Besides which—gods, he only had to think about Chihin to think how he’d felt down in the airlock, and that was just stupid, he didn’t want to do what he’d done, he didn’t want to feel what he felt, he wanted to use his common sense and straighten things out… probably nothing was even wrong in Chihin’s eyes, except for Fala: Chihin probably didn’t think it meant anything more than the crewwomen on the Sun had thought it did. But Chihin was like them and unlike, so unlike and so diiferent in the way she dealt with things that he knew the spacerfarers he’d thought existed, both tough and kind, did exist …
And she might not care. That wasn’t as important as her existing.
“Stand by for jump,” ker Tiar said.
They were going. This part always scared him. And the tc’a were still there. The kifish ship Tiraskhti was pacing them. People were still dead back there.
“… here we go.”
Fala said, “Why was I so unimportant? Is there something wrong with me?”
He didn’t know how to answer that. But Chihin did.
“Nothing but youth,” Chihin said, “and time cures that, if you don’t make fetal mistakes.”
“Let me alone!” Fala said.
He was dreaming. He knew he was, and he could make it stop. He wanted Chihin and Fala not to quarrel. He looked away.
But he could see the ship around him as if it were made of glass. And a shadow of a ship rode close beyond the hull.
Serpent bodies moved and twined within that ship, transparent as their own. He heard sound too low for sound. It quivered through deckplates and through bone, and shrieked until it passed above hearing.
Another ship came dangerously near them, within the proscribed limit, wailing. He leaped up, passed behind Chihin’s frozen shape and reached past her shoulder. There was a warning button on that console and he pushed it.
Lights flared red. A siren wailed.
“Go away!” he shouted in this dream, as the shadow loomed larger. It was coming at them.
Foolishly he waved his arms to warn it off.
But it swept right through them, with a dimming of the lights, a rumbling of sound, a feeling unlike any heat or cold he remembered.
Then all the ships were beyond them and retreating, the rumbling gone fainter as they became a triple shadow against the stars, smaller and smaller and fainter.
He dropped into his cushion, breathless and numb-raked his fingers through his mane and caught a frantic breath.
People had dreams in jump. That was surely all it was.
“… Welcome to sunny Kefk,” Chihin was saying. “A friendly sodium burner, no planet, but then, we can’t have every convenience. …”
“Look alive,” the captain snapped. “Where’s the tc’a?”
“There’s Tiraskhti,” Chihin said, and Hallan saw that, and murmured so, but, searching the scan for the tc’a ships … nothing showed. An alarm had gone off in hyperspace. One of those anomalies,
Chihin called it. Sometimes things happened.
There were things she’d rather lose track of than a clutch of methane-breathers bearing on their tail at three quarters light. “Gods-be snakes could drop out right on top of us,” Hilfy muttered, when scan persistently showed nothing but their kif escort.
“With real luck,” Tarras said, “they’ll drop on Tiraskhti. “
“Don’t count on it,” Tiar said, and toggled a screen change, view of the mass itself: Kefk, sullen apricot orange.
Then it was real to her. The wan sun evoked that reflection on steel bars, that spectrum cast triple shadows on the decking of a kifish prison, lit distant objects in a deathly imitation of sunlight, recalled the clangs and clash of doors and the working of machinery. And over all the smell of it …
Sunny Kefk, Chihin said—leading edge of kifish territory, first of a nest of same-generation suns they favored. Pirate territory, before the treaty, space no other species ever wanted to see.
Well, so, this is an experience, Hilfy thought to herself. The young kid that had come to space with Pyanfar had longed after the strange and the dangerous. And found it once. And now again.
You fool, she said to herself—you utter fool, Hilfy Chanur.