Chanur's Homecoming

get to safe small places in case the ship had to move. Broken bones and smashed skulls else. Spacers died of bad luck like that, a ship moving to save its steel hide and some poor bastard of a spacer smashed to pulp down a corridor become a three-story drop-epitaph on many an acquaintance: the luck ran out. On a ten-ring spacer it could happen—

Luck out on Tahar and Vrossaru. Gods help ’em.

After a dark space the restraint hummed, a large and warm weight settled onto the same mattress and a warmth settled about her. “We’re about to brake,” Khym said; and woke her up just enough to feel a drunken panic.

“Restraint,” she said. “I’ve got it,” he said, and she opened her eyes blearily on dim light and the arch of the safety web going over them, on a familiar face, a large arm going over her like the arch of the safety, a huge body shaping itself to hers, awful and stinking as they both were, straight out of jump and headed in again without respite. She hugged him back, hard.

The vanes cycled again, blowing velocity in a dizzying pulse of neither here nor there, right down to the lowest energy they could reasonably achieve. It was a hunter-ship maneuver. Honest freighter never had the reason to do a thing like that.

Urtur dust screamed over the hull, shields downed during the low-V of their turn and reacquisition, dust abrading the vanes. The whole ship wailed and keened in sound that hurt the ears.

Gods let Tahar make it after all, gods save the rest of us, where’s the kif?

“Unnnh.” Khym clenched his fist in her mane. “Claws, Py, gods-”

Realspace acceleration started up, the unsettling G-shift of rollover.

“We’re going,” she said, “we’re going all right.” Which might or might not be true. There might be enemies after all. Or a big rock the shields would fail on. It was all Tauran’s problem now. Not hers. Not hers.

The dust wailed away, changing pitch.

“Py-”

He burrowed in closer, arm stretched above her. “I’m holding on,” he said; and did: his weight kept her steady and comfortable, so that her groping reach after the handgrip became too much effort. He stayed like that forever, in a position that could not be comfortable for him. She tried again to move and get a foot braced against the safety-rim. “I’ve got it,” he said again, “it’s all right, Py.”

“Sprain your gods-be shoulder,” she muttered.

He breathed into her ear and tongued the inside of it, like in the dark of off-watch, like the two of them twenty and brand new again. “Good gods.” She caught her breath and lost it again. “Not now, Khym.”

“Think of a better time?”

He couldn’t, under the strain they were under. But he amused himself. While they hurtled on toward oblivion and it was clear he was in pain.

“Gods be fool man,” she said. “Love you like my sister.” It sounded stupid. It was the only way she knew to say it to him, in hani, so he would know what she meant. “Always have.”

“Man’s got no brother,” he said. He was breathing hard. Strain was in his voice, while the scream of the ship went on and he kept up his lackadaisical attentions. “Man’s alone. Man never even knows what I’ve got exists at all. Not alone anymore. Never alone anymore. You were right. You were always right.”

“Gods, I wish I were." / wish I was right about what I’m doing, what I’ve done. We’re going to jump and they haven’t got that gods-be com on, they cut the gods-be com, we don’t know when—

She hazed out. She came to and realized G-stress had shifted and Khym had come down on her limp as a dead man, breathing hard. That was no matter. He was warm, and without him she would shiver; she felt it.

“Mark,” a sudden voice came over com, not Haral’s, stranger-voice. “We’re outbound.”

—into jump.—falling.

“Hello,” said the young man, sitting on the rock, beneath blue sky, above a golden valley; and she took him for a Wanderer, up to no good on Chanur land. She set her jaw and drew a deep breath and made herself as tall as she could: No nonsense, man, take a look at the spacer rings and figure you’re not dealing with any young fool; I’ll shred your ears for you.

“Hello,” she said, on her way up from Chanur lands, on the. road. She had chosen to walk, when she might have made a landing here, created a little stir, coming in like that. But she was romantical in her youth.

What it got her was a young bandit, that was what. Real trouble, if he was also crazy. And worse trouble if he carried e knife. Some did.

“You’re on Chanur land,” she said. “Wise if you’d move along.”

“You’re Pyanfar,” he said. And, gods, he was beautiful, his eyes large and gold-amber, his mane thick and wide. He stepped off his rock and landed on his feet in her path. “Are you?”

“Last I checked. Who in a mahen hell are you?"

“Khym Mahn,” he said. “Your husband.”

—down.—alive. By the gods alive.

—and where? Gods, where? Kura. Kura. Got to get up, get to the bridge- No. First dump. Got-remember interval. “We all right?” Khym murmured. His weight hurt her, hurt her all the way to her bones. She was smothering. “We at Kura?”