“Don’t shoot, I got, I got, cap’n!”
It started going out.
And hard on it: “Mahijiru, this is The Pride of Chanur. Cease fire, cease fire. These are allied ships. Dump and brake and hold off. Do not transit the system. Other mahen ships hold the approach to Ajir: nothing passed here beyond their capacity to deal with and mahen authorities in that direction are forewarned. Repeat: the Ajir approach is defended by mahen ships. Stay where you are. All mahen ships anywhere receiving: this is Pyanfar Chanur on The Pride of Chanur: cease all hostilities. End. Repeat that.” She slumped back then, at the end of her energies. “Till response.”
“We have a transmission from Vigilance. They register protest.”
“Tell ’em-tell ’em we note it. Tell them-” It was easier and easier to think in kifish mode. “Stand in line, gods rot it. And consider where they are.”
There were more and more ships arriving in the range. It was nightmare. If it had been an hour earlier it would have been a rescue.
By that much, you cursed bastard. By that much you missed it.
By that much Tahar was almost with us. Across all that space. Goldtooth must have held Sikkukkut-must have pinned them down good. The kif must have thrown something at him again at Kura. Must have-gods know what they did. Keeping Sikkukkut from overjumping us. When he came in here he was desperate. Needing me, for godssakes. He couldn’t fire on me, I was the last hope he had.
We got ships out there-needing help.
“Human ship!” Tully cried. And talked to someone a steady stream of babble, as if they were on the same timeline. It was Tully’s old message those incoming ships must have picked up. It was the old message they had responded to.
The same as Goldtooth must have gotten their own former chatter, and known well what ships were out to meet the enemy. She cut the mains, let them go inertial on what they still had, on the rotational G.
While Tully poured out something, rapid and urgent. And went on saying it. One assumed it was friendly. One assumed nothing nowadays.
She felt a hundred years older. And turned herself and her chair and looked over the bridge, at a crew worn and tired beyond clear sense, at more gray hah- than she recalled a few weeks ago. Or maybe it was the stark lighting. Or maybe it was that they all looked older, thinner, abraded away by distances and a load they had carried too long.
/ want to see Chanur again.
But Chanur land was Mann territory. Nothing could change that, unless Kohan could take Kara Mahn; and the weary, grayed man who had met her on Gaohn docks had not the strength left. The wit, yes; the wit and the will and the canny good sense that had been more than figurehead in Chanur these many hard years. A real power. A mind and an insight shrewder than many a woman’s. But time bore down on Kohan, that was all. The only hope was Hilfy Chanur, who might find herself a man to take care of Kara Mahn: there was nothing Pyanfar Chanur or Rhean or any of the former powers could do about it any longer.
She saw Hilfy sitting there, talking to someone, likeliest one of the nearby hani. Up to you, kid. It all is, from now on. Our time is done. You think you’ve grown up. You’re Chanur now, have you figured it out? I don’t envy you.
Except your youth. I wish I’d known you and you’d known me forty years ago. They looked like rough years then. But the years you’ve got ahead-I can’t see into them. Like there
was something in the way of me and this ship, like a curtain I can’t see past.
I always used to know where I was going. And now all I can see is aliens. And all I can think of is the mistakes I’ve made; and how to get this straight somehow.
Her eyes drifted to Tully. To him. The alien among them.
It’s an enemy at his back, isn’t it?