“No,” said Haral. “Everything’s secure.”
“They’re thinking it over up there,” Pyanfar said.
“Aunt! 4/2!”
Turret was swiveling. Eye tracked to the number four screen. Energy washed over station’s rim: more chaff followed, larger debris.
“Captain, they hit station.” Haral’s voice was incredulous. “They fired.”
“Handur’s Voyager.” Pyanfar had the origin mapped on the station torus and made the connection. “O gods.” She hit repulse and sent them hurtling to station core shadow, tilted their nose with a second burst and cut in main thrust, shooting them nadir of station, nose for infinity. Pyanfar reached and uncapped a red switch, hit it, and The Pride rocked with explosion.
“What was that?” Hilfy’s voice. “Are we hit?”
“I just dumped our holds.” Pyanfar sucked air, an expansion of her nostrils. Her claws flexed out and in on the togglegrip. G was hauling at them badly. The Pride of Chanur was in full rout, having just altered their mass/drive ratio, stripped for running. “Haral, get us a course.”
“Working,” Haral said. Numbers started coming up on the comp screen at Pyanfar’s left.
“Going to have to find us a quiet spot.”
“Urtur’s just within singlejump range,” Haral said, “stripped as we are. Maybe.”
“Has to be.” Beyond Meetpoint in the other direction was stsho space, with a great scarcity of jump points to help them along, those masses by which The Pride or any other jumpship steered; and on other sides were kif regions; and knnn; and unexplored regions, uncharted, without jump coordinates. Jump blind into those and they would never come back again… anywhere known.
She livened another board, bringing up jump-graphs. Urtur. That was the way they had come in, two jumps and loaded — a very large system where mahendo’sat did a little mining, a little manufacture, and licensed others. They might make that distance in one jump now; kif were not following… yet. Did not have to follow. They could figure possible destinations by dumped mass and the logic of the situation. O my brother, she thought, wondering how she would face Kohan. He would be affected by this disgrace, this outrage of lost cargo, of flight while a hani ship perished stationbound and helpless. Kohan Chanur might be broken by it; it might tempt young males to challenge him. And if there were enough challenges, and often enough…
No. Not that kind of end for Chanur. There was no going home with that kind of news. Not until kif paid, until The Pride got things to rights again.
“Mark fifteen to jump point,” Haral said. “Captain, they’ll trace us, no question.”
“No question,” she said. Beyond Haral’s scarred face she caught sight of Hilfy’s, unmarred and scant-bearded — frightened and trying not to show it. Pyanfar opened allship: “Rig for jump.”
The alarm started, a slow wailing through the ship. The Pride leapt forward by her generation pulses, borrowed velocity at the interface, several wrenching flickers, whipped into the between. Pyanfar dug her claws in, decades accustomed to this, did that mental wrench which told lies to the inner ears, and kept her balance. Come on, she willed the ship, as if intent alone could take it that critical distance farther.
III
The Pride came in, sluggish, nightmare arrival, pulsed out and in again, a flickering of jump-distorted instruments which showed them far out on the Urtur range, not close enough to pick up more than an indication of a stellar mass.
Near miss. They had stretched it as far as it could be stretched. Pyanfar struggled to move in her cushion, fighting to aim the fingers of her hand, to shut down all scan, running lights, the weak locational and ID transmission, every emission from the ship, forgetting nothing in the mental confusion which went with emergence. Then she started the sequence to bleed off their velocity, an uncomfortable ride, even as nightmare-slow as they were moving on their emergence. She kept her mind focused, trying not to let her thoughts stray to the horror at the back of it, how fine they had cut it.
Hilfy threw up, not an uncommon reaction to the shift. It did not help Pyanfar’s own stomach.
“We’re dumping down to systemic drift velocity,” Pyanfar said on allship. “Possibly the kif stayed to sort through what we jettisoned, but they’ll be here in short order. Or they’re already here… with likely more kif here to help them. I’ll be very surprised otherwise. We’ve shut down all transmission, all scan output. No use of the main engines either. Everyone still all right down there?”
There was prolonged delay in response. “Looks to be,” Tirun’s voice came back from lowerdeck op, which had lost most of what it was primarily designed to monitor when the holds blew. “Chur and Geran are starting a check by remote, but it looks like it was a clean separation when we blew it out. All working systems are clean.”
The velocity dump went on. Hilfy moved about, cleaning up in shame. Haral stayed her post. Pyanfar occupied herself with feverish calculations and sorted and calculated on that one arrival image they had gotten before scan shut down, and on what they had on passive recept. She did a delicate attitude adjustment, trimmed up relative to the flow they were trying to enter, to present the least surface and the least delicate portion of them to hazard — put The Pride into synch with the general rotation of the system, one with the debris and the rock and gas which made Urtur, spread out over the orbits of ten planets and fifty-seven major moons and uncounted planetoids and smaller hazards, one of the more difficult systems for the rapid passage of any ship into its central plane. The Pride was picking up decayed signal from a mahendo’sat installation farther in… at least that station should be the origin of it, chatter meaningless not only in the distance but in elapsed time since its sending. Some might be scatter from ships operating in the system, traders, countless miners in ships of all sizes from the great orecarriers down to singleseat skimmers. In due course they themselves ought to announce presence and identity, but she had no intention of doing so. There was an excellent chance that their arrival had been far beyond the capacity of the longest scan from outsystem relay, and she saw no profit in bringing the mahendo’sat of Urtur in on a private quarrel with the kif. The kif could have arrived days ago, bypassing them in the between, which could happen with a more powerful ship — system chatter might reveal that. She kept listening to it with one ear, finished up the dump, pulling them finally into trim, counting to herself and hoping her position was what she thought it was.
The Pride drifted then, still maintaining rotation for g, but nothing else of movement. She kept counting. Debris suddenly rang off the unshielded hull, distant battering, a few crashes and squeals of larger objects. Target dead on: she had it, a mob of rocks a little off their velocity, cold mass swarming about them, a screen between them and the kif s possible arrival. She feathered directional jets and trimmed up again. The battering diminished to an occasional patter of dust. Hilfy, standing by the com console counter, looked about her as if she could expect to see the impacts with all their sensor eyes dark; met Pyanfar’s face and looked then at Haral, who grimly sat her post and kept trying to plot their position; and Hilfy composed her own face, managed not to flinch when another rock shrilled down the forward-thrusting bow.
Pyanfar heaved her aching body out of the cushion, staggered in walking around the dividing console to put her hand on the back of Haral’s cushion. “Put the pagers in link,” she told Haral. “Keep it channel one and see that someone’s always on it. Tie into lowerdeck op: they’ll be working down there a while yet. The kif will show, never doubt it. So we lie still, rest up. We receive signal; we don’t send; we don’t maneuver. We don’t do anything now but drift.”