The Pride of Chanur cs-1

by Caroline J. Cherryh

  Running — now — had its hazards. As long as some of the kif shuttled the system at relatively high velocity, those ships could run down on them while they were trying to build theirs back from virtual dead stop. Their chances of breaking cover and running depended on the position of the kif ships, whether they had that critical time they might need to get their referent and to come up to position to jump. Blind as they had made themselves, the only way to find out where those ships were was to try something; and the only way to find out how many there were, was to keep an ear to the kif chatter and see if they could pick out individual ships.

  This Akukkakk would not likely be so careless. It was certain enough they were not outputting ID signal, which itself brought protests from the station; no ID signal and no locational signal from any of them. Only from miners and legitimate residents — if those signals were what they ought to be.

  So, so, so. They were in a bottle, and it was too much to hope that the kif would not ultimately coerce mahendo’sat help in the hunt for them. Station and miners could be intimidated as the kif put the pressure on. What was more, hani ships came and went at Urtur, and those ships would be vulnerable to the kif, unsuspecting of atrocity such as the kif had committed at Meetpoint. They would come into confrontation with the kif having no idea of the stakes involved here. The kif might act against them without warning, to draw The Pride out. Such tactics were not hani practice; but she had been many years off Anuurn and among outsiders, and she knew well enough how to think like a kif, even if the process turned her stomach and bristled the hairs on her nape.

  And then what do I do? she wondered to herself. Do I come out meekly to die? Or let others? Her crew had no more or less right to life than the crew of any other hani ship which came straying into the trap. There were their lives involved. There was Hilfy’s. And thereby — all of Chanur.

  Next time home, she vowed, / get that other gun battery moduled in, whatever it costs.

  Next time home.

  She frowned, cut off the recording, which had come to the point at which she had come in. The present transmissions were few and terse. Someone should be up here directly and constantly monitoring the comflow and the rest: Hilfy was right on that score. But they were not a fighting ship and they had no personnel to spare for such. Six of them, with ordinary duties and a prisoner to watch: there was course to plot, there were checks to be run after their jump under stress, systems they had to be sure of; and there was the chance that they might have to move, defend themselves and run at any moment, which meant three crewmembers had to be mentally and physically fit to take action at any instant, whatever the hour. The automations which ran The Pride in her normal workaday business had nothing to do with their situation now, systems overstressed from a jump the ship was never designed to make, makeshift security on an alien and possibly lunatic passenger. Gods. She double-checked the pager operation, which was transmission activated, advised the crew on watch that she was taking over monitor for a while, to give them rest from the responsibility.

  “He’s all right,” Geran reported on the Outsider. “Resting awhile.”

  It was good, she thought, that someone could.

  She went finally to the galley, up the curve; the reason of that large ell in the control section — no appetite in particular, but her limbs were weak from hunger. She heated up a meal from the freezer, forced it down against her stomach’s earnest complaints, and tossed the dish into the sterilizer. Then she walked back to her private quarters to try to rest.

  She fretted too much for sleep, paced the floor pointlessly, sorted the stack of charts into order and sat down and plotted and replotted possible alternatives, which she already guessed, against odds she already knew. At last she shoved all that work aside and used the console by her bed to link in on the Outsider’s terminal, via main comp and access codes. It was active again: she heard the Outsider’s voice as well as saw the symbols called up by the translator keys. He was using them one after the other, and when she keyed in on com as well, she could pick up Chur’s voice in the room, quiet assistance — sounds which might go with pantomime. Occasionally there was a pairing of symbols the machine did not do — Chur’s interference, perhaps, trying to get a point across. Pyanfar cut off com and the translator reception, stared at the dead screen. The chatter from Urtur system continued from the pager at her belt, subdued and depressing in content. Mahendo’sat ships were being advised by their own station not to run, to submit to search if singled out by the kif, to hug station if they were already there and hope for safety.

  A hani voice objected a question.

  Hani!

  Pyanfar sprang from the bedside, the walls of her cabin immaterial before her vision of that station with a hani ship at dock; with kif able to move on it at will. The hani spoke… had spoken long ago, in the timelag. Whatever would happen… had long since taken place. Time as well as space lay between The Pride and that hani ship and the kif, and there was nothing she could do, blind, from a dead drift, to help it.

  “Gods!” she spat, and hurled the desk chair forward on its track with a crash. It was a Faha vessel in port; Faha’s Starchaser, and that was a house and a company allied to Chanur. Her brother Kohan’s first wife was Huran Faha. Hilfy’s mother, for the gods’ sakes! There were bonds, compacts, agreements of alliance…

  And Hilfy.

  The mahendo’sat at Urtur Station urged the hani ship to keep calm. The mahe had, they avowed, no intention of becoming involved in a kif quarrel, and they were not going to let a rash hani involve them.

  The hani demanded information; kif hunted a Chanur ship: the Faha had been listening and fretting under restraint this long, and wanted answers — knew this was going out over com, as the station knew what the Faha were doing, making vocal trouble, making sure information got out into the dark where Chanur ears might pick it up.

  O gods, o gods. There was an ally, doing the best for them that could be done at the moment… and they were both helpless to come at the enemy.

  Pyanfar pulled the chair out again, sat down, lost in listening for a while. There was no further information. They had gotten that spurt on the station’s longrange or on Starchaser’s… information like a beacon fired off into outsystem, deliberately. If they had it figured The Pride was here… then so did the kif.

  There were echoes, repetitions of the message: com was sorting them out, transmissions of differing degrees of clarity, and the hair prickled on Pyanfar’s neck, sudden, grateful realization: ships all over the system had begun relaying that message, letting it off like multiple ripples in still water, massive defiance of the kif — and the kif had not ordered silence… on this timeline. They could not enforce such a demand, at the present limits of their aggression at Urtur: but those limits could change. The information was going out like a multiplied shout… had gone out, long ago, and was still traveling.

  She found Hilfy for once where she was supposed to be, in her own quarters, asleep. She hesitated when the sleepy voice answered the doorcom hail, no more than hesitated. “Up,” she said into the com. “I’ve somewhat to tell you.”

  Hilfy was quick to the door. It whipped opened and Hilfy hung there, disheveled from bed and grimacing in the full light of the corridor. She had not paused for clothes.

  Pyanfar walked in past her, waited while Hilfy brightened the interior lighting, and held up a restraining hand, that the brightening need not be permanent or full. It was a room Hilfy had made her own, a great deal of Chanur style in this cabin, more than in her own quarters, mementoes affixed to the walls, pictures of homeworld’s mountains and the broad plains of the Chanur holdings… the Holding itself, gold stone, shaded with vines. Pyanfar looked about her, and looked at Hilfy. “Briefly,” Pyanfar said, “I have to tell you a thing; and there’s nothing can be done about it, I’ll tell you that first. We’ve picked up signal from a Faha ship docked at station. They’re in the middle of the kif, and they fired a message off for station that I think the
y meant we should hear: noisy chatter. I think they know we’re out here and in what kind of trouble. But there’s the kif between us, and there’s no way we can do much for each other. You understand?”

  Hilfy’s eyes had stopped flinching at the light. She stared, amber-rimed about the black, and her ears flattened and pricked up again with effort. For a young woman and roused naked out of sleep, she acquired a quiet dignity in getting her wits collected. “Do you know which ship, aunt?”

  “Starchaser. That’s Lihan Faha in command.”

  Hilfy nodded. The ears flinched, ringless. Her face stayed composed. “They’ll be in danger. Like Voyager. And they won’t know it. No one would expect that kind of attack.”

  “Lihan’s no tyro, imp, believe it. We don’t play their hand; they don’t interfere in ours. Can’t. Nothing we can do out here.”

  “We could throw them a warning and run.”

  “I don’t take that as an option at the moment. We send it from distance and the kif will have it before Starchaser has a chance. And public defiance, involving Starchaser in our leaving — the kif would be obliged to react. Revenge is part of their mindset. You have to calculate that into it. No. Starchaser’s riding her own luck. I don’t plan to push it for her. So go back to bed, hear?”

  Hilfy stood a moment without moving. Nodded after a moment, her dignity still about her.

  “Good,” Pyanfar said tightly, and walked out. She heard the door close after her, and walked the upcurving corridor which led from Hilfy’s quarters to her own, across the main topside corridor and down a short distance.

  So she might have cost Hilfy her sound sleep, and the meal she had eaten lay like lead at her own stomach; but Faha involvement in the hazard was not something for Hilfy to find out later, like a child, spared adult unpleasantnesses. Hilfy’s face stayed before her; the pager unit at her hip kept up its static babble, dying echoes of the message, occasional-spurts of closer transmission, but rarer and rarer. A stsho ship had come into the system. The kif disdained to harass it; it begged instructions of Urtur Station, anxious to scud in before the storm.

  A lot of mahe in the system might have the same idea, miners who had already reckoned it time to head for port, getting themselves out of the way of the kif s hunt.

  It was a vast system out there. Most of the ships in it were incapable of jump, insystem operators only. So far, everyone was keeping remarkably calm, even the hani at the eye of that storm.

  Gods grant a great many ships pulled inward… and afforded the kif a harder target if they wanted to raid Station in search of one hani ship. That was one hope. Lihan Faha of Starchaser was too old, too wary to rush out to mismatched battle. Lihan would not expect stupidity of The Pride. The Faha would expect them to fend for themselves and above all not touch anything off prematurely. The Faha needed time: there was a chance that they could offload cargo and strip that ship down for speed, given time, shed mass without the need to lose a cargo. They would not expect help more than that.

  That was logic speaking.

  But it hurt.

  IV

  She sat and listened a time in her cabin, finally contacted Geran belowdecks and turned over the monitoring to her. “Faha,” was Geran’s only comment.

  “Hilfy knows,” Pyanfar said.

  “So,” Geran murmured. And then: “I’m on. I’ve got it.”

  Pyanfar signed off and sighed heavily, sitting on the edge of her bed, arms on her knees — finally took a mild sedative and undressed and curled up in the bowlshaped bed for a precious while of oblivion, trying not to think of emergencies and contingencies and the horde of kif prowling about the system.

  That did not work, but the sedative did. She went under like a stone into a pond and came out again startled by the alarm — but it was only the timer going off, and she lay in the bedclothes with her heart slowly stepping back down to normal.

  “Any developments?” she asked lowerdeck op by com from her bedside, not even having crawled from beneath the sheets, but thrusting an arm out to push the bottom on the console. “Anything happened while I was off?”

  “No, captain.” Haral’s voice answered her. A shift change had occurred in her off time. “The situation seems to be temporary stalemate. Station is broadcasting only operational chatter now. We aren’t getting much from the kif. Nothing alarming. We’d have waked you if there was news.”

  So their orders ran. Interpretations of emergency varied; but Haral was the wisest head in the crew, the canniest. Pyanfar lay there staring at the ceiling a moment and finally decided she might take her time. There was nowhere to rush. The rib muscles she had strained in g force had stiffened. “What about systems check? Has anyone had time to get to that?”

  “We’re still running the board, captain, but it looks good all the way. The blowout was absolutely clean and the recalibration was right almost to the hair.”

  “Better luck than we deserve. What’s the Outsider up to?”

  “Back at work at the keyboard. Chur and Geran are off now, and Tirun’s on, but I didn’t feel, by your leave, captain, that Tirun belonged in there with him in her condition, and I’ve had all I can do with visual checks on the separation readouts — again by your leave.”

  “You were right.”

  “He’s slept a bit. He hasn’t made any trouble… gods, he worked till he nearly dropped over, Chur said; and he’s back at it again this shift, shaky as he is. We fed him right away when he woke up, and he ate it all and went back to his drills, polite as you please. I’ve got his roomcom and his comp monitored from the op station, so we’ve at least got an ear toward him.”

  “Huh.” Pyanfar ran a hand through her mane and scowled up at the brightening room light. The alarm had started the day cycle in the room. “Let the Outsider work; if it falls over, then let it rest. How’s Tirun making it?”

  “Limping, sore, and working with the leg propped up. She’s still white around the nose.”

  “I’m all right,” Tirun’s voice cut in, usurping the same mike.

  “You go off,” Pyanfar said, “anytime you feel you ought to. We’re dead drifting, and someone else can take up the slack if those first checks are run. You see to it, Haral. Anything else I should know?”

  “That’s the sum of it,” Haral said. “We’re all right so far.”

  “Huh,” she said again, got out of the spring-held sheets and cut the com off, pulled on her black trousers and put on her belt, her bracelet, and her several earrings — shook the ear to settle them and gave her mane and beard a quick comb into order. Vanity be hanged. She left the cabin and paid a short visit to the galley, ate a solitary breakfast, feeling somewhat better. She turned the pager to the monitor channel in the meanwhile, listened to the chatter which was reaching them and found it much what Haral had said, a lull in events which in itself contained worrisome possibilities. By now the kif had surely figured out what had happened, and by now they would be hunting in stealth — hence the quiet. The Pride had undergone a great deal of lateral drift from their entry point, but if she were that kif captain, trying to reckon the arrival point of a cargoless fugitive on a jump almost too much for the ship… she would calculate a fringe area jump on a straight string from Meetpoint’s mass to that of Urtur. And that would fine the hunting zone down considerably, from the vast tracts of Urtur’s lenslike system — to a specific zone on the fringe, and the direction of systemic drift, and certain places where a ship seeking cover might move. Time was the other factor; time defined the segment of space in which they might logically be drifting, two points-within-which, which then might be fined down tighter and tighter.

  Time, time, and time.

  They were running out of it.

  She shut off the pager, went back to her cabin, spread out the charts of the last effort and picked up a comp link of her own, started as precise calculations as she could make on the options they had left.

  From the hani ship — she interrupted herself to query Haral and Tirun on th
e point — there had been nothing during the past watch. No transmission at all. Starchaser would be feverishly busy at her own business, stripping down, not provoking anything at this juncture.

  Waiting. All incoming transmission indicated that ships of all kinds were moving toward Urtur Station with all possible haste, a journey of days for some ships, and of weeks for others of the insystem operators… but even the gesture spoke to the kif, that the mahe would defend Urtur Station itself, abandoning other points to whatever the kif wished to do. The incoming jumpships had long since made it in, snugged close: armed ships, those… but one at least was stsho, and its arms were minor and its will to fight was virtually nonexistent.

  Again, she reckoned, if she were that kif in command, those insystem ships would not go in unchallenged. For all those incoming from the suspect vector where a hani ship lay hidden, there would be closer scrutiny — to make sure a clever hani did not drift in disguised with the rest of the inbound traffic. ID transmission would be checked, identifications run through comp; ships might be boarded… all manner of unpleasantness. Most of them would pass visual inspection: there was precious little resemblance between a gut-blown jump freighter with its huge vanes, and a lumpy miner-processor whose propulsion was all insystem and hardly enough to move it along with its tow full.

  Only the miners who might have had the bad luck to come in from the farthest edge of The Pride’s possible location… they might be stopped, have their records scanned, their comp stripped — their persons subjected to gross discomforts until they would volunteer information, if the kif were true to nature.

  “Someone’s jumped, captain.”

  Tirun’s voice, out of the com unit. Pyanfar dumped a complex calculation from her mind and reached for the reply bar, twisting in her chair. “Who? Where?”