"I'll meet you at Anuurn. We'll talk about this, Banny, over a cup or two."
"A cup or two! Good gods, Chanur!"
"Geran, Tirun, get those cans moving."
"Don't you turn your back on me."
"Ayhar, I haven't time."
"What's the hurry?" A new ham voice, silken, from her side: Ayhar crew's impudence, she thought, and turned on it with her mouth open and the beginnings of an oath.
Another captain stood there, her red-gold mane and beard in curling wisps of elegance; gold arm-band; gold belt; breeches of black silk unrelieved by any banding. Immune Clan color. Official of the han. "Rhif Ehrran," that one named herself, "captain, Ehrran's Vigilance. What's the trouble, Chanur?"
Her heart began slow, painful beats. Blood climbed to her ears and sank toward her heart.
"Private," she said in a quiet, controlled tone. "You'll excuse me, captain. I have an internal emergency."
"I'm in port on other business," the han agent said. "But you've almost topped it, ker
Chanur. You mind telling me what's going on?"
She could hand it all to the Ehrran, shove the whole thing over onto the han's representative in port.
Give Tully to her. To this. Young, by the gods young, ears un-nicked, bestowed with half a dozen rings. And cold as they came. Gods-rotted walking recorder from one of the public service clans, immune to challenging and theoretically nonpartisan.
"I'm on my way home," she said. "I'll take care of it."
Ehrran's nostrils widened and narrowed. "What did the kif give you, Chanur?"
A cold wind went down her back. Distantly she heard the crane whining away, lifting a can into place. "Dropped a ring," she said, "in the riot. Kif returned it." The lie disgusted her. So did the fear the Ehrran roused, and knew she roused. "This what the han's got to? Inquisitions? Gathering bad eggs?"
It scored. Ehrran's ears turned back, forward again. "You've about exited private territory, Chanur. You settle this mess. If there are repercussions with the stsho, I'll become involved. Hear me?"
"Clear." Breath was difficult. "Now you mind if I see to my business, captain?"
"You know," Ehrran said, "you're in deep. Take my advice. Drop off your passenger when you get back to Anuurn."
Her heart nearly stopped while Ehrran turned and walked away; but it was Khym Ehrran had meant. She realized that in half a breath more, and outrage nearly choked her. She glared at Banny Ayhar, just glared, with the reproach due someone who dragged the like of Ehrran in on a private quarrel.
"Not my doing," Ayhar said.
"In a mahen hell."
"I can't reason with you," Ayhar said, flung up her hands and stalked off. Stopped again, to cast a look and a word back. "Time you got out of it, Pyanfar Chanur. Time to pass it on before you ruin that brother of yours for good."
Pyanfar's mouth dropped. Distracted as she was she simply stared as Ayhar spun on her heel a second time and stalked off along the dock with her two crewwomen; and then it was too late to have said anything without yelling it impotently at a retreating Ayhar back.
The first can boomed up the cargo ramp into the cradle; Tirun and Geran kicked their own balky Loader around with expert swiftness, raised the slot's holding sling and snagged it into the moving ratchets that vanished into The Pride's actinic-lighted hold. The can ascended the ramp, while Chur, beside the crane operator on the loader, shouted at the aggrieved mahe, urging her to speed.
"Chur!" Pyanfar yelled, headed for the ramp-way and the tube beyond. Chur left off and scrambled after, leaving the docksiders to their jobs. Pyanfar jogged the length of The Pride's ramp and felt a stitch in her side as Chur came up beside her in the accessway.
A han agent on their case.
A chance to get rid of Tully into the keeping of that same agent and she had turned it down.
Gods. O gods.
They scrambled through the lock, headed down the short corridor to the lift, inside. The door hissed shut as Pyanfar hit the controls to start the car down, rim-outward of The Pride's passenger-ring.
"Got it?" Haral's voice came to them by com.
"Gods know," she said to the featureless com panel, forcing calm. "Keep an eye on those kif back there — hear me?"
"Looks as if the party's broken up for good out there."
"Huh." It was a small favor. She did not believe it.
"Aye," Haral agreed, and clicked out of contact. The lift slammed into the bottom of the rotation ring and took a sudden jolt afterward for the holds.
"Know which can?" Chur panted beside her, clinging to the rail.
"Gods, no. You think Goldtooth labeled the gods-rotted thing? Couldn't use the small cans, no. Couldn't consign it direct to us. Had to trust the stsho. Gods-rotted mahen lunatic."
The lift accelerated full out, lurched to a second stop and opened its door on a floodlit empty cavern of tracks below the operations platform where they stood. Their breaths frosted instantly.
Moisture in the hold's lately acquired air formed a thin frost on all the waiting cans and the machinery.
The cold of the deckplates burned bare feet. The gusting blasts of the ventilation system brought no appreciable relief to unprotected hani skin and nose linings.
"Hilfy?" Pyanfar shouted, leaning on the safety railing to look down into the dark.
Hilfy-Hilfy-Hilfy the echo came back in giant's tones.
"Aunt!" A figure in a padded cold-suit crouched far below the operations scaffold, a glimmer of white in the shadow of the first can to reach its cradle at hold's end. "Aunt, I can't get this cursed lid off! It's securitied!"
"Gods fry that bastard!" Pyanfar ignored the locker with the coldsuits and went thumping down the steps barefoot and barechested. The air burned her lungs, froze her ribs. She heard noise behind her, a locker-door rattle. "Get those suits!" she yelled at Chur, and her breath was white in the floodlight glare.
Another can locked through with a sibilance of pressurized air and a resounding impact with its receiving cradle as she came down beside the can-track rails that shone pewter-colored in the general dark. The incoming can rumbled past like a white plastic juggernaut and boomed into the cradle-lock as she arrived. Hilfy scrambled to the side of it and jerked the lever that secured the lid. Internal-conditions dials glowed bright and constant on the top-plate.
"Locked too," Hilfy said in despair, rising, her voice muffled by the cold-mask she wore, overwhelmed by the crash of another arriving can headed up the outside ramp. "That Goldtooth give us any key-code?"
"Gods know. The stsho might have it." Pyanfar shivered convulsively as Chur came pelting up with coldsuits and masks and thrust a set into her numb hands. She stared distractedly as the third can locked through, ignoring the coldsuit, thinking of stsho treachery the while the can rode the hydraulics down and jolted into the third cradle. She shouldered aside Hilfy's move to check its lid and tried it herself. Locked too.
"Gods-rotted luck," Pyanfar said, rising, fumbling the slot-apertured cold-mask into place with fingers that refused to set their claws. The pads of her feet felt the burn of the decking plates. She stared helplessly at Chur, who had gotten her own mask on and held out the cold suit she had dropped. "It has to be the last one, that's all."
"What if there is a key?" Hilfy asked. Her teeth chattered fit to crack, despite the cold-suit.
"And the stsho have got it.
"Number four's coming in," Chur yelled over the rising thunder of machinery, and the fourth can locked through and rumbled down the track toward them as they scrambled to meet it. Chur got to it first, crouched down and tugged fruitlessly at the lid. "It's locked too."
"Gods and thunders!" Pyanfar yanked her pistol from her pocket and fired past Chur into the lid mechanism, stalked down the row and fired at the next and the next and the next. Maintenance lights on the lids went out. The smoke of burned plastics curled up in the actinic light, mingling gray with their breaths. "Get torches if you have to! Get those lids off."
"It's coming!" Chur cried, tugging at the smoking lid, and Hilfy dived to help, past Pyanfar's own numb-footed advance on the can.
It was fish, a flood of dried fish, that sent its stench into the supercooled air; the next one, dried fruit. The third-
"This is it," said Chur, pawing past the cascade of stinking warm shishu fruit, for a second white lid showed through the spilling cargo. She reached it on her knees and wrenched the lock lever down, tugged with all her might at the lid and tumbled back as it came free.
A form like some insect in its cell lifted a pale, breather-masked face in a cloud of steam as the inner air met outer. With a muffled cry Tully began to writhe outward, in a frosting stench of heat and human sweat that almost overcame the fish and fruit. Chur helped, kneeling — seized Tully's white-shirted shoulders and dragged him free in a tumble and slide of fruit, in a cloud of breath and steam from his overheated body.
He gasped, struggled wild-eyed to his feet, hands flailing.
"Tully," Pyanfar said-he was blinded by the lights, she thought; he looked half-drowned in the heat that narrow confinement had contained. "Tully, it's us, it's us, for the gods' sake."
"Pyanfar," he cried and threw himself into her arms. "Pyanfar!" — losing breather-cylinder and hoses and stumbling through the stinking fruit in which he had slid outward. He pressed his steaming self against her, his heartbeat so violent she felt it through his ribs.
"Easy," she said. Hunter instincts. Her heart tried to synch with his. "Careful, Tully." She kept her ears up all the same, carefully disengaged his shaking arms and pushed him back. His eyes were wild with fear. "You safe. Hear? Safe, Tully. On The Pride."
He babbled in his own tongue. Water poured from his eyes and froze on his face. "Got," he said. "Got-" and abandoned her to dive back into the can, pawing amid the tangle of discarded breathing apparatus and trampled fruit, to stagger up again with a large packet in his grasp. He held it out to her, wobbling as she took it from his hands.
"Goldtooth," he said, and something else that did not get past his chattering teeth.
"He's going to freeze," said Chur, throwing one of the two coldsuits about his thinly clad, hairless shoulders.
And perhaps he only then recognized the others, for he cried "Chur," and staggered a step to fling his arms about her, shivering visibly as the cold disspated the last of his heat. "Hilfy!" — as Hilfy unmasked herself; he reached for her.
But his legs went and he slid almost to the ground before Hilfy and Chur could save him.
"Hil-fy!" — foolishly, from a sitting posture on the burning cold deck, with Hilfy's arms about him.
"Get him up," Pyanfar snapped at them both. "Get him to the lift, for the gods' sakes!" — waving them that way with the packet in one hand, for her feet were freezing and Tully's wet clothes were stiffening, with crystals in his hair.
He made shift to walk when they had pulled him up. He hung on them the long, long course down the tracks to the platform stairs, and labored the metal steps with them supporting him on either side and Pyanfar shoving from behind. He faltered at the top, recovered as they heaved him up with his arms across their shoulders.
"Hang on." Pyanfar reached the lift and punched the button for them, held the door open on that blast of seeming heat and the glare of light while Hilfy and Chur between them dragged Tully in and held him on his feet. A dull white frost formed on the lift surfaces.
"Paper," Tully mumbled, lifting his head.
"Got." She closed the door after her and sent the car hurtling forward. Chur held Tully tight against her body and Hilfy pressed close on the other side as the car reached the forward limit and started its topside climb.
"Get him to sickbay," Pyanfar said as it went. "Get him warm and for the gods' sakes get him washed."
That brought a lifting of Tully's head. His beautiful golden mane was wet with melting frost and clung to the naked skin about his eyes. He stank abysmally of fish and fruit and scared human.
"Friend," he said. It was his best word. He offered that, and that frightened look. In distress Pyanfar reached out and patted his shoulder with claws all pulled.
"Sure. Friend."
Gods, not to be sure of them. And to have come this far on hope alone.
"Got — Pyanfar, got-" His teeth chattered, no improvement to his diction. "Come see you —
Need — need-''
The lift stopped on lower decks, hissed its doors open. "Take care of him," Pyanfar said, standing firm to stay aboard. "And do it fast. I want you on other business. Hear?"
"Aye," said Chur.
"Pyanfar!" Tully cried as they dragged him out. "Paper-"
"I hear," she said, and held the packet as the door closed between them. "I got it," she muttered to herself; and remembering another matter, put a hand into her pocket and felt the ring beside the gun barrel, a ring made for fingers, not for ears. Only mahendo'sat and stsho wore finger rings, having no under-finger tendon to their non-retractile claws; having one more joint than hani had. Or kif. Not to mention t'ca and knnn and chi.
A human hand was mahe-like. Tully had been in kifish hands once. They had gotten him from them. And gods knew he would not forget it.
Gods-rotted Outsider. A few minutes dealing with him and she was shaking all over. He had a way of doing that to her.
"He's all right?" Haral asked as she arrived sore-footed on the bridge.
"Will be. Shaken. I don't blame him." She settled to her chair, filthy as she was, and curled her frost-singed feet out of contact with the floor. Haral, immaculate, had the diplomacy not to wrinkle her nose. "You hear that Ehrran business?"
"Some."
"Got ourselves one fat report going home, I'll bet. Tirun and Geran in?"
"They're dumping out that fish and fruit. Getting rid of the stuff. Spoiled cargo, we call it. Send it out as garbage."
"Huh." She leaned back into the chair, hooked a claw into the plastic seal of the packet and ripped it open.
"What's that?"
"Expensive," she said.
The fattish packet yielded several clips of papers, a trio of computer spools. She read labels and drew a deep breath at finding the document Goldtooth had given into Tully's hands — virtually indecipherable mahen scrawl, a printed signature, and hand-printed at the top: Repair authorization in crabbed Universal Block.
". . good repair. .", she made out. That the rest of it was unreadable gave her no comfort at all.
Another document, pages thick, swarming with neat humped type in alien alphabet. She flipped through the pages with further misgivings.
Human? She guessed as much.
The third document (typed):