The Kif Strike Back

  “Gods know which one’s alive over there,” Hilfy said. “I don’t and I don’t care.” She lifted the gun then, not clear she was going to shoot, but not clear she was not going to either.

  Tirun’s hand shot out and grabbed her wrist. “What are you into? What are you into, Hilfy Chanur?”

  The fury on Tirun’s face bewildered her; and came home slowly. Hani. Home. And civilized behavior.

  “It’s a gods-be kif!”

  “Who’s in command out here?”

  She let go the tension in her arm and lowered her ears in silent deference. Tirun let go her hand, ears flat.

  “Py-anfar,” Tully said, and took her by the shoulder, hard. “Hilfy, Py-anfar—”

  She threw off his hand.

  “Can we for gods-sakes move it?” Dur Tahar asked.

  “Move,” Tirun said, and led this time, until others of them outstripped her, Hilfy among the first. Like a shadow in the tail of her eye she saw the kif leap up and run into the shadows on the far dockside, saw him weave out again and into cover, and afterward, vanish.

  * * *

  Pyanfar stumbled, hit the deck on her knees and threw herself to save Haury’s skull—but Haral and Tav were quick enough—both of them to save Haury, and Haral to grab Pyanfar by the belt and haul her into shelter of a metal console.

  “O gods,” Pyanfar moaned, and made shift to get her torn knees under her. Her chest and gut ached, her loins were water, the knees long gone. She leaned on Haral’s arm and on Haral for a moment. “I’m too old for this—o gods—”

  “Aye,” Haral panted, the two of them braced against each other, holding each other.

  And the world went to fire and sound.

  * * *

  “Good gods!” Geran cried; and Hilfy: “Something’s blown up! My gods—”

  Smoke came rolling down the dock like a black wall, obscuring knots of miniaturized kif, throwing laser-fire into visibility before it swallowed everything. And there ahead was a cluster of red-brown amid all the black and gray, figures huddled together on dockside.

  “Look!” Khym yelled, and headed that way, strung out as they were; and Hilfy grabbed Tully and ran. Sirens blew, decompression alert, the triple-interrupt pattern screaming alarms transspecies and translogic—the docks had gone unstable. An outer wall was in jeopardy. And gunfire never stopped. AP bursts peppered the inner walls and kif barred their way, backs turned toward their advance, kif pinning down that group of hani ahead.

  Geran opened up and Hilfy did—braced for aim, then moved, for Khym risked their line of fire—rushed ahead firing as he went, and no matter his wretched marksmanship, there was no need to pick targets. The kif besiegers scattered, and Hilfy stumbled a step as a splinter hit her calf—recovered herself and kept going, in and out among the girders and cables. Shots still came and she fired back at opportunity, rounded the last corner of their cover and dashed across the open dock and in among the hani at Geran’s heels.

  And stopped cold.

  They were Ehrran crew, blackbreeches, who stood up to face them with guns and rifles leveled.

  * * *

  It was the second impact for a battered skull, and Pyanfar lay there retching after breath tinged with sweat and smoke and volatiles. Sound when it returned was a chilling siren above the thump of fire. She felt something stir against her, got her eyes focussed against a tendency to cross and stared over into Haral’s dazed face beside her.

  “I think they got those cans,” Haral commented from the horizontal. “O gods, my head.” And started moving, swearing in soft incoherency. Pyanfar rolled on an elbow and sat up. “Gilan—”

  The Tahar were all moving—sluggish, but moving. Haury proved life by turning on her side and trying to get up on her own; and Pyanfar swung round and looked where the sudden wild fix of Haury’s eyes went. Reflex pulled the trigger of a gun she had forgotten she was holding. The shell burst on a kif in mid-leap; and the remains thudded off their sheltering can-stack onto the deck hardly a bodylength distant, while three more kif scrambled for other cover.

  She sat there and shook like a beardless youngster; and got her breath and shoved her heels and one hand under her. “Keep going,” she said in a voice that failed of steadiness, and looked up at the blank, unfriendly pressure-gates of a sealed ship-berth. An empty berth. Or a ship that had gone on protective internal seal. Those gates in that case could open and pour out hostile kif into their refuge at any moment. “We’ve got to keep going—”

  “Haury,” Tav objected, wobbling to her knees. “Haury—”

  It was so. Haury Savuun had to be carried. None of them had the wind for it. Pyanfar sank down where she was, on her heels, and Haral rested again, holding her hands locked behind a skull that was doubtless doing what hers was, a steady throbbing to the siren that told them the dock might blow to vacuum at any moment.

  “They’ve stopped shooting,” Nif Angfylas said, her torn ears lifting despite her exhaustion. “Maybe—”

  A shot hit the wall and they ducked and covered.

  “Gods-be!” It was a new angle of fire, one forty five degrees oblique to their escape route, and high. “They got us pinned!”

  Another shot exploded and Pyanfar tucked her head into her arms, lifted it with a sinking feeling—the opposite quarter, that time. “They got us crossed,” she yelled at Haral. “Get that gods-be sniper ahead highline, and watch your head! I think he’s on the second level walkway!”

  She scrambled for the firepoint at the other corner of their shelter, and felt a presence close behind—Vihan Tahar, looting the dead kif’s body for weapon and cartridges. Vihan ducked in close at her shoulder while Haral took the other side of the console that offered their tiny triangle of shelter from incoming fire. Smoke roiled up and drifted in blinding clouds. Whatever had gone up had gone in a hurry—it smelled like fuel; but a lake of it still burned on the dock, sending a hellish glare up to the smoke-palled overhead. No fans working up there. The air ducts had gone sealed, not to encourage the fire.

  It did not encourage breathing either. Her nose ran. She wiped her eyes with a gritty hand and checked the AP’s cartridges. Down to six. No reloads. “We don’t waste any fire,” she said to Vihan, at her back. “Anything compatible on that kif?”

  “Got two rounds,” Vihan said, pressing them into her hand. “His gun’s in pieces.”

  “Get over there and see if Haral needs them worse; I got—”

  Fire came back; Pyanfar took a chance shot the moment she saw the brighter flare of a rifle aimed their way, and dived aside, shouldering Vihan to the ground.

  Thunder broke and particles showered. Pyanfar bobbed up again and restrained herself from spending another round. “May have got the son—I can’t tell—”

  Kif moved, a number of black distant figures cavorting in rolling smoke, about a lake of golden fire. Sikkukkut’s? Akkhtimakt’s?

  BOOM! from the other side. She spun about and plastered herself flat against the console with Vihan and Naur crouching tightly by her; and rolled a glance at Haral, who had pressed herself mirror-image to the far corner of the console. “Get him?”

  “Dunno,” Haral said, and wiped watering eyes with a bloody fist. “Gods-be smoke—”

  Pyanfar looked up, where the smoke got lower and lower, obscuring most of the gantry now, lowering a black, asphyxiating ceiling over their heads. “They by the gods got to get those fans going soon.” A cough threatened. Her own eyes were pouring water and her throat was raw.

  “We got four berths to go to next dock,” Haral said.

  “We got a gods-be blockade up there,” Gilan said. “We got kif between us and any way out of here. Snipers got your own people pinned for sure. Sikkukkut’s losing this one—”

  “Console—” Pyanfar said suddenly; and twisted onto her knee, found the storage panel at her back with the kifish lettering that said EMERGENCY.

  She ripped it open and hauled out the first aid kit. Plasm foam. A few plastic bandages. She shov
ed the contents in Gilan Tahar’s direction. No injectables. No class two supplies. No oxygen.

  A second glance up. There was a console call-post up over their heads, if anyone wanted to stand tall enough to try for it. And tell the kif in central their precise position when it got to that. But the sirens warned of more imminent disasters. The smoke worsened.

  She thrust herself onto her knees and risked her head standing up, a quick snatch at the mike and jab at the recessed channel buttons. The connection failed. “Captain,” Haral cried in anguish as she tried the input again.

  “Gods-be short gods-be cord—Pride, hello, Pride, do you receive?”

  “Try Mahijiru!” Haral shouted from a crouch a little below her shoulder. “And get your head down!”

  “Captain,” a hani voice came back, hoarse and weak and static-riddled. “What’s going on?”

  “Chur? Chur? Where’s Tirun? We need help—”

  Something whistled past her head and blew at her back; and something seized her about the legs and got her down, hard, Haral wrapped about her as a second burst blew the corner off the control console and roiled up a stinging smoke. Somewhere in the murk overhead, bending metal shrieked and groaned in protest, something huge giving way—

  “Gantry’s going!” Nif Angfylas cried. “Migods, the gantry’s going down—”

  Pyanfar rolled, as the metal-sound rose to a shrill grinding. She was not the only one to grab for Haury; Tav Savuun had her sister’s other arm—there was general collision of well-meaning help; and in the smoke above, the gantry’s dissolution progressed one shrieking degree at a time, impelled by inexorable station-spin and its own steel mass. Cables dropped down and writhed like snakes.

  “Run!” Pyanfar yelled, struggling to stand and pull Haury with her. Her knees wobbled as she drove against the weight. “Run!”

  * * *

  “Where’s my aunt?” Hilfy Chanur yelled at the Ehrran over the noise of fire, of a horrendous crash from somewhere down docks. “What’s their position? Have you seen them?”

  “Out there!” the seniormost Ehrran crewwoman yelled back with a wave at the stinging smoke. “How should I know?” The Ehrran’s mouth fell open as Tully came panting up with Tirun. “My gods—you fools!”

  Hilfy shot out an arm: Tully evaded the Ehrran’s grasp with a suck of gut and a spin onto the off foot—and Hilfy flung herself with a hard body-check into the path of the Ehrran officer.

  “You bastard whelp—” The Ehrran raked a left hand full of claws into her shoulder, and out of nowhere a heavy blow shot past Hilfy’s shoulder and the Ehrran rocked back with a curse.

  Tirun’s arm. Tirun, ears flat and with an AP gun in the other fist.

  * * *

  “Go!” Pyanfar yelled, seeing the gantry hit and bounce and thunder like a perversely living thing, now toward the kifish positions and now toward their own, broken and in several places achieving independent motion. Smoke skirled and billowed in the shock.

  And for a precious moment there lingered that random violence on the docks as great as the kif and bouncing the kif’s way.

  “Go!” Pyanfar yelled. Tahar crew grabbed Haury by one arm and the other, and they limped along. Pyanfar spent one precious shot toward the far side of the dock to keep kifish heads down: Haral fired another of their diminishing few rounds and Gilan Tahar let off a third as they ran and lurched behind the cover the careening wreckage gave them.

  * * *

  “Come on!” Tirun shouted at the Ehrran officer. “Save it for later, Ehrran—we got troubles down there! You want to talk about it later, fine. Let’s get the rest of us off that dock down there!”

  “That’s Tahar!” The Ehrran pointed at Dur Tahar. “By the gods, Chanur—”

  “Save it,” Tirun yelled. “Settle it later, hear? You’re talking to a ship’s chief officer, woman, and we got hani lives at stake!”

  “I don’t regard any Chanur patents. You got a man out here carrying arms, you got a non-citizen alien and a known fugitive with weapons—” The Ehrran raised her gun. “You’re under arrest, you, all of you!”

  “You gods-be lunatic,” Khym roared, and waded forward. A shot went off and he spun half-about—

  “Gods!” Hilfy cried. Muscles jumped and she launched herself at the same time as Geran and Tirun and Tully.

  But Khym had never stopped; he made his spin full about, landed a sweeping blow and the Ehrran went flying across the dock. Hilfy’s own particular target had her mouth still open when Hilfy hit her and sent her knee up into an unprepared gut—straightened the Ehrran up with a gunbarrel under the chin and shoved her back. “AP,” Hilfy snarled, in case the Ehrran crewwoman had any doubts what was at her jaw. “Drop yours—drop it!”

  The woman rolled her eyes and a gun thudded to the deck. Hilfy shoved her loose. Ehrran were scattering, in full flight, two delaying to pick up their senior, unconscious on the deck. Tully was picking himself up off the deck, bleeding at the nose and wobbling, but he still had his gun in hand, and the last Ehrran lit out running. Hilfy sucked wind and aimed the AP into the running midst of them—

  Her finger froze. Her hand shook. None of them fired. None of them did. The blackbreeches crossed the open area, plunging through a group of oncoming mahendo’sat who had appeared out of cover.

  “Mahend’ nai casheni-te!” Tirun yelled at them. “Hai na Jik!”

  “Pau nai!” the shout came back, with waving of arms. Wait!

  “Blast you, help!”

  Fire spattered the dock. The mahendo’sat dived back pellmell.

  “Gods-be!” Tirun yelled, not her voice but a hoarse, cracking sound; and they dived for cover on their side.

  “You all right, Khym, you all right?” Geran asked.

  “Uhhhnn,” he muttered, hand on his upper arm. Blood leaked through. His eyes were dark and dreadful to see. “Let’s move.”

  “Come on,” Tirun said; and leapt up. Down-docks. Into the fighting. The only way any of them chose to go.

  “Where’s Tahar?” Hilfy yelled, suddenly missing the captain as they started to run. “Tirun—Tahar—”

  “Go,” Tully yelled, waving his arm to indicate direction, gasping for breath as he tried to keep pace. “Tahar go!”

  Ahead of them.

  * * *

  Pyanfar stopped and turned and sent another shot toward the inner wall of the docks, covering the three carrying Haury Savuun, putting herself and another of their last rounds from the AP gun between Haury’s all-too-exposed person and the chance of another shot.

  A shot came back low and exploded off the downed gantry in a hail of fragments. A second shot went past her: hit the back wall. She staggered and flung herself to the minimal cover they had, wiping a haze from her eyes.

  “We got to keep going,” she said, shoving Nif aside to drag at Haury’s limp arm one-handed. “We got no more choice, we’re out of cover—”

  “Where’s Jik?” Haral gasped, as they kept moving, as a shot whumped off the far wall and something blew up behind. “Gods rot that earless son, where is he?”

  Where’s Tirun? Pyanfar translated that. Haral did not ask that, neither of them wondered that aloud.

  And from overhead, everywhere, thundering through the public address: “. . .Ktogot ktoti nakekkekt makthaikki. . . . kothoggi gothikkt nakst. . . sotkot naikkta. . . hakkikktu. . . skthsikki. . . nak sogkt makgotk Kefku. . . .”

  “Sikkukkut’s—claiming—victory,” Naun Tahar gasped, laboring along with Canfy Maurn against her.

  “Good luck to him,” Pyanfar gasped, and grabbed Canfy from the other side as Canfy stumbled.

  And stopped, blinking tears in the smoke. A lone figure sprinted toward them, hani and armed.

  Chapter 14

  “Gods,” Pyanfar cried, “that’s Dur! Tahar!—where’s the rest?”

  Dur Tahar yelled something back, and came sprinting through the fire-zone into Gilan Tahar’s path—cousin and cousin in the stinging smoke, Gilan and Vihan, the distant kin
, in hasty embrace—a glance round as Pyanfar struggled up with Canfy in tow and Haral came running, glancing at every third stride to the darkened farside where sniping went on unabated.

  “Where?” Pyanfar yelled at Dur Tahar. “Gods rot it, where’s my crew?”

  “Ehrran—” Tahar gasped, and whirled and caught her by both arms, “they tangled with Ehrran—Pyanfar—” Tahar gasped a second mouthful of air. “Come on—”

  Pyanfar scanned her up and down in hopes of AP rounds; there was nothing, nothing but the smallish gun in Tahar’s grip against her arm. Her heart sank. “Tahar, where’s Jik? You seen Jik or Ismehanan-min?”

  “Gods-be mahendo’sat’re off across the docks holding their own positions—I don’t know.”

  “Captain!” Haral sang out, and Pyanfar looked beyond Tahar’s shoulder to more oncoming figures, red-brown hides and one white shirt that shone through the smoke like a natural target.

  “Gods rot it!” Pyanfar screamed at the lot of them, “we got snipers! Run!”

  Her heart was up in her throat as her own crew came charging up through the smoke. Tirun, Geran, Hilfy, Khym and Tully, all of them armed; Khym bleeding down his arm, Hilfy from the calf, Tirun limping along hindmost and grimacing in pain.

  “What kept you?” Haral yelled at her sister.

  “Hey,” said Tirun, panting to a halt in front of Haral, swinging a gesture back at the smoke-hazed dockside. “What’d you want? Next time you arrange a party, Hal, for godssakes give us the address!”

  “Let’s get out of here!” Pyanfar yelled, and waved an arm. “Get the injured on their feet, let’s get out of here!”

  Khym gathered Haury Savuun up in his arms, leaking blood on both of them, and Tirun and Geran flung an arm each around Canfy Maurn as they gathered breath and wits and headed through the smoke and the din of sirens—the deep bass sirens of dock-emergency alternate with loudspeakers that clicked and hissed and thundered with kifish threats and instructions.

  A sudden glare of sodium-light broke through the smoke-haze at the left, close, a light alive with shadows as robed figures came pouring out of a ship-access.