Chanur's Homecoming

Of strange gangling beings that had walked the dock once at Gaohn, sinister in their numbers and their resemblance to a creature she had befriended (but too many of them, and too sudden, and with their Tully-like eyes all blue and strange and malevolent). They carried weapons, these strangers; they talked among themselves in their chattering, abrupt speech, and laughed their harsh alien laughter out loud, which echoed up and down the docks.

What do they want? she asked Tully then, in that dream.

Look out for them, he said to her. And one of them drew a Hun and aimed it at them both.

What does it say? Pyanfar asked when it spoke.

But the gun went off and Tully went sprawling without a sound; in slow motion the tall figure turned the weapon toward her—

5

...it went off.

The Pride made the drop into realspace and Pyanfar blinked, gasped a breath, and felt an acute pain about the heart which confused her entirely as her eyes cleared on The Pride’s boards and blinking lights and her ears received the warning beeps from com: Wake up, wake up, wake up—

Meetpoint?

Her eyes found the data on the screen, blurred and focussed again with a mortal effort. “We’re on,” she said around the pounding of her heart, “Haral, we’re on.”

And from elsewhere, distant and echoing in and out of space: “Chur, do you hear me? Do you hear?”

From still another: “We’ve got passive signal. Captain! We’re not getting buoy here. They’ve got Meetpoint image blanked!”

“Gods and thunders. Geran!”

“I’m on it, I’m already on it, captain.”

—Hunting their partners, who could make a fatal mistake in a jump this close, looking for the first sign of signal, and themselves rushing in hard toward Meetpoint, into crowded space, where the scan’s bounce-back could only tell them things too late and passive reception might not have all the data. They were blind. Meetpoint wanted them that way. It was somebody’s trap.

“Priority,” Hilfy said. “Buoy warning: dump immediately.”

“Belay that,” Pyanfar said. With two ships charging up behind them out of hyperspace, she had no wish to have herself slowing down in their path. Collision to fore was an astronomical possibility; behind was a statistical probability.

And the kif who gave them orders meant business.

Acquisition,” Geran said, “your one, Haral.”

“Your two,” Haral said; and id chased the image to Pyanfar’s number two monitor. Aja Jin was in.

“What’ve we got here? Geran-”

“I’m working on it. We got stuff all over the place on passive, nobody outputting image, lot of noise, lot of noise, we got ships here-”

“Mark,” Haral said, “less twenty seconds.”

“That’s it, that’s it, brace for dump.”

She sent it to auto; The Pride lurched half into hyperspace again and fell out with less energy—

—gods, gods, sick as a novice-What in a mahen hell’s in this system? Come on, Geran. Get it sorted. O gods- At forty-five percent of Light. With the system rushing up in their faces. Their own signal going out from that traitor buoy at full Light. Themselves about to become a target for someone. She fumbled after the foil containers at her elbow, bit through one and let the salt flood chase down the nausea. There was a meeting of unpleasant tides somewhere behind the pit of her throat and her nose and hands and the folds of her body broke out in sickly sweat. “Geran. Get me id.”

“Working, I’m working.”

Dump fouling up the scan; nothing where it ought to be, the comp overloaded with input and trying to make positional sense out of it before it got around to analyzing ship IDs.

“Multiple signal,” Hilfy said. “Nothing clear yet. Multi-species.”

“Arrival,” Jik said. “Moon Rising is in.”

“On the mark,” Haral said. “Second dump, stand by.”

Taking it down fast. The pain in her chest refused to leave. The nausea all but overcame her; but she hit the control anyway—

—down again.

—Gangling figures against white light. Captain, a voice said, and Chur was there with the light shining about her, in the midst of a long black hallway, and shafts of light spearing past her as she moved in the slightest. She turned her shoulder and looked back into the light- -"Chur-”

they cycled through again, back in realspace. And the weakness that ran through her was all-enveloping. She fought it back and groped after another of the packets. Bit into it and drank the noisome stuff down in a half dozen convulsive gulps.

“We got signal on Moon Rising,” Geran’s voice reached her, indistinct; she heard Tully talking, some half-drunken babble.

“Chur,” he was saying. “Chur, you answer. Please you answer.”

No sound out of Chur, then. It might still be the sedative. The machine would knock her out in stress. They had plenty of it. Pyanfar blinked again, flexed her right arm in the brace, withdrew it and shoved the mechanism aside, out of her way. Her hands shook. She heard the quiet, desperate drone of Tully’s alien voice: “Chur, Chur, you hear?”

While Geran battled the comp for ID they desperately needed. Mind on business.