Chanur's Homecoming

The press had stalled behind, tide meeting tide in the hallway, those trying to advance through the broken doors and those in panic retreat. The few up front hesitated in the last doorway, facing the guns.

“Ehrran has Central!” the Sfauryn cried.

“You want to do something about it?” Pyanfar yelled back.

“We’re trying to help! Gods, who’re you aiming at? People all over the stations are trying to get in there!”

“Gods-be about time!” Her pulse hammered away, the blood hazed in gray and red through her vision. “If you can get the phones to work, get word to the other levels!”

“Llun’s with us-Llun’ve got portable com, they got some rifles- It’s Llun back there behind us, Chanur. They don’t want to get shot by mistake!”

“Bring ’em on,” she cried. Gods, what days they had come on, when Immune blacks meant target in a fight. She leaned on the wall and lowered the rifle. Blinked against the haze. Rest here awhile. Rest here till they had the reinforcements organized. Llun! honest as sunrise and, thank the gods, self-starting. They had been doing something all the while, one could have depended on that.

But they could still get shot, coming up behind the spacers up front. Someone in spacer blues had to get up there and warn the others in the stairwell that what was coming on their tail was friendly. “Who of us has a run left in her?” she asked, and scanned a weary cluster of Chanur faces, ears flagged, fur standing in sweaty points and bloodied from the flying splinters.

“Me,” Hilfy gasped, “me, I got it.”

“Got your chance to be a gods-be fool. Go. Get. Be careful!”

To a departing back, flattened ears, a lithe young woman flying down that corridor while the shouting reinforcements got themselves organized and came on.

The tide oozed its way through the shattered door, over the rattling sheets of cream plastics that had been the ceiling. It swept on, past a bedraggled handful of heavy-armed hani that hugged the wall and waved them past.

“Time was,” Pyanfar said, and hunkered down again as the last of them passed, the heavy gun between her knees, Haral and Geran and Khym already down, Tirun leaning heavily against the wall and slowly sliding down to her haunches, “time was, Id’ve run that corridor.”

“Hey,” Khym said, tongue lolling. He licked his mouth and gasped. “With age comes smart, huh?”

“Yeah,” Haral said, and cast a worried look down the corridor, the way Hilfy had gone. Hilfy with a ring in her ear and a gods-awful lot of scars, and a good deal more sense than the imp had ever had in her sheltered life. Hilfy the veteran of Kefk docks and Harukk’s bowels. Of Meetpoint and all the systems in between and the circle that led home.

“Kid’ll handle it,” Pyanfar said. “We hold this place awhile. Hold their backsides. Got to think. We got Vigilance out there. We got kif to worry about.”

Station poured out a series of conflicting bulletins. Events were too chaotic for Ehrran to coordinate its lies. “They’re still threatening to destroy the boards up there,” Chur said. And: “Unnn,” from Sirany Tauran. There was nothing for them to do about it. But there was a steady pickup of information from Llun scattered throughout the station, static-ridden, but decipherable. It gave out a name. “They’ve met up with the cap’n,” Chur cried suddenly, on a wave of relief, and pressed the com-plug tighter into her ear to try to determine where that meeting was, but Llun was being cagey and giving out no positions. “They’re saying they’ve linked up with Chanur and the rest and they’re headed with that group.”

There was a murmured cheer for that. ("Good?” Tully asked, leaning forward to catch Chur’s eye. “Good?"

“Gods-be good,” Chur said back. “The captain’s found help.") While Tauran crew stayed busy all about them, stations monitoring scan and outside movements, keeping Tully’s recorded output and her own going out on as wide and rapid a sweep of the sphere as they and Chanur’s Light could achieve in coordination, snugged against a rotating station, and sending with as much power as they could throw into the signal. Especially they kept an eye on Vigilance at its dock, Vigilance’s image relayed to them by Light, as a kifish ship headed for them, conspicuous now among all the others and coming the way a hunter-ship could, by the gods fast. While on a link all his own from belowdecks ops, and without a need to sweep the available sphere, Skkukuk maintained communications with his fellow kif.