Chanur's Homecoming

She sent it wide. In half a dozen languages and amplified via whatever ships would relay it, to all reaches of the system, continuously, since Gaohn station relays and apparently those of the second outsystem station and both buoys were not cooperating. She was talking to more than those insystem and those arriving; she was talking also to a certain mahen hunter, who had lost himself and gone invisible.

Chanur is taking Gaohn Station. This solar system is under control of Chanur and its allies and its subordinates. You an’ entering a controlled space. Identify yourselves.

“Hold fire!” Pyanfar yelled, turning, her back to the sidewall, the AP up in both hands where it bore on a flat eared, white-round-the-eyes cluster of hani blackbreeches Immunes, who were framed in the corridor opening and vulnerable as stsho in a hailstorm. A shot popped past her, high; one streaked back. “Hold!” Khym yelled, and: “Hold it!” Kohan Chanur echoed, two male voices that rumbled and rattled off the corridor walls in one frozen and terrible instant where slaughter looked likely.

But they were kids who had run up on them. Mere kid-. Their ears were back in fright. None of them was armed except with lasers and they were staring down the barrels of

APs that could take the deck out. They thought they were going to die there. It was in the look on their faces.

“Don’t shoot!” one cried, with more presence of mind than the rest, and held her little pistol wide.

“Are you Ehrran?” Pyanfar yelled back at them, and one of them bolted and ran.

The others stayed still, eyes wide upon the leveled guns.

Prisoners we don’t need.

Gods-be groundling fools.

“Get out of here!” she yelled at the rest of them. “Out, rot your hides!”

They ran, scrambling, colliding with each other as they cleared that hall, no shot fired.

She turned again, saw weary faces, bewildered faces, saw dread in Rhean Chanur and the rest, spacers who had come home to fight against kif and ended up fighting hani kids. That was the kind of resistance there was. That was what they had come down to, trying to take their station back from lunatics who threw beardless children at them.

“Gods save us,” she said, and drew a ragged breath and shook her head and winced at the thump of explosion, which was Haral with their allies blasting their way through another pressure door that had been, with hani persistence, replaced with another windowed door after the last armed taking of Gaohn Station. Nothing bad would ever happen twice, of course. Not at civilized Gaohn. Not to hani, who had no wish to become involved in foreign affairs. Gaohn Station prized its staid ways, its internal peace, maintained by ceremonies of challenge and duel.

“Gods curse Naur,” she said aloud. “Gods curse the han.” And shocked her brother, and surely shocked ker Huran Faha, whose shoulder-scar was from downworld hunting, who knew little more of kif than she knew of hyperspace equations. Pyanfar shoved off from the wall and kept going, stepping through the ruined doorway.

“Stop,” the intercom said from overhead. “You are in violation of the law. Citizens are empowered to prevent you.”

There were no citizens in sight. Everyone with sense had gotten out of the section. Those on Gaohn that were not spacers outright, excepting folk like Kohan and Huran, and

red-maned Akify who had lived so long downworld with Chanur she had forgotten she was Llun, were all stationers, who knew the fragility of docksides, and knew there was a Chanur ship and a flock of kif and mahendo’sat looming over them. There was a way to slow station intruders down. Anyone in Central might have sealed and vented the whole area under attack, had they been prepared. Had Gaohn station ever been set up for such a defense. But no, the necessary modifications had been debated once, after the first taking of Gaohn, but never carried through: the Llun themselves had argued passionately against it.

There would never, of course, the Llun had thought, never in a thousand lifetimes come another invasion. The very thought of it disturbed hani tranquility, the acknowledgment of such a calamity was against hani principle: plan for an event and it might well create itself. To prepare Gaohn for defense might create a bellicose appearance that might cause it to need that defense. To provide Gaohn corridors with windowed pressure doors (which permitted visual communication between seal-zones in some contamination or fire emergency) was a safety measure and a moral statement: there would never come the day that the station would have to take extreme measures.

So it had fallen to Ehrran quite simply.

And the foreign forces that were coming in had never heard of such philosophy, and cared less. How could one even translate such a mindset to a kifish hakkikt?

How could a kif who planned across lightyears comprehend the Llun, let alone the groundling Naur, and the mind of the han, which decreed all on its own that hani would be let alone?

... .a kif who planned. . . .