Chanur's Homecoming

Show these bastards indeed. That was a fancy new engine rig The Pride carried, the ratio of those broad jump vanes to her unladed mass was way up since Kshshti; and any kif who saw The Pride and Aja Jin move out in close tandem, would remark the peculiar similarity between their outlines, give or take the cargo holds which were firmly part of The Pride and which were stripped off the hunter-ship’s lean gut and spine.

“Tahar’s away.”

Routine out to startup. The mains cut in on mark; Aja Jin was on the same instant, and Tahar, playing the same insolent game.

It was quiet on the bridge. No chatter, none of the talking back and forth between stations that was normal, all of them , kin and all of them knowing their jobs well enough to get them done through all the back-and-forth. They were not all kin on this trip. And none of them were in the mood. Only she looked over at Haral, the way she had looked a thousand times in The Pride’s voyages; it was reflex.

Haral caught it and looked back, a little dip of one ear and a lift of her jaw, a cheerfulness unlike Haral’s dour business-only blank.

Same face she might have turned her way if she had decided to blow the ship. Pyanfar made a wry pursing of her mouth and gave the old scoundrel the high sign they had once, in their wilder days, passed each other in bars.

They had a word for it. Old in-joke. Meet you at the door.

She drew a wider breath and flexed her hands, reached across and put the arm-brace up, when they would need it.

She had never been so outright scared in her life.

“Coming up,” Haral said finally. But she knew that. The numbers kept ticking off to jump. They took the outbound run with less haste than they could use, on the mark the kif gave them. There was a little leisure, a little chance for crew to stand up and stretch and flex minds as well as bodies; but no one left the bridge. Not even Geran.

She’s asleep, Geran had said when Pyanfar offered her the chance to leave scan and take a fast walk back to Chur’s cabin while they were inertial and under ordinary rotation. So that was that. Pyanfar gnawed her mustaches and offered no comforts; Geran was not one to want two words on a topic where one had said it, and she was focussed down tight; took her little stretch by standing up beside her chair, and kept her eye still to her proper business; answered Jik’s rare comments with a word or two.

“Tully,” Pyanfar said, “get ready.”

“I do,” he said. He had his drugs with him, the drugs that a human or a stsho needed in jump. He prepared to go half to sleep in his chair, sedated so heavily he could hardly stay upright.

Interesting to contemplate-a horde of human ships, all of them that automated. Like facing that many machines.

Set to do what? React to buoys and accept course without a pilot’s intervention?

Defend themselves? Attack? A horde of relentless machines whose crews had committed themselves to metal decisions and a computer’s morality, because their kind had no choice?

Stsho did that, because stsho minds also had trouble in jumpspace; but stsho were nonviolent.

Gods, so gods-be little he says, so little he’s got the words for.

“Tully. Are human ships set to fire when they leave jump?”

He did not answer at once.

“Tully. You understand the question?”

“Human fire?”

“Gods save us. Do their machines- fire after jump? Can they?”

“Can,” Tully said in a small voice. “Ship be ##.”

Translation-sputter.

“Captain,” Hilfy said, “he’s got to go out now. Got to.” His mind was at risk. “Go to sleep,” Pyanfar said, never looking around; his back would be mostly to her anyway, the bulk of the seat in the way.

“Not trust human,” Tully said suddenly.

“Go out,” Hilfy said sharply. “You want me to put that into you? Do it.”

While the chronometer got closer and closer to jump. “Tully,” Pyanfar said. “Good night."

“I go,” he said.

“He’s got it,” Tirun said. “He’s all right."

“We’re on count,” Haral said.

“You give me com we come through,” Jik said.

“Aja Jin has its orders.” They had talked through that matter already. Jik made a last try. And: “You got anything last minute you want to own up to?” she asked. “Jik?"

“I damn fool,” he said.

“Count to ten,” Haral said, and the numbers on the corner of the number-one monitor started ticking away.

“Take her through,” Pyanfar said. They did that, traded off; and she suddenly decided on the stint at exit.

“Got it,” Haral said. That section of the board that pertained to jump was live. “Referent on, we got our lock.”

Star-fixed and dead-on. It was a single-jump to Meetpoint from dusty Kefk, with its armed guardstations and its grim gray station—

—to the white light and opal subtleties of a stsho-run station.

If that was what was still there.

“Going,” Haral said.

Down. . . .

They stopped being at Kefk.

. . . .Gods save us, Pyanfar thought, which thought went on for a long long timestretch.

She dreamed of ships in conflict in their hundreds, burning like suns.