The Kif Strike Back

by C. J. Cherryh

  She dived aside, rolled her shoulders against the wall and bounced off it, headed at a trot for her own crew while they covered the kif down the hall.

  “Tully—” Hilfy said.

  “We can’t get him yet.”

  “Give me a gun.” Hilfy caught at Geran’s wrist. “For the gods’ sakes—”

  “Gods rot it, move.” Pyanfar tore Hilfy away one-handed and dragged her along the hall. Hilfy dug her claws in, roundhoused a swipe at her and Khym caught her by that arm.

  Hilfy fought without a sound. Her feet went from under her in their haste and Khym hugged her against his side and kept her moving, down the hall, round the corner.

  Further still, as they reached the open docks. Hilfy still struggled, but more weakly now, as Khym maintained his grip.

  Pyanfar never let them slow. There were kif, kif everywhere, in the doorways off the dock, standing about by the gantries of the ships.

  Up ahead—far distant—blue lights blinked on the wall above two shipberths: incoming ships, one on either side of The Pride.

  “We’ll get him,” she promised Hilfy, herself hard-breathing as they strode toward that goal. “We’ll get him out.”

  Hilfy’s rage sank away to gasps. She thrust away from Khym’s side as he let her go, staggered free, weaving in her steps ahead of them.

  Rage; and grief. It was not the youngster she had lost and found. It was all too profound for light-hearted Hilfy. Pyanfar’s gut hurt, seeing it, seeing the bowed shoulders, the hurt no one could hold and cure.

  She had grown too old for comforting, the niece who used to swing upon her belt-ends and laugh and ask for tales, where the ship went, where she fared, what the stars were like.

  Hilfy strode on ahead of them, staggering now and again. There was bloodstain on her trousers and her fur, across her shoulders. Her mane was tangled and matted with it.

  And the ships were coming in.

  * * *

  “Chur,” Pyanfar called on pocket com, there at the foot of the ramp. “Chur—we’re coming in.” She cast a glance back; Tirun was still behind them, gun live, covering them against the chance of attack from the shop-lined far side of the docks, over among the shadows and the kif. The mahendo’sat and stsho had gone, hidden, abandoning them.

  “You get ’em?” The voice coming back from the bridge was faint and full of breath.

  “Hilfy’s with us,” said Pyanfar. Hilfy’s ears had come up as they started up the ramp, pricked forward with the first liveliness she had shown. “Had a little problem getting Tully loose. We’re working on it.”

  The ears went down.

  “Hhhuh,” Chur said, or the com lost something. “Hatch is open. Vigilance and Aja Jin are headed in; they haven’t dumped down yet. They want our instructions.”

  “Huh.” From her side. “Confirm as agreed.” An unshielded pocket-com was not the way to talk that out. She strode up the chill ramp plates with one glance back to every three steps forward. Tirun had stationed herself in the cover the start of the ramp afforded, there by the gantry control console, rifle slowly sweeping the dock. They entered the covered accessway and Pyanfar glanced back yet again, Haral standing by her side with AP in hand. “Tirun!” she called out, and Tirun ducked about and pelted up the echoing metal plates.

  Inside, then, Tirun still out of breath as they hurried through the lock into The Pride’s safe inner corridors. Geran swore in relief. Tirun clicked the safety back on her rifle and used it for a stick as she walked: “Not good for sprints anymore,” Tirun muttered as they holstered the APs and slung the rifles back to carry-straps. Hilfy went on through the corridors ahead of them, ears down; got into the lift first and held the door for them, tempers past. But no one touched her. Welcome home, kid. Welcome back. Glad you’re all right, at least. No one ventured it.

  Neither back nor right, Pyanfar thought, with profile view of that young face as the lift went up: ears back, mouth tight on silences. Gods rot it, niece, I got everything I could.

  The lift let them out on bridge level. They trudged out in no particular order. Khym stayed with them, past his cabin and baths and all such allurements. They were filthy, cold from the docks, and stank of kif. They brought that smell onto The Pride along with them.

  Chur powered the copilot’s chair about when they came in, inexorable move of machinery cradling a bandaged hani who lay shrunken and feeble against the cushions. But her ears came up and she lifted her head.

  “Good to see you, kid.”

  Hilfy crossed the bridge and bent down to clasp Chur’s arm. “Good to see you,” Hilfy said hoarsely. “I thought they’d got you. Gods, I thought you were dead.”

  “Huh. No.” Chur laid her head back as they gathered around her. She shut her eyes and opened them refocused on Pyanfar. “Captain. I sent the confirm-message. Not a rotted bit of help from the mahendo’sat onstation. ‘Cept traffic control. Central’s staying real quiet. They’ve been real upset ever since our friends dropped into system. Scared. Not saying a thing but necessities.”

  “Huh.” Pyanfar laid her hand on the chairback. “Best you get to bed, right now.”

  “Food,” Chur said. “Lousy c-stuff. I want a cup of gfi.”

  “I’ll get it,” Khym said, and set the rifle down (gods, on the counter, loose) and headed off.

  “Secure that!” Pyanfar snapped. He jerked to a stop and looked about, looking for what he had done. But Tirun took the gun along with Chur’s.

  “Got it, captain. He gave it to me.”

  Pyanfar nodded and collapsed onto her rump on the console edge as Khym headed off. She gave him no mercy. None. Crew covered for him; and they did it not because he was male, or hers, but because he had just earned it out there, if he had the sense to know it. That warmed some of the cold at her gut. Some. That beaten weariness in the slump of Hilfy’s shoulders, that bleak, all-business stare—that was out of reach.

  “How close are our friends to final dump?” she asked Chur, and handed her rifle on to Haral. “We got anything trustable out of Central?”

  “I marked the first alarm,” Chur said, gestured loosely toward comp, a ticking chronometer on the number two monitor. “Figure—figure our ships’ll be dumping down about now, but Jik may freehand it. Don’t trust the kif to tell us, huh?”

  Understatement. Complicated comp operations from a crew-woman doing well to be sitting upright. “You’re going off-duty. Shift’s Haral and Tirun. Rest of us clean up, then turn about. Move it. We’ve got company coming.”

  There were minute delays, a quick dart of Haral’s eyes.

  Questioning. What do we do? Sit here?—because sitting here at dock was not altogether sane. Think there’s a chance of pulling the rest of this off?

  “Send,” Pyanfar said. “Us to both those ships. Tell them we’re back aboard. Tell them we’ve talked to the kif and we’ve got half the job done. Kif wants to go on talking.”

  “Tully’s left there,” Hilfy said, of a sudden turning about and leaning toward her on the counter edge. Hilfy’s voice cracked and spat. “Four days, aunt—four days they worked on him. . . .”

  “Then we made good time,” Pyanfar said, cold, very cold, because Hilfy wanted heat. “I’d have figured five. We’ll get him out.”

  “They’re taking him apart.” Hilfy stood up and back. “That bastard kif’s got time to do it in.”

  “We got what we could.”

  Hilfy drew one long breath. “Yes,” she said, and was all quiet, all the way through.

  “Send that message,” Pyanfar said to Tirun, and unbuckled her AP and passed it to Haral to put in the locker with the rest. She turned back to Hilfy. “Go wash up. We’re not through yet, niece.”

  “Aye,” Hilfy said, and turned and walked off.

  “You too,” she said to Chur. “Geran, get her out of here.”

  “Want the gfi,” Chur protested.

  “Fine. It’ll come back there where you are, just fine.” She stood there while Geran helped her si
ster up from Haral’s chair and supported her toward the door. “Stay to Khym’s cabin, huh? I want to keep you near controls. Might need you to sit watch.”

  “Aye,” Geran said on Chur’s behalf, a departing glance.

  The situation was not what they had feared, in all: hostages murdered, Mkks with major damage—that was what could have happened even before they made dock. It was little short of a miracle they had worked, getting in and getting Hilfy free.

  But it was not good enough.

  Haral slid into the chair that Chur had left, powered it about again and got to work in Haral’s own unflappable fashion, mind going instantly from dockside to those boards with no glitch-ups likely. Pyanfar tested the weapons-locker door and heard the electric tick of the resisting latch. “That access camera and the motion-sensor better stay on. We don’t control those gates down there.”

  “Right,” Haral said, and reached and keyed mode and number without a beat missed, while the numbers ticked by on comp’s other sections.

  “Got a confirmation on that final dump,” Tirun said, holding the complug to her ear. “Captain, just got the confirm from Aja Jin. Captain’s compliments and he’ll see you here soon as he gets in.”

  Pyanfar looked at the chronometer. They were down to two minutes Light on response-time between themselves and the incoming ships. “Understood,” she said. Two minutes as light moved. A good deal longer for a ship that had blown off its c-fractional energy to move into station’s slow-going frame of reference, and longer still to dock. “I’m going for that bath.”

  Mayhem and chaos might erupt. There might be attack. There were wobbles in her knees, deprivations coming due. There was still time for a bath, a cup to drink; in the meanwhile it was The Pride’s seniormost crew at controls. No flap, no emotional decisions, no foulups. Thank the gods.

  She dumped it all into their laps and headed down the corridor untying belt-cords as she went.

  Hilfy had gone below, to the empty crewquarters. Alone. She would not have had that. But there was nothing else to do, nothing else to offer.

  So we throw the party later, kid. When it’s due.

  Gods help us all.

  She thumbed the door open and headed straight for the bath, shed trousers into the bin, hung the com on the bathroom wall within reach of the shower cabinet and turned on the warm mist with a melting sigh.

  Fur by the fistful swirled into the drain at her feet—gods, only half of it was left from jump: the kif business had scared the rest off. And the while she lathered and rinsed under the warm flood she tried to collect her jump-scattered wits, plotting and replotting how to bet the next dice-throw. The kif would have a trick or two. She knew.

  And the com beeper went off as she reached to cut in the drying-cycle.

  “Gods, what?” she asked, snatching the com, shedding water on the floor. Her heart thudded. Showers—any offduty indulgence—had begun to make her paranoid. They knew; somehow the whole universe knew the moment her guard went down.

  “Got a kif outside in the accessway,” Haral’s voice came back. “Captain, it swears it’s yours.”

  Chapter 3

  “You. Kif.” Pyanfar leaned above the com console, and saw the intruder on the camera they had rigged back at Kefk, a huddled black-robed silhouette in the yellow glare of their access tube. It was cold out there, no place for standing. The kif’s breath frosted against its own darkness. “Kif, this is Pyanfar Chanur. You can talk back from there. You got some news for me?”

  “Skkukuk is my name. Let me in, Chanur. The hakkikt an’nikktukktin has sent me.”

  “In a mahen hell.”

  “I must freeze then.”

  “Get your freezing carcass out of my accessway!”

  The kif stood still. Lifted its arms. The sleeves of the black robes fell back, disclosing black, hairless arms and long, retractable-clawed hands. “Chanur’s safety is mine. I offer it my weapons.”

  “Library,” she muttered to Haral; and Haral dived for the comp, looking to see what Linguistics made of that as a formula. Meanwhile she stalled; and the hair on her backbone stood up. “Kif. Skkukuk. What do you expect from me?”

  “I wait to discover.”

  “Captain,” Haral muttered, “library’s blank on that idiom.”

  “Fine. Gods rot. Kif you take my orders, do you?”

  “I am Chanur’s.”

  She killed the sound. Straightened. “Gods know what that means either. We’ve got a Situation,” she said; and as the number four screen carrying the routine output from station central and traffic control suddenly went all to kifish letters, her jaw dropped. “Gods fry them—”

  Tirun snatched at controls. Nothing better happened. “That’s the station nav output,” Tirun said, hitting keys as fast as her fingers could move. Translation came up: Transmission difficulty. Lights started flashing elsewhere on the com board, urgent communication arriving from incoming Vigilance and Aja Jin, which had just seen their navigation monitors go totally kif.

  Things went chaotic for the moment: Haral swore and started switching systems. Images flickered on the monitors in rapid sequence. “Gods!” Pyanfar hissed, putting kif and airlocks out of her mind in the press of worse disasters. She rang the general alert to bring the crew up. “We got anything to give them?”

  “Station’s not jamming us,” Haral said. “We can output our own scan to our friends out there, but it’s not much, in our position. We can beacon them in to dock right enough.”

  Aft, the lift was working, crew on the way from lowerdecks to the bridge as fast as feet and The Pride’s lift mechanism could carry them. The alarm bell rang in spurts, drowning other sound at intervals.

  “Message from central,” Tirun said. “Kif say—say: compliments of the hakkikt and they won’t interfere with the docking of our ships. This is relayed. . . we’ve got another call: stsho—that’s a protest. Mahendo’sat—a group is protesting to the kif and wanting rescue. They’re stuck in some shops down the way and they’re afraid to go outside. They want police. Meanwhile the kif are saying mahen crew will handle docking for Aja Jin and Vigilance—the hakkikt’s compliments again.”

  There was a soft noise, a wheeze of leather upholstery: Chur made it back alone and took a post. There were running steps in the corridor behind.

  “What we got?” Chur asked straightway.

  “Got a kifish takeover of the whole gods-forsaken station,” Pyanfar muttered. “Got a gods-be kif in our gods-be access—Get back to bed!”

  “Give me that,” Chur murmured to Tirun, all business; and business went on in mutters and com-chatter.

  A thunder of steps, scrape of claws on decking; more bodies hit the cushions, one, two, three: Haral delivered a terse briefing to late-arriving crew and Pyanfar let it go, finding more and more information popping up on her screens as stations came alive. Vigilance and Aja Jin were still proceeding on their approach toward docking: “Negative. No fire,” she answered the query from the inbound mahendo’sat. “Brief them on it, Tirun.” She spun her chair half about and saw The Pride’s bridge more crowded than it had been since Kshshti: Hilfy and Khym were both at posts.

  “Kif are counting on us to calm it down,” she muttered to the lot of them. “Gods rot it, they’re pushing us hard as they can push. Gods-cursed kif bastard knows we won’t fire cold.”

  Hilfy swiveled her head half-about. “He’s got Tully,” she said, once and tautly. So it was said. The line was drawn.

  And gods be feathered if she wanted to be put under pressure to do what she already told herself she was crazy for doing on her own. Like sitting pat at dock instead of tearing loose and running with what she had.

  “So we’ve got our own detainee,” Pyanfar said, puzzling Hilfy: she saw the ears cant in bewilderment. She opened a channel below to the accessway com. “Skkukuk. What do we do with you?”

  The kif had tucked down in a ball. It stood up and straightened. “I am freezing, hunter Pyanfar.”

  “G
ood. What if I blow your head off? Would the hakkikt like that? You offend him somehow?”

  “I lack all status with him.”

  “Hope to gain it, do you?”

  “I am hopeless, unless your sfik is greater than it seems.”

  She laid her ears back. “Kif, you want to live?”

  “Naturally.”

  “Strip and get inside that lock. Leave the robes in the lock. Walk into the main corridor. And wait there.”

  It bowed, hands tucked away again.

  She leaned and keyed the outer hatch open, powered the chair around and met Hilfy’s quick, flat-eared stare. “Got ourselves a sfik item down there. Tully it isn’t. We’ll see what we’ve just been handed. Tell Vigilance and Aja Jin we’re playing this business out and staying at dock; they can do what they like about it.”

  “We’ve got scan image going out,” Haral said. “Jik says affirmative, he’s still coming in.”

  “Gods hope he isn’t kidding,” Geran said.

  “Gods hope,” Pyanfar muttered. Visions of attack assailed her. One swift blast at the dock from either of her two incoming allies and it was all over. But she trusted Jik. She hoped. “Khym. Come on.”

  “You going down there?” Hilfy asked, turning her chair about.

  “Nose to that board, youngster. Stay put. Come on, Khym. This one’s yours.”

  Khym’s ears came up. He had not looked so cheerful since they took him into fire on the docks in the Kshshti mess.

  * * *

  She had her pocket gun in one hand, a com unit at her belt with the gain turned up full as the two of them rode the lift down. Khym had his bare hands; and those were not bad odds—unless, she thought, the kif down in their airlock had a knife or worse: gods witness, they were not a warship, to have security precautions and detectors. They went on guesswork, took the gamble—