With a crew who'd, admittedly, made only one less mistake than the sniper had made, in opting for a silent and invisible weapon on a moving target. Not an outstandingly well-informed or accurate attempt, all told.
And that was worrisome… that was just naggingly worrisome, because it didn't add up, except to a random lunatic.
Which almost excluded the kif. Kif slept with their weapons. Kif lived and died, among themselves, by their weapons. And a mistake like that wasn't the style of a Vikktakkht an Nikkatu, unless he gave orders to miss.
It wasn't the style of a mahen hunter captain, in a mahen port, with all sorts of resources, either.
Certainly wasn't the stsho, unless a stsho hired some other species to do the deed. Could be stsho: they weren't connoisseurs of violence. They couldn't judge the competency or the honesty of the guards they hired. They only paid them well enough that most wouldn't risk their job.
The same as a stupid hani taking a cargo full of stsho trouble, for a price too good to turn down.
They were in it. That was the fact. They were in it and on the dock out there, with shots flying, they'd made mistakes that weren't going to let her sleep tonight, that threatened to replay behind her eyelids and that stacked up ready and awaiting the idle moment, the dark, the unfilled silence. They'd deserved to lose their lives out there. Every time she thought back through it she found a new mistake — theirs, hers trying to cover them, layer upon layer of foul-ups, from the minor glitch to the decision to walk it and not take a taxi.
She scanted the dry cycle, went out damp and sat down on the side of the bed, staring at the locker, within which was a box, and within which was a ragged printout she wasn't supposed to have, and did.
Pyanfar likely hadn't even thought about the ops file in her possession when she told her go downworld; or at least, the level of bitterness between them hadn't gotten that high, that Pyanfar had ever asked if she had more than the printout she had officially turned in.
She'd taken it to learn from it, to understand it, and maybe, in her mind at the time, as a slice of Pyanfar to analyze and figure, when no other clues had served. She still resorted to that printout now and again, when captain Hilfy Chanur had wanted to figure out what Pyanfar had done on some point and what Pyanfar's rules and policy had been on some obscure matter of dealing with certain ports — a compendium of experience that Pyanfar had gathered over a long number of years — some were procedures she'd laid down after certain close calls. Some were just universal good sense; and she had borrowed some inoffensive bits of it to cover the gaps in the Legacy's own freer, easier-going rules, rules that didn't have a lot to say about firearms or being shot at. A lot of that manual her own procedures contradicted, because a lot of it was Pyanfar’s own perfection-driven convictions, and some of it just didn't apply in the peace Pyanfar had built.
But a lot of it the Legacy's written rules didn't cover, or didn't mention for one important other reason, because somewhere at the bottom of her resentment she was still Chanur clan-head, and The Pride's operations, secretive as they were, and likely dangerous as they were, still relied on those procedures.
Things she knew about The Pride's standing orders, The Pride's policies and tendencies and biases and likely choices in an emergency… were in that book; and one of them was that you didn't talk about that book existing, you didn't take that printout off The Pride and you didn't discuss those policies anywhere but on The Pride's deck, because there were agencies and individuals that would kill to know what was in there.
But she didn't have time to reinvent everything. She didn't have time to modify a system that wasn't working. She'd nearly lost lives out there because she hadn't breached The Pride's security to tell them.
They were peacetime traders. The crew hadn't come in with the close-mouthed wariness The Pride's crew had. Tiar wasn't a Haral Araun, she was a good-humored spacer with a pilot's hair-triggered instincts about survival and a common sense about the information flow. Tarras was a canny trader and she scored highest on the simulations with the weapons systems — Tarras had been hours on the simulators, but that didn't say the Legacy had ever launched one of its missiles or fired a gun, or done more than drills. The captain had. Gods-rotted right the captain had. And Rhean's crew had handled sidearms and done the drills and given a fair account of themselves in the battle before the peace, so it wasn't that Tarras had never fired a missile in her life; and it wasn't that Tiar and Chihin hadn't run coordinations or been back-up pilots under heavy fire… but too many ships had died at Anuurn and Gaohn, of mistakes The Pride hadn't made.
Because of The Rules. The by the gods Pyanfar Chanur way of doing things, which wasn't the exact way every hani ship ran its business and which she dared not have her peace-time crew talking about when they were home, or complaining about in a station bar.
And maybe in some remote part of her brain she didn't want to think in those terms any longer. The Compact having changed, peace having broken out— hani wanted to get back to their own business, and take their own time, and not worry about wars, and not hurry more than they had to. The crew was all right, they got along, they were still, after their few years together, making adjustments to working together: they had their operating glitches and they yelled at each other, but no serious glitches, absent hostile action. It was a different age, and instincts dimmed, and fools could steer a ship or a planetary government: precision just didn't matter any more.
Medium was just all right.
Till you rusted or some amateur assassin nailed you for a reason you wouldn't ever find out.
Mad, she was. That son had shot at her and hit Chihin.
That in itself was a sloppy presumption. Aunt Py would say.
If aunt Py were here to lecture… or to haul a young captain out of the mess she'd contracted herself and her crew into.
Not experienced enough for a captaincy, they said in the han, and behind her back.
More by the gods experienced than some — especially in the han. And a crew that was getting smoother as time went on.
But there wasn't time to let Hilfy Chanur figure out her way. There hadn't been time for Hilfy Chanur to figure things out, all her life.
She got up, took the printout from the locker to her office and scanned it in.
She edited off all the references to The Pride. She searched the crew's names, and subbed in her own…
And she came to a dead stop on the matter of Hallan Meras, on the auxiliary post.
Lock him back in the laundry?
Forbid the crew to discuss ops with him, whatsoever?
Why had Vikktakkht wanted him? Why had Vikktakkht insisted to speak to him, except to get a less wary answer, and because Vikktakkht understood hani well enough to know they'd protect him.
Meras was a vulnerability in their midst that her own curiosity had made available to the kif, and she couldn't deny that. She had a certain ruthlessness, a certain deficiency of pity, a certain willingness to run risks with other people's lives… she had discovered that in herself. Or maybe it was just that nobody planetside understood the things she'd seen, and the experiences she'd had… nobody who'd only been a merchant spacer could ever understand… and she grew angry, impatient with people who were naive, and people who were safe, and protected, and innocent…
But that she'd taken Meras with her…
There'd been a good reason. There'd been a kif offering information they had to have. There'd been a kif who could have gone off with what he knew and refused to tell them… (in a mahen hell: Vikktakkht wanted them to know what he'd said)… but at the time, she hadn't known what Meras' possible connection to Vikktakkht was, when she'd taken a young man into that place — she had, who above all knew what could happen to him. And it wasn't all the good reasons for doing it that upset her stomach. It was the angry reason for doing it. That he wasn't Tully. That he was hani, and male, and blindly naive as every charge-ahead brat of a mother's son was brought up to be, worse, he was a feckl
ess fool of an innocent like Dahan had been, and the world wasn't kind to them, the old ways aunt Pyanfar had sent her back to didn't by the gods work, and she didn't care what her biology nagged at her to do. That didn't work either.
And she hated…
… hated a wide-eyed, good-natured, handsome kid looking at her with worship in his eyes, reminding her what she'd lost, what she'd compromised, and what she'd let Pyanfar Chanur…
… strand her planetside to do.
She was by the gods mad. She was still… that… mad….
It still hurt. She could look at Hallan Meras and see her junior over-eager self, and be perfectly forgiving and understanding; but when she looked at him and felt anything…
She got mad, just cruelly… mad… at things unspecified.
That was a problem, wasn't it?
Py had cut her off from Tully, cut her off from her dearest friends in the entire universe, and sent her home… where Py couldn't go again. Ever.
That also… was a problem, wasn't it? It was Chanur's problem. And Py sent her to solve it, and washed off Chanur, and Chanur's politics, and everything to do with the clan — forever, at that point.
Direly sad thought… for aunt Py. Py had gotten hot when she'd said no. Py had said things… maybe because Pyanfar Chanur was feeling pain, who knew? Pyanfar wasn't ever one to say so.
So bad business had happened at Kshshti, so she'd had a rough few years and she hated her unlamented husband with a passion.
But why was she so shaking mad? Why in all reason was she sitting here at her reasonably well-ordered desk upset and wanting to do harm to a young man who'd had no connection with Py except a conversation on a dockside years ago. She was a self-analytical person. She had sore spots and she knew where they were: she might have nightmares that made her throw up, but she didn't let them dominate her waking life, and she didn't let them sway her from what made business sense… gods-be right she'd deal with a kif if he had a deal she needed. She'd felt no panic at going to Kshshti. She could contemplate going to Kefk, clear over the border into kifish territory, and as it seemed now, they were going.
So she didn't have a problem, outside the occasional flashes on the past. She was free, she went where she chose, she had no problems that a financial windfall and peace in the family wouldn't cure. So why did she feel that way about Hallan Meras? Instinct? Something that deserved distrust? Something that threatened them? She hadn't read that between him and the kif. And she generally understood her own behavior better than that.
Attraction? She'd noticed he was male. So? She was also exhausted, distracted, and too harried by petulant stsho, pushy mahendo'sat, and a ship with potential legal problems, to think about any side issues.
She just didn't figure it — being at one moment perfectly at ease face to face with the lad and then, in the abstract, when he wasn't even at hand—
Enough to make you wonder about yourself, it was, what sore spots did go undiscovered, and what that one was about. But it wasn't about Hallan Meras personally. No. He was just a problem—
A security problem where it concerned the manual. Tell na Hallan to keep a piece of information to himself forever, and she honestly had every confidence he'd try. But this was the lad who'd fathered a tc'a by backing a lift-cart.
And, no, she wasn't going to accept him in the crew. Maybe that was what made her mad: that they weren't The Pride, but that given time to work together, their way, her way, they might have become their own unique entity, nothing complicating their lives, no family divisions and feuds, no favoritisms. No mate problems. No jealousies.
And now there wasn't a chance for that to happen. Now she had to do something different, in the incorporation of aunt Py's ideas, aunt Py's personal notions, that there wasn't time to take part of.
Maybe that was why the Hallan matter touched her off. Maybe it was watching things go to blazes and knowing that Hallan's slips weren't harmless, that while they were trying to keep his skin whole and interrupting their life and death business to do it, he had become first a vulnerability, and now an obstacle to shaping her crew into what she wanted.
That might be it. That might be why she wanted to kill him, because a part of her had been seeing all along that he was that kind of danger.
And with the ship utterly still, the loaders silent, and the only sound the air whispering out of the ducts in the medical station… she called in all of them but Hallan Meras.
"Come in," she said to Tarras, who hovered at the door. "Sit down. — Chihin, don't sit up. Don't push it."
Chihin muttered and stuffed a pillow under her head, one-handed. "Nothing said about not sitting up."
"Orders," she said. "Mine. Nice if someone obeyed them. Just a wistful thought, understand."
There was general quiet. A respectful moment of general quiet. But it wasn't blame she wanted to start with. "First," she said, "the assassin made more mistakes. None of us are dead. The truck—"
"I'm sorry," Fala said faintly.
"It did work," Hilfy said. "It wasn't a stupid thought. Nothing we did was a stupid thought. But the unhappy fact is that we didn't win because we were good. He lost because he fouled up— if he lost. We don't know that he didn't accomplish what he wanted. He certainly made a lot of noise. And he's made us have to assume from now on that we're somebody's enemy." She had the thin manual printouts in her possession. She handed them out. "This is procedure from now on. Eat and drink it and sleep with it, but don't talk about it, don't joke about it. Na Hallan's not to get this.
He's not to know about it. No copies go off this ship, in any form."
Fala was frowning. Chihin was trying to leaf through hers, one-handed, the booklet propped on her knee. Tiar and Tarras gave theirs a dubious look.
"A general change?"
She didn't intend to tell them, she hadn't intended to admit it. But she didn't intend to claim it for a daughter either, and you didn't just rip away everything an experienced crew knew and tell them do differently without saying why. "It's The Pride's ops manual. I'm not supposed to have it. You're not supposed to know it exists. Read it. Follow it. We can talk about it. And maybe we can think of better ways. But we've got to live long enough. This fixes responsibilities, it talks about how many decimal places in the reports, it mandates when we do certain maintenance, it talks about some technical details that are just Py's idea, but let's don't quibble about that for now. She's a gods-be stickler for some details you're going to call stupid and you're going to find some procedures in there that were illegal even before the peace. But my word is, memorize this, understand it, don't mention it in front of outsiders, and I pointedly include na Hallan: he's not staying on this ship and he can't take this to another crew.
Questions?"
"Are we going to Kefk?" Tarras asked.
"Very possibly," Hilfy said. "I don't see anything else to do."
There weren't questions beyond that. Maybe there was just too much reading to do.
"Dockers are on paid rest until 0600. I'd suggest you catch some sleep."
"I'm going to be fit tomorrow," Chihin said.
"You're going to be sore and impossible," Hilfy said. "You can sit watch in the morning. Run com."
"The kid, you know," Chihin said, not quite looking at her, "didn't do too badly out there."
"I noticed that." Of crew, she began to understand Chihin was angry too, in the same way she was, only more so. But Chihin, owing na Hallan, was being fair. Chihin set great personal store on being fair, even when it curdled in her stomach — for exactly the same reasons that were bothering her, she could surmise as much and not be far off the mark.
"No reason he can't sit station," Hilfy said. "No reason I don't trust him. He just doesn't know everything. Doesn't need to know. That's all." And Chihin looked somewhat relieved.
So they were going to Kefk. And the captain declared a six hour rest, come lawsuit or armed attack, which made the ship eerily quiet after the clangor and thumping of the loa
der and the irregular cycling of locks.
Hallan gazed at the ceiling of the crew lounge, faintly lit from the guide-strips that defined the walls and the bulkhead, and listened to that silence.
Fala had said, "It was terribly brave what you did."
Chihin had said, "You drive worse than na Hallan." But he couldn't take offense at that, because Chihin, the one who didn't like him, had also said, to him, "Thanks, kid."
She was honest, and she did mean it, even if it choked her; and he liked Chihin — he liked her in a special, difficult way, because Chihin was one of the old guard who was willing to change her perspective on things. You could find people sitting on either side of opinions who were there just because things had landed that way and they went along with it; but Chihin didn't just land, Chihin probed and picked at a situation or a person until she could figure it, and she didn't let up. And she made jokes to let you know what was going on with her. And she made them when you deserved it.
Fala — she was younger than he was, in experience. She'd done what none of her seniors had been in a position to do. And backwards across the docks was faster and it didn't expose any different surface to fire; which wasn't stupid… even if she didn't go a very straight line.
She'd said to him, "Oh, gods, I'm glad you're all right., " in a way that made him go warm and chill and warm again, all the way down to his feet. He'd stood there like a fool, not knowing what to say, except.
"You too."
Because a feeling like that was what you got in families, and what a boy always had to give up, and couldn't count on finding again anywhere: you couldn't count on it in the exile you had to go to and you couldn't count on it from whatever clan you fought your way into. If you were stupid and your feelings for some girl led you to fight some clan lord you couldn't beat, it mostly got you in trouble.
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