“No, no, these are foreigners! And I have confidence in your honor’s elegance. Convey such a message. I am most displeased with such behavior. I shall certainly relate their answer to the authorities at Llyene!”
“Your excellency most certainly has the right words. Shall I provide your excellency a communications link to station central?”
“Absolutely! I shall execrate their offspring and their dealings!”
For a stsho, Tlisi-tlas-tin was acquiring very hani sentiments.
For a hani, she was acquiring a very curious empathy for a flat-toothed, group-following stsho.
Gtst excellency certainly rattled the appropriate doors.
“I am outraged to learn of the demise of gtst excellency and gtst staff! This is villainy! I demand recompense! I demand the immediate cooperation of station authorities! I demand serious inquiry into the kidnapping of gtst excellency of Urtur! I demand serious action against the harassment perpetrated against us by the mahen ship Ha’domaren! Failure to comply instantly will jeopardize trade with all stsho!”
Strange to say, the Voice of the Personage of Kshshti immediately surrendered the mike to the Personage himself.
And strange to say, the Voice was quickly thereafter on the com, in person, to expedite customs for the Legacy, and to declare that officials were on the way to make serious inquiry into the issues raised by gtst excellency.
“Most efficacious!” Hilfy said, and restrained herself from slapping Tlisi-tlas-tin on the back, gtst was so pleased with gtstself … positively beaming as gtst leaned back from the ops room com console.
“Let them reflect upon the consequences I have named! Nothing is idle threat!”
The futures market, on the number two screen, showed an immediate five point rise in strategics and necessities. One could predict an active bidding for the Legacy’s cargo.
One could also predict a message from Ha’domaren …
“You damn lot ignorant hani! You don’t listen, this no place to act like fool! I want talk! Now!”
“I’ll bet you do,” she said, stroking her mane into order.
Old nightmares, old sounds, remembered smells … now and then traded places in rapid succession. Kshshti docks hadn’t changed that much. It was still a raffish, rough place of bare metal, cheap plastics, leaking pipes and condensation that made rainy weather in the high cold chill of the towering overhead, obscured in the multiple suns of the lamps—hydrogen and sodium spectra that gave everything multiple shadows in bilious colors. It might have been years ago. It might be The Pride at dock behind her instead of the Legacy, and it might be those dark and dangerous times.
But it wasn’t Tully walking beside her, it was Tiar, who hadn’t said a word about old history, or anything of the sort, only pounced on her in the airlock with: “You’re not going out there alone, captain. And you’re not meeting that son by yourself.”
So she hadn’t gotten away. Orders be damned, Tiar would follow her. Two of them wandering around out there solo was asking for trouble. The dockside office, Haisi had finally agreed—which was line of sight. Haisi refused to come to the Legacy, she wouldn’t come to Ha’domaren, not even close to it: the registry office, where one of them had to go anyway to get the loaders scheduled, was as close a compromise as they could arrive at, and she didn’t have that much to say to Haisi anyway.
A couple of lines, like Stay off my tail, and Tell me who you’re working for or we’re through talking.
“More bars than restaurants,” Tiar muttered.
“By actual count, probably.” She was trying not to let her nerves get the better of her. It was her personal nightmare, this dockside: kif waiting in ambush, an alley that promised safety turning into a trap …
They’d fought, she and Tully had. But there’d been too many of them. And they’d ended up on a kifish ship, a prize aunt Py had to buy back at cost—
—at a cost that might have changed the Compact forever; or might have had no bearing on the outcome: she could never reason it out. Her wits went down too many tracks when she even tried to figure it, and it was more than meeting a mahen agent that brought her out of the Legacy and onto this dockside: she had to go. She had to walk out here and see the place again, and, now that she was here, she could tell herself it was a place no different than other places, and that if things were equal, they would take a liberty here, disgrace their species in several of the bars, and leave Kshshti as they left any port in the Compact, maybe better, maybe worse.
Nothing mystical about this place, at least. And nothing that remarkable about the tall mahe who stood with arms folded outside the station office.
“Go on,” she said to Tiar, “take care of our business. I’ll talk to this son.”
“Bad language,” Haisi said. “Shame. Shame you lie.”
“Got you, did they?”
“No, just make damn mess.”
“Listen, mahe bastard, you ride my tail one more time in jump I’ll have your ears! I don’t care how good your pilot thinks he is—”
A hand landed on Haisi’s dark chest, fingers spread. “I. I pilot.”
“Fine! I’m glad to know who I’m insulting! You’re a damned fool, I’ve seen better, and I by the gods resent your taking chances with us! I don’t care who your Personage is, you have no gods-be right to risk my ship!”
“No risk. I damn good.”
She jabbed a claw at said chest. “I mean it! I’ll sue you for endangerment. My passenger will sue you!”
“Where damage?”
“My nerves, mahen bastard! I’m carrying a stsho and you by the gods know it! You don’t do it again!”
“Maybe same you use sense don’t make trouble with stsho. Maybe now you talk deal what kind oji.”
“No deal!”
“Oh, now we big confi-dent! Now we got make trouble honest mahe station—”
“Gtst isn’t kidding, mahe! You want trade shut down, you want that on your Personage’s doorstep, you push me.”
“You damn fool! You listen me! You want make friend kif? I think you got same real dislike with kif!”
“Kif aren’t giving me any trouble right now. You are!”
“Kif give you big lot trouble a’ready. Who got Atli-lyen-tlas?”
“You, for all I know.”
“Not true. Kif got.”
A blunt mahen claw jabbed her in the chest, and she batted at the offending hand. “You listen,” Haisi said. “True No’shto-shti-stlen send Tlisi-tlas-tin go you ship?”
“So?”
“True you go visit No’shto-shti-stlen?”
“So?”
“True same got kif guard?”
“You got a point, mahe? Get to it!”
“You like kif guard?”
“I said get to it!”
“All same No’shto-shti-stlen got lot kif. Kif got No’shto-shti-stlen. Same in bed like old friend. No’shto-shti-stlen want be number one stsho and here come stupid hani—” A wave of a dark, blunt-clawed hand. “Believe everything gtst excellency got say. Take contract. You hold damn grenade, Chanur! Thing go bang in you face.”
“Same like be friend with damn mahe reckless no-regard-for-life!”
“Same like be smart mahen accent. Chanur protocol officer not damn polite.”
“I’m always that way with navigational hazards. I have an allergy to fools!”
“You calm down. You listen. You want go bed with kif, you like fine No’shto-shti-stlen. You listen! You aunt be damn fool, all time ‘ssociate with kif bandit. Oh, real polite, real nice. But same call you aunt mekthakkikt, great leader, like real fine … All same kif pirate. All same kif steal, kill, lie, I no got tell Hilfy Chanur about kif—”
“You can sit in your own hell, mahe, you’re way past the limit with me. What I am and what I know, what I did and what I’ll do … aren’t your damn business, they haven’t been your damn business, and I absolutely resent your trying to manipulate me! No luck, no luck, mahe, and you can tell that to the Personage that s
ent you to maneuver Chanur against itself.”
“I try help, hani fool!”
“Stay out of my way!”
“You listen—”
“No.”
“You listen, hani! You want kif be number one power in the Compact, you keep go what you do!”
“Fine. What’s my choice? A smart-mouthed mahe?”
“Don’t be fool!”
“I wasn’t born one and I won’t be made one. Good afternoon, Ana-kehnandian. And our regards to your Personage. Maybe she’ll send someone polite next time she wants favors from a hani!”
“Fool!”
“Twice a fool!” Shouting was drawing an audience … mahendo’sat, a wall of brown and black, no sign of the stsho one might have expected here. “This isn’t a place to discuss anything.”
“Fine, we go my ship.”
“I don’t go near your ship. And it’s no good you coming to mine because you’re not going to get what you want. We’re drawing a crowd. Forget it!”
“Hani!—”
“Forget it, I said!” She walked away, shouldered a couple of mahendo’sat on her way to the registration office door, walked through into the brighter light—with some satisfaction in Haisi’s discomfiture at being what no hunter-ship captain ever wanted to be: public.
He didn’t follow her in. There were stares all about them, mahendo’sat, mostly, and the inevitable (at Kshshti) clutch of black-robed, cowled kif, whispering in their own language of clicks and hisses.
Hani, was one word her ears caught. Chanur, was another.
Tiar was at the desk. She walked up to Tiar’s elbow and waited while the mahen clerk processed the information.
“Not a real happy mahe,” she muttered into Tiar’s canted ear. “He claims he pilots that ship. Cocky son, says he’ll miss us, we don’t have to worry about collision.”
“What did he want?”
“Oh, the usual, warn us about a plot to take over the universe, that sort of thing. What else is new?”
Tiar’s ear flicked. “Captain, somebody might speak hani.”
Dear, literal-minded Tiar. For the first time in a decade she felt alive, felt—
—by the gods, ahead of the situation instead of chasing after it.
Didn’t know what she was going to do, precisely, but she knew what she was doing—and whoever was against them, didn’t: that was the name of the game; and quite comfortably she turned her back to the counter, leaned her elbows there, and simply stared back (smiling pleasantly, of course) at the mahendo’sat and kif staring at her.
Crazy as the rest of the family, she thought. It probably onset with age. Aunt Py had been relatively stable until she became captain of The Pride.
The business at the desk concluded, Tiar putting in her bid for loaders to their dockside, no, they hadn’t sold the cargo yet, but they’d put in a destination when they agreed with the loaders, so much per section the load had to go around the rim of Kshshti, and no, they didn’t need provisioners soliciting them. Everything was fine.
Meanwhile she watched the room in the remote but not impossible chance someone might turn up with a weapon or some sort of trouble might come through the door.
Somebody like Haisi. Somebody like a few of his crew. Probably Haisi was thinking hard what to do about troublesome hani. And if he was connected to anyone responsible, gods rot him, he could have produced credentials from people she knew. She didn’t need any, to prove to him who she was.
“I think we’re ready,” Tiar said.
“Let’s walk back,” she said. “Sort of watch it.”
The crowd at the door moved and let them out onto the dingy, multiple-shadowed docks. “Haisi’s left,” Hilfy said under her breath.
“Wasn’t highly helpful?”
“You could say that.” Another time-flash, on the smells and the sights and the sounds of the dock, a bus passing, on its magnetic guide strip, rattling the deck plates at a service access. And not a hani in sight … just not a place hani had gotten to, lately. Peace might have brought prosperity … but merchant ships tended to establish quiet, regular routes. There weren’t the disruptions, the wild incidents, the rumors, that tended to send the timid running and the foolhardy kiting in on the smell of profit: and, absent those motives, a merchant ship tended to carve out a route it followed and stick to that route for fear of someone moving in to compete … from a cooperative, rumor-trading free trade, they’d become misers, close-mouthed on information, jealously protective of their routes and resentful if somebody moved in on them or undercut their prices—a mercantile age, it was, a greedy, tight-fisted age.
And what was a hani ship saying by being out of its normal route these days, or what was a mahen hunter ship doing sniffing about? That there was something different about them? That, being Chanur, there was something other than trade on their minds?
That murdered stsho were significant?
Trust Kshshti to spread the rumors it got. That little business with Haisi was already spreading on a network more efficient than the station news, bet on it.
“Ever been on Kshshti?”
“No,” Tiar said shortly. Tiar had an anxious, distracted look. And she knew Tiar hadn’t been here: aunt Rhean hadn’t favored this area of space. Aunt Pyanfar had been the one to run the edges, preferentially, using her experience of foreigners to make The Pride profitable.
But aunt Pyanfar hadn’t spoken the languages with any great fluency. And she could. She’d gone into that study to give herself an edge in getting into the crew, she’d had an aptitude for words, a mind quick to grasp foreign ideas, and a tongue that didn’t trip on stshoshi … best bribe she could have offered aunt Py, who couldn’t say Llyene without dropping an essential 1.
And where had it brought her?
A car swerved near them. “Gods-be fool!” Tiar exclaimed.
“Na Hallan would be right at home here,” she said—nasty joke; but na Hallan wasn’t here to hear it, and she was in a joking mood, crazy as it was. Maybe it was discovering Kshshti was a real place, and debunking it of the myth of nightmare … she hadn’t flinched from coming here, hadn’t let herself, but by the gods, maybe she should have come here years ago, walked the docks, had a look at the place and told herself …
“Kif,” Tiar said suddenly, and her eyes spotted them at the same moment, a handful of them standing about in the shadows near the Legacy’s berth.
Her heart was beating faster. She told herself there was no reason for panic, the station was civilized enough these days that an honest trader could get from the dock office to her ship’s ramp without a gun; and that calling on the pocket com would be an over-reaction.
One of them was walking toward them, strobed in the multiple shadows of the lights and the flash of a passing service truck. The matte black of his hooded robe was only marginally different from the skin of the long snout that was all of him that met the light. She couldn’t see his hands, and while what had once been gunbelts were mere ornament these days … knives weren’t outlawed.
“Captain, …” Tiar said.
“If something happens, break for cover behind the number two console, call station on com, I’ll take the number one, call the ship …” She monotoned it, under her breath: her mind was on autopilot, her eyes were on the kif … all the kif. They were predators, highly evolved, and fast over short distances. And no weapons ban covered teeth.
“Good day, captain. What a rare sight … hani back at Kshshti. How pleasant. Captain Hilfy Chanur, is it?”
“We might have met,” she said flatly, ears back and with no pretense at friendliness. “Have we?”
“That unfortunate incident. I assure you I was light-years away and not involved. Let me introduce myself. My name is Vikktakkht, ambassador Vikktakkht an Nikkatu, traveling aboard Tiraskhti. Perhaps the mekthakkikt has mentioned me.”
“I doubt it. If she has, we haven’t been in the same port in years.”
“Ah. And your companion, your chief o
fficer, perhaps.”
“Tiar Chanur.”
“Another name to remember. How do you do, captain? And I won’t ask you such a meaningless question as why you’re here. I know why you’re here. I know where you’re going.”
The hair prickled at her nape. The last she’d seen there were only mahendo’sat back there in front of the office, but there’d been those inside. And she had no inclination to wait here through kifish courtesies. “Nice to meet you, give my regards to the mekthakkikt, and excuse us if we don’t stand about. We’re running a tight schedule.” She took Tiar’s arm and started around the obstacle, but there were more of them beyond him, between them and the consoles and the ramp.
“Captain,” the kif called after her. “Tell Hallan Meras I’d like to talk to him.”
Dangerous to turn her back. It wasn’t Pride crew she was with. “Watch them,” she snapped, and turned to see what Vikktakkht was up to.
“Just tell him,” it said, with a lifting of empty, peaceful hands. “We’re old acquaintances.”
Smug. Oh, so smug.
“Good day, then, Vikktakkht an Nikkatu.”
“You have a very good accent.”
“Practice,” she said succinctly, and turned her back and swept up Tiar on a walk for the ramp access, past the kif who attended Vikktakkht.
The bastard thought she’d panic. The bastard thought she’d still twitch to old wounds. Wrong, kif.
Dangerously wrong.
“What’s he want with na Hallan?” Tiar asked, glancing over her shoulder. “What’s he talking about? Do you know him?”
“Not yet.”
“What’s the kid possibly got to do with him?”
“That’s what I want to ask na Hallan.”
They were down on several spices, they’d run low on tissues, and they were out of shellfish, but they certainly had enough staples from here to Anuurn.
“Ker Chihin,” Hallan said. “Ker Chihin, I’ve got the—”
Straight into the captain’s presence.
“—inventory,” he said. But by the captain’s frowning, ears-down look, by Tarras and Tiar Chanur standing behind her likewise ears-down and frowning, he didn’t somehow think they wanted the inventory. He didn’t think anything he’d done in the galley could have fouled anything else up, unless maybe he’d messed up the computer somehow.