Chanur's Legacy (38 page)

Sunny Kefk, Chihin said—leading edge of kifish territory, first of a nest of same-generation suns they favored. Pirate territory, before the treaty, space no other species ever wanted to see.

Well, so, this is an experience, Hilfy thought to herself. The young kid that had come to space with Pyanfar had longed after the strange and the dangerous. And found it once. And now again.

You fool, she said to herself—you utter fool, Hilfy Chanur.

It must be all right, Hallan decided. Everything was normal on the boards. He felt after the nutrients pack. His hands were shaking. He’d never come out of jump so dehydrated or so wobbly. He could scarcely handle the pack without sticking holes in it, he couldn’t make his fingers work.

Truth was, he was scared—because there was nothing he could do for himself, because there was, beneath the ordinary and necessary chatter the crew made, a grimness that hadn’t been there on the jump before this. And it might very reasonably be because it was a kifish port and their lives were in imminent danger, and they’d lost track of the tc’a ships, all of which was very good reason to be upset.

But there was just this subtle turning of the shoulder Fala did toward him, and somehow she avoided looking at him or at Chihin at all. Everybody was upset with Chihin, the captain had been angry on the starting side of jump, and tempers might be a little cooler on this side—time passed, in hyperspace, a lot of time; and you didn’t come out of it as intense about most things as you’d gone in, even if it felt like only an hour later. It was a lot more than that, the body had had a chance to cool down, and the angers and the fears had a chance to settle and evaporate if they had no reason to start up again on this side of jump.

But he’d made a public scene; and as soon as people weren’t busy they were going to remember it, the same as Fala already did, as his fault.

He wanted to say something to Fala, he wanted to do something to set it right, but Chihin was sitting between them out there, and his brain was still caught in that sugar-short haze that deprivation created in jump. He was doing well to get himself to his feet when the captain told him: Go fix breakfast, be useful; and his trousers started a slide he only just stopped with a grab at his waistband.

Thank the gods Fala was busy on the bridge and the captain didn’t send her too. He couldn’t deal with it now. He could scarcely walk. He felt his way into the galley, which was next to the bridge for very good reasons, and giddily, wobbily, started locating the frozen dinners, keeping a hand sort of near safety holds, because a ship coming in from above a sun could find some other ship dropping in too close to them, even yet, and the ship could have to maneuver without warning.

But you didn’t plan for it. And probably you couldn’t really hold on if it did. Most times the off-duty crew began to stir about just now, only the
Legacy
didn’t have that many hands, and they took their breaks close to the bridge, where they could answer a sudden recall. People took breaks as they could, did necessary maintenance on the bridge and thereabouts ...

And snacked, if they could keep it down. He popped another nutrient pack and shed fur over everything. He
wanted
a bath, but that wasn’t possible till they’d reached the inner system boundary: he’d asked for duty and he had it.

Crew was up and moving. Chihin went through, and gave him some kind of a look he didn’t dare meet; and came back through again, with her face wet and her mustaches dripping.

He was scared to death she was going to speak. But she didn’t. He had some chips, galley’s privilege, to keep his stomach from heaving, and it didn’t help much. He followed it with cold tea, from the fridge. And he thought he was going to be sick right there, he was cold from the drink and shaking and his stomach was trying to turn itself inside out. He leaned on the counter trying just to breathe, wondering if he should go for the facilities, or if jostling wasn’t the right thing to do just now...

A hand landed on his shoulder. “You need some help?” Tarras asked, and when he stood against the counter: “You all right?”

“Fine,” he managed to say. And prayed to keep his stomach still, while Tarras wandered around and looked in the oven and put a pot of gfi on to brew ... the smell was almost more than he could take.

“Looks like you’ve about got it,” Tarras said, and came and leaned against the counter beside him.

“Hits you hard sometimes.”

“Yes,” he said.

“You want to go back to the bridge and sit down?”

“No,” he said, monosyllabic, desperate. No, he did not.

Silence for a moment. Then: “Prickly situation,” Tarras said, and he felt his stomach knot a little tighter,
hoping
she was going to talk about the kif and the ship out there or anything else but—

“You and Fala have something going?”

“No!” He kept his voice low, hoping to the gods they didn’t carry over the noise of the fans. “She’s just nice, is all.”

“She’s a good kid,” Tarras said. “You’re the most attractive thing she’s seen in a year. The only. But that’s beside the point.”

“I didn’t—“ He didn’t want to talk about this. But he was cornered. And Tarras might be on Fala’s side, but Tarras was easier to talk to than Fala. “I didn’t want to upset her.”

“Chihin’s a full-time pain. It’s her aim in life. You’re not obligated to put up with—“

He didn’t like Tarras saying that. He didn’t want to hear it. He shoved off on his way to the crew lounge, as the only refuge he could think of, and Tarras caught his arm, caught it with a claw, and it hurt, but he kept going.

She caught him again. Most wouldn’t. Nobody ever had, on this ship. But he’d learned on the
Sun,
that defying orders meant getting dumped. So he did stop. He didn’t have to look at her.

“Oh,
gods,” Tarras muttered.
“Chihin?”

So Chihin joked. He knew that. It didn’t change the fact he felt it in the gut when she walked past him. It didn’t change the fact he liked her, and it didn’t change the way he’d felt, and the way he still felt.

Tarras let out a breath and leaned against the wall. “Kid, Chihin isn’t the most serious-minded soul in the crew.”

“That’s all right,” he said without looking at her.

“Ow,” Tarras said, and after a moment of silence. “Look,
na
Hallan. She’s
not
a bad sort. —Gods, I’ve landed in it, haven’t I?”

He didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t mad at Tarras. He wasn’t mad at anybody. Mostly his stomach was upset and he wished Fala wasn’t mad. The oven timer went off, to his vast relief, and he said, “It’s ready.”

“I’ll call them,” she said, and ducked out while he took the dinners out.

And burned his fingers.

Something about
na
Hallan and Chihin ... Tiar didn’t wholly pick it up on the first hearing, with Tarras leaning and whispering into her ear.

And then she didn’t believe it. But Tarras said, “It’s serious.”

She
unbelted and got up; and went over to the captain and whispered, “The kid and Chihin? We got a problem.”

Hilfy turned her head, looked at her nose to nose and said, ominously: “Problem?”

Tiar made a glance back toward the galley, another to Chihin and Fala, working side by side. An unnaturally quiet Chihin.

“She hasn’t said a word.”

The captain evidently added the same chain of figures.
Chihin
was deathly quiet. Not a joke. Not an ill-timed jibe about the situation. A lot of efficiency out of her, this last hour, but seldom a word, since the first.

And Fala—Fala was talking to the kif, but not to Chihin.

“I want this straightened out,” Hilfy said under her breath. “Good
gods,
we aren’t in a place we can afford this! Grow by the gods
up,
can’t we?”

“I don’t think it’s Fala,” Tiar said as faintly as she could, and got a second furious look from Hilfy.

“I don’t
care
what’s going on,” Hilfy hissed. “This is deadly serious, cousin. The kif aren’t playing lovers’ games out there. Breakfast at stations, nobody’s getting a break.”

Good idea, Tiar thought to herself, and went and relayed the order out loud: “Stay at vrr’*- nnsts. We’ve got a situation shaping up. We’re”n~r”£n “ongoing caution, here, we can get the food out, but we’re not taking any breaks, got it?”

Let them
think
she and the captain had been consulting on the kif. Give them something outside the ship to worry about. She went back to the galley. “General alert. Get the trays out here, keep them clipped down, no open hot liquids. Tarras, arms board shakedown.”

Tarras’ ears went back, and sobriety happened fast, in a hesitation between the oven and getting back to her post.

“Get the trays out,” Tiar repeated, to the young gentleman at the center of the storm, and he wiped the scowl off his face and started snatching, ignoring singed fingers.

“That’s the way,” she said. “Let’s move! Get in those seats and get belted. This isn’t Anuurn system.”

She took her own tray back, grabbed a drink and settled in while Tarras and Hallan were passing out trays off the stack and drinks out of a box.

The captain started giving system check orders. The captain ordered a condition three on the armament. And that was the first time the
Legacy
had ever brought the weapons board up full. There was a different kind of quiet on the bridge when that order came down, and various stations had to crosscheck with targeting.

Hope to the gods it was a test. The fact of the weapons got to her nerves too, even knowing it was a calculated distraction. The war memories came up along with that long-silent board. Her reflexes wound themselves tight as a spring, and her heart beat a little faster.

Because now that she thought of it, kif being kif, the arms computer on
Tiraskhti
was probably completely live. And probably had been, from the moment the kif went for jump toward his own border,

There w^.t. , :ng craft. There were construction pushers. They looked, except the major kifish ships at dock, like ordinary miners and pushers in any system in hani or mahen space.

Well they might, Hilfy thought. They were probably stolen.

But the ships at dock at Kefk had no look of honest traders. Huge engine packs. Cold-haulers that could release their cargo or blow off their mass with the flip of a toggle: hunter-ships, clutching cargo cans in their clamps, like many-legged insects; purported tankers, whose tanks probably were false mass.

“Captain,” Fala said, “Vikktakkht.”

“I’ll take it,” she said, and a clicking, soft voice said,

“ Chanur captain. You ‘II go first and we ‘II dock beside you. For convenience’ sake. “

“Understood. And do we understand this trip is worth our time?”

“Put Meras on. I find him amusing. “

I won’t talk to you, that meant. “Later,” she said shortly, and punched out. “—Tiar, I want one course laid out for Meetpoint, and courses for Kshshti, Mkks, Harak, Lukkur, and Tt’a’va’o. ...”

“Tt’a’va’o!”

“If we go out of here with kif on our tail,
better
the methane folk than Lukkur. But we take any vector open and deal with it when we get there.”

“Aye, captain.”

“Their prices aren’t bad,” Tarras said.

Tiar said: “Gods, load their cans aboard, after Kshshti?”

“I was kidding,” Tarras said. “Kidding, cousin.”

The
Legacy
still had the option to run, Hilfy thought. She could do a sudden break and sight on Meetpoint and get the
Legacy
out of here.

But you didn’t run from kif. If you ran, they were wired to chase—sometimes literally; sometimes, more dangerously, they merely wrote you down for weak and apt for more abstract predation.

A Chanur—if she ran—would weaken Chanur clan in the eyes of all kif. It would prompt ambitions. It would encourage seditions. Assassinations, to which aunt Pyanfar was all too vulnerable.

But rational as everything had seemed the other side of jump—they weren’t just the only hani ship in system, they were the only foreign ship anywhere: not a mahendo’sat, not a stsho, not a methane-breather showed in the revolutions of the station. Not even a ship that was clearly a merchant ship.

“Those are hunters,” Tiar said. “Every one of those are hunters. What’s building here?”

“I don’t like this,” Fala said. “I really don’t like this.”

“Don’t panic,” Hilfy said quietly. “Never panic with them. It’s a guarantee of problems.”

“Chanur,”
came the kifish voice over her earpiece, ‘”
you’re clear to dock now.”

“Thank you,
hakkikt.”

The schematic flashed up, glowing lines channeling their approach and their mandated velocity.

Scary enough on a small station. But the numbers, the indicators, were kifish characters, base 8.

“They’re offering automated approach,” Fala said, in a voice a little higher than her wont. “They say they have translation programs.”

“So do we and No. No input from them to our computers. Absolutely not. Just calc it.”

“ ‘Just calc it,’ “ Chihin muttered in a tone of desperation. ‘Calc it’ was herself and Tiar and their computers, in rapid cross-check calculation. While they were aimed at Kefk Station like a missile.

But numbers started popping into the display of their own instrumentation, distance to dock, rate of spin, moment of contact.

“Fine it down,” Hilfy said. “That’s a stand-down on the weapons board, Tarras.”

“Confirm, captain. Standing down and locked.”

The kifish station was protesting their irregular approach. The Kefk control center wanted, they
demanded
computer to computer contact. They ordered them to brake and abort. The emergency flasher was on the station output. And if there was a time
Tiraskhti
could be absolutely certain weapons were at stand-down, it was now, preparing for dock. If there was a time
Tiraskhti
could get a shot that might miss their own station, it was in the next few minutes.

“By the book,” Hilfy said calmly, and kept her claws out of the upholstery of her seat. “.Extra decimals. Let’s not have a repair bill at this place.”