Chanur's Homecoming

It sang, it wailed, it moaned and howled up and down the scale like a lunatic; and its retreating image showed the perilous yellow of knnn-ID.

O my gods—

“Mark!” Haral cried.

And flung them. . . . . . . .outsystem. . . .

. . . .into jump. . . . . . .tranquility. . . . .returning. . . . .down again. . . .emergency. . . .

9

. . . .emergency. . . . . . . .emergency. ...

. . . .Siren shrieking, auto-alarm from scan. . . .

Pyanfar reached, rolled her head to get view of the chrono and blinked to clear her eyes on the display. It was not at fault. They were on mark. On schedule. Urtur arrival.

. . . “Message,” Hilfy mumbled, “message . . .kifish. . . .”

It came blasting out over the com, general. “Proceed!” came a kifish voice from Pyanfar’s own back, their interpreter, live and with them. “Our escort ships are laying down a pattern of fire, they are proceeding on!”

“We stay on auto!” Pyanfar yelled at Haral. “We got ships at our tail-” Lest old habit take over.

Slow down and they had ships racing up their backside. They kept on, hurtling into Urtur system with all its debris of dust. . . .

... a star more like a black-stained, broken egg, sullen yellow at system heart, all bound up in a black, flat mist of dust and rock through which a couple of distant gas giants and a host of moonlets plowed rings. It was a scientific wonder. ...

... a hellhole for inbound ships, where dust and rock could break down a starship’s defensive bubble and strip away its V. Hit the thick of it at their present velocity and they would make a UV glow, particles accelerated by the contact with virtual particles they brought with them, exotics shooting off in ricochet fashion and creating an accelerated maelstrom of reactions that would bleed away their energy. Ships had to dump when they reached a gravity well; but a cloud like Urtur’s had ways of doing it for a ship. . . .

. . . getting through the V shield, chewing away bit by bit in pyrotechnic decay, until it got to vulnerable realspace metal and quasimetals, and got the vital vane-surfaces, and gnawed away at the hull till it began to glow. . . .

Not yet for The Pride. Instruments jumped and flared as dust and larger debris met the bowshock of particles they carried with them and flared and came apart to join the stream and fly off in discharges at collision with still other particles. They were a cometary fluorescence, if any living eye could track them, if any ship moving at that V dared be close to any other ship doing the same or had the time to look to anything but their own survival.

The trailing ships would be popping into system and running into their backturned message and the kif’s as Hilfy relayed it on: We’re here, so are the kif, keep going, stay on auto. And wide of their entry point, three kif launched precautionary fire before enemies could get organized, plowing through the medium as an irregular flutter of telemetry out of the maelstrom they were meeting, creating more hard radiation trails with the passage of their fire.

Their escort was not going to stop. It had to blow a hole for them through anything that might be in the way and keep going, they had agreed that much. But the kif had their own idea what precaution meant.

It was not saying that a contrary-coursed enemy could not come flaring bow-on toward them, to unintended collision.

Or that there might not be one of Urtur’s rocks out there too big for their shields.

“We’re not getting buoy telemetry,” Haral murmured; and Pyanfar swallowed hard against the upwelling of nausea in her throat and fought the blurring of her eyes. Her hands were numb. It was the brace that held her right hand near controls; she shoved with a heave of her shoulder and swung it woodenly over, pushing Confirm to comp’s automatic warning that they were blind.

“Bad habit hereabouts,” she said between her teeth. And tried to remember what to do next, which was to read the advisements comp was programmed to hand her, data and detail matches to check against the autos.

Enemies might peg them by sheerest luck. A rock was more likely to do it for them. Sikkukkut’s earliest ships had come through here and gods knew what had become of them, whether they still existed, whether they had not gone on to a kifish rendezvous at Kita or Kshshti.

—a knnn had grazed past them, otherside.

—hallucination?

Gods, no, it was real, it had been real-attack pouring into Meetpoint off several vectors, including Urtur . . . Sikkukkut’s enemies had come out of Urtur and Tt’a’va’o and Hoas and V’n’n’u vectors-or space corresponding to those points—

Realtime months ago.

Your doing, Jik? Your gods-be contacts with the tc’a? Gods, gods, have you ever told the truth in your life? What have you done?

Had it been Goldtooth coming in at Meetpoint? Could he marshal methane-breathers to his aid-along with humans?

Could anyone guarantee the methane-folk?