Chanur’s Homecoming by CJ Cherryh

“Think all the way to Kura Point. I’m going to send you Sifeny and Fiar back to your shift; let you all work it out. Take my own back to the boards. Human and my husband and the kif and all. With my thanks, her Sirany. They’re good. I don’t like to mess with teams that work. Yours or mine. And we need some crew rested full. For contingencies.”

“You got it.” Sirany released restraints and climbed out of the chair. “Get you a sandwich back here,” she said then, and gathered up her crew, galleyward bound. Pyanfar stared at her retreating back, still hanging onto the seat. In case. The way any spacer held onto things in a moving ship. She looked at her own crew, at sober faces of Chanur who had arrived around her.

Ears lifted. “Good,” Haral said.

“I hope,” she said, and slid a glance Geran’s way, at a face that showed trouble. “How is she?”

Geran shrugged. The woman had gone so gaunt herself that her ribs showed. Her worry was tautly held, made a darker spot above her nose, an indentation in her brow that had gotten to be part of her expression.

“You’re a mess yourself. We need you. Get in there with Sirany’s crew, get some food down you; Tully’ll run some back to Chur. Don’t argue with me, gods rot it, I’ll have your ears. Chur’ll have mine if I get her there without you. Hilfy, get the rest of us up here.” The assigned crew was all there, all settling in as Hilfy’s voice began calling Tully and Khym and Skkukuk on the general speakers.

“Mess,” Pyanfar said, and flung herself into her chair. Haral was beside her, already in control of things. “No sign of Moon Rising.”

There had been a chance. There was less and less. It was four months back at Meetpoint, as hyperlight ran down the starlanes, but not by the way they traveled; whatever had happened there was four, five months old and about to get

older.

“Long time back,” she said, while the data flowed past her.

“Kura’s alive,” Haral said. “Just not talking. Kif scared them plenty. They shut down everything. They got no ships here or they’re all lying silent.”

They had been a long time away from home. And far from the han. “Gods know what the stsho taught us, huh?”

Years the way homework! saw it. That was the way of spacers. To stay young while the worlds aged, and groundlings connived and contrived their little worldly plots and made their gains in the intervals when spacers were strung out between the stars, lost in dreams.

“Kif’s not having any trouble out there. Real fine piece of navigation, that.”

“We got troubles, Skkukuk’s gods-be dinner’s loose again. Got careless with his door open.”

“Or we missed a couple of ’em.”

“What’s it eating, that’s what Sirany wanted to know. That’s what / want to know.”

“Maybe it’s gotten acclimated to electric shock,” Hilfy said, breaking in on station-to-station. “Adaptive, Skkukuk said they were. Akkhtish life.”

She looked straight across at Haral with a sinking feeling about her stomach.

“Lifesupport,” Haral said.

“Check it. Those godsforsaken things eat plastics.”

“We’ll get it.” Haral was out of her seat and headed. “Hilfy, get the menfolk on it. Get Skkukuk!”

“We can’t leave our gods-be schedule. Can’t. We got no way to recalc this thing and get word to all the ships back there fast enough. Gods rot it-” They were off auto-pilot see-and-evade while crew was coming up. It put the ship at some risk of damage. Not doing it was worse in terms of fragile flesh and bone. They had lives at stake back there. She punched a button to usurp com. “Ker Sirany, we’re slaying stable a good half hour. I’m taking your advice on the vermin. We’re trying to track them down.”

“Understood,” Sirany’s voice came back, clear above the quiet of other voices in the galley. And, politic, not one other word.

Second jab of keys tied into com. “Skkukuk, this is the captain speaking, you hear me, son? Your gods-be dinner’s loose again, I want ’em counted, I want to know where it is, I want it out of our way, or I’ll have your hide for a wall-hanging, you hear me?”

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