Chanur's Homecoming

The great captain let his enemy lay hands on her. The great captain believes she has these for subordinate. The captain is wrong. Can the great captain be such a fool? Beware these hani. They are not subordinate either.

She lifted her chin. Come-hither. And Skkukuk came, all anxious, not without a suspicious glance toward the vanishing mahendo’sat. “Hakt’, that is dangerous.”

“Friend,” she said. And in perversity reached out and laid a hand on Skkukuk’s hard arm, from which touch he flinched out of reach.

“Kkkt!” As if she had attacked him. Very like her own gut reaction with Jik. And she had not perceived Jik’s touch as lifethreatening.

“I teach you a thing, Skkukuk. You’re traveling with hani. You’ll hear things that may disturb you.” A second time she reached, and this time caught him. The arm was thin, hard as metal. She felt a tremor there. “Scare you, skku of mine? Power among hani is a different matter. Power among hani is a handful of clans that just decided to go along with me because I handed them the only way out of here they’re ever going to get. And because as long as there’ve been clans on Anuurn, there’s been Chanur, and our roots go deep and our connections are complicated, and we’re calling in debts they have to pay for sfik reasons and self-protection. We’re connected to Faha; Faha’s got ties of its own. Gods know I’d have to look up library to see where the others run. That’s the way we are. Clan is one entity. You’re skku to Chanur. Do you see? You behave yourself with these strangers aboard. And they won’t gain a bit on you. Their relation is all with Chanur as a clan, do you follow that?”

Dark eyes glittered. She stared at a kif s face a handspan from hers, closer than she ever wanted to be. He made her nose run. And she made him shiver.

“Yes, hakt’.” he said. “Power.”

She let him go. And wanted a bath. Wanted clean air. Wanted-gods, never to have tried to reason with a kif. Or to have dealt with one.

“Come on,” she said, shoved him and then Tully into motion and turned and hurried to The Pride, faster and faster, Skkukuk close after her, Tully panting along beside her, his breath hollow and hoarse from the thin air and the chill. Get you out of this, lad, before you catch a cough. Get me out of this. Gods, I’m too old for this kind of stuff. She took the pocketcom from her belt. “This is Pyanfar. Open up, hear me? We’re coming in.”

“Aye,” Haral’s voice came back.

Up the ramp. Into the chill ribbed yellow of the passageway. Around the bend and toward the white light, the safety of the airlock. She came across that threshold weak-kneed and with her side one mass of pain.

“Lock it up,” she yelled at com. “We’re all in.”

“Aye,” Haral said. “Everyone all right?" The hatch whined and hissed shut; and they were as free of the kif as they were able to be.

She shut her eyes and hung there, bent over then to get her breath while Tully did the same.

“Captain?”

“Fools, fools!” Skkukuk cried, and an alien grip closed on her arm. “The mekt-hakt’ is starved, is fainting for your incompetence!”

Tully snarled something at him. Pyanfar rescued her own arm, blinking dazedly as it became almost a matter of keeping two men apart. Neither one hers. And both being hers, in a way which had nothing to do with being male. She had never seen that look on Tully’s face. Tully’s teeth bared without humor at all, teeth no match for Skkukuk’s, which were all too close. She straight-armed them apart, hard. “Manners, gods-be, shut it down!"

“Captain?"

“I’m all right,” she said, and shook her head, dazed, dizzy, and with a rush of fight-impulse going through her veins that turned her giddy. Human sweat and kifish mingled in her nostrils with her own. So much for human/kifish cooperation.

Gods, no time, we got our orders, I got no time to go away like this.

“I’m coming down there,” Khym said.

“No need.” She felt totally disconnected, blinked back and forth between Skkukuk and Tully. Her husband in it was the last thing she wanted. “We got more coming. Tauran’s crew is boarding as soon as they can get locked up and back here. Working alternate with us. They tell you? We got a trip to make.”

The door to the inside corridor opened. “Where, cap’n?” Haral’s voice took over com again. “Where are we going?”

They had not known. “Home,” she said; and felt a momentary rush of triumph for her own cleverness.

Until she thought again of Chur, and the cost it might be to them all in more terms than one. The triumph faded, left only an ache and a vast and mortal terror. “They’ve turned us loose. We’re going home.”

8

“Go,” she said to Skkukuk outside the airlock. “If you want to get to quarters for any reason, get to it. You’re going to be standing watch out by the ramp in ten minutes. We got too much traffic coming in here to take any chances. And be polite! Hear?”

“Yes, hakt’!”

“Get!”

He ran, a flurry of black robes and rattle of weapons, down the corridor toward his own quarters.