Chanur's Homecoming

by C. J. Cherryh

  “Ker Fiar. Ker Sifeny.” Her mind had two spare moments, amid the scramble to catch up. “This is Pyanfar Chanur; welcome aboard.”

  “Captain,” a double murmur came back. Gods knew what their captain had instructed them—before she abandoned The Star and they boarded. Things like: keep an eye on the bastards? Wait my orders? Keep your heads down and be polite?

  We’ll take the ship if we have to, and mahen devils take the kif and all foreigners?

  “We’re not a by-the-book ship,” she said. “You can guess that, the way things have been running. The second you get something my First better know about, you sing out Priority-priority and you get it; interstation com’s usually free for crew chatter, meanwhile, station-station or allstations, same as my own crew, no differences on this deck. We got non-hani aboard, same rules, and men on this ship get no special courtesy, no discourtesy either. We got a long trip and a hard one and Chanur’s grateful for all the help we got; we need it at the other end too. You want to know anything, you ask, we’ll answer; you have any trouble, you come to me same as your own captain. You won’t have any trouble. If you do, I want to know about it. Hear?”

  “Aye,” the double voices came back.

  Probably unconvinced.

  “There’s Chakkuf jumped,” Sif Tauran said.

  “Got that,” Haral said.

  “Priority,” Geran snapped, and scan flashed to monitor one. “We got movement incoming, bearing 05, 35, 19, point zero zero 3 by 5 Gs—”

  An object was out there, coming out of concealment and accelerating as if devils were behind it.

  “Time we got out of here,” Pyanfar muttered. “Gods and thunders, it had to be on our side of the system—”

  “Priority,” Geran said, “Sikkukkut’s moving.”

  Scan showed the color-shift.

  “Tirun—” Pyanfar said. “Intercept calc, all along that vector.”

  “I’m on it,” Tirun said, “coming up. They can’t do it, can’t do it, nowhere along our line, beam or missile, b’gods, the incomer’s lost us, but it’s gods-be close.”

  Close for intercepting fire, pegged anywhere along their track; sweat broke out all over her.

  “Priority.” Geran’s voice, booming out over the com on override. “We got another incoming—”

  Pyanfar overrode with a priority master and a button on intercom. “Priority, priority,” from Sifeny. “That’s two more.”

  “Got that,” Pyanfar said. “Tirun: recalc.”

  “They’re farther down, we’re all right, I’m checking it anyhow, cap’n.”

  “Priority!” The monitor screen blinked alarm: space was blossoming with ships.

  “Kkkkt!” Skkukuk cried over station-to-station. “Priority, this pattern is gktokik! This is methane-breather, this is tc’a and chi! Avoid output!”

  “F’godssakes—” —Shut up on my bridge, you gods-be lunatic!

  “Clear on our vector,” Tirun said, “we got it, we got it clear, go, go.”

  “Sikkukkut’s got visitors and we’re not waiting for this to unfold around us. Out of here, as the schedule goes. Stay by it!”

  “Priority,” Hilfy said.

  Comflow was coming over from Tahar, hani and obscene. Her heart lurched. “Hilfy, I got it, I got it. Send. Tahar! This is Pyanfar, what’s happened back there?”

  “Chanur,” the answer came back, “we got a glitch in final-check. We’re trying to fix it. You got to go, go. We’ll come in as we can.”

  A sick feeling hit her stomach. Irony, maybe. It was a jump-lost ship that had started the Faha-Tahar feud. And it was a Faha-kinship crew and Tahar riding together on a ship that might not make it this time.

  “Yeah, I hear that, Dur. How much lag?”

  “Feathered if I know. We’re tracing it. Give us a quarter hour down if we’re lucky. If not—”

  “If not, yeah.”

  “Hey, I speak kifish real good, Chanur. I’ll turn ’round and hail ’em all. Got a message?”

  “Luck to you. Luck, Tahar, hear?”

  “Same to you.”

  Moon Rising cut communications. Dur Tahar had her hands full, with her own crew doing well to be working at all.

  She dropped her head against a shaking hand and drew a deep breath and tried to get herself in order.

  Gods and thunders, the best we got—the ones I could trust— The best and the only friends we got except Jik—that gods-be pirate—and Vrossaru with her. Gods, don’t let us lose ’em now.

  I’ll go religious, I swear I will, get ’em through jump with us!

  “Coming up on mark,” Haral said, while com crackled and sputtered with advisements from the rest of the group: Moon Rising had to be subtracted out of jump equations all the way down the run, a contingency that was all too close to happening. From his own limited board, Skkukuk rattled off a string of kifish exhortations and instructions, something about his captain; the hakkikt, praise to whom; and their destination.

  Another thought froze her heart. “Tully. Has Tully got his drugs?”

  “He’s got them,” Hilfy said. “He just reported on com; Chur’s under; we got clear from all our passengers, in and secure.”

  Ten thousand things to come undone, ten thousand ways the whole business can go wrong—

  The scan-projections were a shifting mix of color, Geran and Sif Tauran working feverishly to keep some semblance of accuracy in ship actions, with system scan blank and tc’a popping in at high-V: they had only their own knowledge, passive-scan; and their long-established, dopplered realscan; passive-scan and longscan leapfrogged, projection and factual report, older and older as their time-packet left the arena.

  It was riot back there. Other ships appeared out of system fringes. The hakkikt had not fallen into the trap, had not sat there nose to station in the safe interval he might have thought he had before outbound ships could have faked a jump, braked beyond system edge, and turned around.

  Bastard has the luck.

  Gods help the stsho.

  “Ten to mark,” Haral said, seeming unperturbed. “You want to take it on otherside, captain, or take her out?”

  “I’ll take it otherside.” That meant mind in order. A precise knowledge of the coordinates and the parameters for error. “Eggs’ll get you pearls we don’t get system scan at Urtur either.”

  “Huh. Akkhtimakt’s been through there, not too certain we even got a station there. If he ever got there. If he didn’t short-jump and turn. That’s eight to mark.”

  “Secure for jump,” Hilfy’s voice rang out over general com. The warning sounded early. For the strangers.

  “We couldn’t hope for that much,” Haral commented.

  “Seven.”

  “How’s Moon Rising? What’s their status?”

  “They’re not talking,” Hilfy said. “Ker Fiar’s trying to raise them.”

  “Gods,” she said. “Ha—”

  “Priority!” Geran screamed across the bridge.

  Instruments broke up. Cleared in wild retreating doppler. Com wailed in the earpiece. Pyanfar yelled to drown the sound and the pain as something passed them at C-fractional inbound, ran right down on them and whisked away into system. Her heart all but stopped; and lurched into action again in heavy thumps as someone sent the com-output to her.

  It sang, it wailed, it moaned and howled up and down the scale like a lunatic; and its retreating image showed the perilous yellow of knnn-ID.

  O my gods—

  “Mark!” Haral cried.

  And flung them. . . .

  . . . outsystem. . . .

  . . . into jump. . . .

  . . . tranquility. . . .

  . . . returning. . . .

  . . . . down again. . . .

  . . . . emergency. . . .

  Chapter 9

  . . . emergency. . . .

  . . . emergency. . . .

  . . . Siren shrieking, auto-alarm from scan. . . .

  Pyanfar reached, rolled her head to get vie
w of the chrono and blinked to clear her eyes on the display. It was not at fault. They were on mark. On schedule. Urtur arrival.

  . . . “Message,” Hilfy mumbled, “message . . . kifish. . . .”

  It came blasting out over the com, general. “Proceed!” came a kifish voice from Pyanfar’s own back, their interpreter, live and with them. “Our escort ships are laying down a pattern of fire, they are proceeding on!”

  “We stay on auto!” Pyanfar yelled at Haral. “We got ships at our tail—” Lest old habit take over.

  Slow down and they had ships racing up their backside. They kept on, hurtling into Urtur system with all its debris of dust. . . .

  . . . a star more like a black-stained, broken egg, sullen yellow at system heart, all bound up in a black, flat mist of dust and rock through which a couple of distant gas giants and a host of moonlets plowed rings. It was a scientific wonder. . . .

  . . . a hellhole for inbound ships, where dust and rock could break down a starship’s defensive bubble and strip away its V. Hit the thick of it at their present velocity and they would make a UV glow, particles accelerated by the contact with virtual particles they brought with them, exotics shooting off in ricochet fashion and creating an accelerated maelstrom of reactions that would bleed away their energy. Ships had to dump when they reached a gravity well; but a cloud like Urtur’s had ways of doing it for a ship. . . .

  . . . getting through the V shield, chewing away bit by bit in pyrotechnic decay, until it got to vulnerable realspace metal and quasimetals, and got the vital vane-surfaces, and gnawed away at the hull till it began to glow. . . .

  Not yet for The Pride. Instruments jumped and flared as dust and larger debris met the bowshock of particles they carried with them and flared and came apart to join the stream and fly off in discharges at collision with still other particles.

  They were a cometary fluorescence, if any living eye could track them, if any ship moving at that V dared be close to any other ship doing the same or had the time to look to anything but their own survival.

  The trailing ships would be popping into system and running into their backturned message and the kif’s as Hilfy relayed it on: We’re here, so are the kif, keep going, stay on auto. And wide of their entry point, three kif launched precautionary fire before enemies could get organized, plowing through the medium as an irregular flutter of telemetry out of the maelstrom they were meeting, creating more hard radiation trails with the passage of their fire.

  Their escort was not going to stop. It had to blow a hole for them through anything that might be in the way and keep going, they had agreed that much. But the kif had their own idea what precaution meant.

  It was not saying that a contrary-coursed enemy could not come flaring bow-on toward them, to unintended collision.

  Or that there might not be one of Urtur’s rocks out there too big for their shields.

  “We’re not getting buoy telemetry,” Haral murmured; and Pyanfar swallowed hard against the upwelling of nausea in her throat and fought the blurring of her eyes. Her hands were numb. It was the brace that held her right hand near controls; she shoved with a heave of her shoulder and swung it woodenly over, pushing Confirm to comp’s automatic warning that they were blind.

  “Bad habit hereabouts,” she said between her teeth. And tried to remember what to do next, which was to read the advisements comp was programmed to hand her, data and detail matches to check against the autos.

  Enemies might peg them by sheerest luck. A rock was more likely to do it for them. Sikkukkut’s earliest ships had come through here and gods knew what had become of them, whether they still existed, whether they had not gone on to a kifish rendezvous at Kita or Kshshti.

  —a knnn had grazed past them, otherside.

  —hallucination?

  Gods, no, it was real, it had been real—attack pouring into Meetpoint off several vectors, including Urtur . . . Sikkukkut’s enemies had come out of Urtur and Tt’a’va’o and Hoas and V’n’n’u vectors—or space corresponding to those points—

  Realtime months ago.

  Your doing, Jik? Your gods-be contacts with the tc’a? Gods, gods, have you ever told the truth in your life? What have you done?

  Had it been Goldtooth coming in at Meetpoint? Could he marshal methane-breathers to his aid—along with humans?

  Could anyone guarantee the methane-folk?

  Whatever had begun to happen at Meetpoint had played itself out already, while they existed only as a probability in the gods’ intentions, an arc in hyperspace, a bubble with a slender stem to Somewhere shooting along in Nowhere Reasonable on the whim of V and vector and the dimples stars made with their mass—while they did that, ships had battered away at each other, and ships which might have been at Urtur might well have leapt out again days ago, with the kind of hyperspace arc hunter-ships could cut— sleek, power-wasting hunter-ships who could cut days off a freighter’s time—

  —but not The Pride’s, except they were encumbered with a handful of freighters who had to make it through to give them a chance at all where they were going.

  —Moon Rising, O gods, where?

  System buoy gave them nothing. Industry existed back there in that timelag; and Starwind and Hope; and Lightweaver to bring up the rear, unless Moon Rising made it on some miracle—

  There was a sick feeling at her gut that had nothing to do with the after-jump queasiness. The numbers ticked away; warnings flashed all over the board, approaching mark, have to make it on schedule or lose it all—

  “Coming up on dump,” she said. And let the autos take them, as instruments blipped and flashed hazard warning.

  —Easy then to drift away, give it up, quit trying after the figures that glowed ghostly green just beyond her reach, just out of focus. Survival was in those numbers. It was just inconveniently far, everyone so godsforsaken tired and home so far and so fraught with disasters—

  Wake up, Pyanfar Chanur, focus, make the fingers feel, the hand move, the mind work—

  —long way home. Someone else’s job. She was already there, the pale golden dust, the deeper gold of grainfields and the fleet herds that raced and bounded and soared for the sheer exuberance of running, sharp hooves and sharper horns—

  Blood and hani hide. No uruus was calved that could get a horn into Kohan Chanur, except for young Hilfy’s mistake, wide-eyed youngster caught right in the path of one that should have gone the other way.

  “It’s all right,” Kohan said. And sat down, plump, right where he stood, with his hand pressed to his ribs and his nose gone pale. “It’s quite all right.”

  While Hilfy stood there in horror, only then catching up to what had happened, when all the rest of them had reached their peak of panic when na Kohan had, and moved; but Kohan was nearer, saw young Hilfy’s danger, and hit the uruus like a projectile. It lay dead, its quickness and its beauty all still in the dust; he sat there with blood leaking through his fingers and a sick look on his face that was none of it for himself, only for what could have happened. And the rest of them, chagrined and self-disgusted that he had had to do what he had done, a skilled hunter caught like that, and none of them in position to help when a young girl’s mistake near killed herself and her lord. Hilfy stood there thinking, they knew later, that she had killed him, killed her father, her lord she should have died for, the dearest thing in all her protected young life. She had never taken a scar. Never did.

  Till a dockside brawl on Meetpoint; till the kif laid hands on her; till she was their prisoner for much too long—

  Kohan would not know his daughter.

  She’s grown up, brother. She’s not a girl anymore. Not anything you can understand anymore, your pretty Hilfy; you, tied to the world; her, a spacer, with a spacer’s ways, like Haral, like Tirun, like me.

  I don’t want your world.

  I’ve ruined her for it, taken her out of it, changed her in ways I wouldn’t have chosen, brother; but I couldn’t keep her prisoner myself; couldn�
�t hold her, wouldn’t try.

  I hate it. I’ve always hated it. Not the fields, not the feel of the sun. It’s the confinement. One world. One place. A horizon too small.

  Minds too small to understand me.

  I’d rather go anywhere than home. Rather die for anything than fat old women and empty-headed men who love their walls and their wealth and their privilege and never know what’s out there—

  Khym knows. Maybe you almost do. But I’m coming back for them. Hilfy and I. So gods-be many have bled for you. Or frozen cold in space. Or gone to particles, not even enough to find. You don’t know the ways you can die out here.

  I don’t want to get there. Don’t want to see the look on your face.

  But by the gods I won’t leave you to Ehrran and the scavengers.

  —Aren’t we coming out of it? Has something malfunctioned? Are there red lights? Gods, do you ever stop thinking when you lose it and the ship doesn’t come down again, do you just go on—

  —out again, and back to realspace, with V lower and the telemetry flicking past numbers in mechanical agony, red lights flaring—

  “I got it, I got it,” she mumbled to save Haral the effort. Not malfunction lights: it was gas out there, thick enough to glow and flare off their shields. The shield-depletion curve was rising, fluctuating as they swept up gas and hit a bare spot, where the shield recovered a little strength. The kifish escort was far away now. On auto, relying on numbers alone and not even in direct control, they achieved a kind of tranquility. Warning lights flickered, reminding them of laws and lanes they overrode. Haral swore and disabled them for the duration of Urtur passage, to be rid of the beep.

  She fumbled after the nutrients packet, bit a hole in it, and drank it down—and Tully, Tully was alone belowdecks, his poor teeth always had trouble with the packets and there was no one to help him, alone because the gods-be Tauran were too squeamish—

  —behind her Skkukuk would be seeing to his own meal. Her stomach heaved at the thought. But his kifish voice came through now and again, delivering some information to Hilfy and Fiar at com, translating off those kifish ships up front.