“You stay here. Tell Hilfy meet me at the lock. I gods-rotted don’t need
protection from the stsho and I want you at controls. In case.” She flung
herself out of the chair and headed for the door.
Tully was inbound, in great haste. “Pyan-far!” he cried.
“Sorry, Tully, no time.” She brushed past, or tried. He caught her arm.
“Got talk! Pyanfar!”
“No time, Tully. Haral — see to him.”
“No # listen I # go #!” He snatched again when she broke the grip and tried to
overtake her in the hall. “Pyanfar!”
As she left him behind.
“Pyanfar– ”
She made it into the lift and shut the door between. She punched com. “Haral.
Get Tully under wraps. Get him his drugs for jump. And stay by those controls!”
Not the most logical series of orders. Gods, Tully and Khym loose on the same
level of the ship, Haral busy–
The lift stopped on lower deck. The door opened, on Tirun, Chur and Geran,
standing at the lift. Haral’s voice rang through the lower corridor — “Who’s
free down there?”
“Get topside,” Pyanfar said, coming through them, papers in hand. “Move it,
hear?” Their fur was draggled, dark-tipped with sweat. They smelled of it. “Get
Tully put somewhere.”
“Aye.”
The door closed and they went up. She headed down the corridor at a long stride,
where Hilfy waited at the lock, slant-eared and with the whites showing round
her eyes.
“Calm down, imp,” she said, meeting that look. “It’s just the stsho this time.”
But she still had the gun in her pocket. It lately seemed a good idea.
The Pride’s area of the dock was quiet now, ghostly quiet, with the giant doors
to the market still sealed, with the cargo access shut and the station’s cargo
ramp drawn back and dark. No cans stood about the dock. Only the gantry
remained, the huge air ducts socketed to the vent panel beside the water in- and
outflow hoses, but those were in shutdown inside. The sensor-bundle, the
sextuple power cables and the com lines: that was all that tied The Pride to
station now, those and the access tube, the station personnel ramp, and the
probe and grapples that, behind that triple-thick wall, added failsafe to The
Pride’s own steel-armed grip.
Not much, compared to the truck-wide cargo ramp. Not much to hold them now that
that link was free. A ship could break away from grapples if it had to, taking
damage and trusting station valves and gates to shut. Not even kif had done such
a thing, reckless as they were of life, but stsho in their paranoia might think
of such possibilities.
Pyanfar cast one narrowed look at that contact with their docking probe and
thought such lawless thoughts. Like turning pirate.
Like what a desperate hani could do, if she lost a gamble with the mahendo’sat
and the han and there were nothing left at home. Her crew would stay loyal and
to a mahen hell with the han if Kohan Chanur died.
Good gods. The thought chilled. It came of advancing age.
Of having a male aboard. Put the mind in different modes. Like hunt and nest and
kill the intruders instead of the polite surrender to the han on which
civilization rested. Pulling sticks, Khym called it. Hani ships going far and
wide across Compact space with males aboard and all the attendant mindset in the
crews. Riot on station docks, interHouse brawls, crews at odds with other crews
and hani born in space, never knowing Anuurn under their feet at all, with no
Hermitage in reach.
Gods, what am I doing here? — standing by Hilfy, gun in pocket, watching a
stsho official car come humming up the dock. Somehow she had gotten into this.
The steps to it eluded her at the moment, but the steps that led from it–
A kif offered alliance — and for one fleeting moment it truly looked
attractive. She was running out of friends.
The car rolled up and stopped humming; hummed again in a different key as the
door slid down and Stle sties stlen’s current persona put out a pink-shod foot.