Till a dockside brawl on Meetpoint; till the kif laid hands on her; till she was their prisoner for much too long-
Kohan would not know his daughter.
She’s grown up, brother. She’s not a girl anymore. Not anything you can understand anymore, your pretty Hilfy; you, tied to the world; her, a spacer, with a spacer’s ways, like Haral, like Tirun, like me.
I don’t want your world.
I’ve ruined her for it, taken her out of it, changed her in ways I wouldn’t have chosen, brother; but I couldn’t keep her prisoner myself; couldn’t hold her, wouldn’t try.
I hate it. I’ve always hated it. Not the fields, not the feel of the. sun. It’s the confinement. One world. One place. A horizon too small.
Minds too small to understand me.
I’d rather go anywhere than home. Rather die for anything than fat old women and empty-headed men who love their walls and their wealth and their privilege and never know what’s out there-
Khym knows. Maybe you almost do. But I’m coming back for them. Hilfy and I. So gods-be many have bled for you. Or frozen cold in space. Or gone to particles, not even enough to find. You don’t know the ways you can die out here.
I don’t want to get there. Don’t want to see the look on your face.
Rut by the gods I won’t leave you to Ehrran and the scavengers.
-Aren’t we coming out of it? Has something malfunctioned? Are there red lights? Gods, do you ever stop thinking when you lose it and the ship doesn’t come down again, do you just go on-
-out again, and back to realspace, with V lower and the telemetry flicking past numbers in mechanical agony, red lights flaring-
“I got it, I got it,” she mumbled to save Haral the effort. Not malfunction lights: it was gas out there, thick enough to flow and flare off their shields. The shield-depletion curve was rising, fluctuating as they swept up gas and hit a bare spot, where the shield recovered a little strength. The kifish escort was far away now. On auto, relying on numbers alone and not even in direct control, they achieved a kind of tranquility. Warning lights flickered, reminding them of laws and lanes they overrode. Haral swore and disabled them for the duration of Urtur passage, to be rid of the beep.
She fumbled after the nutrients packet, bit a hole in it and drank it down-and Tully, Tully was alone belowdecks, his poor teeth always had trouble with the packets and there was no one to help him, alone because the gods-be Tauran were too squeamish-
-behind her Skkukuk would be seeing to his own meal. Her stomach heaved at the thought. But his kifish voice came through now and again, delivering some information to Hilfy and Fiar at com, translating off those kifish ships up front.
Kifish transmissions everywhere; and Chakkuf and Nekekkt and Sukk were doing their job, the point of a spear that had to drive straight into Urtur before it stopped, re-vectored, and ran up the V sufficient for a jump out of this hell. That was the worst of it, that dead-relative-stop they had to do to line up that next jump, or slew through hyperspace askew from their target and depending on the next star to pull them in, loss of realspace-time, loss of everything if they miscalculated. . . .
Those hunter-ships were aware of their schedule, were able to make up that time and distance on sheer power, and rendezvous again, elsewhere. They claimed. It was their idea. A merchant pilot would have laughed, disbelieved it: and suffered a chill up the back at the thought of ships that could do that, knnn-like, as far off their capacity as they were off that of an insystemer.
She had no doubts. Clearly the kif would not have shown them everything they had.
And, gods, she would have given anything to find that fire answered, Akkhtimakt in Urtur system, resisting. He was not. That meant he was elsewhere. The terror reasserted itself, habitual and consuming.
“Chur,” she heard Hilfy say. “Time you woke up. Chur-“