The Pride of Chanur

X

“Getting pickup on the companion,” Chur said, snugged in com station. “They swear it’s a secure line.”

“Huh.” Pyanfar finished up the checks and reached for the contact flashing on her com module. “Chanur here.”

“Introduce you,” Goldtooth’s voice came back to her. “Captain Pyanfar Chanur, got link to Aja Jin. Captain Nomesteturjai.”

“Chanur,” a voice rumbled back. “Name Jik, here.”

“Number one fellow, Jik,” Goldtooth said. “Honest same you, Pyanfar Chanur.”

“Honest like stall me off; like delay me. Chanur’s fighting for its life, you rag-eared bastard, does that get through your head? Challenge; and I’m not there. In your spying about, do you know what that means?”

“Ah,” Goldtooth said. “Know this trouble. Yes.”

Pyanfar said nothing, forced the claws back in.

“Know where this Akukkakk too,” Goldtooth said. “Interested, hani captain?”

“After I’ve settled my own business.”

“Same place.”

“Anuurn?”

“Keep you alive, hani. We make slow maybe, but you make deal we want. More big than pearls and welders, a, hani?”

“You follow, rot you.” She keyed through the course and the graph on comp. “There’s the way.”

A mahen hiss came back, throaty and rueful. “You steer by luck, hani? You crazy mad, that course?”

“Do it all the time, mahe. Scare you?”

“Hani joke, a?”

“Got two kif docked down there. We go, they’ll go. You got that patrol alerted?”

“Got,” came that second voice.

“Ha,” Pyanfar muttered. “You got your data; got all you want. Enough. We’re getting out of here.”

“A.”

Assent. Pyanfar flung a glance toward Haral, across the separating console, and the contact went out. Chur flicked signals to the dock crew. “Got us prioritied out,” Chur reported. “No problem.” The lines were coming loose. Telltales began to flash, wanting ports sealed. Haral put the seals in function, straight down the sequence. Screens in front of number one post livened, Geran routing through the station scan image. The airlock grapple clanged into unlock, and the last of the seal-ports was firm. “Moving out,” Pyanfar warned over allship, and cleared The Pride’s own grapples, her grip on station independent of the station’s grip on her: those boomed into the housing, and undocking jets eased them clear.

It was a smooth parting, an easy push clear and a nosing toward an untrafficked nadir as g started up, a whine of the rotational engines. Comp flashed them their lane, and scan showed Mahijiru and Aja Jin moving down below the station rim off portside. The Pride gathered momentum, a solid g and a half now, outbound.

“Kif are breaking free,” Chur said, com monitor. “Station advises.”

“No scan confirmation,” Geran said.

Pyanfar was already reaching for the shielded weapons switch, uncapped it and flicked it on: a ripple of lights advised the gunports were clearing. “Stay on that,” she told Haral without taking her eyes off her own business. “No comp synch, not with the mahe in the way. Can’t be taking one of them by mistake.”

“Hope they’re as considerate,” Haral muttered.

“Huh.”

“Kif are moving out,” Geran said. “Number two screen.”

“Where’s our escort?” Pyanfar wondered glumly. ” — Op deck, stay braced. Listen in and take your cues.”

“Escort moving,” Chur said. “They’re on intercept; station’s got them scan-blanked.”

“Understood.” She darted a look at station-sent scan, on which they themselves showed as an oversized wedge, massed blip of ships in synch. Geran sent another image. G continued, dragging at the gut, straining her arm back against the elbow brace. The kif were not gaining, were maintaining a sedate acceleration in their wake.

Goldtooth and this stranger Jik: escort. She did not, she admitted to herself, understand the mahen order of things, no more than outsiders understood the stsho. Trading with them was one thing. Figuring out the limits of a mahe like Stasteburana was another. Goldtooth and this mahe friend of his, this ship which had come kiting into system in the hour of Tahar’s exit — merchanters, maybe; but what she saw of Mahijiru and Aja Jin on vid was ominously lean, ominously trim with their cargo holds stripped off; a lot of space given to the power assembly on those two, a profligate lot of jump capacity masked by those missing holds, odd-shaped cores swelling in such fashion that they would cut into any reasonable geometry of tanks which had been strapped on. Vanes with strange dark interstices, like folding joints, vanes larger than ships of their mass ought to carry. It was a curious thing, that ships never saw «ach other; that they nosed up to station and stayed invisible behind station walls; that they existed as blips and dots and figures in comp, moving too fast for vid to pick up. Only now that they were in synch, a package moving at the same velocity and in sight of each other—

“Runner ships,” Pyanfar muttered to Haral. “Look at our escort, cousin.”

“Got that,” Haral said quietly. “Got that, Captain.”

Something new among the mahendo’sat. Something which had to have been very quiet for a long time. Ships like the kif runners. Hunter ships. Her mustache-hairs drew taut as if her nose had picked up something. Gods: Mahijiru, out prowling about Meetpoint, out on the fringes of stsho space—

Hunting rumors? A crew lounging on the dock, loud and visible with repair they could have done inside as well. Two sets of hunters on the docks besides the kif themselves, and they had come sniffing round each other, each so cleverly assaying the other, she and the mahe —

“That goldtoothed bastard knew something,” Pyanfar said. “From the very start he knew. Knew this Akukkakk; knew those kif ships; knew what was stirring out here.”

Haral shot her a disquieted look.

“Knnn,” Geran said suddenly; and vid went off and another image came in, sectorized on the mass of knnn ships, which were no longer stationary.

“Gods,” Chur muttered, “here we go.”

“Never mind the rotted knnn,” Pyanfar said. “Watch the kif; op, take that sectorized image and keep us posted.”

It vanished from her screen; Tirun acknowledged recept below. Behind them, on the image which turned up, the kif started now to move.

“Got us knnn,” Goldtooth’s voice cut in, transferred from Chur’s board.

“Nuisance,” Pyanfar said. “You know more than that, mahe? What more do you know? About how you were hunting trouble at Meetpoint?”

“Got no need hunt. Hani in port.”

“Captain.” Tirun’s voice. “Decreased interval.”

She was watching it. Flexed her claws carefully on the togglegrip. “Moving out,” she told the mahe. “Going to boost up and test; clear my field, understand? No more time here.”

“A.”

She moved the control. The Pride kicked up to widen the interval between herself and the mahe. The number one screen flicked from scan to a bracketed star; the images shifted one screen over and dumped the vid entirely. On scan the kif fell farther and farther behind, chancing nothing with the patrol.

And the knnn — the knnn streamed along in a manic flood, accelerating as they went, a few points off their course.

“Interval achieved,” Haral said.

“Boosting up,” Pyanfar warned the others. She hit the jump pulse, lightly, swallowed against the queasiness and saw the instruments sorting themselves out at the new velocity.

“Clear,” Haral said. “All stable. Coming up on jump.”

“Stand by the long one,” Pyanfar advised the crew below. Cast a last and frantic look at scan, where Mahijiru and Aja Jin had fallen behind on estimated-position. No communication possible now: they were too much lag apart. It was the position she wanted, the mahe running at their tail: their nose they could take care of themselves. Best to flare through any ambush where they were going and not be the second or third ship in, as Starchaser had been at Kita, after the nest had been stirred and the kif wakened.

Luck, she wished the mahe. In spite of other things. In spite of deceits; in spite of mahen purposes which had nothing to do with hers. Luck, she thought; and: conniving liar.

The course was flashing on the screen, a jump first for Ajir System, and through it to Anuurn itself, the straightest course and the most vulnerable to ambush; but they were out of time for finesse.

“Ready,” she warned the crew.

They reached their point. Mahijiru would be after them, gliding on their tail; and Aja Jin, that other of Goldtooth’s ilk…

…all the way.

A wail from com as they came up, a buoy, Ajir marker dopplered into nonsense. Mahendo’sat/hani cooperative, this station, full of traffic and hazards in the jump range for a lunatic chase to come streaking through, velocity unchecked: a second time to try the maneuver that had failed at Kita, had failed, with damage to the ship. Gods help any other incomer who chanced to be in the way.

ALERTALERTALERT, The Pride wailed, capsuled transmission: mahe escort behind. Likely hostile action. Beware of kif insystem and out. Launch all system defense. Take precaution. Two ships following us are escort. Next is trouble. Casualties in previous attacks: Handur’s Voyager; Faha’s Starchaser. Kif attack on non-Compact unarmed ship, three alien casualties. ALERTALERTALERT…

Chaos would break loose at Ajir: kif at dock might take exception to it; Handur might be here to hear it; and Faha.

If the kif were not waiting here, in ambush already…

The mass that was Ajir, a yellow sun, loomed ahead: Ajir, askew from most stars of the region, wearing its belt of worlds and debris rakishly aslant — hazard, Pyanfar’s memory kept warning her, distant and fogged in the muddle of postjump, of extreme velocities and instruments feeding them only the skim of reality, too fast, too fast…

“Where is it?” she asked of Haral — for the gods’ sakes, homestar… a blind newborn could sense it from Ajir, could feel it, head for it however shaken in jump: their bow was toward it.

“Locked on,” Haral’s slow voice purred through the madness, slow, when they were pushing c and the system was whipping past in unreality, moving while they drifted through movements: one dopplered star was clear for them, zeroed in the brackets, and all the rest had gone mad…

Home.

Weeks, in the time/notime of jump…

They were in. Hard to think, to begin the dump sequences. The ship would take over when manual intervention failed utterly; would dump velocity and glide them to an outsystem halt, still within return range. Easier to let it slide, let the system blur past, let the machinery take over—

No. They were on manual override from the last one. Machine-rules were already violated. Pyanfar lifted the arm, saw with her dazed vision Haral, who had begun the same desperate struggle, slow and sickly in the aftermath of their arrival. A warning light was blinking, not the same malfunction, but outside alert: com recept — beacon-

They dumped down and went totally blind for an instant. Anuurn beacon welcomed them out of it; their own alert was still going, crying havoc where they went. She got her hand up, signaled Chur with a blinker; after an interminable moment it went out.

Second dump. There was Tully’s voice over the open com; and Hilfy’s comforting him — Hilfy, who not so long ago had ridden sickly through the jumps, and now steadied their passenger.

“Getting image,” Geran said. “There are ships out here.”

None in their way: Geran would not be so calm. They were zenith of everything and everyone.

“Getting course input,” Haral said; and the screen shifted, lines blinking and calling for matchup, the lane assignment from the buoy.

Third dump. Pyanfar swallowed heavily and looked at scan again as it sorted itself out. “Image aft,” Geran said: it went to number two screen. Mahijiru. The wavefront was running up their backsides, where that ship and its partner were aimed if they delayed dump.

“Too close, mahe,” Pyanfar muttered.

Final dump. They hit course, down the slot and true, on Kilan Station’s guidance. “Transmit intent to dock at Gaohn,” Pyanfar said: that was the innermost of the two stations of Ahr System, that about Anuurn itself. The signal went out: the acknowledgment flashed back from one of the robot buoys, automatic routing, approach as routine as any incoming merchanter.

“Dump behind us,” Chur said. “Second arrival; both our I friends are in.”

“Transmit instructions to ignore routing and stay on our tail. Give them a signal.”

“Station scan,” Geran said, “is showing a lot of ships. A lot of ships.”

Pyanfar looked. Six major planets about Ahr: Gohin; Anuurn itself; Tyo; Tyar; Tyri and Anfas — with assorted moons, rings and planetoids. Anuurn alone was comfortably habitable; and Gaohn Station circled it; and there was Kilan Station which supported the little colony on Tyo. There was always traffic. Hani were not the colonists that mahendo’sat” and stsho and even knnn tended to be: but here, in home-system, there was always traffic, from little ships which plied the system to the greater ones which jumped in from other stars; there was the huge null-g shipyard of Harn Station, where all hani ships were born and where they came for refitting and repair.

But there were twice the usual number, easily twice, ships in offlanes positions, waiting; ships in clusters; ships by groups of four and five. “I don’t like that,” Haral said.

“Not all ours,” Pyanfar said. And after a moment: “He’s here. Goldtooth said it; the kif at Kirdu said it. Hinukku’s come here. After revenge.”

No one said anything. The minutes crept up on the chronometer. The Pride was sending her own signal, computer talking to computer. A telltale flashed and a signal came over com. “Mahijiru,” Chur said. “Aja Jin, Both moving up on our track.”

“Blink them a comeahead,” Pyanfar said. “Tightbeam; nothing more.”

“Permission to move about,” Tirun sent from lowerdeck. “Denied. Got a situation here. Stay put.” “Understood,” Tirun answered.

Chur leaned down, opened the cabinet by her post and brought out a bottle, sucked a bit from it and passed it on; it went to Geran and to Haral; finally into Pyanfar’s hand with an exact quarter visible through the opaque plastic. She sipped at it, her mouth like paper and tasting days stale; her hand left shed fur on the moist bottle when she dropped it into the wasteholder. The salt and the moisture helped, took some of the shakes from her limbs. There was still a misery in her back and in her joints, a tendency for her eyes to blur. Not easy on the body, double-skipping. Bodies were not designed for such abuses. She thought of docking, of having to walk about, to deal with possible trouble—

To get a shuttle and to get downworld with all else hovering about them…

Something clenched about her gut, protesting. She looked at scan, their own, tight scan, number four screen, where a friendly blip was moving up into intercept. Another blip showed on the edge of the screen.

“Got synch,” Goldtooth’s voice came through. “Jik come up otherside.”

“Got too many ships,” Pyanfar said, signaling Chur to put the transmission through. “Want you where you are, mahe.”

A mahen chuckle. “A.”

“Rot your hide.”

She shut it down.

“Got station contact,” Chur said. “They don’t say anything out of the way; normal approach instructions.”

“Three berths,” Pyanfar said. “Together. Tell them to clear something if they don’t have it. Talk them into it.”

It was a long interval. They still had lagtime from station. “Stationmaster,” Chur said finally, “intervened to grant it. We’ve got twenty through twenty-two.”

“Comment?”

“Nothing,” Chur reported.

Trouble. Pyanfar’s ears flicked. If they could demand ships shunted about and get their request it was because they had a right to it; and if they had a right to it, then there was an emergency in progress. Homecoming kin had right-of-way… in situations of death; of challenge; of disasters.

“System’s quiet,” Chur reported. “I’m not getting idle chatter. They’re not volunteering any information, captain.”

“Kif,” Pyanfar said. “Outsiders present.”

Tully said something from belowdecks. Went silent. Hilfy’s voice followed, talking to him, low and urgent.

“Let’s not have any panic down there,” Pyanfar said. “Tully. Quiet. Take orders, hear?”

“Understand,” Tully said.

The minutes crawled past. Jik’s Aja Jin came into position, so that The Pride went flanked by the mahe. “Goldtooth,”

Pyanfar said. “You come onstation with me; want your friend stay out of dock and watch, a?”

“A,” the answer came back, short and sweet; from Jik no word. He would do it, Pyanfar thought. Station was sending specific instructions: Haral was attending that, inputting it for comp. She hit the shunt which dumped the data onto Haral’s screens, with a blinking warning that control of the ship came with it: Haral nodded, accepting it without missing a keystroke. Pyanfar loosed her restraints, swung her cushion about and assayed to get her feet under her.

“Get to the bridge,” she told those below, leaning over com. “Aye,” Tirun sent back. Pyanfar walked about a bit, unsteady on her feet, bent down enough to get some of the dried food out of storage by her own console. Chips and bottles of salts. She opened them, put them in reach of Haral and Geran and Chur, chewed on a bit of dried meat and washed it down with half a bottle of the liquid. Dehydrated. The jumps took some time off bodies. She walked about trying to get the needling pains out of her joints, heard the lift in function and then steps coming down the corridors.

“Captain.”

Knnn-song wailed out of com.

“Gods and thunders!” Pyanfar spat. “Location on that.”

“Ahead of us,” Geran said. “One of those ships moving up on station.”

Tirun and Hilfy and Tully had arrived, stood together in the archway which opened onto the bridge, silent in the grating sound which ran the scale.

Knnn never called at Anuurn. Never, till now.

“It overjumped us,” Pyanfar said with — she reckoned — commendable calm. “If that’s our knnn, it just overjumped us by at least an hour.”

“Fast bastard,” Tirun muttered.

“Mahijiru,” Chur said, “asks if we notice.”

“Cut that thing off,” Pyanfar said. “Tell Mahijiru yes, we did notice.” She pricked up her ears with an effort, flicking the rings into order on the left. “Hilfy. Tully’s channel.” Hilfy turned her pager onto broadcast. “Tully — we’re home now. Anuurn. Got trouble here.”

“Kif,” Tully said. “I hear. Hani — make deal with them?”

“Papers,” Pyanfar said sharply, and when Tully’s hand went to his left pocket: “You keep those with you. You’re registered; you’ve got a number in the Compact. No. No way the kif can take you by law. Going to have one lot of mad kif, maybe; maybe some mad hani. But they can’t take you, except by force.”

“Fight them.”

“You take my orders. My crew, my orders.”

“Pyanfar.” Tully thrust out his hand to stop her from turning away. “I don’t go from you.”

Pyanfar flattened her ears, staring up into Tully’s pale, distraught eyes. “I don’t need someone making me conditions. You do what I tell you.”

“Do. Yes. I go on this ship. With you. #### give ### hani I quick dead.”

“We’ve got troubles enough, Outsider. Hani troubles as well as kif. Let be.”

“With you. Long time voyage. With you.”

“I’m not your kin, rot you. You come on my ship, you make me trouble — what in a Mahen hell do I owe you?”

“Dead, outside. Need you.”

“Huh.” Male. The shout left a quiet after it. Alien male, but all the same she saw the line drawn, the edge past which there was no thinking… their patient, docile Outsider. She cuffed his arm, claws not quite pulled. “You listen, friend Tully; you think, rot your hide. We go off this ship; we; you; we come back, you come back with us. Hear?”

“Come with you?”

“I say it.”

He flung his arms about her; sweaty, reeking as he was, as they both were, he hugged her with abandon. She freed one arm and the other and shoved him off in indignation, which in no wise changed the look in his eyes.

“Do all you say,” he said.

“By the gods you’ll do it. You do something wrong and I’ll notch your ears for you. You keep that brain of yours working or I’ll rattle it like a gourd. Can you do that? Can you look at a kif and not go crazy?”

That took a moment’s thought. He nodded then. “Get them other time,” he said confidently, waved a hand toward the wide infinite. “We go find kif other time pull their heads off.”

The mangled extravagance appealed to her; he did, with his clear-eyed insanity. She cuffed him harder and got a moment’s shock, not temper — like Khym, like her own easygoing Khym, where Kohan would have swung and cursed at the sting. She was reassured, that he was capable of restraint, that a cuff on the ears stood a chance of getting his attention; that blunt-fingered and slender as he was, a couple of them could hold him if they had to. “If we get out of this,” she promised him, “we go skin some kif. Next trip out. I take you with me.”

That was premature. They owned nothing to give away, least of all the disposition of the Outsider. Lose Chanur, she thought with a chill, and they could make no more promises at all; but confidence burned in Tully’s eyes, a trust that he was theirs.

Gods. Theirs. Theirs for managing, for using, for finding the location of his distant people before the mahendo’sat or the kif could do so, and making a wedge for Chanur trade. But it was Hilfy’s kind of a look he gave her. Worship… not quite. Absolute belief. She looked at Hilfy to be sure and found the same. Looked disquietedly at the others, at Haral and Geran and Chur and Tirun, who had their own rights on this ship which was theirs as well as hers, who had been here longer and knew better and had to know what the odds were. It was there too — quieter, but as crazily trusting. She talked about going kif-hunting and they gave her that kind of stare.

“Keep it sane in here,” she said. “I’m going to clean up. Tully, for the gods’ sake, bathe.”

She stalked out. The Pride streaked on toward station. She had no least doubt that some of those ships out there were kif, and that there was at least the remote possibility that the kif might face about and start a run at them in some berserk notion of revenge.

If this Akukkakk saw no other possibility, he might. But his presence here, before her, indicated that he knew that she had to come here; and why; and that he had a chance of revenge far wider than one ship, a handful of deaths.

It was Chanur he was aiming at. His information was accurate enough to have brought him here. Somewhere, hani had talked; and he knew where to put the pressure on.

Faha, she thought unworthily, but the suspicion nagged at her. If not the Faha, others, who had talked too freely at some dock or — gods help them — Handur prisoners, taken alive at Meetpoint. She doubted the latter: the destruction had been thorough: and Goldtooth denied the chance of survivors. But someone, somewhere — had said enough in the wrong hearing. She put the thought away. It was too bitter.

She wore the red this time, red silk breeches and the best of her rings and the pendant pearl. Appearances. She combed and brushed until her mane and her beard gleamed red gold highlights. She splashed on perfume, reckoned that some sweeter scent would hardly hurt Tully, and pocketed one of several vials in the drawer.

For Hilfy she pocketed something too. She went back to the bridge then, distracted herself with current reports on their approach — Hilfy was not there, nor were Tully or Geran or Chur, but Tirun had taken the number three cushion next Haral. “No trouble,” Pyanfar observed.

“Routine so far,” Haral said.

“I’ll take it. Your turn.” Pyanfar slid in at her place and Haral slid out of hers, weary and staggering in the use of cramped muscles.

“Getting some kif transmission,” Tirun said after a moment. “Operational. They know we’re here. Nothing more said.”

“How many of them, do you reckon?”

“Station’s given us an accurate count. Seven.”

“Gods have mercy.”

“Aye.”

Pyanfar shook her head and called up the various images available to her screens. They were coming in under automatic at present, locked on station’s guidance. Vid image filled one screen, Anuurn itself, blue and marbled with cloud. Beautiful. It was always beautiful on approach, never so spectacular as Urtur, but full of life. It conjured blue skies; and grassy\plains and broad rivers and vast seas; it conjured colors; and scents; and textures; and a gut feeling which was different than all other words… for hani.

She watched at her leisure: with The Pride under automatic there was little else to do. A sweep of their second vid camera showed their mahen escorts riding slightly aft, two sleek killers, so precise in position they might have been one single ship.

“Aja Jin advises he’ll drop back to guard as we go in,” Tirun said.

“Understood.”

“Still picking up signal from that knnn. Tried the translator on it. I get nothing but a docking matchup, aside from the singing.”

“They docked?”

“Quarter hour ago. Gods know what station’s going to do with them. No facilities except the emergency hookup. I don’t get any outside transmission on that problem.”

“Huh.”

“Not a word from anyone else in system. Unnatural quiet.”

“Kif docked?”

“All seven.”

“Thank the gods for that. You sure?”

“Station’s word on it.”

Pyanfar laid her ears back, scowled. It was too cooperative all round, kif who put into station… something was crooked here. Badly out of trim. It was far too late to turn about. And there was Kohan and all of Chanur below, who had no such options to turn and run. Therefore The Pride did not.

“Station requests all weapons shielded.”

Pyanfar considered a moment, reached to the board and complied. “Done,” she said, wishing otherwise. Presumably Mahijiru did the same. Aja Jin had dropped behind them now, in a defensive position at their vulnerable tails.

“Got plan?” Goldtooth’s voice reached her ears then, transferred from Tirun’s board.

“Want you with me when we go out,” she said. “You understand hani station rules. Know them all?”

“All,” Goldtooth confirmed.

“See you on the dock.”

Weapons, she meant to say: hani stations observed no weapons-rules. It was not a thing she wanted to discuss on com. She trusted that the mahe would turn up armed. It was certain the kif would.