But a lot of it the Legacy’s written rules didn’t cover, or didn’t mention for one important other reason, because somewhere at the bottom of her resentment she was still Chanur clan-head, and The Pride’s operations, secretive as they were, and likely dangerous as they were, still relied on those procedures. Things she knew about The Pride’s standing orders, The Pride’s policies and tendencies and biases and likely choices in an emergency … were in that book; and one of them was that you didn’t talk about that book existing, you didn’t take that printout off The Pride and you didn’t discuss those policies anywhere but on The Pride’s deck, because there were agencies and individuals that would kill to know what was in there.
But she didn’t have time to reinvent everything. She didn’t have time to modify a system that wasn’t working. She’d nearly lost lives out there because she hadn’t breached The Pride’s security to tell them. They were peacetime traders. The crew hadn’t come in with the close-mouthed wariness The Pride’s crew had. Tiar wasn’t a Haral Araun, she was a good-humored spacer with a pilot’s hair-triggered instincts about survival and a common sense about the information flow. Tarras was a canny trader and she scored highest on the simulations with the weapons systems—Tarras had been hours on the simulators, but that didn’t say the Legacy had ever launched one of its missiles or fired a gun, or done more than drills. The captain had. Gods-rotted right the captain had. And Rhean’s crew had handled sidearms and done the drills and given a fair account of themselves in the battle before the peace, so it wasn’t that Tarras had never fired a missile in her life; and it wasn’t that Tiar and Chihin hadn’t run coordinations or been back-up pilots under heavy fire … but too many ships had died at Anuurn and Gaohn, of mistakes The Pride hadn’t made.
Because of The Rules. The by the gods Pyanfar Chanur way of doing things, which wasn’t the exact way every hani ship ran its business and which she dared not have her peace-time crew talking about when they were home, or complaining about in a station bar.
And maybe in some remote part of her brain she didn’t want to think in those terms any longer. The Compact having changed, peace having broken out— hani wanted to get back to their own business, and take their own time, and not worry about wars, and not hurry more than they had to. The crew was all right, they got along, they were still, after their few years together, making adjustments to working together: they had their operating glitches and they yelled at each other, but no serious glitches, absent hostile action. It was a different age, and instincts dimmed, and fools could steer a ship or a planetary government: precision just didn’t matter any more.
Medium was just all right.
Till you rusted or some amateur assassin nailed you for a reason you wouldn’t ever find out.
Mad, she was. That son had shot at her and hit Chihin.
That in itself was a sloppy presumption. Aunt Py would say.
If aunt Py were here to lecture … or to haul a young captain out of the mess she’d contracted herself and her crew into.
Not experienced enough for a captaincy, they said in the han, and behind her back.
More by the gods experienced than some—especially in the han. And a crew that was getting smoother as time went on.
But there wasn’t time to let Hilfy Chanur figure out her way. There hadn’t been time for Hilfy Chanur to figure things out, all her life.
She got up, took the printout from the locker to her office and scanned it in.
She edited off all the references to The Pride. She searched the crew’s names, and subbed in her own …
And she came to a dead stop on the matter of Hallan Meras, on the auxiliary post.
Lock him back in the laundry?
Forbid the crew to discuss ops with him, whatsoever?
Why had Vikktakkht wanted him? Why had Vikktakkht insisted to speak to him, except to get a less wary answer, and because Vikktakkht understood hani well enough to know they’d protect him. Meras was a vulnerability in their midst that her own curiosity had made available to the kif, and she couldn’t deny that. She had a certain ruthlessness, a certain deficiency of pity, a certain willingness to run risks with other people’s lives … she had discovered that in herself. Or maybe it was just that nobody planetside understood the things she’d seen, and the experiences she’d had … nobody who’d only been a merchant spacer could ever understand … and she grew angry, impatient with people who were naive, and people who were safe, and protected, and innocent…