Chanur's Homecoming

There were casualties. One dead. Three likely to be. The dead one was one of the lads from Llun; and Hilfy stood over him and looked down at a boyish, simple face. Nothing much. A boy who had been too brave and a little foolish. Playing at hero.

Gods. Gods. He never knew it was real.

Did he? This boy? Could he imagine Harukk’s black gut? A kifish dockside?

Or did he have to?

A hand touched her shoulder. Her father, sweaty and bloody and breathing hard. And safe. She looked up at Kohan Chanur: he towered, huge and kind and perhaps no longer or ever as innocent as she had always thought him.

She looked at him and saw he was also hunting someone who no longer existed. His daughter. The unscarred one. Perhaps he wanted her to show some emotion. That made her saddest of all, that if she softened it would be a lie. Sadness was all she could muster. She only looked at him.

Her mother was more practical. Huran Faha stood by, with perhaps a little amazement, a hard and reckoning look between them when she turned away, a warning look, because there were Llun taking back this control center as Ehrran clanswomen were rounded up and led away. It had not been that hard at the last. Poor groundling fools who melted away in hand-to-hand so fast it was over in a couple of shots and a tangle of bodies, Ehrran struggling up close and intimate with spacers who learned their infighting in dockside bars. Not a chance in a mahen hell, after that. Easy stuff.

Only the boy, who had never dodged. Who just plunged ahead in his simple bravery because that was what men were supposed to do, wasn’t it?

“Gods blast “em!” Suddenly the anger was too much, and there was nowhere to spend it. She had no wish to stay and answer close questions from the Llun.

She was not known the way her aunt Pyanfar was. She was only another spacer, thin and scarred and unremarkable, except that she had stood for a moment with Chanur clan, except for a moment the lord of Chanur-ex-lord! O gods! had laid his hand on her shoulder. It was time to be gone back to her ship. She gave a look to Fiar and Sif, caught their eye in one sweep and slanted an ear toward the door. Time to be out indeed, before Llun caught on to who she was, and what crew she belonged to.

gut a brusque presence swept into the center, graynosed and haggard and accompanied by a band of hani in hardly better shape-the look, Hilfy had gotten to know it, of spacers off a brutally hard run. Dulled fur, thinned patches. She knew them, had seen this lot last on a Meetpoint dockside with police closing in on all of them.

Banny Ayhar and her crew filled the doorway, blinked, and stared at her closer than a chance encounter warranted. “Is that young Chanur?” Banny asked. “Is that Hilfy Chanur?”

Hilfy’s jaw refused to work. The wits that had done quite well up to that point, turned to butter.

“Chanur for sure!” Banny drew a deep breath, and her ears slanted back and up again. “They told me what you did.” Down again. “Got us free, b’gods! Gods-be fools! But what’s this with you and the kif?”

There was profound silence at her back, and profoundest attention to the question.

“Chanur,” another voice said at her back. “Ker Hilfy.”

She started out, past Banny. But that obstacle was not moving.

“Kif,” Banny Ayhar said. “That’s what I want to know. What’s going on?”

It was stop or fight. A fight now could do Chanur no particular good. She glared at Banny Ayhar with flattened ears and the power of the AP in her fist which was right now worth nothing at all.

My gods, I can lose it all. Everything. If they get wind of what we’re doing, they’ll throw it wide and high and we’ll all die, the whole world will die for it. O Banny Ayhar, you godscursed fool, you’re about to throw away everything you won.

“You got the message here,” she said to Banny, quiet and urgent, ears up now. “You want to lose it all? Or you want to stand with me here?”

She was talking to a captain; and a hardnosed one; and flatly forgot the ker and the respects: she threw her whole life and self into it.

Banny’s ears twitched this way and that in the deep hush. Everyone in the whole center must have heard that appeal, as if Ayhar and Prosperity were part of all that tainted Chanur. There was Harun back there. And Munur Faha. She was not alone. Even in the matter with the kif. There were senior captains to rely on. There stood Fiar and Sif, co-conspirators off the same bridge.

She saw a sudden guardedness in Banny Ayhar’s eyes, the look of an old trader and an old hand in rough places. The old woman knew when she had gotten a high sign, by the gods she caught it up; and it was suddenly spacers and stationers in the control center, spacers and Them, which was only slightly less foreign than the kif.

“Chanur,” that Llun voice behind her said, a woman’s voice of some age and authority.

But before she turned, Ayhar lifted her chin in that way that from Anuurn docks to Meetpoint, said Ally, till I find out different.

“Cap’n, they got into Central, they got it.”