Chanur's Homecoming (20 page)

Tirun caught her eye as she walked onto the bridge and looked a further worried question at her. Tirun, who looked deathly tired herself. "No change," Tirun said. "Except bad news. Goldtooth's bunch had two chasers on his tail when he went out. Akkhtimakt's got to jump any minute now. Got to. He's getting his tail shot up. Some of those ships may not make it otherside. They got to clear out of here." Pyanfar looked. Everyone was still running for jump. The last of Goldtooth's company was gone. And a flock of stsho, fortunate in being out of range of all disasters and not being tied up dead-V at station. Not a sign of a methane-breather. Anywhere.

No hani was moving. They were caught at dock. And there was not a way in a mahen hell to get out vectored for hani space with the angle and the V Sikkukkut's two station-aimed ships had on them. Ikkhoitr and Khafukkin were going to make it in before their own three ships. Kif were going to have control of that dock, and gods help the hani who took exception to it.

"We got one more ship ID: a Faha. Starwind."

"Munur." That was a youngish captain. A very small ship. And a distant cousin of Hilfy's on her mother's side. ''Ehrran?"

"Not a sign."

"With Goldtooth or kited out of here home a long time ago. Want to lay odds which?" Exhaustion and nerves added up on her. She shivered, and a great deal of it was depletion. "Yeah. Stay on it." She indicated the direction of the galley and marshaled a steady voice. "Jik's going to rest a bit. He's plenty mad. And crazy-tired. I hope to the gods he takes those pills and settles down, but I don't think he'll do it. Pass out awhile, maybe. Maybe come to with a clearer head. Right now he's real trouble. He's not thinking real clear. Me, I'm not, either. We put his quarters on ops-com when he wakes up. Maybe let him up here, I don't know yet. It's my judgment I don't trust. I'm going to clean up, pass out a few minutes. How are you holding?"

"I'm all right," Tirun said. It was usual sequence: Haral first on the cleanup; Haral first to snatch a little rest, Haral the one whose wits had to be sharpest and reflexes quickest, their switcher; and Haral generally shorted herself on rest-time to pay her sister for it. "'Bout time, though." And before she could leave the chair she was leaning on: "Captain, Chur's wanting a bit of something hot. Geran went to the lowerdecks to fix it."

That was the best news since the drop. "Huh," she said. "Huh." With a little relaxation in tensed muscles. She shoved off and walked on down the corridor. She wanted food. Wanted a bath. Wanted, gods knew, to be lightyears away from all of this. But they did not have that choice. They could run for it and get out of Meetpoint system while Sikkukkut was busy. But he would find them; and anyone they were attached to. Their world was held hostage. Not mentioning the immediate threat to three hundred thousand gods-be stsho and a handful of hani ships.

A kif could not forget an insult.

No more than a hani forgot harm to her friends.

It was a quiet gathering down in crew quarters, in the central area where they had a microwave, and a little store of instant food: one of those amenities they had installed along with the high- V braces and the AP weapons they had acquired on the black market. A couple of little couches and a table or two in a lounge, and a common-room for sleeping, in which they could have installed partitions, but they had never gotten around to that- never much wanted it, truth be known. A body learned to sleep with cousins trekking in and out, and there was never any urgent reason to change, even in the days when they had had wealth.

Right now, Hilfy thought, it was the best reason of all; a body wanted company in this crisis. Geran came kiting in and out again with two cups of soup, gods only hope she got one into her own stomach on the way topside; Chur was evidently

awake and willing to try it eating, which was one heart-lightening event among all the bad news. Haral was sitting on the couch opposite with a bit of jerky in one hand and her mouth full, while she raked her damp mane into order with the other. Her eyes had that distracted, glassy weariness jump left in a body. Tully came out of the common bath with a towel over his shoulders, wearing a pair of Khym's trousers, a rust silk pair which he had had to pin at the waist, but Haral was out of spares and the other pair was going through the laundry. He staggered over to the cabinet and got a cup and poured soupmix and water into it, shoved it in the microwave and sat down to towel his head and beard dry. Pale, old scars stood out on white-skinned shoulders; and pinker, recent ones.

"Akkhtimakt's jumped out," came the bulletin from the bridge. And: "We got a general slow-down on Sikkukkut's side, sure enough, 'cept for two of 'em it looks like Sikkukkut's sending out to keep 'em worried, same as he did with Goldtooth's lot. Looks for good and sure like Sikkukkut's going to stay with us. Thought you'd like to know."

"No surprise," Haral muttered. "Couldn't be that lucky. Couldn't be lucky enough to get help out of Goldtooth. Sikkukkut's going to have this place stripped to the deckplates before he gets back."

"Going to do whatever he wants," Hilfy said, "that's sure."

"Lousy mess."

Tully had lifted his face from the towel and looked at them, yellow hair tousled, eyes showing lines of strain about the edges. Sometimes he seemed too tired even to make the effort of speech. Or to listen for the translator's sputtering whisper giving him its mangled version of things around him. The things hardest to get across were the delicate topics, like: How's Chur-honestly? Or: What do you think Jik will do? And: What are we going to do when the kif move into the station? He seemed to go away at times. At others he seemed desperate to say something of too much difficulty to attempt it.

Things like: My people are going. I talked to them. Even if the message didn't get there. I was that close.

/ didn't betray you.

I swear I didn't try.

The microwave bleeped Finished; and Tully got up and got his soup, with a package of shredded meat and a packet of mahen fuyas, which he and Haral thought edible and everyone else aboard loathed. He offered one of the grain-meat sticks to Haral: she took it and stirred her soup with it, and he settled down with the other packets in his agile fingers, cup in both hands and elbows on his knees, to drink a sip and sigh in profoundest weariness.

"I figure," Hilfy said, to fill the quiet, and to answer questions Tully did not ask, "Goldtooth rendezvoused here with the human fleet. That's why he kited out on us at Kefk. He and Ehrran came in here, he got stuck here, in a standoff with Akkhtimakt. Maybe he got Akkhtimakt pried loose from the station. He did that much for the stsho. But Ehrran's on her way to Anuurn. Bet."

"Godsrotted well has to be," Haral muttered. "But with Goldtooth in it we got to wonder, don't we?"

''Like what happened here?'' That bothered her. The whole arrangement of things bothered her. The lack of methane-breathers. And Akkhtimakt and Sikkukkut, if they both wanted to be fools, could go on trading that position till the suns all froze. Every few shipboard days, every few ground-bound months, one side could do a turnaround at Urtur or Tt'a'va'o or Kefk or wherever, and come in and strafe the other who had taken possession of Meetpoint. Or Kefk. Or wherever. If ships got to trading positions like that, time-dilation got to stretching lives wider and wider; no in-system passages. No slow-time. Just run and run and run as long as a ship could take it and a body could take the depletion. A merchant ship did its jumps with a lot of slowtime and dock-time in between; and a tradeoff like that could do as much timestretch in a month of their own perception as a trader did in a decade. Before flesh and bone and steel had gone their limits. "Wonder is he didn't come in on Kefk."

"Kefk's got two guardstations. Kefk's got position on him."

Tully stared at them both. He had lost that, probably. But of a sudden the problem had found itself a cold spot in

Hilfy's gut. She took a sip of her cup to warm that cold and licked the soup off her mustaches.

"Sikkukkut's got something in mind. He's sure not going to sit here."

"There are fools in the universe," Haral said. "What if he isn't? What if he's not sitting still here? What if he's got something else in mind?"

But Goldtooth was out on the Tt'a'va'o vector. Methane-breather territory. Logical choice: the stsho feared the humans like plague. Stsho would deal with Ehrran; they would deal with the kif before they dealt with Goldtooth and his human allies. They would go with the known villains.

Stsho had no armaments. No capability for that kind of stress. Stsho would run if they could. Evade it all.

Tc'a and chi and-gods save us- knnn-they're not here, they're always here. Where are they? Knnn aren't afraid of anything. They won't run. Avoid, maybe; run in panic-not the knnn. Ever.

"Methane-breathers," Hilfy said. "Gods rot it, Haral. It's a trap. Sikkukkut's and Goldtooth's both."

Haral's ears flagged and lifted again, and a thinking look got through the exhaustion in Haral's eyes.

"Hilfy." Tully held his cup between his knees and his brow furrowed with worry under its fringe of pale wet hair. "Goldtooth not go Tt'a'va'o."

"You mean you know that?"

"I think. He come-turn, go whhhsss, like Tt'a'va'o Not."

"You mean he faked a jump? Stopped out there in deep space? You think he can do that?"

Tully might or might not have gotten all of that. "Mahe," he said. "Human do."

"Stop a jump short?"

"Same."

"Good gods."

"Makes sense," Haral said. "If they've got the stuff to do that. If they got it from humans- He waits here to fake a run."

"And Ehrran runs for good and real and leaves hani here to catch it when Sikkukkut came through? Gods-be, she's got a treaty with the stsho!"

"Give her credit. What could she do-if Akkhtimakt was here first. Goldtooth wanted Akkhtimakt intact. He's shoving the two kif into a fight, by the gods, that's what he's doing!" Haral rubbed her graying nose and it wrinkled up again. "Let them weaken each other before he throws the humans at them and before the mahen forces come in here. That's what he's up to. Let Jik hang; let Jik keep at least one gods-be kif halfway tame if he can while Goldtooth sets it up so he can take out both kif. That's what the mahendo'sat would really like. Throw the humans at 'em. Let the humans get shot up. That's why he left Jik behind at Kefk."

"No mahen workers left here onstation, I'll bet on that."

"Gods-rotted sure. Goldtooth could have had the word out long before this. Routed everything out of here. Cleared it all out when the stsho broke that treaty."

"Eggs to pearls Goldtooth's left a spotter here."

"No contest."

"It's still insystem," Hilfy said. "It's still in position to get whatever happened here, maybe there's more than one of them, huh? Maybe a couple of spotters, one drifting out slow, going to fire up when it's outside normal pickup, just sneak out of here. And if Goldtooth's out there in the deep and those fool kif that were tailing him jump all the way to Tt'a'va'o-"

Haral's ears lifted. The exhaustion melted from her eyes and replaced itself with a hard, hard look. "Keep going."

"Goldtooth might wait for news. Before his turnaround. If he makes one. He may have put more than one or two spotters on the outside of this system. He's used up all his credit with Sikkukkut himself, he's out there in the dark with the humans, with the tc'a that Jik was working with, he's got some credit with the han, maybe some with the knnn. What if he decided there wasn't any choice and he just lets the kif fight it out?"

"Maybe that's the safest thing we could all do."

"But-"

"I'm listening."

"But-you know the mahendo'sat are going to save their own hides. Ehrran's left him. We can't speak for the han. We got kif going to go head-on against each other with the humans on their backside. If both of them get busy, if the mahendo'sat hit them in the back-neither Akkhtimakt nor Sikkukkut can stand for that chance. They're in a mess. They can't leave the mahendo'sat armed at their backs. They're kif, and Goldtooth's going to attack and they know it. My gods, we got one kif making a threat against Anuurn. What's Akkhtimakt going to threaten, huh? Or is he just going to turn around and send a ship apiece at every mahen world and station?"

Haral's ears were all but flat. She was still listening.

"Ask Skkukuk," Tully said suddenly.
   

"Ask him what?" Hilfy asked.

''He kif. Ask what kif do."

"He's not on Sikkukkut's level. If he'd outthought him, we'd have Skkukuk to worry about."

"Kif mind. Lot dark. / go ask."

"Man's got a point," Haral said. "But no way we talk to the kif. Better we talk to the captain. Py-an-far, you understand me, Tully?"

"You think I'm right?"

"I been in space forty some years, kid, I never been real close to kif on their terms. You have. And you speak main-kifish. Which I still don't, not real well. But I've had a look at our passenger, 'bout enough to get an idea or two. And between the mahendo'sat and that kif, I'm real anxious. We got that other bomb aboard. And sorry as I am for him, he scares me worse'n Skkukuk."

"Jik," Hilfy murmured. And took another sip that failed to warm her gut.

'He's got a lot on him," Haral said, "and much as we owe him and he owes us-first, he's hurting; second, he's been hurt, by the kif and by his own partner and by us on top of it all; and thirdly, he's mahendo'sat and seeing his whole species in danger, and maybe he's got more information than we've gotten out of him. What's he going to do?"

The cold got worse. For one uneasy moment Hilfy could not even look at Tully. For one uneasy moment he was like Jik, alien and full of strange motives and unpredictabilities.

And she was female and he was not, with all the craziness on that score. No place for him to be sitting. Listening to us. Gods, what if he was only waiting, all this time? He's alien. Isn't he? Same as Jik. And we've been through so gods-be much-and I don't know what's in his mind right now. My friend. My- She gave a mental shiver, looked at the time. "Gods," she said, "we better get topside. Tirun-"