"Good day, then, Vikktakkht an Nikkatu."
"You have a very good accent."
"Practice," she said succinctly, and turned her back and swept up Tiar on a walk for the ramp access, past the kif who attended Vikktakkht.
The bastard thought she'd panic. The bastard thought she'd still twitch to old wounds. Wrong, kif.
Dangerously wrong.
"What's he want with na Hallan?" Tiar asked, glancing over her shoulder. "What's he talking about?
Do you know him?"
"Not yet."
"What's the kid possibly got to do with him?"
"That's what I want to ask na Hallan."
They were down on several spices, they'd run low on tissues, and they were out of shellfish, but they certainly had enough staples from here to Anuurn.
"KerChihin," Hallan said. "Ker Chihin, I've got the-"
Straight into the captain's presence.
"— inventory," he said. But by the captain's frowning, ears-down look, by Tarras and Tiar Chanur standing behind her likewise ears-down and frowning, he didn't somehow think they wanted the inventory. He didn't think anything he'd done in the galley could have fouled anything else up, unless maybe he'd messed up the computer somehow.
Maybe dumped their navigation records… something that bad…
"Vikktakkht," the captain said, and his heart skipped a beat. Or two. He remembered the jail. He remembered the kif he'd talked to every day. He remembered the richly dressed one who'd said…
… said, "Remember my name…"
"Meetpoint," he managed to say.
"Where on Meetpoint? Was he the one you hit?"
"I — don't know."
"But you know this name."
"He said… 'Someday you'll want to ask me a question.' "
"What question?"
"I don't know." He shook his head in utter confusion. "That was all he said. I was in the jail. And that was what he said."
"You know him from there."
"The day they… brought me to this ship." He didn't know whether what he'd answered was enough. He tried to think if there was anything else, any detail he could dredge up from memory, but nothing came clear to him, nothing had made sense then and nothing made sense now.
"That's all he said, captain. I didn't know what it meant. I still don't. I don't know what question he's talking about. I don't know what he wants."
"What would you ask him?"
"What he means. What he wants. I don't know!"
He was scared, really scared. He hadn't thought about the jail. He had put that place behind him. He trusted them, that there was no way he was going back to that place. But he'd found the way to foul up, it seemed. The captain just stood there looking at him, and finally said, "Are you willing to go out there, Meras?"
"Yes, captain," he said. But the prospect scared him of what else he could find to do wrong, “Whatever you want."
"It's what He wants that worries me. Go back to work. I've got some calling around to do. I'll let you know."
He was through with what they'd assigned him to do, but it didn't seem a good moment to bring that trivial matter up with her. He said quietly, "Aye, captain," and took his list and his pocket computer back to the galley to create something to do.
Chapter Thirteen
"Captain?" Fala slid a cup of gfi under Hilfy's hand, and she murmured thanks without looking. Her eyes were on the screen, while the search program located the most recent of the letters for Pyanfar, the ones that had just missed her at Meetpoint, the ones that had been backed up at Hoas and Urtur and Kura and Touin. A lot from mahen religious nuts who wanted to tell the mekt-hakkikt about prophecies (one never understood why they were never good news) and a handful who had an invention they wanted to promote, which they were sure the great Personage of Personages would find useful (no few hani were guilty of this sin.) There were a few vitriolic communications from people clearly unbalanced. The prize of that lot was from a mahe who had "written four times this week and you not answer letter. I tell you how solve border dispute by friendly rays of stars which make illuminate our peace. You make power color rainbow green and make green like so… when Iji orientate in harmony with rainbow color red with orange. Please take action immediate." (With illustrations, and important words underlined.) But nothing, so far, no hint of aunt Pyanfar's business in this stack.
A question Hallan Meras would like to ask Vikktakkht.
There was no question that she knew of… except the whereabouts of Atli-lyen-tlas.
And had the kif known that would be a question, back on Meetpoint, before a kifish guard handed Meras over to the Legacy?
Or was it some other thing, something Meras didn't remember or was afraid to say? Pyanfar had passed through Meetpoint not so long before: No'shto-shti-stlen had said so, and the huge stack of messages assumed she would come back through that port.
Hilfy sat, and sat, sipped gfi and stared at the blinking lights that meant incoming messages. The computer was set for the keywords Atli-lyen-tlas, stsho, ambassador, Ana-kehnandian, Ha'domaren, Pyanfar, hani, and Vikktakkht. She figured that should cover it.
But a quick scan of what arrived in the priority stack were mostly inquiries from various mahen companies asking about conditions at Kita. Not a word from the kif. If kif were talking to each other out there, they were not talking to her. Possibly they were occupied with the local investigation.
Possibly they were couriering their messages to each other around the rim, not using com at all.
"Fueling's complete,"Tarras reported from downside ops. “ I've got a good bid on the goods. The market could go a point higher, could sink a little. My instinct says take it. "
"Do it. Very good. — Tarras, when the loaders get here, go ahead and open the hold, but keep someone monitoring the cameras. Whoever's going out, wear a coat, stuff the pistol in your pocket, never mind the regulations."
She still wasn't panicked about the threat, and she kept asking herself whether she were really this calm, or whether she was operating in a state of flashback. Kshshti was the site of her nightmares, and things were going wrong, but she found herself quite cold, quite logical. She could wish aunt Py were here, she could wish her crew had had some experience beyond the years-ago skirmish at Anuurn. Out there on the docks— her one split second of panic was realizing she had to tell Tiar which way to look: The Pride's crew had known, at gut level, which side to step to, who would do what, who was likeliest to cover whom. They'd done it before. They'd worked out the missteps. Paid for a few of them.
But aunt Py wasn't here. Sorting the mail stacks, even with computer search, for some answer to what was going on… could take weeks: the people with the real information were less likely to dump their critical messages in among the lunatic communications the stations collected in general mail, unless there was some code to tell The Pride's computers to pay attention; and she didn't know what keywords to search. Meanwhile it was her ship, her crew. It was her responsibility to get them through alive, and that included telling them when to break the law, violate the peace, the treaties, and the laws of civilized behavior.
It was up to her to decide a course of action on a kif who had gotten his claws into someone on her ship — before they signed the contract. Surmise that the stsho contract was the kif's interest: if it was, surmise that it had known about that contract, it had expected them to get it, and that it was up to its skinny elbows in the disappearance of Atli-lyen-tlas.