“Specifically?” Kauryfy said.
“Settling things among ourselves. This isn’t over. Far from it. I want you to take my orders.”
Kauryfy’s pupils did a quick tightening and redilating. Her mustaches drew down. “Known each other a few years, haven’t we?”
“There was Hoas.”
Kif dust-up, back in the small-time pirate days. Another flicker of Kauryfy’s eyes.
“Yeah,” Kauryfy said, and looked from her to the kifish shadow that stood at her back; and back again. “Well, we got along then.”
“I’ll go with it,” said Haurnar Vrossaru, in her deep northlands accent.
“Same,” said Haroury Pauran, dark as some mahendo’sat, and with one blue eye and one gold. She thrust her hands into her belt and scowled, looked aside at young Munur Faha, who sullenly lowered and lifted her ears: “Aye,” said Munur. She was Hilfy’s cousin, remote. “I’m with you.”
That left two. Vaury Shaurnurn gnawed at her mustaches and turned her shoulder to the lot of them: the other (that would be Tauran, by elimination, of The Star of Tauran) turned and looked Shaurnurn’s way. And then Tahar’s.
“Kin of ours died at Gaohn,” said Tauran.
“Here is here,” Tahar said.
And: “Kkkkt,” from Skkukuk, who had antennae for trouble. That long jaw lifted. So did the gun. And the other kif stiffened.
“Pasiry died at Gaohn. Your allies shot her in the gut. She bled to death while we were pinned down.”
“Here is here,” Pyanfar said. “Argue it later. For godssake, ker Vaury. I’ll tell it to you later, where we got Tahar. Right now we’ve got an appointment. An important one. In Ruharun’s name, cousin.”
They were not kin either. Far from it. Vaury Shaurnurn looked her way with ears flat. Cousin. Listen to me, ker Vaury. Believe nothing I say, do everything I say, make no false moves. Cousin.
She stared Vaury Shaurnurn dead in the eyes and thought that thought as hard as she could. Vaury’s ears lowered and lifted again. “Cousin,” Vaury said ever so deliberately. “We’ve been in and out of the same places, haven’t we? Never been other than courteous with me; all right. That’s all I’ll say. All right.” Vaury gave a glance at Tully, up and down. “This the same one?” The glance lingered at the AP at Tully’s hip and traveled up again to his face. “Same human as at Gaohn?”
“Tully,” Pyanfar said. “Yes.” She looked aside to the stranger-kif. “Who this visitor of ours is, is another matter. Ikkhoitr crew, I’m thinking.”
“Ikkhoitru-hakt’.”
“Captain.” The hair bristled down her back. “Honored, we are. I’ll trust your people are going to escort us over to Harukk.”
Ikkhoitr’s captain turned and stalked down the hall in that direction, kifish-economical. And without hani courtesy.
“Kkkkt,” Skkukuk said, warning.
It was not friendly, that captain’s move. He was, kifishlike, on the push, looking for chinks and advantages; and one little lapse into hani courtesies had achieved unintended irony. She had ordered him.
She had invoked the hakkikt. And being kif, he dared not demur or hesitate. She had scored on him, who had come in here looking for fault, fluent and deadly dangerous.
Gods hope he had failed to find it. Or that kif did not have the habit of lying in certain regards.
“Skkukuk says watch him,” she muttered to the others. “Tirun, you stay aboard. Hear?”
Tirun did not like it. But crew did not argue these days. Not in front of kif, even their own.
* * *
The personnel lock cycled, letting the party out. And closed again, audible from the bridge over the steady bleep and tick of incoming telemetry and com. “That’s seal,” Haral said to Tirun belowdecks. “Get up here.”
“Station com’s still gibbering,” Hilfy said. “Gods-be stsho’re going crazy. I can’t make out anything except how glad they are to have the noble hakkikt back a—” She blinked, as Geran suddenly turned her head, and blinked again, seeing Chur wobbling into the bridge, Chur without her rings and dressed in a towel, the implant still in her arm and secured with tape. Her mane and beard were dull, her fur thin in pink spots where skin showed through, and her ribs showed prominent above a hollowed belly.
“Geran—” Hilfy said, but Geran had already grabbed her.
Haral turned her chair and took a look. “Geran, for godssakes—”
“Got to walk a bit,” Chur said, the merest ghost of Chur’s voice, but she passed a glance around at monitors and displays. “Got a mess, do we? Lock working down there— Y’don’t expect a body to sleep. Geran, set me down, I’ve got to sit. Who’s covering you?”
“He is.” Meaning Khym. “Sit.”
“You’re an emergency,” Haral said. “Gods rot it, sit down.” As Chur wilted onto Skkukuk’s seat. “We’re up to our noses. Could have an attack from gods know who come screaming through here any minute, we got to be able to move, how do we move with you wandering around?”
Chur save a ghastly grin. “Hal, cousin, if we’ve got to move without the captain, I’m sitting a chair, no way I’m not. What in a mahen hell is going on out there?”
“The captain aboard Harukk is what’s going on out there. We got kifish guns to our heads and gods know what else about to come in here for a piece of stsho hide.”
“Figured.” Chur drew a large breath as if breathing was hard. “Gods take ’em. What’s our cousin up to?”
“Sfik,” Hilfy said. “She’s got three species for an escort and a half-dozen hani captains following her moves. She’s running the biggest gods-be bluff of our lives, that’s what she’s doing. Trying to buy us time.”
“If we got two hani walking sequential it’ll be the first time since we went on two feet.” Chur leaned her head back on the headrest and rolled it aside to look at the displays. “Not mentioning the mahendo’sat.” Her breath was coming harder, and for a moment Hilfy tensed in her chair, thinking she might go unconscious; but Geran had Chur’s shoulder, and Chur got her head up again. “Haral, I want a pocket com and I want ops-com run back there to my cabin. All right?”
“You got it,” Haral said. “Geran, get her out of here.”
“Hilfy,” Khym said, “you want to cover me?” —preparing to get out of his seat and help. But: “I’m doing all right,” Chur said, and caught hold of the arm and levered herself up like an old woman, where Geran could steady her. Then she walked, slowly, slowly, back the way she had come, past a startled Tirun Araun, just arrived up from lowerdecks.
“What’s that?” Tirun asked when she and Geran were out and down the corridor. With a look backward. “She all right?”
“Wants to know what’s going on,” Khym said. “She’s fighting.”
“She’s got her way again,” Haral said in the same low tone. “Too.” And swung her chair back around.
“Priority,” Khym said suddenly, which set a lurch into Hilfy’s pulse.
“Scan-blocking,” Tirun said, slipping into place while Hilfy cast an anxious look at the scan display on her number-two monitor. A vanished ship reestablished itself in the red of projected-position. One by one other ships went red, the blight spreading in an orderly way. Then:
“That’s friendly of them,” Haral murmured as their own position at station vanished from the other display. “At least they’re catholic when they blank the scan.”
* * *
The ramp access doors opened, above the once-teeming docks: deserted now, mostly. Bits of paper. Trash. Abandoned machinery. Burn-scars on the paints. And cold, which the Meetpoint docks always were, too much size and too little free heat from the dull, dead Mass about which the station orbited. There were abundant kif—not far away, black shapes in robes. Skkukun, likely, quasi-slaves on Ikkhoitr. Expendables and dangerous as a charged cable.
And there were stsho, fragile-looking pale figures huddled over against the far side of their own docks, scurrying like pale ghosts, out of doorways and shelter, the
dispossessed owners of Meetpoint. A mass of them surged toward the foot of the ramp, indecisively retreated, bolted again toward them in utter chaos, a crowd all spindle-limbed and gossamer-robed in opalescent whites and pearl, stsho of rank, with their feathery, augmented brows, their moonstone eyes struck with panic. They gibbered and wailed their plaints, their effusive pleas for protection—
And they came to one collective and horrified halt, and gasped and chittered for dread. Of the kif, perhaps.
Or perhaps it was the first sight of Tully that did it.
“Stay close,” Pyanfar muttered to Tully. “Not friends.”
“Got,” he said under his breath. And kept close at her elbow as they descended, Jik trailing behind her; and Tahar; and Harun and all the rest. Kif waiting below formed a black wedge as they went down into that mass of stsho, and the stsho gave way before that like leaves before a wind, gibbering as they went, down a dock on which many of the lighted signs, indicating ships at dock, showed stsho names. Too timid to break dock, helpless in the advent of armed ships sweeping in out of Kefk inbound vector, which was unhappily also the outbound vector for the nearest stsho port, at Nsthen—they could do nothing in their unweaponed state but cower and wait, while their appointed kifish defenders did the smart thing and ran like the devils of a mahen hell were on their heels.
“Lousy mess,” Pyanfar said; and hitched the rifle she carried to a more conspicuous attitude, while they walked along an aisle of kif with Ikkhoitr’s black-robed captain, and stsho retreated and stared at them from concealment with terrified, moonstone eyes.
Then a kifish name showed in lights above a berth: and the ramp of Harukk gaped for them.
She hitched her gunbelt up and tried to calm her stomach. Her nose had begun to prickle and she searched after another pill in her pocket, never minding the timelapse. Metabolism did peculiar things after jump. She was strung tight and getting tighter, on the raw edge of fatigue.
Walking up that ramp was very much not what she wanted to do, if her body had had its choice in the matter; but brain began to assert itself as cold terror ebbed down to a different kind of wariness.
Gods, we got to think, Pyanfar Chanur, we got to think about all those stationfolk, dithering stsho though they be, and gods help any hani and any mahendo’sat—the hakkikt’s just taken himself another space station, and this time he’s got his blood up and he’s got a point to make. Gods help ’em all, think, think, get the mind wide awake.
Gods-be pills make you sleepy, curse ’em.
I haven’t got the strength for this. I’m not any kid anymore. The knees are going to go. I’m going to fall down right on this godsforsaken rampway, and if I do it’s all unraveled, we’re all going to die and the gods-blessed Compact is going to go all to pieces because I can’t keep my knees from wobbling and my gut from hurting and my eyes from fuzzing.
Ten more steps, Pyanfar Chanur, and then ten more, and we get to rest a while, we can lean on that lift wall, can’t we? They won’t notice.
Down the corridor, the bleak, black, ammonia-reeking corridor past Harukk’s airlock; and Jik and Kesurinan walking side by side behind her— No knowing what signals they’ve passed, gods rot the luck—
Tully, where’s Tully, f’ godssakes—
She caught sight of him, shouldered back by Skkukuk as she entered the lift with Ikkhoitr’s captain and Jik and Kesurinan and Tahar. “Tully!” she snarled, and he dived forward and made the door before it closed on the first group, leaving the others for a second lift, and gods only hope they ended up in the same place.
Herself and Jik and Tully and Skkukuk, with Tahar and the kifish captain and his lot: the lift let them out in Harukk’s upper corridor, in a chill, damp closeness and the stink of ammonia and incense.
They’ll die if we foul it up. All these people on Meetpoint. My crew. Us on this ship. How do you reason with a kif?
Kif waited for her at the other end, kif dressed in skintight suits and robes modified for freefall work. Sodium-light glared and tinted gray-black skins, the glitter of weapons, of wet-surfaced eyes as they waited to welcome the hakkikt’s guests.
In a hospitality both Jik and Tully had abundant cause to remember.
Chapter 7
The hakkikt waited for them in his audience-chamber, deep within Harukk’s well-shielded ring, and, thank all the gods, there was a place to sit, a chair at a low table, the captains and Jik and Tully all offered chairs at the table with Sikkukkut, and the captains’ escorts left with the skkukun, standing about in the dim sodium-light and the smoke of incense. Pyanfar took the little cup of parini they offered her as she sat: her hand shook when she did it, and if the cup was not drugged, it was as dangerous on her queasy and pill-shocked stomach as if it had been. She had rather food, she had far rather food at the moment.
But not on a kifish ship.
And: “Tully,” she said. “Be careful of that. Hakkikt, I don’t know if he can drink.”
“Kkkt. Indeed. Can you, na Tully?”
“Yes,” Tully said in perfect hani. And answered the hakkikt face to face, after all his evasions and his stratagems. He sipped a bit from his cup, and what went on behind those strange, shyly down-glancing eyes was anyone’s guess.
So with Jik, who drank his own cup, carefully. And if there was raw hate inside him, if there was shock and a still-raw wound, it did not surface. Kesurinan sat beside him, at this different, jointed table with the hollow center, in which a kifish servant squatted ungainly with a serving-flask and waited for someone’s cup to empty. Harun and Tauran, Vrossaru and Pauran and Shaurnurn, Faha and Kesurinan and Jik and scar-faced Dur Tahar; Tully and Skkukuk side by side; and the captain of Ikkhoitr, if she had not lost track of the kif in the shuffle, sitting by his (her?) prince’s elbow.
Gods save them all from the Ikkhoitr captain’s tale-bearing. The long-snouted bastard had indeed been whispering and clicking away, nose to Sikkukkut’s hooded ear.
“Kkkkt,” Sikkukkut said then, and looked at his senior captain with—it might be—curiosity. “Indeed.” He turned then and extended a thin tongue briefly into the metal-studded cup which rested like a silver ball in his black hand. “Is there unanimity among you?”
“Enough,” Pyanfar said; and in coldest blood: “Hani methods, hakkikt. Hani will always dispute. Even when they agree. A sfik-thing. Mine and theirs. It’s satisfied and they’re here. In fact they’re glad to see you.”
“Kkkkt. Are they?”
“We weren’t fond of Akkhtimakt,” Harun said in a low voice, before Pyanfar could mull it over.
Gods, be careful. Speak for yourself and you become a Power, Harun. He may ask what you don’t know how to answer. Watch it, for godssakes watch it, you don’t know what that sounds like in kifish.
“Hani understatement,” Pyanfar said. “Akkhtimakt, a curse on his name, moved in here and dealt with the stsho. That was one thing. He disturbed hani interests. That was another.”
“There were, of course, the mahendo’sat. And this other group of ships. Humans? Were those humans?”
“Yes,” Harun said.
“Interesting.” Another sip at the cup, a glance Tully’s way and back again. “Close but not close enough. The mahendo’sat have pulled off, doubtless to try again. Hence my watchers about the system. A fool would linger on these docks. We might have another Kefk here. In an emergency. There might even be sabotage, kkkt? Did the mahendo’sat touch here?”
“No,” Harun said.
“Who is this captain?”
“Harun of Harun’s Industry,” Pyanfar said.
“Ah. Your cousin.”
Cold went through her nerves. “Distant,” Pyanfar said. “Our clans have a distant tie.” O gods, I hope he doesn’t have our kinships in library. “Ceremonial.” The lie wove itself wider and wider. “Hani place sfik on kinships. And blood-debts. Harun has ties to some of these. I have ties to Harun and Faha, there. It’s really quite simple. And blood-debt to Jik and Kesurinan.” Not to forg
et that business. Add it in. Secure Jik much as I can. “We can have that even to non-hani.” Change the subject. Hold out possibilities to the bastard. “There’s sfik-value on that too.”
And if hani around the table did not know now that every other word she said to the kif was a lie, they were deaf and blind.
“Has he talked to you?”
“Somewhat.” She took a chance, reached and took a sip of parini. “I’m going to keep him on my ship as adviser. I’m sure Kesurinan understands, ummn? But he misses the smokes, hakkikt. He truly does.”
“The smokes,” Sikkukkut repeated in a flat tone, as if she had gone quite mad. “Do we still have such a thing?”
The skku in the center of the tables searched anxiously among its robes. Efficient, by the gods. Foresight covering all sorts of hospitality. It brought out the little sack, eyes aglitter with triumph.
“Your skku is amazing,” Pyanfar murmured, making a low-status kif very happy in its neurotic zeal; and took another minuscule sip of parini.
“I might bestow you another gift,” Sikkukkut said. And scared two kif and a hani at the same time.
“Huh.” She kept her calm. With difficulty. “We hardly have formalities enough to keep another skku occupied. Nothing so splendid, hakkikt.”
“But you want another gift.”
Bluff called. She looked up, lowered her ears and got them up again, heart hammering. “Is the hakkikt disposed to talk policy?”
“Ah.” Sikkukkut set down his cup, hands in his lap as he sat crosslegged in the insect-chair. “Shikki,” he said sharply; and the skku eeled its way over to lay the smokepouch on the table in front of Jik.
Jik picked it up carefully, felt of it and carefully extracted a smokestick and a lighter. “You mind?”
Sikkukkut gave a wave of his hand and Jik put the stick in his mouth and carefully lit it. His hands were shaking, but only a little, limned in the fire that lit his face. The light died. He drew a long breath of smoke in as if it was life itself.
“Foul habit,” Sikkukkut said as the smoke went up to mingle with the ammonia-stink and the incense. He rested an elbow on the raised insect-leg of his chair and leaned his chin on that hand. “But you and I remain friends. Kkkt. Good. That is very well. Kotgokkt kotok shotokkiffik ngik thakkur.”