She caught sight of him, shouldered back by Skkukuk as she entered the lift with Ikkhoitr's captain and Jik and Kesurinan and Tahar. "Tully!" she snarled, and he dived forward and made the door before it closed on the first group, leaving the others for a second lift, and gods only hope they ended up in the same place.
Herself and Jik and Tully and Skkukuk, with Tahar and the kifish captain and his lot: the lift let them out in Harukk's upper corridor, in a chill, damp closeness and the stink of ammonia and incense.
They'll die if we foul it up. All these people on Meetpoint. My crew. Us on this ship. How do you reason with a kif?
Kif waited for her at the other end, kif dressed in skintight suits and robes modified for freefall work.
Sodium-light glared and tinted gray-black skins, the glitter of weapons, of wet-surfaced eyes as they waited to welcome the hakkikt's guests.
In a hospitality both Jik and Tully had abundant cause to remember.
Chapter Seven
There were hazard lights blinking urgent alarm, and Harals voice protesting — "Captain-" — Plaintively, as if she had not heard the beeps and already begun to reach. There was perhaps some mercy in being human and drugged out of one's mind. .
"Got it," Pyanfar coughed, though her throat had gone to stone in the long slow leak of time past the instruments, in the inside out of jumpspace. "Location?" One went lethargic, grew fatally tranquil in that dizzy flow where one could do nothing, nothing but watch and take a subjective day moving a finger. There was an itch at the tip of her nose just as important as their collective lives. .
But the intellect knew what the will forgot. The mind was primed with a sequence of things she had waited two months to do. The right hand reached the control she had meant two months ago to reach and brought the field up while they still had power, long before they had gotten buoy signal. The eyes sought instruments, diverging lines that had to meet-
The fields of Mahn, yellow in the sun, the woods, the dappled shade. .
The vine outside the wall of Chanur, that branched like a river, from one great gnarled trunk; and generations of Chanur had climbed it, branch to branch to branch-
"We're on." That was Geran's mumble confirming destination. "We're in the jump range."
Location: need the vector.
"We're alive," Hilfy murmured. "We're going to make it, going to make it-"
— as if she were utterly surprised.
There it was, that red line trued right on.
"Huh." Pyanfar coughed her throat clear and blinked away the haze.
"Of course we did," Geran said. "Have any doubt, kid?"
There were safety procedures for a ship to follow when coming in from dust-ringed Urtur and they were not following them. They were coming into a system with C-charged dust in their company.
Some of it would slip the smaller field of their dump and go through Kshshti system like a hard-radiation storm.
"One more dump," she murmured, pleaded with the ship. "Stand by" — thinking of a ship she had seen die — of a ship which had had a vane shot to flinders, and jumped without a chance in a mahen hell of slowing down.
Nothing to do then but capsule the crew and hope-
She shoved the dump in and felt her eyes roll as the field cycled up. . come on, come on, ship, hold it-
More failure lights blinked and held steady. Branches on the wall. . "Got to be that Y unit," she muttered to Haral, to no one in particular, and had visions of that dying ship again.
None of that crew was alive now. Those the mahendo'sat had hauled down in their capsule and saved — they had died at Gaohn, standing off the kif.
She moved an arm and did a third dump, watching in blear-eyed fascination as the lines on the scopes crept together and merged like silken threads, red and blue, as The Pride dragged at the interface and let the bubble go.
Down again, and the wail of alarms calling her back to life.
"Still over mark," Haral muttered. "That's twenty."
"I know. We've got it, we've got it left with the mains." She shoved the jump drive off and sent The Pride into an axis roll, canceled G and threw the mains on to finish the job the drive had failed.
There was margin left. "Kif. Are there kif? Look alive back there."
"Scan's clear," Chur's voice returned. "Kshshti positive; got the beacon. Stand by course input."
Monitors changed priorities. The course change flashed in, very little off their present heading.
She put the bow down and trued up.
"That's luck," Haral said of the course they had been handed.
"Huh," she said. "That's priority for you." Rotational G picked up again as the vector change took effect. "Find out what we lost."
"Stand by," Tirun said.
There was long silence, while comp ran diagnostics under Tirun's hands.
"It didn't hold?" Khym's voice, sounding plaintive and a bit shaken. "Did we lose that vane again?"
"Didn't hold," Geran said. "But we're all right."
"Not leaving here real quick, are we?"
He was trying. And getting harder to deceive. Pyanfar swallowed hard, and took the damage summary as it came flickering to the screen. "We're all right," she heard Hilfy say, which was probably into the com, for Tully. "We're through. We just had trouble with that unit. Sit still down there."
"Blew two holes in final-backup," Pyanfar muttered to Haral, in conversation-tone.
"Gods," Haral said. That was all. And sent Kshshti system image her way, onto all the screens.
"Not much, this place."
"Huh."
It was not. A dull orange sun with only moons for company, moons and a station. Small mining, sufficient for its needs. Some trading. Mostly mahendo'sat maintained it because it would be someone's, situated as it was; and best it should be theirs, when it was a connection on a route straight for Maing Tol from Kefk, inside kif space. With a shipyard facility, thank the gods.
"Lot of traffic," Pyanfar muttered, picking up the com chatter. "Gods-rotted lot of traffic to be out here at this hole."
"Kita," Haral reminded her.
"Kita for sure. Word got spread uncommon fast, didn't it? Or we lost more time than we ought in that jump."
"Huuuhn." No comment. Not here, not now. Not with Khym on the bridge.
Twenty stars were The Pride's regular ports of call. Not Kshshti. It was not a port any hani sought.
"Nasty little place," Geran muttered from back along the counter. "Real nasty."
There was time. There was time for a great many things as The Pride came limping in toward Kshshti-
Time to hear the chatter of the station before their wavefront reached station and station's then-wave reached them: the chitter and wail of methane-breathers in confused conference, the clicking sounds of kif whose uncoded remarks were on ordinary kifish business, terse and uninfprmative. No hani voices. No sign of hani at all.
"Station answering," Hilfy said as that wave came in. The feed was routine, coldly businesslike transmission. It might have been any approach to a mahen station, less lively than some. "Queer quiet,"
Haral muttered. "I'd've expected a curse to a mahen hell and back again, the way we came in."
"Huh," Pyanfar said. "Bet you to a mahen hell all of this is set up from the start. We're expected and they're not rattling this thicket, no."
That got a look from Haral. Not a happy one.
So they glided closer and closer to Kshshti with the noise of methane-breathers whispering over com.
Rimstation. Border station. Kif claimed the star; mahendo'sat had built the station and held it with the tc'a and chi, whose mining had no particular profit. Nothing at Kshshti did. . except its nuisance value to kif ambitions across the line.