V
It was a monster, like Tully, this thing that they constructed in the spotlit, chill bowels of The Pride’s far rim. It had started out hani-shaped, a patched and hazardous EVA-pod which they had stripped for parts and never succeeded in foisting off on another hani ship. Its limbs had just grown longer, sectioned off and spliced with tubing, and it was rigged with a wheezing lifesupport system.
“Get Tully,” Pyanfar said applying herself to the last of the welding which should get the system in order. “Rouse him out.” And Chur went, bedraggled as herself with the dust and the grime of The Pride’s salvage storage.
Pyanfar worked, spliced and cursed when the system blew in another frustrating curl of smoke, unhitched that component and rummaged for a new one, sealed that in and congratulated herself when it worked, a vibration and a flicker of green lights on the belt and inside the helmet. She grinned, wiped her hands on the blue work breeches she had put on for this grimy task… a long time since she had practiced such things, a long time since she had worn blue roughspun and gotten blisters on her hands. In her youth, under another of The Pride’s captains, she had done such things, but only Haral and Tirun could recall those days. She licked a burn on her finger and squatted on the deck, content with the operation of the unit. Let it run a while, she decided: see if it would go on working. The suit stared back, stiff and gangling on its huge feet, reflecting her in distant miniature off its curved faceplate. It stood like some mahendo’sat demon, two limbs shy of that description, but ghastly enough in its exposed hoses and its malproportioned height, against the dark of the surrounding machine-shop. A reek of blood mingled with the singed smell of the welding. A bucket on the deck caught the occasional drip from the skinned carcass which hung beyond it under the light.
It was a little more than hani-sized, chained up to the hoist-track above, long-faced head adroop on a longish neck, to thaw and drain. It had begun to reek under the lights. The long limbs were coming untucked, and the belly gaped. Uruus. Sweet meat and a fat one: the best steaks had already headed galleyward, in this raid on their private larder. It had wounds this carcass, but that only lengthened the limbs, letting the haunches drop.
The door unsealed and sealed in the dark distance; steps whispered along the metal flooring. Pyanfar adjusted her translator and got nothing, but she could see the lights go on in the far dark expanse, illusionlike and high because of the upward curve of the deck in the vast storage chamber, picking out two figures, one gangling tall and pale. She sat and waited as the lights turned themselves on and off in sequence along the walkway, bringing the two nearer and nearer where she sat.
Tully and Chur, of course. The Outsider came willingly enough, but he stopped dead when he came close, and the light went out on him, leaving him and Chur in the dark outside the area where Pyanfar sat. She stood up, making him out clearly enough in the shadow. “Tully, it’s safe. Come on. it’s all right, Tully.”
He did come, slowly, alien shadow in the rest of the strangeness, and Chur had hold of his arm in case. He looked at the vacant suit, and at the hanging carcass, and kept staring at it.
“Animal,” Pyanfar said. “Tully. I want you to see what we’re doing. I want you to understand. Hear?”
He turned toward her, eyes deep in their shadowed sockets, the angled light glancing off a pale mane and planes of feature decidedly un-hani. “You put me in this?”
“Put that in the suit,” Pyanfar said cheerfully. “Transmitter sending signal hard as it can. We tell the kif that we’re throwing you out and we give them that, you understand, Outsider. Make them chase that. And we run.”
It began to get through to him. His eyes flickered over the business again, the vacant suit, the frozen carcass “Their instruments see in it,” he said.
“Their instruments will scan it, yes; and that’s what they’ll get.”
He gestured toward the carcass. “This? This?” “Food,” she said. “Not a person, Tully. Animal. Food.”
Of a sudden his face took on an alarming grin. His body heaved with a choking sound she realized finally for laughter. He clapped Chur on the shoulder, turned that convulsed face toward her with moisture streaming from his eyes and still with that mahendo’sat grin. “You # the kif.”
“Put that inside,” she told him, motioning toward the carcass. “Bring it. You help, Tully.”
He did, with Chur, his rangy body straining against the half-frozen weight, an occasional grimace of what might be disgust at the look or the feel of it. Pyanfar shut down the pod’s lifesupport, opened up their work of art, and wrinkled her nose as the Outsider and Chur brought the reeking carcass over. There was trim work to do. She abandoned fastidiousness and did it herself, having some notion how it might fit. The head could be gotten into the helmet, a bit of the neck to stuff the vacant body cavity of the carcass, and a little scoring and breaking of the rib cage, a sectioning and straightening of stiff limbs.
“Going to smell good if that drifts a while with the heater on,” Chur observed. Tully laughed his own choking laugh and wiped his face, smearing his mustache with the muck which coated his arms to the elbow. Pyanfar grinned, suddenly struck with the incongruity of things, squatting here in the dark with a crazed alien and a suit full of uruus carcass, the three of them in insane conspiracy. “Hold it,” she ordered Chur, trying to get the belly seam fastened. Chur held the sides together at the bottom and Tully helped at the top, and there it was, sealed and Tully-shaped.
“Come,” Pyanfar said, taking the feet, and Tully and Chur energetically got purchase on its shoulders, lumbering along with it as the lights recognized their presence and began to go on and off as they traveled.
“Cargo dump?” Chur asked.
“Airlock,” Pyanfar said. “Should passengers leave a ship by any other route?”
It was no light weight. They staggered along the walk with the body of the pod dragging at this and that point, got it onto a cargo carrier at the next section and breathed sighs of relief as it lay corpsewise on the carrier, mirrored faceplate staring up at the overhead. Tully was white and trembling from the exertion: sweat stood on his skin and he held onto the carrier’s endrail, panting, but bright eyed.
“You’re Pyanfar, right?” he asked between breaths. “Pyanfar?”
“Yes,” she owned, wiped an itch on her nose with a dirty hand, reckoning she could get no dirtier, nodded at Chur and gave him Chur’s name again.
“I #,” he said, nodding affirmative. He pushed enthusiastically when they pushed, and they got the thing moving easily down the aisle through interior storage, past the hulking shadows of the tanks and the circulating machinery, out again into the normal lighted sections of belowdecks, under a lower ceiling, and through ordinary corridors to the lock.
“# he go #?” Tully asked, staggered as he helped them offload the pod, looked anxiously leftward as the lock’s inner hatch opened. “Go quick out?”
“Ah, no,” Pyanfar said. She carried the feet through and braced them as Chur and Tully got the upper body through and upright. “There, against the outer hatch. We blow that, and he’ll go right nicely.” She set the feet down and added her weight as they heaved and braced it, stood back and surveyed her handiwork with a grin and a thought of the kif. She powered up the lifesupport with a touch of the buttons on the belt, and it stood a little stiffer, on minimum maintenance. She shut it down again, not to waste a good cylinder.