The Kif Strike Back

by C. J. Cherryh

  “O good gods.” She sat down against the counter edge, hands on knees. “Tully—”

  “Tully asked me when we got back,” Hilfy said, “just how close you’re friends with Sikkukkut. Now I know why.”

  “Gods,” Pyanfar said. “I’m not, Tully. I’m trying to save our lives, you understand me? Did you tell him anything, did you give him anything?”

  Tully shook his head. It was not the naive look, not the clear blue stare he generally had. It was a different Tully. Tully-inside, calm and cold and thinking. She knew it when she saw it, long as it had been. “I say nothing, don’t look at him. I go far away. I wait. I not be. You say you come to get me. So I wait for you.”

  Pyanfar let go a long, long breath. The silence stayed there a moment. “Politics,” she said. “All politics. You understand politics, Tully? Kif aren’t anyone’s friends. Not mine. Not anyone’s. But there’s kif and there’s worse kif. You know why I’m dealing with him? You understand? Can you understand?”

  “Politics,” Tully said. Not naive, no. “I know you come take me from kif. That be your politics.”

  “I’m not any friend of Sikkukkut’s. Believe that.”

  “Bad thing happen. I don’t understand. You lot scare. Where we go? What we fight? We got enemy be friend, hani and stssts—”

  “Stsho.”

  “—be enemy. You don’t trust Goldtooth, don’t trust Jik. Don’t trust hani. Don’t trust kif.”

  “Goldtooth and Jik are friends. We just can’t trust them much. Not where it crosses mahendo’sat interests.”

  “Where be hani?”

  Pyanfar glanced Hilfy’s way, felt Tirun’s stare at her side. She slouched against the console. “Good question.”

  “What I do?” Tully asked. “What I do, Py-anfar?”

  “What did you do? What are you going to do? I wish I had an answer for either one. Friend, Tully. That’s all I can tell you. Same’s Goldtooth’s my friend; and yours. Gods know what it counts for. Wish I had an answer for you. Wish you had one for me.”

  “I fight,” he said. “I crewman on The Pride. You want fight #, hani, kif, I don’t # to die with #.”

  “Gods rot that translator. Do you understand me at all? Have we got it fouled up again?”

  “You be my friend. You. Hilfy. All. I die with you.”

  “Gods, thanks,” Pyanfar murmured bedazedly. A superstitious chill went down her spine. “Translator again. I hope.” Hilfy’s ears had flagged. “I sure hope you come up with a better idea.”

  Perhaps he did not take the humor. His face stayed void of it. Of everything but anxiety.

  “Friend,” he said.

  “You’ve got duties. Get. Hilfy. Get.”

  “Aye,” Hilfy said. And touched the seat-back. “Tully.”

  He rose from the chair arm. At the other side Tirun had just turned attention to something from the com-plug in her ear and turned half about again with a flick of the ears and a tilt of the head. Some new difficulty. An incoming call. Pyanfar gave Tully room to get up, laid a hand on his back as he passed, a slight pat of consolation. “Friend. Go help Hilfy, huh? She wanted you for something. Uhhhnnn. Tully.”

  He looked back at her, all unprepared and trying to collect it again.

  “Is there anything you know that we don’t?”

  Flicker.

  “Uhhhn,” she said again, eyes half-lidded.

  “Py-anfar—”

  “You think of something, huh, you come to me. You come and tell me. All right?”

  The kif had used shocks with him and got nothing. The mahendo’sat used wit; and achieved something. She stared him in the eyes without any mercy at all. And tried for a piece of him.

  “Don’t trust,” he said suddenly, miserably. “Don’t trust humanity, Py-anfar.” And he fled out the door—walked out, but it was flight, all the same. Hilfy delayed at his back with one anguished look toward her. And turned and went after him.

  Pyanfar was unamazed, except by Tully’s unequivocal thoroughness. It was doublecross. Goldtooth’s. Jik’s. Hers. Humanity’s. Everyone’s but Tully’s—who, along with Chanur, had just betrayed his own kind. Gods knew his reasons.

  What drove him?

  Anything hani-like? Where was family, clan, House? What was he?

  He.

  Male. Houseless. Sisterless. Wifeless. Renegade. Nau hauruun.

  But not hani. There was no analogy in Tully to that kind of destructive orphan, who killed and stalked at random. Nau hauruun.

  Not Tully their friend. Tully no-name. Tully from distant Earth, of the ships and the strangers.

  “Captain,” Tirun said quietly. “Captain—Ehrran’s on. ‘Fraid they’ve been on hold a while. They’re getting pretty hot.”

  “Good,” Pyanfar said flatly; and went and flung herself into her well-worn chair and powered it about to the boards.

  Mind on business, Pyanfar Chanur. Wake up. Smell the wind and watch the branches overhead. “I’ll take it. You got any movement out of Harukk on the Tahar business?”

  “Not a thing,” Tirun said. “I keep calling; keep getting the same answer. Sikkukkut’s still not available. Business, they say.”

  “Gods-be sfik games. I begin to get the feel of it. And I don’t like what’s going on. Put that call through again as soon as I finish with Ehrran. Have them tell Sikkukkut I’m personally interested in the Tahar crew. Tell him we’ve got sfik involved here.”

  That got a look from Haral, beside her. “Captain. Begging your pardon—”

  Haral left it unfinished. It was hani lives at stake, feud with Tahar or no feud. A miscalculation with the kif might touch something off and get the Tahar crew killed outright. Jik might even be working near to success on the matter. All these things she thought of, and thought of again under that worried glance from Haral, and a like one from Tirun past Haral’s back. A twitch of many-ringed ears. A deep frown.

  “Send it,” Pyanfar said. “Be tactful, that’s all.”

  “Tactful,” Tirun muttered, and turned to execute the first order.

  Pyanfar turned her chair again and touched the button to bring the long-waiting call through from Rhif Ehrran; listened to Tirun address the Vigilance com officer.

  More games of politics and captainly protocols. The com officer insisted on getting response from The Pride’s captain before putting her own on.

  “I’ll take it,” Pyanfar said—curiously, pride with Ehrran had just diminished in importance. She failed even to feel a twinge of temper with the Ehrran officer who tried to provoke her and put it on record. “This is Pyanfar Chanur.”

  Keep Ehrran quiet. Get the essentials done. Tahar was the emergency. Chur was safe. Tully assured her nothing critical had spilled into kif hands. There were things Sikkukkut still needed. And that meant at once a safer and a less predictable kif.

  “Vigilance. Com officer speaking. One more moment, captain. I’m afraid the captain’s gone offline a moment.” Cold and calculatedly insolent. Games of provocation.

  Three human Compacts? Fights between them?

  One human Compact, Earth, the human homeworld, trying to counter two rival human powers with new trading routes? Or was it trade they were interested in?

  That was a big section of space, if it had room for three starfaring economies. . . correction: two. And one that just wanted to be bigger.

  Did Goldtooth know the situation inside human space? Mahendo’sat with their scientists and their mad delving into oddities—always poking and prodding at things, hoping—hoping what? For new species? New alliances?

  New situations they could use to deal with their old neighbors the kif?

  Beware of Goldtooth. Thus the stsho, who had double-dealing down to an art.

  “Ker Pyanfar, this is Rhif Ehrran. I trust whatever emergency kept you wasn’t serious.”

  “No. It’s all handled. No further problem. Unless you have one.”

  “No. I’m going to relieve you of one. I’m sending a detail over to p
ick up Tahar.”

  “Afraid not. I’ve accepted her appeal for parole. Sorry, Ehrran. She’s under a Chanur roof, so to speak. And I’m head of house—out here.”

  “This isn’t Anuurn and we’re not in the age of sofhyn and spears, you hear me, Chanur?”

  “No. We play with bigger toys nowadays, don’t we? You’re fond of quoting the law. Me, I like the old laws right fine: like kinright. The kind of law you can’t quote by the book, Ehrran.”

  “Put Tahar on.”

  “Maybe you ought to concentrate on her crew. They’ve got a real problem. They might appreciate your intervention. But Dur Tahar’s comfortable enough where she is. Is that all you want?”

  Click.

  “Log that,” Pyanfar said. “Put the other call through.”

  “Aye,” Tirun said.

  “Good shot,” Haral said with a dip of her ears. Meaning Rhif Ehrran and a genteel stroll to the brink.

  “Huh,” Pyanfar said. “Why couldn’t the kif grab her, huh? Do us a favor.”

  “Make a trade?” Haral suggested brightly.

  “Gods, that’s a—”

  “Captain.” Tirun lifted a hand, signaling quiet. “Harukk’s going through real procedures this time—I think they’re going to try to put the call through. Maybe—yes. The captain’s waiting, Harukk-com, if you can do that. Yes. . . . Right. Captain, Harukk-com’s compliments, and they’ll try to reach the hakkikt if you’ll put the request yourself.”

  Protocols. Sfik games again. Pyanfar flicked her ears and made an affirmative handsign. Immediately the ready light came on and Pyanfar keyed it. Her claws flexed. She drew in a deep breath and killed all the anxieties, banished them to a cold, far place without a future.

  “Harukk,” she said calmly, “this is Pyanfar Chanur. I have an urgent message for the hakkikt, praise to him.”

  “Honor to the hakkikt, he may give you his attention, hunter.”

  So we come up from our obscure beginnings, do we, kif? Provincial boss and chief torturer—to prince? And we by the gods set you there.

  She waited. Coldly, calmly. Long. Eventually:

  “This is Sikkukkut, ker Pyanfar. What is this urgency?”

  “Hakkikt. I appreciate the courtesy. And the gift you sent me. I’d like to talk with you further. I understand you have Moon Rising’s crew in your custody. . . .”

  “Hunter Pyanfar, your forwardness would daunt a chi. Is my gift too scant for your appreciation?”

  “Hakkikt, I see a way to use it to your benefit and mine. There’s some urgency in it. If you’ll send a courier I can be more specific.”

  Pause. “Hunter Pyanfar, you interest me. But I see no reason why one of my skkukun should come from my ship to yours and back again, when your own look to be in good health. And I have nothing to say to your crew. I made you a proposition at Meetpoint, you may recall, which you declined. I make it again—a rare offer. Come to my deck this time. If this offer has the merit you say. I trust it does. I’ll expect you—within the hour.”

  Click.

  She leaned back in the chair.

  “Captain,” Haral said, beside her, “good gods—”

  She turned a look in Haral’s direction. “That didn’t go right.”

  “Now what? We call Jik?”

  “Call Jik to mop up? We just got a challenge, cousin. I got it. Sfik. The bet just got taken and doubled.”

  “They want to get their hands on you, good gods, they can’t get Goldtooth in reach—they want you! You just heard Tully say what that son is and you said yourself what Sikkukkut wants most—Goldtooth was just here, talking to you. The kif have to know that. They know he could have passed us what they want to know—”

  “They’ll kill the prisoners. They’ll kill them sure now if I fail that appointment, and they’ll let us know about it. If that weren’t enough, our credit with the kif hits bottom. Hard.”

  “You can’t do it!”

  “I can’t duck it either. No. Sure that earless bastard is going to try us. One way or the other. And I think I’m starting to think in kifish; I think I read him. I’m perfectly safe to walk in there—if I can keep him wondering. I’m going to need company out there. Want to take a walk?”

  “Oh, sure,” Haral said with a despairing shrug. “Gods, why not?”

  Chapter 12

  The air of Kefk hit like an ammonia-tainted wall. Haral coughed even on the ramp; Pyanfar sneezed and felt the sting of her eyes in spite of the antiallergents. Haral had put on her portside finery, dark spacer blue with a collection of gold earrings, a set of bracelets, an anklet with a bangle, a belt with silver and gold chains that rattled right along with a monstrous black AP gun and a belt-knife. Pyanfar wore the red silk trousers, gold bracelets and belt and gold-earrings aplenty; a knife and a pocket-gun besides the AP slung low on her hip.

  “We look a right set of pirates,” Haral had said before the lock sealed them out. “It’s the pirates outside worry me,” Tirun had retorted to them both, there in the lock.

  And Khym had said other things, while Geran and Hilfy fretted and gnawed their mustaches sparse—“Huh,” Geran had said, with exhaustion and worry in her eyes. “I’ll go with you—”

  Haral: “My job.”

  And Tully, later: “Where she go—where go, Py-anfar?”

  She avoided answers with Tully. “Out,” she had told him in that unwanted encounter in the downside corridor. “I got business, Tully. I’m in a hurry.”

  “Careful,” he had said, anxious-looking. Frightened, doubtless from the time he heard that inner lock open, preparing to expose The Pride to the kifish docks. She reckoned the crew would tell him where they had gone after she was well on her way. Or better yet, when she and Haral got back.

  When.

  They walked the dockside, she and Haral, in a sodium-light hell of clinging smokes and ammonia-reek and a moist chill like a swamp at sundown. Kif moved, black wisps in the dimmer shadow along the far wall of this section of warehouses and factory fronts. There was no color anywhere about Kefk docks but the sickly sodium-glow, no brightness but the stark white of some argon spotlight on a round steel doorway.

  “Kkkkt. Kkkkt,” the sound came to them, as they walked past kifish ships. Kif, doubtless some of their erstwhile companions—had seen them walk outside and gathered in clusters to whisper—and perhaps, Pyanfar thought, to wonder whether the two hani walking down the docks of Kefk had lost their collective minds.

  (“Look at you,” Khym had cried in dismay while she dressed for this foray. “Wear that into a den of thieves? Py, for gods-sakes!”)

  Crazy to wear that much gold into a kifish den if one had not the sfik to hold onto it. “So we look like trouble,” Pyanfar had said to Haral when they laid their plan. “A lot of trouble, by kifish lights. That’s the idea.”

  Advertise their presence and hold it under kifish noses till they smelled it and looked at the gold and the weapons and remembered that The Pride’s crew had no general reputation for being fools.

  Therefore they must be the other kind. Dangerous.

  They were also the hakkikt’s invited guests. At least on the way to the meeting.

  “Marvelous thing about kif,” Pyanfar muttered in a moment when she and Haral were well out of earshot of kif, between one gloomy ship-berth and another. “It occurs to me that these types out here on the dock aren’t any more secure than we are. We’re high on the wave and so are they and kif sail a rotted choppy sea. Always wondering when the wind’s going to shift.”

  “They’re different, that’s a fact,” Haral muttered in her turn. “No lasting grudges—and, gods be feathered, nothing they won’t trade. Flighty folk. I don’t think hani ever have got the right of them. Maybe we should’ve brought our friend Skkukuk on this trip, huh?”

  “I did think about it. But I’ve got an uneasy feeling that one’s a little crazy even for a kif. I don’t want him near guns and knives.”

  “Huh. Me neither, now I think on it.”


  A waft of something reached them down the dock. Blood. Even through the ammonia. Pyanfar hissed and cleared her throat. “Good gods.” Haral swore in disgust. “That’s enough to kill your appetite.”

  “We’re nearly—”—there, Pyanfar started to say and suddenly lost the thread of her thought as she caught sight of the kifish numerals for 28: Harukk’s berth. Kif traffic was thick hereabouts and the blood-smell grew stronger.

  It worsened rapidly, the closer they walked. The steel rampway rail had a series of metal poles chained to its stanchions, and a dark object sat atop each.

  “Gods and thunders,” Pyanfar muttered, “Haral, don’t flinch.”

  The heads were kif. Kif came and went on that number 28 ramp, past the awful watchers; she and Haral headed that way among the rest, waiting for challenge from some guard or other.

  None came. They passed the first stanchion up and Pyanfar gave the gory object atop it a cold and curious glance.

  “So much for the opposition,” Haral said.

  “Sure ought to keep the new converts in line,” Pyanfar muttered. Every kif that came into Harukk had to see it, victory for some, grim warning for the others.

  At least, she thought in profoundest relief, none of the heads was hani.

  Kif turned and stared at them as they passed, upward-bound like all the rest who had business aboard Harukk. A knot of kif who stood at the accessway clicked and hissed as they passed but made no offer to delay them.

  There were, finally, guards inside the large airlock.

  “Hakktan,” one said in kifish. Captain?

  “Ukt,” Haral answered with a nod at Pyanfar. Yes. Pyanfar stood by with her arms folded, arrogant to the slant of her ears, and let Haral do the talking. Two of the three kif kept their hands tucked within their sleeves, doubtless concealing weapons besides the guns they wore openly. They stood blocking other traffic into the lock from either direction, while the third reported their presence to the monitor above.

  The answer came, orders for their admittance. The guard at the inner hatch stepped aside; and the third guard bowed with that hands-empty gesture: “Inside,” that one said.