blanket would soak it up.
Tully was still out. She talked to him periodically, in the chance he should
have waked, to let him know one friend was with him. But he did not respond.
Possibly they had taped a drug patch to him to keep him under. Perhaps he had
just failed to come to. Instincts wanted to call for help and other instincts
remembered what would come and told her to keep her mouth shut and let him go if
he could.
They were headed for jump. And if he were awake he would be terrified.
So was she, when she let her attention wander to herself. When she did that she
hoped there was a ship or two chasing them that would let off an unexpected shot
before they got to jump, and solve their problems at one stroke.
Think of anything but the place where they were going.
Think of Pyanfar, who was likely taking the station authorities apart and
telling them what to do about it, which thought gave her a surge of hope; and
Haral — she pictured Haral sitting in that chair whose upholstery she had worn
out and turning round just so, with that unflappable calm that never broke, not
even when in her first tour she had made a dangerous mistake.
Want to fix that? Haral would say.
O gods, she wished she could.
The thrust died of a sudden, just died, in one stomach-lurching shift to
inertial.
Prep for jump.
“Harukk’s left,” Tirun said, when the word came in. “That’s 43 minutes light,
station-center. Pursuit ship relayed image. Jumped . . . about an hour and
fifteen ago.”
Timelag, Tirun meant: reporting time was in that, what ship scan could pick up
and relay, beating the beacon report by a few minutes.
Pyanfar nodded, kept working on the course plottings, a great deal of it futile
until they had the readout on the new rig. When it got finished.
When.
“That’s affirmative on Mkks vector.”
“Huh.” Her hands shook. She flexed her claws out and in and powered the chair
about, taking a look at the work aft, which their dome camera was fixed on. She
flinched inwardly at the sight, The Pride stripped of her familiar outlines.
There was a new unit moving in. They had the transmissions from the pusher. And
getting ship and tail unit joined was only the roughest beginning of the matter,
a matter of preparing disconnect-ravaged surfaces for new welds. Hard-suited
workers showed like sparks in the working floods, like a swarm of insects where
they had backed off for that unit’s arrival. Service-corn frequency was never
silent, crackling with chiso, the mahen patois that bridged their scores of
languages, easier than trade-tongue for mahendo’sat.
“I’m going to get some rest,” she said, for the smothering weight of all of it
came down at once, and getting herself out of the chair and down the corridor
loomed as a major undertaking.
“Call Haral up when you have to.”
“Aye,” Tirun said. Not an expression, not a question what they were going to do
or how.
She appreciated that.
Time did twists now. In one fashion she could relax, because for the next
stationside several weeks Harukk and its company were in the between, in the
compression of hyper-light, where everything was in suspension and nothing would
start again until the Mkks gravity well took hold. Two weeks at least, in which
everything was stopped. No pain. No fear. Nothing, til they came out again.
But Tully needed drugs for that gravity-drop, needed them like stsho needed
them. Perhaps kif knew this. Perhaps they cared to keep him sane.
Better, perhaps, if he was not.
She waked, suddenly, caught at the edge of the sleeping-bowl and realized she
was not falling, despite the thumping of her heart. She rolled and looked at the
clock and punched the lights on and the com connection. The hammering was
silent. That had waked her.
“Bridge, gods rot it, it’s 0400!”
“Aye, captain.” Haral’s voice. “Nothing’s going on. Thought we’d let you sleep.”
“Uhhhnn.” She leaned her elbow on the bed-edge. “That tail set?”
“They’re welding now.”
“They’re not going to make that deadline.”