Chanur's Homecoming

  Long hesitation. “That you’re no pirate. That we’re convinced of that.”

  She stood there a moment. Blinked, trying to run it through her brain. “But not that we’re right.”

  Sirany’s ears went down. Not anger. Profound distress. “I’m still figuring that out for myself.”

  “How long are you going to think about it, huh?” Her pulse thumped in her ears. The bridge fuzzed in one long smear of lights both white and green. “We got no gods-be time left when we come out. You understand that?”

  “You’ve set the comp that way. I know.”

  Black closed in. Cleared again. “I set it,” she said carefully, “to get us in there as close in the well as we could get. We got one lousy lot of Akkhtimakt’s kif in our way. We’re not going to have time to sit and talk about it. We don’t have the guns to hammer our way clear across system from far out. We aren’t fit for a long fight. This ship has seen fighting like that before, at Gaohn, captain, and I don’t want to do it again. Odds get up to you, fast.”

  A hand descended on her shoulder, ever so gently. “Cap’n. Time.”

  “I’m onto it, Haral, I’m gods-be onto it.” She drew herself up on a deep breath. “We’re one ship down, we’re up to our noses in kif, and I am not, by the gods greater and lesser, ker Sirany Tauran, a raving lunatic.” A second breath, speech clear and spaced this time. No shouting, no hysteria. “I am giving you my sane assessment of the situation: we’re aiming one set of kif at the other set and hoping to the gods we have enough left to push them outsystem. If we don’t, we are going to die there, collectively and gods hope, without seeing what else will happen. And I am not having my plans tampered with and my communications setup interfered with and myself and my crew deprived of necessary information or of control of this ship at the last moment do we understand each other, ker Sirany? I’m going to take controls at Anuurn. My shift. That’s the way I set it up, that’s the way it’s going to be, don’t play hero with me. You want to fight, you’ll get your share. Not on the drop!”

  Sirany’s ears were down. Not anger. That fright-doubt expression again. They lifted and twitched and flattened and lifted again. And what will you do about it, you and your crew, none of you fit to stand?

  Someone moved. More than one someone out of a chair.

  Khym’s gusting breath. Khym looming like a shadow over in the peripheries of her vision.

  Male and crazy. It was in the sudden nervous flick of Sirany’s eyes.

  “He’s on our side,” Pyanfar said hoarsely. She was disarmed by that threatening move of his. There was nothing left to say. Sirany doubted her husband’s sanity if not her own and they had just lost all hope of reason. Clock was running. The ship was headed for jump and they had crew to take care of. She made a despairing wave of her hand, not sure she could find equilibrium if she let go of the chair. Everything swam in a blur. “See you otherside, ker Sirany. Gods hope.” She let go, resisted the urge to grab Khym’s arm, managed to keep the deck stable and the exit steady in her vision.

  “Pyanfar.” Sirany’s voice, name unadorned.

  She managed to turn around. Steadied herself, Khym’s shadow to her left, Hilfy and Tirun over there somewhere. Haral still beyond.

  “It’s concern, understand,” Sirany said. “It’s not—doubt, ker Pyanfar.”

  “I’m going to fall on my face,” she said calmly, rationally. And stared as much at the level line of the control boards beyond Sirany’s back, to keep something level in her vision. The bridge was trying to tilt. “Send us something to eat for godssakes and let us go, ker Sirany.”

  She managed to turn, still keeping the counters level in her sight, walked out without the use of her internal equilibrium. One foot in front of the other. Khym was behind her. Others were. Chur’s door was shut as she passed it. Where Geran was—she could not remember, whether Geran had gone to the galley, whether she had heard her pass that corridor.

  She reached the door of her own quarters. Fumbled after the lock and got it, and staggered in and fell into bed.

  “I’m going after food,” Khym said in a voice hoarse and deep.

  “They’ll do it.”

  “Me,” he said. “I make sure it gets done. We’re time-critical.”

  And came back out of a confusing darkness and shook at her till she sat up and wrapped her hands around the cup he gave her. Whole jug of the stuff with him. Awful. Full of sickly spices. Tofi. “Gods, you got to put that stuff in?”

  “Way I cook. Shut up and drink it. It’s got calories.”

  She drank it, drank another cup because he insisted. Ate the dried stuff. Her hands just fell away limp and dropped the packets. He fell in beside her. Out of some terrible reverberating tunnel the intercom was ringing with strange hani voices: “Rig for jump.” Operations noises. Strange crew. The words echoed and twisted in and out of her brain, losing focus. She felt after the security of the restraint webbing, found it, and all the while the room kept coming and going.

  Khym had remembered the safeties. Half-conscious as he was, he had remembered that.

  “They’re all right,” some real voice said from the doorway. “Excuse me, captain.”

  It confused her to a mahen hell. The door shut. Tauran security check.

  They had had a door open.

  Black things. Might feed on a body while it was helpless.

  Kifish life, active in jump, when they lay inert and unable to move, to feel pain. Might wake up with fingers gone. Bleed to death. Gnawed to a rack of bones, aswarm with slinking vermin.

  A siren went.

  “We’re going,” Khym mumbled against her shoulder.

  She grabbed him and held tight. Trust their lives to Tauran. And her programming and the Nav-comp, and the lock on that door.

  * * *

  “Last jump,” Hilfy murmured, in her bunk beside Haral’s and Tirun’s and Geran’s, down in crew quarters. Two beds were empty. Chur’s and Tully’s. She clenched her claws into the mattress, counting breaths. Tully had stayed topside with Chur. She had been shocked when Geran showed up to join them. But: “I got to work otherside,” Geran had said. As if she had turned all emotion off. Their lives and more than their lives rode on Geran, otherside. That was true. And Geran came down to rest with them, face cold and set, leaving her sister to Tully’s care a second time. “He’s good with her,” Geran had said. “She wanted him.”

  And sent you away? Perhaps Chur had done that. Gods knew what Chur’s condition was. Geran kept her mouth shut.

  “How is she?” Haral had the nerve to ask. The same question. Forever the same question, as if it was going to have some better answer.

  “Holding,” Geran said. “Holding.” No optimism. Geran had stayed up there a long time and come down at the last moment of stability, with the alarms ringing.

  “She able to eat?” Tirun was merciless. Trod right in where even Haral did not dare.

  Long silence out of Geran. Then: “Yeah. Did pretty well.” In a flat and hopeless voice.

  Last jump.

  “I programmed that son to take us right in close to Anuurn,” Haral said between her teeth. “Forty-five and eight by six. Lay you odds we get it inside point five.”

  “We’ll string it a bit,” Tirun said, all matter-of-fact calculating the drag and push of entering and already-arrived ships on the gravity slope. Deformation calc. Keeping the mind busy.

  It was Geran and Chur who always laid the bets. Even that was offkey. Geran refused to take the bait. She remained in dire silence. It was not money Tirun and Haral were betting. It was drinks in the nearest bar.

  Hilfy stared at the overhead. Terrified.

  We’re not going to make it, we’re not going to make it, we’re too few and the kif too many, we can’t push them. Sikkukkut’s ships are a throwaway—we’re all throwaways.

  What’s a kif care, how many ships he loses?

  Cheap annoyance to his enemies.

  And we were pushing him too hard.

/>   * * *

  “Otherside,” Pyanfar murmured, “we got to move. We’ll run stable right after the first cycle-down. You got to count. First pulse, then get up and go even if we got an alarm going. I don’t know if Tauran’s going to call us. I don’t trust that.”

  “First pulse,” Khym said against her ear, all indistinct. “Right. Got it.”

  “Got to—”

  * * *

  —down.

  —the wide dark again.

  She struggled to remember her own name. It was important to recall. She lay with an alien snuggled tight against her, his strange smooth hand holding hers ever so loosely. He had drugged himself before this, and lay helpless, as his kind had to be, in order to face the deep.

  Chur, the name was. She stayed, tied by that loose grip on her essence. She could not have left him alone.

  Left my son. Lost him. Never find him again, never know.

  Not leave my friend out here helpless. No.

  She was aware. It was not normal to be this hyper-stretched. She knew this. She had time, in this long waking of subjective days, to sort through things, not in the waking dream of time-stretch, the dim haze with which minds got through the deep, slower than bodies, but wide-awake in the twisting dark. She stretched out like the ship, and ran calculations in her head with one part of her brain, and kept the tether of that strange, fine-boned hand.

  Not leave him. She thought of Tully and remembered why they were here, remembered aliens, and the ship, and the situation, Situation, the captain would call it. She forgot about time with Geran, Geran being forever, like the stars and the movement of the worlds. But Tully came from elsewhere; was more lost than she was. Tully had period and limit. There was a time when she had not known him. There was never a time but this that she had lain so close to him. She tried to tell Geran this, explaining why she wanted Tully to stay. “Get out,” it came out of her mouth. Not the way she had meant it, but speaking with her mind that full was a surreal experience. Calculations. Numbers. One could spill out too much. “Gods rot it, get. Go. I don’t want you here. Him. He’s enough. You got work, Gery. Get to it. You want to kill us at those boards?”

  I’m sorry.

  She wiped that scene. Built another. She sat in bed, propped with pillows.

  “We got troubles,” she said, which was what she had meant to say. “Gery, I want my place back.”

  “You’ll get it,” Geran said, gently (she knew Geran would say exactly that thing, knew the precise cant of the ears, the pained look, the soft, quiet tone). “Come on now. We got relief aboard. Tauran. I told you that. You want to go to the galley, have a sit? Something to drink?”

  “All right,” she said; and let herself be led there, slowly. Seated, in familiar surroundings. Tully was there. He came and laid his hand on her arm.

  “You scare me,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. (Back in bed a moment. Tully lying there asleep, drugged senseless. Pretty mane he had. Prettiest thing about him. The gods could have fur like that, all sunlight. She scared him sometimes. But he snugged down against her: maybe she kept him warm. Friend, he had said just as he was going out. A little pat of his hand on her shoulder, a smoothing of her fur. Friend.)

  They were all there, all the crew, at the galley table, which made no sense with things as they were, at risk. Only the captain was missing. And the kif. Someone put a cup in her hands. Geran shaped her hands around it and nudged them, helped her carry it to her mouth. It was hard to get back again. Hard. She was aware of heat in the liquid. It tasted of nothing at all. It was hard to focus small enough, to adjust her ears to hear the noise of their speech, to concentrate her mind to sort this kind of detail and not raw calculations of the sort she had been running.

  She blinked at movement, at the captain’s voice. Pyanfar had shown up, sitting between Haral and Tirun. Khym was meddling about in the cabinets, on galley duty again.

  “. . . I’m not easy about this,” Pyanfar said. “Some reason, I’m just not real easy about this next jump. We’re going into it close to Anuurn as we can. I don’t know what we’re into. But it’s been too quiet, all along the way. Kura had no time to get us a message. I wish we’d come closer to the station.”

  Chur blinked. Blinked and found Jik there, when she had remembered only dimly why he was there at all. Their little galley table held more places than usual. Space folded itself. A lot of things fit.

  “Push them out of the system,” Chur said then “That’s what we have to do. Cut them to ribbons on first encounter. The han knows they’re coming. The mahendo’sat have told them. Haven’t you, Jik?”

  “A,” the mahendo’sat said, and shrugged.

  “There was Banny Ayhar. Ayhar went on to Maing Tol. You gave them a message, Jik, when they shot me at Kshshti. I’ve figured their course home. That’s where they’d have gone. Nothing would stop them. Not with what they knew. Not with what you gave them to carry. Isn’t that so, Jik?”

  “Good guess,” Jik said, in better hani than he usually spoke. He leaned his elbows on the table. “Bad luck at Kshshti dock. How you know ’bout Maing Tol?”

  “I told her,” Geran said. “Told her the message was all right. Gods, she got a hole in her gut defending it, you think I wouldn’t tell her that? It was important, after all.”

  “Better be. I got a hole in my gut to prove it. You think I’m going to lose track of something like that? Banny Ayhar went on to Maing Tol and I know she went with something of yours. I know what I’d have done in Banny Ayhar’s place. I’d have gotten out of there fast. I’d have run for home the safest, shortest way. And the Personage at Maing Tol would have a thing to say to the han about then, wouldn’t he, knowing he had to arrest that whole crew or let them go. Let them go with a message. Let them go with a whole mahen company to see them home.”

  “I’m not at controls,” Pyanfar said. “I’ve been thinking about something like that. I’ve hoped it was so. But this isn’t my shift. Not my watch.”

  “I told you that,” Geran said.

  “Hey, you think I don’t keep track of things? I’m better than that. I know where I am. I’ve known all this time. You think it’s easy running calc in your head? I know where every ship could be. And how long. I know their mass and their cap. I know what their drop time is. I got gray hairs in this game. I know our competition, don’t I? Not competition this time. Our help. All the help we got. Trust me, captain. I got it figured for you.”

  “Not my watch,” Pyanfar said again.

  And left the table. Was gone.

  So did others. “I’m sorry,” Jik said. “I’m not here.”

  Then she was alone with the crew again. Khym left. Then she did.

  There was deathly quiet. Tully was anchor, in a long dark sea.

  She reached out and carefully, in motion that took the better part of a day, perhaps, in timestretch, disconnected herself.

  * * *

  . . . down again.

  . . . gravity slope.

  It was hard to move at all. But Chur did that, levered herself to the side of the bed and remembered—she could have forgotten nothing—to put the safety back. For Tully’s sake.

  Longer still down the corridor, which reeled and snaked and kept going into the lighted bridge. Perhaps it took a day to walk it. Dark things skittered and moved, ran like black, rapid serpents in the corridors.

  New logical track: moving and breeding. Feeding where they could. Insulation. Plastics. Ignoring barriers.

  Akkht-bred. Like the kif.

  Alert within jump.

  . . . down and still falling. . . .

  She made it as far as the captain’s place. And leaned there. “Captain,” she said, perhaps another day in the saying of it: “The mahendo’sat. A message has gone to them. A message can have reached from Maing Tol to Iji. Ayhar of Prosperity will have come home. From Kirdu to Kita is one jump. A ship can have gone to Iji from there. From Kirdu to Ajir, one; from there to Anuurn. Our ships will
have heard. They’ll come home, captain. As we are, coming home at the earliest possible. The mahendo’sat will not have resisted this move. The quarry goes to the small valley, but hunters cross the hill. That is only reasonable.” Words slurred. She watched the slow twitch of a listening ear. Not her captain, but this stranger. Tauran. She knew that too.

  “Believe us,” she said to that captain. “Believe what we’ve told you.”

  Other calculations. The solar system danced in her memory, swung through two years of positional changes. Lanes threaded like moving spirals of color through this maze of rock, converging on Anuurn.

  Cover a ship with mass and emissions-noise, a gravity well it could stay in, concealed in dancing fragments, in the thunderous emissions of a gas giant. Akkhtimakt knew there would be attack coming in at him. He had had time to plan and research the moves he hoped to make, and attack could not possibly take him by utter surprise.

  She crossed to the com board, reached the slack hand of a Tauran crew woman, punched in a channel. “Kif. Do you hear me?”

  “Kkkt,” the voice came back, slow and slurred. “Who calls? Who is this?”

  She reached—it was terrible effort—to the board. Sat down in a vacant chair. Tully’s. Between two Tauran crewwomen. She freed up armaments from that master board and set her hand on that control, preprogramming fire on the Tyar vector from their entry point.

  Black things ran and squealed. There were red lights on boards, systems failures. She went to the main board and carefully switched to backups, system after system, where automation had failed.

  . . . down again. She staggered, held to the board, blinked with the jolting here of the bridge about her, where she spent her life. The crew woman beside her was turning her head in confusion, the whole of the bridge was real for the moment before it began to darken.

  “My gods,” someone said. As The Pride fired on its own.

  The dark folded round again, but it was only a dimming of the light; and there was pain, the bite of the strap against her sagging body. She pushed herself upright again. She reached for the com-switch again, threw it on wide. “Captain. This is Chur. Get up here. Emergency, emergency.”