“Authority.” His skin was cold under her fingerpads, his muscles hard and shivering, whether from the relative coolness of the bridge’s open spaces or from some other cause. “Authority of this system. Hani?”
“Mahendo’sat station. They don’t like the kif much either. No one does, but it’s not possible to get rid of them. Mahendo’sat, kif, hani, tc’a, stsho, knnn, chi… all trade here. We don’t all like each other, but we keep our business to ourselves.”
He listened, silent, for whatever he could understand of what she said. Com sputtered again, the whistles and wailing of the knnn.
“Some of them,” Pyanfar said, “are stranger than you. But you don’t know the names, do you? This whole region of space is strange to you.”
“Far from my world,” he said.
“Is it?”
That got a misgiving look from him. He pulled away from her hand, looked at her and at the others.
“Wherever it is,” Pyanfar said in nonchalance. She looked back at Haral and Hilfy. “I think that’s about enough. Our passenger’s tired. He can go back to his quarters.”
“I want talk you,” Tully said. He took hold of the cushion nearest, resisting any attempt to move him. “I want talk.”
“Do you?” Pyanfar asked. He reached toward her. She stood still with difficulty — but he did not touch. He drew the hand back. “What is it you want to talk about?”
He leaned, standing, against the cushion with both hands. His pale eyes were intent and wild, and whatever the precise emotion his face registered, it was distraught. “You #### me. Work, understand. I stay this ship and I work same crew. All you want. Where you go. # give me ####.”
“Ah,” she said. “You’re offering to work for your passage.”
“Work on this ship, yes.”
“Huh.” She thrust her hands within her waistband and would have looked down her nose at him, but it was a matter of looking up. “You make a deal, do you? You work for me, Outsider? You do what I say? All right. You rest now. You go back to your cabin and you learn your words and you think how to tell me what the kif want with you — because the kif still want this ship, you understand. They want you, and they’ll come after this ship.”
He thought about that a moment. Almost he looked as if he might speak. His lips shaped a word and took it back again, and clamped shut. And something sealed in behind his eyes when he did that, a bleakness worse than had ever been there.
It sent a prickle down her spine. This creature is thinking of dying, she thought. It was the look from against the wall, from the corner in the washroom, but colder still. “Hai,” she said, in her best dockside manner, and set her hand on his bowed shoulder, roughly but careful with the claws. Shook at him. “Tully. You aren’t strong enough yet to work. Enough that you rest. You’re safe. You understand me? Hani don’t trade with kif.”
There was a glimmering then, a sudden break in that seal. He reached out quite unexpectedly and seized her other hand, his blunt fingers both holding and exploring it, the furred web he lacked, the pads of the tips. Pressure hit the center of her hand and the claws came out, only slightly: she was careful, though her ears flattened in warning. To her further distress he set his other hand on her shoulder, then let go both holds and looked about at Haral and Hilfy, then back at her again. Crazy, she judged him; and then she thought about kif, and reckoned that he had license for a little strangeness. “I’ll tell you something,” she said, “for free. Kif followed you across the Meetpoint dock to my ship; they followed my ship here to Urtur, and right now we’re sitting here, just trying to be quiet so the kif don’t find us. Trying to decide how best to get out of here. There’s one kif in particular, in command of a ship named Hinukka. Akukkakk…”
“Akukkakk,” he echoed, suddenly rigid. The sound came as names must, from the other ear, his own voice. His eyes were dilated.
“Ah. You do know.”
“He want take me his ship. Big one. Authority.” “Very big. They have a word for his kind, do you know it? Hakkikt. That means he hunts and others pick up the scraps he leaves. I lost something at Meetpoint: a hani ship and my cargo. So did this great hakkikt, this great, this powerful kif. You escaped him. You ran from him. So it’s more than profit that he wants out of this. He wants you, Tully, to settle accounts. It’s his pride at stake, his reputation. For a kif, that’s life itself. He’s not going to give up. Do you know, he I tried to buy you from me. He offered me gold, a lot of gold. He might even have kept the deal straight and not delayed for piracy afterward. He’s that desperate.” Tully’s eyes drifted from her to the others and back again. You deal with him?”
“No. I want something for dead hani and lost cargo. I want this great hakkikt. You hear me, Tully?”
“Yes,” Tully said suddenly, “/want same.”
“Aunt,” Hilfy protested in a faint voice.
“You want to work,” Pyanfar said, ignoring her niece’s disquiet. “There’ll be the chance for that. But you wait, Tully. You rest. At shift change, I’ll call you again. You come eat with us. Meal, understand? But you get some rest first, hear? You work on my ship, you take orders first. Follow instructions. Right?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Go, then. Haral and Hilfy will take you back down. Go.”
He nodded, delivered himself over to Haral and Hilfy together: not a backward look from either of them as they took him out. Or from him. She watched them go, found herself rubbing the hand that he had touched.
The knnn song wailed out again. Neighbors to the kif, the knnn. That bore remembering. That one was uncommonly talkative. No one was ever sure what knnn senses were, or what motivated their migrations from star to star.
She turned to the com bank, pushed Record, and sent the song again to the translator. It gave her no more information than the last time. The song ceased, and there remained only the whisper of the dust. Urtur system everywhere had grown very still.
The translator still carried white sound, Haral’s voice or Hilfy’s. The Outsider was saying nothing in being taken back to his quarters. She was marginally uneasy about having him out of sight. Perhaps he was mad after all. Perhaps he would suicide and leave them with nothing to show for the encounter but a feud with the kif. Up to a point she could not prevent him killing himself, except by taking measures which would not encourage his good will.
But revenge was something of purpose, something to make life worthwhile. She had offered him that.
She thought of his face close at hand, lively, crazed eyes, a hand as cold as something an hour dead — a creature, she reminded herself, who had been fighting alone an enemy which would have turned a stsho to jelly.
She grinned somewhat, a drawing back of the lips and wrinkling of the nose, and stared thoughtfully toward the telescope image.
No disengagement possible. Not with this kif prince, this hakkikt Akukkakk, whose personal survival rode on this Outsider business. His own sycophants would turn on him if he lost face in this matter. He had lost this Outsider personally… likely by some small carelessness, the old kif game of tormenting victims with promises and threats and shreddings of the will. An old game… one which hani understood; irresistible to a kif who thrived on fear in his victims.
Akukkakk had to make up that embarrassment at Meet-point. He would have been obliged to revenge if it were so much as a bauble stolen from him at dockside. But this Outsider Tully was far more than that. A communicative, spacefaring species, hitherto unknown, in a position to have come into kif hands without passing through more civilized regions. The kif had new neighbors.
Possible danger to them.
Possible expansion of kif hunting grounds… in directions which had nothing to do with hani and mahendo’sat. Those were high stakes, impossibly high stakes to be riding on one poor fugitive.
Urtur would swarm with kif, before all was said and done.
She delved into the com storage and started hunting components for a transmitter of some power, r
oused out Chur and sent her hunting through the darker areas of The Pride’s circumference for other supplies.
V
It was a monster, like Tully, this thing that they constructed in the spotlit, chill bowels of The Pride’s far rim. It had started out hani-shaped, a patched and hazardous EVA-pod which they had stripped for parts and never succeeded in foisting off on another hani ship. Its limbs had just grown longer, sectioned off and spliced with tubing, and it was rigged with a wheezing lifesupport system.
“Get Tully,” Pyanfar said applying herself to the last of the welding which should get the system in order. “Rouse him out.” And Chur went, bedraggled as herself with the dust and the grime of The Pride’s salvage storage.
Pyanfar worked, spliced and cursed when the system blew in another frustrating curl of smoke, unhitched that component and rummaged for a new one, sealed that in and congratulated herself when it worked, a vibration and a flicker of green lights on the belt and inside the helmet. She grinned, wiped her hands on the blue work breeches she had put on for this grimy task… a long time since she had practiced such things, a long time since she had worn blue roughspun and gotten blisters on her hands. In her youth, under another of The Pride’s captains, she had done such things, but only Haral and Tirun could recall those days. She licked a burn on her finger and squatted on the deck, content with the operation of the unit. Let it run a while, she decided: see if it would go on working. The suit stared back, stiff and gangling on its huge feet, reflecting her in distant miniature off its curved faceplate. It stood like some mahendo’sat demon, two limbs shy of that description, but ghastly enough in its exposed hoses and its malproportioned height, against the dark of the surrounding machine-shop. A reek of blood mingled with the singed smell of the welding. A bucket on the deck caught the occasional drip from the skinned carcass which hung beyond it under the light.
It was a little more than hani-sized, chained up to the hoist-track above, long-faced head adroop on a longish neck, to thaw and drain. It had begun to reek under the lights. The long limbs were coming untucked, and the belly gaped. Uruus. Sweet meat and a fat one: the best steaks had already headed galleyward, in this raid on their private larder. It had wounds this carcass, but that only lengthened the limbs, letting the haunches drop.
The door unsealed and sealed in the dark distance; steps whispered along the metal flooring. Pyanfar adjusted her translator and got nothing, but she could see the lights go on in the far dark expanse, illusionlike and high because of the upward curve of the deck in the vast storage chamber, picking out two figures, one gangling tall and pale. She sat and waited as the lights turned themselves on and off in sequence along the walkway, bringing the two nearer and nearer where she sat.
Tully and Chur, of course. The Outsider came willingly enough, but he stopped dead when he came close, and the light went out on him, leaving him and Chur in the dark outside the area where Pyanfar sat. She stood up, making him out clearly enough in the shadow. “Tully, it’s safe. Come on. it’s all right, Tully.”
He did come, slowly, alien shadow in the rest of the strangeness, and Chur had hold of his arm in case. He looked at the vacant suit, and at the hanging carcass, and kept staring at it.
“Animal,” Pyanfar said. “Tully. I want you to see what we’re doing. I want you to understand. Hear?”
He turned toward her, eyes deep in their shadowed sockets, the angled light glancing off a pale mane and planes of feature decidedly un-hani. “You put me in this?”
“Put that in the suit,” Pyanfar said cheerfully. “Transmitter sending signal hard as it can. We tell the kif that we’re throwing you out and we give them that, you understand, Outsider. Make them chase that. And we run.”
It began to get through to him. His eyes flickered over the business again, the vacant suit, the frozen carcass “Their instruments see in it,” he said.
“Their instruments will scan it, yes; and that’s what they’ll get.”
He gestured toward the carcass. “This? This?” “Food,” she said. “Not a person, Tully. Animal. Food.”
Of a sudden his face took on an alarming grin. His body heaved with a choking sound she realized finally for laughter. He clapped Chur on the shoulder, turned that convulsed face toward her with moisture streaming from his eyes and still with that mahendo’sat grin. “You # the kif.”
“Put that inside,” she told him, motioning toward the carcass. “Bring it. You help, Tully.”
He did, with Chur, his rangy body straining against the half-frozen weight, an occasional grimace of what might be disgust at the look or the feel of it. Pyanfar shut down the pod’s lifesupport, opened up their work of art, and wrinkled her nose as the Outsider and Chur brought the reeking carcass over. There was trim work to do. She abandoned fastidiousness and did it herself, having some notion how it might fit. The head could be gotten into the helmet, a bit of the neck to stuff the vacant body cavity of the carcass, and a little scoring and breaking of the rib cage, a sectioning and straightening of stiff limbs.
“Going to smell good if that drifts a while with the heater on,” Chur observed. Tully laughed his own choking laugh and wiped his face, smearing his mustache with the muck which coated his arms to the elbow. Pyanfar grinned, suddenly struck with the incongruity of things, squatting here in the dark with a crazed alien and a suit full of uruus carcass, the three of them in insane conspiracy. “Hold it,” she ordered Chur, trying to get the belly seam fastened. Chur held the sides together at the bottom and Tully helped at the top, and there it was, sealed and Tully-shaped.
“Come,” Pyanfar said, taking the feet, and Tully and Chur energetically got purchase on its shoulders, lumbering along with it as the lights recognized their presence and began to go on and off as they traveled.
“Cargo dump?” Chur asked.
“Airlock,” Pyanfar said. “Should passengers leave a ship by any other route?”
It was no light weight. They staggered along the walk with the body of the pod dragging at this and that point, got it onto a cargo carrier at the next section and breathed sighs of relief as it lay corpsewise on the carrier, mirrored faceplate staring up at the overhead. Tully was white and trembling from the exertion: sweat stood on his skin and he held onto the carrier’s endrail, panting, but bright eyed.
“You’re Pyanfar, right?” he asked between breaths. “Pyanfar?”
“Yes,” she owned, wiped an itch on her nose with a dirty hand, reckoning she could get no dirtier, nodded at Chur and gave him Chur’s name again.
“I #,” he said, nodding affirmative. He pushed enthusiastically when they pushed, and they got the thing moving easily down the aisle through interior storage, past the hulking shadows of the tanks and the circulating machinery, out again into the normal lighted sections of belowdecks, under a lower ceiling, and through ordinary corridors to the lock.
“# he go #?” Tully asked, staggered as he helped them offload the pod, looked anxiously leftward as the lock’s inner hatch opened. “Go quick out?”
“Ah, no,” Pyanfar said. She carried the feet through and braced them as Chur and Tully got the upper body through and upright. “There, against the outer hatch. We blow that, and he’ll go right nicely.” She set the feet down and added her weight as they heaved and braced it, stood back and surveyed her handiwork with a grin and a thought of the kif. She powered up the lifesupport with a touch of the buttons on the belt, and it stood a little stiffer, on minimum maintenance. She shut it down again, not to waste a good cylinder.
And for the moment Tully stood staring at it too, panting and sweating, arms at his sides and a haggard look suddenly in place of the laughter, an expression which held something of a shudder, as if after all he had begun to think about that thing and his situation, and to reckon questions he had not asked.
“Out,” Pyanfar said, motioning Chur from the lock, including Tully with that sweep of her arm. He hesitated. She moved to take his arm in his seeming daze, and he suddenly hung his h
and on her shoulder, one and then the other, and bowed his head against her cheek, brief gesture, quickly dropped, hands withdrawn as swiftly as her ears flattened. She caught herself short of a hiss, deliberately patted his hairless shoulder and brought him on through the lock into the corridor.
Thank you, that act seemed to signify. So. It had subtler understandings, this Tully. She flicked her ears, a look which got a quickly turned shoulder from Chur, and shoved the Outsider leftward in Chur’s direction. “Go clean up,” she said. “Get showered, hear? Wash.”
Chur took him, indicated to him that he should help her with the carrier, and they went trundling it past and down the corridor to put that back where it belonged. Pyanfar blew a short breath and closed the interior lock, then headed for the common washroom where she had left her better clothes — did a small shudder of the skin where the Outsider’s hand had rested on her shoulder.
But it had understood what they were doing, very well understood what they were up to with the decoy, and that in fact it was not all a matter of humor.
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