blood-crazed roar. A volley of smoke-bounced shots came back from kif near the
wreckage and Pyanfar dived aside, remembered Khym behind her with one
heart-stopping fright and rolled to cover his blind rush.
But he came skidding in beside her, gasping, with the pistol quickly braced up
hunting targets as Tirun reached their cover. Geran and Haral had tucked in with
the mahendo’sat next a stack of cans: shots spattered the plastic and those
three ducked.
Then a flurry opened up from the other side, and for a moment the pop of
projectile fire rang everywhere off the overhead: mahen voices yowled distant
satisfaction and she put her head out, sprawled back again because shots were
wild and going a dozen ways about the wreckage and up the dock to their
position.
Geran got off three quick shots from her side, Haral another burst. “That’s
mahen fire!” Haral yelled, seeing something from her vantage; and Pyanfar
ventured another look, saw fire going the other way and pelted out of cover the
last long sprint for the wreckage, from which cover a steady spatter of fire
went out aimed the other way.
Mahe braced in among the tangle started at their arrival, and hani among them
turned about with backlaid ears. Ehrran.
Pyanfar slid in among them, grabbed an Ehrran shoulder and shook it as Geran
arrived, and the rest of the crew. “Where’s Chanur?” Pyanfar shouted into the
Ehrran crewwoman’s baeklaid ears. “Where, gods rot you!”
The Ehrran pointed mutely to a hani lying on the deck and Pyanfar’s heart
lurched over as Geran scrambled that way, to her sister’s side. “Where’s the
rest?” Pyanfar yelled, and a larger hani arm appeared from behind her and seized
a fistful of Ehrran beard. “Where are they?” Khym shouted, and the Ehrran waved
a frantic hand toward the dock at large.
“–Ran — they ran — Somewhere out there–” Pyanfar let go her grip with a
shove and abandoned the Ehrran to get to Chur.
Chur was alive. They had propped her head off the deck and the wound that had
spread blood all about was hard-sealed and glistening with plasm that stopped
further bleeding. Geran bent over her, just holding her hand, looking more than
scared.
“How is she?” Pyanfar asked.
“She hurts,” Chur said for herself, past scarcely moving jaws. Her eyes were
slitted. “Where’s Hilfy-Tully?”
“We don’t know. Where’d you lose them?”
A weak move of Chur’s head. A try at pointing. “Got out,” she said. The pointing
was nowhere in particular. “Don’t know.”
Pyanfar looked round at the others who hovered near. “That packet. Tully had it
in his hands. Hunt the wreck.”
“Got,” Chur said thickly, reached feebly behind her head, delirious, Pyanfar
thought, until she recognized the thing Chur’s head was lying on. Chur tried to
pull it. Tully’s plastic sack.
“Gods,” Pyanfar said with feeling. “Geran. Stay with her. You hang onto that.
They’ll get an ambulance in here real soon.”
“Not Kshshti,” Chur said. “Pride.”
For a moment Pyanfar failed to understand her, then gripped her arm. “No way we
leave you here. Got that?”
“Got,” Chur said, and let her eyes close.
“Stay with her,” Pyanfar said to Geran. “We’ll find them.” She stood up, keeping
low, for there were still shots flying, drew Tirun and Khym and Haral off to the
mahen position. She seized one by the arm and pulled him about. “Hani. Seen
hani?”
“No got,” he said.
“Alien?”
“No got.”
She edged back again, cast about amid the confusion of arriving emergency
vehicles, the thunder of PA above sirens, each confounding the other. Evacuate,
she made out. Evacuate, evacuate — unsafe–
–getting the non-involved clear. She hoped. Possibly the whole sector of the
station had gone unstable in the explosions. In the mahen-language shouting and
the noise of the sirens there was no knowing. She put her head up, for firing
had stopped, ducked down again as her own crew pulled her down, but there were
still no shots.
“Think they’re through out there,” she said, and seized Haral by the arm. “Get
Chur into an ambulance. Geran’s not to leave her. Whatever.”
“Right,” Haral said; he turned to leave and froze, so that Pyanfar turned to