Let them think she and the captain had been consulting on the kif. Give them something outside the ship to worry about. She went back to the galley. “General alert. Get the trays out here, keep them clipped down, no open hot liquids. Tarras, arms board shakedown.”
Tarras’ ears went back, and sobriety happened fast, in a hesitation between the oven and getting back to her post.
“Get the trays out,” Tiar repeated, to the young gentleman at the center of the storm, and he wiped the scowl off his face and started snatching, ignoring singed fingers.
“That’s the way,” she said. “Let’s move! Get in those seats and get belted. This isn’t Anuurn system.”
She took her own tray back, grabbed a drink and settled in while Tarras and Hallan were passing out trays off the stack and drinks out of a box.
The captain started giving system check orders. The captain ordered a condition three on the armament. And that was the first time the Legacy had ever brought the weapons board up full. There was a different kind of quiet on the bridge when that order came down, and various stations had to crosscheck with targeting.
Hope to the gods it was a test. The fact of the weapons got to her nerves too, even knowing it was a calculated distraction. The war memories came up along with that long-silent board. Her reflexes wound themselves tight as a spring, and her heart beat a little faster.
Because now that she thought of it, kif being kif, the arms computer on Tiraskhti was probably completely live. And probably had been, from the moment the kif went for jump toward his own border,
There w^.t. , :ng craft. There were construction pushers. They looked, except the major kifish ships at dock, like ordinary miners and pushers in any system in hani or mahen space.
Well they might, Hilfy thought. They were probably stolen.
But the ships at dock at Kefk had no look of honest traders. Huge engine packs. Cold-haulers that could release their cargo or blow off their mass with the flip of a toggle: hunter-ships, clutching cargo cans in their clamps, like many-legged insects; purported tankers, whose tanks probably were false mass.
“Captain,” Fala said, “Vikktakkht.”
“I’ll take it,” she said, and a clicking, soft voice said,
“ Chanur captain. You ‘II go first and we ‘II dock beside you. For convenience’ sake. “
“Understood. And do we understand this trip is worth our time?”
“Put Meras on. I find him amusing. “
I won’t talk to you, that meant. “Later,” she said shortly, and punched out. “—Tiar, I want one course laid out for Meetpoint, and courses for Kshshti, Mkks, Harak, Lukkur, and Tt’a’va’o. …”
“Tt’a’va’o!”
“If we go out of here with kif on our tail, better the methane folk than Lukkur. But we take any vector open and deal with it when we get there.”
“Aye, captain.”
“Their prices aren’t bad,” Tarras said.
Tiar said: “Gods, load their cans aboard, after Kshshti?”
“I was kidding,” Tarras said. “Kidding, cousin.”
The Legacy still had the option to run, Hilfy thought. She could do a sudden break and sight on Meetpoint and get the Legacy out of here.
But you didn’t run from kif. If you ran, they were wired to chase—sometimes literally; sometimes, more dangerously, they merely wrote you down for weak and apt for more abstract predation.
A Chanur—if she ran—would weaken Chanur clan in the eyes of all kif. It would prompt ambitions. It would encourage seditions. Assassinations, to which aunt Pyanfar was all too vulnerable.
But rational as everything had seemed the other side of jump—they weren’t just the only hani ship in system, they were the only foreign ship anywhere: not a mahendo’sat, not a stsho, not a methane-breather showed in the revolutions of the station. Not even a ship that was clearly a merchant ship.
“Those are hunters,” Tiar said. “Every one of those are hunters. What’s building here?”
“I don’t like this,” Fala said. “I really don’t like this.”
“Don’t panic,” Hilfy said quietly. “Never panic with them. It’s a guarantee of problems.”
“Chanur,”came the kifish voice over her earpiece, ‘” you’re clear to dock now.”