“Take her through,” Pyanfar said. They did that, traded off; and she suddenly decided on the stint at exit.
“Got it,” Haral said. That section of the board that pertained to jump was live. “Referent on, we got our lock.”
Star-fixed and dead-on. It was a single-jump to Meetpoint from dusty Kefk, with its armed guardstations and its grim gray station-
-to the white light and opal subtleties of a stsho-run station.
If that was what was still there.
“Going,” Haral said.
Down. . . .
They stopped being at Kefk.
. . . .Gods save us, Pyanfar thought, which thought went on for a long long timestretch.
She dreamed of ships in conflict in their hundreds, burning like suns.
Of strange gangling beings that had walked the dock once at Gaohn, sinister in their numbers and their resemblance to a creature she had befriended (but too many of them, and too sudden, and with their Tully-like eyes all blue and strange and malevolent). They carried weapons, these strangers; they talked among themselves in their chattering, abrupt speech, and laughed their harsh alien laughter out loud, which echoed up and down the docks.
What do they want? she asked Tully then, in that dream.
Look out for them, he said to her. And one of them drew a Hun and aimed it at them both.
What does it say? Pyanfar asked when it spoke.
But the gun went off and Tully went sprawling without a sound; in slow motion the tall figure turned the weapon toward her-
Chapter Five
…it went off.
The Pride made the drop into realspace and Pyanfar blinked, gasped a breath, and felt an acute pain about the heart which confused her entirely as her eyes cleared on The Pride’s boards and blinking lights and her ears received the warning beeps from com: Wake up, wake up, wake up-
Meetpoint?
Her eyes found the data on the screen, blurred and focussed again with a mortal effort. “We’re on,” she said around the pounding of her heart, “Haral, we’re on.”
And from elsewhere, distant and echoing in and out of space: “Chur, do you hear me? Do you hear?”
From still another: “We’ve got passive signal. Captain! We’re not getting buoy here. They’ve got Meetpoint image blanked!”
”Gods and thunders. Geran!”
“I’m on it, I’m already on it, captain.”
-Hunting their partners, who could make a fatal mistake in a jump this close, looking for the first sign of signal, and themselves rushing in hard toward Meetpoint, into crowded space, where the scan’s bounce-back could only tell them things too late and passive reception might not have all the data. They were blind. Meetpoint wanted them that way. It was somebody’s trap.
“Priority,” Hilfy said. “Buoy warning: dump immediately.”
“Belay that,” Pyanfar said. With two ships charging up behind them out of hyperspace, she had no wish to have herself slowing down in their path. Collision to fore was an astronomical possibility; behind was a statistical probability.
And the kif who gave them orders meant business.
Acquisition,” Geran said, “your one, Haral.”
“Your two,” Haral said; and id chased the image to Pyanfar’s number two monitor. Aja Jin was in.
“What’ve we got here? Geran-”
“I’m working on it. We got stuff all over the place on passive, nobody outputting image, lot of noise, lot of noise, we got ships here-”
“Mark,” Haral said, “less twenty seconds.”
“That’s it, that’s it, brace for dump.”
She sent it to auto; The Pride lurched half into hyperspace again and fell out with less energy-
-gods, gods, sick as a novice-What in a mahen hell’s in this system? Come on, Geran. Get it sorted. O gods- At forty-five percent of Light. With the system rushing up in their faces. Their own signal going out from that traitor buoy at full Light. Themselves about to become a target for someone. She fumbled after the foil containers at her elbow, bit through one and let the salt flood chase down the nausea. There was a meeting of unpleasant tides somewhere behind the pit of her throat and her nose and hands and the folds of her body broke out in sickly sweat. “Geran. Get me id.”