A destruct mechanism on the station might be set to blow on a signal sent from outsystem. That was possible too, if someone were totally ruthless: if someone like Akkhtimakt, with no sympathy for three hundred thousand stsho, had mined the station exterior, the whisper of a transmission arriving at lightspeed to some receptor could blow the station’s vulnerable skin. On certain vectors they would never know it till it blew, even if they were listening. Gods knew she had no wish to give Sikkukkut any ideas he did not conceive of on his own, by warning him of the possibility. Neither did she want to stay connected to the station any longer than she had to.
In the meanwhile she sat drinking gfi and watching a wobbly-tired mahe trying to reconstruct diagrams out of his memory and a computer’s help, and listening to him make mis-identifications once and twice and catch himself.
They both needed help. Food was no substitute for rest. And they had soon to move out and start ops for a long, risky jump. Pumps were filling the tanks to capacity. Khym was wandering about readying all the duty stations, setting up everything they had to have to keep them going.
Thank gods for a backup crew on this one.
We’re laying ourselves wide open, Tahar and Chanur both-to mutiny and murder. You’ll understand us at close range or you’ll kill us on the way home.
That was what she implied in that offer. And all the captains knew it; while presumably Sikkukkut and even Skkukuk just thought she had all her compatriots sufficiently bluffed.
Gods hoped they understood, because one hani ship would not be able to talk anything but ops with another of their ships so long as they had their kifish escort; and that meant all the way home.
She watched the red and green marks grow on the screen as Jik built the patterns, and sipped her drink and ate her sandwich.
And slowly the wider implications of what Jik was constructing dawned on her.
Longtime moves. Very longtime moves.
The kif had not lied: the mahendo’sat scheme had been aimed at the kif from the start, a series of operations stretching back to the days when Akkukkak had been the threat. And even before that. Mahendo’sat owned far more than the few hunter-ships they were supposed to have, which meant shipbuilding and secrecy-heavy secrecy, to have kept the whisper of that construction out of the rumor mill.
Gods knew what the kif had been doing during that time. Or what the mahendo’sat knew and what the kif knew about their own intentions that they were not telling and that even Jik might not know the truth of.
Gods knew too, what both kif and mahendo’sat knew about humanity; or how long ago they had known it; and how much truth anyone was telling in that department.
And right now and to this hour, if Jik could get his hands on Tully, she feared, in some dark corner of The Pride, Jik would ask him some very hard questions; and perhaps Goldtooth had done that, when he had had Tully aboard Mahijiru, and, irony of ironies, gotten distrust. Likely Tully had done his don’t-understand-you act. He was very good at it. And gods knew-perhaps Tully’s instincts about when to use that silence were better than any of them believed.
Tully had asked her once, with distress wrinkling up his smooth brow, whether Goldtooth was on their side or not. She had not suspected the full implications of it then, or the extent of the pressure Goldtooth might have been putting on him. Or why Goldtooth had jerked him alone away from the human crew that was traveling on the mahen ship Ijir, before it fell into Akkhtimakt’s grasp.
Being taken off that foredoomed ship was Tully’s good fortune; indisputable. But she remembered his face when he had seen her aboard Mahijiru, remembered an expression she could read a little better now in retrospect, the terrible stress and the relief with which he had flung himself toward her and wrapped his arms around her, shivering and smelling of fear.
Friend, he had said over and over, said it repeatedly, with a worried look, during that early part of the voyage; but he had kept what he had known behind his teeth. . . . while dissension among them, the normal stresses of the crew, any hint of violence-had sent Tully into a panic that was not at all reasonable in their old friend. He had become afraid of them, in the isolation of his translator-interpreted environment, missing virtually all the nuances and the subtleties of what was said around him. He had lived in doubt of them right down to the moment he betrayed his own kind with a warning not to trust humanity.