Hilfy was quick to the door. It whipped opened and Hilfy hung there, disheveled from bed and grimacing in the full light of the corridor. She had not paused for clothes.
Pyanfar walked in past her, waited while Hilfy brightened the interior lighting, and held up a restraining hand, that the brightening need not be permanent or full. It was a room Hilfy had made her own, a great deal of Chanur style in this cabin, more than in her own quarters, mementoes affixed to the walls, pictures of homeworld’s mountains and the broad plains of the Chanur holdings… the Holding itself, gold stone, shaded with vines. Pyanfar looked about her, and looked at Hilfy. “Briefly,” Pyanfar said, “I have to tell you a thing; and there’s nothing can be done about it, I’ll tell you that first. We’ve picked up signal from a Faha ship docked at station. They’re in the middle of the kif, and they fired a message off for station that I think they meant we should hear: noisy chatter. I think they know we’re out here and in what kind of trouble. But there’s the kif between us, and there’s no way we can do much for each other. You understand?”
Hilfy’s eyes had stopped flinching at the light. She stared, amber-rimed about the black, and her ears flattened and pricked up again with effort. For a young woman and roused naked out of sleep, she acquired a quiet dignity in getting her wits collected. “Do you know which ship, aunt?”
“Starchaser. That’s Lihan Faha in command.”
Hilfy nodded. The ears flinched, ringless. Her face stayed composed. “They’ll be in danger. Like Voyager. And they won’t know it. No one would expect that kind of attack.”
“Lihan’s no tyro, imp, believe it. We don’t play their hand; they don’t interfere in ours. Can’t. Nothing we can do out here.”
“We could throw them a warning and run.”
“I don’t take that as an option at the moment. We send it from distance and the kif will have it before Starchaser has a chance. And public defiance, involving Starchaser in our leaving — the kif would be obliged to react. Revenge is part of their mindset. You have to calculate that into it. No. Starchaser’s riding her own luck. I don’t plan to push it for her. So go back to bed, hear?”
Hilfy stood a moment without moving. Nodded after a moment, her dignity still about her.
“Good,” Pyanfar said tightly, and walked out. She heard the door close after her, and walked the upcurving corridor which led from Hilfy’s quarters to her own, across the main topside corridor and down a short distance.
So she might have cost Hilfy her sound sleep, and the meal she had eaten lay like lead at her own stomach; but Faha involvement in the hazard was not something for Hilfy to find out later, like a child, spared adult unpleasantnesses. Hilfy’s face stayed before her; the pager unit at her hip kept up its static babble, dying echoes of the message, occasional-spurts of closer transmission, but rarer and rarer. A stsho ship had come into the system. The kif disdained to harass it; it begged instructions of Urtur Station, anxious to scud in before the storm.
A lot of mahe in the system might have the same idea, miners who had already reckoned it time to head for port, getting themselves out of the way of the kif s hunt.
It was a vast system out there. Most of the ships in it were incapable of jump, insystem operators only. So far, everyone was keeping remarkably calm, even the hani at the eye of that storm.
Gods grant a great many ships pulled inward… and afforded the kif a harder target if they wanted to raid Station in search of one hani ship. That was one hope. Lihan Faha of Starchaser was too old, too wary to rush out to mismatched battle. Lihan would not expect stupidity of The Pride. The Faha would expect them to fend for themselves and above all not touch anything off prematurely. The Faha needed time: there was a chance that they could offload cargo and strip that ship down for speed, given time, shed mass without the need to lose a cargo. They would not expect help more than that.
That was logic speaking.
But it hurt.
IV
She sat and listened a time in her cabin, finally contacted Geran belowdecks and turned over the monitoring to her. “Faha,” was Geran’s only comment.
“Hilfy knows,” Pyanfar said.
“So,” Geran murmured. And then: “I’m on. I’ve got it.”
Pyanfar signed off and sighed heavily, sitting on the edge of her bed, arms on her knees — finally took a mild sedative and undressed and curled up in the bowlshaped bed for a precious while of oblivion, trying not to think of emergencies and contingencies and the horde of kif prowling about the system.
That did not work, but the sedative did. She went under like a stone into a pond and came out again startled by the alarm — but it was only the timer going off, and she lay in the bedclothes with her heart slowly stepping back down to normal.
“Any developments?” she asked lowerdeck op by com from her bedside, not even having crawled from beneath the sheets, but thrusting an arm out to push the bottom on the console. “Anything happened while I was off?”
“No, captain.” Haral’s voice answered her. A shift change had occurred in her off time. “The situation seems to be temporary stalemate. Station is broadcasting only operational chatter now. We aren’t getting much from the kif. Nothing alarming. We’d have waked you if there was news.”
So their orders ran. Interpretations of emergency varied; but Haral was the wisest head in the crew, the canniest. Pyanfar lay there staring at the ceiling a moment and finally decided she might take her time. There was nowhere to rush. The rib muscles she had strained in g force had stiffened. “What about systems check? Has anyone had time to get to that?”
“We’re still running the board, captain, but it looks good all the way. The blowout was absolutely clean and the recalibration was right almost to the hair.”
“Better luck than we deserve. What’s the Outsider up to?”
“Back at work at the keyboard. Chur and Geran are off now, and Tirun’s on, but I didn’t feel, by your leave, captain, that Tirun belonged in there with him in her condition, and I’ve had all I can do with visual checks on the separation readouts — again by your leave.”
“You were right.”
“He’s slept a bit. He hasn’t made any trouble… gods, he worked till he nearly dropped over, Chur said; and he’s back at it again this shift, shaky as he is. We fed him right away when he woke up, and he ate it all and went back to his drills, polite as you please. I’ve got his roomcom and his comp monitored from the op station, so we’ve at least got an ear toward him.”
“Huh.” Pyanfar ran a hand through her mane and scowled up at the brightening room light. The alarm had started the day cycle in the room. “Let the Outsider work; if it falls over, then let it rest. How’s Tirun making it?”
“Limping, sore, and working with the leg propped up. She’s still white around the nose.”
“I’m all right,” Tirun’s voice cut in, usurping the same mike.
“You go off,” Pyanfar said, “anytime you feel you ought to. We’re dead drifting, and someone else can take up the slack if those first checks are run. You see to it, Haral. Anything else I should know?”
“That’s the sum of it,” Haral said. “We’re all right so far.”
“Huh,” she said again, got out of the spring-held sheets and cut the com off, pulled on her black trousers and put on her belt, her bracelet, and her several earrings — shook the ear to settle them and gave her mane and beard a quick comb into order. Vanity be hanged. She left the cabin and paid a short visit to the galley, ate a solitary breakfast, feeling somewhat better. She turned the pager to the monitor channel in the meanwhile, listened to the chatter which was reaching them and found it much what Haral had said, a lull in events which in itself contained worrisome possibilities. By now the kif had surely figured out what had happened, and by now they would be hunting in stealth — hence the quiet. The Pride had undergone a great deal of lateral drift from their entry point, but if she were that kif captain, trying to reckon the arrival point of a cargoless fugitive on a jump almost too much for the ship… she would calculate a fringe area jump on a straight string from Meetpoint’s mass to that of Urtur. And that would fine the hunting zone down considerably, from the vast tracts of Urtur’s lenslike system — to a specific zone on the fringe, and the direction of systemic drift, and certain places where a ship seeking cover might move. Time was the other factor; time defined the segment of space in which they might logically be drifting, two points-within-which, which then might be fined down tighter and tighter.