section 12: hire of vessel;
section 22: illegal cargo;
section 23: illegal arms;
section 24: discharge of arms;
section 25: actions in breach of treaty law;
section 30...
She looked up as Khym left on his errand. "They missed the illegal system entry."
Haral gave a short, dry laugh and sat down. The Pride shuddered to operations aft, and the humor died a rapid death.
"We answer that?"
"Fills the time." She drew a deep breath. "Sleep, rest, plot course. We take for granted they'll get us out of here."
Haral's eyes drifted to the clock. Hers too, irresistibly.
"Tully," Hilfy murmured. The Gforce kept on. Her nose bubbled with every breath; some blood vessel had popped inside, adding misery upon misery. Her hurts throbbed, and might be pouring blood, but she could not tell and the cocooning blanket would soak it up.
Tully was still out. She talked to him periodically, in the chance he should have waked, to let him know one friend was with him. But he did not respond. Possibly they had taped a drug patch to him to keep him under. Perhaps he had just failed to come to. Instincts wanted to call for help and other instincts remembered what would come and told her to keep her mouth shut and let him go if he could.
They were headed for jump. And if he were awake he would be terrified.
So was she, when she let her attention wander to herself. When she did that she hoped there was a ship or two chasing them that would let off an unexpected shot before they got to jump, and solve their problems at one stroke.
Think of anything but the place where they were going.
Think of Pyanfar, who was likely taking the station authorities apart and telling them what to do about it, which thought gave her a surge of hope; and Haral — she pictured Haral sitting in that chair whose upholstery she had worn out and turning round just so, with that unflappable calm that never broke, not even when in her first tour she had made a dangerous mistake.
Want to fix that? Haral would say.
O gods, she wished she could.
The thrust died of a sudden, just died, in one stomach-lurching shift to inertial.
Prep for jump.
"Harukk's left," Tirun said, when the word came in. "That's 43 minutes light, station-center.
Pursuit ship relayed image. Jumped. . about an hour and fifteen ago."
Timelag, Tirun meant: reporting time was in that, what ship scan could pick up and relay, beating the beacon report by a few minutes.
Pyanfar nodded, kept working on the course plottings, a great deal of it futile until they had the readout on the new rig. When it got finished.
When.
"That's affirmative on Mkks vector."
"Huh." Her hands shook. She flexed her claws out and in and powered the chair about, taking a look at the work aft, which their dome camera was fixed on. She flinched inwardly at the sight, The Pride stripped of her familiar outlines. There was a new unit moving in. They had the transmissions from the pusher. And getting ship and tail unit joined was only the roughest beginning of the matter, a matter of preparing disconnect-ravaged surfaces for new welds. Hard-suited workers showed like sparks in the working floods, like a swarm of insects where they had backed off for that unit's arrival. Service-corn frequency was never silent, crackling with chiso, the mahen patois that bridged their scores of languages, easier than trade-tongue for mahendo'sat.
"I'm going to get some rest," she said, for the smothering weight of all of it came down at once, and getting herself out of the chair and down the corridor loomed as a major undertaking.
"Call Haral up when you have to."
"Aye," Tirun said. Not an expression, not a question what they were going to do or how.
She appreciated that.
Time did twists now. In one fashion she could relax, because for the next stationside several weeks Harukk and its company were in the between, in the compression of hyper-light, where everything was in suspension and nothing would start again until the Mkks gravity well took hold. Two weeks at least, in which everything was stopped. No pain. No fear. Nothing, til they came out again.
But Tully needed drugs for that gravity-drop, needed them like stsho needed them. Perhaps kif knew this. Perhaps they cared to keep him sane.
Better, perhaps, if he was not.
She waked, suddenly, caught at the edge of the sleeping-bowl and realized she was not falling, despite the thumping of her heart. She rolled and looked at the clock and punched the lights on and the com connection. The hammering was silent. That had waked her.
"Bridge, gods rot it, it's 0400!"
"Aye, captain." Haral's voice. "Nothing's going on. Thought we'd let you sleep."
"Uhhhnn." She leaned her elbow on the bed-edge. "That tail set?"
"They're welding now."
"They're not going to make that deadline."
"They've got techs working on the boards already. They're pushing it."
"Gods." She let her head down on her arm, feeling as if a wall had come down on her yesterday and some of the bricks still lay there. Lifted it again. "How's Chur?"
"Geran called, says she's doing all right. They both got a little sleep."
"Huh. Good."
"Got a call from Vigilance. They got our paper. Ehrran's chewing sticks."
"Good."
"Got a pot of something fixed in galley."
Her stomach rebelled. "Fine." She passed a hand over her face, rubbing her eyes. "I'm coming." She punched the com off, rolled out and sat on the bed edge trying to convince her legs to work.
Gods, Hilfy. Tully. That settled back on her shoulders. There was the packet in the security bin. There was Tt'om'm'mu's writhing shape in its violet glow and the mahendo'sat, together against the glass (don't ask about the knnn) and mahendo'sat making vital connections on her ship, when mahendo'sat incompetency had let kif do as they pleased.
Incompetent? Kshshti stationmaster, and no better than that?
Suspicions had tramped her subconscious half the night, rose up in memories of dreams of a kif in the shadows of that room. Of delicate connections in the column links, some mahen technician carefully making a sequence of mistakes that would send false readout to the boards. Gods, what if-
A body could go crazy on what-ifs. Like treachery from Goldtooth from the start. Like Vigilance being in the right — for hani interests. Like Chanur on the wrong side of matters and about to become expendable in some mahen intrigue.
Or traitorous.
She got up, showered, dressed in a subdued way, a pair of old breeches she saved for rough work. No earrings but the plain ones, such as any spacer wore.
Khym had done much the same, in a pair of silk breeches that had seen the Meetpoint riot and would never be the same. He met her in the galley with gfi and a dish of something overspiced-not good at cookery either. But the job got done and the stuff was far from fatal.
"Good," she said, to please him, and coupled with that was the ugly thought that nothing mattered much, beyond Mkks. Tomorrow. Their tomorrow, and their next tomorrow, when they would come out the other side of jump.
How much time-gain for a hunter-ship like Harukk and its ilk? Days faster than The Pride at absolute best. Harukk would be in port at Mkks as much as a week by the time their day-after-tomorrow came, and they spent time working up to dock at Mkks, and all the attendant nonsense. If they got that far.
She shivered, swallowed an overspiced last mouthful and washed it down with gfi. Her ears kept going down despite herself. She pricked them up. Looked Khym's way. "There's a procedures list in comp," she said to him. "Checklist."