C.J. Cherryh. Chanur’s Venture

stopped working as they passed out of range. But some words he understood on his

own. “Safe, hear?”

He nodded, glancing distractedly her way. He had his plastic bundle clutched

firmly in his arms and they sat close to him to keep him warm. The white flash

from the front of the car glanced off his pale skin and pale hair and turned his

nervous movements into something surreal.

“I–” he began, and the car lurched, swerved, threw them all forward and left

with a suddenness that brought the rear of the escort car up in Hilfy’s view as

she turned her head, the car, the mahendo’sat driver fighting to turn, the

guards flinging up arms to protect themselves as the car slewed into angled

impact, glanced, hooked itself perversely into the escort car’s torn body and

kept slewing round, grating metal as a tire stripped off the rim and jolted over

deckplates. Things blurred, snapped clear in a howl from the mahendo’sat, and a

fist slammed them; the back of the seat flew up in Hilfy’s face and she grabbed

for Tully as her head hit the padding with the shock of explosion whumping

through the air and the whole car tilting and slamming down again.

“They’re firing!” Chur yelled and that reality got through to Hilfy’s brain,

sent her hand clawing for the gun in her pocket, numb-fingered from a shock to

her elbow somewhere in the spin. The car had stopped. The forward window was

cracked. The driver was slumped; both guards were alive. . . . “Stay inside,”

Chur was yelling from the other side as one guard worked at the door on that

side. A shock hit the car and blossomed in a fireball beyond the cracked front

window and Hilfy got the gun out as the stench of ozone roiled through the door

in silver smoke. The door opened on manual, slammed down as the smoke poured in

and the mahe sprawled as he went out in a pop of weaponsfire through the smoke:

his comrade fired from inside and another shock hit the car, fire bloomed,

deafening.

“Hilfy!” Tully dragged at her as cold air hit from the other direction, as Chur

got the door open on the sheltered side and bailed out of the car. Hilfy flung a

look in the other direction, pasted shot after shot at the flutter of black kif

robes amid the smoke, intending to go when she had stopped that.

But alien hands seized the waist of her trousers and skidded her sharply

backward across the slick seat even as she fired. An arm whipped round her waist

and jerked her from the door backwards as she got off a last few shots. Tully

tried to carry her, but she twisted free, got her feet on the ground and ran for

herself, Tully beside her, Chur–

Another shock blossomed by her, and she was flying through the air, the deck

coming up under her hands and under her face as something heavy came down on her

and sprawled.

She was running then after a blank space, her legs working, not knowing how she

had gotten there or where she was going until the gray of a girder came up and

hit her shoulder and she spun, flailed for balance and caromed into Tully, arms

about him as she decided on cover and kept falling, crawling then, along the

base of the gantry over deckbolts. She gripped the hard edge of the base rim,

hitched herself along, lay still then. Smoke roiled along the overhead where red

alarm strobes flashed, staining girders and smoke alike. Sounds were distant,

through the ringing in her ears. She felt small distant pains, saw Tally’s face

twisted with exertion and with pain. “Chur?” he said, twisting on his elbow to

look back. In panic: “Chur?” And Hilfy rolled over to look through the obscuring

smoke, wiping her eyes and trying to see and hear.

“Chur?” she cried.

The red-gray smoke gave up a momentary view of tangled vehicles and other

wreckage, of running figures, of fire from various quarters. She heard the dim

chitter of kif commands, flinched as a shot came their way and reached to her

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