She walked down the corridor and into the open door of sickbay, their little closet of a facility. Tirun had beaten her there. Khym and Tully were taking Jif off the stretcher and laying him on the table.
"He'll have some bruises," Pyanfar said. "You'd better run a scan on him. He may have more than that." She went to the med cabinet, keyed the lock with a button-sequence and sorted through a tray of bottles- hani-specific; hani drugs did strange things with some mahendo'sat. No telling what the kif had given him even if she ran a query into Library, and it was better to stick to the simple things. She pulled out an old-fashioned bottle of ammonia salts and brought that over to hold under Jik's nose.
Not a twitch.
"Gods-be." She capped the stinking bottle and slapped Jik's chill face. "Wake up. Hear me?"
"What did they give him?" Tirun asked, lifting Jik's eyelid, peering close. "He smells like a dopeden."
"He's a hunter-captain, gods rot it, his own precious government's got him mind-blocked, gods know how far down he's gone." She turned around, shoved her way past Khym and got to the intercom. "Bridge! Get Harukk on, tell 'em I want to know what they dosed Jik with, fast."
"Aye," Haral's voice came back.
Tirun was counting pulsebeats. And frowning.
"Gods, he doesn't know where he is." Pyanfar crossed the deck again, shoving roughly past both the men, to grab at Jik's shoulders. "Jik, gods fry you, it's Pyanfar, Pyanfar Chanur, you hear me? Emergency, Jik, wake up?"
Jik's mouth opened. His chest moved in a larger breath.
"Come on, Jik-for the gods' sake, wake up!" She yelled it into his ear. She shook at him.''Jik! Help!''
Tension began to come back to his musculature. His face acquired familiar lines. "Come on," she said. "It's me, it's Pyanfar."
Help, she said. And the great fool came back to her. He hauled himself out of whatever mental pit his own people had prepared for him, the way he had run out onto that dock to fight for her and her crew, when an absolute species-loyalty had dictated he save himself. Help. More strangers handled him, dumped him from stretcher to table, gods, not unlike what the kif must have done to him, and he went away from them, deeper and deeper, only knowing at some far level that he was being touched.
Knowing now that there was a hani cursing him deaf in one ear and asking something of him, but nothing more than that.
O gods. Gods, Jik.
His eyes slitted open. He was still far away.
"Hey," she said. "You're all right. You're on The Pride. I got you out. Kesurinan's gone back to Aja Jin, you hear me, Jik, you're not with the kif anymore. You're on my ship."
He blinked. His mouth worked, the movement of a dry tongue. He heard her, she thought, at some level. He was exploring consciousness and trying to decide if he wanted it.
"It's me," she said again. "Jik," She patted his arm and stooped with a sick feeling at the gut when he flinched from her touch. '' Friend.''
"Where?" he said, at least it sounded like that.
"On The Pride. You're safe. You understand me?"
"Understand," he said. His lids drifted down over the pupils. He was gone again, but not so deeply gone. She hesitated a moment, then turned in a blind rage at two fool men who had not sense enough to clear out of sickbay's narrow space and give them room to work.
She found herself staring eye to eye with Tully-with Tully who had been twice where Jik had been, and whose face was stsho-white and his eyes white round the edges. She had been about to shout. The look on Tully's face strangled the sound in her throat.
"Out," she said, and choked on the word. "Clear out of here, you're not doing anything useful."
Khym flattened his ears, thrust out an arm and herded Tully away; Tully went without seeming to notice it was Khym who had touched him. The human was a shaken man.
So was she, shaken. The hair was standing up all down her back.
"Captain," Haral's voice came, "it's sothosi. Library's sending to labcomp right now."
"We're on it."
Tirun was on it, a quick move for the comp unit; a glance at the screen and a dive for the medicine cabinet. She broke open a packet, grabbed an ampule and art astringent pad and made herself a clean spot on Jik's arm.
The stimulant went in. In another moment Jik made another gasp after air, and another, a healthier darkness returning to his nose and lips. "There we go," Tirun said, monitoring his heartbeat. "There we go."
Pyanfar found herself a chair and sat down, before her knees went. She bent over and raked her hands through her mane, conscious of the uncomfortable weight of the AP at her hip and the prodding of the gun in her opposite pocket. She stank. She wanted a bath.
She wanted not to have done what she had done. Not to have made the mistakes she had made. Not to be Pyanfar Chanur at all, who was responsible for too much and too many mistakes. And who had now to think the unthinkable.
"You all right?" Tirun asked.
She looked up at her cousin, her old friend. At a crewwoman who had been with her from her youth. "Tirun." She lapsed into a provincial hani language and kept her voice down. "He'll stay here. I want this room safed, I want him left under restraint-"
She tried to keep the cold distance she had had on Harukk. It was hard when she looked into an old friend's eyes and saw that natural reaction, that dropping of Tirun's ears.
"Tirun," she said, though she had meant to justify nothing; she found herself pleading, found a shiver going through her limbs. "We got a problem. I'll talk about it later. Do it. Can you? Stay with him till he wakes up and make sure he's breathing all right. And for godssakes leave those restraints on him. Can you do that?"
"Yes," Tirun said. No doubt. No question, from an honest hani who handed her captain every scruple she had and expected her captain was going to explain it all. Eventually.
"Tell him I'm going to come back down. Tell him it's because we've got a few hours, I want him to rest and I can't think of any other way to make sure he does." She still spoke in chaura, a language no mahendo'sat was going to understand; and that was statement enough how much truth she was handing out. Tirun stared at her and asked no questions. Not even with a flick of her ears. Lock up a friend who had saved their lives and come back in this condition from doing it. Lie to him.
If she could knock him cold again without risking his life she would do that too.
She got up and walked out, raked a hand through her mane and felt the stinging pain of exhaustion between her shoulders, the burn of cold decking on her feet. Kif-stink was still in her nostrils.
She flung the kifish packet onto the counter by her own station on the bridge.
No one had left post; or if Geran had left to check on Chur she had come back again in a hurry. Solemn faces stared at her: Hilfy, Geran, Khym and Tully; Haral kept operations going.
"Leave it, Haral," Pyanfar said.
Haral swung her chair about, same as the others.
"You know the way we came in here," Pyanfar said, "and took Kefk. We got orders to do it again. At Meetpoint."
Ears sank. Tully sat there, the human question, hearing what he could pick up on his own and what garbled version whispered to him over the translator plug he kept in one ear.
"You've heard bits and pieces of it," she said, and sat down on the armrest of her own cushion, facing all of them. "We've got to follow orders the way they're given. Or we've got to blow ourselves to particles here at dock. And that takes out only one kif faction. It leaves the other one the undisputed winner. And by the gods, I'd rather they chewed on each other a while and gave the Compact a chance. That's one consideration. But there's another one. Sikkukkut's threatened Anuurn."