The Kif Strike Back

by C. J. Cherryh

  But the kif performed a like maneuver: one of their dark guides went in and beckoned her on; while the others lingered to take up guard with Haral outside.

  Move and countermove.

  A species old in assassinations and treachery; and the hani species recent from the age of walled estates and bright banners and yes, by the gods, treachery of its own, House and House, with never poison in the cup but connivance and betrayal and duel aplenty. Pyanfar drew a deep breath of the tainted air as she walked in, searching it for information; and saw a touch of color in this black and gray hell, behind crossed bars. Huddled in a comer, the merest glimmer of rust-brown, a lump of hani bodies rested together in their misery.

  —Hilfy—

  In this place. Here. No sane hani ever built a place like this, this cage for thinking creatures, this place of horrors and torment.

  She was supposed to be daunted by this place. Sikkukkut arranged it. No word of explanation—just guides who came to take them down to see what happened to hani here.

  “—orders of the hakkikt,” the guides had said in the corridor outside the hakkikt’s hall, and showed them into a lift and down and further astern in Harukk’s huge ring. To recover the prisoners, they promised. And the message was clear: dare my hospitality to the depth, hani; or tell me you’re afraid. Tell me that in front of my captains and my sycophants, and we’ll know where hani fit in our ranks and in our future plans. We’ll know how we have to deal with you—how much you can take and how much you can hold onto. Are you like Ehrran, hunter Pyanfar? Where is your flinching-point?

  Useful to know that—when we meet in space, when your nerve and mine guide ships and time their reflexes—

  Where are your reactions, hunter Pyanfar—so that I can predict them?

  She walked halfway to the bars and stood there. There was a small movement from the knot of hani in the corner of their cell. A tension and then a furtive fix of slitted eyes: if they had been resting at all, the opening of the outer door had gotten their attention. And now her presence did.

  Chanur, their enemy, resplendent with silk and gold and weapons, standing beside their kifish guard in the heart of this prison.

  * * *

  “Stand behind me,” Hilfy said when she and Khym got to the lock—she turned and looked up at him, great towering hulk that he was. “Cover me. Don’t shoot toward the access; you can blow us all to vacuum. You hearing me, na Khym?”

  “Yes,” he said, and the ears flicked, so she knew he heard. But the eyes were dark. And that was trouble. So was his silence on the way down the corridor.

  “You make a mistake you can kill her—hear? This is probably a little thing, the stuff we were supposed to get for that gods-be kif—”

  “I’m not crazy,” Khym said, and bristled about the shoulders. “But they’re from Sikkukkut. He’s trying something.”

  He was thinking. “I’m sure of it.” Hilfy said, and hit the com button by the lock. “Open her up, Geran.”

  “I’m on monitor,” Tirun’s voice came back. “Careful, cousin. And don’t take any stuff either.”

  The Tahar gathered themselves up. Blood had caked on their fur, in their manes. The senior—Gilan, her name was—had taken a kifish bite on the left shoulder and the awful wound glistened under plasm that had kept her from bleeding to death. It was not the only such wound. Canfy Maurn had a hand wrapped up in a rag and by the blood on it, it was a bad one.

  “Get them out,” Pyanfar said to the kif, with no doubt the kif was going to do that, and fast. “You’ve got your orders.”

  “Kkkt.” The kif lifted his long-jawed face, contemplating mayhem. “I take no orders from you, hani.”

  “Captain, you earless bastard, and I’m sure the hakkikt won’t miss you much.”

  “Ssss. My orders are only the hakkikt’s. Don’t push, hani.”

  * * *

  The airlock opened. A group of kif stood there, black knot against the orange-lit accessway, the foremost two holding a large metal cage in which dark things darted and squealed. Hilfy sucked a deep breath of the cold air that wafted in. It tasted of something obnoxious, beyond the expected ammonia-taint.

  “You can set it down right there,” Hilfy said, with the pistol in her fist aimed at the kif in general. “We’ll take it aboard.”

  “But we are ordered to observe courtesy,” said the leftmost kif, stepping over the threshold with his end of the cage.

  “Hold it!” Hilfy brought the gun to both hands and remembered the danger of firing. Angle them against the wall. Make the shots true. Panic wobbled her hands.

  A living red-brown wall shifted into Hilfy’s way, brushing the gun aside. “She said stop,” Khym rumbled, and faster than seemed likely made a grab for the kif.

  “Look out!” Hilfy cried. The cage went flying up into Khym’s way, clanged and hit the floor in a multiple squealing as Khym smashed it underfoot. Khym swung a fistful of robes and a live kif into the airlock wall as the rest surged forward. “Khym, get out of the way!”

  Khym just lifted another kif onehanded and threw him at the corner, and grabbed a third. Hilfy uptilted the pistol and used the butt on a kifish snout. Escaping vermin squealed and screamed underfoot. She trod on something tough that threw her off-balance as the kif grappled for her gun. Suddenly her attacker vanished backward as Khym got it by the scruff and flung it for the hatch—not a true throw. The kif hit the wall and sprawled out, fell on a second cage on the accessway floor and drew squeals and panic from the contents as it collapsed.

  A kif down the accessway leveled a gun.

  “Khym!” Hilfy howled. “Gun!”

  He froze in the lock dead center.

  And the hatch shut as fire hit it from both sides.

  Hilfy wilted against the inner wall, and Khym still stood there.

  “You all right?” Tirun asked them over com. “Hilfy, Khym, you all right?”

  “Good gods,” Hilfy breathed. Tirun had heard—the veteran spacer had hit the hatch control from the main board. Khym still stood there with his ears flat. He turned with an appalled look on his face.

  “It’s a trap,” Hilfy said hoarsely to Khym and Tirun both. “They meant to take the ship. The captain and Haral are over there in Harukk and they’re trying to take The Pride.”

  * * *

  The kif glared and moved to the barred door, reaching inside its black robes to find a small key-tab. “You,” it said to the Tahar crew, “file out. You go into this hani’s custody. If there should be difficulty—I will shoot one of you. I’ll choose at random.” It inserted the key. The door went back.

  “Chanur’s taking you out,” Pyanfar said.

  “Captain’s here,” Gilan said hoarsely, the other side of the open door.

  “She’s on my ship. Come on, Tahar.”

  Gilan Tahar blinked dully, laid one hand on the doorframe and walked out, the wounded arm dangling, her step unsteady. Her crewmates followed: Naun and Vihan Tahar; Nif Angfylas; Canfy Maurn and Tav and Haury Savuun; Haury looking as if she were doing well to walk at all, holding her ribs and limping on a bloodstained leg. Ears were torn; skin had been gashed. Haury wobbled against the bars and Tav steadied her, keeping her own body between her sister and the kif.

  “Come on,” Pyanfar said, low and harsh—Fast, move it—don’t hold us up and don’t try anything fancy, Gilan Tahar. She gestured toward the door that led out; and a sense of overwhelming oppression closed about her. Haral was out of sight, beyond the door. The metal bars, the cruelty of the place afflicted her to the soul, infectious and bewildering. Kill occurred to her and hunt, and her claws flexed out on reflex. It was the fear-smell, everywhere about the ship, endemic among the kif.

  The guide-guard turned and walked to the door, silently directing her, out of this place with the prize she had gained. A handful of hani lives. A promise—a kifish promise.

  “The hakkikt will get my report,” she said, not to let the chance pass. “He’ll ask, kif.” She walked out, relieved t
o find Haral still there, hand on gunbutt, at a standoff with the kifish guards. “Come on. We’re leaving.”

  Hilfy came panting onto the bridge and leaned on Tirun’s chair back as Khym arrived, as Geran and Tully turned at their places. “We lose any of that accessway?” she asked Tirun.

  “It’s still sound,” Tirun said. “Pressure checks up. We’re in contact with Jik and Goldtooth on open channels—captain’d skin us if we used that code—”

  “What do they say?”

  “They’re not happy. Jik says he’s getting some people out onto that dock—”

  “Gods rot it, Tirun, Pyanfar’s with the kif—we’ve got to get in there—”

  “Hilfy—” Tirun turned around, flat-eared and dark-eyed. “For godssake you’re talking about the gods-be hakkikt! What do you want, raid Harukk? They’ve pushed, we got ’em. What more do you want us to do? Go in shooting and get ’em both killed?”

  Hilfy let her breath flow out, leaning there on Tirun’s seat back and being the fool and knowing it. Her joints were loose, either the run topside or outright panic. “Get Tahar up here. It’s her crew the captain’s risking her hide for—and Tahar knows those kif out there.”

  Tirun’s ears lifted and flicked back and forth in indecision. “Well, we can use the extra hands up here. Do it, Geran.” Another wide flick of the ears, a rumpling of her broad nose and lift of her lip. “And it occurs to me we’ve got one other mind on this ship knows those kif.”

  “Skkukuk,” Hilfy said. A falling feeling hit her gut. She knew her own unreason on the matter; and it was Tirun’s command. Tirun’s say. Not hers to argue in any case.

  “If we need him,” Tirun added, with another twitch of the ring-laden ears—veteran of a hundred crises, Tirun Araun, cagy and hard to take. And all the while her sister Haral was out there in trouble with Pyanfar—one forgot that the two of them had that desperately close personal bond. Tirun made one forget—doing what wanted doing with no hesitation, no self-interest between her and the ship. Hilfy looked at the old spacer and at Geran Anify, whose efficiency covered com and scan, trading functions back and forth with Tirun like a smoothly functioning machine while the world came apart about them; and for the first time in her adolescent life she truly knew the measure of her seniors, and knew what she had yet to reach—It hit like a blow to the gut, what she was, what they were; and she was not likely to live long enough to get there. But even that thought was a selfishness Tirun would never take the time for in a crisis. She saw it all in a flash like a shellburst, a moment of panic; and then she found the wobble in her knees had gone away and she discovered some scrap of something Tirun-like in a place she had never known she had it stored, down where she kept her temper.

  To a mahen hell with yourself, Hilfy Chanur, and your fears and your precious wants—the ship’s got a problem.

  “—Tahar’s on her way topside,” Geran said; another light flared on the corn panel, another call; Hilfy itched to reach out and intercept it, taking her station back, but Geran had it, Geran occupied her seat, Tully positioned next to her where Geran could assist him, with his eyes firmly on the scan, watching for any move out of Kefk: even something as small as a construction pusher could take them out, if it went crashing into their vanes; or if some saboteur eva’d out through a service access and limpeted some explosive to The Pride’s big vane panels, or to the yoke. It would cripple them at the least. Make any jump out of Kefk uncertain, enough to kill them if they tried it. Enough—

  —o gods, to force them to negotiate—

  “Tirun,” Hilfy said, leaning on Tirun’s chairback. “If they damage us—they’ve got Pyanfar and Haral in reach. That may be what they’re trying. Take us if they can; cripple us if they can’t—Nothing personal on the kif’s side: if you get a chance to put an uppity ally down and subordinate ’em, you do it.”

  Tirun’s ears moved. She heard. Hilfy flung herself the few paces across the deck to take the seat next to Tully, to take over scan function with eyes that could read and hands that could use the buttons.

  And:

  “—They were about eight kif,” Geran was saying to someone on the com. “No. No. No, captain. Let me ask my—let me—let me ask our duty officer, captain—Tirun, it’s Vigilance. Ehrran’s sending crew out there to secure the docks.”

  “Gods rot it—give me that.”

  “She’s just broken contact.”

  Chapter 13

  They rode the lift in Harukk, nine hani and two armed kif, and the door let them out onto the access level of the ship, into the dim light and colder air of that final passageway that was open to the docks.

  We’re going to make it, Pyanfar thought, which she had doubted down below, in the prison-hold. She had doubted everything until the kif got them to the lift and two got inside the lift car with them, outnumbered at least at that range and within that car; and she believed it almost entirely when she saw that door open and let them out onto the right level of the ship, in a corridor with no ambushes and no waiting contingent of kifish guards just a way out. She glanced once at Haral in the course of a look over her shoulder at the kif and the Tahar crew, and caught a flicker of Haral’s ears and eyes that worked like telepathy: same thought: We’re near, captain, maybe we got a chance of getting away with this after all.

  Pyanfar turned and kept walking at the pace their guide set. This time there were stares from passers-by, curiosity at last—recalculation what kind of game was being played here, she reckoned.

  What kind and by whom.

  * * *

  “That damn fool,” Jik said over com. “She no do, she no do—”

  And broke contact abruptly. That was Jik’s comment on Rhif Ehrran’s decision to go out on Kefk docks. Hilfy heard it along with the rest, and looked to her right as captain Dur Tahar arrived on the bridge at a fast pace.

  “What’s this about my crew?” Tahar said forthwith, out of breath.

  “We’re working on it,” Hilfy said, and got out of her seat, scan set to alarm. Dur Tahar on The Pride’s bridge deserved at least one crew member on her feet to fend her off Tirun’s neck, and Khym had just risen to appoint himself—not the best situation.

  “So what’s going on?” Tahar asked, casting a look toward command, where Tirun, in urgent communication with Goldtooth, had no time for talking. “What’s the trouble?”

  “—Well, what do they say?” the gist of that conversation ran from Tirun’s side. “The hakkikt got any good reason why we just got our airlock shot up? Why we got gods-be vermin running loose all over our lowerdeck? Where’s our captain, huh? They know?”

  What Mahijiru command had to say to that was inaudible.

  “Captain’s out trying to get your crew released,” Hilfy said to Tahar. “Meanwhile we just got shot at. You want to take a crew post, captain? We’re up to our noses in problems. Scan would be real helpful just now. Tully doesn’t read real good.”

  She expected objection of rank. Tahar lowered her ears and started for the indicated post with never an objection. But Tirun swung her chair about before Tahar could get to it. “Belay that. Goldtooth says he can’t reach Sikkukkut. Kif are being obstinate. They’re stalling. It wasn’t any accident.” Tirun got out of Haral’s chair and with a wave at Dur Tahar, hurled herself into Pyanfar’s instead. “Sit,” she said, hitting the seat’s turn-control. “Take number two, Tahar. I’ll fill you in. Hilfy—Khym. Get that by-the-gods kif up here. I want to talk to him right now.”

  Hilfy caught Khym by the arm and moved.

  No one sat in Pyanfar’s place. But it was being done. No foreign clan sat in The Pride’s seats. But they did that too—they did anything that gave them a better chance.

  They pelted down the main corridor; and of a sudden there was the electric thump of the generators coming up, a vibration all down The Pride’s steel spine. Khym skidded on one foot and stopped, turning back before Hilfy grabbed him by the arm.

  “That’s power-up!” Khym cried.

&nbs
p; “That’s precaution,” Hilfy said, and hauled him about again into a run for the lift. “We’re not pulling out. Tirun wouldn’t do that. For gods-sakes follow orders.”

  So our systems are all the way hot. So the kif know we can move. Or shoot. They can take us out. We can take Kejk out with us, if it comes to that. That’s what Tirun’s letting them know.

  * * *

  “Kkkt,” the kif said, on guard at Harukk’s lock—“kkkkt:” when it saw what it faced, softly and with an edge a hani could read. Pyanfar kept her hand near her gun and flattened her ears as it looked like challenge.

  Then the guard waved them on with the dark flourish of a sleeve. Pyanfar strode out into the chill of the access and turned abruptly, with a scowl for the kif and a concern that all their party made it out clear.

  The Tahar crewwomen walked as best they could, Gilan on her own, Naun and Vihan doing the best they could to support Haury between them. Nif and Canfy with Tav. Haral came last, dour and grim—no bending, no show of weakness. Sikkukkut had not forgotten them; Sikkukkut would be curious what they would do, would be suspicious of connivance—

  —would cut their throats at the first hint things were not as represented to him; or at the first suspicion hani motives had confounded him.

  Come on, keep it moving—Pyanfar put impatience into a scowl at Gilan Tahar and spun on her heel the instant Haral cleared the lock, outbound and downbound for the docks.

  * * *

  “Kkkkt,” the kif Skkukuk said, lifting his hooded head from his nesting-spot on a clean bed in a clean cabin. “Kkkt. Young Chanur—”

  “Up,” Hilfy said. She kept her gun in holster and made no move to threaten. Khym was behind her, and that was more than sufficient.

  “I am weak with hunger. Hani, it is a waste—”

  “Get up, kif. Move. We’ve had a little problem with your dinner. It’s all over the ship. Our hatch has a nice new burn-scar on it. That’s what we want to ask you about.”

  “Treachery,” Skkukuk said. He stirred himself and came off the bed, using a hand to catch his balance. “Kkkt. Treachery.”