Chanur's Homecoming (44 page)

"Ker gods-be Rhif s safe on her ship," Geran said.

"Patience, we got the Light up there over her head, she's not going anywhere."

"We got a kifish ship coming into dock," Haral said. "There's trouble when it comes. Gods know what that fool Ehrran will do."

Another agonizing stretch of hallway. The first of them had gained the stairwell. There was much yelling of encouragement, inexperienced hani screwing up their courage before a long climb that meant head-on confrontation with an armed opposition.

They were out of range of the pocket-coms. Too much of the station's mass was between them and the ships at dock.

"M'gods." Footfalls came up at their backs, a thundering horde of runners. Pyanfar spun, on the same motion as the rest of the crew, on a straggle of hani in merchants' brights, with a crowd behind them all the way down the corridor, a crowd a lot of which was blackbreeches, strung out down the hall as they filtered through the obstacles of the shattered pressure doors. "Over their heads!" She popped off a shot into the overhead, and plastic panels near the shattered door disintegrated into flying bits and smoke and a thundering hail of ceiling panels that fell and bounced and paved the corridor in front of the onrush.

"Stop, stop!" the cry came back, with waving of hands, some of the merchants in full retreat coming up against the press behind, and a dogged few coming through, holding their hands in plain view. "Sfauryn!" one cried, naming her clan, which was a stationer clan: merchants, indeed, and nothing to do with Ehrran.

"We're Chanur!" Tirun yelled back at them, rifle leveled. "Stay put!"

The press had stalled behind, tide meeting tide in the hallway, those trying to advance through the broken doors and those in panic retreat. The few up front hesitated in the last doorway, facing the guns.

"Ehrran has Central!" the Sfauryn cried.

"You want to do something about it?" Pyanfar yelled back.

"We're trying to help! Gods, who're you aiming at? People all over the stations are trying to get in there!"

"Gods-be about time!" Her pulse hammered away, the blood hazed in gray and red through her vision. "If you can get the phones to work, get word to the other levels!"

"Llun's with us-Llun've got portable com, they got some rifles- It's Llun back there behind us, Chanur. They don't want to get shot by mistake!"

"Bring 'em on," she cried. Gods, what days they had come on, when Immune blacks meant target in a fight. She leaned on the wall and lowered the rifle. Blinked against the haze. Rest here awhile. Rest here till they had the reinforcements organized. Llun! honest as sunrise and, thank the gods, self-starting. They had been doing something all the while, one could have depended on that.

But they could still get shot, coming up behind the spacers up front. Someone in spacer blues had to get up there and warn the others in the stairwell that what was coming on their tail was friendly. "Who of us has a run left in her?" she asked, and scanned a weary cluster of Chanur faces, ears flagged, fur standing in sweaty points and bloodied from the flying splinters.

"Me," Hilfy gasped, "me, I got it."

"Got your chance to be a gods-be fool. Go. Get. Be careful!"

To a departing back, flattened ears, a lithe young woman flying down that corridor while the shouting reinforcements got themselves organized and came on.

The tide oozed its way through the shattered door, over the rattling sheets of cream plastics that had been the ceiling. It swept on, past a bedraggled handful of heavy-armed hani that hugged the wall and waved them past.

"Time was," Pyanfar said, and hunkered down again as the last of them passed, the heavy gun between her knees, Haral and Geran and Khym already down, Tirun leaning heavily against the wall and slowly sliding down to her haunches, "time was, Id've run that corridor."

"Hey," Khym said, tongue lolling. He licked his mouth and gasped. "With age comes smart, huh?"

"Yeah," Haral said, and cast a worried look down the corridor, the way Hilfy had gone. Hilfy with a ring in her ear and a gods-awful lot of scars, and a good deal more sense than the imp had ever had in her sheltered life. Hilfy the veteran of Kefk docks and Harukk's bowels. Of Meetpoint and all the systems in between and the circle that led home.

"Kid'll handle it," Pyanfar said. "We hold this place awhile. Hold their backsides. Got to think. We got Vigilance out there. We got kif to worry about."

Station poured out a series of conflicting bulletins. Events were too chaotic for Ehrran to coordinate its lies. "They're still threatening to destroy the boards up there," Chur said. And: "Unnn," from Sirany Tauran. There was nothing for them to do about it. But there was a steady pickup of information from Llun scattered throughout the station, static-ridden, but decipherable. It gave out a name. "They've met up with the cap'n," Chur cried suddenly, on a wave of relief, and pressed the com-plug tighter into her ear to try to determine where that meeting was, but Llun was being cagey and giving out no positions. "They're saying they've linked up with Chanur and the rest and they're headed with that group."

There was a murmured cheer for that. ("Good?" Tully asked, leaning forward to catch Chur's eye. "Good?"

"Gods-be good," Chur said back. "The captain's found help.") While Tauran crew stayed busy all about them, stations monitoring scan and outside movements, keeping Tully's recorded output and her own going out on as wide and rapid a sweep of the sphere as they and Chanur's Light could achieve in coordination, snugged against a rotating station, and sending with as much power as they could throw into the signal. Especially they kept an eye on Vigilance at its dock, Vigilance's image relayed to them by Light, as a kifish ship headed for them, conspicuous now among all the others and coming the way a hunter-ship could, by the gods fast. While on a link all his own from belowdecks ops, and without a need to sweep the available sphere, Skkukuk maintained communications with his fellow kif.

''Chanur-hakkikt skkutotik sotkku sothogkkt,'' his news bulletin went out, and Chur winced. "Sfitktokku fikkrit koghkt hanurikktu makt." Other hani ships were picking that up, and there were spacers enough out there who knew main-kifish: The Chanur hakkikt has subordinated other clans. Something more about hani and a sea or tides or something the translator had fouled up. Skkukuk was being coded or poetic, was talking away down there, making his own kifish sense out of bulletins he got. She considered cutting him off. She thought of going down there and shooting him in lieu of ten thousand kif she could not get her hands on.

But the captain had given her orders. Pyanfar Chanur had asked it, and asked it with all sanity to the contrary, which meant it was one of the captain's dearly held notions, and that meant Pyanfar Chanur intended her crew to keep then-hands off that kif and let him do what Pyanfar had said he should do.

This kif had saved the captain's life. Geran had told her so.

This kif was Pyanfar's kifish lieutenant. Pyanfar herself had told her so.

For Pyanfar's reasons. If they were to go down, as well be on the captain's orders, where they had lived forty years, onworld and off. If Pyanfar Chanur said jump the ship they jumped; if it was on course for the heart of a sun, they objected the fact once to be sure and then they jumped it.

It was a catching sickness. The Tauran captain was doing much the same, obeying orders she doubted.

While one of The Pride's black, verminous inhabitants boldly sat on its haunches in the aisle by the start of the galley corridor and stared in wonder at the fools who ran the ship.

Up the stairs, up and up until the bones ached and the brain pounded for want of air. Hilfy Chanur had gotten herself up to the fore of the band, after dispersing parts of the Llun contingent down every available corridor as they ascended, to round up other stationers and get them moving down other corridors. There was one advantage to holding the heart of a city-sized space station, which was that one had all the controls to heat and light and air under one's hands.

The Ehrran had that.

But there was also an outstanding disadvantage to holding Central: that it was one small area, and that a city-sized space station had a lot of inhabitants, all of whom were converging on that point from all corridors, all passages, every clan on the station furiously determined to put the Llun back in control of systems the Llun understood and the Ehrran interlopers patently did not.

If there were Llun working systems up there at gunpoint, they were doing it all most unwillingly, and Ehrran had only the Llun's word for it just what they were doing with those controls.

Fools, aunt Pyanfar would say. A space station was a good deal different than a starship's controls; if there were even experienced spacers in the Ehrran contingent up there. Mostly it had to be groundling Ehrran, blackbreeches whose primary job was trade offices and lickfooting to Naur and others of the Old Rich and the New.

Aunt Rhean was beside her as they climbed. Her father was just behind, grayed and older by the years The Pride had been away. And somewhere they had picked up two other men, young Llun, who had come in somewhere around level five and charged in among them in a camaraderie quite unlike men of the common clans-Immunes, free from challenge all their lives and having not a hope in the world of succeeding their own lord except by seniority, they came rushing in, stopped in a moment of recognition, likely neither one having known the other was coming, and surely daunted by Kohan's senior and downworld presence. Then: "Come ahead, rot you!" Kohan had yelled at them. And they had paired up with a great deal of shouting and bravado like two adolescents on a hunt. There were Llun women, armed and experienced in the last desperate battle for Gaohn. And it was all headed right into Ehrran's laps.

If the captive Llun up in control had "been willing, they could at least have killed the lights and put the station reliant on the flashlights the Llun and the station merchants and some of the spacers had had the foresight to bring with them. They could have vented whole sections of the docks, with enormous loss of life. They could have fired the station stabilization jets and affected the gravity. They could have thrown the solar panels off their tracking and used some of the big mirrors to make it uncomfortable for Chanur's Light. Perhaps the Ehrran urged them to these things at gunpoint.

But none of them had happened.

The level twelve doorway was in front of them. Locked. Of course that was locked. One of the Ehrran had probably done that on manual. They surely held the corridors up here, between invaders and Central.

"Back," Hilfy yelled, and those in front of her cleared back and ducked down as best they could on the stairs, covering themselves. An AP threw things when it hit. And this door went like the others-the window was down, when she opened her eyes, her face and arms and body stung and bleeding with particles. The broken doorway let in a swirl of smoke, and a red barrage of laser fire lit the gray, exploding little holes off the stairwell wall up there.

For the first time panic hit her, real fear. This was the hero-stuff, being number one charging up the stairs into that mess. It was where her rashness and the possession of that Illegal AP had put her.

"Hyyaaaah!" she yelled in raw terror, and rushed the stairs, because running screaming the other way was too humiliating. She fired one more time and got plastic-spatter all over her as the shell blew in the corridor and ceiling tiles hailed down in front of her. For a terrifying moment she was alone going through that doorway, and then she felt others at her back, blinked her burned eyes wider and saw blackbreeched hani lying in the corridor, some moving, some not; saw laser fire scatter in the smoke and aimed another shell that way.

There were screams. She flinched.

They were hani. They were downworlders. They had no experience of APs or what it was like to have a body blown apart or walls caving in with the percussion of shells. The survivors scrambled and fled and left guns lying in their disgrace, while outraged Llun charged after that lot, the two stationer-lads yelling as they went.

"Door," Rhean said, having arrived beside her, and she pointed to where the Llun were already headed.

"No problem," Hilfy gasped. She was cold all over. Her hand clenched about the grip of the gun as if it was welded there: she had lost all distinction between herself and the weapon, had lost a great deal of feeling all over her splinter perforated skin. She cast a look back to see how many of their own had made it through, and it was a sea of their own forces in that corridor.

She walked now, over the littered floor, past the dead, where the others had run; and up to the sealed door then charge had secured, near where a shocked handful of Ehrran prisoners huddled under guard. It was the last door, the one that led into Central. "I'll blow it," she said. "You got to take it the hard way-" remembering only then that it was a senior captain she was telling how to do things. It was so simple a matter. It was hurtfully simple. Near Rhean Chanur near her father, were hani who surely knew. There was Munur Faha, for one. And the Harun. They had to charge in there hand to hand against guns that might destroy fragile controls and kill fifty, sixty thousand helpless people.

Fools. She could have wept over the things she saw. Poor fools. My people. Do you see now? Do you see what we've done to ourselves, what a plagued thing we've let in, because we tried to keep everything the old way?

There was information coming in, finally, scattered reports booming out over the PA as Llun portable com began supplanting the reports out of Central: ' 'Ehrran is in violation of Immune law,'' one such repeated. ''Llun has appealed to all clans to enforce its lawful order for Ehrran withdrawal from station offices and enjoins Ehrran to signal its intent to comply."

That announcement was becoming tiresome, dinning down from the overhead. Pyanfar wiped her bleeding face and flicked her ears and looked up at the wreckage of the speaker, which gave the advisories a rattling vibration and garbled the words.