Chanur's Homecoming

Sikkukkut waited for them, in a room ringed with black kifish shadows. Two incense-globes on tall poles gave off curls of sickly spicy smoke that curled visibly in front of the sodium-lights mounted to the side of the room, while another light from overhead fell wanly on Sikkukkut’s floor-hugging table, himself and his chair, the legs of which arched up about him like the legs of a crouching insect. Sikkukkut sat where the body of the insect would be, robed in black edged with silver that took the orange light, with the light falling on his long, virtually hairless snout and the glitter of his black eyes as he lifted his head.

“Hunter Pyanfar,” he said. “Kkkt. Sit. And is it Kesurinan of Aja Jin?”

“Same, hakkikt,” Kesurinan said. And did not say: where is my captain? which was doubtless the burning question in her mind.

Pyanfar settled easily into another of the insect chairs and tucked her feet up kif-style as one of the skkukun brought her a cup, one of the ball-shaped, studded cups the kif favored, and another poured parini into it. Kesurinan had hesitated to sit: “You too,” Sikkukkut said, and as Kesurinan took another of the chairs, next Pyanfar, he looked in Skkukuk’s direction. “Kkkkt. Sokktoktki nakt, skku-Chanuru.”

A moment’s hesitation. It was courtesy; it was invitation to a kifish slave to sit at table with the hakkikt and his captain. “Huh,” Pyanfar said, sensing Skkukuk’s crisis; and her flesh shrank at the sudden purposeful grace with which Skkukuk came around that table and assumed the chair beside her-he slithered, on two feet: was, she suddenly recognized those moves, not skulking, not slinking-but moving with that fluidity very dangerous kif could use; very powerful kif; kif whose moves she instinctively kept an eye to when she saw them dockside and met them in bars. This was a fighter, among a species who were born fighting. And all hers, for the moment.

She sipped her parini. Sikkukkut sipped whatever he was drinking while a skku served the others in turn.

“Tahar,” Sikkukkut said, “is on her way in. And your ship is live, hunter Pyanfar. Have you noticed this?”

“I’ve noticed,” she said, and kept all her moves easy.

Sikkukkut’s long tongue exited the v-form gap of his teeth and extended into the cup, withdrew again. “So have I. Your crew claims they’re following orders. Is this so?”

“Yes.”

“Kkkt.” Silence a moment. “While you are on the dock.”

“I hope,” Pyanfar said ever so softly, “that nothing’s been launched toward my ship-bearing in mind there might be agencies still on the station that would like to damage the hakkikt’s ally. I hope the hakkikt will protect us against a thing like that.”

Deathly stillness. At last the hakkikt lapped at his cup again and blinked with, for a kif, bland good humor. “You have been foolish, hunter Pyanfar. There’s far too much opportunity for error. And you have delivered far too much power into the hands of subordinates. We will talk about this.”

Another weighty silence, in which perhaps she was expected to reply. She simply sat still, having achieved a position in which she could sit and stare thoughtfully at the hakkikt.

Eggsucking bastard, she thought. Where’s Jik, you earless assassin?

She tried not to think of what kind of demonstration Sikkukkut was capable.

“We will have a discussion on the matter,” Sikkukkut said; and there was the subtle, soft whisper of arrival in the outer corridor. “Is that Tahar? Yes. Alone except for my escort. I wonder at this new tactic.”

Tahar hesitated in the doorway, then ventured close-a quiet step, a quiet settling into place when the hakkikt gestured her to sit at the table: a rippled-maned, bronze-pelted southern hani with a black scar across her mouth that gave her a grim and raffish look.

“So all the ships in your hand,” Sikkukkut said, looking at Pyanfar, “are in mine.”

“/ am in your hand,” Pyanfar said, with as steady a voice as ever she faced down a dockside official bent on penalties. But never suggest I don’t control those ships, no, not to a kif. Status, Pyanfar Chanur. Status is all there is with him. “It’s a complex situation, hakkikt. Hani minds are not, after all, kifish. But that’s my value to you.”

“Godsawful gibberish,” Haral said from her station. The printout was ten pages long, and full of code words that only Jik and his Personage might know. Hilfy Chanur stared at the same set of papers and flipped this way and that, trying to get some idea what they applied to.

—Ghost is proceeding on the course suggested in her previous report.

Pieces and bits of information depending on other information.

—reports from inconvenience/Inconvenience? are negative.

“I think Inconvenience is another codename,” Hilfy said.

“We knew,” said Tirun, from the end of the consoles, “that that son was in connivance up to his nose.”

“Who are we?” Haral wondered. “Could we be that Ghost?”

“Inconvenience,” Hilfy suggested. “If-”

“Priority,” Geran exclaimed, atop a sound from Tully. “Priority, engine live, coming over station rim vicinity berth 23-”