The Kif Strike Back

The Kif Strike Back by Caroline J. Cherryh

Map of Compact Space

In Our Last Episode… (As told in: The Pride of Chanur and Chanur's Venture .)

A kifish prince named Akkukkak acquired a prize and an unprecedented opportunity: an alien ship and crew fell into his hands—promising him new hunting-grounds for the kif and a new species to prey on. All he had to do was to find out where the ship came from and how powerful the aliens might be.

But the last surviving alien escaped him onto the docks at Meetpoint, and ran onto the hani ship The Pride of Chanur.

That was how Pyanfar Chanur met Tully the human; and how the ancient Chanur clan ended up in a fight hani would ordinarily have avoided.

It ended in a full-scale shootout at Gaohn Station in the hani home system, when Akkukkak occupied Gaohn. Chanur clan and a couple of mahendo'sat hunter-captains named Goldtooth and Jik joined forces to defeat the kif.

Akkukkak perished in that battle—or at least made an unwilling exit in the company of a species called the knnn, methane-breathers of bizarre mentality.

Tully went back to human space. Pyanfar Chanur hoped then that there would be trade forthcoming. She anticipated a whole new era of hani prosperity with Chanur clan getting rich.

But she was quickly betrayed, first by the stsho who owned Meetpoint and who barred her from that critical trading, station— and thereby from access to humanity; then by her mahendo'sat partners, who went off and dealt with the humans on their own; and finally by her own kind, because a good many hani clans saw Chanur clan as a threat to their own power and were all too glad to see it impoverished.

In hani eyes, Pyanfar Chanur had done a heinous thing in bringing aliens to Gaohn: hani had been brought into space by the mahendo'sat and always resented the debt. Mahendo'sat had taken their direct influence off the hani home world of Anuurn, but hani never quite trusted them; they liked kif far less, distrusted the stsho, and wished not even to contemplate the knnn—let alone the prospect of non-Compact aliens like humans, all of which Pyanfar Chanur had brought into the very heart of hani civilization.

More, she had grown foreign. When a hani lord is defeated in challenge, he dies; but Pyanfar intervened when her son supplanted her husband: she took her husband offworld where no hani male had ever been permitted, and declared him part of The Pride's crew. Moreover, Kohan, lord of Chanur, acquiesced in her action, a circumstance which occasioned ribald jokes at Chanur's expense and further damaged Chanur's credit among hani.

So for two years The Pride of Chanur and other Chanur ships made small runs and barely kept operating, sinking deeper and deeper into financial ruin.

Constantly Pyanfar renewed her applications for Meetpoint access; but she lacked money for the bribes necessary to deal with the stsho, she had no help from the mahendo'sat, not a whiff of human trade, and there seemed no hope for Chanur's fortunes.

But unexpectedly and for no reason she could fathom, the stsho sent word her application was approved: The Pride turned toward Meetpoint with the last large cargo Chanur could scrape together.

Once docked, Pyanfar headed immediately for the offices Stle stles stlen, stationmaster of Meetpoint, to sign the necessary documents and reinstate her trading license.  She was accosted on dockside by Goldtooth, who dragged her aboard his ship, Mahijiru, and brought her face to face with Tully—-back in Compact space and at a station which would erupt  in xenophobic riot if it knew a human was present

Now Pyanfar Chanur was a hani of considerable nerve, but this was more than she could bear—until Goldtooth began naming advantages to the deal, like human trade, and money, and alliance—and until a small quiet alarm started going off In her skull telling her just who had gotten those papers cleared, and how fast it all might collapse if she refused Goldtooth's deal.

She took it; and Tully; and a packet of papers; and went buck to break the news to her crew.

Hut kif on the station arranged a riot to cover their attempt  to snatch Tully from her custody. Goldtooth fled the docks; she and her crew ended up billed for damages—which she charged to the mahendo'sat government, using the papers Goldtooth had left her. Stle stles stlen was mollified—for the moment, so well-disposed, in fact, that this avowed friend of the mahendo'sat gave her one direct warning: don't trust Goldtooth.

The kif also approached Pyanfar with two direct offers: one, to buy Tully from her and, two, to ally themselves with her against a certain kif who had a bounty on her head.

It was certainly tempting. Money enough to solve their problems. A way out of their dilemma. A possible peace with the kif.

But she turned it down, dumped her precious cargo, and pulled out of Meetpoint as rapidly as she could with Tully aboard—because her credit with Stle stles stlen hung upon a credit authorization from the mahendo'sat—and that was only valid if she played her role as Goldtooth's courier. Kif offers or not, she had never dealt with kif and never wished to; Goldtooth, moreover, had her trapped—and Goldtooth had run, heading deep into stsho space with kifish hunters on his tail, some of whom were interested in her.

Then she learned that getting Tully and his message to the mahen regional capital was only part of it—

A knnn tracked them out of Meetpoint. That was no good news. Rumors of what she was carrying had evidently spread to methane-side. Knnn, so alien no one could talk to them, so technologically advanced no one could fight them—existed inside the Compact and outside the law. They might take exception to any move at any moment and kill a ship; and no one would do a thing about it—because no one could talk to them. It was a monumental achievement that the serpentine tc'a had once upon a time gotten the knnn to understand the concept of trade: so nowadays knnn simply contacted a station, rushed onto its methane-dock and deposited whatever they liked, grabbed whatever they wanted and left. This was an improvement over their former behavior, in which they simply looted and left. Or took a ship apart.

And Tully, when questioned, avowed that humans were late getting back to Compact space because their ships had been stopped. Someone was conducting piracy against human ships in human space, and kif was the automatic assumption. The message and the mission seemed to have to do with a mahen determination to push through a regular, patrollable route that would bring humans to Compact space—and incidentally right past their old enemies the kif. All this made sense, and Pyanfar was averse to nothing that bothered the kif.

But Tully handed her his own suspicions—that it was not kif which had raided them: it was knnn, and humans had firedon knnn ships.

Pyanfar was horrified.

If Tully was right, they had a potential knnn target aboard their ship. They were carrying a message which involved knnn affairs, either one of which was about as welcome as a ticking bomb. If the knnn moved on them they were flatly done for. Moreover, the kif who was hunting them had seized the route that led most directly to the mahen capital and they had to reroute to the border station of Kshshti—far from a safe place to have a prize like Tully, a place close to kif territory and frequented by the methane breathers.

As if they needed more trouble, they had picked up another pursuer. A hani government ship captained by one Rhif Ehrran was out hunting a hani renegade named Tahar. This Tahar had sided with the kif at the battle of Gaohn, and was a well-known outlaw, said to be operating as a pirate in the vicinity of Kefk and Meetpoint. But The Pride of Chanur turned up under Rhif Ehrran's nose, trafficking with mahendo'sat and kif—and this policewoman of the han diverted herself from one quarry to another potential traitor. Rhif Ehrran's political patrons would be far happier to see the demise of Chanur than that of a mere pirate already powerless in hani affairs. So priorities were revised. Rhif Ehrran learned, probably from Stle stles stlen, that Chanur had Tully aboard— and that Chanur was in the employ of a foreign government; and Rhif Ehrran saw a chance to ruin Chanur once for all.