look too, where hani had appeared among the emergency vehicles, some
black-trousered, several blue, the first sight of which lifted her hope and the
second dashed it.
“Ayhar,” she spat, and hurled herself to her feet. “Ehrran!” — for Rhif Ehrran
was in that group, and she headed for them in mingled wrath and hope, dodged
round a stretcher crew and a fire-control team headed into the wreckage. Hani
faces turned her way, Banny Ayhar and Rhif Ehrran chiefest of them.
“Chanur!” Ehrran shouted, headed her way, “By the gods, Chanur, you’ve really
fouled it up, haven’t you?”
She slowed to a walk, with long, long strides. A hand caught her arm and she
jerked free.
“Captain,” Tirun begged her. “Don’t.
She stopped. Stood there. And Ehrran had the sense to stop out of her reach.
Tirun was on one side of her, Khym on the other.
“Where are they?” she asked Ehrran.
“Gods if I know,” Ehrran said, hand on that pistol at her side. The whites
showed at the edges of her eyes. “Gods rot it, Chanur–”
“Be some use. We need searchers. They may have taken cover somewhere, anywhere
along the docks.”
Ehrran flicked her ears nervously, turned and lifted a hand in signal to her
own. “Fan out. Watch yourselves.”
“Move,” Pyanfar said to her own, and they did.
Hilfy moved a finger, a hand, discovered consciousness and remembered kif, with
the kif-stink all about her. She tried the whole arm, both arms, a deep panicked
breath, and opened her eyes on a gray ceiling and bare steel and lights, with
the memory of a jolt she had not fully heard, with her arms tangled in
something, her legs pinned — the wreck — o gods —
She turned her head, a dizzy haze of lights, a bright spot of light with kif
clustered round something pale on a table, something pale and human-sized.
She heaved, met restraints that held her to a surface. Blankets wrapped her arms
about, and they had her fastened about that. She heard another clank of
machinery, shieldings in retraction, all the familiar sounds, watched the kit
cast an anxious look up and go back to their work — Clank! Thump!
Ship sounds. It was the grapple-disengage. The kif stayed at work, clinging to
the table on which Tully lay when the G stress shifted. There were hisses, the
click of kifish speech. She shut her eyes and opened them again and the
nightmare remained true.
Pyanfar stopped and looked about her, swung the rifle about as she heard someone
coming in this zone of wreckage and shot-out lights. Hani silhouette against the
lighted zone.
“Captain,” Haral cried, and the echoes went up. “Captain–” Her first officer
gasped for breath and stopped, leaning on a gantry leg. “Harukk just left dock.
Mahendo’sat just sent word. . . .”
She said nothing. Nothing seemed adequate. She only slung the rifle to her
shoulder and started running for the center of the search, for what help there
was to find.
* * *
They had left. “Tully,” Hilfy said. The G stress was considerable, and it was
hard to breathe; the kif had beat that out the door, gone somewhere for
protection, but they had left Tully lying there on the table, no blanket,
nothing against the cold. “Tully–”
But he did not move. She gave over trying to rouse him. They had patched the
worst, she reckoned. They were headed for long acceleration, for jump, and they
wanted their prisoner to stay alive that long.
She, she reckoned, was quite another matter. Against Chanur, quite a number of
kif had a score to settle.
“Going where? She built the map in her head. Kefk, likeliest. Kefk, inside kif
territory. They could do that in one jump.
The whole ship jolted. Hit, she thought with one wild hope that someone,
somehow, had moved to stop it; but the G grew worse then, incredibly worse. The
ship had dumped cargo, no, not even cargo: she remembered Harukk, the sleek
wicked lines of her docked at Meet-point. It was the false pods that had just
blown, and stripped Harukk down to the hunter-ship she was.
Nothing could catch her now.