She hit D and P; the screen blinked text up, full of gaps and mangled syntax: it was running a code-cracker set in the assumption it was mahensi, but it was not mahen standard, it was some godsforsaken related language, though the computer was making some sense of it on cognates. Jik’s message. The coded packet he had dropped in their laps back at Mkks.
Dialect. Which?
She punched more buttons, desperately, asking for the decoded original. It came up, vaguely recognizable as mahen phonemes. “Gods be,” she muttered, “Haral, Haral, the comp just spat out Jik’s message but it’s still hashed up, it’s
got a string of words together but it’s still sorting-we got a breakthrough here.”
The screen blinked with a red strip across the top, which was Tirun using her keyboard to snatch information across to her board and probably to Haral’s. “Keep on it,” Haral said. “Tirun, monitor com.”
“Aye,” Tirun said, and “Aye,” Hilfy muttered, punching keys, with the hair bristling on her neck and her ears flicking in half-crazed vexation with the computer, which had thrown her a half-solved problem in her own field here on the very edge of oblivion.
Kif could call our bluff any second now. Haral could push that button.
We could go streaming for that sun and the gods rot it what language is he using that comp hasn’t got? O gods be! when’s that alarm going to come? We’re going to die, gods rot it, and it’s giving me something to chase, and gods rot it, Haral, let me finish this gods-be silly problem before you push the godsforsaken button, it’s a rotten thing to die with a question in your head, if this thing’s got the whole why and wherefore of it, all Jik’s conniving, all his secrets-hold off the button, Haral, tell me when we go, I don’t want to die till I get this-
The computer beeped and sorted and ticked away, launched on a new hunt with a little hani shove in a certain direction for its research. It blinked away to itself and Hilfy clasped her hands in front of her mouth and stared at the screen in mindless timestretch.
Probably a letter to his wife. Gods know. Has he got a wife? Kids?
We’re going to die here and this stupid machine can’t go any faster and what can we do anyway? Pyanfar’s already out there with the kif. And we can’t get to her. Whatever happens.
Harukk occupied a berth well around the rim, beyond the weakened section, but not beyond the damage: wreckage lay about them, walls and decks were fire-blackened and pocked with shells and laser-hits.
And the approach to the hakkikt’s ship was more ghastly than before, hedged with a veritable forest of poles and stanchions on which he had put the heads of enemies and rebels against his power.
Pyanfar had seen the display before; so had Kesurinan. Hope he changes them off, was the wisp of thought that leapt into Pyanfar’s distressed mind. M’gods, putrefaction. The things life-support has to put up with on this station-filters must be a gods-be mess.
-in a distracted, callous mode because she had gotten used to such horrors, and only her heart flinched in a forlorn, pained recollection that there were places where such things did not happen, where naive, precious folk went about their lives never having seen a sapient head parted from its body and hung up like a traffic warning.
This kif is going to expand beyond Kefk. Going-gods know how far. Gods help the civilized worlds.
A sneeze hit her. She stifled it, turned it into a snarl and wiped her nose. She was allergic to kif-had taken another pill when she changed clothes, but the air was thick hereabouts. Her eyes watered. Lives rode on her dignity and she was going to sneeze, the very thought that she was going to sneeze made her nose itch and the watering grow worse. But she squared her shoulders and put the itching out of her mind, eyes fixed on the ramp, on the access which lay open for them.
“It’s coming, it’s coming,” Hilfy murmured, as the screen came up with more and more whole words, as it broke the code on a few key ones and spread the pattern wider: a makeshift job of encoding, a kind of thing one ship’s computer could do and another one could unravel, if it had a decoding faculty; and The Pride’s did. The Pride’s fancy-educated communications officer had taken her papa’s parting-gift in the form of the same system she had studied on by com-net back on Anuurn; it cost; and it worked, by the gods, it sorted its vast expensive dictionaries for patterns, spread its tentacles and grabbed every bit of memory it could get out of the partitionings, and sorted and cross-checked and ran phonemic sorts, linked up with the decoder-program in the fancy new comp-segment the mahendo’sat had installed in The