Chanur's Venture cs-2

by Caroline J. Cherryh

  "Arm! Move it!"

  "Got section seal go," the mahen official was saying into her ear. "Got no chance kif get away, you wait report-"

  "You authorize us past that seal. Hear?"

  "Office got no authority-"

  "Get it!" She cut the official off in midword and shoved her way past Khym. Geran had the sidearms out of the locker. "Get the rifles," she said. They had them. It was illegal, a defense they never admitted to port authorities they had.

  "Aye," Haral said, and ran.

  "Pyanfar-" Khym said.

  She put the lock on controls, spun about and ran. Khym was with them and she had no desire to stop him. Not in this.

  * * *

  The huge section doors were shut, red and amber strobes on their surface spearing through the wafts of smoke that reached even here. Sirens wailed and echoed in the vastness of the docks. "They're shut, they're sealed," Hilfy gasped, blinking smoke-tears and half-carrying the human who half-carried her, the two of them weaving past the clutter of dockside bins and chutes as they tried to get the break they needed to get past the line of fire. "We can't get out — Tully, stop!"

  Shots broke out from a new direction. She dragged him off his balance. They both staggered, thumped into the echoing side of a bin and she landed hard on her rump as Tully collapsed with a gasp.

  Flesh stank. He rolled over, clutching at his arm and she kept pulling at him, claws hooked into his shirt as she worked toward the corner- O gods, that there be shelter there- There was an alleyway of a kind, a recess for freight loading, a door with a white light over its recess.

  SERVICE ACCESS, said a battered sign, ROHOSU COMPANY.

  Beside it, mahen graffiti, obscurely obscene. She tried the door; but it was locked like every other door along the row once the emergency had sounded. She rang the bell; battered at the unyielding steel. "Open up, gods rot you!

  We're hani! Let us in!"

  No answer. Tully babbled something. Sirens.

  She heard them too, far down the dock. She sank down by him, pried his hand from his arm and grimaced at the wound the dim light showed, black edged and bleeding hard. She grabbed the tail of his shirt and tore a wide strip of cloth off, pressed it tight and put his hand on it, ripped another strip off to tie it with.

  "Easy," she breathed, senseless chatter to keep him from panic. "Easy, you're all right, all right, hear?"

  He slumped back against the wall, his face gone to waxen color. The hand of the wounded arm shook and the tremor spread to the rest of him as he began to go into shock. But he listened, his eyes on her whenever she looked.

  "Listen," she said, "listen, station's onto it now. And The Pride — they'll have heard by now.

  The captain's doing something, you can bet she'll get us help — Pyanfar, understand?"

  "Pyanfar come."

  "Bet on it. All right, huh?" She got the bandage around his arm, put his hand on it to hold that.

  She snugged the knot tight and he mumbled something in human, language. No translator. The translator-tape — in the bundle of clothes. With the papers. Back at the wreck. With Chur.

  "Hilfy-" He stiffened, eyes fixed toward the exit of the alley. She turned her head.

  Shadows moved in that red-dyed smoke, paused and conversed outside, a gathering of black robes, tall, stoop-shouldered silhouettes.

  Tully edged aside, out of the light the door cast. She moved too, as carefully as she could, as far as Tully did, and put her arms about him to hide his pallor with her own redbrown hide as much as she could within the shadows. She felt Tully shivering; felt her own stomach knotted up when she recalled kif eyesight.

  They were night-hunters by preference; and Tully — white shirt, pale hair, paler skin-

  She kept her arms clenched about him.

  And saw that conversation outside their refuge break up, the kif start to move.

  One stopped and looked their way.

  * * *

  "Open that gods-rotted door!" Pyanfar yelled, and used the rifle butt on the guardroom spex, so a scared mahendo'sat in the section-control yelled back threats from the other side. "It's clear from the Personage!" she yelled. "Open that section-seal!"

  "Au-to-matic," the yell came back through the com-transfer, in mangled pidgin. Mahens station. Half the personnel never managed fluency in pidgin.

  "Personage!" she yelled back in mahen Standard.

  Gibberish came back. This one spoke dialect.

  * * *

  Black-robed shadows filled the alleyway, dark, featureless, except for the wan light of the bulb in the low ceiling of the door recess and Hilfy gathered herself to her feet. Tully struggled and she helped him by his good arm to give him that chance at least.

  "Run if you can," she said in a low voice, thinking perhaps she could break a hole for him. But he knew so few words. He pressed closer to her as the kif gave them less room. He would try to fight-blunt-fingered, without any advantage, without even speed to outrun a kif. And it was Tully they wanted: alive. She had no doubt of that. "Got claws," she said beneath her breath. "You don't. Run, understand?"

  The kif moved closer, keeping their circle. "We'll not hurt you," one said. "You're in the wrong place, young hani. Certainly you are. If you had a gun you would have used it, would you not? But we aren't your enemies."

  "Who?" She perceived the origin of the voice: the speaker stood out among the rest, taller, finer-robed, and she guessed the name as she edged into Tully, trying to keep open space about them as the kif moved and shifted.

  "Sikkukkut. From Meetpoint. You remember me, young Chanur. I have no wish to hurt you, either one. And there are far too many of us. Come, be reasonable."

  The kif moved, all of them at once. "Run!" she yelled at Tully, spun and swung and kept swinging as her claws carried a kif headon into the wall. "Run, for gods sakes, run-"

  Black cloth obscured her vision, cleared as Tully pulled one off her, and she rattled that one's brains.

  But kif claws pulled Tully by the shoulder, and grabbed him by the arm.

  "Gods blast!" she cried qnd tried to get that one off him, but two kif got her arms and a kifish arm came hard about her throat.

  * * *

  The door thundered back on chaos, the flash of red lights on smoke the fans refused, the sweep of floods, the lunatic strobe-flash. "Gods," Geran muttered. The center of the trouble was evident, a knot of flashing white lights stabbing into the smoke far up the dockside. Pyanfar started running first, rifle in both hands — "No, wait-" from the mahen official who had gotten the door open. "Hani, got wait! — " But Geran was pace for pace with her and gaining — fleet-footed Geran, whose sister Chur was in that mess.

  A laser shot streaked the smoke. Pyanfar brought the rifle up and fired on the run. Geran did the same, not with particular skill, but with dispatch; and more fire came behind her, with the mahen official screaming for them to take cover.

  Khym shouted, something: the heights distorted it, twisted it into a blood-crazed roar. A volley of smoke-bounced shots came back from kif near the wreckage and Pyanfar dived aside, remembered Khym behind her with one heart-stopping fright and rolled to cover his blind rush.

  But he came skidding in beside her, gasping, with the pistol quickly braced up hunting targets as Tirun reached their cover. Geran and Haral had tucked in with the mahendo'sat next a stack of cans: shots spattered the plastic and those three ducked.

  Then a flurry opened up from the other side, and for a moment the pop of projectile fire rang everywhere off the overhead: mahen voices yowled distant satisfaction and she put her head out, sprawled back again because shots were wild and going a dozen ways about the wreckage and up the dock to their position.

  Geran got off three quick shots from her side, Haral another burst. "That's mahen fire!" Haral yelled, seeing something from her vantage; and Pyanfar ventured another look, saw fire going the other way and pelted out of cover the last long sprint for the wreckage, from which cover a steady spatter of fire w
ent out aimed the other way.

  Mahe braced in among the tangle started at their arrival, and hani among them turned about with backlaid ears. Ehrran.

  Pyanfar slid in among them, grabbed an Ehrran shoulder and shook it as Geran arrived, and the rest of the crew. "Where's Chanur?" Pyanfar shouted into the Ehrran crewwoman's baeklaid ears.

  "Where, gods rot you!"

  The Ehrran pointed mutely to a hani lying on the deck and Pyanfar's heart lurched over as Geran scrambled that way, to her sister's side. "Where's the rest?" Pyanfar yelled, and a larger hani arm appeared from behind her and seized a fistful of Ehrran beard. "Where are they?" Khym shouted, and the Ehrran waved a frantic hand toward the dock at large.

  "— Ran — they ran — Somewhere out there-" Pyanfar let go her grip with a shove and abandoned the Ehrran to get to Chur.

  Chur was alive. They had propped her head off the deck and the wound that had spread blood all about was hard-sealed and glistening with plasm that stopped further bleeding. Geran bent over her, just holding her hand, looking more than scared.

  "How is she?" Pyanfar asked.

  "She hurts," Chur said for herself, past scarcely moving jaws. Her eyes were slitted. "Where's Hilfy-Tully?"

  "We don't know. Where'd you lose them?"

  A weak move of Chur's head. A try at pointing. "Got out," she said. The pointing was nowhere in particular. "Don't know."

  Pyanfar looked round at the others who hovered near. "That packet. Tully had it in his hands.

  Hunt the wreck."

  "Got," Chur said thickly, reached feebly behind her head, delirious, Pyanfar thought, until she recognized the thing Chur's head was lying on. Chur tried to pull it. Tully's plastic sack.

  "Gods," Pyanfar said with feeling. "Geran. Stay with her. You hang onto that. They'll get an ambulance in here real soon."

  "Not Kshshti," Chur said. "Pride."

  For a moment Pyanfar failed to understand her, then gripped her arm. "No way we leave you here. Got that?"

  "Got," Chur said, and let her eyes close.

  "Stay with her," Pyanfar said to Geran. "We'll find them." She stood up, keeping low, for there were still shots flying, drew Tirun and Khym and Haral off to the mahen position. She seized one by the arm and pulled him about. "Hani. Seen hani?"

  "No got," he said.

  "Alien?"

  "No got."

  She edged back again, cast about amid the confusion of arriving emergency vehicles, the thunder of PA above sirens, each confounding the other. Evacuate, she made out. Evacuate, evacuate — unsafe — getting the non-involved clear. She hoped. Possibly the whole sector of the station had gone unstable in the explosions. In the mahen-language shouting and the noise of the sirens there was no knowing. She put her head up, for firing had stopped, ducked down again as her own crew pulled her down, but there were still no shots.

  "Think they're through out there," she said, and seized Haral by the arm. "Get Chur into an ambulance. Geran's not to leave her. Whatever."

  "Right," Haral said; he turned to leave and froze, so that Pyanfar turned to look too, where hani had appeared among the emergency vehicles, some black-trousered, several blue, the first sight of which lifted her hope and the second dashed it.

  "Ayhar," she spat, and hurled herself to her feet. "Ehrran!" — for Rhif Ehrran was in that group, and she headed for them in mingled wrath and hope, dodged round a stretcher crew and a fire-control team headed into the wreckage. Hani faces turned her way, Banny Ayhar and Rhif Ehrran chiefest of them.

  "Chanur!" Ehrran shouted, headed her way, "By the gods, Chanur, you've really fouled it up, haven't you?"

  She slowed to a walk, with long, long strides. A hand caught her arm and she jerked free.

  "Captain," Tirun begged her. "Don't.

  She stopped. Stood there. And Ehrran had the sense to stop out of her reach. Tirun was on one side of her, Khym on the other.

  "Where are they?" she asked Ehrran.

  "Gods if I know," Ehrran said, hand on that pistol at her side. The whites showed at the edges of her eyes. "Gods rot it, Chanur-"

  "Be some use. We need searchers. They may have taken cover somewhere, anywhere along the docks."

  Ehrran flicked her ears nervously, turned and lifted a hand in signal to her own. "Fan out.

  Watch yourselves."

  "Move," Pyanfar said to her own, and they did.

  Hilfy moved a finger, a hand, discovered consciousness and remembered kif, with the kif-stink all about her. She tried the whole arm, both arms, a deep panicked breath, and opened her eyes on a gray ceiling and bare steel and lights, with the memory of a jolt she had not fully heard, with her arms tangled in something, her legs pinned — the wreck — o gods —

  She turned her head, a dizzy haze of lights, a bright spot of light with kif clustered round something pale on a table, something pale and human-sized.

  She heaved, met restraints that held her to a surface. Blankets wrapped her arms about, and they had her fastened about that. She heard another clank of machinery, shieldings in retraction, all the familiar sounds, watched the kit cast an anxious look up and go back to their work — Clank! Thump!

  Ship sounds. It was the grapple-disengage. The kif stayed at work, clinging to the table on which Tully lay when the G stress shifted. There were hisses, the click of kifish speech. She shut her eyes and opened them again and the nightmare remained true.

  Pyanfar stopped and looked about her, swung the rifle about as she heard someone coming in this zone of wreckage and shot-out lights. Hani silhouette against the lighted zone.

  "Captain," Haral cried, and the echoes went up. "Captain-" Her first officer gasped for breath and stopped, leaning on a gantry leg. "Harukk just left dock. Mahendo'sat just sent word. . "

  She said nothing. Nothing seemed adequate. She only slung the rifle to her shoulder and started running for the center of the search, for what help there was to find.

  * * *

  They had left. "Tully," Hilfy said. The G stress was considerable, and it was hard to breathe; the kif had beat that out the door, gone somewhere for protection, but they had left Tully lying there on the table, no blanket, nothing against the cold. "Tully-"

  But he did not move. She gave over trying to rouse him. They had patched the worst, she reckoned. They were headed for long acceleration, for jump, and they wanted their prisoner to stay alive that long.

  She, she reckoned, was quite another matter. Against Chanur, quite a number of kif had a score to settle.

  "Going where? She built the map in her head. Kefk, likeliest. Kefk, inside kif territory. They could do that in one jump.

  The whole ship jolted. Hit, she thought with one wild hope that someone, somehow, had moved to stop it; but the G grew worse then, incredibly worse. The ship had dumped cargo, no, not even cargo: she remembered Harukk, the sleek wicked lines of her docked at Meet-point. It was the false pods that had just blown, and stripped Harukk down to the hunter-ship she was.

  Nothing could catch her now.

  "How long ago?" Pyanfar shouted at the messenger, and the tall mahe backed up a step.

  "Soon ago, soon." The mahe laid hands on his chest. "I messenger, hani captain, got com shot up, come office Personage give me same, say bring you."

  Pyanfar took a swing at nothing in particular, turned away and found Rhif Ehrran in her path.

  "Well, Chanur? Got any brilliant plan?"

  "If you weren't down here on the dock, if you hadn't left the only ship fit to chase them sitting crewless, you gods-rotted fool-!"

  "To do what? Chase a hunter-ship to Kefk? You're the fool, Chanur. There'll be a full report.

  Believe me that there will."

  "Py, don't!" It was Khym who got her arm in time and dragged her back, so it was too late to do it at white heat. She straightened herself, stared at the Ehrran whose crew had moved in to back their captain.

  "Captain," a mahe said, moving in. "Captain, Personage want see, quick, please quick. Got car."r />
  She shoved the rifle at Khym, turned and followed the mahe across the littered deck. She was aware of Haral with her, Tirun, Khym hastening to catch up.

  "Chanur." A hani voice, a portly hani moving up from the side. "Chanur-" Banny Ayhar caught her arm and tried to stop her.

  She flung the hand off. "Get out of my way, Ayhar. Go lick Ehrran's feet."

  "Listen, Chanur." Ayhar caught her arm with force this time and thrust her bulk in the way. "I'm sorry! You want passage?"

  She stopped dead and stared at Banny Ayhar's broad face.

  "She hire you?"

  "No."

  "Who did?"

  "See here, Chanur-"

  Pyanfar walked off.

  Chapter Nine

  The lift let them out where Tully and Hilfy should have gotten to, in the upper security levels, where guards looked nervous at the appearance of a clutch of blood-stained hani armed with rifles, and one of them a male.

  But doors opened for them unquestioned, doors upon doors of Kshshti's utilitarian architecture, gray steel, heavy security, armed guards at intervals.

  Stars and dark: Pyanfar lost the sight in front of her for that, remembrance of the kif hunter-ship in dock at Meetpoint, sleek, deadly, fast; of a ship outbound to Kshshti nadir and the jump range at a greater and greater fraction of C. She went there the guard motioned, went where doors parted.

  The last let them into a dim chamber with a plasteen division, with violet light beyond. On the white-lit side, a desk and two mahendo'sat. On the violet one, a huge serpent-form, which moved and shifted restlessly before the waist-up glass.

  Tc'a. The sight of the methane-breather shocked her to an involuntary stop. The barrier looked frail, the presence hani were accustomed to see only on vid and dimly, showed detail that made it seem all too imminent: wrinkled, soft-leather skin with phosphor-glow in the gold, eyespots large as a fist, five of them clustered round a complex trifold mouth/sensor. The tongue darted, constantly. The body shifted to this side and that, which tc'a always did.