Chanur's Homecoming

She flung the kifish packet onto the counter by her own station on the bridge.

No one had left post; or if Geran had left to check on Chur she had come back again in a hurry. Solemn faces stared at her: Hilfy, Geran, Khym and Tully; Haral kept operations going.

“Leave it, Haral,” Pyanfar said.

Haral swung her chair about, same as the others.

“You know the way we came in here,” Pyanfar said, “and took Kefk. We got orders to do it again. At Meetpoint.”

Ears sank. Tully sat there, the human question, hearing what he could pick up on his own and what garbled version whispered to him over the translator plug he kept in one ear.

“You’ve heard bits and pieces of it,” she said, and sat down on the armrest of her own cushion, facing all of them. “We’ve got to follow orders the way they’re given. Or we’ve got to blow ourselves to particles here at dock. And that takes out only one kif faction. It leaves the other one the undisputed winner. And by the gods, I’d rather they chewed on each other a while and gave the Compact a chance. That’s one consideration. But there’s another one. Sikkukkut’s threatened Anuurn.”

“How-threatened?” Haral asked.

“Just that. One ship-if he thinks we’re getting out of line. He’s not talking about an attack at Gaohn. Nothing like it. He means an attack directly on the world. That’s the kind of kif we’re dealing with. One large C-charged rock, hitting Anuurn, before Anuurn can see it coming, gods know. It was a threat. I hope it was a remote threat. We’re dealing with a kif who knows too gods-be much about hani and too gods-be little: he was a fool to tell me that and maybe he doesn’t imagine what we’d do to stop him-before or after the event. But I don’t think he’s the only kif who’d think of it. I hope they chew each other to bloody rags. We arrange that if we can-but we’ve got to do what we’re told right now or we find ourselves looking the wrong way at one of Sikkukkut’s guns, und we don’t get the chance to warn anybody, or work our way around this, or save a gods-be thing.”

“Captain,” Haral said, “we got a kif up there at zenith. He’s got position on us.”

“I know about it. We’re not going to take ’em on. We just get out of here. We’ve got six hours, we’re dropping into a Situation at Meetpoint, and the Compact may not survive it in any form we understand it. That’s what we’ve got. That’s what we’re up against. I don’t know what we’re going to find at Meetpoint. Tully-are you following this? Do you understand me?”

“I understand,” he said in a faint voice. “I crew, captain.”

“Are you? Will you be, at Meetpoint?”

“You want me sit with Hilfy at com, speak human if humans be there.” His voice grew steadier. “Yes. I do.”

With all he could and could not understand. She gazed on him in a paralysis of will, as if putting off deciding anything at all could stop time and give them choices they did not have.

Jik, they had locked up below. A kif and a human were loose among them. The human sat in their most critical councils.

But Tully had given them the warning she had passed to Jik, a warning blurted out in one overcharged moment that Tully had stood between her and Hilfy and she had questioned his motives.

Don’t trust humans, Pyanfar.

On one sentence, one frightened, treasonous sentence in mangled hani, they bet everything.

Gods, risk my world on him? Billions of lives? My whole people? My gods, what right have I got?

“I’ll think on it,” she said. “I haven’t got any answers.” She picked up the packet and flung it down again. “We’ve got our instructions. We’ve got Tahar with us. We’ve got Jik’s ship. And we’ve got orders to keep Jik with us and keep that ship of his under tight watch.”

“There’s something else,” Hilfy said. And took up a piece of paper and got up and brought it to her. It trembled in Hilfy’s hand. “Comp broke the code. Maybe he meant us to break it. I don’t know.”

She hesitated in the dim doorway of sickbay, with that paper in her pocket; Jik was awake, Tirun had said.

He was. She saw the slitted glitter of Jik’s eyes, saw them open full as she walked in, quiet as she was. She went and laid her hand on his shoulder, above the restraint webbing. Tirun had put a pillow under his head and a blanket over his lower body.

His eyes tracked on her quite clearly now, gazed up at her sane and lucid. “Come let me go, a? Damn stubborn, you crew.”

But she did not hear the edge of annoyance that might have been there. It was all too quiet for Jik, too wary, too washed of strength. It was-gods knew what it was.

Apprehension, comprehension-that he might not be among friends?

That for some reason she might be truly siding with the kif-or that she was operating under some other driving motive, in which they were no longer allies?

He had for one moment, in that kifish place, drugged and on the fading edge of his resources, answered questions he had held out against for days, answered because she got through his defenses with a warning his mind had been in no