Dark eyes glittered. She stared at a kif s face a handspan from hers, closer than she ever wanted to be. He made her nose run. And she made him shiver.
“Yes, hakt’.” he said. “Power.”
She let him go. And wanted a bath. Wanted clean air. Wanted-gods, never to have tried to reason with a kif. Or to have dealt with one.
“Come on,” she said, shoved him and then Tully into motion and turned and hurried to The Pride, faster and faster, Skkukuk close after her, Tully panting along beside her, his breath hollow and hoarse from the thin air and the chill. Get you out of this, lad, before you catch a cough. Get me out of this. Gods, I’m too old for this kind of stuff. She took the pocketcom from her belt. “This is Pyanfar. Open up, hear me? We’re coming in.”
“Aye,” Haral’s voice came back.
Up the ramp. Into the chill ribbed yellow of the passageway. Around the bend and toward the white light, the safety of the airlock. She came across that threshold weak-kneed and with her side one mass of pain.
“Lock it up,” she yelled at com. “We’re all in.”
”Aye,” Haral said. ”Everyone all right?” The hatch whined and hissed shut; and they were as free of the kif as they were able to be.
She shut her eyes and hung there, bent over then to get her breath while Tully did the same.
“Captain?”
“Fools, fools!” Skkukuk cried, and an alien grip closed on her arm. “The mekt-hakt’ is starved, is fainting for your incompetence!”
Tully snarled something at him. Pyanfar rescued her own arm, blinking dazedly as it became almost a matter of keeping two men apart. Neither one hers. And both being hers, in a way which had nothing to do with being male. She had never seen that look on Tully’s face. Tully’s teeth bared without humor at all, teeth no match for Skkukuk’s, which were all too close. She straight-armed them apart, hard. “Manners, gods-be, shut it down!”
“Captain?”
“I’m all right,” she said, and shook her head, dazed, dizzy, and with a rush of fight-impulse going through her veins that turned her giddy. Human sweat and kifish mingled in her nostrils with her own. So much for human/kifish cooperation.
Gods, no time, we got our orders, I got no time to go away like this.
“I’m coming down there,” Khym said.
“No need.” She felt totally disconnected, blinked back and forth between Skkukuk and Tully. Her husband in it was the last thing she wanted. “We got more coming. Tauran’s crew is boarding as soon as they can get locked up and back here. Working alternate with us. They tell you? We got a trip to make.”
The door to the inside corridor opened. “Where, cap’n?” Haral’s voice took over com again. “Where are we going?”
They had not known. “Home,” she said; and felt a momentary rush of triumph for her own cleverness.
Until she thought again of Chur, and the cost it might be to them all in more terms than one. The triumph faded, left only an ache and a vast and mortal terror. “They’ve turned us loose. We’re going home.”
Chapter Eight
“Go,” she said to Skkukuk outside the airlock. “If you want to get to quarters for any reason, get to it. You’re going to be standing watch out by the ramp in ten minutes. We got too much traffic coming in here to take any chances. And be polite! Hear?”
“Yes, hakt’!”
“Get!”
He ran, a flurry of black robes and rattle of weapons, down the corridor toward his own quarters.
That left her and Tully; and Tirun coming to meet them, welcome sight. “You all right, captain?”
“We got Tauran coming in, we got nowhere to put them, we got data up to our ears to process into nav, but things could be worse-” Another figure turned the corner, tall and wide-shouldered and hani: her husband was coming her way in a hurry, and she flinched to the very bones. “Haral, you listening up there?”
“Aye, captain.”
“Lay us course for Urtur on our old capacity: we got some slower ships to take with us. Have Hilfy line up our direct transmission with Aja Jin, we got specifics to get. Then relay the result to Tahar. Have Aja Jin run our backup check.”