Chanur's Homecoming cs-4

by Caroline J. Cherryh

  "Show those bastards," Haral muttered beside her. AsThe Pride finished her roll with never a wasted motion, precisely angled the jets and underwent outbound impulse.

  "Aja Jin's cleared on mark," Geran said. "Precisely." Pyanfar flicked her ears, rings jingling, and her heart picked up.

  Show these bastards indeed. That was a fancy new engine rig The Pride carried, the ratio of those broad jump vanes to her unladed mass was way up since Kshshti; and any kif who saw The Pride and Aja Jin move out in close tandem, would remark the peculiar similarity between their outlines, give or take the cargo holds which were firmly part of The Pride and which were stripped off the hunter-ship's lean gut and spine.

  "Tahar's away."

  Routine out to startup. The mains cut in on mark; Aja Jin was on the same instant, and Tahar, playing the same insolent game.

  It was quiet on the bridge. No chatter, none of the talking back and forth between stations that was normal, all of them , kin and all of them knowing their jobs well enough to get them done through all the back-and-forth. They were not all kin on this trip. And none of them were in the mood. Only she looked over at Haral, the way she had looked a thousand times in The Pride's voyages; it was reflex.

  Haral caught it and looked back, a little dip of one ear and a lift of her jaw, a cheerfulness unlike Haral's dour business-only blank.

  Same face she might have turned her way if she had decided to blow the ship. Pyanfar made a wry pursing of her mouth and gave the old scoundrel the high sign they had once, in their wilder days, passed each other in bars.

  They had a word for it. Old in-joke. Meet you at the door.

  She drew a wider breath and flexed her hands, reached across and put the arm-brace up, when they would need it.

  She had never been so outright scared in her life.

  "Coming up," Haral said finally. But she knew that. The numbers kept ticking off to jump. They took the outbound run with less haste than they could use, on the mark the kif gave them. There was a little leisure, a little chance for crew to stand up and stretch and flex minds as well as bodies; but no one left the bridge. Not even Geran.

  She's asleep, Geran had said when Pyanfar offered her the chance to leave scan and take a fast walk back to Chur's cabin while they were inertial and under ordinary rotation. So that was that. Pyanfar gnawed her mustaches and offered no comforts; Geran was not one to want two words on a topic where one had said it, and she was focussed down tight; took her little stretch by standing up beside her chair, and kept her eye still to her proper business; answered Jik's rare comments with a word or two.

  "Tully," Pyanfar said, "get ready."

  "I do," he said. He had his drugs with him, the drugs that a human or a stsho needed in jump. He prepared to go half to sleep in his chair, sedated so heavily he could hardly stay upright.

  Interesting to contemplate-a horde of human ships, all of them that automated. Like facing that many machines.

  Set to do what? React to buoys and accept course without a pilot's intervention?

  Defend themselves? Attack? A horde of relentless machines whose crews had committed themselves to metal decisions and a computer's morality, because their kind had no choice?

  Stsho did that, because stsho minds also had trouble in jumpspace; but stsho were nonviolent.

  Gods, so gods-be little he says, so little he's got the words for.

  "Tully. Are human ships set to fire when they leave jump?"

  He did not answer at once.

  "Tully. You understand the question?"

  "Human fire?"

  "Gods save us. Do their machines- fire after jump? Can they?"

  "Can," Tully said in a small voice. "Ship be ##."

  Translation-sputter.

  "Captain," Hilfy said, "he's got to go out now. Got to." His mind was at risk. "Go to sleep," Pyanfar said, never looking around; his back would be mostly to her anyway, the bulk of the seat in the way.

  "Not trust human," Tully said suddenly.

  "Go out," Hilfy said sharply. "You want me to put that into you? Do it.''

  While the chronometer got closer and closer to jump. "Tully," Pyanfar said. "Good night."

  "I go," he said.

  "He's got it," Tirun said. "He's all right."

  "We're on count," Haral said.

  "You give me com we come through," Jik said.

  "Aja Jin has its orders." They had talked through that matter already. Jik made a last try. And: "You got anything last minute you want to own up to?" she asked. "Jik?"

  "I damn fool," he said.

  "Count to ten," Haral said, and the numbers on the corner of the number-one monitor started ticking away.

  "Take her through," Pyanfar said. They did that, traded off; and she suddenly decided on the stint at exit.

  "Got it," Haral said. That section of the board that pertained to jump was live. "Referent on, we got our lock."

  Star-fixed and dead-on. It was a single-jump to Meetpoint from dusty Kefk, with its armed guardstations and its grim gray station-

  -to the white light and opal subtleties of a stsho-run station.

  If that was what was still there.

  "Going," Haral said.

  Down. . . .

  They stopped being at Kefk.

  . . . .Gods save us, Pyanfar thought, which thought went on for a long long timestretch.

  She dreamed of ships in conflict in their hundreds, burning like suns.

  Of strange gangling beings that had walked the dock once at Gaohn, sinister in their numbers and their resemblance to a creature she had befriended (but too many of them, and too sudden, and with their Tully-like eyes all blue and strange and malevolent). They carried weapons, these strangers; they talked among themselves in their chattering, abrupt speech, and laughed their harsh alien laughter out loud, which echoed up and down the docks.

  What do they want? she asked Tully then, in that dream.

  Look out for them, he said to her. And one of them drew a Hun and aimed it at them both.

  What does it say? Pyanfar asked when it spoke.

  But the gun went off and Tully went sprawling without a sound; in slow motion the tall figure turned the weapon toward her-

  Chapter Five

  ...it went off.

  The Pride made the drop into realspace and Pyanfar blinked, gasped a breath, and felt an acute pain about the heart which confused her entirely as her eyes cleared on The Pride's boards and blinking lights and her ears received the warning beeps from com: Wake up, wake up, wake up-

  Meetpoint?

  Her eyes found the data on the screen, blurred and focussed again with a mortal effort. "We're on," she said around the pounding of her heart, "Haral, we're on."

  And from elsewhere, distant and echoing in and out of space: "Chur, do you hear me? Do you hear?"

  From still another: "We've got passive signal. Captain! We're not getting buoy here. They've got Meetpoint image blanked!''

  ''Gods and thunders. Geran!''

  "I'm on it, I'm already on it, captain."

  -Hunting their partners, who could make a fatal mistake in a jump this close, looking for the first sign of signal, and themselves rushing in hard toward Meetpoint, into crowded space, where the scan's bounce-back could only tell them things too late and passive reception might not have all the data. They were blind. Meetpoint wanted them that way. It was somebody's trap.

  "Priority," Hilfy said. "Buoy warning: dump immediately."

  "Belay that," Pyanfar said. With two ships charging up behind them out of hyperspace, she had no wish to have herself slowing down in their path. Collision to fore was an astronomical possibility; behind was a statistical probability.

  And the kif who gave them orders meant business.

  Acquisition," Geran said, "your one, Haral."

  "Your two," Haral said; and id chased the image to Pyanfar's number two monitor. Aja Jin was in.

  "What've we got here? Geran-"

  "I'm working on it. We got
stuff all over the place on passive, nobody outputting image, lot of noise, lot of noise, we got ships here-"

  "Mark," Haral said, "less twenty seconds."

  "That's it, that's it, brace for dump."

  She sent it to auto; The Pride lurched half into hyperspace again and fell out with less energy-

  -gods, gods, sick as a novice-What in a mahen hell's in this system? Come on, Geran. Get it sorted. O gods- At forty-five percent of Light. With the system rushing up in their faces. Their own signal going out from that traitor buoy at full Light. Themselves about to become a target for someone. She fumbled after the foil containers at her elbow, bit through one and let the salt flood chase down the nausea. There was a meeting of unpleasant tides somewhere behind the pit of her throat and her nose and hands and the folds of her body broke out in sickly sweat. "Geran. Get me id."

  "Working, I'm working."

  Dump fouling up the scan; nothing where it ought to be, the comp overloaded with input and trying to make positional sense out of it before it got around to analyzing ship IDs.

  "Multiple signal," Hilfy said. "Nothing clear yet. Multi-species."

  "Arrival," Jik said. "Moon Rising is in."

  "On the mark," Haral said. "Second dump, stand by."

  Taking it down fast. The pain in her chest refused to leave. The nausea all but overcame her; but she hit the control anyway-

  -down again.

  -Gangling figures against white light. Captain, a voice said, and Chur was there with the light shining about her, in the midst of a long black hallway, and shafts of light spearing past her as she moved in the slightest. She turned her shoulder and looked back into the light-

  -"Chur-" they cycled through again, back in realspace.

  And the weakness that ran through her was all-enveloping. She fought it back and groped after another of the packets. Bit into it and drank the noisome stuff down in a half dozen convulsive gulps.

  "We got signal on Moon Rising," Geran's voice reached her, indistinct; she heard Tully talking, some half-drunken babble.

  "Chur," he was saying. "Chur, you answer. Please you answer.''

  No sound out of Chur, then. It might still be the sedative. The machine would knock her out in stress. They had plenty of it. Pyanfar blinked again, flexed her right arm in the brace, withdrew it and shoved the mechanism aside, out of her way. Her hands shook. She heard the quiet, desperate drone of Tully's alien voice: "Chur, Chur, you hear?"

  While Geran battled the comp for ID they desperately needed. Mind on business.

  "We got recept on Meetpoint," Hilfy said. "Lot of output. Busy in there. I'm trying to link up with our partners, get a fix on those ships-"

  "We've got to keep going," she muttered. "Got to. No gods-be choice. Blind. We got our instructions, we got-"

  "Kif," Skkukuk said suddenly. "Kifish output!"

  "Audio two," Hilfy said.

  It was. Some kifish ship was transmitting in code. Unaware of them yet, it might be. Or close enough to have picked them up, inbound from Kefk. "Going to have an intercept down our necks any minute," she muttered, and sweated. "Akkhtimakt. He's on guard here. Or he's running the whole gods-be station-"

  "Image, priority," Geran said. "My gods."

  Passive scan came up with resolution, a haze to this side, to that, all in differing colors indicating different vectors and slow, virtually null-movement, relative. Big hazy ball where Meetpoint ought to be. Haze to zero-ninety-minus sixty. Haze id minus seventy-thirty-sixty. Another ball out to one ten. The only thing that made sense was the Given in the system, the Meetpoint Mass itself, big and dark and dead from its cons-old formation. And the station itself. The rest-

  "Khym," Pyanfar snapped. "Interior com. Tully! audio one. Listen sharp. We don't know what we've got here. Could be humans, could be anything. Whatever we got, it's a lot of it."

  "Got it," Khym said; and: "Got," from Tully.

  The comp main panel between Haral and Hilfy was a steady flicker of inter-partition queries and action from this and that side of its complex time-sharing lobes. Like the lunatic tc'a: it had several minds to make up, and they were all busy.

  She rubbed her chest where the pain had settled and swiped the back of the same hand across an itch on her nose.

  And listened to Khym trying over and over again to raise Chur on the com.

  "Chur," he cried suddenly. "Geran-I got her, she's answering! Chur, how are you?"

  She was alive back there. Someone switched Chur's answer through. It was scatologically obscene.

  Pyanfar drew one painful breath and another.

  "Thank the gods," Haral murmured in a low voice. And from Khym: "Ker Chur, we have a problem just now-"

  "That's stsho," Hilfy said. "I'm picking up something near the station. Stsho. And hani. More than one. You got data coming, Geran, Jik.-I hear that." To someone on com. And Geran:

  "Gods rot it, I'm working." Then: "Yeah, just take it easy, hear?"

  "I got," Jik said quietly. "They be here they don't-"

  "Ten minutes station AOS," Haral said. "Mark."

  Pyanfar drew another breath and flexed her hands. "Hilfy, output to Meetpoint traffic control: coming in on standard approach."

  "Aye, done, standard approach data in transmission."

  "Aja Jin make dump," Jik said.

  "Stand by our final."

  The wavefront of their arrival had not yet gotten to Meetpoint central. The robotic beacon in the jump range knew as much as its AI brain was capable of knowing anything; but the buoy was not communicating data back to them even after it had had time to receive their ID squeal.

  It was certain that it was a trap. Stsho had no nerve sufficient to antagonize an armed enemy, blinding them as they came in. It was what they hired guards to do.

  "No telling where Sikkukkut is," Pyanfar muttered. "It'd take him maybe another hour to get that lot away from Kefk. But he's fast."

  "Kkkkt," Skkukuk said, which sound sent the hair up on her back. Not a comment except that click which meant a thousand things. "You all right back there: Skkukuk, you all right?" she asked the kif. And deliberately pleased the bastard. It was a genuine question; nourishment for him was a problem. No gods-be little vermin on my bridge, was her ultimatum; and Skkukuk had come up with his own answer. Straight simple-sugars and water, into a vein.

  "Kkkkt," he said again. "Yes, hakt'." Doubtless coming to a whole array of mistaken kifish conclusions about his status, the crew's, Jik's and Tully's; that elongate, predatory brain was set up to process that kind of information constantly, inexorable as a star in its course. Claw and crawl and climb. With a sense of humor only when it was in the ascendancy and demonstrating its power.

  Creator Gods, if You made that, You must've had something in mind. But what?

  "Imaging," Tirun said; "priority channel four."

  "Your two," Haral said; but that change was already there, the hazy ball of Meetpoint separating into a whole globe of points. So did one of the other patches of haze. Another remained indistinct.

  "We got a lot of company," Haral said.

  It was a swarm for sure. A monstrous swarm sitting around Meetpoint station, like insects around a corpse.

  "Migods," she murmured.

  Another blur materialized. About ten minutes Light off station nadir. Unresolved yet, and small. It could get a lot wider.

  "There's another one," Haral said; on the second Geran and Jik both came in on com.

  "Got that," Pyanfar muttered, her mind half there, half on what the comp was bringing up, color-code spotted into the station-mass that said stsho/hani ID.

  More IDs. There were stsho and hani in the station imaging, there were mahendo'sat and kif outlying. But not a single methane-breather in the output, which could mean that imaging had ignored them; or that no methane-breather was outputting; or that the methane-breathers had gotten the wind up them at some time earlier in events and lit out for their own territories.

  "Captain," Geran said.
<
br />   "I got it, I got it."

  "Not a methane-breather anywhere," Haral muttered. "I don't like this."

  "Got to be Akkhtimakt out there," Tirun said. "Looks like we got a real standoff here."

  "Mahen ships out there," Pyanfar said. "Goldtooth, I'll bet you that, eggs to pearls. And too many ships. Gods, look at that."

  "Humans," Haral said in a low voice. Not on bridge-com; voice-only.

  "Yeah."

  Tully knows it. Got to know it. He's not deaf. Not blind either.

  "Pyanfar," Jik said. "Give com."

  "In your own hell I will. Sit still."

  Stsho and hani sitting there dead at dock with kif in full view, kifish ships with the advantage of position and startup time and the mass of Meetpoint's dark dwarf to pull them in?

  But so had those other blotches on scan, mahen and alien. Standoff for sure.

  We got troubles, gods, we got troubles.

  "Hilfy: to both our partners; stand by hard dump, at the 2 unit mark; gods-be if we're going into that. Hard dump and brake, We're going to sit."

  "You got damn kif come in here behind us, upset ever'thing!" Jik cried. "Give com, dammit, I talk!"

  "Sit still while you got ears!"

  "Aja Jin's outputting," Hilfy said. "Jik. Translate."

  Faster than the mechanical translation.

  "They make ID. Say hello to Ana. Say got kif coming behind us."

  "Gods rot them." Monitors flicked and shifted. They were being inundated with com input, faster than their operators could handle it. Transcriptions were coming over. Kifish com. Hani ships were standing out from station. Stsho were in panic. Their wavefront had gotten to the station but not to the outliers they had seen on passive. Three more minutes for Akkhtimakt's kif to notice them. Seven for the unidentifieds that might be mahendo'sat. Eight for the ones farthest out, who might be human. And double that for response time. "We're going to have kif up our backsides."

  "You going have damn kif break through system, they don't stop, you hear? Pyanfar! Give com!"

  "Shut it up. Haral! Dump us down."

  Haral hit the switches. The Pride shed V in a single lurch to a lower state; space went inside out-