Hani moved as if galvanized; Jik was slower, but only to put out his smoke and to pocket the pouch.
And the stsho huddled there at her feet gibbering and wailing in pain. A chill went over her. She hesitated, turned back toward Sikkukkut, opened her mouth.
“If the hakkikt has no use for these-”
“Enough!”
She stepped past the stsho. One caught at her trouser-leg. “Help,” it cried. “Esteemed hani, help, intercede-”
She walked past. She had to. The kif had made an aisle, directing everyone out.
No further risk, I can’t, I daren’t, gods, don’t let me fall on my face here and now.
I can’t do more than I’ve done.
“That’s another,” Hilfy said. “Harukk’s talking again. Encoded. Names-that’s orders to ships. Chakkuf. Sukk. Nekkekt. I can’t make anything out of it, but they could be moving-orders.”
“I don’t like this.” From Tirun.
“What’s going on?” From Chur’s channel, over the main speakers.
“You know everything we know,” Khym said.
Which summed it up well enough.
If there was a spotter, something they had constantly to worry about, it would lie more than a lighthour out, maybe three or four. And it would move when it felt like it. When its own criteria had been met. One of Goldtooth’s ships, maybe. Maybe one of Akkhtimakt’s. Or more than one. They sat here with nose to station with the chance, however remote, that some attack might come in, some mass of ships might be sitting out there dead silent and so lost in the immensity of the spherical search-zone that they were virtually invisible. Like the spotters. There was no way to find that kind of lurker either, except by that same blind luck, or its own error. The entire perimeter of Meetpoint’s dark-mass influence, at a spherical radius of one to four lighthours-was an impossible area to search for any single ship. Station obscured part of their sweep and rotation complicated matters, with station not sending, the buoys on but erratic, and the kif deliberately censoring their own scan output. There was not even a star close enough to light an object, little help that that was: the dark-mass radiated, but with a sullen, dying heat, a spot their instruments regularly scanned, looking for any anomaly that might be a ship trying to mask itself; Meetpoint’s own mass gave off a quiet white noise to their most sensitive instruments, the several system navigational buoys screamed their false information into the dark, emissions of a vast number of ships churned and dispersed in a maelstrom generated by other traffic; while their best chance of seeing a hidden ship lay in the computer’s memory of the starfield continually overlaid on its present reception. Any star occulted, anywhere about the sweep, might signal that presence, and they had had two such occultations, which buoy-information called planetesimals-
“-Library,” Haral had said on the first such: “does the Meetpoint buoy correlate its input with archives?”
Meaning did the buoy-system ever check itself to see if a cold, silent object it spotted was a known planetesimal? Affirmative. It did. But it reported it out as a planetesimal even while it was relaying a query: it was defaulted that way. The AI of the buoy knew nothing else to call it. The stsho who built it built no contingencies into it: or they had made them and did not put that information into the navigational ephemeris.
If something was out there hours out it had not seen recent developments in any of its timelagged reception: depending on its line of sight, it might only now be watching Harukk arriving at station … in the confused, digital way of distance-scattered passive. It might not know what ship; or be sure how many were out here.
And gods only knew what would trigger it.
Hilfy wiped her eyes, shifted the com plug and kept focused. For their very lives.
“Abort linguistics search,” Haral said suddenly, out of profound silence. “We need the room in nav.”
Hilfy hesitated. And did it. Haral started running calc and never saying what it was for; but if Haral aborted one of Pyanfar’s orders it was desperate. She pulled out the print she had, which was all gibberish. Lost. Utterly.