Chanur's Legacy cs-5

by Caroline J. Cherryh

  Tarras came up from downside, saying something about the shower downside being occupied, and her having to use the one topside, poor put-upon dear, and Hilfy glared at her, thinking it could be the end of a family friendship if Tarras opened her mouth on the matter of subclauses at the moment.

  "Do that," Hilfy said sweetly, with as great a control as she had left. "I've a few things to see to. We've got to recalc our outbounds."

  Tarras took the hint. "Want help?"

  She thought about it, a second run-through. Thought about particles floating through the filter systems.

  "Shower first. We all will. We'll just give station last-minute notice of our undock." Satisfying notion.

  "Let them do the scrambling. The oji has priority. Doesn't it?"

  The banging and hammering had stopped. The hatch had cycled- For a long time there was quiet. Hallan decided the ship might be headed for undock, but people tended to forget him. So he decided it was a good idea to put the blast cushion in order, just in case, and to take a couple of blankets out of the storage lockers, because the heat still had not caught up, and also if they went out very hard or very long, one could want something to stuff in the unsupported spots. They didn't make flight cushions his size either. Or chairs. Or most anything on a ship.

  But the ship didn't go, for a long time. He tucked up with his blankets and tried to calculate what he knew about Meetpoint and exactly what v they were going to carry if they were loaded full and going, the way the captain had said, to Urtur — which, as he understood, most ships couldn't do without going to Hoas, unless they dumped all their cargo. And they were carrying cargo, he'd heard the loaders, which he was relatively sure sounded inbound. So the Legacy must have the engines for it, or they were in a lot of trouble — like lost in hyperspace, forever. Truth be told, he was scared, and a little suspicious that even Tiar had been having a joke at his expense.

  If it really was Urtur they wouldn't come in fast or close to the star, because of the dust. Urtur was a dreadfully dirty system, most of it in the disc, but not all of it—

  And a pity they couldn't see their own fluorescing trail. Riding on light. Bathed in it. At home, he had had a picture on his wall, a photo someone had caught of a mahen ship coming into Hoas. And he liked to imagine them doing that, every time they made system drop. But you couldn't see it yourself. He had asked about it; and the Sun's crew said it was a stupid question. Everybody was busy when you were coming in, and if you ever did see something like that they were too close and you were real busy real fast.

  He had ridden through jump himself a lot of times, the last two years in the sum Ascendant's ops center.

  He thought through all the moves Dm would be making, if he were in ops, if Dru were sitting by him. Dru said he knew what he was doing. Dru was the one who'd gotten him a license, so she could take a break and leave him with the boards, she said — which was undoubtedly true, but she also said he really deserved a license, in a way he could never get the rest of the crew to admit.

  Yet.

  “Hallan?''

  Tiar, he thought, on the intercom.

  "Yes?"

  "Just checking. Are you all right down there?"

  "Yes. I'm fine."

  "Gods in pink feathers! The books!"

  "That's all right."

  'No, it isn't. Look. We're about to go into sequence. Are you all right?''

  "I'm fine, ker Tiar."

  On the Sun, they didn't use words like Tiar used to him then. He'd never heard them put together that way — and from a very old, very proper clan like Chanur. He didn't understand why she was upset.

  But Tiar sent Fala running down the corridor from ops with the nutrients pack he desperately needed for jump and a book, a real, battered, tag-eared book… of Compact Trade Regulations.

  He was quite touched by that. He really was.

  The Legacy achieved v at a gentle burn. No more energy, in the long haul, to put a push on it — v was v, and you paid for it, until you ran past your capacity; but the Legacy had a stsho aboard, a creature that couldn't take more than 1.5 g's without cracking its mostly hollow bones.

  Which might be tempting, but they had Tlisi-tlas-tin in charge along with the 'Preciousness,' whatever it was, and the reason doubtless that No'shto-shti-stlen hadn't put the Preciousness aboard a kifish ship was the very well-known habit of kif changing loyalties when unthreatened, unwatched, and seeing a point of advantage.

  And likewise for the mahendo'sat — if the Preciousness was in any sense religious, keep it away from mahen hands: the mahendo'sat knew that game too well — and some of them were crazier than others.

  The methane-folk? Who knew? The stsho, maybe, knew, who had dealt more with the methane-breathers than anyone. And if the honorable Tlisi-tlas-tin had to go with the Preciousness and the honorable had to breathe oxygen, then maybe that answered that question in a very practical way.

  Which left hani — since stsho traders refused to take their own ships beyond Hoas. Stupid hani.

  Credulous hani. Hani who hadn't been in space until the mahendo'sat (with no one's leave) landed on Anuurn and pitched them from wooden exploration ships into star-faring trade.

  For mahen reasons, of course, some of which were sane and some of which were not.

  She flipped switches to check working stations, heard Meetpoint's thin voice in her right ear. "Coming up on jump," she was able to declare at last, and opened channel 3 and said in stshoshi trade, "Your honor, kindly take position for jump. We trust you have your medical kit at hand."

  Silence.

  "Your honor. Kindly advise us if you have done what we request for the preservation of yourself and the Preciousness."

  Frythat dimwit!

  "Honorable captain?"

  "Are you ready, honorable?"

  "We are ready.,"

  "Steady, cap'n." From Tiar, at her right elbow. "Murder's not in the contract."

  "Don't say that word."

  "Hey, we'll be free of it. Shove the Preciousness and gtst honor right out the chute and be damned to them."

  "Not allowed. Subclause 3."

  "They tell you about this Tlisi-tlas-tin character, cap'n?"

  "No."

  "Didn't think so."

  From Tarras: "Do I get to pitch gtst out the lock?"

  "Negative. Negative. Subclause three point two. No pitching of the Preciousness."

  "What is this thing? Do you figure?"

  "Not a bit. Religious or something. Who knows?"

  "That's a blip." From Tarras at scan. "We got somebody away from station."

  "Ha'domaren. "

  "How'd you know that?" Tarras asked.

  "How could I not guess? I want a readout on every ship that's left Meetpoint since we've been there."

  "No problem. I got it. You want it now or other-side?"

  "Any kifish ship?"

  "Two kif, one t'ca. All Hoas-bound, last few days."

  "That son's going to move. Lay you odds."

  "After us?"

  "Lay you any money you want that's a mahen agent, for some gods-rotted personage we don't know who, with an empty hold. It's politics, it's politics, it's some one of Pyanfar's rivals…"

  "Possible," Tiar said.

  "It's going to come," Hilfy said. "They'll try. There's never been a dearth of Personages…"

  "Coming up on mark," Tiar said.

  "Advise our passengers."

  "Got that,"Fala said from belowdecks.

  The numbers ticked down, everything automated, more so than The Pride. Progress. And more things to go wrong. She still watched the lines, and compared the numerical readout, scary large numbers.

  She'd done it on The Pride, with her aunt's hand or Haral Araun's on the controls. These days it was Tiar's. She wasn't a pilot, never would be. She could just ride it through.

  "Here we go. Suppose we got that mass calc right?" Ship dropped. Everything went hazed.

  — You could dream in jump.

&
nbsp; — Sometimes you even knew you were dreaming, if it was an old dream, an often dream.

  Dream of gold hair and a human face.

  Waiting there. He always was. Even if he was on a ship fifty lights away. Hello, he said, most times, though he was always distant. He had been, since they had parted company at Anuurn. Clearly Pyanfar had talked to him. Told him the practicalities of things. Laid down conditions.

  Hello, kid.

  But she wasn't the kid any more. Things had changed. She'd been married. And widowed. Thank the gods there were no offspring to promote permanent ties with Sfaura.

  Give No'shto-shti-stlen the gods-be puzzle egg. And good luck to gtst with it.

  Meanwhile there was a human face, a human presence, distant and shadowy, a comfort in her traveling.

  You have to take care, Tully said to her. He had never gotten that good at hani speech, that she knew of. But that was years ago.

  I always take care, she said.

  You trust this deal you're in.

  Let's not talk about business. She knew what she wanted to do. Exactly what her aunt frowned on her doing. But Tully was evasive. He walked away from her, with his back turned.

  And the lights dimmed, and there were bars about— ammonia, and sodium light.

  She took alarm. "Tully?" she said, and he looked at her, scared as she was. She didn't want to be here again. She didn't want this part.

  He came and held on to her. He had then. He did until the kif came and then he went with them because they threatened her. The whole thing passed in a kind of haze, the way the hours had in mat kifish cage.

  There were sounds to hear. She chose not to hear them. She could govern the dream now — she had learned to do that, and she kept saying, over and over again, Tully, come back. Tully, listen to me. I don't want to remember that. What do you go there for? I don't want to see that-Come back and talk to me.

  "Tully!"

  He came back then, just a shadow. And wouldn't talk to her.

  "He knows better," Pyanfar said, out of nowhere and uninvited. "He had his choice, go or stay. He understood. You wouldn't. You still won't."

  She did. That was the trouble. She loved him, enough to make them both miserable. Go have babies, Py had said. Thank the gods that had failed. And maybe Korin had never had a chance, maybe he'd sensed that, male-wise, sullen, quarrelsome, and unwisely set on running domestic affairs. Maybe that had set up the situation from the first day he moved in. Maybe—

  Maybe in some remote way that had set up everything else, because she had come home with violence, with anger, with the habit of war and the indelible memory of a kifish cage. Korin couldn't have imagined that place. He'd made assumptions, he'd made assertions, he'd struck out to make her hear him—

  And she couldn't have cared less… what he thought, what he wanted, who he was. The only thing she'd wanted—

  — was kif in her gunsights. Korin dead. AndTully, on her terms.

  "He's not your answer," aunt Pyanfar said, in that brutal, blunt way Py had when she was right.

  "Look past your gods-cursed selfish notions, niece, and ask him what's right to ask of him, and don't tell me it's helping you outgrow him."

  That day she'd swung on Py. Not many people had done that and gotten away unmarked. But Py had just ducked, and faced her, the way Py did now, hand against The Pride's main boards.

  "Meanwhile," aunt Py said. "Meanwhile. You have a ship to run."

  That wasn't what Py had said. Maybe it was her own mind organizing things. The brain did strange things in jump. It dreamed. It worked on problems. At times it argued with itself, or with notions it couldn't admit wide awake.

  Most people forgot what they dreamed. It was her curse to remember. Mostly, she thought, she remembered because she wanted to be there. She wanted to be back on The Pride, before the kif, before anything had happened.

  "Time to come back," Pyanfar said.

  — Alarm was sounding. Wake, wake, wake.

  They were in Urtur space, with the alarm complaining and the yellow caution flashing. The computers saw dust ahead.

  "You there?" she asked. "Tiar?"

  "I'm on it. We're close in. Going for secondary dump."

  — You can be a gods-be fool, aunt Py was hanging about to say. Because there's no way you're not being followed.

  "Ship out there," Tarras said, on scan.

  ''Ha'domaren?''

  "Sure the right size and vector."

  She reached after the nutrients pack, bit a hole in it and drank down the awful stuff. They were, as their bodies kept time, days away from Meetpoint. On Meetpoint docks, on Urtur station, it was more than a month. As light traveled, it was years. And the body complained of such abuses. You shed hair, you lost calcium, you dehydrated, your mouth tasted of copper and you wanted to throw up, especially when the nutrient liquid hit your stomach and about a quarter hour later when the iron hit your bloodstream. But you got used to it and you learned to hold it down, or you didn't, and you didn't last as a deep-spacer.

  "You all right?" she heard Fala ask of Meras, below, heard him answer, brightly, "I’m fine."

  Like hell, she thought. It wasn't fair if he was. The stsho would be coming out from under… stsho and humans had to sedate themselves for the trip, whatever those completely different brains had in common— though Tully could survive without; had had to prove it… once, at least; and was still sane…

  Woolgathering, Pyanfar called it, and damned the habit. She didn't have her hands on controls. She'd been ship's com tech, protocol officer, and that didn't have a thing to do with running the ship. But she followed the moves, she knew in her gut when it was time for Tiar to kick in the third v dump, and Up-synched the order, tense until Tiar gave it, and then satisfied.

  She could do it herself. She was tolerably sure of it. But she never bet the ship on it. And certainly not on this jump.

  "Fine job," she said to Tiar.

  "We're in a little closer than I wanted."

  "Still," she said. First class equipment, first class navigator in Chihin and first-class pilot in Tiar. It wasn't any run of the lot ship could single-jump as they'd done. The older pilots, the navigators of Chihin's age … they'd done it in the war years, they'd the kind of reflexes and system-awareness that could come out of it with a critical sense where they were.

  So, most clearly, did Ha'domaren's crew. That told you something. That told you, at least, the quality of that crew and equipment, that it carried no cargo, and that whoever was at the helm had done this before.

  That they were overjumped, that somebody had actually overhauled and passed them in hyperspace, that said that was one bastard who didn't mind the navigation rules or care about the dust hazard in Urtur system.

  Chapter Five

  Urtur was a smaller port than Meetpoint — heavily industrial. Its star was veiled in murk and dust, a ringed star, with gas giant planets sweeping the veil into bands of crepe and gas and ice; with miner-craft both crewed and otherwise running the dusty lanes in the ecliptic; with refineries and mills and shipyards operating at the collection points—

  And the main station, under mahendo'sat governance, devoted itself to manufacture, shipping, and entertainment for the miners and makers of goods. You wanted culture? Go to Idunspol. You wanted religion? Go to forbidden, god-crazed Iji. You wanted iron and heavy metals, you wanted sheet and plate and hydrogen, you wanted a raucous good time and a headache in the morning? Urtur was the place for it.

  You said Chanur here, and certain authorities' ears pricked up and twitched — by an irony of things as they were, there were outstanding warrants here that could not quite be forgotten, by mahen law: every situation was subject to change and every administration could be succeeded by some new power diametrically opposed to the last. So charges stayed on the books, something like reckless endangerment, public hazard, speeding, unlawful dumping, and damage to public property. The Pride of Chanur had had its less popular moments.

  And sup
posedly the charges included the name of Hilfy Chanur, crewwoman. But she paid no more attention to them than aunt Py did, coming and going as she pleased these days in regal empowerment.

  So she ordered the Legacy shut down and the hatch opened to Urtur; and she completed the formalities with station control, signing this and signing that — advised station control of the existence of their full-scale dataload and its date of provenance from Meetpoint; and got a bid of 3000, which wouldn't go higher-counting that rag-eared son of a mahen outlaw had beaten them in by eight hours.

  But with their fragile passenger and gtst fragile object, they couldn't have made it in at anything like that speed.

  "That's five thousand that son Haisi's cost us," she muttered. "Maybe eight."

  "Couldn't have done better," Tiar said. "Better take it."

  "Out of his hide," she said, signaled acceptance, and switched channels to gtst honor Tlisi-tlas-tin.

  "Honorable, we're ready to make contact with your party on Urtur. We're pleased to announce arrival and opening of station business. We will have the distinction to contact the excellency immediately and advise gtst of your presence and mission."

  "We acknowledge. We are in preparation. We would like our meal now, if your honor will instruct her aides,''

  "We will, honorable. Stand by." A sigh as she cut the connection.

  "Gtstcould have eaten it when we fixed it," Tarras muttered.

  "Gtstmission is to be a pain," Hilfy said. "Check on the other passenger while you're at it. Make sure he didn't crack his head."

  They'd been up and about for hours. They had had their lunch, but the stsho had been too exhausted and too sick to, as the stsho put it, 'burden the stomach with uncertain and foreign preparations.'

  Hell.

  Meanwhile she had been putting together a message to advise gtst excellency Atli-lyen-tlas to contact her on an urgent basis.

  To the most excellent Atli-lyen-tlas, emissaryo/gtst excellency No'shto-shti-stlen, the honorable Hilfy Chanur, captain of the hani ship Chanur’s Legacy, head of the ancient and honorable Chanur clan, sends her respectful greetings and has the distinction and honor to advise and inform your excellency that she has a message of extreme importance for the attention of your excellency personally, which can only reflect well upon the achievement and elegance of your excellency for the future.