Chanur’s Homecoming by CJ Cherryh

“I’m going after food,” Khym said in a voice hoarse and deep.

“They’ll do it.”

“Me,” he said. “I make sure it gets done. We’re time-critical.”

And came back out of a confusing darkness and shook at her till she sat up and wrapped her hands around the cup he gave her. Whole jug of the stuff with him. Awful. Full of sickly spices. Tofi. “Gods, you got to put that stuff in?”

“Way I cook. Shut up and drink it. It’s got calories.”

She drank it, drank another cup because he insisted. Ate the dried stuff. Her hands just fell away limp and dropped the packets. He fell in beside her. Out of some terrible reverberating tunnel the intercom was ringing with strange hani voices: ”Rig for jump.” Operations noises. Strange crew. The words echoed and twisted in and out of her brain, losing focus. She felt after the security of the restraint webbing, found it, and all the while the room kept coming and going.

Khym had remembered the safeties. Half conscious as he was, he had remembered that.

“They’re all right,” some real voice said from the doorway, “Excuse me, captain.”

It confused her to a mahen hell. The door shut. Tauran security check. They had had a door open.

Black things. Might feed on a body while it was helpless. Kifish life, active in jump, when they lay inert and unable to move, to feel pain. Might wake up with fingers gone. Bleed to death. Gnawed to a rack of bones, aswarm with slinking vermin. A siren went.

“We’re going,” Khym mumbled against her shoulder. She grabbed him and held tight. Trust their lives to Tauran. And her programming and the Nav-comp, and the lock on that door.

“Last jump,” Hilfy murmured, in her bunk beside Haral’s and Tirun’s and Geran’s, down in crew quarters. Two beds were empty. Chur’s and Tully’s. She clenched her claws into the mattress, counting breaths. Tully had stayed topside with Chur. She had been shocked when Geran showed up to join them. But: “I got to work otherside,” Geran had said. As if she had turned all emotion off. Their lives and more than their lives rode on Geran, otherside. That was true. And Geran came down to rest with them, face cold and set, leaving her sister to Tully’s care a second time. “He’s good with her,” Geran had said. “She wanted him.”

And sent you away? Perhaps Chur had done that. Gods knew what Chur’s condition was. Geran kept her mouth shut.

“How is she?” Haral had the nerve to ask. The same question. Forever the same question, as if it was going to have some better answer.

“Holding,” Geran said. “Holding.” No optimism. Geran had stayed up there a long time and come down at the last moment of stability, with the alarms ringing.

“She able to eat?” Tirun was merciless. Trod right in where even Haral did not dare.

Long silence out of Geran. Then: “Yeah. Did pretty well.” In a flat and hopeless voice.

Last jump.

“I programmed that son to take us right in close to Anuurn,” Haral said between her teeth. “Forty-five and eight by six. Lay you odds we get it inside point five.”

“We’ll string it a bit,” Tirun said, all matter-of-fact calculating the drag and push of entering and already-arrived ships on the gravity slope. Deformation calc. Keeping the mind busy.

It was Geran and Chur who always laid the bets. Even that was offkey. Geran refused to take the bait. She remained in dire silence. It was not money Tirun and Haral were betting. It was drinks in the nearest bar.

Hilfy stared at the overhead. Terrified.

We’re not going to make it, we’re not going to make it, we’re too few and the kif too many, we can’t push them. Sikkukkut’s ships are a throwaway-we’re all throwaways.

What’s a kif care, how many ships he loses?

Cheap annoyance to his enemies.

And we were pushing him too hard.

“Otherside,” Pyanfar murmured, “we got to move. We’ll run stable right after the first cycle-down. You got to count. First pulse, then get up and go even if we got an alarm going. I don’t know if Tauran’s going to call us. I don’t trust that.”

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