Chanur's Homecoming

Gods hope he had failed to find it. Or that kif did not have the habit of lying in certain regards.

“Skkukuk says watch him,” she muttered to the others. “Tirun, you stay aboard. Hear?”

Tirun did not like it. But crew did not argue these days. Not in front of kif, even their own.

The personnel lock cycled, letting the party out. And closed again, audible from the bridge over the steady bleep and tick of incoming telemetry and com. “That’s seal,” Haral said to Tirun belowdecks. “Get up here.”

“Station com’s still gibbering,” Hilfy said. “Gods-be stsho’re going crazy. I can’t make out anything except how glad they are to have the noble hakkikt back a-” She blinked, as Geran suddenly turned her head, and blinked again, seeing Chur wobbling into the bridge, Chur without her rings and dressed in a towel, the implant still in her arm and secured with tape. Her mane and beard were dull, her fur thin in pink spots where skin showed through, and her ribs showed prominent above a hollowed belly.

“Geran-” Hilfy said, but Geran had already grabbed her.

Haral turned her chair and took a look. “Geran, for godssakes-”

“Got to walk a bit,” Chur said, the merest ghost of Chur’s voice, but she passed a glance around at monitors and displays. “Got a mess, do we? Lock working down there- Y’don’t expect a body to sleep. Geran, set me down, I’ve got to sit. Who’s covering you?”

“He is.” Meaning Khym. “Sit.”

“You’re an emergency,” Haral said. “Gods rot it, sit down.” As Chur wilted onto Skkukuk’s seat. “We’re up to our noses. Could have an attack from gods know who come screaming through here any minute, we got to be able to move, how do we move with you wandering around?”

Chur gave a ghastly grin. “Hal, cousin, if we’ve got to move without the captain, I’m sitting a chair, no way I’m not. What in a mahen hell is going on out there?”

“The captain aboard Harukk is what’s going on out there. We got kifish guns to our heads and gods know what else about to come in here for a piece of stsho hide.”

“Figured.” Chur drew a large breath as if breathing was hard. “Gods take ’em. What’s our cousin up to?”

“Sfik,” Hilfy said. “She’s got three species for an escort and a half-dozen hani captains following her moves. She’s running the biggest gods-be bluff of our lives, that’s what she’s doing. Trying to buy us time.”

“If we got two hani walking sequential it’ll be the first time since we went on two feet.” Chur leaned her head back on the headrest and rolled it aside to look at the displays. “Not mentioning the mahendo’sat.” Her breath was coming harder, and for a moment Hilfy tensed in her chair, thinking she might go unconscious; but Geran had Chur’s shoulder, and Chur got her head up again. “Haral, I want a pocket com and I want ops-com run back there to my cabin. All right?”

“You got it,” Haral said. “Geran, get her out of here.”

“Hilfy,” Khym said, “you want to cover me?"—preparing to get out of his seat and help. But: “I’m doing all right,” Chur said, and caught hold of the arm and levered herself up like an old woman, where Geran could steady her. Then she walked, slowly, slowly, back the way she had come, past a startled Tirun Araun, just arrived up from lowerdecks.

“What’s that?” Tirun asked when she and Geran were out and down the corridor. With a look backward. “She all right?”

“Wants to know what’s going on,” Khym said. “She’s fighting.”

“She’s got her way again,” Haral said in the same low tone. “Too.” And swung her chair back around.

“Priority,” Khym said suddenly, which set a lurch into Hilfy’s pulse.

“Scan-blocking,” Tirun said, slipping into place while Hilfy cast an anxious look at the scan display on her number-two monitor. A vanished ship reestablished itself in the red of projected-position. One by one other ships went red, the blight spreading in an orderly way. Then:

“That’s friendly of them,” Haral murmured as their own position at station vanished from the other display. “At least they’re catholic when they blank the scan.”

The ramp access doors opened, above the once-teeming docks: deserted now, mostly. Bits of paper. Trash. Abandoned machinery. Burn-scars on the paints. Arid cold, which the Meetpoint docks always were, too much size and too little free heat from the dull, dead Mass about which the station orbited. There were abundant kif-not far away, black shapes in robes. Skkukun, likely, quasi-slaves on Ikkhoitr. Expendables and dangerous as a charged cable.

And there were stsho, fragile-looking pale figures huddled over against the far side of their own docks, scurrying like pale ghosts, out of doorways and shelter, the dispossessed owners of Meetpoint. A mass of them surged toward the foot of the ramp, indecisively retreated, bolted again toward them in utter chaos, a crowd all spindle-limbed and gossamer-robed in opalescent whites and pearl, stsho of rank, with their feathery, augmented brows, their moonstone eyes struck with panic. They gibbered and wailed their plaints, their effusive pleas for protection—