The copilot let an object fall to her. She reached with difficulty and gathered the plastic-wrapped article from the angle of the pit where it stayed fast, unwrapped the earplug and thrust it in. No information was coming in during their ascent, only static, but having the contact helped.
Station had gotten that one message off, had still been sending it out when ascent began, which meant that the station central command had been in hani control and that stationers had their hands full, sparing no one to answer questions. It kept going, meaning that the kif had not gotten to it to silence it — or that they had had no critical interest in doing so.
But the docks — She pictured the workers fled in panic, disorganized, having no preparation against such an action as the kif had taken. Attacking stations was not a thing hani would do; therefore it was not reasonable; therefore there was no contingency.
Gods blast such thinking, and the complacency which fed it. Gods blast her own; and hani nature, that they ran each for their own fragmented concerns, because all the world was set up that way. She had had no choice in going home to Chanur, because a hani would go on with challenge while the house caught fire, until the fire singed his own hide. Hani always went their own way, disdaining Outside concerns, pricklish about admitting they would not be in space at all but for the mahendo’sat explorers who had found them — but that was so. And hani went on doing things the old way, the way that had worked when there were no colonies and no outside trade; when hani were the unchallenged owners of the world and hani instincts were suited to the world they owned.
But, gods, there were other ecosystems. They had another one going, in the Compact itself; and they dealt with distances wider than the grassy expanses of Anuurn’s plains; and with creatures of instincts which had proven equally capable of being right in other ways.
In one unimagined hell, the kif way had worked best; and gods, even the chi way had worked somewhere, lunatic as they seemed, incomprehensible to Outsiders. And Tully — who sometimes made half sense, and at other times made none at all.
Had Goldtooth despised her for her desertion, because being hani she had had no choice but to go, in the face of every reason to the contrary? Shame pricked at her, the suspicion that all hani-kind had failed a mahen hope, that hope which had lent those two ships; and that somewhere up above might be the wreckage of her mahen allies and The Pride itself, with a kif waiting to blow this shell of a lander to vapor and junk, along with the hani brain who had just figured out something critical to the species, far too late.
Madness. The angle had her brain short of oxygen. There was a grayness about her vision. She felt nothing any longer in her backside and her arms and her legs, and the pressure kept j on building.
Engine sound changed. They were leaving the-envelope of I air, still accelerating. She blinked and struggled to move her neck, saw through a blur telltales winking in the darkness, saw j a flare of light as the scan screen cleared. She blinked again, trying to see past the silhouetted arm of the copilot, making out something large and close to their position.
“…Luck,” a voice snapped through the plug into her ear, I “this is The Pride of Chanur. We’ll match with you and lock on.”
Tirun.
If she could have leaped up and shouted for joy she would I have done so. Pinned by the g force, it was all she could do to smile, a strained and difficult smile, with her heart hammering against her ribs and the blood bringing pain to her extremities.
Then the Luck’s engines stopped, and she gasped a reflexive breath in the sudden relief. The invisible hand which had pressed her to the deck was gone, and she reached in a practiced hand-over-hand to the com board, drifting feet toward the overhead and tucking down again to reach the mike. “Hurry it, Tirun, for the gods’ sake. And to the Rau: “Where are the kif? Can you pick them up?”
“Station’s scan’s off,” the Rau navigator said. “Not just Gaohn’s: Harn and Tyo too, completely down. We’ve got our own, that’s all.”
“Put on the rescue beeper,” Pyanfar said, thrusting that dire news to a far recess of her mind. “The Pride can home on it. Let her automatics take you.”
“Advice,” the captain said. “Your job now, her Chanur. Gods help us, we’re stone blind to any jumpships moving out there.”
“Keep her trimmed and constant and watch out for the shock.” Pyanfar aimed herself back to the shelter of her padded nest in haste. “Those grapples will do the fine matching, don’t try the jets. She’s moving under comp.”
“Gods, it’s on us,” the copilot said.
“Closing,” Geran’s voice sounded through the com plug. “Stand by, Luck.”
A proximity alarm started, quickly silenced from the board. Scan broke up.
“O gods,” said the navigator.
Pyanfar tucked, clenching the cushion support with all her strength.
Impact. The Luck rang and leapt and her body left the deck, grip scarcely holding; hit it again, shoved back as the grapples grated, shifted.
Held. There was a comforting silence. Weightlessness.
“Got trouble,” Tirun’s voice said. “Blow that lock out; we’ve got a tube the other side. For the gods’ sake board, abandon ship. We can’t defend you.”
“Haral!” Pyanfar yelled down the core corridor. “Everyone! get forward!”
“Captain,” Nerafy Rau said.
“Come on,” Pyanfar said, hauled herself to the captain’s cushion and hung there one-handed, staring down at her. “All of you… gods, come with us. We’ll get you back to your ship if there’s a chance of it. If not that, there’s kif to settle with, and those people on the stations — will you die here with no shot fired?”
“No,” the Rau captain said, and started unbuckling. The others did. Pyanfar completed the somersault and looked aft down the corridor, at a white-shirted human sailing up it narrowly in advance of a flood of armed hani. The Rau captain handed her way up from the pit and headed for the nearby lock and Pyanfar grabbed for the board and the mike as the crew left it. “Tirun! Where are the kif?”
“Gods know. Mahijiru’s running far-guard; tell you the rest when you get here.”
The bodies of her companions tumbled about her. The lock powered inward and airshock rammed through in a cold gust. “Coming,” Pyanfar said, and let the mike go, kicked at the nearest conduit and flung herself into the stream of bodies, into the dark and numbing cold of The Pride’s ship-to-ship grapple-tube. Extremities went numb. Breath stung in the lungs and moisture threatened to freeze her eyeballs. It hurt, gods, it hurt. A light glowed green as she arrived in The Pride’s null-g outer frame, a safety beacon, a guidance star far across the dark, marking the location of the personnel lift. A blue chain of glowlights dotted across the blackness toward it, the safety line. “Khym!” Pyanfar shouted, thinking of his inexperience, “blue’s the guideline, Khym… Tully! go to the blue lights!”