ripple like vision through oil.
It let them go and Haral began their realspace course-change then, a long
sickening hammering of correcting directionals and mains. G hauled at an already
outraged gut.
“Got the Maing Tol fix,” Haral said. And a long, long while later, when the
engines reached null-V and kept burning: “We just passed null.”
And later, as bodies ached in one long misery: “Closing on mark.”
“Go when ready,” Pyanfar said. Urtur’s dust had not hit the hull yet, but the
place always sent the wind up her back.
Blanked off station scan, for the gods’ sake. A ship hurtling dark and
unreported through Urtur system with Urtur Station’s collusion, a risk to other
ships–
Fearing what? Kif insystem?
“Stand by the pulse.” Haral’s voice cracked with fatigue.
“Want me to take it?”
“I’ve got it set. Stand by.”
Another pulse, another queasy moment neither here nor there. There was the
bloody smear of a red light on the board.
“Vane two red,” Pyanfar muttered. “Stop it there.”
“We’re a shade off V.”
“What blew?” (Khym, weakly.) “There something wrong?”
“Regulator in the vane column,” Pyanfar said, blinking it all into focus again.
Her bones ached. “Ship doesn’t like all this change of mind. Tirun, I want an
interrupt check on that vane.”
“Right.” Tirun’s voice shook with exhaustion. No complaints. “Sure like to know
why it didn’t cut off.”
“Solve it from inside.”
“Urtur’s no gods-rotted place for a walk.”
“We in trouble?” Khym asked.
“Just got a little mechanical problem. Still got one backup left on that system.
Regulator ought to have shut the vane down short of blowing what blew. I think
our problem’s there. That’s an in-hull problem. No big trouble.” But it was
trouble. Something made it blow. And Kshshti was a long, long one-jump. Big
stress. If that vane went– “What’s our transit time?”
“Got–” Haral said, “–48.4 hours to next jump.”
“We’ll find the glitch by then.” She powered the chair back, needing room to
breathe. Another quarter turn of the chair and she saw Khym sitting there, head
leaned back against the cushion, breathing in slow, careful intakes, looking her
way with a bleak curiosity. He had not been sick. Was not. Was plainly
determined not to be.
Holding it, she guessed.
“Tully wants to come topside,” Chur said.
“Fine.” She was numb, with a certain insulation between herself and calamities
back at Meetpoint, and the one back there on their tail. She looked aside as all
number-four screens acquired an image from The Pride’s outside eyes, habit when
they arrived at a place. Haral had done that, reflex or a statement: no panic.
Just routine operations.
Urtur was spectacle enough, to be sure, one great fried egg of a star and system
magnified in their pickup, a yellow star for a yolk that glowed hellishly in the
flattened disk of dust that surrounded it. Planets swept dark orbits in the
disk, accreted rings of their own. Urtur’s worlds were mostly gas giants, with a
few well-cratered smaller planets buried in the muck.
No place for a walk indeed. Particles would hole even a hardsuit in short order.
Mahendo’sat owned Urtur system, doing mahen things like poking about in the dust
hunting clues to why Urtur was like it was — for pure curiosity, which was why
mahendo’sat did a great many peculiar things. But at the same time and
practically, they maintained a case for the methane-breathers, who thought
methane-dominant Elaji a fine fair place, with its clouds aglow with the
constant flicker of lightnings and meteors making streaks by the minute in an
atmosphere already greenhoused by previous impacts. Oxy-breathers got photos of
the surface. Tc’a revelled in it, and mined rare metals, and had industry in
that hell.
Knnn too.
And where, she wondered, considering that deficient scan image, was their own
private knnn?
Blocked off scan the same as they, and out of range of their own pickup?
145
C. /. Chenyh
Gone, perhaps. Off their track entirely.
She did not trust that. Not finding the knnn simply meant they had not found it.
The Pride did a minor course correction, a gentle push at her left. For any ship