Chanur's Legacy

by C. J. Cherryh

  But he’d made a public scene; and as soon as people weren’t busy they were going to remember it, the same as Fala already did, as his fault.

  He wanted to say something to Fala, he wanted to do something to set it right, but Chihin was sitting between them out there, and his brain was still caught in that sugar-short haze that deprivation created in jump. He was doing well to get himself to his feet when the captain told him: Go fix breakfast, be useful; and his trousers started a slide he only just stopped with a grab at his waistband.

  Thank the gods Fala was busy on the bridge and the captain didn’t send her too. He couldn’t deal with it now. He could scarcely walk. He felt his way into the galley, which was next to the bridge for very good reasons, and giddily, wobbily, started locating the frozen dinners, keeping a hand sort of near safety holds, because a ship coming in from above a sun could find some other ship dropping in too close to them, even yet, and the ship could have to maneuver without warning.

  But you didn’t plan for it. And probably you couldn’t really hold on if it did. Most times the off-duty crew began to stir about just now, only the Legacy didn’t have that many hands, and they took their breaks close to the bridge, where they could answer a sudden recall. People took breaks as they could, did necessary maintenance on the bridge and thereabouts …

  And snacked, if they could keep it down. He popped another nutrient pack and shed fur over everything. He wanted a bath, but that wasn’t possible till they’d reached the inner system boundary: he’d asked for duty and he had it.

  Crew was up and moving. Chihin went through, and gave him some kind of a look he didn’t dare meet; and came back through again, with her face wet and her mustaches dripping.

  He was scared to death she was going to speak. But she didn’t. He had some chips, galley’s privilege, to keep his stomach from heaving, and it didn’t help much. He followed it with cold tea, from the fridge. And he thought he was going to be sick right there, he was cold from the drink and shaking and his stomach was trying to turn itself inside out. He leaned on the counter trying just to breathe, wondering if he should go for the facilities, or if jostling wasn’t the right thing to do just now …

  A hand landed on his shoulder. “You need some help?” Tarras asked, and when he stood against the counter: “You all right?”

  “Fine,” he managed to say. And prayed to keep his stomach still, while Tarras wandered around and looked in the oven and put a pot of gfi on to brew … the smell was almost more than he could take.

  “Looks like you’ve about got it,” Tarras said, and came and leaned against the counter beside him. “Hits you hard sometimes.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “You want to go back to the bridge and sit down?”

  “No,” he said, monosyllabic, desperate. No, he did not.

  Silence for a moment. Then: “Prickly situation,” Tarras said, and he felt his stomach knot a little tighter, hoping she was going to talk about the kif and the ship out there or anything else but—

  “You and Fala have something going?”

  “No!” He kept his voice low, hoping to the gods they didn’t carry over the noise of the fans. “She’s just nice, is all.”

  “She’s a good kid,” Tarras said. “You’re the most attractive thing she’s seen in a year. The only. But that’s beside the point.”

  “I didn’t—” He didn’t want to talk about this. But he was cornered. And Tarras might be on Fala’s side, but Tarras was easier to talk to than Fala. “I didn’t want to upset her.”

  “Chihin’s a full-time pain. It’s her aim in life. You’re not obligated to put up with—”

  He didn’t like Tarras saying that. He didn’t want to hear it. He shoved off on his way to the crew lounge, as the only refuge he could think of, and Tarras caught his arm, caught it with a claw, and it hurt, but he kept going.

  She caught him again. Most wouldn’t. Nobody ever had, on this ship. But he’d learned on the Sun, that defying orders meant getting dumped. So he did stop. He didn’t have to look at her.

  “Oh, gods,” Tarras muttered. “Chihin?”

  So Chihin joked. He knew that. It didn’t change the fact he felt it in the gut when she walked past him. It didn’t change the fact he liked her, and it didn’t change the way he’d felt, and the way he still felt.

  Tarras let out a breath and leaned against the wall. “Kid, Chihin isn’t the most serious-minded soul in the crew.”

  “That’s all right,” he said without looking at her.

  “Ow,” Tarras said, and after a moment of silence. “Look, na Hallan. She’s not a bad sort. —Gods, I’ve landed in it, haven’t I?”

  He didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t mad at Tarras. He wasn’t mad at anybody. Mostly his stomach was upset and he wished Fala wasn’t mad. The oven timer went off, to his vast relief, and he said, “It’s ready.”

  “I’ll call them,” she said, and ducked out while he took the dinners out.

  And burned his fingers.

  Something about na Hallan and Chihin … Tiar didn’t wholly pick it up on the first hearing, with Tarras leaning and whispering into her ear.

  And then she didn’t believe it. But Tarras said, “It’s serious.”

  She unbelted and got up; and went over to the captain and whispered, “The kid and Chihin? We got a problem.”

  Hilfy turned her head, looked at her nose to nose and said, ominously: “Problem?”

  Tiar made a glance back toward the galley, another to Chihin and Fala, working side by side. An unnaturally quiet Chihin.

  “She hasn’t said a word.”

  The captain evidently added the same chain of figures. Chihin was deathly quiet. Not a joke. Not an ill-timed jibe about the situation. A lot of efficiency out of her, this last hour, but seldom a word, since the first.

  And Fala—Fala was talking to the kif, but not to Chihin.

  “I want this straightened out,” Hilfy said under her breath. “Good gods, we aren’t in a place we can afford this! Grow by the gods up, can’t we?”

  “I don’t think it’s Fala,” Tiar said as faintly as she could, and got a second furious look from Hilfy.

  “I don’t care what’s going on,” Hilfy hissed. “This is deadly serious, cousin. The kif aren’t playing lovers’ games out there. Breakfast at stations, nobody’s getting a break.”

  Good idea, Tiar thought to herself, and went and relayed the order out loud: “Stay at your posts. We’ve got a situation shaping up. We’re in an ongoing caution, here, we can get the food out, but we’re not taking any breaks, got it?”

  Let them think she and the captain had been consulting on the kif. Give them something outside the ship to worry about. She went back to the galley. “General alert. Get the trays out here, keep them clipped down, no open hot liquids. Tarras, arms board shakedown.”

  Tarras’ ears went back, and sobriety happened fast, in a hesitation between the oven and getting back to her post.

  “Get the trays out,” Tiar repeated, to the young gentleman at the center of the storm, and he wiped the scowl off his face and started snatching, ignoring singed fingers.

  “That’s the way,” she said. “Let’s move! Get in those seats and get belted. This isn’t Anuurn system.”

  She took her own tray back, grabbed a drink and settled in while Tarras and Hallan were passing out trays off the stack and drinks out of a box.

  The captain started giving system check orders. The captain ordered a condition three on the armament. And that was the first time the Legacy had ever brought the weapons board up full. There was a different kind of quiet on the bridge when that order came down, and various stations had to crosscheck with targeting.

  Hope to the gods it was a test. The fact of the weapons got to her nerves too, even knowing it was a calculated distraction. The war memories came up along with that long-silent board. Her reflexes wound themselves tight as a spring, and her heart beat a little faster.

  Becaus
e now that she thought of it, kif being kif, the arms computer on Tiraskhti was probably completely live. And probably had been, from the moment the kif went for jump toward his own border.

  There were mining craft. There were construction pushers. They looked, except the major kifish ships at dock, like ordinary miners and pushers in any system in hani or mahen space.

  Well they might, Hilfy thought. They were probably stolen.

  But the ships at dock at Kefk had no look of honest traders. Huge engine packs. Cold-haulers that could release their cargo or blow off their mass with the flip of a toggle: hunter-ships, clutching cargo cans in their clamps, like many-legged insects; purported tankers, whose tanks probably were false mass.

  “Captain,” Fala said, “Vikktakkht.”

  “I’ll take it,” she said, and a clicking, soft voice said,

  “Chanur captain. You’ll go first and we’ll dock beside you. For convenience’ sake.”

  “Understood. And do we understand this trip is worth our time?”

  “Put Meras on. I find him amusing.”

  I won’t talk to you, that meant. “Later,” she said shortly, and punched out. “—Tiar, I want one course laid out for Meetpoint, and courses for Kshshti, Mkks, Harak, Lukkur, and Tt’a’va’o… .”

  “Tt’a’va’o!”

  “If we go out of here with kif on our tail, better the methane folk than Lukkur. But we take any vector open and deal with it when we get there.”

  “Aye, captain.”

  “Their prices aren’t bad,” Tarras said.

  Tiar said: “Gods, load their cans aboard, after Kshshti?”

  “I was kidding,” Tarras said. “Kidding, cousin.”

  The Legacy still had the option to run, Hilfy thought. She could do a sudden break and sight on Meetpoint and get the Legacy out of here.

  But you didn’t run from kif. If you ran, they were wired to chase—sometimes literally; sometimes, more dangerously, they merely wrote you down for weak and apt for more abstract predation.

  A Chanur—if she ran—would weaken Chanur clan in the eyes of all kif. It would prompt ambitions. It would encourage seditions. Assassinations, to which aunt Pyanfar was all too vulnerable.

  But rational as everything had seemed the other side of jump—they weren’t just the only hani ship in system, they were the only foreign ship anywhere: not a mahendo’sat, not a stsho, not a methane-breather showed in the revolutions of the station. Not even a ship that was clearly a merchant ship.

  “Those are hunters,” Tiar said. “Every one of those are hunters. What’s building here?”

  “I don’t like this,” Fala said. “I really don’t like this.”

  “Don’t panic,” Hilfy said quietly. “Never panic with them. It’s a guarantee of problems.”

  “Chanur,” came the kifish voice over her earpiece, “you’re clear to dock now.”

  “Thank you, hakkikt.”

  The schematic flashed up, glowing lines channeling their approach and their mandated velocity.

  Scary enough on a small station. But the numbers, the indicators, were kifish characters, base 8.

  “They’re offering automated approach,” Fala said, in a voice a little higher than her wont. “They say they have translation programs.”

  “So do we and No. No input from them to our computers. Absolutely not. Just calc it.”

  “‘Just calc it,”’ Chihin muttered in a tone of desperation. ‘Calc it’ was herself and Tiar and their computers, in rapid cross-check calculation. While they were aimed at Kefk Station like a missile.

  But numbers started popping into the display of their own instrumentation, distance to dock, rate of spin, moment of contact.

  “Fine it down,” Hilfy said. “That’s a stand-down on the weapons board, Tarras.”

  “Confirm, captain. Standing down and locked.”

  The kifish station was protesting their irregular approach. The Kefk control center wanted, they demanded computer to computer contact. They ordered them to brake and abort. The emergency flasher was on the station output. And if there was a time Tiraskhti could be absolutely certain weapons were at stand-down, it was now, preparing for dock. If there was a time Tiraskhti could get a shot that might miss their own station, it was in the next few minutes.

  “By the book,” Hilfy said calmly, and kept her claws out of the upholstery of her seat. “Extra decimals. Let’s not have a repair bill at this place.”

  Station was still objecting. From Tiraskhti, moving in just behind them, there was silence that meant, one hoped, observant respect, waiting to see whether they could justify the defiance of station control, respect that grew or died a dangerous death on the skill with which they touched that docking cone.

  And bet that the station wouldn’t be quick to warn them of an impending mismatch.

  “Rotation shutdown,” Tiar announced, and the next queasy part started, as the Legacy gave up its own internal G and the ring coasted into null. They were coming very slowly, at a tangent to the station’s scarily rapid spin. This was the point where panic could set in, and a point where, as an insystemer, you were either licensed to do this or you linked to tenders who were, and got cabled in.

  Or you docked, like the ore carriers, in null at the mast.

  A long hauler didn’t have either option. Just the mobile cone that gave you a little guide and a tangential approach, and took you up at a distance that wouldn’t let you crack the bulkheads, before the grapple snagged you and the docking assembly took you into sudden 1.2 G sync with the station’s rotation.

  Tiar made a lightning reach: the Legacy’s portside thrusters shoved her one way and then braked that motion null. A quick flurry of small adjustments truing up with the calculated appearance of the cone. You didn’t track the cone until the last moment, didn’t see it until it was too late to brake: and station computers weren’t talking to theirs: theirs was just talking to their engines, now that it had the intercept plotted.

  There was the cone. The last correction to put the probe right down its throat and a brisk shove from the mains that put the Legacy into the guide zone at intercept with the station’s rate. The jolt of capture rang through the bow; the contact moved the whole passenger ring for a stomach-wrenching second and pressed them down in their seats. Grapples banged, the braces touched and boomed against the hull …

  “And we are in,” Tarras declared.

  In. At a kifish station. Solo. Wonderful. “Good job,” Hilfy said in the collective breath that followed. “Good job. The crew earns one for that.”

  By the Book, Fala was already sending her fueling request, arguing in the Trade with the Kefk dock authority.

  And by the Book, by aunt Py’s lately sacred and mandated Book, there would be no bending on that point: fueling and offloading of wastes before the Legacy ever opened an airlock, aunt Py’s procedures, in places Pyanfar didn’t trust; and a very good idea, in Hilfy’s present estimation—but meanwhile a kifish hakkikt would, publicly, be compelled to wait on his hearing until that fuel was in, and that was a dangerous slight, in a game of volatile egos: sfik, kifish elegance, was life: offend it, and expect attack, as they expected a move of you under like circumstances. Kif were much on etiquette … their own etiquette, to be sure, a pricklish protocol of arms.

  An air of competency, of hauteur, of willingness to take extreme action … with the firepower to back it up: those were assets; while generosity was the gesture of a superior to a servant; kindness fell in the same category; and loyalty lasted as long as a leader had sfik intact.

  Courage? Fierceness in a fight was a plus. But so was deviousness. Self-preservation was the highest virtue, and risking one’s neck could be self-preservation—if it demonstrated an arrogant competency to potential rivals.

  A whole other universe, Hilfy thought to herself, a very solitary, dark, and aggressive universe. You could do anything you could carry off with style—or at least with sufficient firepower on your side. That counted.


  Come to Kefk, Vikktakkht had insisted, certainly aware that she had been a prisoner among his kind, and perhaps, as many kif were surprisingly educated, aware that hani minds, prone to emotional might-have-beens and what-ifs entirely alien to his species, might come adrift from what was, and wander into delusion …

  Vikktakkht might hope for that.

  But there was a benefit to fluency in other languages. She could think in kifish: see things from kifish perspective—and, so doing, feel the shift in her heartbeat, the change from twice a month hunter to hair-triggered, hard-wired round the clock predator.

  If they expected her to have balked at coming here—not likely.

  To panic at being here—she had yet to reach that state.

  Here I am, na kif. What am I thinking? What will I do? Do you know me that well?

  You made me half crazy. If I’m here alone, I must be one tough bastard of a hani.

  And you know I don’t like you much. So you’re taking the chance, na kif. You’d better pay off. Because by your rules—if you cross me, I can only start a war by not blowing you to hell.

  “They’re going to fuel us,” Fala said. “They say they want payment transferred at the same moment they start pumping.”

  “That’s fine. We’ll transfer it bit by bit. They reach an eighth of our load, they get an eighth of the payment. In international trading certificates, and they can run courier and check the authenticity. No computer links to their bank. And we’re not talking to Vikktakkht or anybody of his ilk until those tanks are full.” Gods, did she know this routine! In her sleep, along with the nightmares. “—Tarras, get a bid on the data dump. We’re still traders, that’s what we’re here for, let’s not give them any other ideas. And everything in cash.”

  Hallan, quietly: “There’s some sort of light keeps blinking on com.”