She heard them too, far down the dock. She sank down by him, pried his hand from his arm and grimaced at the wound the dim light showed, black edged and bleeding hard. She grabbed the tail of his shirt and tore a wide strip of cloth off, pressed it tight and put his hand on it, ripped another strip off to tie it with.
"Easy," she breathed, senseless chatter to keep him from panic. "Easy, you're all right, all right, hear?"
He slumped back against the wall, his face gone to waxen color. The hand of the wounded arm shook and the tremor spread to the rest of him as he began to go into shock. But he listened, his eyes on her whenever she looked.
"Listen," she said, "listen, station's onto it now. And The Pride — they'll have heard by now.
The captain's doing something, you can bet she'll get us help — Pyanfar, understand?"
"Pyanfar come."
"Bet on it. All right, huh?" She got the bandage around his arm, put his hand on it to hold that.
She snugged the knot tight and he mumbled something in human, language. No translator. The translator-tape — in the bundle of clothes. With the papers. Back at the wreck. With Chur.
"Hilfy-" He stiffened, eyes fixed toward the exit of the alley. She turned her head.
Shadows moved in that red-dyed smoke, paused and conversed outside, a gathering of black robes, tall, stoop-shouldered silhouettes.
Tully edged aside, out of the light the door cast. She moved too, as carefully as she could, as far as Tully did, and put her arms about him to hide his pallor with her own redbrown hide as much as she could within the shadows. She felt Tully shivering; felt her own stomach knotted up when she recalled kif eyesight.
They were night-hunters by preference; and Tully — white shirt, pale hair, paler skin-
She kept her arms clenched about him.
And saw that conversation outside their refuge break up, the kif start to move.
One stopped and looked their way.
"Open that gods-rotted door!" Pyanfar yelled, and used the rifle butt on the guardroom spex, so a scared mahendo'sat in the section-control yelled back threats from the other side. "It's clear from the Personage!" she yelled. "Open that section-seal!"
"Au-to-matic," the yell came back through the com-transfer, in mangled pidgin. Mahens station. Half the personnel never managed fluency in pidgin.
"Personage!" she yelled back in mahen Standard.
Gibberish came back. This one spoke dialect.
Black-robed shadows filled the alleyway, dark, featureless, except for the wan light of the bulb in the low ceiling of the door recess and Hilfy gathered herself to her feet. Tully struggled and she helped him by his good arm to give him that chance at least.
"Run if you can," she said in a low voice, thinking perhaps she could break a hole for him. But he knew so few words. He pressed closer to her as the kif gave them less room. He would try to fight-blunt-fingered, without any advantage, without even speed to outrun a kif. And it was Tully they wanted: alive. She had no doubt of that. "Got claws," she said beneath her breath. "You don't. Run, understand?"
The kif moved closer, keeping their circle. "We'll not hurt you," one said. "You're in the wrong place, young hani. Certainly you are. If you had a gun you would have used it, would you not? But we aren't your enemies."
"Who?" She perceived the origin of the voice: the speaker stood out among the rest, taller, finer-robed, and she guessed the name as she edged into Tully, trying to keep open space about them as the kif moved and shifted.
"Sikkukkut. From Meetpoint. You remember me, young Chanur. I have no wish to hurt you, either one. And there are far too many of us. Come, be reasonable."
The kif moved, all of them at once. "Run!" she yelled at Tully, spun and swung and kept swinging as her claws carried a kif headon into the wall. "Run, for gods sakes, run-"
Black cloth obscured her vision, cleared as Tully pulled one off her, and she rattled that one's brains.
But kif claws pulled Tully by the shoulder, and grabbed him by the arm.
"Gods blast!" she cried qnd tried to get that one off him, but two kif got her arms and a kifish arm came hard about her throat.
The door thundered back on chaos, the flash of red lights on smoke the fans refused, the sweep of floods, the lunatic strobe-flash. "Gods," Geran muttered. The center of the trouble was evident, a knot of flashing white lights stabbing into the smoke far up the dockside. Pyanfar started running first, rifle in both hands — "No, wait-" from the mahen official who had gotten the door open. "Hani, got wait! — " But Geran was pace for pace with her and gaining — fleet-footed Geran, whose sister Chur was in that mess.
A laser shot streaked the smoke. Pyanfar brought the rifle up and fired on the run. Geran did the same, not with particular skill, but with dispatch; and more fire came behind her, with the mahen official screaming for them to take cover.
Khym shouted, something: the heights distorted it, twisted it into a blood-crazed roar. A volley of smoke-bounced shots came back from kif near the wreckage and Pyanfar dived aside, remembered Khym behind her with one heart-stopping fright and rolled to cover his blind rush.
But he came skidding in beside her, gasping, with the pistol quickly braced up hunting targets as Tirun reached their cover. Geran and Haral had tucked in with the mahendo'sat next a stack of cans: shots spattered the plastic and those three ducked.
Then a flurry opened up from the other side, and for a moment the pop of projectile fire rang everywhere off the overhead: mahen voices yowled distant satisfaction and she put her head out, sprawled back again because shots were wild and going a dozen ways about the wreckage and up the dock to their position.
Geran got off three quick shots from her side, Haral another burst. "That's mahen fire!" Haral yelled, seeing something from her vantage; and Pyanfar ventured another look, saw fire going the other way and pelted out of cover the last long sprint for the wreckage, from which cover a steady spatter of fire went out aimed the other way.
Mahe braced in among the tangle started at their arrival, and hani among them turned about with backlaid ears. Ehrran.
Pyanfar slid in among them, grabbed an Ehrran shoulder and shook it as Geran arrived, and the rest of the crew. "Where's Chanur?" Pyanfar shouted into the Ehrran crewwoman's baeklaid ears.
"Where, gods rot you!"
The Ehrran pointed mutely to a hani lying on the deck and Pyanfar's heart lurched over as Geran scrambled that way, to her sister's side. "Where's the rest?" Pyanfar yelled, and a larger hani arm appeared from behind her and seized a fistful of Ehrran beard. "Where are they?" Khym shouted, and the Ehrran waved a frantic hand toward the dock at large.
"— Ran — they ran — Somewhere out there-" Pyanfar let go her grip with a shove and abandoned the Ehrran to get to Chur.
Chur was alive. They had propped her head off the deck and the wound that had spread blood all about was hard-sealed and glistening with plasm that stopped further bleeding. Geran bent over her, just holding her hand, looking more than scared.
"How is she?" Pyanfar asked.
"She hurts," Chur said for herself, past scarcely moving jaws. Her eyes were slitted. "Where's Hilfy-Tully?"
"We don't know. Where'd you lose them?"
A weak move of Chur's head. A try at pointing. "Got out," she said. The pointing was nowhere in particular. "Don't know."
Pyanfar looked round at the others who hovered near. "That packet. Tully had it in his hands.
Hunt the wreck."
"Got," Chur said thickly, reached feebly behind her head, delirious, Pyanfar thought, until she recognized the thing Chur's head was lying on. Chur tried to pull it. Tully's plastic sack.