"You've set the comp that way. I know."
Black closed in. Cleared again. "I set it," she said carefully, "to get us in there as close in the well as we could get. We got one lousy lot of Akkhtimakt's kif in our way. We're not going to have time to sit and talk about it. We don't have the guns to hammer our way clear across system from far out. We aren't fit for a long fight. This ship has seen fighting like that before, at Gaohn, captain, and I don't want to do it again. Odds get up to you, fast."
A hand descended on her shoulder, ever so gently. "Cap'n. Time."
"I'm onto it, Haral, I'm gods-be onto it." She drew herself up on a deep breath. "We're one ship down, we're up to our noses in kif, and I am not, by the gods greater and lesser, ker Sirany Tauran, a raving lunatic." A second breath, speech clear and spaced this time. No shouting, no hysteria. "I am giving you my sane assessment of the situation: we're aiming one set of kif at the other set and hoping to the gods we have enough left to push them outsystem. If we don't, we are going to die there, collectively and gods hope, without seeing what else will happen. And I am not having my plans tampered with and my communications setup interfered with and myself and my crew deprived of necessary information or of control of this ship at the last moment do we understand each other, ker Sirany? I'm going to take controls at Anuurn. My shift. That's the way I set it up, that's the way it's going to be, don't play hero with me. You want to fight, you'll get your share. Not on the drop!"
Sirany's ears were down. Not anger. That fright-doubt expression again. They lifted and twitched and flattened and lifted again. And what will you do about it, you and your crew, none of you fit to stand?
Someone moved. More than one someone out of a chair.
Khym's gusting breath. Khym looming like a shadow over in the peripheries of her vision.
Male and crazy. It was in the sudden nervous flick of Sirany's eyes.
"He's on our side," Pyanfar said hoarsely. She was disarmed by that threatening move of his. There was nothing left to say, Sirany doubted her husband's sanity if not her own and they had just lost all hope of reason. Clock was running. The ship was headed for jump and they had crew to take care of. She made a despairing wave of her hand, not sure she could find equilibrium if she let go of the chair. Everything swam in a blur. "See you otherside, ker Sirany. Gods hope." She let go, resisted the urge to grab Khym's arm, managed to keep the deck stable and the exit steady in her vision.
"Pyanfar." Sirany's voice, name unadorned.
She managed to turn around. Steadied herself, Khym's shadow to her left, Hilfy and Tirun over there somewhere. Haral still beyond.
"It's concern, understand," Sirany said. "It's not-doubt, ker Pyanfar."
"I'm going to fall on my face," she said calmly, rationally. And stared as much at the level line of the control boards beyond Sirany's back, to keep something level in her vision. The bridge was trying to tilt. "Send us something to eat for godssakes and let us go, ker Sirany."
She managed to turn, still keeping the counters level in her sight, walked out without the use of her internal equilibrium. One foot in front of the other. Khym was behind her. Others were. Chur's door was shut as she passed it. Where Geran was-she could not remember, whether Geran had gone to the galley, whether she had heard her pass that corridor.
She reached the door of her own quarters. Fumbled after the lock and got it, and staggered in and fell into bed.
"I'm going after food," Khym said in a voice hoarse and deep.
"They'll do it."
"Me," he said. "I make sure it gets done. We're time-critical."
And came back out of a confusing darkness and shook at her till she sat up and wrapped her hands around the cup he gave her. Whole jug of the stuff with him. Awful. Full of sickly spices. Tofi. "Gods, you got to put that stuff in?"
"Way I cook. Shut up and drink it. It's got calories."
She drank it, drank another cup because he insisted. Ate the dried stuff. Her hands just fell away limp and dropped the packets. He fell in beside her. Out of some terrible reverberating tunnel the intercom was ringing with strange hani voices: ''Rig for jump." Operations noises. Strange crew. The words echoed and twisted in and out of her brain, losing focus. She felt after the security of the restraint webbing, found it, and all the while the room kept coming and going.
Khym had remembered the safeties. Half conscious as he was, he had remembered that.
"They're all right," some real voice said from the doorway, "Excuse me, captain."
It confused her to a mahen hell. The door shut. Tauran security check. They had had a door open.
Black things. Might feed on a body while it was helpless. Kifish life, active in jump, when they lay inert and unable to move, to feel pain. Might wake up with fingers gone. Bleed to death. Gnawed to a rack of bones, aswarm with slinking vermin. A siren went.
"We're going," Khym mumbled against her shoulder. She grabbed him and held tight. Trust their lives to Tauran. And her programming and the Nav-comp, and the lock on that door.
"Last jump," Hilfy murmured, in her bunk beside Haral's and Tirun’s and Geran's, down in crew quarters. Two beds were empty. Chur's and Tully's. She clenched her claws into the mattress, counting breaths. Tully had stayed topside with Chur. She had been shocked when Geran showed up to join them. But: "I got to work otherside," Geran had said. As if she had turned all emotion off. Their lives and more than their lives rode on Geran, otherside. That was true. And Geran came down to rest with them, face cold and set, leaving her sister to Tully's care a second time. "He's good with her," Geran had said. "She wanted him."
And sent you away? Perhaps Chur had done that. Gods knew what Chur's condition was. Geran kept her mouth shut.
"How is she?" Haral had the nerve to ask. The same question. Forever the same question, as if it was going to have some better answer.
"Holding," Geran said. "Holding." No optimism. Geran had stayed up there a long time and come down at the last moment of stability, with the alarms ringing.
"She able to eat?" Tirun was merciless. Trod right in where even Haral did not dare.
Long silence out of Geran. Then: "Yeah. Did pretty well." In a flat and hopeless voice.
Last jump.
"I programmed that son to take us right in close to Anuurn," Haral said between her teeth. "Forty-five and eight by six. Lay you odds we get it inside point five."
"We'll string it a bit," Tirun said, all matter-of-fact calculating the drag and push of entering and already-arrived ships on the gravity slope. Deformation calc. Keeping the mind busy.
It was Geran and Chur who always laid the bets. Even that was offkey. Geran refused to take the bait. She remained in dire silence. It was not money Tirun and Haral were betting. It was drinks in the nearest bar.
Hilfy stared at the overhead. Terrified.
We're not going to make it, we're not going to make it, we're too few and the kif too many, we can't push them. Sikkukkut's ships are a throwaway-we're all throwaways.
What's a kif care, how many ships he loses?
Cheap annoyance to his enemies.
And we were pushing him too hard.
"Otherside," Pyanfar murmured, "we got to move. We'll run stable right after the first cycle-down. You got to count. First pulse, then get up and go even if we got an alarm going. I don't know if Tauran's going to call us. I don't trust that."