She had just served notice to that Power what the stakes were, by the gods; and what her life was worth to her crew.
That was power of a sort no kif wielded, of a sort no kif could easily foresee.
Martyrdom was a concept that had gotten a shiver even out of Sikkukkut.
“Word from Harukk,” Hilfy said, coldly and calmly as she could, though her hand trembled as it hovered over the com console: “Quote: We demand cause for this violation of regulations.”
“Reply:” said Haral Araun, her low voice quite calm, “We have obeyed instructions from our captain.”
The hair rose on Hilfy Chanur’s spine. She was more fluent in main-kifish than most hani, than most communications officers far senior to her, in fact. And what Haral was telling the kif was precisely the correct response, a very kifish thing to say, whether or not the old spacer knew it: Hilfy would have bet her scant possessions that Haral had calculated it, not by book-learning, but by decades of dockside give and take with the kif. She punched in and rendered it in main-kifish to the hakkikt’s communications officer, who let a considerable stark silence ride after it.
Click.
“Harukk-com just went offline,” Hilfy said, still calmly, though her heart was slamming away at her ribs. Beside her, Tully and Geran and Khym sat keeping an eye on scan, on the limited view they had with their nose into station and the scan output from station. Tirun Araun ran Haral’s copilot functions from her post over by the aft bulkhead, the master-alternate, acting as switcher and sequencer, Haral’s usual job; and Tirun had armaments live back there too. In case.
“Haa,” Khym muttered suddenly.
“We just lost station output,” Geran said.
Sikkukkut’s officials had just blinded them, at least insofar as station could. Doubtless someone was on the com to Sikkukkut personally, to tell him that there was a hani ship live, armed, and with its powerful nose stuck right into Kefk’s gut.
Not mentioning what those engines back there could do if they cycled the jump vanes sitting at dock. Some of their particles would stay in realspace, mightily agitated; others, in their random way, would enter hyperspace, and stream for the depths of the local gravity wells, the greatest of which was Kefk’s main star. Everything would part company in a rather irretrievable fashion, either turning into a bright spot or a failed attempt at a black hole, stripping its own substance down, since it had no directional potential except the station and the star’s own motion through the continuum. Probably not enough to prevent implosion. Hilfy activated a keyboard in her idle moment, fed in The Pride’s mass and her best guess at total station mass, adding in the number of ships tied into the station, a moment of black self-amusement, filling her mind with numbers and schoolbook calculations.
It was significant that the kif had not immediately demanded that they shut down the internal power: the kif knew they had no power to enforce that until they had Pyanfar in their hands.
And Hilfy did not want to think about that at the moment. She simply ran the numbers on their own possible dissolution, and whether they would actually form the hyperspace bubble, and whether with all those ships and that station and all that mass, they might actually have a hyperspatial effect on the largest star when they plowed into it.
She sent it into Nav, since the bubble variables resided there in standard equations; and of a sudden her comp monitor blinked, beeped, and came up with output too soon to have responded to that complex query: TRLING/PR1, it read, PSWD.
Password?
Nav query?
Those were the two thoughts that hit her brain while her eyes were in motion back to the top of that screen where the program name was listed: they found that PRIORITY ONE code and the Linguistics Path Designator as the implication suddenly hit like a wash of cold water.
YN she typed, which was the shortest city name on Anuurn and the standard password for their lightly coded systems: fast keys to hit.
Syntax achieved, the screen said. Display/Print?/Tape?/All?