“Working, I’m working.”
Dump fouling up the scan; nothing where it ought to be, the comp overloaded with input and trying to make positional sense out of it before it got around to analyzing ship IDs.
“Multiple signal,” Hilfy said. “Nothing clear yet. Multi-species.”
“Arrival,” Jik said. “Moon Rising is in.”
“On the mark,” Haral said. “Second dump, stand by.”
Taking it down fast. The pain in her chest refused to leave. The nausea all but overcame her; but she hit the control anyway-
-down again.
-Gangling figures against white light. Captain, a voice said, and Chur was there with the light shining about her, in the midst of a long black hallway, and shafts of light spearing past her as she moved in the slightest. She turned her shoulder and looked back into the light- -“Chur-”
they cycled through again, back in
realspace. And the weakness that ran through her was all-enveloping. She fought it back and groped after another of the packets. Bit into it and drank the noisome stuff down in a half dozen convulsive gulps.
“We got signal on Moon Rising,” Geran’s voice reached her, indistinct; she heard Tully talking, some half-drunken babble.
“Chur,” he was saying. “Chur, you answer. Please you answer.”
No sound out of Chur, then. It might still be the sedative. The machine would knock her out in stress. They had plenty of it. Pyanfar blinked again, flexed her right arm in the brace, withdrew it and shoved the mechanism aside, out of her way. Her hands shook. She heard the quiet, desperate drone of Tully’s alien voice: “Chur, Chur, you hear?”
While Geran battled the comp for ID they desperately needed. Mind on business.
“We got recept on Meetpoint,” Hilfy said. “Lot of output. Busy in there. I’m trying to link up with our partners, get a fix on those ships-”
“We’ve got to keep going,” she muttered. “Got to. No gods-be choice. Blind. We got our instructions, we got-”
“Kif,” Skkukuk said suddenly. “Kifish output!”
“Audio two,” Hilfy said.
It was. Some kifish ship was transmitting in code. Unaware of them yet, it might be. Or close enough to have picked them up, inbound from Kefk. “Going to have an intercept down our necks any minute,” she muttered, and sweated. “Akkhtimakt. He’s on guard here. Or he’s running the whole gods-be station-”
“Image, priority,” Geran said. “My gods.”
Passive scan came up with resolution, a haze to this side, to that, all in differing colors indicating different vectors and slow, virtually null-movement, relative. Big hazy ball where Meetpoint ought to be. Haze to zero-ninety-minus sixty. Haze id minus seventy-thirty-sixty. Another ball out to one ten. The only thing that made sense was the Given in the system, the Meetpoint Mass itself, big and dark and dead from its cons-old formation. And the station itself. The rest-
“Khym,” Pyanfar snapped. “Interior com. Tully! audio one. Listen sharp. We don’t know what we’ve got here. Could be humans, could be anything. Whatever we got, it’s a lot of it.”
“Got it,” Khym said; and: “Got,” from Tully.
The comp main panel between Haral and Hilfy was a steady flicker of inter-partition queries and action from this and that side of its complex time-sharing lobes. Like the lunatic tc’a: it had several minds to make up, and they were all busy.
She rubbed her chest where the pain had settled and swiped the back of the same hand across an itch on her nose.
And listened to Khym trying over and over again to raise Chur on the com.
“Chur,” he cried suddenly. “Geran-I got her, she’s answering! Chur, how are you?”
She was alive back there. Someone switched Chur’s answer through. It was scatologically obscene.
Pyanfar drew one painful breath and another.
“Thank the gods,” Haral murmured in a low voice. And from Khym: “Ker Chur, we have a problem just now-”
“That’s stsho,” Hilfy said. “I’m picking up something near the station. Stsho. And hani. More than one. You got data coming, Geran, Jik.-I hear that.” To someone on com. And Geran:
“Gods rot it, I’m working.” Then: “Yeah, just take it easy, hear?”
“I got,” Jik said quietly. “They be here they don’t-“