Pride of Chanur (8 page)

That did not work, but the sedative did. She went under like a stone into a pond and came out again startled by the alarm- but it was only the timer going off, and she lay in the bedclothes with her heart slowly stepping back down to normal.

"Any developments?" she asked lowerdeck op by com from her bedside, not even having crawled from beneath the sheets, but thrusting an arm out to push the bottom on the console. "Anything happened while I was off?"

"No, captain." Haral's voice answered her. A shift change had occurred in her off time. "The situation seems to be temporary stalemate. Station is broadcasting only operational chatter now. We aren't getting much from the kif. Nothing alarming. We'd have waked you if there was news."

So their orders ran. Interpretations of emergency varied; but Haral was the wisest head in the crew, the canniest. Pyanfar lay there staring at the ceiling a moment and finally decided she might take her time. There was nowhere to rush. The rib muscles she had strained in g force had stiffened. "What about systems check? Has anyone had time to get to that?"

"We're still running the board, captain, but it looks good all the way. The blowout was absolutely clean and the recalibration was right almost to the hair."

"Better luck than we deserve. What's the Outsider up to?"

"Back at work at the keyboard. Chur and Geran are off now, and Tirun's on, but I didn't feel, by your leave, captain, that Tirun belonged in there with him in her condition, and I've had all I can do with visual checks on the separation readouts-again by your leave."

"You were right."

"He's slept a bit. He hasn't made any trouble . . . gods, he worked till he nearly dropped over, Chur said; and he's back at it again this shift, shaky as he is. We fed him right away when he woke up, and he ate it all and went back to his drills, polite as you please. I've got his roomcom and his comp monitored from the op station, so we've at least got an ear toward him."

"Huh." Pyanfar ran a hand through her mane and scowled up at the brightening room light. The alarm had started the day cycle in the room. "Let the Outsider work; if it falls over, then let it rest. How's Tirun making it?"

"Limping, sore, and working with the leg propped up. She's still white around the nose."

"I'm all right," Tirun's voice cut in, usurping the same mike.

"You go off," Pyanfar said, "anytime you feel you ought to. We're dead drifting, and someone else can take up the slack if those first checks are run. You see to it, Haral. Anything else I should know?"

"That's the sum of it," Haral said. "We're all right so far."

"Huh," she said again, got out of the spring-held sheets and cut the com off, pulled on her black trousers and put on her belt, her bracelet, and her several earrings-shook the ear to settle them and gave her mane and beard a quick comb into order. Vanity be hanged. She left the cabin and paid a short visit to the galley, ate a solitary breakfast, feeling somewhat better. She turned the pager to the monitor channel in the meanwhile, listened to the chatter which was reaching them and found it much what Haral had said, a lull in events which in itself contained worrisome possibilities. By now the kif had surely figured out what had happened, and by now they would be hunting in stealth-hence the quiet. The Pride had undergone a great deal of lateral drift from their entry point, but if she were that kif captain, trying to reckon the arrival point of a cargoless fugitive on a jump almost too much for the ship . . . she would calculate a fringe area jump on a straight string from

Meetpoint's mass to that of Urtur. And that would fine the hunting zone down considerably, from the vast tracts of Urtur's lenslike system-to a specific zone on the fringe, and the direction of systemic drift, and certain places where a ship seeking cover might move. Time was the other factor; time defined the segment of space in which they might logically be drifting, two points-within-which, which then might be fined down tighter and tighter.

Time, time, and time.

They were running out of it.

She shut off the pager, went back to her cabin, spread out the charts of the last effort and picked up a comp link of her own, started as precise calculations as she could make on the options they had left.

From the hani ship-she interrupted herself to query Haral and Tirun on the point-there had been nothing during the past watch. No transmission at all. Starchaser would be feverishly busy at her own business, stripping down, not provoking anything at this juncture.

Waiting. All incoming transmission indicated that ships of all kinds were moving toward Urtur Station with all possible haste, a journey of days for some ships, and of weeks for others of the insystem operators . . . but even the gesture spoke to the kif, that the mahe would defend Urtur Station itself, abandoning other points to whatever the kif wished to do. The incoming jumpships had long since made it in, snugged close: armed ships, those . . . but one at least was stsho, and its arms were minor and its will to fight was virtually nonexistent.

Again, she reckoned, if she were that kif in command, those insystem ships would not go in unchallenged. For all those incoming from the suspect vector where a hani ship lay hidden, there would be closer scrutiny-to make sure a clever hani did not drift in disguised with the rest of the inbound traffic. ID transmission would be checked, identifications run through comp; ships might be boarded ... all manner of unpleasantness. Most of them would pass visual inspection: there was precious little resemblance between a gut-blown jump freighter with its huge vanes, and a lumpy miner-processor whose propulsion was all insystem and hardly enough to move it along with its tow full.

Only the miners who might have had the bad luck to come in from the farthest edge of The Pride's possible location . . . they might be stopped, have their records scanned, their comp stripped-their persons subjected to gross discomforts until they would volunteer information, if the kif were true to nature.

"Someone's jumped, captain."

Tirun's voice, out of the com unit. Pyanfar dumped a complex calculation from her mind and reached for the reply bar, twisting in her chair. "Who? Where?"

"Just got the characteristic ghost, that's all. I don't know. It was farside of system and long ago. No further data; but it fits within our timeline. That close."

"Give me the image."

Tirun passed it onto the screen. Nadir range and badly muddled pickup: there was too much debris in the way.

"Right," she said to Tirun. "No knowing."

"Out?" Tirun asked.

"Out," Pyanfar confirmed her, and keyed out the image as well, stared morosely at the charts and the figures which, no matter how twisted, kept coming up the same: that there was no way to singlejump beyond Urtur, however reduced in mass they were now.

That jump-ghost which had just arrived might have been someone successfully running for it. More ships than that one might have jumped from here, lost in the gas and debris of Urtur's environs.

But quite, quite likely that ship was kif, a surplus ship moving on to arrange ambush at the most logical jump point that they might use.

Rot Akukkakk. She recalled the flat black eyes, red-rimmed, the long gray face, the voice very different from the whining tone of lesser kif. A bitter taste came into her mouth.

How many of them? she wondered, and pulled the scattered charts toward her on the desk and again thought like a kif, wondering just where he might station his ships remaining at Urtur, having figured now, as he must have figured, what they were up to.

That inward flight which was making the station safer-was also giving this Akukkakk a free field in which to operate. There were a finite number of opacities in the quadrant where the sweep of debris might be concealing The Pride. A diminishing number of other fugitives to confuse him . . . just them and him, finally, along with whatever other kif ships he had called in.

Four kif ships had been at Meetpoint. Some or all might have come with him. There might have been as many more at Urtur when Hinukku came in. Eight ships, say. Not beyond possibility.

She made her calculations again, flexed an ache from her shoulders, and pushed back from the desk, combed her beard with her fingers and flicked her ears for the soothing sound of the rings.

Huh. So. She at least knew their options-or the lack of them. It was a thoroughly bad game to have gotten into. She levered her aching body out of the chair it had occupied too many hours, stretched again, calculating that they must be about due for Chur and Geran to come on again. And Hilfy: there had not been a word out of her. Possibly the imp had been late getting to sleep after the news which had broken in on her rest. If she had been sleeping, so much the better.

Pyanfar walked out into the corridor and down it, into the dim zone of the bridge, beyond the archway, where most of the lights were out and the dead screens made areas dark which should have been busy with lights. There was one unexpected bright spot, a counter alight in that ell nook of the bridge around the main comp bank. Someone had come back and left it on, she thought, walking up on it to turn it out; and came on Hilfy there, seated with her attention fixed on the translator, left hand propping her forehead and her right hand poised over the translator keyboard. The screen in front of her was alive with mahendo'sat symbols. Audio brought in a pathetic Outsider-voiced attempt at speech. Pyanfar frowned, walked closer, and Hilfy saw the movement and half turned, turned back in haste to close off the audio from the bridge. Pyanfar leaned on the back of her chair to observe the strings of symbols on the screen, and Hilfy got up in haste.

Go, the Outsider was trying to say. That was the symbol on the screen at the moment. / go.

"I thought you were supposed to be resting," Pyanfar said.

"I got tired of resting."

Pyanfar nodded toward the screen, where the Figure Walking was displayed. "How's it doing?"

"He."

"It, he, how's it doing?"

"Not so good on pronunciation."

"You've been cutting in on his lessons? Talking to him?"

"He doesn't know me from the machine." Hilfy had her hands locked behind her, ears flat, wary of reprimands. "You can't work the second manual without help: it's sentences. He has to have prompts. I've got more vocabulary filled in with him. We're well into abstracts and I've been able to figure something about the way his own sentences are built from what he keeps doing wrong with ours."

"Huh. And have you perchance gotten a name out of him amid these mistakes? His species? An indication what he comes from? A location?"

"No."

"Well. I didn't expect. But well done, all the same. I'll check it out."

"Seven hundred fifty-three words. He ran the whole first manual. Chur demonstrated changing the keyboard and the cassette and he ran it all, just like that; and got into the second book, trying to do sentences. But he can't pronounce, aunt; it just comes out like that."

"Mouth shape is different. Can't say we can ever do much with his language either; like trying to talk to the tc'a or the knnn . . . maybe even a different hearing range, certainly not the same equipment to speak with-gods, no guaranteeing the same logic, but the latter I think we may have. Some things he does make half sense." She lowered herself into the vacated chair, reached and livened a second screen. "Go talk Tirun out of her work down in op, imp; she's been on duty and she shouldn't be. I'm going to try to run a translator tape on your seven hundred fifty-three words."

"I did that."

"Oh, did you?"

"While I was sitting here." Hilfy untucked her hands from behind her and hastily reached for the counter, indicated the cassette in the slot of the translator input. "I pulled the basic pattern and sorted the words in. Sentence logic too. It's finished."

"Does it work?"

"I don't know, aunt. He hasn't given me a sentence in his own language. Just words. There's no one for him to talk his own to."

"Ah, well, so." Pyanfar was impressed. She ran some of the audio of the tape past, cut it, looked up at Hilfy, who looked uncommonly proud of herself. "You're sure of the tape."

"The master program seemed clear. I-learned the translator principles pretty thoroughly; father didn't connect that so much with spacing. I got to start that study from the first; but / knew what I wanted it for. Like comp. I'm good at that."

"Huh.-Why don't we try it, then?"

Hilfy nodded, more and more self-pleased. Pyanfar rose and searched through the com board cabinets, pulled out the box of sanitary wrapped audio plugs and dropped a handful of those into Hilfy's palm, then located a spare pager from the same source. She sat down at main com and ran the double channels of the translator through bands two and three of the pagers. She took her own plug and inserted it in her ear, tested it out linked to the Outsider's room com for a moment, and got nothing back but bursts of white sound, which were mangled hani words that part of the schizoid translator mind refused to recognize as words. "We're two, he's three," she said to Hilfy, shutting the audio down for the moment. "Bring him up here."

"Here, aunt?"

"You and Haral. This Outsider who tries to impress us with his seven hundred fifty-three words ... we find out once for all how his public manners are. Take no chances, imp. If the translator fails, don't; if he doesn't act stable, don't. Go."

"Yes, aunt." Hilfy stuffed the audio units and the other pager into her pockets, hastened out the archway in a paroxysm of importance.

"Huh," Pyanfar said after her, stood staring in that direction. Her ears flicked nervously, a jangling of rings. The Outsider might do anything. It had chosen their ship to invade, out of a number of more convenient choices. It. He. Hilfy and the crew seemed unshakeably convinced of the he, on analogy to hani structure; but that was still no guarantee. There were, after all, the stsho. Possibly it made the creature more tragic in their eyes.

Gods. Naked-hided, blunt-toothed and blunt-fingered. ... It had had little chance in hand-to-hand argument with a clutch of kif. It should be grateful for its present situation.