Chanur's Venture (21 page)

white light over its recess. SERVICE ACCESS, said a battered sign, ROHOSU

COMPANY. Beside it, mahen graffiti, obscurely obscene. She tried the door; but

it was locked like every other door along the row once the emergency had

sounded. She rang the bell; battered at the unyielding steel. "Open up, gods rot

you! We're hani! Let us in!"

No answer. Tully babbled something. Sirens.

She heard them too, far down the dock. She sank down by him, pried his hand from

his arm and grimaced at the wound the dim light showed, black edged and bleeding

hard. She grabbed the tail of his shirt and tore a wide strip of cloth off,

pressed it tight and put his hand on it, ripped another strip off to tie it

with.

"Easy," she breathed, senseless chatter to keep him from panic. "Easy, you're

all right, all right, hear?"

He slumped back against the wall, his face gone to waxen color. The hand of the

wounded arm shook and the tremor spread to the rest of him as he began to go

into shock. But he listened, his eyes on her whenever she looked.

"Listen," she said, "listen, station's onto it now. And The Pride -- they'll

have heard by now. The captain's doing something, you can bet she'll get us help

--Pyanfar, understand?"

"Pyanfar come."

"Bet on it. All right, huh?" She got the bandage around his arm, put his hand on

it to hold that. She snugged the knot tight and he mumbled something in human,

language. No translator. The translator-tape--

--in the bundle of clothes. With the papers. Back at the wreck. With Chur--

"Hilfy--" He stiffened, eyes fixed toward the exit of the alley. She turned her

head.

Shadows moved in that red-dyed smoke, paused and conversed outside, a gathering

of black robes, tall, stoop-shouldered silhouettes.

Tully edged aside, out of the light the door cast. She moved too, as carefully

as she could, as far as Tully did, and put her arms about him to hide his pallor

with her own redbrown hide as much as she could within the shadows. She felt

Tully shivering; felt her own stomach knotted up when she recalled kif eyesight.

They were night-hunters by preference; and Tully -- white shirt, pale hair,

paler skin--

She kept her arms clenched about him.

And saw that conversation outside their refuge break up, the kif start to move.

One stopped and looked their way.

* * *

"Open that gods-rotted door!" Pyanfar yelled, and used the rifle butt on the

guardroom spex, so a scared mahendo'sat in the section-control yelled back

threats from the other side. "It's clear from the Personage!" she yelled. "Open

that section-seal!"

"Au-to-matic," the yell came back through the com-transfer, in mangled pidgin.

Mahens station. Half the personnel never managed fluency in pidgin.

"Personage!" she yelled back in mahen Standard.

Gibberish came back. This one spoke dialect.

* * *

Black-robed shadows filled the alleyway, dark, featureless, except for the wan

light of the bulb in the low ceiling of the door recess and Hilfy gathered

herself to her feet. Tully struggled and she helped him by his good arm to give

him that chance at least.

"Run if you can," she said in a low voice, thinking perhaps she could break a

hole for him. But he knew so few words. He pressed closer to her as the kif gave

them less room. He would try to fight-blunt-fingered, without any advantage,

without even speed to outrun a kif. And it was Tully they wanted: alive. She had

no doubt of that. "Got claws," she said beneath her breath. "You don't. Run,

understand?"

The kif moved closer, keeping their circle. "We'll not hurt you," one said.

"You're in the wrong place, young hani. Certainly you are. If you had a gun you

would have used it, would you not? But we aren't your enemies."

"Who?" She perceived the origin of the voice: the speaker stood out among the

rest, taller, finer-robed, and she guessed the name as she edged into Tully,

trying to keep open space about them as the kif moved and shifted.

"Sikkukkut. From Meetpoint. You remember me, young Chanur. I have no wish to

hurt you, either one. And there are far too many of us. Come, be reasonable."

The kif moved, all of them at once. "Run!" she yelled at Tully, spun and swung

and kept swinging as her claws carried a kif headon into the wall. "Run, for

godssakes, run--"

Black cloth obscured her vision, cleared as Tully pulled one off her, and she

rattled that one's brains.

But kif claws pulled Tully by the shoulder, and grabbed him by the arm.

"Gods blast!" she cried qnd tried to get that one off him, but two kif got her

arms and a kifish arm came hard about her throat.

* * *

The door thundered back on chaos, the flash of red lights on smoke the fans

refused, the sweep of floods, the lunatic strobe-flash. "Gods," Geran muttered.

The center of the trouble was evident, a knot of flashing white lights stabbing

into the smoke far up the dockside. Pyanfar started running first, rifle in both

hands -- "No, wait--" from the mahen official who had gotten the door open.

"Hani, got wait!--" But Geran was pace for pace with her and gaining --

fleet-footed Geran, whose sister Chur was in that mess.

A laser shot streaked the smoke. Pyanfar brought the rifle up and fired on the

run. Geran did the same, not with particular skill, but with dispatch; and more

fire came behind her, with the mahen official screaming for them to take cover.

Khym shouted, something: the heights distorted it, twisted it into a

blood-crazed roar. A volley of smoke-bounced shots came back from kif near the

wreckage and Pyanfar dived aside, remembered Khym behind her with one

heart-stopping fright and rolled to cover his blind rush.

But he came skidding in beside her, gasping, with the pistol quickly braced up

hunting targets as Tirun reached their cover. Geran and Haral had tucked in with

the mahendo'sat next a stack of cans: shots spattered the plastic and those

three ducked.

Then a flurry opened up from the other side, and for a moment the pop of

projectile fire rang everywhere off the overhead: mahen voices yowled distant

satisfaction and she put her head out, sprawled back again because shots were

wild and going a dozen ways about the wreckage and up the dock to their

position.

Geran got off three quick shots from her side, Haral another burst. "That's

mahen fire!" Haral yelled, seeing something from her vantage; and Pyanfar

ventured another look, saw fire going the other way and pelted out of cover the

last long sprint for the wreckage, from which cover a steady spatter of fire

went out aimed the other way.

Mahe braced in among the tangle started at their arrival, and hani among them

turned about with backlaid ears. Ehrran.

Pyanfar slid in among them, grabbed an Ehrran shoulder and shook it as Geran

arrived, and the rest of the crew. "Where's Chanur?" Pyanfar shouted into the

Ehrran crewwoman's baeklaid ears. "Where, gods rot you!"

The Ehrran pointed mutely to a hani lying on the deck and Pyanfar's heart

lurched over as Geran scrambled that way, to her sister's side. "Where's the

rest?" Pyanfar yelled, and a larger hani arm appeared from behind her and seized

a fistful of Ehrran beard. "Where are they?" Khym shouted, and the Ehrran waved

a frantic hand toward the dock at large.

"--Ran -- they ran -- Somewhere out there--" Pyanfar let go her grip with a

shove and abandoned the Ehrran to get to Chur.

Chur was alive. They had propped her head off the deck and the wound that had

spread blood all about was hard-sealed and glistening with plasm that stopped

further bleeding. Geran bent over her, just holding her hand, looking more than

scared.

"How is she?" Pyanfar asked.

"She hurts," Chur said for herself, past scarcely moving jaws. Her eyes were

slitted. "Where's Hilfy-Tully?"

"We don't know. Where'd you lose them?"

A weak move of Chur's head. A try at pointing. "Got out," she said. The pointing

was nowhere in particular. "Don't know."

Pyanfar looked round at the others who hovered near. "That packet. Tully had it

in his hands. Hunt the wreck."

"Got," Chur said thickly, reached feebly behind her head, delirious, Pyanfar

thought, until she recognized the thing Chur's head was lying on. Chur tried to

pull it. Tully's plastic sack.

"Gods," Pyanfar said with feeling. "Geran. Stay with her. You hang onto that.

They'll get an ambulance in here real soon."

"Not Kshshti," Chur said. "Pride."

For a moment Pyanfar failed to understand her, then gripped her arm. "No way we

leave you here. Got that?"

"Got," Chur said, and let her eyes close.

"Stay with her," Pyanfar said to Geran. "We'll find them." She stood up, keeping

low, for there were still shots flying, drew Tirun and Khym and Haral off to the

mahen position. She seized one by the arm and pulled him about. "Hani. Seen

hani?"

"No got," he said.

"Alien?"

"No got."

She edged back again, cast about amid the confusion of arriving emergency

vehicles, the thunder of PA above sirens, each confounding the other. Evacuate,

she made out. Evacuate, evacuate -- unsafe--

--getting the non-involved clear. She hoped. Possibly the whole sector of the

station had gone unstable in the explosions. In the mahen-language shouting and

the noise of the sirens there was no knowing. She put her head up, for firing

had stopped, ducked down again as her own crew pulled her down, but there were

still no shots.

"Think they're through out there," she said, and seized Haral by the arm. "Get

Chur into an ambulance. Geran's not to leave her. Whatever."

"Right," Haral said; he turned to leave and froze, so that Pyanfar turned to

look too, where hani had appeared among the emergency vehicles, some

black-trousered, several blue, the first sight of which lifted her hope and the

second dashed it.

"Ayhar," she spat, and hurled herself to her feet. "Ehrran!" -- for Rhif Ehrran

was in that group, and she headed for them in mingled wrath and hope, dodged

round a stretcher crew and a fire-control team headed into the wreckage. Hani

faces turned her way, Banny Ayhar and Rhif Ehrran chiefest of them.

"Chanur!" Ehrran shouted, headed her way, "By the gods, Chanur, you've really

fouled it up, haven't you?"

She slowed to a walk, with long, long strides. A hand caught her arm and she

jerked free.

"Captain," Tirun begged her. "Don't.

She stopped. Stood there. And Ehrran had the sense to stop out of her reach.

Tirun was on one side of her, Khym on the other.

"Where are they?" she asked Ehrran.

"Gods if I know," Ehrran said, hand on that pistol at her side. The whites

showed at the edges of her eyes. "Gods rot it, Chanur--"

"Be some use. We need searchers. They may have taken cover somewhere, anywhere

along the docks."

Ehrran flicked her ears nervously, turned and lifted a hand in signal to her

own. "Fan out. Watch yourselves."

"Move," Pyanfar said to her own, and they did.

Hilfy moved a finger, a hand, discovered consciousness and remembered kif, with

the kif-stink all about her. She tried the whole arm, both arms, a deep panicked

breath, and opened her eyes on a gray ceiling and bare steel and lights, with

the memory of a jolt she had not fully heard, with her arms tangled in

something, her legs pinned -- the wreck -- o gods --

She turned her head, a dizzy haze of lights, a bright spot of light with kif

clustered round something pale on a table, something pale and human-sized.

She heaved, met restraints that held her to a surface. Blankets wrapped her arms

about, and they had her fastened about that. She heard another clank of

machinery, shieldings in retraction, all the familiar sounds, watched the kit

cast an anxious look up and go back to their work -- Clank! Thump!

Ship sounds. It was the grapple-disengage. The kif stayed at work, clinging to

the table on which Tully lay when the G stress shifted. There were hisses, the

click of kifish speech. She shut her eyes and opened them again and the

nightmare remained true.

Pyanfar stopped and looked about her, swung the rifle about as she heard someone

coming in this zone of wreckage and shot-out lights. Hani silhouette against the

lighted zone.

"Captain," Haral cried, and the echoes went up. "Captain--" Her first officer

gasped for breath and stopped, leaning on a gantry leg. "Harukk just left dock.

Mahendo'sat just sent word. . . ."

She said nothing. Nothing seemed adequate. She only slung the rifle to her

shoulder and started running for the center of the search, for what help there

was to find.

* * *