Tirun came. Geran arrived from down the corridor, blear-eyed and staggering. “We’re relieved,” Pyanfar said. “Come on. How’s Chur?”
“Alive,” Geran said, and her mouth went hard shut, as if that was the only word that was going to get out. But: “Going to get something down her,” Geran muttered in passing. “Going to sleep there this trip.”
“Huh,” Pyanfar said, venturing no more than that. The two of them crowded into the same bed, that was what Geran meant: there was nowhere else in that lifesupport-crowded cabin. She said nothing about it, tried not to think of anything at all, but the bridge and the galley corridor went strange in her sight, all near and far at once.
Dark and stars and the monstrous shape of a knnn ship bearing down on them as if they were a minnow in the deep.
Kif ships putting down a steady barrage of fire into nothing at all, because there might be something out there. (But there might equally be helpless bystanders. Mahendo’sat. Hani. Tc’a.)
Strangers with their hands on The Pride’s controls, delving Into Chanur records-
Kefk docks, all lit in fire-
Three hundred thousand stsho dying in sudden vacuum, delicate, gossamer-robed bodies frozen and drifting, with horror on their faces.
Human shapes, tall and mahen-like, pouring by the thousands into a hallway, Tully times infinity, armed and hostile-
“Captain-” Tirun had her arm. Held onto her, as the hall went dark in her sight and the wall suddenly ended up in the way of her shoulder.
“I’m all right,” she snarled, and shoved the hand off.
“Aye,” Tirun said, in the tone it deserved.
She made it as far as the galley, dropped into a seat as her sight went dark again. Someone shoved a cup of gfi into her hands and her vision cleared on it; she got it to her mouth and forced a nauseating swallow down. Grimaced then and nearly heaved. A sandwich arrived in front of her, in a hairless human hand, Tully and Khym in better shape than any of them who had been on duty since Kefk. But the mingled stink of them all was enough to turn a kif s stomach. It was more than enough for a hani’s, and mixed with the godsawful smell of gfi and food and the ammonia-stink that had somehow gotten onto all of them. She had always run a clean ship, an immaculate ship. Now this.
While the Compact was trying to come undone, and, gods-
“I’m worried about the kif that went out of here,” she said. “Sikkukkut’s. Not just Akkhtimakt’s lot. The pair of Sikkukkut’s that went out on this heading before he came into station-” Remember. Remember it. Mind did strange things when jump shook it and set it down again. There had been such kif. She and Skkukuk had discussed it. There had been methane-breathers. There had been Jik, on their bridge, spilling an incredible sequence of evidence into their computer. She forced a mouthful down. “I got to tell you, ker Fiar, and you can tell your cousins, we got a Situation aboard: we can’t always say what we’d like to say. Skkukuk’s real stable, but we don’t tell him we’re not the hakkikt’s loyal friends. Wouldn’t bother him in some ways. But he’d think we were crazy. Kif thinks you’re crazy, he won’t do what you say. So we just don’t fill him in on everything. You got to understand him-”
“Aye,” Fiar murmured in a guarded tone, because, perhaps, it seemed incumbent on her to say something to that insanity, surrounded as she was by Chanur and Chanur’s odd crew. Khym attracted as much of her attention as Tully did, little nervous moves of her ears, following sounds. They came desperately forward. “You think one of those lead ships went on to Anuurn, captain?”
“Could have,” she said, and Haral:
“Our escort’s in a way to cover anything they choose to cover. Emissions all over the godsforsaken system. No telling what’s here. But they know what they found before they churned it all up. That’s for sure, whatever they’ve cut out of what they send us.”
“You’re not working for them.”