Chanur's Homecoming

If there was a spotter, something they had constantly to worry about, it would lie more than a lighthour out, maybe three or four. And it would move when it felt like it. When its own criteria had been met. One of Goldtooth’s ships, maybe. Maybe one of Akkhtimakt’s. Or more than one. They sat here with nose to station with the chance, however remote, that some attack might come in, some mass of ships might be sitting out there dead silent and so lost in the immensity of the spherical search-zone that they were virtually invisible. Like the spotters. There was no way to find that kind of lurker either, except by that same blind luck, or its own error. The entire perimeter of Meetpoint’s dark-mass influence, at a spherical radius of one to four lighthours-was an impossible area to search for any single ship. Station obscured part of their sweep and rotation complicated matters, with station not sending, the buoys on but erratic, and the kif deliberately censoring their own scan output. There was not even a star close enough to light an object, little help that that was: the dark-mass radiated, but with a sullen, dying heat, a spot their instruments regularly scanned, looking for any anomaly that might be a ship trying to mask itself; Meetpoint’s own mass gave off a quiet white noise to their most sensitive instruments, the several system navigational buoys screamed their false information into the dark, emissions of a vast number of ships churned and dispersed in a maelstrom generated by other traffic; while their best chance of seeing a hidden ship lay in the computer’s memory of the starfield continually overlaid on its present reception. Any star occulted, anywhere about the sweep, might signal that presence, and they had had two such occultations, which buoy-information called planetesimals—

“-Library,” Haral had said on the first such: “does the Meetpoint buoy correlate its input with archives?”

Meaning did the buoy-system ever check itself to see if a cold, silent object it spotted was a known planetesimal? Affirmative. It did. But it reported it out as a planetesimal even while it was relaying a query: it was defaulted that way. The AI of the buoy knew nothing else to call it. The stsho who built it built no contingencies into it: or they had made them and did not put that information into the navigational ephemeris.

If something was out there hours out it had not seen recent developments in any of its timelagged reception: depending on its line of sight, it might only now be watching Harukk arriving at station ... in the confused, digital way of distance-scattered passive. It might not know what ship; or be sure how many were out here.

And gods only knew what would trigger it.

Hilfy wiped her eyes, shifted the com plug and kept focused. For their very lives.

“Abort linguistics search,” Haral said suddenly, out of profound silence. “We need the room in nav.”

Hilfy hesitated. And did it. Haral started running calc and never saying what it was for; but if Haral aborted one of Pyanfar’s orders it was desperate. She pulled out the print she had, which was all gibberish. Lost. Utterly.

Then com beeped:

“Harukk-com to all ships at dock: praise to the hakkikt, stand by departure.”

“What are they doing?” Khym exclaimed. “They can’t be putting out!”

“We’re going live,” Haral said sharply. And started throwing switches. Systems thunked and started coming up.

“We keep those connectors?” Tirun asked, businesslike, while Hilfy sweated in panic and punched buttons on her own: “Harukk-com, this is The Pride of Chanur.”

“This is Harukk-com, praise to the hakkikt, report your status.”

Her mind blanked. She sorted wildly, found the standard reports, shot them over. “Praise to the hakkikt,” she muttered, “status on our personnel.”

“Returning,” the kif said. “We are in receipt of your data, Chanur-com. Provide data on your subordinates.”

She shut the channel down to hold. Kifish courtesies, abrupt and rude by any other standard. She punched in on Haral, whose information-request light was flashing priority. “They say they’re coming back. Harukk wants stats from the rest.”

“Subordinates,” Haral said. “Get the stats on all those ships.”

Haral was right, gods, entirely right: it was kifish, it was a matter of protocols, claim everything the captain claimed, have all those stats in hand, permit no ship they claimed to report on its own. Her fingers stabbed at buttons, opened com to the mahendo’sat, to Tahar, to every other hani berth.

Claim it or lose it.