofi. She poured her own from the fastbrewer, looked back at their unlikely crew crowded into the galley. At Jik sitting disconsolate and hurting and trying his best to choke down a sandwich and a cup of reconstituted milk; no one in Chanur put off any temper on him, not Hilfy and not Khym either.

So. Crew was going to give him a chance. For their own reasons, which might include latitude for the captain’s judgment; but maybe because of past debts.

It was hard, being hani, not to think like one. There were times they had been as glad to see Jik as he had surely been to see her come after him on Harukk. Even if on his side it was all policy and politics. He had saved their skins many a time.

Even if it was always to bet them again.

 

Chur slitted open her eyes, wrinkled her nose and blinked sleepily at her sister. Her heart sped a bit. She had dreamed of black things in the corridors, had dreamed of something loose on the ship. Noise in the corridors. It felt as if some time had passed.

And Geran had noted that little increase in pulse rate. Geran had this disconcerting habit of taking glances at the monitors while she talked, and whenever she reacted to anything. Geran’s be-ringed ears flicked at what she saw now; and it was a further annoyance that the screen was hard to see from flat on one’s back.

“We got Jik out,” Geran said.

Chur blinked again. So much that came and went was illusion and it was the good things she most distrusted, the things she really wanted to believe. “He all right?”

“Knocks and bruises and the like. Told Tirun he’d run into a wall trying to leave. Likely story. You know you never get the same thing twice out of him. How are you feeling?”

“Like I ran into the same wall. What’d you do to that gods-be machine? You put me out?”

“Got pretty noisy around here. I thought you might need the sleep.” •

“In a mahen hell you did!” Chur lifted her head and shoved her free elbow under her. “You want my heartbeat up?”

“Lie down. You want mine up?”

“What happened out there?” She sank back, her head swimming, and tried to focus. “Gods, I still got that stuff in me. Cut it out, Geran. F’gods sakes, I’m tired enough, hard enough to go against the wind-“

“Hey.” Geran took her by the shoulder.

“I’m awake, I’m awake.”

“You want to try to eat something?”

“Gods, not more of that stuff.”

Foil rustled. A sickly aroma hit the air, which was otherwise sterile and medicated. Food, any food was a trial. Chur nerved herself and cooperated as Geran lifted her head on her arm and squirted something thin and salty into her mouth. She licked her mouth and took a second one, not because she wanted it. It was enough.

“Not so bad,” she said. It was so. She had missed salt. It did something more pleasant in her mouth than the last thing Geran had brought her. She cautiously estimated its course to her stomach and felt it hit bottom and lie there gratefully inert. She looked up at Geran, who had a desperately hopeful look on her face. “You worried about something, Gery?”

The ears flicked. “We’re doing all right.”

Lie.

” Where’s those gods-be black things?”

“Got ’em all penned up again.” Change of subject. Geran looked instantly relieved. And the traitor machine beeped with an increased heartbeat. Geran looked back at it and the facade fell in one agonized glance.

“We under attack?” Chur asked.

“We’re prepping for jump,” Geran said.

Scared Gods, Gery, you’d send a monitor off the scale-

“Huhn,” Chur said. “What’re you thinking? That I won’t make it?”

“Sure, you’ll make it.”

“How far’re we going?”

Geran’s ears went flat and lifted again. There was a drawing round her nose, like pain. “Home, one of these days.”

“Multiple jump?”

“Don’t think so.”

“Maybe, huh?”

“Gods rot it, Chur-“

/ haven’t got the strength. I can’t last it out. Look at her. Gods, look at her. “Listen. You mind your business up for’ard f’godssakes, what d’you want, me make it fine and you marry this ship up with a rock? You pull it together. Me, I’m fine back here. Back here feeding me-” The monitor started going off again. She let it. “When’d you eat, huh? Take care of yourself. I got to worry whether you’re doing your job up there?”.

“No ” Geran said. She gave a furtive glance at the monitor and composed herself sober as an old lord. “I just want to make sure you get anything into your stomach you can.”

“Don’t trust this machine, do you? I make you a deal. You cut that gods-be sedative out of the works and I’ll try to eat. Hear me?”

“Stays the way they set it.”

The monitor beeped again.

“Gods fry that rotted thing!” Chur cried, and the beep became a steady pulse. Geran reached and hit the interrupt; and it prevented the flood of sedative.

“Quiet,” Geran said.

She subsided. Her temples ached. The room came and went. But in the center of it Geran stayed in unnatural focus, like hunter-vision, hazed around the edges.

/ can think my way home, she thought, which was rankest insanity, the maundering of a weakened brain. Just got to hold onto the ship and get there with it.

That was crazy. But for a moment she seemed to pass outside the walls, know activity in the ship, feel the rotation of Kefk station, the whirling of the sun, a hyperextension like the timestretch of jump, where time and space redefined themselves. An old spacer could take that route home. She could not have explained it to a groundling, never to anyone who had not flown free in that great dark-she stopped being afraid. It was very dangerous. She could see the currents between the stars, knew the dimplings and the holes, the shallows and the chasms planets and stars made. She smiled, having mindstretched that far, and still being on her ship.

/ can think the way home. Bring us all home.

“Chur?”

“I’ll be with you,” she said. “No worry. Wish they could move this godsrotted rig onto the bridge.” She shut her eyes a moment, shut that inward eye that beckoned to all infinity, then looked at Geran quite soberly. “When?”

 

“Bring him, captain?” It was not Tirun Araun’s way to question orders; but there was reason enough, and Pyanfar let her ears down and up again in a kind of shrug that got a diffident flattening from Tirun’s ears and put a little stammer in Tirun’s mouth. “That is to say-“

“Skkukuk’s not the one I’m worried about,” Pyanfar said quietly. They were outside the lift, in upper main, and the ship hummed and thumped with tests and closures, auto-rigging for a run. And if there was a place Tirun ought to be it was at her boards down on lowerdeck, in their cargo bridge; and The Pride ought to have a cargo to carry, and a trader’s honest business. But those days were past for them. There was only something dreadful ahead; and she went from one to another of the crew and spoke with them, quietly, of things that had to be done, and never of the situation they were in. With Tirun it was just a matter of giving her orders, and of telling her, obliquely, in that way they had talked for forty years and more, that she knew that she asked a great

deal; and Tirun’s worried look settled and became quiet again, still as deep water. “How many rings you got, cousin?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Tirun flicked her ears and set the ones she wore to swinging. ” ‘Bout many as proves I’ve got good sense, captain.”

“We get out of this one, cousin, I’ll buy you a dozen more.”

“Huh.” Tirun said. “Well, I got enough. We get out of this one, captain, you and I’ll both be surprised, and that son Sikkukkut no more than most.”

“All of our allies will,” Pyanfar said. “Skkukuk’s safe. He’s on this ship, isn’t he? Kif don’t understand that kind of suicide. You know Jik had to explain to Sikkukkut we’d really blow the ship? Couldn’t figure why you’d do that. You can tell a kif about it all you like. He’ll think it’s a lie. A bluff. Skkukuk’s no different, I think. Tell the son I’m going to give him a job to do: he’ll handle kif-com. I’m putting him under Hilfy’s orders.”

“My gods, cap’n.”

“Tully’s sitting com too, this jump. No choice, is there? You’ve got to handle armaments-this time for real, I’m very much afraid; and back up Haral, and keep an eye on scan: I’m putting Jik in Chur’s seat, but his board stays locked, whatever condition his hands are in; and sure as rain falls down I’m not giving him com. While we’re at Kefk we’ve got one excuse; at Meetpoint we may have to contrive another. But I don’t want to put him between his ethics and our survival. Gods know, maybe it’ll take something off his shoulders, in some bizarre turn of the mahen mind. He wants to help us; he wants to carry out his own orders; he probably wants to save Goldtooth’s neck in spite of what the bastard did to him, he wants a whole lot of things that are mutually exclusive. Or that may turn that way in a hurry. And gods know I don’t want him in reach of your board and the guns.”

“He won’t like Skkukuk there.”

“He’ll know why, though. I figure he’ll know inside and out why that is.”

“Him knowing the kif and all, yes.”

“Him knowing the kif and knowing what his own side wants from him, gods save him-gods save us from mahendo’sat and all their connivances. And watch Goldtooth, cousin, for the gods’ own sakes, if we do spot him, keep us a line of fire there. I don’t like the rules in this game either, but we didn’t make them up. They’re his, they’re that bastard Sikkukkut’s, and gods know who else has a finger in it. Watch them all.”

“Aye,” Tirun said in a hoarse, faint voice. “Them and Ehrran.”

“Everyone else for that matter. I don’t know a friend we’ve got.”

“Tahar,” Tirun said.

“Tahar,” she recalled.

A pirate and an outlaw.

 

And: “I’ve got Skkukuk?” Hilfy said. Her jaw had dropped, her ears were flat.

Pyanfar nodded. They stood where she had caught up with Hilfy, in the galley. And Tully sat sipping a cup of gfi, his blue eyes following their moves and his human, immobile ears taking in the whole of it. His com-translator would whisper it to him.

“Luck of the draw. He’s sitting down by Tirun on the jumpseat, but he’ll be working off your board. Just keep your finger by the cutoff. If we have to. And get your wits about you when we come out of the drop. I have to ask you this: how good are you on kifish nuance?”

“I’m good.”

“Objective assessment: good enough to pick up the subtleties in a kif’s transmissions?”

Hilfy paused, and gathered her cup off the counter. She glanced Tully’s way and back again. There was clearest sanity in her golden eyes. “I know what you’re saying. No. But Skkukuk can do it. What I’ve got to do is watch what he-‘s saying. And be fast on the cutoff.”

“You tell me this: is a kif going to damage a ship he’s on?”

Hilfy thought about that one too. Her ears dropped and lifted again. “No,” she said. “Not when you put it that way. But there is a point he’d turn on us.”

“He’d be alone. Crew wouldn’t go along with him the way it might on a kifish ship. Kifish crew’d turn on their captain and mutiny. Hani won’t. I think maybe Skkukuk’s got a glimmering of that. It’ll make him behave.”

Again a dip of Hilfy’s ears. One ring swung there. But the eyes were not that young any longer. “I tell you what that son’s thinking. He’s thinking the crew’s conserving its own position and it’s rallied around you out of fear of him. That’s what he’s thinking. He’s thinking if we got into trouble we’d do a real stupid thing, standing by you just for fear of him. He thinks if we prove tough enough other hani will join us on Sikkukkut’s side. It’s all very simple to him. One thing I’ve found the kif astonishingly free of is species-prejudice.”

“I think you’re right.”

That seemed to soothe some raw spot in Hilfy. The ears came up again, pricked in an expression that made her look young again. And they flagged when she looked at Tully.

So you’re not a fool, Pyanfar thought. Thank the gods great and lesser. And did not miss that distracted look that passed between those two. No species-prejudice there either. Too little species prejudice. O Hilfy, you’re a long way from home and gods-be if I care if you’re two outright fools in that regard. I ought to be shocked. I can’t even find it anymore. Gods save you both, I hope you’ve done what I don’t even want to think about. I hope you’ve had a little bit of what I’ve had forty years of.

And what kind of thinking’s that?

 

Khym was sleeping when she came into their quarters. She dropped the trousers on the floor, quietly, pocket-gun and all; and came and got into the bowl-shaped bed, down in the middle of it where he was, a huge warm lump all hard with muscle and tucked up like a child. She put her arms around his back, buried her head against his shoulder. He turned over and nuzzled her shoulder.

Sleep, she wished him, with a bit of regret. Among pleasures in life a warm bed and a nap in her husband’s arms was not the least. She had not the heart to wake him, not when he was this far gone.

“Py,” he murmured, in that breathy rumble of his voice at whisper. And bestirred himself, perhaps for his own sake, perhaps just in that way a man would who knew he was wanted: matter of kindness, for a tired wife who came to him for refuge. What they did had nothing to do with time of year. That would have shocked the old gray whiskers back home. Wives and husbands were a seasonal matter: men were always in and wives got around to it when they were home, by ones and twos and, in spring, a confounded houseful of women with hairtrigger tempers and demands on a single, harried man; then the house lord got round to driving out all the young men who had overstayed their childhood, before some scandal happened: young women went to roving, older sisters heaved out any near-adult brother the lord happened not to take exception to. It was housecleaning, annual as the spring rains.

A spacer missed the seasons. She just came home when she got the chance, and tried to make it coincide with spring, a little visit to her brother Kohan, who was glassy-eyed and distracted with affairs in Chanur at such a time, she paid a little courtesy to his wives and any sister or cousin who lived in the house or just happened to be home-

-then it was up in decent leisure to Mahn in the hills, where Khym and his groundling wives held court. His other wives had never much gotten in her way: they were outfought and knew it, and hated her cordially in that way of rivals who knew she would be gone within a week or two, back to her ship and her gadding about again: if one had to have a rival one could not shove out, best at least she be the sort who was seldom home.

Now where were those wives? Hating her still, because she had him to herself at last and he was not decently dead, in his defeat? They would pity him and hate her, and call it all indecent, as if he himself had not had a choice in the world about being snagged up onto a Chanur ship and carried away to a prolonged and unnatural preservation. It ruined his reputation. It touched on their honor. Likely they imagined just such lascivious and libertine unseasonal things as she had led him into, or worse, that he was the prize of all the crew.

She thought about that. “What do you think,” she said into his ear, “do you think you’d object to one of the crew now and again? How do you feel about that?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I mean- they’re-” He was quiet a long time. “They’re friends.”

“I don’t mean you should.” She brushed his mane straight, dragged a clawtip along beside his ear. “I never meant that. I was asking if you ever wanted to.”

”They’re your friends.”

She felt his heart beating faster. Like panic. And cursed herself for bringing it up at all. “They never asked. Gods, what a mess. Don’t even think about it. I’m sorry I said it. I just felt sorry for them.”

“So do I. I’d do it. Tell them that if you want to. Like friends. I think they’d be sensible about it. I think I could be.”

Ask sensible of a man. Trust him. Gods, that’s what’s changed, isn’t it? He’s steady as a rock. He wouldn’t play games about it. They wouldn’t, with him. They respect him. They’d treat him like a sister-in crew matters. Not one of them is petty and not one is the sort that has to prove a point in bed or after. You know that about women you work with for forty years; and they’d know he was a loan. I’d take that risk for them.

But what’s good for him, that matters; that, they’d never question. Gods know I wouldn’t.

“I think you could trust them,” she said. “It’s all of them if it’s one, you understand that. I’m just telling you it’s all right with me. Won’t make me happy or unhappy. I just thought- well, if it ever does happen, you don’t have to slip around about it.”

“I never-!”

“I know that. I’m just telling you how I feel. If it’s ever one, it’s all. Remember it. Gods, back home I’d drop in on you for a hand of days and shove your other wives out; been the longest five days yet, hasn’t it? I’m feeling guilty about hanging onto you so long. It’s getting obsessive. I thought maybe, if things settle down again-” Thoughts crowded in that made it all remote and hopeless and stupid even to talk about it; but it was peace that she had come here for: she shoved Meetpoint aside and pretended. “Well, I thought I ought to give you a little breathing room. I shove you into my room, I don’t give you much choice, do I? I want you to

know you’ve got a berth on this ship. On your own. As much as you want to be. Or where you want to be. You want not to share my bed a while, that’s fine. I’d miss you. But I don’t want you ever to think that’s what you’re aboard for.”

“I’m aboard because I’m a total fool.” A frown was on his face, rumpling up his brow. “The rest came later. Py, don’t talk like this.”

“Gods, you don’t understand.”

“I don’t own this ship. It’s Kohan’s. I can’t come here, bed his kin-“

Male thinking, hindend-foremost and illusionary. Downworld thinking. It infuriated her in him, when so much else was extraordinary. “This ship is mine, gods rot it,. Kohan’s got nothing to do with it. And if you want to bed down with Skkukuk, he’s mine, too. I’ll also shred your ears.”

That struck him funny. And wrinkled his nose in disgust.

“I didn’t consult with Kohan,” she said. “I don’t consult. You know gods-be well how the System works, how it always worked, your sweat and your blood and you never owned a gods-be thing. Now you really do. Something you can’t lose. You can do as you godsblessed please, and you do it, husband. Forty years I’ve been out here. You’ve been here two and already your thinking’s skewed. You at least listen to my craziness. All those years in Mahn, you used to ask me what the stars were like. Now you know what I come from, why I didn’t get along with the rest of the women . . . why I never could make our daughter understand me. Tahy thinks I’m crazy. Some kind of pervert, probably. Kara knows I am. I just can’t get excited about what they think down there. I don’t have those kind of nerves anymore. Their little laws don’t seem important to me. That’s dangerous, I think. I don’t know how to get back to where I was. None of us do. Haral’s got a bastard daughter off in Faha; Tirun’s got a son somewhere still alive, left him in Gorun. Gods know they usually take precautions. But they’ve never married; they never will; they just take their liberties down in Hermitage with whatever takes their fancy, and I don’t ask. You know why they do that? I was lucky. My sister Rhean-one spring that we coincided down in Chanur I asked her how her husband was, you know, not a loaded question. But she got this look like she was dying by inches: ‘Pyanfar,’ she said, ‘the man doesn’t know where Meetpoint is. He doesn’t know what it is. That’s how my husband is.’ And I never asked her. That’s lord Fora she was talking about.”

“He’s not stupid, I knew him in Hermitage.”

“No, he’s not stupid. Rhean just can’t talk to him. Her world isn’t where he lives. His isn’t where she lives. Nowadays she comes home as little as she can. If she could go to Hermitage and do her planettime there, I think she would far rather. A man you pick up in the hills, he’ll pretend you’re all his dreams, won’t he?”

“You ever do it?”

She hesitated. Which was as good as yes. She shrugged. “Not after we were married.”

“A Morhun found me like that; and left me a week later. Me, a kid out in the bush, hoping for an ally. Playing games with a boy like that-that’s cruel.”

“I was honest about it. I said I was down on leave. When I was. When I was younger than that I was honestly looking.”

“No boy of that age’d know you meant gone in the morning. No boy would know that that ship’s worth more to you than he ever could be. No boy would know he couldn’t follow you where you’d go, that the territory you want isn’t- isn’t something he could take for you. And he’d want to lay the whole world in your lap, Py, any man would want to, and he’d try to talk to you and maybe learn by morning he couldn’t give you anything you cared about. That’s a hard thing, Py. It was hard for me.”

“You were lord of Mahn!”

“I was lord of the place you used to go hunting, the house you lived in when you wanted a rest. I was a recreation. I never could give you anything. And I wanted to give you everything.”

“O gods, Khym. I said I was lucky.”

“But I could never give you anything. And I wanted to. When I went up to Gaohn to fight for you, gods, it was the first time I ever felt I was worth anything. When you wanted me to go with you-well, I followed you off like some boy out of Hermitage, didn’t I? Go off and fight our way up in the world like two teenaged kids? Didn’t know then the size of the farm you had picked out for me to take. Gods, what an ambition you’ve got! Give you a spacestation or two, shall I?”

“Gods, I wish you could.” For a moment Meetpoint was back in bed with them. The room felt cold. His arms tightened. He gave her what he had, and she still did not know whether it was out of duty or out of his own need; but at least it was a free gift, not something she demanded by being there. That was what she hoped they had won, after all these years, and this far removed from all the rules.

“You never were a recreation,” she said. “You were my sanctuary. The place I could go, the ear that would listen.”

“Gods help me, my other wives always knew who I was waiting for. Who I was always waiting for. They took it out on Tahy and Kara. I tried to stop that. Py, I spent thirty-odd years buying my other wives off our kids’ backs and it didn’t work.”

It was like a light going on, illuminating shadow-spots. Corners of the old house at Mahn she had never seen. The reason of so many things, so evident, and so elusive. “You never told me, rot it.”

“The times you were home-were too good. And you couldn’t stay. I knew that. I did what I could.”

Gods, I poisoned the whole house. All the other marriages. Ruined my kids-hurt Chanur in the long run, when my daughter turned on Khym and took our staunchest ally out. My doing. All of it mine.

He sighed, a motion of his huge frame against her. “I didn’t mean to say that. Gods blast, Py, I just fouled it up, is all.”

That was his life. That was why he walked on eggshells round those women, lost the kids. O gods. Lost Mahn alone, finally. And came back to Chanur like a beggar when I finally came home. Alienated his sisters. Everything. His sisters-for an outsider. They couldn’t forgive that. And the wives’ clans too. All for one wife. That’s crazy.

But, gods, what I’ve done-for a husband. I think I love this great fool. Isn’t that something? Love him like he was clan and kin. Like he was some part of me. It’s gotten all too close. He needs someone else for balance. Some sense of perspective. So do I. And I’m not interested. Handsomest man on Anuurn could walk in stark naked, I’d rather Khym. Always would. And he’d rather me. I never saw that part of it. I never saw that that was always what was wrong with us, and look what it did. We did so much damage, never meaning to; I did so much to him. Gods, I wish I could turn him over to the others.

They wouldn’t know how to treat him but they’d try. Even Tirun.

He wants so much to be one of them. That’s what he really wants. And they’d forget that. They’d forget because I can’t tell them any way I could make them understand what goes on in him.

Haral would. Haral might make a dent in Tirun, the old reprobate: gods, Khym, if you knew what good behavior Tirun’s been on-not laid a hand on you, has she? Because you’re mine. She’d go off and get drunk with you and take you home nice as milk, she would, because she’s onship and you’re offlimits and gods know she likes you, thinks you’re something special. I don’t know. She might be the real lady with you, you’re so much the gentleman. Funny what a crooked line we walk.

No, if you knew either side of Tirun, really knew her, you’d like her.

Geran and Chur-Gods. I wish you’d known them before this mess. So pretty. But deep water, both of them. And dark. You don’t ever pick a fight with either. But they’ve got a godsrotted broad sense of humor . . . never told you those stories. Not planetside. They don’t go down so much. Not comfortable around groundlings. That’s the awful thing: sometimes you want the land under your feet and the sun on your back, and then you’ve got to deal with the people that live there.

And Hilfy-you see what’s going on, her and Tully? My poor, conservative, ex-groundling man-not a flicker. We’re too well-bred. We don’t see. We don’t know what to do about it, so we don’t see; and we wish them by the gods well, because you and I, Khym, we’re on the downside of our years and we’ve got enough to do just to do for ourselves, in the mess we’re in.

You couldn’t sleep with Hilfy; never her. She’s the odd one out. Species she can get across. But the generations she can’t bridge. Can’t figure me out; gods, she can’t figure herself out. You’d confuse everything. And you’re uncle to her, you always will be, even if you haven’t a corpuscle in common. You’re her substitute for Kohan. She loves her father so much. That’s why she fusses over you like a little grandmother.

Bring her out here, never give her a stopover at home, and her in the growing years-She takes what she can. It was all so pat for us. And we wasted so much time. Good for her, I think. Good for Hilfy.

Thank the gods you’re here.

 

2342 and The Pride was stretching muscles, electronic impulses sending tests down to systems aft and bringing internal support up full, while lights on the bridge flickered and instruments blipped, routine departure-prep.

Given a kifish ship still stationary over station axis, bow-down so that its guns were constantly in line with every ship on the rotating station, but most notably the ones whose systems were now live, the ones full of non-kif who thought non-kifish and unpredictable thoughts.

But they kept com flowing naturally between The Pride and station central, which was partly Harukk personnel. And com operations went on likewise between The Pride and Aja Jin and Tahar’s Moon Rising, nothing compromising in any fashion, just the necessary coordination of three ships which planned to put out close together. There was still the coder they might have used. There were languages the kif might not understand.

There was also that ship over their heads, and mindful of that and of the firepower here gathered, they refrained from all such options.

“Hilfy,” Pyanfar said, “take message on your three: first thing at Meetpoint, auto that escape course out to both our partners.”

“Aye,” Hilfy said. “Understood.”

Hilfy and Haral and Tully were all settled in, Khym was settling. Haral was still running Geran’s station from the co-pilot’s board, but that was all perfunctory: there was not

one gods-be thing scan could tell them at this point. If the kif decided to fire, they fired. That was all. And lost part of their station doing it.

“Geran come,” Tully said, doing- gods witness, the service Hilfy had drilled him on at that board: he had a pick to use where his poor clawless fingers had not a chance, he stuck it into the right holes in the right sequence, and he was at least adequate to keep an ear to internal operations. Even trusting him with that was taking a chance: Tirun was downside with Skkukuk and Jik was loose, but Pyanfar got a firm grip on her nerves and figured that (gods save them from such insanity) Tirun and Skkukuk between them could handle Jik if he had something inventive in mind.

While Tully, in a good moment and with the gods’ own luck on his side, might handle an emergency call down there: The Pride’s autorecognition was set on the word Priority, which no one let past their teeth during ops if it was not precisely that: Priority got flashed to Hilfy’s board and Haral’s simultaneously, and Tully would have to make an unlikely sequence of mistakes to take the lower corridors off wide open monitor.

Geran arrived, she saw that in the conveniently reflective monitor, a shadow arriving from the main topside corridor, larger and larger until the bridge lights picked out Geran’s red-brown coloring and the glint of the gold in her ear-rims. “H’lo,” Geran said. After putting Chur to bed, and walking out of that room. With all the chance of finality. H’lo, to Hilfy, when Geran normally said nothing at all when she walked on-shift. I’m all right, that meant. Don’t doubt I’m on.

“We’re routine right now,” Hilfy said quietly. Which was the right tack to take with Geran. No fuss. No emotional load. Pyanfar kept an ear to it all and keyed an acknowledgment to dockside’s advisement they were about to withdraw power.

“Tirun,” Tully said.

“I’ve got it,” Khym said, second-com, picking that up; and: “Right. I’ll tell him. Na Jik, you’ll come topside now; Tirun’s on her way.”

“Geran,” Pyanfar said on bridge-com, “Jik’s in your charge. Best I can do.” There was the matter of Jik’s hands, which would heal of injuries in the several day subjective transit before systemfall; but recuperation and jump was not a matter she wanted to open up with Geran at the moment. “I don’t much want him on your elbow, but I haven’t got a place else to put him.”

“I’ll watch him.”

Enough said, then. If Geran buckled there was still Tirun on Jik’s other side. And that left Tully down at that end of the boards with Skkukuk. She might have put Khym in that seat. But Khym was getting used to the com board; he was actually worth something with it in a pinch. Putting Khym at Tirun’s confusing second-switcher post handed him a system that had a completely different set of access commands, Tully could learn a sequence from scratch; Khym, jump-muzzy and in emergency, might touch a control he thought he knew. Disastrously.

“Yes, Harukk-com,” Hilfy said. “That data is current. Captain, they’re inquiring again on departure time and routing.”

“It stands as instructed.”

Uncoupling began, a series of crashes as The Pride disengaged itself from dock under Haral’s signal to the other side of that station wall, and Haral’s touch at the controls of her board. There was the low drone of Khym’s voice, making routine advisements to the dockers and station com, and Hilfy’s voice talking quietly to Aja Jin and Moon Rising. “Captain,” Tully said, “Tirun come.”

“Got that,” Pyanfar murmured.

If Tirun was on her way, that was the last and they were going to make schedule easily. So much the better with nervous kif all about. Pyanfar flicked her ears and settled her nerves, while The Pride’s operating systems made noise enough to mask the lift and rob them of other cues to movement in the ship. There were the telltales on the board-if she chose to key the matrix over to access-monitor. Her nose twitched at the mere thought of Skkukuk in proximity. She dared not take the allergy pills. She needed her reflexes. She rubbed her itching nose fiercely with the back of her hand, curled her lip, and looked up at the convenient reflection in a dead monitor as the gleam of the lift’s internal light reflected a motley assortment of silhouettes in the distance down the corridor at her back.

Her eyes flicked to the chrono.

2304.

“Moon Rising reports all ready,” Hilfy said.

“Got that,” Haral said.

Tahar was showing off. Flouting the schedule on the short side. Which took work.

Tahar clan was Tahar clan, even when it owed Chanur its mortgaged hide.

The lift door had closed back there. The shadows in the reflective glass had come closer. Pyanfar slowly rotated her chair to face the last-comers. Courtesy. Tirun walked beside Jik, Jik beside Skkukuk’s dark-robed shape. They had washed Jik’s clothes for him, had not even dared have clean ones couriered over from Aja Jin, for fear of rousing kifish suspicions. And someone of the crew must have lent him the bracelet on his arm. The kif had robbed him of the gaudy lot of chain he usually wore.

“This person,” Skkukuk said the moment he got through the door, “this person refuses your order, hakt’.”

“He means the gun,” Tirun said.

“We don’t carry firearms up here,” Pyanfar said patiently. With spectacular patience, she thought. “Nor do we change captains under fire.” With an internal shudder and a thought toward Jik: / hope. “Tirun will give you instructions. If you’re that good, prove it.”

So much for kifish psych.

But the son moved. Jik was still looking at her.

“How my ship?” he asked, very quiet, very civilized. She would not have been that restrained, under similar circumstances.

“Hilfy, give his station that comflow on receiving only.”

“Aye,” Hilfy said. “It’s in.”

“That’s scan two,” Pyanfar said, meaning seat assignment; and he gave a short, more than decent nod of his dark head and went to belt in, wincing a bit as he sat down. He spoke quietly to Geran; and Pyanfar found her claws clenched in the upholstery: she released her grip, carefully; and turned her seat around again.

2313.

“We’re on count,” Haral said. “Aja Jin reports ready. We’re on.”

“Stand by.”

”We going to show the hakkikt punctuality?”

She considered the potential for provocation. Considered the kif. And considered another possibility as she put their engines live. There was another set of switches by her hand, safety-locked by a whole string of precautions which they had a program now to bypass. Input three little codes and that set of key-slots would light. And The Pride would have a last chance to take out a space station full of kif, a handful of innocent methane-breathers; a doublecrossing allied ship that held one of two plans for a mahen hegemony over the Compact; a kif who was very close to having a kifish hegemony, and who with cold intent, threatened the whole hani species. Half the whole problem in the Compact was sitting right here at this station, with the solution within reach of her hand; and for one ship to take out half the problems in the immediate universe was not a bad trade, as trades went.

It also assured by default the immediate success of their rivals, whose intentions were also mahen and kifish hegemonies, maybe a human one, a methane-breather action, and the immediate collapse of the stsho and then the han into the control of one or the other hegemonies. Which meant years of bloody fighting. Not taking into account humanity, which was already at odds within its own compact, and whose ships they knew were armed.

Take out one set of contenders here or make Jik’s throw for him and play power against power.

She was not even panicked in contemplating that sequence of bypasses. She felt only a numb detachment: she could give it, and only Haral would know; Haral would look her way with a slight flattening of the ears and never pass the warning to the crew. Just a look that said: / know. Here we go.

Perhaps Haral was thinking the same thing about now, that it was one last chance, while their nose was still into the station’s gut and they were an indisputable part of station mass. Haral went on flicking switches, the shut-down of certain systems no longer necessary, along with the check of systems-synchronization and docking jets.

2314.

“We break on the mark,” Pyanfar said in the same tone in which they threw those checkout sequences back and forth. “Advise them down the line. Advise station.”

“Aye,” Haral said. “Hilfy.”

“I got it,” Hilfy said.

The minute ticked down.