Chanur's Homecoming cs-4

by Caroline J. Cherryh

  She had just served notice to that Power what the stakes were, by the gods; and what her life was worth to her crew.

  That was power of a sort no kif wielded, of a sort no kif could easily foresee.

  Martyrdom was a concept that had gotten a shiver even out of Sikkukkut.

  "Word from Harukk," Hilfy said, coldly and calmly as she could, though her hand trembled as it hovered over the com console: "Quote: We demand cause for this violation of regulations."

  "Reply:" said Haral Araun, her low voice quite calm, "We have obeyed instructions from our captain."

  The hair rose on Hilfy Chanur's spine. She was more fluent in main-kifish than most hani, than most communications officers far senior to her, in fact. And what Haral was telling the kif was precisely the correct response, a very kifish thing to say, whether or not the old spacer knew it: Hilfy would have bet her scant possessions that Haral had calculated it, not by book-learning, but by decades of dockside give and take with the kif. She punched in and rendered it in main-kifish to the hakkikt's communications officer, who let a considerable stark silence ride after it.

  Click.

  "Harukk-com just went offline," Hilfy said, still calmly, though her heart was slamming away at her ribs. Beside her, Tully and Geran and Khym sat keeping an eye on scan, on the limited view they had with their nose into station and the scan output from station. Tirun Araun ran Haral's copilot functions from her post over by the aft bulkhead, the master-alternate, acting as switcher and sequencer, Haral's usual job; and Tirun had armaments live back there too. In case.

  "Haa," Khym muttered suddenly.

  "We just lost station output," Geran said.

  Sikkukkut's officials had just blinded them, at least insofar as station could. Doubtless someone was on the com to Sikkukkut personally, to tell him that there was a hani ship live, armed, and with its powerful nose stuck right into Kefk's gut.

  Not mentioning what those engines back there could do if they cycled the jump vanes sitting at dock. Some of their particles would stay in realspace, mightily agitated; others, in their random way, would enter hyperspace, and stream for the depths of the local gravity wells, the greatest of which was Kefk's main star. Everything would part company in a rather irretrievable fashion, either turning into a bright spot or a failed attempt at a black hole, stripping its own substance down, since it had no directional potential except the station and the star's own motion through the continuum. Probably not enough to prevent implosion. Hilfy activated a keyboard in her idle moment, fed in The Pride's mass and her best guess at total station mass, adding in the number of ships tied into the station, a moment of black self-amusement, filling her mind with numbers and schoolbook calculations.

  It was significant that the kif had not immediately demanded that they shut down the internal power: the kif knew they had no power to enforce that until they had Pyanfar in their hands.

  And Hilfy did not want to think about that at the moment. She simply ran the numbers on their own possible dissolution, and whether they would actually form the hyperspace bubble, and whether with all those ships and that station and all that mass, they might actually have a hyperspatial effect on the largest star when they plowed into it.

  She sent it into Nav, since the bubble variables resided there in standard equations; and of a sudden her comp monitor blinked, beeped, and came up with output too soon to have responded to that complex query: TRLING/PR1, it read, PSWD.

  Password?

  Nav query?

  Those were the two thoughts that hit her brain while her eyes were in motion back to the top of that screen where the program name was listed: they found that PRIORITY ONE code and the Linguistics Path Designator as the implication suddenly hit like a wash of cold water.

  YN she typed, which was the shortest city name on Anuurn and the standard password for their lightly coded systems: fast keys to hit.

  Syntax achieved, the screen said. Display/Print?/Tape?/All?

  She hit D and P; the screen blinked text up, full of gaps and mangled syntax: it was running a code-cracker set in the assumption it was mahensi, but it was not mahen standard, it was some godsforsaken related language, though the computer was making some sense of it on cognates. Jik's message. The coded packet he had dropped in their laps back at Mkks.

  Dialect. Which?

  She punched more buttons, desperately, asking for the decoded original. It came up, vaguely recognizable as mahen phonemes. "Gods be," she muttered, "Haral, Haral, the comp just spat out Jik's message but it's still hashed up, it's got a string of words together but it's still sorting-we got a breakthrough here."

  The screen blinked with a red strip across the top, which was Tirun using her keyboard to snatch information across to her board and probably to Haral's. "Keep on it," Haral said. "Tirun, monitor com."

  "Aye," Tirun said, and "Aye," Hilfy muttered, punching keys, with the hair bristling on her neck and her ears flicking in half-crazed vexation with the computer, which had thrown her a half-solved problem in her own field here on the very edge of oblivion.

  Kif could call our bluff any second now. Haral could push that button.

  We could go streaming for that sun and the gods rot it what language is he using that comp hasn't got? O gods be! when's that alarm going to come? We're going to die, gods rot it, and it's giving me something to chase, and gods rot it, Haral, let me finish this gods-be silly problem before you push the godsforsaken button, it's a rotten thing to die with a question in your head, if this thing's got the whole why and wherefore of it, all Jik's conniving, all his secrets-hold off the button, Haral, tell me when we go, I don't want to die till I get this-

  The computer beeped and sorted and ticked away, launched on a new hunt with a little hani shove in a certain direction for its research. It blinked away to itself and Hilfy clasped her hands in front of her mouth and stared at the screen in mindless timestretch.

  Probably a letter to his wife. Gods know. Has he got a wife? Kids?

  We're going to die here and this stupid machine can't go any faster and what can we do anyway? Pyanfar's already out there with the kif. And we can't get to her. Whatever happens.

  Harukk occupied a berth well around the rim, beyond the weakened section, but not beyond the damage: wreckage lay about them, walls and decks were fire-blackened and pocked with shells and laser-hits.

  And the approach to the hakkikt's ship was more ghastly than before, hedged with a veritable forest of poles and stanchions on which he had put the heads of enemies and rebels against his power.

  Pyanfar had seen the display before; so had Kesurinan. Hope he changes them off, was the wisp of thought that leapt into Pyanfar's distressed mind. M'gods, putrefaction. The things life-support has to put up with on this station-filters must be a gods-be mess.

  -in a distracted, callous mode because she had gotten used to such horrors, and only her heart flinched in a forlorn, pained recollection that there were places where such things did not happen, where naive, precious folk went about their lives never having seen a sapient head parted from its body and hung up like a traffic warning.

  This kif is going to expand beyond Kefk. Going-gods know how far. Gods help the civilized worlds.

  A sneeze hit her. She stifled it, turned it into a snarl and wiped her nose. She was allergic to kif-had taken another pill when she changed clothes, but the air was thick hereabouts. Her eyes watered. Lives rode on her dignity and she was going to sneeze, the very thought that she was going to sneeze made her nose itch and the watering grow worse. But she squared her shoulders and put the itching out of her mind, eyes fixed on the ramp, on the access which lay open for them.

  "It's coming, it's coming," Hilfy murmured, as the screen came up with more and more whole words, as it broke the code on a few key ones and spread the pattern wider: a makeshift job of encoding, a kind of thing one ship's computer could do and another one could unravel, if it had a decoding faculty; and The Pride's did. The Pride's fancy-educated comm
unications officer had taken her papa's parting-gift in the form of the same system she had studied on by com-net back on Anuurn; it cost; and it worked, by the gods, it sorted its vast expensive dictionaries for patterns, spread its tentacles and grabbed every bit of memory it could get out of the partitionings, and sorted and cross-checked and ran phonemic sorts, linked up with the decoder-program in the fancy new comp-segment the mahendo'sat had installed in The

  Pride back at Kshshti-gods knew what all it did. While no one who wanted to keep a document in code was going to be fool enough to drop proper names through it or use telltales like /' or -to, or -ma extensions, it had the advantage of that mahen code program it sorted in as a crosscheck. The result was coming out in abbreviated form, truncated, dosed with antique words and code phrases no machine could break, but it was developing sense.

  Prime writes haste* not * runner/courier accident* eye/see.

  Events bring necessity clarify actions take* prime/audacity....

  She added a hani brain's opinion what the choice ought to be in two instances. The computer flicked through another change.

  Number one writes hastily {?} Do not hold this courier or risk disclosure. Events compel me to clarify actions which Number One has taken--

  "Haral," she said, and felt a shiver all over as she added another suggestion to comp.

  . . . since {ghost?} is not holding to agreements support will go {to?} opposition all efforts supporting candidacy-

  "We got some stuff here," Tirun muttered. "Jik's talking doublecross of somebody."

  "Who's Ghost?" Hilfy said. "Goldtooth?"

  "Akkhtimakt?" Tirun wondered in her turn.

  "Ehrran?" Geran wondered, which possibility of double-dealing sent a chill down Hilfy's back.

  "Maybe some human," Haral said, and the hair bristled all the way down.

  O gods, Pyanfar needs to know this.

  And may never know it.

  If they lay a hand on her; if we blow this place; gods know what we're taking out-if we have to. If they make us do that.

  Good gods, we're talking about conspiracy all the way to Maing Tol or wherever-Candidacy, who in creation has a candidacy anyone out here worries about-

  -except the hakkikt.

  The corridors of Harukk would haunt her dreams-ammonia-smelling and dim, with none of The Pride's smooth pale paneling: conduits were in plain view, and bore bands of knots on their surfaces that, Pyanfar suddenly realized in a random flash, must be the kifish version of color-coding. The codings added alien shadows to the machinery, shadows cast in the ubiquitous and horrid orange of sodium-light and the occasional yellow-green of a coldglow. Tall robed shadows stalked ahead of them and others walked behind, as a door opened and let her and Kesurinan and Skkukuk into the hakkikt’s meeting-room.

  Sikkukkut waited for them, in a room ringed with black kifish shadows. Two incense-globes on tall poles gave off curls of sickly spicy smoke that curled visibly in front of the sodium-lights mounted to the side of the room, while another light from overhead fell wanly on Sikkukkut's floor-hugging table, himself and his chair, the legs of which arched up about him like the legs of a crouching insect. Sikkukkut sat where the body of the insect would be, robed in black edged with silver that took the orange light, with the light falling on his long, virtually hairless snout and the glitter of his black eyes as he lifted his head.

  "Hunter Pyanfar," he said. "Kkkt. Sit. And is it Kesurinan ofAja Jin?'

  "Same, hakkikt," Kesurinan said. And did not say: where is my captain? which was doubtless the burning question in her mind.

  Pyanfar settled easily into another of the insect chairs and tucked her feet up kif-style as one of the skkukun brought her a cup, one of the ball-shaped, studded cups the kif favored, and another poured parini into it. Kesurinan had hesitated to sit: "You too," Sikkukkut said, and as Kesurinan took another of the chairs, next Pyanfar, he looked in Skkukuk's direction. "Kkkkt. Sokktoktki nakt, skku-Chanuru."

  A moment's hesitation. It was courtesy; it was invitation to a kifish slave to sit at table with the hakkikt and his captain. "Huh," Pyanfar said, sensing Skkukuk's crisis; and her flesh shrank at the sudden purposeful grace with which Skkukuk came around that table and assumed the chair beside her-he slithered, on two feet: was, she suddenly recognized those moves, not skulking, not slinking-but moving with that fluidity very dangerous kif could use; very powerful kif; kif whose moves she instinctively kept an eye to when she saw them dockside and met them in bars. This was a fighter, among a species who were born fighting. And all hers, for the moment.

  She sipped her parini. Sikkukkut sipped whatever he was drinking while a skku served the others in turn.

  "Tahar," Sikkukkut said, "is on her way in. And your ship is live, hunter Pyanfar. Have you noticed this?"

  "I've noticed," she said, and kept all her moves easy.

  Sikkukkut's long tongue exited the v-form gap of his teeth and extended into the cup, withdrew again. "So have I. Your crew claims they're following orders. Is this so?"

  "Yes."

  "Kkkt." Silence a moment. "While you are on the dock."

  "I hope," Pyanfar said ever so softly, "that nothing's been launched toward my ship-bearing in mind there might be agencies still on the station that would like to damage the hakkikt's ally. I hope the hakkikt will protect us against a thing like that."

  Deathly stillness. At last the hakkikt lapped at his cup again and blinked with, for a kif, bland good humor. "You have been foolish, hunter Pyanfar. There's far too much opportunity for error. And you have delivered far too much power into the hands of subordinates. We will talk about this."

  Another weighty silence, in which perhaps she was expected to reply. She simply sat still, having achieved a position in which she could sit and stare thoughtfully at the hakkikt.

  Eggsucking bastard, she thought. Where's Jik, you earless assassin?

  She tried not to think of what kind of demonstration Sikkukkut was capable.

  "We will have a discussion on the matter," Sikkukkut said; and there was the subtle, soft whisper of arrival in the outer corridor. "Is that Tahar? Yes. Alone except for my escort. I wonder at this new tactic."

  Tahar hesitated in the doorway, then ventured close-a quiet step, a quiet settling into place when the hakkikt gestured her to sit at the table: a rippled-maned, bronze-pelted southern hani with a black scar across her mouth that gave her a grim and raffish look.

  "So all the ships in your hand," Sikkukkut said, looking at Pyanfar, "are in mine."

  "/ am in your hand," Pyanfar said, with as steady a voice as ever she faced down a dockside official bent on penalties. But never suggest I don't control those ships, no, not to a kif. Status, Pyanfar Chanur. Status is all there is with him. "It's a complex situation, hakkikt. Hani minds are not, after all, kifish. But that's my value to you.''

  "Godsawful gibberish," Haral said from her station. The printout was ten pages long, and full of code words that only Jik and his Personage might know. Hilfy Chanur stared at the same set of papers and flipped this way and that, trying to get some idea what they applied to.

  -Ghost is proceeding on the course suggested in her previous report.

  Pieces and bits of information depending on other information.

  -reports from inconvenience/Inconvenience? are negative.

  "I think Inconvenience is another codename," Hilfy said.

  "We knew," said Tirun, from the end of the consoles, "that that son was in connivance up to his nose."

  "Who are we?" Haral wondered. "Could we be that Ghost?"

  "Inconvenience," Hilfy suggested. "If-"

  "Priority," Geran exclaimed, atop a sound from Tully. "Priority, engine live, coming over station rim vicinity berth 23-"

  Harukk's neighborhood. Kif ship.

  "I am glad to know your value to me," said Sikkukkut carefully. "It's always helpful to have those things explained." His fingers moved delicately over the projections on the cup he held, restless, sensual movement.
"I have held such a discussion with my friend Keia. He has tried to explain. I'm not sure with what success."

  "He's very valuable," Pyanfar said, her heart thudding the harder against her ribs. Careful, careful, don't tie the crew and all we've got to him. "He's a force we'd miss. Against Meetpoint."

  "You assume Meetpoint."

  "Hakkikt, I've expected the order hourly."

  "Is that why your ship's engines are live?"

  She grinned, honest hani grin, a gentle pursing of the mouth. "I'm quite ready to go."

  "Kkkt. Skku of mine."

  "Congruent interests."

  And do your subordinates share your enthusiasm?"

  "They'll follow."

  "They've followed you here. Meetpoint might be far more dangerous."

  "They're well aware of that."

  "What is their motive, do you suppose?"

  "Self-interest. Survival."

  "They think then that your guidance will advance them."

  "Evidently they think that. They're here."

  "You see outside my ship the results of miscalculation."

  "I noticed, hakkikt."

  "You still consider Keia Nomesteturjai a friend, hunter Pyanfar."

  "Hakkikt, when you use that word it makes me nervous. I'm not certain we understand each other."

  "When you say subordinate I suffer similar apprehensions. What is that ship of yours doing?"

  "Following my orders."

  "Which are?"

  "Are we to Iater? I'm willing to discuss it if we are." In the hakkikt’s stony silence she sipped at the cup. "On the other hand, we were talking about Meetpoint. That is where we're going."

  "Do be very careful, hunter Pyanfar."

  She lowered her ears and pricked them up again. But a kif might not read that hani apology; and galling as retreat was: "I retract the question then."