Chanur's Homecoming

“We got recept on Meetpoint,” Hilfy said. “Lot of output. Busy in there. I’m trying to link up with our partners, get a fix on those ships-”

“We’ve got to keep going,” she muttered. “Got to. No gods-be choice. Blind. We got our instructions, we got-”

“Kif,” Skkukuk said suddenly. “Kifish output!”

“Audio two,” Hilfy said.

It was. Some kifish ship was transmitting in code. Unaware of them yet, it might be. Or close enough to have picked them up, inbound from Kefk. “Going to have an intercept down our necks any minute,” she muttered, and sweated. “Akkhtimakt. He’s on guard here. Or he’s running the whole gods-be station-”

“Image, priority,” Geran said. “My gods.”

Passive scan came up with resolution, a haze to this side, to that, all in differing colors indicating different vectors and slow, virtually null-movement, relative. Big hazy ball where Meetpoint ought to be. Haze to zero-ninety-minus sixty. Haze id minus seventy-thirty-sixty. Another ball out to one ten. The only thing that made sense was the Given in the system, the Meetpoint Mass itself, big and dark and dead from its cons-old formation. And the station itself. The rest—

“Khym,” Pyanfar snapped. “Interior com. Tully! audio one. Listen sharp. We don’t know what we’ve got here. Could be humans, could be anything. Whatever we got, it’s a lot of it.”

“Got it,” Khym said; and: “Got,” from Tully.

The comp main panel between Haral and Hilfy was a steady flicker of inter-partition queries and action from this and that side of its complex time-sharing lobes. Like the lunatic tc’a: it had several minds to make up, and they were all busy.

She rubbed her chest where the pain had settled and swiped the back of the same hand across an itch on her nose.

And listened to Khym trying over and over again to raise Chur on the com.

“Chur,” he cried suddenly. “Geran-I got her, she’s answering! Chur, how are you?”

She was alive back there. Someone switched Chur’s answer through. It was scatologically obscene.

Pyanfar drew one painful breath and another.

“Thank the gods,” Haral murmured in a low voice. And from Khym: “Ker Chur, we have a problem just now-”

“That’s stsho,” Hilfy said. “I’m picking up something near the station. Stsho. And hani. More than one. You got data coming, Geran, Jik.-I hear that.” To someone on com. And Geran:

“Gods rot it, I’m working.” Then: “Yeah, just take it easy, hear?”

“I got,” Jik said quietly. “They be here they don’t-”

“Ten minutes station AOS,” Haral said. “Mark.”

Pyanfar drew another breath and flexed her hands. “Hilfy, output to Meetpoint traffic control: coming in on standard approach.”

“Aye, done, standard approach data in transmission.”

“Aja Jin make dump,” Jik said.

“Stand by our final.”

The wavefront of their arrival had not yet gotten to Meetpoint central. The robotic beacon in the jump range knew as much as its AI brain was capable of knowing anything; but the buoy was not communicating data back to them even after it had had time to receive their ID squeal.

It was certain that it was a trap. Stsho had no nerve sufficient to antagonize an armed enemy, blinding them as they came in. It was what they hired guards to do.

“No telling where Sikkukkut is,” Pyanfar muttered. “It’d take him maybe another hour to get that lot away from Kefk. But he’s fast.”

“Kkkkt,” Skkukuk said, which sound sent the hair up on her back. Not a comment except that click which meant a thousand things. “You all right back there: Skkukuk, you all right?” she asked the kif. And deliberately pleased the bastard. It was a genuine question; nourishment for him was a problem. No gods-be little vermin on my bridge, was her ultimatum; and Skkukuk had come up with his own answer. Straight simple-sugars and water, into a vein.

“Kkkkt,” he said again. “Yes, hakt’.” Doubtless coming to a whole array of mistaken kifish conclusions about his status, the crew’s, Jik’s and Tully’s; that elongate, predatory brain was set up to process that kind of information constantly, inexorable as a star in its course. Claw and crawl and climb. With a sense of humor only when it was in the ascendancy and demonstrating its power.

Creator Gods, if You made that, You must’ve had something in mind. But what?

“Imaging,” Tirun said; “priority channel four.”

“Your two,” Haral said; but that change was already there, the hazy ball of Meetpoint separating into a whole globe of points. So did one of the other patches of haze. Another remained indistinct.

“We got a lot of company,” Haral said.

It was a swarm for sure. A monstrous swarm sitting around Meetpoint station, like insects around a corpse.

“Migods,” she murmured.

Another blur materialized. About ten minutes Light off station nadir. Unresolved yet, and small. It could get a lot wider.

“There’s another one,” Haral said; on the second Geran and Jik both came in on com.

“Got that,” Pyanfar muttered, her mind half there, half on what the comp was bringing up, color-code spotted into the station-mass that said stsho/hani ID.