“Gods,” Pyanfar muttered through her teeth, put a hand wearily to the rampway wall and turned about to the airlock, feeling suddenly older. That was muffed. She should have been quicker on her mental feet, slower of temper. The Tahar might have been talked into it. Maybe wanted to be talked into it. If a Tahar could be trusted at their backs. She hated the whole of it, mahe, Tahar, Outsider, all of it — winced under Chur’s stare. Not a word from Chur the whole way back, regarding the business she had conducted, this tape — selling, trust-selling.
And Tully’s face… of a sudden he jerked away from Chur’s grip and went into the airlock, Chur hastening to stop him. Pyanfar broke into a run into the hatchway, but Chur had got him. Tully had stopped against the inside wall, his back against it, his eyes full of anger.
“Captain,” Chur said, “the translator was working.”
Pyanfar reached into her pocket and thrust her audio plug into her ear, faced Tully, who looked steadily toward her. “Tully. That was not a friend. What did you hear? What?”
“You’re same like kif. Want the same maybe. What deal with the mahendo’sat?”
“I saved your miserable hide. What do you think? That you can travel through Compact territory without everyone who sees you having the same thoughts? You didn’t want to deal with the kif — good sense; but by the gods, you haven’t got a choice but us or the kif, my friend Tully. All right. I traded them the tape you made — but not that I couldn’t have gotten the ship repair without that: they’re anxious to get rid of us; they’d have come round tape or no tape, you can bet they would. But now everyone’s going to know about your kind; gods, let the mahendo’sat make copies of it; let them sell it in the standard kit. It’s the best deal you can get. I’m not selling you, you rag-eared bastard; can I make you understand that? And maybe if your ships meet our ships… there’ll be a tape in the translators that may keep us from shooting at each other. We meet and trade. Understand? Better deal than the kif give you.”
A tremor passed over his face, expressions she could not read. The eyes spilled water, and he made a move of his arm, jerked at Chur’s grip on it and Chur cautiously let him go.
“You understand me?” Pyanfar asked. “Do I make myself understood?”
No response.
“You’re free,” Pyanfar said. “Those papers let you go anywhere. You want to walk out the rampway, onto the dock? You want to go back to station offices and stay with the mahe?”
He shook his head.
“That’s no.”
“No. Pyanfar. I #.”
“Say again.”
He reached to his waist and drew out the papers, offered them to her.
“Your papers,” Pyanfar said. “All in order. Go anywhere you like.”
He might have understood. He pointed toward the door. “This hani — want me go with him.”
“Her. Dur Tahar. No friend of mine. Or to this ship. Nothing that concerns you.”
He stood a moment, seeming to think it over. Finally he pointed back toward the inner hatch. “I go sit down,” he said, shoulders slumping. “I go sit. Right?”
“Go,” she said. “It’s all right, Tully. You’re all right.”
“Friend,” he said, and touched her arm in leaving, walked out with his head down and exhaustion in his posture. “Follow him?” Chur asked.
“Not conspicuously. Docking’s got his quarters out of commission. Get a proper cot for the washroom.”
“We could take him into crew quarters.”
“No. I don’t want that. There’s nothing wrong with the washroom, for the gods’ sake. Just get him a sedative. I think he’s had enough.”
“He’s scared, captain. I don’t much blame him.”
“He’s got sense. Go. Tell Geran if she doesn’t hear something about that repair crew within half an hour, come get me.”
“Aye,” Chur murmured, and hastened off in Tully’s wake.
So. Done, for good or ill. Pyanfar leaned against the wall, aching in all her bones, her vision fuzzing. After a moment she walked out, down the vacant corridor toward the lifts, hoping to all the gods Geran could find no incident to put between her and bed.
No one stopped her. She rode the lift up, walked a sleep-drunken course down the central corridor to her own door.
“Aunt,” Hilfy’s voice pursued her. She stopped with her hand against the lockplate and looked about with a sour and forbidding stare.
“Repair crew’s on its way,” Hilfy said ever so quietly. “I thought you’d want to know. Message just came.”
“You’ve been sitting watch topside?”
“Got a little rest. I thought—”
“If Geran’s on, it’s waste to duplicate effort. Get yourself back to quarters and stay there. Sleep, gods rot you; am I supposed to coddle you later? Take something if you can’t. Don’t come complaining to me later.”
“Captain,” Hilfy murmured, ears back, and bowed.
Pyanfar hit the bar and opened the door, walked in and punched it closed before the automatic could function. Belatedly the look on Hilfy’s face occurred to her; and the long duty Hilfy had spent at com through transit, and that she had intended to say something approving of that, and had not.
Gods rot it. She sat down on the side of the bed and dropped her head into her hands. Gods, that she had staggered through the requisite interview with the mahendo’sat, bargained with them, offended the Tahar — and Tully… she had traded off what three of his shipmates had died to keep to themselves.
In such a condition she gambled, with Chanur and Tully’s whole species on the board.
She dropped her hands between her knees, finally reached for the bedside drawer where she kept a boxful of pills. She shook one into her hand and put it into her mouth — spat it out in sudden revulsion and flung the open boxful across the cabin. Pills rattled and circled and lay still. She lay down on the bed as she was, drew the coverlet over herself, tucked her;arms about her head and shut her eyes, flinging herself into an extended calculation about their routing out of here and refusing to let her mind off that technical problem. She built the numbers in front of her eyes and fended off the recollection of Tully’s face or Hilfy’s, or the scuttling figure of the knnn with its prize, or the kif which skulked and whispered together out on the docks.
VII
“Aunt.”
It was not com; it was Hilfy in person, leaning over her bed, shaking at her. “Aunt.” Pyanfar came out of sleep with a wild reach to get her elbow under her, shook herself, stared into Hilfy’s dilated eyes. “It’s Starchaser,” Hilfy said. “They’ve come through. They’re in trouble. They can’t get dumped. The word just came in—”
“O gods.” Pyanfar kicked the coverlet off, scrambled out dressed as she was and seized Hilfy by the arm on her way out of the room. “Talk, imp: has anyone scrambled?”
“Station’s called miners in the path… some mention of an outbound freighter being able to change course…” Hilfy let herself be pulled through the doorway into the corridor and loped along keeping up with her on the way to the bridge. “They’re twenty minutes lag out, crossing Lijahan track zenith.”
“Twenty now?”
“About.”
Haral was on the bridge, standing by scan, with the area-light on her face, and her expression was grim when she looked around at their arrival. “They’ve got to get to the pod,” Haral said. “No way anyone can get to her in time. No way any rescue can haul that mass down, even if she’s stripped.”
“What’s our status?”
“We can’t get there,” Hilfy objected, plain logic.
“Not for rescue,” Pyanfar said quietly.
“Repairs underway,” Haral said. “Vane’s unsecured. If they’re running ahead of company — we’re in trouble.”
Tirun came limping in, loping haste, and there was a query from lowerdeck. “You’re getting all we’ve got,” Haral relayed to Geran and Chur below. “Can’t tell anything yet.”
“Come on,” Pyanfar muttered to the blip on systemic image. “Do it, Faha. Get out of there.” She sank down into the com cushion, an eye still toward the screen, and punched through the station op code. “This is The Pride of Chanur. Urgent relay the stationmaster, Pyanfar Chanur speaking: warn you of possible hostile pursuit on tail of incoming emergency. Repeat: warn you of possible hostile pursuit of incoming emergency.”
“This message receive clear, Pride of Chanur. Mahen ships answer emergency. Please stand by.”
She watched scan, rested a knuckle against her teeth and hissed a breath. Ships showed in the schematic, traffic at dead standstill compared to the incoming streak that was Starchaser, motion slowed enough to see only because of systemwide scale. Everything was history, the images on the scope, the voices from the zone of emergency. Unable to dump velocity, Starchaser would streak helplessly across the system and lose herself on an unaimed voyage to infinity. It was a long way to die.
“Lost the transmission,” Haral said. Hilfy edged in, looking desperate, tried the switches herself past Haral’s side. Pyanfar gnawed the underside of a^ claw and shook her head. The business of getting a jump-mazed crew on their feet and headed to the escape pod — in Starchaser’s type, high up on the frame — and get it away, all this within the minutes they had left…
Then they could only hope, if they could make it that far, that the pod’s engines could hammer down the velocity, give some jumpship the chance to match velocities and lock onto the pod’s small, manageable mass, so that they could be dumped down. That freighter out there was the best chance the crew had, if only they could get loose.
“Pod’s away!” Haral exclaimed, and Tirun and Hilfy were pounding each other on the back. Pyanfar clenched her two hands together in front of her mouth and stared flateared at the scan, where a new schematic indicated the probable course of the pod which had now parted company with doomed Star-chaser. Both dots advanced along the track, but a gap developed, the pod’s deceleration far from sufficient to rid itself of a jumpship’s velocity before it gave out, but doing what it could. The crew would likely black out in the stress: that was a mercy. Now it was a race to see if the freighter could overhaul the pod or whether the pod would leave the system.
“Mahe freighter?” Pyanfar asked.
Haral nodded.
The Pride was on station-fed transmission; and station had to be using the feed from ships farther out, the Lijahan mines, whatever was in a position to have data, and relative time was hard to calculate now. The freighter came up by major increments while the minutes passed, boosting itself on its jump field. The gap still narrowed with agonizing sluggishness, as scan shifted, keeping up with events which were now long decided.
Com sputtered, a wailing transmission. Knnn. “Gods,” Tirun said. “A knnn’s out there in it.”
Station command responded, a tc’a voice. There were other transmissions, knnn voices, more than one, a dissonance of wails.
“Chanur,” said a hani voice, clear and close at hand. “Is this also your doing?”
Pyanfar reached for it, punched in the contact, retracted the claw with a moral effort. “Tahar, is that a question or a complaint?”
“This is Dur Tahar. It’s a question, Chanur. What do you know about this?”
“I told you. Let’s keep it off com, Tahar.”
Silence. The Tahar were no allies of the Faha crew. It was a Chanur partisan in trouble, but if any ship at station could have moved in time, Moon Rising would have tried: she did not doubt it. It was a painful thing to watch, what was happening on scan. Close to her, Tirun had settled, and Hilfy, simply watching the screen while her Faha kinswomen and the wreckage that had been a Faha ship hurtled closer and closer to the boundaries of the pickup. After such a point insystem scan could not follow them. Station was getting transmission now from a different source, from the merchanter Hasatso, the freighter tracking Starchaser, the only ship in range. The blip that was Starchaser itself finally went off the screen.
“Chanur ship,” station sent. “Tahar ship. Advise you merchanter Hasatso have make cargo dump; do all possible.”
“Chanur and Faha will compensate,” Pyanfar replied, and hard upon that Moon Rising sent thanks to Hasatso via station. “Gods look on them,” Haral muttered — a cargo dumped, to close the gap, to close on an emergency not of their species.
Knnn wailed. Elsewhere there was silence. For a long while there seemed only one rhythm of breaths on The Pride, above and below.
“They’re nearly on it,” Hilfy breathed.
“They’ve got them,” said Tirun. “No way they can miss now.”
It went slowly. The transmissions from Hasatso became more and more encouraging; and at long last they reported capture. “Hani signal,” Hasatso told Kirdu Station, “in pod. Live.”
Pyanfar breathed out the breath she had been holding. Grinned, reached and squeezed Hilfy’s arm. Hilfy looked drained. “Tahar,” Pyanfar sent then, “did you receive that report?”
“Received,” Tahar said curtly.
Pyanfar broke it off, sat a moment with hands clasped on the board in front of her. A ship lost; a tradition; that deserved its own mourning. Home and life to the Faha crew, and that was gone. “Station,” she sent after a moment, “advise the Faha crew that Chanur sends its profound sorrow, and that ker Hilfy Chanur par Faha will offer the resources of The Pride of Chanur, such as they are.”
“Advise them,” another voice sent directly, “that Dur Tahar o/Tahar’s Moon Rising also offers her assistance.”
That was courtesy. Pyanfar leaned back in the cushion, finally turned and rose with a stretch of her shoulders. “What can be done’s done. Go fetch something to drink, Hilfy; if I’m roused out, someone owes me that. Drink for all that want it. Breakfast. I’ll hear reports less urgent during. — Haral, who’s supposed to be on duty?”
“I am.”
“So. Then close down lowerdeck. Tirun, back you go.”
“Aye” Tirun muttered, and levered herself up stiffly and limped off in Hilfy’s wake. Pyanfar settled against the com post counter and looked at Haral, seated at the number two spot.
“That knnn’s fallen into pattern about Lijahan,” Haral said, paying attention to the screens. “Still making commotion. A wonder they don’t try for the cargo salvage out there.”
“Huh. Only grant they all stay put.”
“Skimmer’s still working out there at our tail. They’ve got a crew outside working the connectors. The cable’s ready to secure. But fourteen panels were missing and six loose, and they estimate another twenty hours working shift on shift to get the new ones hooked up.”
“Gods.” Pyanfar ran a hand over her brow and into her mane, thinking of kif — of attack which had chewed Starchaser to scrap. There were others besides the knnn who might be expected to rush to that salvage out there; there were the onstation kif… who showed no sign of moving. That was unnatural. No one was moving, except maybe a few miners out there with ambition. No one from station.
Word was out; rumor… had a wind up everyone’s back.
“The Tahar,” Haral said further, after a moment, “appealed that order to put out with an appeal to finish cargo operations. It was allowed.”
“Helpful. At least they’re here.”
“Helpful as the Tahar in general. Begging your pardon.”
“I’ll talk to them.”
“You think Tahar’d move to guard our tail?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t. Not unless they see profit in it. What are they doing? Not taking cargo.”
“Offloading. Stripping to run. Canisters pouring out like maggots.”
Pyanfar nodded. “Station wants that cargo safe then; and Tahar’s going to dump that out fast down to the bit she uses to stall with. The Personage has backed down, that’s what; got a few of his onstation companies wailing about losses, and Tahar’ll stay here as long as she likes. That’ll give me time.”
“Gods, the bill on this.”
“Expensive, our Outsider. In all senses.” She looked about as Hilfy came through the archway with a large tray, two cups and two breakfasts. “Thanks,” Pyanfar said, taking plate and cup… paused to look at Hilfy, who had stopped to look at the situation on the screen. They were still getting transmission relayed from Hasatso, with occasional breakup which indicated velocity dump. “Going to be a while,” Pyanfar said. “Unless they’ve got a medical emergency I doubt they’ll boost up again after turnover, just ride it slow in. Hours from now. Go on back to quarters. I mean it.”
A few ports ago Hilfy might have argued, might have laid her ears back and sulked. She nodded now and went. Pyanfar slid a glance at Haral, who stared after the retreating youngster and then nodded once, thoughtfully.
“Huh,” Pyanfar said, digging into the breakfast, and for some little time she and Haral sat and watched the scan and ate. “Tell you, cousin,” Pyanfar said finally, “you go off-watch and I’ll take it.”
“Not needful, captain.”
“Don’t be noble. I’ve got some things to do. One thing you can do for me. When you go down, look in on Tully. Make sure he’s all right.”
“Right,” Haral said. She stood up and gathered the dishes onto the tray. “But he’s all right, captain. Chur’s bedded down to keep an eye on him.”
Pyanfar had been finishing her last sip of gfi, to surrender the cup. She banged it down on the tray. “Gods blast — Did I or did I not order him separate?”
Haral’s ears dropped in dismay. “Chur said he was upset, captain; made herself a pallet in the washroom so’s he wouldn’t wake up by himself. She said — your pardon, captain — sedated, he looked so bad — You were in bed, captain. It was my discretion.”
Pyanfar exhaled shortly. “So. Well. Depressed, Chur says.”
Haral nodded. “We’d take him,” Haral said.
“Chur said.”
“Um.” Haral figured that train of things of a sudden and her mustache-hairs drew down. “Sorry, captain.”
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