Chanur's Homecoming

by C. J. Cherryh

  “Gods rot you, what are you likely to do? Leave us? Get us all skinned? Kill my world with your conniving?” Sikkukkut’s kifish ignorance had let this hazard loose: Dispose of Keia as you will.

  Now it came to a bluff she could not call, force she could not use, persuasion she knew would not work. To haul him aboard The Pride even by strong pressure now would set Kesurinan off, trigger gods knew what contingency orders.

  “I do number one good back there.”

  “I got no way to trust you!”

  “I got interest like I say.” He reached out and laid his hands on her shoulders. Stared into her eyes, and she stared up at him, looking for something to rely on. Liar. Ten times a liar. Your gods-be government won’t let you tell the truth once a day. “Hani got importance, Pyanfar. I swear. God witness.”

  “More than your own? Don’t tell me that!” Her knees felt weak. The face looming over her was alien, the eyes as unreadable as Tully at his most obscure.

  “We be neighbor to hani more than kif, a? That be backside whole mahen space, I don’t doublecross you.”

  “Gods be, we’re reasoning like the kif. Self-interest!”

  “Politic all time reason like kif. Damn mess. I best pilot you got, hani. You want lock me up? Or you want trust?”

  “When did it ever work?” Panic rushed over her. “No, gods rot it, I don’t want to trust you.”

  “Work in there number one good. You get me out, got me smokes, a?”

  “Same time we got Sikkukkut going to come in behind us! You know he is! He’s appointed me to do his work for him, you think he’s not going to follow up on it?”

  “Damn sure. You be no fool, Pyanfar.” He waved a hand toward Aja Jin’s berth. “Number one fine ship in whole Compact, you got. Got number one fine pilot. Me. We go keep promise, a?”

  “Get! Go! Give your orders! And get your rotted carcass back aboard my ship and give me that data before we undock. I want it, Jik, I want it in plain language and plain charts!”

  “You beautiful.” A touch at her face. She flinched and spat; and he gave one of his maddening humor-grins, then turned and sprinted for his own access-ramp, Kesurinan running with him stride for stride.

  For their own ship. Their own choice. Gods knew if he would come back. The docks were dangerous. Kif might intercept him even on that short a crossing between ships. Sikkukkut might discover something in his questioning of stsho to change his mind. Stle stles stlen might have secreted damning records, being a trader through and through.

  She looked at Dur Tahar. And had no doubt at all of the pirate, of her enemy, of a hani she had been willing to kill.

  “That may have been a mistake,” Pyanfar said.

  “Could be.”

  “Tahar, if we get through this, anything between us. . . .”

  Tahar’s face went hard, her ears flat. “Yeah. I know.”

  “You don’t know, gods rot it! There is no bloodfeud, between you and Chanur. You’ve paid it.”

  The ears came up. “Paid it on your side too,” Tahar said with Tahar’s own surly arrogance. And stood there a breath longer before she turned abruptly and headed for Moon Rising’s ramp.

  It left her Tully and Skkukuk. A bewildered and nonplussed Skkukuk, Tully close at her side and the kif standing there as if his orderly world were all disarranged.

  The great captain let his enemy lay hands on her. The great captain believes she has these for subordinate. The captain is wrong. Can the great captain be such a fool? Beware these hani. They are not subordinate either.

  She lifted her chin. Come-hither. And Skkukuk came, all anxious, not without a suspicious glance toward the vanishing mahendo’sat. “Hakt’, that is dangerous.”

  “Friend,” she said. And in perversity reached out and laid a hand on Skkukuk’s hard arm, from which touch he flinched out of reach.

  “Kkkt!” As if she had attacked him. Very like her own gut reaction with Jik. And she had not perceived Jik’s touch as life-threatening.

  “I teach you a thing, Skkukuk. You’re traveling with hani. You’ll hear things that may disturb you.” A second time she reached, and this time caught him. The arm was thin, hard as metal. She felt a tremor there. “Scare you, skku of mine? Power among hani is a different matter. Power among hani is a handful of clans that just decided to go along with me because I handed them the only way out of here they’re ever going to get. And because as long as there’ve been clans on Anuurn, there’s been Chanur, and our roots go deep and our connections are complicated, and we’re calling in debts they have to pay for sfik reasons and self-protection. We’re connected to Faha; Faha’s got ties of its own. Gods know I’d have to look up library to see where the others run. That’s the way we are. Clan is one entity. You’re skku to Chanur. Do you see? You behave yourself with these strangers aboard. And they won’t gain a bit on you. Their relation is all with Chanur as a clan, do you follow that?”

  Dark eyes glittered. She stared at a kif’s face a handspan from hers, closer than she ever wanted to be. He made her nose run. And she made him shiver.

  “Yes, hakt’,” he said. “Power.”

  She let him go. And wanted a bath. Wanted clean air. Wanted—gods, never to have tried to reason with a kif. Or to have dealt with one.

  “Come on,” she said, shoved him and then Tully into motion and turned and hurried to The Pride, faster and faster, Skkukuk close after her, Tully panting along beside her, his breath hollow and hoarse from the thin air and the chill. Get you out of this, lad, before you catch a cough. Get me out of this. Gods, I’m too old for this kind of stuff. She took the pocketcom from her belt. “This is Pyanfar. Open up, hear me? We’re coming in.”

  “Aye,” Haral’s voice came back.

  Up the ramp. Into the chill ribbed yellow of the passageway. Around the bend and toward the white light, the safety of the airlock. She came across that threshold weak-kneed and with her side one mass of pain.

  “Lock it up,” she yelled at com. “We’re all in.”

  “Aye,” Haral said. “Everyone all right?” The hatch whined and hissed shut; and they were as free of the kif as they were able to be.

  She shut her eyes and hung there, bent over then to get her breath while Tully did the same.

  “Captain?”

  “Fools, fools!” Skkukuk cried, and an alien grip closed on her arm. “The mekt-hakt’ is starved, is fainting for your incompetence!”

  Tully snarled something at him. Pyanfar rescued her own arm, blinking dazedly as it became almost a matter of keeping two men apart. Neither one hers. And both being hers, in a way which had nothing to do with being male. She had never seen that look on Tully’s face. Tully’s teeth bared without humor at all, teeth no match for Skkukuk’s, which were all too close. She straight-armed them apart, hard. “Manners, gods-be, shut it down!”

  “Captain?”

  “I’m all right,” she said, and shook her head, dazed, dizzy, and with a rush of fight-impulse going through her veins that turned her giddy. Human sweat and kifish mingled in her nostrils with her own. So much for human/kifish cooperation.

  Gods, no time, we got our orders, I got no time to go away like this.

  “I’m coming down there,” Khym said.

  “No need.” She felt totally disconnected, blinked back and forth between Skkukuk and Tully. Her husband in it was the last thing she wanted. “We got more coming. Tauran’s crew is boarding as soon as they can get locked up and back here. Working alternate with us. They tell you? We got a trip to make.”

  The door to the inside corridor opened. “Where, cap’n?” Haral’s voice took over com again. “Where are we going?”

  They had not known. “Home,” she said; and felt a momentary rush of triumph for her own cleverness.

  Until she thought again of Chur, and the cost it might be to them all in more terms than one. The triumph faded, left only an ache and a vast and mortal terror. “They’ve turned us loose. We’re going home.”

  C
hapter 8

  “Go,” she said to Skkukuk outside the airlock. “If you want to get to quarters for any reason, get to it. You’re going to be standing watch out by the ramp in ten minutes. We got too much traffic coming in here to take any chances. And be polite! Hear?”

  “Yes, hakt’!”

  “Get!”

  He ran, a flurry of black robes and rattle of weapons, down the corridor toward his own quarters.

  That left her and Tully; and Tirun coming to meet them, welcome sight. “You all right, captain?”

  “We got Tauran coming in, we got nowhere to put them, we got data up to our ears to process into nav, but things could be worse—” Another figure turned the corner, tall and wide-shouldered and hani: her husband was coming her way in a hurry, and she flinched to the very bones. “Haral, you listening up there?”

  “Aye, captain.”

  “Lay us course for Urtur on our old capacity: we got some slower ships to take with us. Have Hilfy line up our direct transmission with Aja Jin, we got specifics to get. Then relay the result to Tahar. Have Aja Jin run our backup check.”

  “Won’t take long; I got us course plot already on our present cap. I got their caps. We got this fancy mahen computer and I figured we were going somewhere. We doing the sequencing for the whole convoy?”

  “You got it.” Miracles from the harried bridge. She did not even question them. “Do it, cousin. And get kif stats out of Harukk, we got an escort.”

  Khym intercepted them and fell in to walk with her and Tirun and Tully. “You all right?” he asked. That was all.

  “I’m a whole lot better.” She discovered she could breathe again. The tightness in her chest let up a bit, and a sneeze startled her. “Gods-be kif.” Her eyes watered. She wiped her nose. “Khym, you and Tully want to go up there and get us some sandwiches and get us rigged for a run? We’re getting out of here.”

  “They’re letting us go?” Khym asked, ears half-back. Worried-looking.

  “You’re right, we got troubles. Even the kif are worried. We got to get through Urtur, remember? We got to get past Akkhtimakt to get home. Got to clear out the opposition all the way to Anuurn, that’s what we’ve got. Go do the galley. And give Tully a chance to get off his feet, he’s exhausted.”

  Me, I got to take this ship through jump. We got to move, I got no time to be resting—

  “Tully,” Khym said. “Galley.”

  “Aye,” Tully said, and quickened his pace and got through to join him; the two of them went off up ahead at a fair walk, Tully staggering a little as he went, muscles undone by fatigue and exertion and cold. Her own felt like rubber.

  “Tirun, we got seven of Tauran clan coming in. We got to bed ’em somewhere. Run protocols for me. My brain’s mush. Got to figure out where to put Tully and their captain. No, b’gods, put Sirany Tauran in Jik’s cabin. Tully—”

  “He’s with us.”

  “They’re not going to like sharing sheets with ’im on offshift. Gods-be. Our attitudes. We got the world going down and we got to worry about sheets and our godscursed prejudices.”

  “Let ’em gripe. He’s crew, captain.”

  She gnawed her mustaches and heaved a breath. “Let ’em howl, then. We’re going to split-shift with a couple of them if I can get it out of Sirany. Do the best we can and hang their sensibilities. If Khym doesn’t send them into frothing fits—”

  “Aye,” Tirun said.

  “Let’s get at it, then.” She waved Tirun into faster motion as they came to the turn for the lift. “We don’t know what’s going to break loose here. I want us out of here. Fast. We could have a hundred ships all round us.”

  Three hundred thousand stsho, Pyanfar. Vulnerable and helpless, whatever breaks around them.

  Ask the kif to let them go?

  What reason? What reason can I think of?

  “Better restock that downside freezer, huh? How close are we to full tanks?”

  “Three quarters, last I looked. Haral’s running checks on systems. She had to cancel that linguistics run in favor of the course plot, cap’n; sorry about that.”

  “Sorry. My gods. Get. Go. Out of here is all we got time for; tell her I want that course sequence as tight as she can shave it down, no waste time, everything up to cap. Time’s what we can’t buy.”

  * * *

  “Here, here, here,” Jik said, using a light-pen to mark the moves on the computer monitor, and the 3-D rotating model obligingly paced itself through its level-changes: he had brought both fiche and software key aboard when he came, and the mahen-installed comp suddenly displayed unguessed virtuosities. “Same come in maybe Tt’a’va’o, maybe V’n’n’u.”

  Geran made a sound deep in her throat, slow and full of omen. “We got the whole mess shoved off into hani space is what we got.”

  Jik said nothing at all to that. He had a mouthful of sandwich. He had not stopped for food on Aja Jin and arrived opportunely for a handout from The Pride’s galley. Pyanfar gulped a mouthful of gfi and blinked with the heat of it while she watched the display run its paces.

  Tauran clan was on their way down the docks, with everything they could carry. Tirun was down there in the airlock with Skkukuk on guard at the foot of the ramp, preparing to receive them with their baggage. An eerie quiet hung all about them, Harukk and its chosen few bound out from dock on whatever business it chose, the station itself subject to kifish piracies she had no wish to think of; and saw every time she shut her eyes—the wretches on Harukk, pale and fragile and physiologically incapable of violence, not even to save their minds or their lives.

  A destruct mechanism on the station might be set to blow on a signal sent from outsystem. That was possible too, if someone were totally ruthless: if someone like Akkhtimakt, with no sympathy for three hundred thousand stsho, had mined the station exterior, the whisper of a transmission arriving at lightspeed to some receptor could blow the station’s vulnerable skin. On certain vectors they would never know it till it blew, even if they were listening. Gods knew she had no wish to give Sikkukkut any ideas he did not conceive of on his own, by warning him of the possibility. Neither did she want to stay connected to the station any longer than she had to.

  In the meanwhile she sat drinking gfi and watching a wobbly-tired mahe trying to reconstruct diagrams out of his memory and a computer’s help, and listening to him make misidentifications once and twice and catch himself.

  They both needed help. Food was no substitute for rest. And they had soon to move out and start ops for a long, risky jump. Pumps were filling the tanks to capacity. Khym was wandering about readying all the duty stations, setting up everything they had to have to keep them going.

  Thank gods for a backup crew on this one.

  We’re laying ourselves wide open, Tahar and Chanur both—to mutiny and murder. You’ll understand us at close range or you’ll kill us on the way home.

  That was what she implied in that offer. And all the captains knew it; while presumably Sikkukkut and even Skkukuk just thought she had all her compatriots sufficiently bluffed.

  Gods hoped they understood, because one hani ship would not be able to talk anything but ops with another of their ships so long as they had their kifish escort; and that meant all the way home.

  She watched the red and green marks grow on the screen as Jik built the patterns, and sipped her drink and ate her sandwich.

  And slowly the wider implications of what Jik was constructing dawned on her.

  Longtime moves. Very longtime moves.

  The kif had not lied: the mahendo’sat scheme had been aimed at the kif from the start, a series of operations stretching back to the days when Akkukkak had been the threat. And even before that. Mahendo’sat owned far more than the few hunter-ships they were supposed to have, which meant shipbuilding and secrecy—heavy secrecy, to have kept the whisper of that construction out of the rumor mill.

  Gods knew what the kif had been doing during that time. Or what the mahendo’sat knew and wh
at the kif knew about their own intentions that they were not telling and that even Jik might not know the truth of.

  Gods knew too, what both kif and mahendo’sat knew about humanity; or how long ago they had known it; and how much truth anyone was telling in that department.

  And right now and to this hour, if Jik could get his hands on Tully, she feared, in some dark corner of The Pride, Jik would ask him some very hard questions; and perhaps Goldtooth had done that, when he had had Tully aboard Mahijiru, and, irony of ironies, gotten distrust. Likely Tully had done his don’t-understand-you act. He was very good at it. And gods knew—perhaps Tully’s instincts about when to use that silence were better than any of them believed.

  Tully had asked her once, with distress wrinkling up his smooth brow, whether Goldtooth was on their side or not. She had not suspected the full implications of it then, or the extent of the pressure Goldtooth might have been putting on him. Or why Goldtooth had jerked him alone away from the human crew that was traveling on the mahen ship Ijir, before it fell into Akkhtimakt’s grasp.

  Being taken off that foredoomed ship was Tully’s good fortune; indisputable. But she remembered his face when he had seen her aboard Mahijiru, remembered an expression she could read a little better now in retrospect, the terrible stress and the relief with which he had flung himself toward her and wrapped his arms around her, shivering and smelling of fear.

  Friend, he had said over and over, said it repeatedly, with a worried look, during that early part of the voyage; but he had kept what he had known behind his teeth . . . while dissension among them, the normal stresses of the crew, any hint of violence—had sent Tully into a panic that was not at all reasonable in their old friend. He had become afraid of them, in the isolation of his translator-interpreted environment, missing virtually all the nuances and the subtleties of what was said around him. He had lived in doubt of them right down to the moment he betrayed his own kind with a warning not to trust humanity.

  Tully’s was a treason unlike Jik’s complicated diagrams. But not simple at all. She watched Tully sitting at scan-monitor, his face—gods, she had even gotten used to it—intent on that screen, seeming lost in his autistic world while the alien babble went on. He was listening; she would bet a great deal on it. He was a great deal like Jik on some levels. That was the anomaly. He did his work. He came with her time and again onto a kifish ship, which had to be terrible to him. But kif were not his greatest fear. She sensed that in a thousand little moves, little twitches of expression, the way his face and his whole body reacted when there was some momentary false alarm.