counter, scrambled on a rolling scatter of trinkets, found a clear aisle and ran
toward the Rows where a moment’s clear sight showed a heaving mass in the
doorway. Stsho darted from that crowd, pale and gibbering; drunken mahendo’sat
stayed to yell odds — a pair of hani arrived from the other direction: Chur and
Geran headed full tilt toward the mass.
She jerked spectators this way and that, careless of her claws. Mahendo’sat
howled outrage and moved. A kif-shape darted past her, moving faster than clear
sight. She caught at it and got only robe as she broke through to the center of
the mob. Plastic splintered. Glass broke, bodies rolled underfoot.
More kif ran from the scene, a scatter of black-robed streaks outward bound at
speed.
“Khym!” Pyanfar yelled and flung herself in the path of his wild-eyed rush after
the kif. Behind him Haral and Geran added themselves; Chur and Tirun followed.
Hilfy jumped last, atop the heap on Khym’s shoulders as it all came down in
front of her.
They stopped him. They held him down until the struggles ceased.
There was mahen laughter, quickly hushed. In prudence, mahe drew back to
perimeters, while the noise of looting went on in the market, the crash of
glass, the splintering of plastics, the polyglot wails of outrage and avarice.
“Gods rot you!” Pyanfar yelled, with a claws-out swipe at anything too near.
“Get!”
Mahendo’sat gave her room. A small knot of hani spacers stood facing her. Ears
were back. The Pride’s crew gained their feet, Haral foremost, ears laid back
and grinning. Khym levered himself to his feet with Tirun holding fast to his
right arm and Hilfy locked to the other side. The last sounds of combat died
inside the bar. A last glass broke.
“Pyanfar Chanur,” a broadnosed hani said in stark, disapproving tones.
“Tell it to your captain,” said Pyanfar. “Tell it proper. He’s my husband. You
hear? Na Khym nef Mahn. Hear me?”
Ears flicked. Eyes showed whites. The news had not gotten this far out, what
lunacy she had done. Now it did. “Sure,” a younger hani said, backing up. “Sure,
captain.”
And Chur, at her back: “Captain — we’d better get out of here.”
She heard the sirens. She looked about past the melting crowd, who sought other
bars. Trampled bodies stirred within the doorway.
There were cars coming up the dock, with the white strobe flash of Security.
Chapter Two
The door hissed back and revealed two guards, which at Meetpoint might have been
any oxy-breathing kind but stsho, considering the stsho’s congenital distrust of
violence. They hired all their security. Fortunately for the peace at present,
these were both mahendo’sat.
Pyanfar stopped in her pacing of the narrow room — waiting area, they had
called it: stsho euphemism. Other species had other names for such small rooms
with doorlocks facing outward. “Where’s my crew?” she spat at the mahendo’sat
forthwith, ears flattened despite herself. “Gods rot it, where are they?”
“Director wants,” one said, standing aside from the door. “You come now, hani
captain.”
She pulled in her claws and came, since something finally seemed in movement,
and since neither of the two mahendo’sat were armed with more than nature gave
them and showed no desire for confrontation. They would not talk, not this pair;
not threaten or swerve from duty: mahendo’sat at punctilious, honest best.
“Here,” was their only other word, at a lift door some distance through the
maze.
More traveling. The lift went a long zigzag distance through Meetpoint’s bowels,
and let them out again in white, pastel-decorated halls. Lights obtruded here
and there in seeming random — stsho, this section, not making apology to other
species’ tastes, all pastels and opal colors, vast spaces, odd-angled panels
riddled with random holes and alcoves. The tall black-furred, black-kilted mahen
guards and the splash of her own scarlet trousers and red-gold hide were equally
alien here.
A last door, a last hallway of twisting plasti-form shapes. She flicked her ears
so that the rings chimed, flexed her claws with one deep breath as if she
contemplated a leap from some height, and let herself be shown into a
pearl-toned hall, a splendor of bizarre walls and white-upholstered depressions