Chanur’s Homecoming by CJ Cherryh

The whole situation could be unraveling. Jik might have talked, might have spilled something; it might be the beginning of the attack they had feared; it might be anything, and gods help her, she had just fouled it up with Tully and there was no time, no time, never time to straighten it out between them.

Gods, gods, gods, I hurt him. I never wanted to hurt him, we can all die here and I can’t get past that gods-be translator.

Why is it all so complicated?

Chapter Two

It was not a situation Pyanfar enjoyed, sitting on the bridge and watching on the vid as a pair of armed kif headed toward her airlock. They wore no suits, only the hooded black robes universal with their kind. That meant the kif put some reliance on the jury-patches and the repressurization of this zone of the dock, more than she herself would have liked to put on it-kifish repair crews had been thumping and welding away out there, motes on vid, getting a patch on those areas the decompression had weakened.

So finally the hakkikt seemed to have settled accounts with the rebels inside his camp to the extent that now he could send a message to the friends of the mahen and hani traitors who had made such a large hole in his newly-acquired space station, who had disturbed the tc’a into riot on their side of the station, and incidentally sent over five hundred unsuspecting kif out into space on the wind of that decompression.

Sikkukkut had a very legitimate grievance; even a hani had to admit as much. Though the kif that had gone on that unscheduled spacewalk were many of them Sikkukkut’s enemies, a good many had been partisans of his, and while no kif had ever been observed to grieve over the demise of any other kif, and while the incident might even have contributed to stopping the rebellion, still it had embarrassed him-and embarrassing a kifish leader was a very serious matter. It was not an accustomed feeling, to have a sense of wrong on her side when she was dealing with the kif; and to know, the while those black-robed figures cycled through the lock, that The Pride was not in a position, nose to a wrecked dock and outnumbered ten to one in ships and multiple thousands to one in personnel, to negotiate anything at all, not regarding what this mass of ships chose to do, not regarding their own position within the kifish power structure, not even regarding (heir safety or their lives.

So bluff was still the game, status and protocols, which was why she was sitting up here gnawing her mustaches and having her crew meet with an armed delegation that neither they nor she had power to negotiate with. She tried to use kifish manners, which kif understood, and she hoped to the gods the kif did understand the gesture she was making, which meant that Pyanfar Chanur had just abandoned her inclination to meet the hakkikt’s messengers on hani protocols, with hani courtesies: now she withdrew to a remoteness which to a kif (she hoped) signaled not fear (a frightened kif would show up to placate the offended party, and thrust himself right into the presence of his potential enemy to try to patch it up) but rather signaled that the captain of this hani freighter turned hunter-ship considered herself risen in the hakkikt’s favor, to the extent that she intended henceforth to receive her messages through subordinates. She sensed that self-promotion was the way things worked with kif: she sensed it by experience, and kifish manners, and Skkukuk’s inside-out advice: their own much-bewildered kifish crewman alternately shrank and flourished in every breeze of her tempers, crushed by a moment’s reprimand, bright-eyed and energetic on her next moment’s better humor; and jealous and paranoid in his constant suspicions the crew would undermine him-as he tried to undermine them, of course, but less zealously of late, as if he had finally gotten it through his narrow kifish skull that that was not the way things worked on a hani ship; or that the crew was too firmly in the captain’s favor to dislodge; or perhaps the crew’s own increasing courtesy with him had sent his mind racing on a new stratagem down some path thoroughly mistaken and thoroughly kif: it was enough to give a sane hani a headache. But Skkukuk had shown her a vital thing: that a kif took all the ground he could get at every hour of every day, and if he made a mistake and got a reprimand, he did not, as a hani would do, cherish a grudge for that reprimand: where a hani would burn with shame and throw sanity and self-preservation to the winds, and where a hani who chastised another hani knew that she was asking for bloodfeud to the second and third generation, involving both clans and affiliate clans to the eighth degree, a kif just accepted a slap in the face with the same unflappable sense of self-preservation that would make him go for his own leader’s throat the moment that leader looked vulnerable, at the very moment a reasonable hani might stand by her leader most loyally. Pyanfar had puzzled this out. In a total wrench of logic she could even understand that kif being dead as they were to any altruistic impulse, had to move to completely different tides, and the most urgent of those tides seemed to be the drive to inch their way up in status at every breath if they could get away with it.