And, no, she wasn't going to accept him in the crew. Maybe that was what made her mad: that they weren't The Pride, but that given time to work together, their way, her way, they might have become their own unique entity, nothing complicating their lives, no family divisions and feuds, no favoritisms. No mate problems. No jealousies.
And now there wasn't a chance for that to happen. Now she had to do something different, in the incorporation of aunt Py's ideas, aunt Py's personal notions, that there wasn't time to take part of.
Maybe that was why the Hallan matter touched her off. Maybe it was watching things go to blazes and knowing that Hallan's slips weren't harmless, that while they were trying to keep his skin whole and interrupting their life and death business to do it, he had become first a vulnerability, and now an obstacle to shaping her crew into what she wanted.
That might be it. That might be why she wanted to kill him, because a part of her had been seeing all along that he was that kind of danger.
And with the ship utterly still, the loaders silent, and the only sound the air whispering out of the ducts in the medical station… she called in all of them but Hallan Meras.
"Come in," she said to Tarras, who hovered at the door. "Sit down. — Chihin, don't sit up. Don't push it."
Chihin muttered and stuffed a pillow under her head, one-handed. "Nothing said about not sitting up."
"Orders," she said. "Mine. Nice if someone obeyed them. Just a wistful thought, understand."
There was general quiet. A respectful moment of general quiet. But it wasn't blame she wanted to start with. "First," she said, "the assassin made more mistakes. None of us are dead. The truck—"
"I'm sorry," Fala said faintly.
"It did work," Hilfy said. "It wasn't a stupid thought. Nothing we did was a stupid thought. But the unhappy fact is that we didn't win because we were good. He lost because he fouled up— if he lost. We don't know that he didn't accomplish what he wanted. He certainly made a lot of noise. And he's made us have to assume from now on that we're somebody's enemy." She had the thin manual printouts in her possession. She handed them out. "This is procedure from now on. Eat and drink it and sleep with it, but don't talk about it, don't joke about it. Na Hallan's not to get this.
He's not to know about it. No copies go off this ship, in any form."
Fala was frowning. Chihin was trying to leaf through hers, one-handed, the booklet propped on her knee. Tiar and Tarras gave theirs a dubious look.
"A general change?"
She didn't intend to tell them, she hadn't intended to admit it. But she didn't intend to claim it for a daughter either, and you didn't just rip away everything an experienced crew knew and tell them do differently without saying why. "It's The Pride's ops manual. I'm not supposed to have it. You're not supposed to know it exists. Read it. Follow it. We can talk about it. And maybe we can think of better ways. But we've got to live long enough. This fixes responsibilities, it talks about how many decimal places in the reports, it mandates when we do certain maintenance, it talks about some technical details that are just Py's idea, but let's don't quibble about that for now. She's a gods-be stickler for some details you're going to call stupid and you're going to find some procedures in there that were illegal even before the peace. But my word is, memorize this, understand it, don't mention it in front of outsiders, and I pointedly include na Hallan: he's not staying on this ship and he can't take this to another crew.
Questions?"
"Are we going to Kefk?" Tarras asked.
"Very possibly," Hilfy said. "I don't see anything else to do."
There weren't questions beyond that. Maybe there was just too much reading to do.
"Dockers are on paid rest until 0600. I'd suggest you catch some sleep."
"I'm going to be fit tomorrow," Chihin said.
"You're going to be sore and impossible," Hilfy said. "You can sit watch in the morning. Run com."
"The kid, you know," Chihin said, not quite looking at her, "didn't do too badly out there."
"I noticed that." Of crew, she began to understand Chihin was angry too, in the same way she was, only more so. But Chihin, owing na Hallan, was being fair. Chihin set great personal store on being fair, even when it curdled in her stomach — for exactly the same reasons that were bothering her, she could surmise as much and not be far off the mark.
"No reason he can't sit station," Hilfy said. "No reason I don't trust him. He just doesn't know everything. Doesn't need to know. That's all." And Chihin looked somewhat relieved.
So they were going to Kefk. And the captain declared a six hour rest, come lawsuit or armed attack, which made the ship eerily quiet after the clangor and thumping of the loader and the irregular cycling of locks.
Hallan gazed at the ceiling of the crew lounge, faintly lit from the guide-strips that defined the walls and the bulkhead, and listened to that silence.
Fala had said, "It was terribly brave what you did."
Chihin had said, "You drive worse than na Hallan." But he couldn't take offense at that, because Chihin, the one who didn't like him, had also said, to him, "Thanks, kid."
She was honest, and she did mean it, even if it choked her; and he liked Chihin — he liked her in a special, difficult way, because Chihin was one of the old guard who was willing to change her perspective on things. You could find people sitting on either side of opinions who were there just because things had landed that way and they went along with it; but Chihin didn't just land, Chihin probed and picked at a situation or a person until she could figure it, and she didn't let up. And she made jokes to let you know what was going on with her. And she made them when you deserved it.
Fala — she was younger than he was, in experience. She'd done what none of her seniors had been in a position to do. And backwards across the docks was faster and it didn't expose any different surface to fire; which wasn't stupid… even if she didn't go a very straight line.
She'd said to him, "Oh, gods, I'm glad you're all right., " in a way that made him go warm and chill and warm again, all the way down to his feet. He'd stood there like a fool, not knowing what to say, except.
"You too."
Because a feeling like that was what you got in families, and what a boy always had to give up, and couldn't count on finding again anywhere: you couldn't count on it in the exile you had to go to and you couldn't count on it from whatever clan you fought your way into. If you were stupid and your feelings for some girl led you to fight some clan lord you couldn't beat, it mostly got you in trouble.
That was what was wrong with this going to space, that na Chanur wasn't here, na Chanur who was also overlord of Anify hadn't the least idea he existed. It was like in the old ballads, like in that book, the young fools meeting in the woods, and things getting out of hand and the clan lord not knowing about it.
Only when he found out, na Chanur was going to want to kill him, and na Chanur and in particular na Anify was going to be upset with Fala, which was going to make her sisters and her mother mad at her, which was going to set the family on its ear, at the least, and get na Chanur after na Meras, who wouldn't be happy with him at all, or with his sisters, for helping him get to space, and creating a problem with Chanur that he might have to fight over. Not to mention na Sahara, who wouldn't like the publicity of a truly famous incident.