language. No translator. The translator-tape–
–in the bundle of clothes. With the papers. Back at the wreck. With Chur–
“Hilfy–” He stiffened, eyes fixed toward the exit of the alley. She turned her
head.
Shadows moved in that red-dyed smoke, paused and conversed outside, a gathering
of black robes, tall, stoop-shouldered silhouettes.
Tully edged aside, out of the light the door cast. She moved too, as carefully
as she could, as far as Tully did, and put her arms about him to hide his pallor
with her own redbrown hide as much as she could within the shadows. She felt
Tully shivering; felt her own stomach knotted up when she recalled kif eyesight.
They were night-hunters by preference; and Tully — white shirt, pale hair,
paler skin–
She kept her arms clenched about him.
And saw that conversation outside their refuge break up, the kif start to move.
One stopped and looked their way.
* * *
“Open that gods-rotted door!” Pyanfar yelled, and used the rifle butt on the
guardroom spex, so a scared mahendo’sat in the section-control yelled back
threats from the other side. “It’s clear from the Personage!” she yelled. “Open
that section-seal!”
“Au-to-matic,” the yell came back through the com-transfer, in mangled pidgin.
Mahens station. Half the personnel never managed fluency in pidgin.
“Personage!” she yelled back in mahen Standard.
Gibberish came back. This one spoke dialect.
* * *
Black-robed shadows filled the alleyway, dark, featureless, except for the wan
light of the bulb in the low ceiling of the door recess and Hilfy gathered
herself to her feet. Tully struggled and she helped him by his good arm to give
him that chance at least.
“Run if you can,” she said in a low voice, thinking perhaps she could break a
hole for him. But he knew so few words. He pressed closer to her as the kif gave
them less room. He would try to fight-blunt-fingered, without any advantage,
without even speed to outrun a kif. And it was Tully they wanted: alive. She had
no doubt of that. “Got claws,” she said beneath her breath. “You don’t. Run,
understand?”
The kif moved closer, keeping their circle. “We’ll not hurt you,” one said.
“You’re in the wrong place, young hani. Certainly you are. If you had a gun you
would have used it, would you not? But we aren’t your enemies.”
“Who?” She perceived the origin of the voice: the speaker stood out among the
rest, taller, finer-robed, and she guessed the name as she edged into Tully,
trying to keep open space about them as the kif moved and shifted.
“Sikkukkut. From Meetpoint. You remember me, young Chanur. I have no wish to
hurt you, either one. And there are far too many of us. Come, be reasonable.”
The kif moved, all of them at once. “Run!” she yelled at Tully, spun and swung
and kept swinging as her claws carried a kif headon into the wall. “Run, for
godssakes, run–”
Black cloth obscured her vision, cleared as Tully pulled one off her, and she
rattled that one’s brains.
But kif claws pulled Tully by the shoulder, and grabbed him by the arm.
“Gods blast!” she cried qnd tried to get that one off him, but two kif got her
arms and a kifish arm came hard about her throat.
* * *
The door thundered back on chaos, the flash of red lights on smoke the fans
refused, the sweep of floods, the lunatic strobe-flash. “Gods,” Geran muttered.
The center of the trouble was evident, a knot of flashing white lights stabbing
into the smoke far up the dockside. Pyanfar started running first, rifle in both
hands — “No, wait–” from the mahen official who had gotten the door open.
“Hani, got wait!–” But Geran was pace for pace with her and gaining —
fleet-footed Geran, whose sister Chur was in that mess.
A laser shot streaked the smoke. Pyanfar brought the rifle up and fired on the
run. Geran did the same, not with particular skill, but with dispatch; and more
fire came behind her, with the mahen official screaming for them to take cover.
Khym shouted, something: the heights distorted it, twisted it into a