“Yes, captain,” Tirun breathed, and scurried off, ears back, up the service ramp beside the cargo belt.
Pyanfar cast a second look at the double-stacked canisters in turning. No kif in sight. Haste, she wished Tirun, hurry it. It was a quick trip inside to pull the trade items from the automated delivery. Tirun came back with the boxes under one arm and set out directly in the kind of reasonable haste she might use on her captain’s order.
“Huh.” Pyanfar turned again and looked toward the shadow.
There. By the canisters after all. A kif stood there, tall and black-robed, with a long prominent snout and hunched stature. Pyanfar stared at it directly — waved to it with energetic and sarcastic camaraderie as she started toward it.
It stepped at once back into the shelter of the canisters and the shadows. Pyanfar drew a great breath, flexed her claws and kept walking, round the curve of the canister stacks and softly — face to face with the towering kif. The kif looked down on her with its red-rimmed dark eyes and longnosed face and its dusty black robes like the robes of all other kif, of one tone with the gray skin… a bit of shadow come to life. “Be off,” she told it. “I’ll have no canister-mixing. I’m onto your tricks.”
“Something of ours has been stolen.”
She laughed, helped by sheer surprise. “Something of yours stolen, master thief? That’s a wonder to tell at home.”
“Best it find its way back to us. Best it should, captain.”
She laid back her ears and grinned, which was not friendliness.
“Where is your crewwoman going with those boxes?” the kif asked.
She said nothing. Extruded claws.
“It would not be, Captain, that you’ve somehow found that lost item.”
“What, lost, now?”
“Lost and found again, I think.”
“What ship are you, kif?”
“If you were as clever as you imagine you are, captain, you would know.”
“I like to know who I’m talking to. Even among kif. I’ll reckon you know my name, skulking about out here. What’s yours?”
“Akukkakk is mine, Chanur captain. Pyanfar Chanur. Yes, we know you. Know you well, captain. We have become interested in you… thief.”
“Oh. Akukkakk of what ship?” Her vision sharpened on the kif, whose robes were marginally finer than usual, whose bearing had precious little kifish stoop in dealing with shorter species, that hunch of shoulders and thrusting forward of the head. This one looked at her the long way, from all its height. “I’d like to know you as well, kif.”
“You will, hani. — No. A last chance. We will redeem this prize you’ve found. I will make you that offer.”
Her mustache-hairs drew down, as at some offensive aroma. “Interesting if I had this item. Is it round or flat, this strayed object? Or did one of your own crew rob you, kif captain?”
“You know its shape, since you have it. Give it up, and be paid. Or don’t — and be paid, hani, be paid then too.”
“Describe this item to me.”
“For its safe return — gold, ten bars of gold, fine. Contrive your own descriptions.”
“I shall bear it in mind, kif, should I find something unusual and kif-smelling. But so far nothing.”
“Dangerous, hani.”
“What ship, kif?”
“Hinukku.”
“I’ll remember your offer. Indeed I will, master thief.”
The kif said nothing more. Towered erect and silent. She aimed a dry spitting toward its feet and walked off, slow swagger.
Hinukku, indeed. A whole new kind of trouble, the mahendo’sat had said, and this surly kif or another might have seen… or talked to those who had seen. Gold, they offered. Kif… offered ransom; and no common kif, either, not that one. She walked with a prickling between her shoulder blades and a multiplying apprehension for Tirun, who was now a small figure walking off along the upcurving docks. No hope that the station authorities would do anything to prevent a murder… not one between kif and hani. The stsho’s neutrality consisted in retreat, and their law in arbitrating after the fact.
Stsho ships were the most common victims of marauding kif, and still kif docked unchecked at Meetpoint. Madness. A bristling ran up her back and her ears flicked, jingling the rings. Hani might deal with the kif and teach them a lesson, but there was no profit in it, not until moments like this one. Divert every hani ship from profitable trade to kif-hunting? Madness too… until it was The Pride in question.
“Pack it up out here,” she told her remaining crew when she reached them. “Get those last cans on and shut it down. Get everything ready to break dock. I’m going to call Tirun back here. It’s worse than I thought.”
“I’ll go after her,” Haral said.
“Do as I say, cousin — and keep Hilfy out of it.”
Haral fell back. Pyanfar started off down the dock — old habit, not to run; a reserve of pride, of caution, of some instinct either good or ill. Still she did not run in front of witnesses. She widened her strides until some bystanders — stsho — did notice, and stared. She gained on Tirun. Almost, almost within convenient shouting distance of Tirun, and still a far, naked distance up the dock’s upcurving course to reach Handur’s Voyager. Hinukku sat at dock for Tirun to pass before she should come to the hani ship. But the mahendo’sat vessel Mahijiru was docked before that, if only Tirun handled that extraneous errand on the way, the logical thing to do with a heavy load under one arm. Surely it was the logical thing, even considering the urgency of the other message.
Ah. Tirun did stop at the mahendo’sat berth. Pyanfar breathed a gasp of relief, broke her own rule at the last moment and sprinted behind some canisters, strode right into the gathering which had begun to close about Tirun. She clapped a startled mahendo’sat spectator on the arm, pulled it about and thrust her way through to Tirun, grabbed her arm without ceremony. “Trouble. Let’s go, cousin.”
“Captain,” Goldtooth exclaimed from her right. “You come back make new bigger deal?”
“Never mind. The tools are a gift. Come on, Tirun.”
“Captain,” Tirun began, bewildered, being dragged back through the gathering of mahendo’sat. Mahendo’sat gave way before them, their captain still following them with confused chatter about welders and pearls.
Kif. A black-clad half ring of them appeared suddenly on the outskirts of the swirl of dark-furred mahendo’sat. Pyanfar had Tirun’s wrist and pulled her forward. “Look out!” Tirun cried suddenly: one of the kif had pulled a gun from beneath its robe. “Go!” Pyanfar yelled, and they dived back among cursing and screaming mahendo’sat, out again through a melee of kif who had circled behind the canisters. Fire popped after them. Pyanfar bowled over a kif in their path with a strike that should snap vertebrae and did not break stride to find out. Tirun ran beside her; they sprinted with fire popping smoke curls off the deck plates ahead of them.
Suddenly a shot came from the right hand. Tirun yelped and stumbled, limping wildly. More kif along the dockfront offices, one very tall and familiar. Akukkakk, with friends. “Earless bastard!” Pyanfar shouted, grabbed Tirun afresh and kept going, dragged her behind the canisters of another mahendo’sat ship in a hail of laser pops and the reek of burned plastic. Tirun sagged in shock — a curse and a jerk on the arm got her running again, desperately: the burn ruptured and bled. They darted an open space, having no choice: shrill harooing rang out behind and on the right, kif on the hunt.