“I figure,” Hilfy said, to fill the quiet, and to answer questions Tully did not ask, “Goldtooth rendezvoused here with the human fleet. That’s why he kited out on us at Kefk. He and Ehrran came in here, he got stuck here, in a standoff with Akkhtimakt. Maybe he got Akkhtimakt pried loose from the station. He did that much for the stsho. But Ehrran’s on her way to Anuurn. Bet.”
“Godsrotted well has to be,” Haral muttered. “But with Goldtooth in it we got to wonder, don’t we?”
”Like what happened here?” That bothered her. The whole arrangement of things bothered her. The lack of methane-breathers. And Akkhtimakt and Sikkukkut, if they both wanted to be fools, could go on trading that position till the suns all froze. Every few shipboard days, every few ground-bound months, one side could do a turnaround at Urtur or Tt’a’va’o or Kefk or wherever, and come in and strafe the other who had taken possession of Meetpoint. Or Kefk. Or wherever. If ships got to trading positions like that, time-dilation got to stretching lives wider and wider; no in-system passages. No slow-time. Just run and run and run as long as a ship could take it and a body could take the depletion. A merchant ship did its jumps with a lot of slowtime and dock-time in between; and a tradeoff like that could do as much timestretch in a month of their own perception as a trader did in a decade. Before flesh and bone and steel had gone their limits. “Wonder is he didn’t come in on Kefk.”
“Kefk’s got two guardstations. Kefk’s got position on him.”
Tully stared at them both. He had lost that, probably. But of a sudden the problem had found itself a cold spot in
Hilfy’s gut. She took a sip of her cup to warm that cold and licked the soup off her mustaches.
“Sikkukkut’s got something in mind. He’s sure not going to sit here.”
“There are fools in the universe,” Haral said. “What if he isn’t? What if he’s not sitting still here? What if he’s got something else in mind?”
But Goldtooth was out on the Tt’a’va’o vector. Methane-breather territory. Logical choice: the stsho feared the humans like plague. Stsho would deal with Ehrran; they would deal with the kif before they dealt with Goldtooth and his human allies. They would go with the known villains.
Stsho had no armaments. No capability for that kind of stress. Stsho would run if they could. Evade it all.
Tc’a and chi and-gods save us- knnn-they’re not here, they’re always here. Where are they? Knnn aren’t afraid of anything. They won’t run. Avoid, maybe; run in panic-not the knnn. Ever.
“Methane-breathers,” Hilfy said. “Gods rot it, Haral. It’s a trap. Sikkukkut’s and Goldtooth’s both.”
Haral’s ears flagged and lifted again, and a thinking look got through the exhaustion in Haral’s eyes.
“Hilfy.” Tully held his cup between his knees and his brow furrowed with worry under its fringe of pale wet hair. “Goldtooth not go Tt’a’va’o.”
“You mean you know that?”
“I think. He come-turn, go whhhsss, like Tt’a’va’o Not.”
“You mean he faked a jump? Stopped out there in deep space? You think he can do that?”
Tully might or might not have gotten all of that. “Mahe,” he said. “Human do.”
“Stop a jump short?”
“Same.”
“Good gods.”
“Makes sense,” Haral said. “If they’ve got the stuff to do that. If they got it from humans- He waits here to fake a run.”
“And Ehrran runs for good and real and leaves hani here to catch it when Sikkukkut came through? Gods-be, she’s got a treaty with the stsho!”
“Give her credit. What could she do-if Akkhtimakt was here first. Goldtooth wanted Akkhtimakt intact. He’s shoving the two kif into a fight, by the gods, that’s what he’s doing!” Haral rubbed her graying nose and it wrinkled up again. “Let them weaken each other before he throws the humans at them and before the mahen forces come in here. That’s what he’s up to. Let Jik hang; let Jik keep at least one gods-be kif halfway tame if he can while Goldtooth sets it up so he can take out both kif. That’s what the mahendo’sat would really like. Throw the humans at ’em. Let the humans get shot up. That’s why he left Jik behind at Kefk.”