Chanur's Homecoming

awake and willing to try it eating, which was one heart-lightening event among all the bad news. Haral was sitting on the couch opposite with a bit of jerky in one hand and her mouth full, while she raked her damp mane into order with the other. Her eyes had that distracted, glassy weariness jump left in a body. Tully came out of the common bath with a towel over his shoulders, wearing a pair of Khym’s trousers, a rust silk pair which he had had to pin at the waist, but Haral was out of spares and the other pair was going through the laundry. He staggered over to the cabinet and got a cup and poured soupmix and water into it, shoved it in the microwave and sat down to towel his head and beard dry. Pale, old scars stood out on white-skinned shoulders; and pinker, recent ones.

“Akkhtimakt’s jumped out,” came the bulletin from the bridge. And: “We got a general slow-down on Sikkukkut’s side, sure enough, ’cept for two of ’em it looks like Sikkukkut’s sending out to keep ’em worried, same as he did with Goldtooth’s lot. Looks for good and sure like Sikkukkut’s going to stay with us. Thought you’d like to know.”

“No surprise,” Haral muttered. “Couldn’t be that lucky. Couldn’t be lucky enough to get help out of Goldtooth. Sikkukkut’s going to have this place stripped to the deckplates before he gets back.”

“Going to do whatever he wants,” Hilfy said, “that’s sure."

“Lousy mess.”

Tully had lifted his face from the towel and looked at them, yellow hair tousled, eyes showing lines of strain about the edges. Sometimes he seemed too tired even to make the effort of speech. Or to listen for the translator’s sputtering whisper giving him its mangled version of things around him. The things hardest to get across were the delicate topics, like: How’s Chur-honestly? Or: What do you think Jik will do? And: What are we going to do when the kif move into the station? He seemed to go away at times. At others he seemed desperate to say something of too much difficulty to attempt it.

Things like: My people are going. I talked to them. Even if the message didn’t get there. I was that close.

/ didn’t betray you.

I swear I didn’t try.

The microwave bleeped Finished; and Tully got up and got his soup, with a package of shredded meat and a packet of mahen fuyas, which he and Haral thought edible and everyone else aboard loathed. He offered one of the grain-meat sticks to Haral: she took it and stirred her soup with it, and he settled down with the other packets in his agile fingers, cup in both hands and elbows on his knees, to drink a sip and sigh in profoundest weariness.

“I figure,” Hilfy said, to fill the quiet, and to answer questions Tully did not ask, “Goldtooth rendezvoused here with the human fleet. That’s why he kited out on us at Kefk. He and Ehrran came in here, he got stuck here, in a standoff with Akkhtimakt. Maybe he got Akkhtimakt pried loose from the station. He did that much for the stsho. But Ehrran’s on her way to Anuurn. Bet.”

“Godsrotted well has to be,” Haral muttered. “But with Goldtooth in it we got to wonder, don’t we?”

“Like what happened here?” That bothered her. The whole arrangement of things bothered her. The lack of methane-breathers. And Akkhtimakt and Sikkukkut, if they both wanted to be fools, could go on trading that position till the suns all froze. Every few shipboard days, every few ground-bound months, one side could do a turnaround at Urtur or Tt’a’va’o or Kefk or wherever, and come in and strafe the other who had taken possession of Meetpoint. Or Kefk. Or wherever. If ships got to trading positions like that, time-dilation got to stretching lives wider and wider; no in-system passages. No slow-time. Just run and run and run as long as a ship could take it and a body could take the depletion. A merchant ship did its jumps with a lot of slowtime and dock-time in between; and a tradeoff like that could do as much timestretch in a month of their own perception as a trader did in a decade. Before flesh and bone and steel had gone their limits. “Wonder is he didn’t come in on Kefk.”

“Kefk’s got two guardstations. Kefk’s got position on him.”

Tully stared at them both. He had lost that, probably. But of a sudden the problem had found itself a cold spot in

Hilfy’s gut. She took a sip of her cup to warm that cold and licked the soup off her mustaches.

“Sikkukkut’s got something in mind. He’s sure not going to sit here.”

“There are fools in the universe,” Haral said. “What if he isn’t? What if he’s not sitting still here? What if he’s got something else in mind?”

But Goldtooth was out on the Tt’a’va’o vector. Methane-breather territory. Logical choice: the stsho feared the humans like plague. Stsho would deal with Ehrran; they would deal with the kif before they dealt with Goldtooth and his human allies. They would go with the known villains.

Stsho had no armaments. No capability for that kind of stress. Stsho would run if they could. Evade it all.