. . . .who arrived at Meetpoint to drive his kifish opposition against the anvil of mahen territory, knowing that there were limited routes Akkhtimakt could take: down the line into stsho territory was one, where there would be no resistance-but Goldtooth and the humans had sealed that route.
. . . .the second to methane-breather territory, but that was a deadly trap: no one wanted to contest the knnn.
. . . .the third course lay past Sikkukkut to Kefk, which would have put Akkhtimakt at psychological disadvantage, though ironically not a positional one: there was no worse place for a kif on the retreat to come, than into kifish territory, a wounded fish into an ocean of razor jaws. . . .
Think, Pyanfar, it’s late to think. The enemy either has one choice more than you’ve thought of, or one fewer than they need.
Sikkukkut knew that some message had gone with Banny Ayhar-knew that someone would have carried it, and where mahen forces would come-he had used the mahen push,
anvil and hammer, but he never trusted the mahendo’sat, not Jik, manifestly not Goldtooth. He obviously didn’t stop Ayhar.
Or he didn’t try because he wanted it to happen.
Gods, could Jik have told him? No. No. He surely wouldn’t. Not to someone that smart and that canny. They cooperated with limits. It was convenient for both sides. For separate reasons.
But why did Sikkukkut value me from the beginning? Why did he and the mahendo’sat both value me enough to keep us alive and set me here, with this much power?
Is Sikkukkut a fool? He was never a fool. Neither is Jik. Nor Goldtooth.
If Sikkukkut lost too many ships fighting for power, my gods, he’d find some other kif gnawing up his leg the moment he looked weak. That’s what the mahendo’sat are doing to him, whittling away at him. It’s the kif’s chief weakness, that aggressiveness of theirs. Does Sikkukkut know that? Can a species see its own deficiencies?
Look about us at ours, at this pitiful spectacle, hani against hani, spears and arrows flying in the sun, banners aflutter-
I see what keeps us from being what we might be.
Can he?
Can-?
“Look OUT!” someone yelled; and fire spattered from the end of the corridor.
“Any word?” Chur asked. She had left the rifle in lowerdecks. To carry the thing was more strength than she had, and there was no enemy aboard. She arrived on the bridge with Tully close behind her and clung to a seat at her regular post. It was a strange captain who turned a worried face toward her. “I’m taking orders,” Chur breathed, to settle that, and clung to the chair with her claws, the whole scene wavering in and out of gray in her vision, her heart going like a motor on overload. “Any word on them?”
“Ehrran’s threatening to back out of dock and blow us all. Light’s threatening to blow Vigilance where she sits. We’re supposed to have a kifish ship in here picking up-that. Skkukuk. I’ve told him that’s all we want it to do.” There
was a fine-held edge to Sirany’s voice, an experienced captain at the edge of her own limits. “Handle the kif.”
“Aye,” Chur said, and crawled into the vacant chair between scan and com and livened the aux com panel. With Tauran crew on either side of her. Tully sat one seat down. Other seats were vacant. Fiar’s and Sif s.
Handle the kif. Indeed.
Skukkuk thought of himself as crew. He was loyal. Geran had said that much with a grimace. And Chur had gotten her own captain’s instructions to the kif on open com. That and the encounter belowdecks was all she had to go on, while the kif waited below in lowerdeck ops, for transfer arrangements to be finalized. But she had been in the deep too long to panic over the unusual or the outré.
One of the black things skittered through the bridge and vanished like a persistent nightmare, long, furred, and moving like a streak.
On scan, one of the kifish ships nearest had just flared with vector shift.
Skkukuk’s tight-beamed request for transport had had time to be heard and was evidently being honored.