You have to take care, Tully said to her. He had never gotten that good at hani speech, that she knew of. But that was years ago.
I always take care, she said.
You trust this deal you're in.
Let's not talk about business. She knew what she wanted to do. Exactly what her aunt frowned on her doing. But Tully was evasive. He walked away from her, with his back turned.
And the lights dimmed, and there were bars about— ammonia, and sodium light.
She took alarm. "Tully?" she said, and he looked at her, scared as she was. She didn't want to be here again. She didn't want this part.
He came and held on to her. He had then. He did until the kif came and then he went with them because they threatened her. The whole thing passed in a kind of haze, the way the hours had in mat kifish cage.
There were sounds to hear. She chose not to hear them. She could govern the dream now — she had learned to do that, and she kept saying, over and over again, Tully, come back. Tully, listen to me. I don't want to remember that. What do you go there for? I don't want to see that-Come back and talk to me.
"Tully!"
He came back then, just a shadow. And wouldn't talk to her.
"He knows better," Pyanfar said, out of nowhere and uninvited. "He had his choice, go or stay. He understood. You wouldn't. You still won't."
She did. That was the trouble. She loved him, enough to make them both miserable. Go have babies, Py had said. Thank the gods that had failed. And maybe Korin had never had a chance, maybe he'd sensed that, male-wise, sullen, quarrelsome, and unwisely set on running domestic affairs. Maybe that had set up the situation from the first day he moved in. Maybe—
Maybe in some remote way that had set up everything else, because she had come home with violence, with anger, with the habit of war and the indelible memory of a kifish cage. Korin couldn't have imagined that place. He'd made assumptions, he'd made assertions, he'd struck out to make her hear him—
And she couldn't have cared less… what he thought, what he wanted, who he was. The only thing she'd wanted—
— was kif in her gunsights. Korin dead. AndTully, on her terms.
"He's not your answer," aunt Pyanfar said, in that brutal, blunt way Py had when she was right.
"Look past your gods-cursed selfish notions, niece, and ask him what's right to ask of him, and don't tell me it's helping you outgrow him."
That day she'd swung on Py. Not many people had done that and gotten away unmarked. But Py had just ducked, and faced her, the way Py did now, hand against The Pride's main boards.
"Meanwhile," aunt Py said. "Meanwhile. You have a ship to run."
That wasn't what Py had said. Maybe it was her own mind organizing things. The brain did strange things in jump. It dreamed. It worked on problems. At times it argued with itself, or with notions it couldn't admit wide awake.
Most people forgot what they dreamed. It was her curse to remember. Mostly, she thought, she remembered because she wanted to be there. She wanted to be back on The Pride, before the kif, before anything had happened.
"Time to come back," Pyanfar said.
— Alarm was sounding. Wake, wake, wake.
They were in Urtur space, with the alarm complaining and the yellow caution flashing. The computers saw dust ahead.
"You there?" she asked. "Tiar?"
"I'm on it. We're close in. Going for secondary dump."
— You can be a gods-be fool, aunt Py was hanging about to say. Because there's no way you're not being followed.
"Ship out there," Tarras said, on scan.
''Ha'domaren?''
"Sure the right size and vector."
She reached after the nutrients pack, bit a hole in it and drank down the awful stuff. They were, as their bodies kept time, days away from Meetpoint. On Meetpoint docks, on Urtur station, it was more than a month. As light traveled, it was years. And the body complained of such abuses. You shed hair, you lost calcium, you dehydrated, your mouth tasted of copper and you wanted to throw up, especially when the nutrient liquid hit your stomach and about a quarter hour later when the iron hit your bloodstream. But you got used to it and you learned to hold it down, or you didn't, and you didn't last as a deep-spacer.
"You all right?" she heard Fala ask of Meras, below, heard him answer, brightly, "I’m fine."
Like hell, she thought. It wasn't fair if he was. The stsho would be coming out from under… stsho and humans had to sedate themselves for the trip, whatever those completely different brains had in common— though Tully could survive without; had had to prove it… once, at least; and was still sane…
Woolgathering, Pyanfar called it, and damned the habit. She didn't have her hands on controls. She'd been ship's com tech, protocol officer, and that didn't have a thing to do with running the ship. But she followed the moves, she knew in her gut when it was time for Tiar to kick in the third v dump, and Up-synched the order, tense until Tiar gave it, and then satisfied.
She could do it herself. She was tolerably sure of it. But she never bet the ship on it. And certainly not on this jump.
"Fine job," she said to Tiar.
"We're in a little closer than I wanted."
"Still," she said. First class equipment, first class navigator in Chihin and first-class pilot in Tiar. It wasn't any run of the lot ship could single-jump as they'd done. The older pilots, the navigators of Chihin's age … they'd done it in the war years, they'd the kind of reflexes and system-awareness that could come out of it with a critical sense where they were.
So, most clearly, did Ha'domaren's crew. That told you something. That told you, at least, the quality of that crew and equipment, that it carried no cargo, and that whoever was at the helm had done this before.
That they were overjumped, that somebody had actually overhauled and passed them in hyperspace, that said that was one bastard who didn't mind the navigation rules or care about the dust hazard in Urtur system.
Chapter Five
Urtur was a smaller port than Meetpoint — heavily industrial. Its star was veiled in murk and dust, a ringed star, with gas giant planets sweeping the veil into bands of crepe and gas and ice; with miner-craft both crewed and otherwise running the dusty lanes in the ecliptic; with refineries and mills and shipyards operating at the collection points—
And the main station, under mahendo'sat governance, devoted itself to manufacture, shipping, and entertainment for the miners and makers of goods. You wanted culture? Go to Idunspol. You wanted religion? Go to forbidden, god-crazed Iji. You wanted iron and heavy metals, you wanted sheet and plate and hydrogen, you wanted a raucous good time and a headache in the morning? Urtur was the place for it.
You said Chanur here, and certain authorities' ears pricked up and twitched — by an irony of things as they were, there were outstanding warrants here that could not quite be forgotten, by mahen law: every situation was subject to change and every administration could be succeeded by some new power diametrically opposed to the last. So charges stayed on the books, something like reckless endangerment, public hazard, speeding, unlawful dumping, and damage to public property. The Pride of Chanur had had its less popular moments.
And supposedly the charges included the name of Hilfy Chanur, crewwoman. But she paid no more attention to them than aunt Py did, coming and going as she pleased these days in regal empowerment.
So she ordered the Legacy shut down and the hatch opened to Urtur; and she completed the formalities with station control, signing this and signing that — advised station control of the existence of their full-scale dataload and its date of provenance from Meetpoint; and got a bid of 3000, which wouldn't go higher-counting that rag-eared son of a mahen outlaw had beaten them in by eight hours.