In such a condition she gambled, with Chanur and Tully’s whole species on the board.
She dropped her hands between her knees, finally reached for the bedside drawer where she kept a boxful of pills. She shook one into her hand and put it into her mouth — spat it out in sudden revulsion and flung the open boxful across the cabin. Pills rattled and circled and lay still. She lay down on the bed as she was, drew the coverlet over herself, tucked her;arms about her head and shut her eyes, flinging herself into an extended calculation about their routing out of here and refusing to let her mind off that technical problem. She built the numbers in front of her eyes and fended off the recollection of Tully’s face or Hilfy’s, or the scuttling figure of the knnn with its prize, or the kif which skulked and whispered together out on the docks.
VII
“Aunt.”
It was not com; it was Hilfy in person, leaning over her bed, shaking at her. “Aunt.” Pyanfar came out of sleep with a wild reach to get her elbow under her, shook herself, stared into Hilfy’s dilated eyes. “It’s Starchaser,” Hilfy said. “They’ve come through. They’re in trouble. They can’t get dumped. The word just came in—”
“O gods.” Pyanfar kicked the coverlet off, scrambled out dressed as she was and seized Hilfy by the arm on her way out of the room. “Talk, imp: has anyone scrambled?”
“Station’s called miners in the path… some mention of an outbound freighter being able to change course…” Hilfy let herself be pulled through the doorway into the corridor and loped along keeping up with her on the way to the bridge. “They’re twenty minutes lag out, crossing Lijahan track zenith.”
“Twenty now?”
“About.”
Haral was on the bridge, standing by scan, with the area-light on her face, and her expression was grim when she looked around at their arrival. “They’ve got to get to the pod,” Haral said. “No way anyone can get to her in time. No way any rescue can haul that mass down, even if she’s stripped.”
“What’s our status?”
“We can’t get there,” Hilfy objected, plain logic.
“Not for rescue,” Pyanfar said quietly.
“Repairs underway,” Haral said. “Vane’s unsecured. If they’re running ahead of company — we’re in trouble.”
Tirun came limping in, loping haste, and there was a query from lowerdeck. “You’re getting all we’ve got,” Haral relayed to Geran and Chur below. “Can’t tell anything yet.”
“Come on,” Pyanfar muttered to the blip on systemic image. “Do it, Faha. Get out of there.” She sank down into the com cushion, an eye still toward the screen, and punched through the station op code. “This is The Pride of Chanur. Urgent relay the stationmaster, Pyanfar Chanur speaking: warn you of possible hostile pursuit on tail of incoming emergency. Repeat: warn you of possible hostile pursuit of incoming emergency.”
“This message receive clear, Pride of Chanur. Mahen ships answer emergency. Please stand by.”
She watched scan, rested a knuckle against her teeth and hissed a breath. Ships showed in the schematic, traffic at dead standstill compared to the incoming streak that was Starchaser, motion slowed enough to see only because of systemwide scale. Everything was history, the images on the scope, the voices from the zone of emergency. Unable to dump velocity, Starchaser would streak helplessly across the system and lose herself on an unaimed voyage to infinity. It was a long way to die.
“Lost the transmission,” Haral said. Hilfy edged in, looking desperate, tried the switches herself past Haral’s side. Pyanfar gnawed the underside of a^ claw and shook her head. The business of getting a jump-mazed crew on their feet and headed to the escape pod — in Starchaser’s type, high up on the frame — and get it away, all this within the minutes they had left…
Then they could only hope, if they could make it that far, that the pod’s engines could hammer down the velocity, give some jumpship the chance to match velocities and lock onto the pod’s small, manageable mass, so that they could be dumped down. That freighter out there was the best chance the crew had, if only they could get loose.
“Pod’s away!” Haral exclaimed, and Tirun and Hilfy were pounding each other on the back. Pyanfar clenched her two hands together in front of her mouth and stared flateared at the scan, where a new schematic indicated the probable course of the pod which had now parted company with doomed Star-chaser. Both dots advanced along the track, but a gap developed, the pod’s deceleration far from sufficient to rid itself of a jumpship’s velocity before it gave out, but doing what it could. The crew would likely black out in the stress: that was a mercy. Now it was a race to see if the freighter could overhaul the pod or whether the pod would leave the system.
“Mahe freighter?” Pyanfar asked.
Haral nodded.
The Pride was on station-fed transmission; and station had to be using the feed from ships farther out, the Lijahan mines, whatever was in a position to have data, and relative time was hard to calculate now. The freighter came up by major increments while the minutes passed, boosting itself on its jump field. The gap still narrowed with agonizing sluggishness, as scan shifted, keeping up with events which were now long decided.
Com sputtered, a wailing transmission. Knnn. “Gods,” Tirun said. “A knnn’s out there in it.”
Station command responded, a tc’a voice. There were other transmissions, knnn voices, more than one, a dissonance of wails.
“Chanur,” said a hani voice, clear and close at hand. “Is this also your doing?”
Pyanfar reached for it, punched in the contact, retracted the claw with a moral effort. “Tahar, is that a question or a complaint?”
“This is Dur Tahar. It’s a question, Chanur. What do you know about this?”
“I told you. Let’s keep it off com, Tahar.”
Silence. The Tahar were no allies of the Faha crew. It was a Chanur partisan in trouble, but if any ship at station could have moved in time, Moon Rising would have tried: she did not doubt it. It was a painful thing to watch, what was happening on scan. Close to her, Tirun had settled, and Hilfy, simply watching the screen while her Faha kinswomen and the wreckage that had been a Faha ship hurtled closer and closer to the boundaries of the pickup. After such a point insystem scan could not follow them. Station was getting transmission now from a different source, from the merchanter Hasatso, the freighter tracking Starchaser, the only ship in range. The blip that was Starchaser itself finally went off the screen.
“Chanur ship,” station sent. “Tahar ship. Advise you merchanter Hasatso have make cargo dump; do all possible.”
“Chanur and Faha will compensate,” Pyanfar replied, and hard upon that Moon Rising sent thanks to Hasatso via station. “Gods look on them,” Haral muttered — a cargo dumped, to close the gap, to close on an emergency not of their species.
Knnn wailed. Elsewhere there was silence. For a long while there seemed only one rhythm of breaths on The Pride, above and below.
“They’re nearly on it,” Hilfy breathed.
“They’ve got them,” said Tirun. “No way they can miss now.”