Chanur's Homecoming

  “Ehrran’s threatening to back out of dock and blow us all. Light’s threatening to blow Vigilance where she sits. We’re supposed to have a kifish ship in here picking up—that. Skkukuk. I’ve told him that’s all we want it to do.” There was a fine-held edge to Sirany’s voice, an experienced captain at the edge of her own limits. “Handle the kif.”

  “Aye,” Chur said, and crawled into the vacant chair between scan and com and livened the aux com panel. With Tauran crew on either side of her. Tully sat one seat down. Other seats were vacant. Fiar’s and Sif’s.

  Handle the kif. Indeed.

  Skkukuk thought of himself as crew. He was loyal. Geran had said that much with a grimace. And Chur had gotten her own captain’s instructions to the kif on open com. That and the encounter belowdecks was all she had to go on, while the kif waited below in lowerdeck ops, for transfer arrangements to be finalized. But she had been in the deep too long to panic over the unusual or the outré.

  One of the black things skittered through the bridge and vanished like a persistent nightmare, long, furred, and moving like a streak.

  On scan, one of the kifish ships nearest had just flared with vector shift.

  Skkukuk’s tight-beamed request for transport had had time to be heard and was evidently being honored.

  “Tully,” she said, leaning to look down the board where he had settled in. “We don’t know when the humans come, right? You record message: record, understand? We send it to system edge, wide as we can, and constant—” She remembered in dismay she was not dealing with Pyanfar. “Your permission, cap’n.”

  “What?” the snapped answer came back. She had to explain it all again. In more detail. And: “Do it,” Sirany said. “Just keep us advised what you do. You got whatever you want.”

  She drew a larger breath, activated com output and set about explanations, alternately to kif and to human and to The Pride’s interim captain. Then there was the matter of communicating with their mahen allies out there, whose disposition and intentions were another question: not many of the mahendo’sat ships had stayed insystem, but such as had were out there face-to-face with the kif, and nominally linked to the hani freighters who were also holding position out there in that standoff. So far they were letting the kifish ship move out where a kifish message with The Pride’s wrap on it had indicated it should go.

  Blind acquiescence was asking a lot, of both mahendo’sat and hani. And even of the kif.

  But things had to stay stable. More, they had to sort themselves out into some kind of defense, both internal and external. The next large group of ships to come in, at any given moment, could be Akkhtimakt’s kif in a second strike, which would swing the whole kifish allegiance in the other direction; or it might be Sikkukkut, having disposed of Goldtooth; or Goldtooth and the humans. Or either without the other. Gods knew what else. Panicked stsho, for all they knew. Or tc’a.

  Far better that whatever-it-was should meet an already existing wavefront of information designed to provoke discussion instead of indiscriminate fire.

  Handle the kif, the woman said.

  She sent it wide. In half a dozen languages and amplified via whatever ships would relay it, to all reaches of the system, continuously, since Gaohn station relays and apparently those of the second outsystem station and both buoys were not cooperating. She was talking to more than those insystem and those arriving; she was talking also to a certain mahen hunter, who had lost himself and gone invisible.

  Chanur is taking Gaohn station. This solar system is under control of Chanur and its allies and its subordinates. You are entering a controlled space. Identify yourselves.

  * * *

  “Hold fire!” Pyanfar yelled, turning, her back to the side wall, the AP up in both hands where it bore on a flat-eared, white-round-the-eyes cluster of hani blackbreeches, Immunes, who were framed in the corridor opening and vulnerable as stsho in a hailstorm. A shot popped past her, high; one streaked back. “Hold!” Khym yelled, and: “Hold it!” Kohan Chanur echoed, two male voices that rumbled and rattled off the corridor walls in one frozen and terrible instant where slaughter looked likely.

  But they were kids who had run up on them. Mere kids. Their ears were back in fright. None of them was armed except with lasers and they were staring down the barrels of APs that could take the deck out. They thought they were going to die there. It was in the look on their faces.

  “Don’t shoot!” one cried, with more presence of mind than the rest, and held her little pistol wide.

  “Are you Ehrran?” Pyanfar yelled back at them, and one of them bolted and ran.

  The others stayed still, eyes wide upon the leveled guns.

  Prisoners we don’t need.

  Gods-be groundling fools.

  “Get out of here!” she yelled at the rest of them. “Out, rot your hides!”

  They ran, scrambling, colliding with each other as they cleared that hall, no shot fired.

  She turned again, saw weary faces, bewildered faces, saw dread in Rhean Chanur and the rest, spacers who had come home to fight against kif and ended up fighting hani kids. That was the kind of resistance there was. That was what they had come down to, trying to take their station back from lunatics who threw beardless children at them.

  “Gods save us,” she said, and drew a ragged breath and shook her head and winced at the thump of explosion, which was Haral with their allies blasting their way through another pressure door that had been, with hani persistence, replaced with another windowed door after the last armed taking of Gaohn station. Nothing bad would ever happen twice, of course. Not at civilized Gaohn. Not to hani, who had no wish to become involved in foreign affairs. Gaohn station prized its staid ways, its internal peace, maintained by ceremonies of challenge and duel.

  “Gods curse Naur,” she said aloud. “Gods curse the han.” And shocked her brother, and surely shocked ker Huran Faha, whose shoulder-scar was from downworld hunting, who knew little more of kif than she knew of hyperspace equations. Pyanfar shoved off from the wall and kept going, stepping through the ruined doorway.

  “Stop,” the intercom said from overhead. “You are in violation of the law. Citizens are empowered to prevent you.”

  There were no citizens in sight. Everyone with sense had gotten out of the section. Those on Gaohn that were not spacers outright, excepting folk like Kohan and Huran, and red-maned Akify who had lived so long downworld with Chanur she had forgotten she was Llun, were all stationers, who knew the fragility of docksides, and knew there was a Chanur ship and a flock of kif and mahendo’sat looming over them. There was a way to slow station intruders down. Anyone in Central might have sealed and vented the whole area under attack, had they been prepared. Had Gaohn station ever been set up for such a defense. But no, the necessary modifications had been debated once, after the first taking of Gaohn, but never carried through: the Llun themselves had argued passionately against it.

  There would never, of course, the Llun had thought, never in a thousand lifetimes come another invasion. The very thought of it disturbed hani tranquility, the acknowledgment of such a calamity was against hani principle: plan for an event and it might well create itself. To prepare Gaohn for defense might create a bellicose appearance that might cause it to need that defense. To provide Gaohn corridors with windowed pressure doors (which permitted visual communication between seal-zones in some contamination or fire emergency) was a safety measure and a moral statement: there would never come the day that the station would have to take extreme measures.

  So it had fallen to Ehrran quite simply.

  And the foreign forces that were coming in had never heard of such philosophy, and cared less. How could one even translate such a mindset to a kifish hakkikt?

  How could a kif who planned across lightyears comprehend the Llun, let alone the groundling Naur, and the mind of the han, which decreed all on its own that hani would be let alone?

  . . . .a kif who planned. . . .

  . . . .a ki
f who let loose a mahen hunter-ship and a hani force to accomplish a task for him which he—

  —could not do himself?

  —did a kif ever believe force insufficient?

  Could a kif be so subtle?

  Gods-rotted right a kif could be subtle. But not down any hani track. A kif wanted power, wanted adherents, wanted territory—

  —Sikkukkut knew, by the gods, that Goldtooth was not done, and being capable of tricks like short-jumping himself, he knew what Goldtooth might have done at Meetpoint, a trick that she had only discovered when they pinned Jik down and wormed it out of him.

  Knnn and gods-knew what had come in on Sikkukkut at Meetpoint, and what would Sikkukkut have done back there? Stayed to contest it? Run home to Kefk and Mkks, or Akkt?

  One wished.

  But that was not Sikkukkut’s style. The wily bastard would have put more and more of the mahen puzzle together, the same as they, Jik’s determined silence notwithstanding. Since Kefk, there was less and less left that Sikkukkut had to know.

  That intrusion which had nearly run them over on their outbound course had been attack coming in again at Meetpoint, that was what it had to be, with the methane-breathers coming in the Out range as methane-breathers were crazy enough to do; and right before Sikkukkut launched his own pet hani toward Anuurn, he had been couriering messages right and left to other ships. . . .

  . . . .Sikkukkut was planning something, and he had that babbling traitor Stle stles stlen aboard: the stsho would have told him anything and everything about Goldtooth he knew to tell.

  Small black creatures stayed active during jump. They were from the kifish home world. So could the kif? Were they plotting and planning all the way, was that the secret to kifish daring and fierceness in their strikes, that they came out of hyperspace clearheaded and focused, revising plans such as hani and mahendo’sat and humans and anyone else would have to make well beforehand?

  My gods, my gods.

  She slogged along after the others, her own group lagging farther and farther back. Flesh had its limits. Even Hilfy flagged. Her pulse racketed in her ears like the laboring of some failing machine. There was that pain in her chest again, her eyes were blurred.

  We may not have even this time. We shouldn’t be here. I should turn this back, get back to the ship, prepare to defend us—

  —with what, fool? This vast armament you have?

  —turn kif on kif? Can you lead such creatures as that, can you even keep a hold on Skkukuk if you can’t get control of Gaohn?

  Jik, gods rot you, where are you?

  Another doorway. An AP shell took it out, just blew the window out, leaving jagged edges of plex. The youngsters and then the rest waded on through the wreckage that loomed in her vision like an insurmountable barrier, the gun weighing heavier and heavier in her hand. Kohan had gone ahead with Rhean. Khym was still with her. So were all her own crew. “Looks like we got rearguard,” Haral gasped, a voice hardly recognizable. “Gods-be fools not watching their own backsides. Groundlings and kids.”

  “Yeah,” she murmured, and got herself through the door, walked on, and wobbled in her tracks. A big hand steadied her. Khym’s.

  The PA sputtered. “Cease, go back to your ships immediately. Vigilance has armaments to enforce the decree of the han. It stands ready to use them. Do not endanger this station.”

  “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, I’d’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.