Chanur's Homecoming (29 page)

Three hundred-thousand stsho, Pyanfar. Vulnerable and helpless, whatever breaks around them.

Ask the kif to let them go?

What reason? What reason can I think of?

"Better restock that downside freezer, huh? How close are we to full tanks?"

"Three quarters, last I looked. Haral's running checks on systems. She had to cancel that linguistics run in favor of the course plot, cap'n; sorry about that."

"Sorry. My gods. Get. Go. Out of here is all we got time for; tell her I want that course sequence as tight as she can shave it down, no waste time, everything up to cap. Time's what we can't buy."

"Here, here, here," Jik said, using a light-pen to mark the moves on the computer monitor, and the 3-d rotating model obligingly paced itself through its level-changes: he had brought both fiche and software key aboard when he came, and the mahen-installed comp suddenly displayed unguessed virtuosities. "Same come in maybe Tt'a'va'o, maybe V'n'n'u."

Geran made a sound deep in her throat, slow and full of omen. "We got the whole mess shoved off into hani space is what we got."

Jik said nothing at all to that. He had a mouthful of sandwich. He had not stopped for food on Aja Jin and arrived opportunely for a handout from The Pride's galley. Pyanfar gulped a mouthful of gfi and blinked with the heat of it while she watched the display run its paces.

Tauran clan was on their way down the docks, with everything they could carry. Tirun was down there in the airlock with Skkukuk on guard at the foot of the ramp, preparing to receive them with their baggage. An eerie quiet hung all about them, Harukk and its chosen few bound out from dock in whatever business it chose, the station itself subject to kifish piracies she had no wish to think of; and saw every time she shut her eyes-the wretches on Harukk, pale and fragile and physiologically incapable of violence, not even to save their minds or their lives.

A destruct mechanism on the station might be set to blow on a signal sent from outsystem. That was possible too, if someone were totally ruthless: if someone like Akkhtimakt, with no sympathy for three hundred thousand stsho, had mined the station exterior, the whisper of a transmission arriving at lightspeed to some receptor could blow the station's vulnerable skin. On certain vectors they would never know it till it blew, even if they were listening. Gods knew she had no wish to give Sikkukkut any ideas he did not conceive of on his own, by warning him of the possibility. Neither did she want to stay connected to the station any longer than she had to.

In the meanwhile she sat drinking gfi and watching a wobbly-tired mahe trying to reconstruct diagrams out of his memory and a computer's help, and listening to him make mis-identifications once and twice and catch himself.

They both needed help. Food was no substitute for rest. And they had soon to move out and start ops for a long, risky jump. Pumps were filling the tanks to capacity. Khym was wandering about readying all the duty stations, setting up everything they had to have to keep them going.

Thank gods for a backup crew on this one.

We're laying ourselves wide open, Tahar and Chanur both-to mutiny and murder. You'll understand us at close range or you'll kill us on the way home.

That was what she implied in that offer. And all the captains knew it; while presumably Sikkukkut and even Skkukuk just thought she had all her compatriots sufficiently bluffed.

Gods hoped they understood, because one hani ship would not be able to talk anything but ops with another of their ships so long as they had their kifish escort; and that meant all the way home.

She watched the red and green marks grow on the screen as Jik built the patterns, and sipped her drink and ate her sandwich.

And slowly the wider implications of what Jik was constructing dawned on her.

Longtime moves. Very longtime moves.

The kif had not lied: the mahendo'sat scheme had been aimed at the kif from the start, a series of operations stretching back to the days when Akkukkak had been the threat. And even before that. Mahendo'sat owned far more than the few hunter-ships they were supposed to have, which meant shipbuilding and secrecy-heavy secrecy, to have kept the whisper of that construction out of the rumor mill.

Gods knew what the kif had been doing during that time. Or what the mahendo'sat knew and what the kif knew about their own intentions that they were not telling and that even Jik might not know the truth of.

Gods knew too, what both kif and mahendo'sat knew about humanity; or how long ago they had known it; and how much truth anyone was telling in that department.

And right now and to this hour, if Jik could get his hands on Tully, she feared, in some dark corner of The Pride, Jik would ask him some very hard questions; and perhaps Goldtooth had done that, when he had had Tully aboard Mahijiru, and, irony of ironies, gotten distrust. Likely Tully had done his don't-understand-you act. He was very good at it. And gods knew-perhaps Tully's instincts about when to use that silence were better than any of them believed.

Tully had asked her once, with distress wrinkling up his smooth brow, whether Goldtooth was on their side or not. She had not suspected the full implications of it then, or the extent of the pressure Goldtooth might have been putting on him. Or why Goldtooth had jerked him alone away from the human crew that was traveling on the mahen ship Ijir, before it fell into Akkhtimakt's grasp.

Being taken off that foredoomed ship was Tully's good fortune; indisputable. But she remembered his face when he had seen her aboard Mahijiru, remembered an expression she could read a little better now in retrospect, the terrible stress and the relief with which he had flung himself toward her and wrapped his arms around her, shivering and smelling of fear.

Friend, he had said over and over, said it repeatedly, with a worried look, during that early part of the voyage; but he had kept what he had known behind his teeth. . . . while dissension among them, the normal stresses of the crew, any hint of violence-had sent Tully into a panic that was not at all reasonable in their old friend. He had become afraid of them, in the isolation of his translator-interpreted environment, missing virtually all the nuances and the subtleties of what was said around him. He had lived in doubt of them right down to the moment he betrayed his own kind with a warning not to trust humanity.

Tully's was a treason unlike Jik's complicated diagrams. But not simple at all. She watched Tully sitting at scan-monitor, his face-gods, she had even gotten used to it- intent on that screen, seeming lost in his autistic world while the alien babble went on. He was listening; she would bet a great deal on it. He was a great deal like Jik on some levels. That was the anomaly. He did his work. He came with her time and again onto a kifish ship, which had to be terrible to him. But kif were not his greatest fear. She sensed that in a thousand little moves, little twitches of expression, the way his face and his whole body reacted when there was some momentary false alarm.

It's something not here present. Akkhtimakt's only another kif. He hates Sikkukkut but Sikkukkut doesn't panic him. There's Goldtooth and the mahendo'sat for him to worry about. There's his own kind.

We might end up in a fire-or-die case of mistaken identity: that's certainly to fear, if humanity comes breaking in here.

Or is it something he knows they'll do? Or that he'll have to do?

Or does he see a day-no matter who wins-that someone might take him into that dark corner and start asking questions he won't want to answer?

Gods, why'd he do it? Why'd he help us, even when he's afraid of us, over his own kind? He knows loyalty. He knows friendship. He commits himself to us like kin. It doesn't make sense. What kind of people could create him, and still make him betray them?

A people varied as we are. A people in internal conflict.

A chill went through her. A bit of sandwich went down hard. She washed it down with gfi and focused on Jik's dark, red-rimmed eyes. He had asked her something. Got? she realized belatedly. She glanced at the diagrams, at the instructions inbuilt to the comp. She had followed him, followed maybe more than Jik thought. The data and the model were both in their library now
 
and connected to Nav, the probability of mahen ships being anywhere in this zone.

"Backside," she said. Meaning the hinder side of hani-mahen space. "Where's the stats on that, hah?"

"Not got. Not mine."

A fool would believe this mahendo'sat. But he had shown her too much, confirmed too much, admitted too much. And he knew she could put it together.

The whole mahen-hani treaty was in rags with what he had handed over. And as much as she could ever believe him, it had harm enough in it to be most of the truth he had.

"No way we can make that rendezvous with your ships at Urtur," she said. "And remember, we got two of Sikkukkut's ships running hours in front-days, with these merchant rigs dragging at us, if they don't keep the pace we tell them."

"Cost us five day. We got five day?" A weary blink. "World can die in five hour. I got crew shoot message out."

"You mean when we go through there? You got a beeper?'"

"Silent till got mahen ID. 'Spensive. I try. Mahen ship come through there, they get, if we don't get kif notice."

Truth, something said again. "Jik. Truth about those short-jumps. Can you do it? Can the kif do it?"

"Got limit like maybe two day light, precise. You try farther you don't come down ever."

"Two days. Then Goldtooth is short of that. Out there turning around."

"Same." A flicker of dark eyes, a little withholding of truth. "We try fix other end, a?"

"You going to run on me?"

"No," he said, and looked her in the eyes when he said it. Reached and grasped her wrist where it lay on the counter. "You, me do lot work get inside this business. We got high priority stay there. You understand? Ana be outside. We be inside. He use us way we want to be use', number one good deal. Best. I tell you I damn smart." Ghost of a grin. His hand squeezed her hand. She tolerated it. Gods-be mahendo'sat never figured what pressure did to retractile claws. Same as Tully. "I tell you. You valu'ble. Damn valu'ble. You don't lake chance. Hear. All spacer hani be precious stuff."

She retrieved her hand. "You better get back. While you can. Before I change my mind."

"You got good nerve," he said. "Mahendo'sat got no better."

"Same you, gods rot you." Mawkish sentiment overcame her. She laid her ears down. They burned. Crew was witness. But it occurred to her she might never have the chance. "That was quick thinking in there, on Harukk."

"A." He tapped his head. "Number one stuff." He levered himself wearily to his feet and caught himself on the cabinet. "See you otherside, a?"

"Get. Geran, walk him down."

She watched him go, tall black mahe and smallish red-maned hani, off the bridge and down the corridor. A shiver came over her. She drank the last of the gfi and got up to toss the cup. Haral got it from her. They treated her as if she were glass.

"Captain," Haral said, "you want to go lie down, catch a nap, I'll get Tauran settled. I've had my off-shift, you're-"

"I'll take you up on that," she murmured, and wandered off, toward the corridor. There was a thump from below. That was the airlock cycling, too soon to be Jik. Tauran was arriving. They were about to take boarders. They had about time to get them settled in and then they started their outsystem run. It was discourtesy to Tauran, not to be there to meet them.

But to dump her ship into system at Urtur, into kifish fire and Urtur's dust, herself helplessly groggy, she could not do that either.

Neither could she trust a strange pilot at Urtur. It had to be her or Haral. Tirun at a pinch. No one else. Not with The Pride's new rig, either. O gods. I've got to brief Tauran on systems, she's not used to that much power. Haral's got course auto'ed in, gods know all we have to do is persuade Tauran's pilots to keep hands off the autos and ride with it, o gods, I hope they take orders.

She turned and trekked the weary, staggering way back tothe bridge, over to com, leaned there, over Hilfy's shoulder. "Give me lowerdecks main." And when the light lit: "Tauran. Ker Sirany?"

"I'm here," the answer came back.

"Pyanfar Chanur here. Welcome aboard. I'm about to go off shift awhile. I'd do briefing myself but I'll be taking us through jump. I want you to sit topside during undocks; Meetpoint system is the best chance we have for you to check out our boards, on the run out. Appreciate it if you'd make a quick settle-in and come up to bridge, let my onshift crew show you the rig."

"Understood."

"We're running wobbly, ker Sirany. Out on my feet. Profoundest apologies."

"We'll be up there directly, ker Pyanfar."

"Thanks." She clicked them out. Shoved back from the board and wandered off with the sour, distressed feeling of proprieties slighted and gods know what she had just said or how it sounded or whether it did any good or not. And no one had explained to Tauran clan about Khym's crew status.

No. They would have heard. Everyone at Meetpoint would have heard plenty about Khym and the riot and the kif. The Pride and Chanur had become notorious. They would have heard about Khym, about Tully, even before they saw him. Only Skkukuk had startled them.

They were spacers, not groundlings. Not Immunes, black-breeched and arrogant with power like Ehrran and her ilk.

She stopped by Chur's cabin, shot the door open a moment. Chur was awake, there in her bed with the silver machinery there by the wall and all the tubes going into her arm and out. "You doing all right?" she asked as Chur lifted her head. "We're going home, you hear that? Got crew from The Star of Tauran coming on board. You're going to hear strange voices on the bridge. Didn't want you to worry."

"Aye," Chur said. "Been keeping up with things, captain." A difficult wrinkling of her nose. "You look like you could 'bout as well trade places with me."

"Hey, we're all right, we got Jik out. Got his charts and some cooperation for a change. He's back on his ship. We got the whole lot of kif backing us. We're going back home, to make sure nothing of Akkhtimakt's gets that far. Minor matter to the kif, but it may be just our size, huh? We got this one turn at Urtur. Then easier. How are you doing?"