Chanur's Homecoming

by C. J. Cherryh

  “Departure at 2315,” was the center of that detail. It was, at the moment, all she was interested in. The kif gave them time enough to get organized. Barely. With precise course instructions, aborting one that they had laid in.

  “Hilfy.”

  “Aye,” the subdued voice reached her.

  “Message to Kesurinan and Tahar: stand by departure; they’ll have a bit over six hours. So will we.”

  A pause. “Aye.”

  Silence after. The Pride was at rest again. The crew on the bridge could see her, where she stood. The camera was live. She looked up at it. “Things could be worse,” she said glumly. “I can think of one way right off. But we got Jik in our custody, we got Tahar and Aja Jin with us, and we’ve got the hakkikt’s orders: it’s Meetpoint. His way.”

  A longer pause.

  “Aye,” Haral said simply, as if she had given a routine order.

  The largest space station in the Compact.

  And a forewarned one.

  “Clear the boards, stand offduty; I got Jik to see to.”

  “Aye, captain.”

  She walked out of the airlock. And only then it occurred to her, like the ghost of an old habit that no longer meant anything, that she had just packed her husband and another crewman off to tend another man, knowing beyond the last twitch of instinct, if it was ever instinct, that Jik was safe with them, safe as that kif was safe to send down the corridor in the other direction, because even the kif was a rational mind and sane and sensible, while the universe quaked and tottered on all sides of them.

  She walked down the corridor and into the open door of sickbay, their little closet of a facility. Tirun had beaten her there. Khym and Tully were taking Jif off the stretcher and laying him on the table.

  “He’ll have some bruises,” Pyanfar said. “You’d better run a scan on him. He may have more than that.” She went to the med cabinet, keyed the lock with a button-sequence, and sorted through a tray of bottles—hani-specific; hani drugs did strange things with some mahendo’sat. No telling what the kif had given him even if she ran a query into Library, and it was better to stick to the simple things. She pulled out an old-fashioned bottle of ammonia salts and brought that over to hold under Jik’s nose.

  Not a twitch.

  “Gods-be.” She capped the stinking bottle and slapped Jik’s chill face. “Wake up. Hear me?”

  “What did they give him?” Tirun asked, lifting Jik’s eyelid, peering close. “He smells like a dopeden.”

  “He’s a hunter-captain, gods rot it, his own precious government’s got him mind-blocked, gods know how far down he’s gone.” She turned around, shoved her way past Khym and got to the intercom. “Bridge! Get Harukk on, tell ’em I want to know what they dosed Jik with, fast.”

  “Aye,” Haral’s voice came back.

  Tirun was counting pulsebeats. And frowning.

  “Gods, he doesn’t know where he is.” Pyanfar crossed the deck again, shoving roughly past both the men, to grab at Jik’s shoulders. “Jik, gods fry you, it’s Pyanfar, Pyanfar Chanur, you hear me? Emergency, Jik, wake up!”

  Jik’s mouth opened. His chest moved in a larger breath.

  “Come on, Jik—for the gods sake, wake up!” She yelled it into his ear. She shook at him. “Jik! Help!”

  Tension began to come back to his musculature. His face acquired familiar lines. “Come on,” she said. “It’s me, it’s Pyanfar.”

  Help, she said. And the great fool came back to her. He hauled himself out of whatever mental pit his own people had prepared for him, the way he had run out onto that dock to fight for her and her crew, when an absolute species-loyalty had dictated he save himself. Help. More strangers handled him, dumped him from stretcher to table, gods, not unlike what the kif must have done to him, and he went away from them, deeper and deeper, only knowing at some far level that he was being touched.

  Knowing now that there was a hani cursing him deaf in one ear and asking something of him, but nothing more than that.

  O gods. Gods, Jik.

  His eyes slitted open. He was still far away.

  “Hey,” she said. “You’re all right. You’re on The Pride. I got you out. Kesurinan’s gone back to Aja Jin, you hear me, Jik, you’re not with the kif anymore. You’re on my ship.”

  He blinked. His mouth worked, the movement of a dry tongue. He heard her, she thought, at some level. He was exploring consciousness and trying to decide if he wanted it.

  “It’s me,” she said again. “Jik.” She patted his arm and stooped with a sick feeling at the gut when he flinched from her touch. “Friend.”

  “Where?” he said, at least it sounded like that.

  “On The Pride. You’re safe. You understand me?”

  “Understand,” he said. His lids drifted down over the pupils. He was gone again, but not so deeply gone. She hesitated a moment, then turned in a blind rage at two fool men who had not sense enough to clear out of sickbay’s narrow space and give them room to work.

  She found herself staring eye to eye with Tully—with Tully who had been twice where Jik had been, and whose face was stsho-white and his eyes white round the edges. She had been about to shout. The look on Tully’s face strangled the sound in her throat.

  “Out,” she said, and choked on the word. “Clear out of here, you’re not doing anything useful.”

  Khym flattened his ears, thrust out an arm and herded Tully away; Tully went without seeming to notice it was Khym who had touched him. The human was a shaken man.

  So was she, shaken. The hair was standing up all down her back.

  “Captain,” Haral’s voice came, “it’s sothosi. Library’s sending to labcomp right now.”

  “We’re on it.”

  Tirun was on it, a quick move for the comp unit; a glance at the screen and a dive for the medicine cabinet. She broke open a packet, grabbed an ampule and an astringent pad, and made herself a clean spot on Jik’s arm.

  The stimulant went in. In another moment Jik made another gasp after air, and another, a healthier darkness returning to his nose and lips. “There we go,” Tirun said, monitoring his heartbeat. “There we go.”

  Pyanfar found herself a chair and sat down, before her knees went. She bent over and raked her hands through her mane, conscious of the uncomfortable weight of the AP at her hip and the prodding of the gun in her opposite pocket. She stank. She wanted a bath.

  She wanted not to have done what she had done. Not to have made the mistakes she had made. Not to be Pyanfar Chanur at all, who was responsible for too much and too many mistakes. And who had now to think the unthinkable.

  “You all right?” Tirun asked.

  She looked up at her cousin, her old friend. At a crewwoman who had been with her from her youth. “Tirun.” She lapsed into a provincial hani language and kept her voice down. “He’ll stay here. I want this room safed, I want him left under restraint—”

  She tried to keep the cold distance she had had on Harukk. It was hard when she looked into an old friend’s eyes and saw that natural reaction, that dropping of Tirun’s ears.

  “Tirun,” she said, though she had meant to justify nothing; she found herself pleading, found a shiver going through her limbs. “We got a problem. I’ll talk about it later. Do it. Can you? Stay with him till he wakes up and make sure he’s breathing all right. And for godssakes leave those restraints on him. Can you do that?”

  “Yes,” Tirun said. No doubt. No question, from an honest hani who handed her captain every scruple she had and expected her captain was going to explain it all. Eventually.

  “Tell him I’m going to come back down. Tell him it’s because we’ve got a few hours, I want him to rest and I can’t think of any other way to make sure he does.” She still spoke in chaura, a language no mahendo’sat was going to understand; and that was statement enough how much truth she was handing out. Tirun stared at her and asked no questions. Not even with a flick of her ears. Lock up a friend who had saved their lives and c
ome back in this condition from doing it. Lie to him.

  If she could knock him cold again without risking his life she would do that too.

  She got up and walked out, raked a hand through her mane and felt the stinging pain of exhaustion between her shoulders, the burn of cold decking on her feet. Kif-stink was still in her nostrils.

  * * *

  She flung the kifish packet onto the counter by her own station on the bridge.

  No one had left post; or if Geran had left to check on Chur she had come back again in a hurry. Solemn faces stared at her: Hilfy, Geran, Khym, and Tully; Haral kept operations going.

  “Leave it, Haral,” Pyanfar said.

  Haral swung her chair about, same as the others.

  “You know the way we came in here,” Pyanfar said, “and took Kefk. We got orders to do it again. At Meetpoint.”

  Ears sank. Tully sat there, the human question, hearing what he could pick up on his own and what garbled version whispered to him over the translator plug he kept in one ear.

  “You’ve heard bits and pieces of it,” she said, and sat down on the armrest of her own cushion, facing all of them. “We’ve got to follow orders the way they’re given. Or we’ve got to blow ourselves to particles here at dock. And that takes out only one kif faction. It leaves the other one the undisputed winner. And by the gods, I’d rather they chewed on each other a while and gave the Compact a chance. That’s one consideration. But there’s another one. Sikkukkut’s threatened Anuurn.”

  “How—threatened?” Haral asked.

  “Just that. One ship—if he thinks we’re getting out of line. He’s not talking about an attack at Gaohn. Nothing like it. He means an attack directly on the world. That’s the kind of kif we’re dealing with. One large C-charged rock, hitting Anuurn, before Anuurn can see it coming, gods know. It was a threat. I hope it was a remote threat. We’re dealing with a kif who knows too gods-be much about hani and too gods-be little: he was a fool to tell me that and maybe he doesn’t imagine what we’d do to stop him—before or after the event. But I don’t think he’s the only kif who’d think of it. I hope they chew each other to bloody rags. We arrange that if we can—but we’ve got to do what we’re told right now or we find ourselves looking the wrong way at one of Sikkukkut’s guns, and we don’t get the chance to warn anybody, or work our way around this, or save a gods-be thing.”

  “Captain,” Haral said, “we got a kif up there at zenith. He’s got position on us.”

  “I know about it. We’re not going to take ’em on. We just get out of here. We’ve got six hours, we’re dropping into a Situation at Meetpoint, and the Compact may not survive it in any form we understand it. That’s what we’ve got. That’s what we’re up against. I don’t know what we’re going to find at Meetpoint. Tully—are you following this? Do you understand me?”

  “I understand,” he said in a faint voice. “I crew, captain.”

  “Are you? Will you be, at Meetpoint?”

  “You want me sit with Hilfy at com, speak human if humans be there.” His voice grew steadier. “Yes. I do.”

  With all he could and could not understand. She gazed on him in a paralysis of will, as if putting off deciding anything at all could stop time and give them choices they did not have.

  Jik, they had locked up below. A kif and a human were loose among them. The human sat in their most critical councils.

  But Tully had given them the warning she had passed to Jik, a warning blurted out in one overcharged moment that Tully had stood between her and Hilfy and she had questioned his motives.

  Don’t trust humans, Pyanfar.

  On one sentence, one frightened, treasonous sentence in mangled hani, they bet everything.

  Gods, risk my world on him? Billions of lives? My whole people? My gods, what right have I got?

  “I’ll think on it,” she said. “I haven’t got any answers.” She picked up the packet and flung it down again. “We’ve got our instructions. We’ve got Tahar with us. We’ve got Jik’s ship. And we’ve got orders to keep Jik with us and keep that ship of his under tight watch.”

  “There’s something else,” Hilfy said. And took up a piece of paper and got up and brought it to her. It trembled in Hilfy’s hand. “Comp broke the code. Maybe he meant us to break it. I don’t know.”

  * * *

  She hesitated in the dim doorway of sickbay, with that paper in her pocket; Jik was awake, Tirun had said.

  He was. She saw the slitted glitter of Jik’s eyes, saw them open full as she walked in, quiet as she was. She went and laid her hand on his shoulder, above the restraint webbing. Tirun had put a pillow under his head and a blanket over his lower body.

  His eyes tracked on her quite clearly now, gazed up at her sane and lucid. “Come let me go, a? Damn stubborn, you crew.”

  But she did not hear the edge of annoyance that might have been there. It was all too quiet for Jik, too wary, too washed of strength. It was—gods knew what it was.

  Apprehension, comprehension—that he might not be among friends?

  That for some reason she might be truly siding with the kif—or that she was operating under some other driving motive, in which they were no longer allies?

  He had for one moment, in that kifish place, drugged and on the fading edge of his resources, answered questions he had held out against for days, answered because she got through his defenses with a warning his mind had been in no shape to deal with, and because she had signaled him that he had to do this.

  Now he was clear-headed. Now he knew where he was, and perhaps he recalled, too late, what he had done. That was what came through that faint voice, that failing attempt at good humor.

  “Hey,” she said, and tightened her hand. “You got nowhere to go, do you?”

  “Aja Jin.”

  “Told you about that. Kif’ll shoot your head off. We’re clear. Got it all patched up with Sikkukkut. You passed out on me. Missed the good part. I need to talk to you.”

  “I got talk to my ship.”

  “That can wait. You’ll fall on your nose if you try to get up. Don’t want you trying it, hear? Tirun fill you in?”

  “Not say.”

  “Your ship’s fine; the dock’s patched; I got you clear and got everything fixed up with Sikkukkut: he’s a gods-be bastard, but he does listen. He’s still suspicious, but he’s put you aboard The Pride, says you’ve got to ride out the next move aboard my ship and let Kesurinan handle Aja Jin. That was all I could get. We’ve got to live with that.”

  “I got damn itch on nose, Pyanfar.”

  She reached and rubbed the bridge of it. “Got it?”

  “Let me go. I walk fine.”

  “Haven’t got time. We’re moving. Going to Meetpoint. You’re going to have to ride it out where you are. I’m sorry about that, but we haven’t got another cabin we can reach till we undock. And then things are going to go pretty fast.”

  He was quiet a heartbeat or two. Then: “Pyanfar—”

  “I got a question for you. I want to know what we’re headed into. What did Goldtooth tell you before he left us, huh?”

  A silent panic crept into his eyes. He lifted his head and let it fall back against the pillow, still staring at her. “Not funny.”

  “I need to know, friend. For your sake, for that ship of yours, gods know, for mine. What are we headed for? What’s he doing?”

  “We talk on bridge.”

  Bluff called. She stared at him and he at her and there was a knot at her gut. “You know how it is,” she said.

  “A,” he said. “Sure.”

  “I got this thing to ask you. I want to know the truth. You understand me.”

  He ran his tongue over his lips. “What this deal with humans?”

  “Tully told me—told me flatly not to trust them. You know Tully; he’s not too clear. But what he said, the way he said it—I think they’re going to doublecross your partner. I think they’re not the fools Goldtooth thinks they are. And they’
re not taking his orders.”

  “Maybe you do better talk to Tully.”

  “I have. We’ve got a problem. Sikkukkut wants Meetpoint. He wants us three to go in first, The Pride, Aja Jin, and Moon Rising. You see how much he trusts us. He wants us to go in there and shake things up and crack Meetpoint so he can walk right in easy.”

  “Akkhtimakt maybe be there.”

  “So’s everyone else. Aren’t they? I got one more question. What about the methane-folk? What’s the real truth?”

  “Lot—lot mad.” Another pass of Jik’s tongue across his lips. “I try talk to tc’a. They want keep like before. Knnn—different question. Goldtooth said—said got maybe trouble.”

  “Who’s Ghost?”

  Jik blinked. His eyes locked on hers, pupils dilated.

  “When you were in trouble,” Pyanfar said, “I hauled out that little packet you gave me at Mkks and started it through comp. We got a number one good linguistics rig. The best. Mahen make, a? Why’d you ever give me that packet, huh?—to carry on for you. In case something happened here at Kefk? So I could get through to Kshshti or Meetpoint? Gods-be careless job of encoding if we could break it—but then, then it might have had to go to a mahen ship way out from your Personage, mightn’t it? Someone like Goldtooth, maybe? And the real code’s in the language—isn’t it?”

  “Maybe same—want you to have.”

  “You knew gods-be well we’d have to go to mahen authority to read it! You by the gods knew we’d have to run to your side when it got hot—we’d be held to being your courier again, that’s what you knew, that’s what you set us up for, rot your conniving, doublecrossing hide!”

  He lay there and blinked at her.

  “Was it because you thought something might happen to you, Jik? Or did you already plan to do what Goldtooth did for you here at Kefk? Blow the docks and run and leave me to get anywhere I gods-blessed could, with your confounded message? Was it you who gave Goldtooth the orders to break dock?”

  “Hani, you got damn nasty mind.”

  “I’m dead serious, Jik.”

  “You crazy.” He gave a wrench at the restraints. “Damn, Pyanfar? I walk fine.”

  “Answer me.”