Chanur’s Legacy by C.J. Cherryh

Hilfy called it a lucky thing it had hit the arm and missed anything irreplaceable. And she was mortally glad to get the dockers furloughed over the next watch, the station medical team off her deck, the airlocks sealed, and the situation down to manageable.

Thank the gods the station had turned a blind eye to the gun law violations.

Thank the gods no sharp station lawyer had yet suggested they’d foreknown there was a risk … or they wouldn’t have gone out on the docks armed.

To their credit they’d at least advised station that they’d been harassed. To their credit they were Pyanfar Chanur’s relatives, and they had special and real reason to worry. As they need not argue with the Personage of Kshshti, if the Personage wasn’t friendly to Ana-kehnandian’s personage, which was yet to be proved. She hadn’t liked Ana-kehnandian’s friendliness with the police.

And she didn’t like the feeling in the pit of her stomach.

It was all right on the bridge. There was too much potentially to do to let the mind settle in old tracks. There was just trained response and a bucket of water on every fire that popped up … in fact, there were gratefully few of them; but that left an old Pride hand wondering where the rest were smouldering.

And when she walked back to her quarters to wash the blood and the sweat and the ammonia smell out of her memory … when the steam of the shower was around her and sound was down to the hiss of water from the jets, then the thoughts came back, then the mind went time-wandering and couldn’t remember then from now—except the shower was fancier and the responsibility was hers. All hers.

With a crew who’d, admittedly, made only one less mistake than the sniper had made, in opting for a silent and invisible weapon on a moving target. Not an outstandingly well-informed or accurate attempt, all told.

And that was worrisome … that was just naggingly worrisome, because it didn’t add up, except to a random lunatic.

Which almost excluded the kif. Kif slept with their weapons. Kif lived and died, among themselves, by their weapons. And a mistake like that wasn’t the style of a Vikktakkht an Nikkatu, unless he gave orders to miss.

It wasn’t the style of a mahen hunter captain, in a mahen port, with all sorts of resources, either.

Certainly wasn’t the stsho, unless a stsho hired some other species to do the deed. Could be stsho: they weren’t connoisseurs of violence. They couldn’t judge the competency or the honesty of the guards they hired. They only paid them well enough that most wouldn’t risk their job.

The same as a stupid hani taking a cargo full of stsho trouble, for a price too good to turn down.

They were in it. That was the fact. They were in it and on the dock out there, with shots flying, they’d made mistakes that weren’t going to let her sleep tonight, that threatened to replay behind her eyelids and that stacked up ready and awaiting the idle moment, the dark, the unfilled silence. They’d deserved to lose their lives out there. Every time she thought back through it she found a new mistake—theirs, hers trying to cover them, layer upon layer of foul-ups, from the minor glitch to the decision to walk it and not take a taxi.

She scanted the dry cycle, went out damp and sat down on the side of the bed, staring at the locker, within which was a box, and within which was a ragged printout she wasn’t supposed to have, and did. Pyanfar likely hadn’t even thought about the ops file in her possession when she told her go downworld; or at least, the level of bitterness between them hadn’t gotten that high, that Pyanfar had ever asked if she had more than the printout she had officially turned in.

She’d taken it to learn from it, to understand it, and maybe, in her mind at the time, as a slice of Pyanfar to analyze and figure, when no other clues had served. She still resorted to that printout now and again, when captain Hilfy Chanur had wanted to figure out what Pyanfar had done on some point and what Pyanfar’s rules and policy had been on some obscure matter of dealing with certain ports—a compendium of experience that Pyanfar had gathered over a long number of years—some were procedures she’d laid down after certain close calls. Some were just universal good sense; and she had borrowed some inoffensive bits of it to cover the gaps in the Legacy’s own freer, easier-going rules, rules that didn’t have a lot to say about firearms or being shot at. A lot of that manual her own procedures contradicted, because a lot of it was Pyanfar’s own perfection-driven convictions, and some of it just didn’t apply in the peace Pyanfar had built.

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