Chanur’s Homecoming by CJ Cherryh

She laid her ears back, trying to put that on one side or the other. “Tell him-gods, just tell him I’ll do what I have to. First thing-” She put her hands in the waist of her trousers. They were icy; her feet were numb from the decking. And it was still raw fear. “Tully.”

“Captain?”

The humans were first. She kept her shoulder to the han representatives and to the Llun; and felt a dull shock to find Skkukuk’s armed presence a positive comfort on her left, where it regarded breaking that news.

“What we do, we talk a little trade, talk up all the trouble they got to watch out for. I figure maybe they’ve seen enough to worry about. Maybe we just tell them it gets worse up ahead.”

“They go,” Tully said finally, coming out of that small fluorescent-lit room on Gaohn dockside, where mahendo’sat and kif and humans and hani argued. Armed. Every one of them, since the kif were worse without their weapons at hand than with. And they went at it in shifts, till Tully came out in a waft of that godsawful multispecies stale air, and leaned against the doorframe. “They go.” He looked drowned. Sweat stuck his hair to his forehead and his eyes looked bruised. After three days at this back-and-forth, herself out of the room for clean air and a new grip on her temper, agreement was like the floor going away.

“Go? Leave? They say yes?”

Gods, who threatened them? What happened? What went wrong? Belligerence was not the strategy she chose. Discouragement was. She had hammered this home with Skkukuk until the deviousness and the advantage of the tactic slowly blossomed in his narrow kifish skull, and his red-rimmed eyes showed a distinctive interest, which, gods help them all, might turn up as something new in kifish strategy.

“They say yes,” Tully said, and made a ship-going motion with his flat hand. “Go way home. Kif and mahendo’sat go with. First mahendo’sat, then kif, with few hani. You got find hani ship go. Make passage ‘long kif territory.”

“That bastard.” Meaning Skkukuk, who had ulterior motives in running a parade of exiting humans right through kifish territory. It was also the shortest route. And Tully just hung there against the wall blinking in his own sweat and smelling godsawful no matter how much perfume he dosed himself with. He picked it up off the others. They all did. But overheated human still had its own distinctive aroma.

“Good?” he asked.

“Gods.” She drew a deep breath and took him by the shoulder on her way to the door. He had to go back in. They still needed him. The mechanical translators were a disaster. And he looked all but out on his feet. “Yes. Good. Thank gods. Can you go a little longer? Another hour?”

“I do.” Hoarse and desperate-sounding.

“Tully. You can go with them. You understand. Go home.”

He blinked at her. Shook his head. He had that gesture back. “Here. The Pride.”

“Tully. You don’t understand. We got trouble. We’re all right now. After this-I can’t say. I don’t know that Chanur won’t be arrested. Or worse than that. I have enemies, Tully. Lot of enemies. And if something happens to me and Chanur you’d be alone. Bad mess. You understand that? I can’t say you’ll be safe. I can’t even say that for myself or the crew.”

He did not understand. The words, maybe. But not the way the han paid off people like Ayhar, like Tahar, who was still not in a mood to come in. Gods knew what they reserved for Chanur.

“I friend.”

“Friend. Gods. They owe you plenty, Tully. But you got to get out of here with somebody.”

His mobile eyes shifted toward the door, the same as a hani slanting an ear. They. “Not good I go with.”

It made sense then. Too much. “They got the han’s way of saying thanks, huh? Same you, same me with the hani. Gods-rotted mess, Tully.”

He just looked at her.

And they went in one after the other. To get down to charts and precise routes.

Across the table from a tired, surly lot of humans.