Cats in Space and Other Places

by Bill Fawcett

  Pyanfar blinked, brought up against a brace and hung there while the dock spun in her vision. Her brain wanted to work for a change, and the white light and gray perspectives of the dock were chasing visions of dark and stars and tiny ships in wheeling succession. Her AP was in her fist. Steps thundered past her as others secured the other corner and the neighboring corridor turned up empty of everything but scattered paper and a closed windowed door that said DOCKSEAL in large letters. KEY ENTRY ONLY.

  "Gods rot them all!" She fired. Thoughtlessly, because an AP was as good a key as any; and fired again through the smoke and the deafening thunder as shrapnel off her own shot peppered her hide. "Gods-be fools!"

  The door was never armored to withstand that kind of blast. The window-seal went. She was not up to running, just walked behind the fleetfooted youngsters and the foolhardy who went racing up to step gingerly through the shattered pressure-seal window.

  She stepped through: her own crew stayed about her, and Rhean's lot, as if it were a walk up a troubled dock- side, back in the days when a winebottle was the most fearsome missile and an irate taverner the greatest hazard a hani crew on dockside had to deal with. She trod on something sharp, winced and flinched, walking into a corridor her followers had already taken possession of: Fiar and Sif jogged out to the fore.

  "Slow down!" she yelled. "Rhean, hold it back!" —As the whole thing became a faster and faster rush forward; she could not keep up, had no wish to keep up there with the young and the energetic. They had to take the stairwells beyond this long corridor, they had to go up the hard way, not trusting the lifts that could be controlled from the main boards: Gaohn was too big to take quickly, except by overwhelming force. And time was on other sides. Time was, O gods, on the side of Sikkukkut. . . .

  . . . .who arrived at Meetpoint to drive his kifish opposition against the anvil of mahen territory, knowing that there were limited routes Akkhtimakt could take: down the line into stsho territory was one, where there would be no resistance—but Goldtooth and the humans had sealed that route.

  . . . .the second to methane-breather territory, but that was a deadly trap: no one wanted to contest the knnn.

  . . . .the third course lay past Sikkukkut to Kefk, which would have put Akkhtimakt at psychological disadvantage, though ironically not a positional one: there was no worse place for a kif on the retreat to come, than into kifish territory, a wounded fish into an ocean of razor jaws. . . .

  Think, Pyanfar, it's late to think. The enemy either has one choice more than you've thought of, or one fewer than they need.

  Sikkukkut knew that some message had gone with Banny Ayhar—knew that someone would have carried it, and where mahen forces would come—he had used the mahen push, anvil and hammer, but he never trusted the mahendo'sat, not Jik, manifestly not Goldtooth. He obviously didn't stop Ayhar.

  Or he didn't try because he wanted it to happen.

  Gods, could Jik have told him? No. No. He surely wouldn't. Not to someone that smart and that canny. They cooperated with limits. It was convenient for both sides. For separate reasons.

  But why did Sikkukkut value me from the beginning? Why did he and the mahendo'sat both value me enough to keep us alive and set me here, with this much power?

  Is Sikkukkut a fool? He was never a fool. Neither is Jik. Nor Goldtooth.

  If Sikkukkut lost too many ships fighting for power, my gods, he'd find some other kif gnawing up his leg the moment he looked weak. That's what the mahendo'sat are doing to him, whittling away at him. It's the kif's chief weakness, that aggressiveness of theirs. Does Sikkukkut know that? Can a species see its own deficiencies?

  Look about us at ours, at this pitiful spectacle, hani against hani spears and arrows flying in the sun, banners aflutter—

  I see what keeps us from being what we might be.

  Can he?

  Can—?

  "Look OUT!" someone yelled; and fire spattered from the end of the corridor.

  "Any word?" Chur asked. She had left the rifle in lowerdecks. To carry the thing was more strength than she had, and there was no enemy aboard. She arrived on the bridge with Tully close behind her and clung to a seat at her regular post. It was a strange captain who turned a worried face toward her. "I'm taking orders," Chur breathed, to settle that, and clung to the chair with her claws, the whole scene wavering in and out of gray in her vision, her heart going like a motor on overload. "Any word on them?"

  "Ehrran's threatening to back out of dock and blow us all. Light's threatening to blow Vigilance where she sits. We're supposed to have a kifish ship in her picking up— that. Skkukuk. I've told him that's all we want to do." There was a fine-held edge to Sirany's voice, an experienced captain at the edge of her own limits. "Handle the kif."

  "Aye," Chur said, and crawled into the vacant chair between scan and com and livened the aux com panel. With Tauran crew on either side of her. Tully sat one seat down. Other seats were vacant. Fiar's and Sif's.

  Handle the kif. Indeed.

  Skukkuk thought of himself as crew. He was loyal. Geran had said that much with a grimace. And Chur had gotten her own captain's instructions to the kif on open com. That and the encounter belowdecks was all she had to go on, while the kif waited below in lowerdeck ops, for transfer arrangements to be finalized. But she had been in the deep too long to panic over the unusual or the outré.

  One of the black things skittered through the bridge and vanished like a persistent nightmare, long, furred, and moving like a streak.

  On scan, one of the kifish ships nearest had just flared with vector shift.

  Skkukuk's tight-beamed request for transport had had time to be heard and was evidently being honored.

  "Tully," she said, leaning to look down the board where he had settled in. "We don't know when the humans come, right? You record message: record, understand? We send it to system edge, wide as we can, and constant—" She remembered in dismay she was not dealing with Pyanfar. "Your permission, cap'n."

  "What?" the snapped answer came back. She had to explain it all again. In more detail. And: "Do it," Sirany said. "Just keep us advised what you do. You got whatever you want."

  She drew a larger breath, activated com output and set about explanations, alternately to kif and to human and to The Pride's interim captain. Then there was the matter of communicating with their mahen allies out there, whose disposition and intentions were another question: not many of the mahendo'sat ships had stayed insystem, but such as had were out there face-to-face with the kif, and nominally linked to the hani freighters who were also holding position out there in that standoff. So far they were letting the kifish ship move out where a kifish message with The Pride's wrap on it had indicated it should go.

  Blind acquiescence was asking a lot, of both mahendo'sat and hani. And even of the kif.

  But things had to stay stable. More, they had to sort themselves out into some kind of defense, both internal and external. The next large group of ships to come in, at any given moment, could be Akkhtimakt's kif in a second strike, which would swing the whole kifish allegiance in the other direction; or it might be Sikkukkut, having disposed of Goldtooth; or Goldtooth and the humans. Or either without the other. Gods knew what else. Panicked stsho, for all they knew. Or tc'a.

  Far better that whatever-it-was should meet an already existing wavefront of information designed to provoke discussion instead of indiscriminate fire.

  Handle the kif, the woman said.

  She sent it wide. In half a dozen languages and amplified via whatever ships would relay it, to all reaches of the system, continuously, since Gaohn station relays and apparently those of the second outsystem station and both buoys were not cooperating. She was talking to more than those insystem and those arriving; she was talking also to a certain mahen hunter, who had lost himself and gone invisible.

  Chanur is taking Gaohn Station. This solar system is under control of Chanur and its allies and its subordinates. You are entering a controlled space. Id
entify yourselves.

  "Hold fire!" Pyanfar yelled, turning, her back to the sidewall, the AP up in both hands where it bore on a flat-eared, white-round-the-eyes cluster of hani black- breeches, Immunes, who were framed in the corridor opening and vulnerable as stsho in a hailstorm. A shot popped past her, high; one streaked back. "Hold!" Khym yelled, and: "Hold it!" Kohan Chanur echoed, two male voices that rumbled and rattled off the corridor walls in one frozen and terrible instant where slaughter looked likely.

  But they were kids who had run up on them. Mere kids. Their ears were back in fright. None of them was armed except with tasers and they were staring down the barrels of APs that could take the deck out. They thought they were going to die there. It was in the look on their faces.

  "Don't shoot!" one cried, with more presence of mind than the rest, and held her little pistol wide.

  "Are you Ehrran?" Pyanfar yelled back at them, and one of them bolted and ran.

  The others stayed still, eyes wide upon the leveled guns.

  Prisoners we don't need.

  Gods-be groundling fools.

  "Get out of here!" she yelled at the rest of them. "Out, rot your hides!"

  They ran, scrambling, colliding with each other as they cleared that hall, no shot fired.

  She turned again, saw weary faces, bewildered faces, saw dread in Rhean Chanur and the rest, spacers who had come home to fight against kif and ended up fighting hani kids. That was the kind of resistance there was. That was what they had come down to, trying to take their station back from lunatics who threw beardless children at them.

  "Gods save us," she said, and drew a ragged breath and shook her head and winced at the thump of explosion, which was Haral with their allies blasting their way through another pressure door that had been, with hani persistence, replaced with another windowed door after the last armed taking of Gaohn Station. Nothing bad would ever happen twice, of course. Not at civilized Gaohn. Not to hani, who had no wish to become involved in foreign affairs. Gaohn Station prized its staid ways, its internal peace, maintained by ceremonies of challenge and duel.

  "Gods curse Naur," she said aloud. "Gods curse the han." And shocked her brother, and surely shocked ker Huran Faha, whose shoulder-scar was from downworld hunting, who knew little more of kif than she knew of hyperspace equations. Pyanfar shoved off from the wall and kept going, stepping through the ruined doorway.

  "Stop," the intercom said from overhead. "You are in violation of the law. Citizens are empowered to prevent you."

  There were no citizens in sight. Everyone with sense had gotten out of the section. Those on Gaohn that were not spacers outright, excepting folk like Kohan and Huran, and red-maned Akify who had lived so long downworld with Chanur she had forgotten she was Llun, were all stationers, who knew the fragility of docksides, and knew there was a Chanur ship and a flock of kif and mahendo'sat looming over them. There was a way to slow station intruders down. Anyone in Central might have sealed and vented the whole area under attack, had they been prepared. Had Gaohn station ever been set up for such a defense. But no, the necessary modifications had been debated once, after the first taking of Gaohn, but never carried through: the Llun themselves had argued passionately against it.

  There would never, of course, the Llun had thought, never in a thousand lifetimes come another invasion. The very thought of it disturbed hani tranquility, the acknowledgment of such a calamity was against hani principle: plan for an event and it might well create itself. To prepare Gaohn for defense might create a bellicose appearance that might cause it to need that defense. To provide Gaohn corridors with windowed pressure doors (which permitted visual communication between seal-zones in some contamination or fire emergency) was a safety measure and a moral statement: there would never come the day that the station would have to take extreme measures.

  So it had fallen to Ehrran quite simply.

  And the foreign forces that were coming in had never heard of such philosophy, and cared less. How could one even translate such a mindset to a kifish hakkikt?

  How could a kif who planned across lightyears comprehend the Llun, let alone the groundling Naur, and the mind of the han, which decreed all on its own that hani would be let alone?

  . . . .a kif who planned. . . .

  . . . .a kif who let loose a mahen hunter ship and a hani force to accomplish a task for him which he—

  —could not do himself?

  —did a kif ever believe force insufficient?

  Could a kif be so subtle?

  Gods-rotted right a kif could be subtle. But not down any hani track. A kif wanted power, wanted adherents, wanted territory—

  —Sikkukkut knew, by the gods, that Goldtooth was not done, and being capable of tricks like short-jumping himself, he knew what Goldtooth might have done at Meetpoint, a trick that she had only discovered when they pinned Jik down and wormed it out of him.

  Knnn and gods-knew what had come in on Sikkukkut at Meetpoint, and what would Sikkukkut have done back there? Stayed to contest it? Run home to Kefk and Mkks, or Akkt?

  One wished.

  But that was not Sikkukkut's style. The wily bastard would have put more and more of the mahen puzzle together, the same as they, Jik's determined silence notwithstanding. Since Kefk, there was less and less left that Sikkukkut had to know.

  That intrusion which had nearly run them over on their outbound course had been attack coming in again at Meetpoint, that was what it had to be, with the methane-breathers coming in the Out range as methane-breathers were crazy enough to do; and right before Sikkukkut launched his own pet hani toward Anuurn, he had been couriering messages right and left to other ships. . . .

  . . . .Sikkukkut was planning something, and he had that babbling traitor Stle stles stlen aboard: the stsho would have told him anything and everything about Goldtooth he knew to tell.

  Small black creatures stayed active during jump. They were from the kifish homeworld. So could the kif? Were they plotting and planning all the way, was that the secret to kifsh daring and fierceness in their strikes, that they came out of hyperspace clearheaded and focused, revising plans such as hani and mahendo'sat and humans and anyone else would have to make well beforehand?

  My gods, my gods.

  She slogged along after the others, her own group lagging farther and farther back. Flesh had its limits. Even Hilfy flagged. Her pulse racketed in her ears like the laboring of some failing machine. There was that pain in her chest again, her eyes were blurred.

  We may not have even this time. We shouldn't be here. I should turn this back, get back to the ship, prepare to defend us—

  —with what, fool? This vast armament you have?

  —turn kif on kif? Can you lead such creatures as that, can you even keep a hold on Skkukuk if you can't get control of Gaohn?

  Jik, gods rot you, where are you?

  Another doorway. An AP shell took it out, just blew the window out, leaving jagged edges of plex. The youngsters and then the rest waded on through the wreckage that loomed in her vision like an insurmountable barrier, the gun weighing heavier and heavier in her hand. Kohan had gone ahead with Rhean. Khym was still with her. So were all her own crew. "Looks like we got rearguard," Haral gasped, a voice hardly recognizable. "Gods-be fools not watching their own backsides. Groundlings and kids."

  "Yeah," she murmured, and got herself through the door, walked on and wobbled in her tracks. A big hand steadied her. Khym's.

  The PA sputtered. "Cease, go back to your ships immediately. Vigilance has armaments to enforce the decree of the han. It stands ready to use them. Do not endanger this station."

  "Ker gods-be Rhif's safe on her ship," Geran said.

  "Patience, we got the Light up there over her head, she's not going anywhere."

  "We got a kifish ship coming into dock," Haral said. "There's trouble when it comes. Gods know what that fool Ehrran will do."

  Another agonizing stretch of hallway. The first of them had gained the stairwell.
There was much yelling of encouragement, inexperienced hani screwing up their courage before a long climb that meant head-on confrontation with an armed opposition.

  They were out of range of the pocket-coms. Too much of the station's mass was between them and the ships at dock.

  "M'gods." Footfalls came up at their backs, a thundering horde of runners. Pyanfar spun, on the same motion as the rest of the crew, on a straggle of hani in merchants' brights, with a crowd behind them all the way down the corridor, a crowd a lot of which was blackbreeches, strung out down the hall as they filtered through the obstacles of the shattered pressure doors. "Over their heads!" She popped off a shot into the overhead, and plastic panels near the shattered door disintegrated into flying bits and smoke and a thundering hail of ceiling panels that fell and bounced and paved the corridor in front of the onrush.

  "Stop, stop!" the cry came back, with waving of hands, some of the merchants in full retreat coming up against the press behind, and a dogged few coming through, holding their hands in plain view. "Sfauryn!" one cried, naming her clan, which was a stationer clan: merchants, indeed, and nothing to do with Ehrran.

  "We're Chanur!" Tirun yelled back at them, rifle leveled. "Stay put!"

  The press had stalled behind, tide meeting tide in the hallway, those trying to advance through the broken doors and those in panic retreat. The few up front hesitated in the last doorway, facing the guns.

  "Ehrran has Central!' the Sfauryn cried.

  "You want to do something about it?" Pyanfar yelled back.

  "We're trying to help! Gods, who're you aiming at? People all over the stations are trying to get in there!"

  "Gods-be about time!" Her pulse hammered away, the blood hazed in gray and red through her vision. "If you can get the phones to work, get word to the other levels!"

  "Llun's with us—Llun've got portable com, they got some rifles— It's Llun back there behind us, Chanur. They don't want to get shot by mistake!"

  "Bring 'em on," she cried. Gods, what days they had come on, when Immune blacks meant target in a fight. She leaned on the wall and lowered the rifle. Blinked against the haze. Rest here awhile. Rest here till they had the reinforcements organized. Llun! Honest as sunrise and, thank the gods, self-starting. They had been doing something all the while, one could have depended on that.