But the ship didn’t go, for a long time. He tucked up with his blankets and tried to calculate what he knew about Meetpoint and exactly what v they were going to carry if they were loaded full and going, the way the captain had said, to Urtur—which, as he understood, most ships couldn’t do without going to Hoas, unless they dumped all their cargo. And they were carrying cargo, he’d heard the loaders, which he was relatively sure sounded inbound. So the Legacy must have the engines for it, or they were in a lot of trouble—like lost in hyperspace, forever. Truth be told, he was scared, and a little suspicious that even Tiar had been having a joke at his expense.
If it really was Urtur they wouldn’t come in fast or close to the star, because of the dust. Urtur was a dreadfully dirty system, most of it in the disc, but not all of it—
And a pity they couldn’t see their own fluorescing trail. Riding on light. Bathed in it. At home, he had had a picture on his wall, a photo someone had caught of a mahen ship coming into Hoas. And he liked to imagine them doing that, every time they made system drop. But you couldn’t see it yourself. He had asked about it; and the Sun’s crew said it was a stupid question. Everybody was busy when you were coming in, and if you ever did see something like that they were too close and you were real busy real fast.
He had ridden through jump himself a lot of times, the last two years in the sum Ascendant’s ops center. He thought through all the moves Dm would be making, if he were in ops, if Dru were sitting by him. Dru said he knew what he was doing. Dru was the one who’d gotten him a license, so she could take a break and leave him with the boards, she said—which was undoubtedly true, but she also said he really deserved a license, in a way he could never get the rest of the crew to admit.
Yet.
“ Hallan ?”
Tiar, he thought, on the intercom.
“Yes?”
“Just checking. Are you all right down there?”
“Yes. I’m fine.”
“Gods in pink feathers! The books!”
“That’s all right.”
‘No, it isn’t. Look. We’re about to go into sequence. Are you all right?”
“I’m fine, ker Tiar.”
On the Sun, they didn’t use words like Tiar used to him then. He’d never heard them put together that way—and from a very old, very proper clan like Chanur. He didn’t understand why she was upset.
But Tiar sent Fala running down the corridor from ops with the nutrients pack he desperately needed for jump and a book, a real, battered, tag-eared book … of Compact Trade Regulations.
He was quite touched by that. He really was.
The Legacy achieved v at a gentle burn. No more energy, in the long haul, to put a push on it—v was v, and you paid for it, until you ran past your capacity; but the Legacy had a stsho aboard, a creature that couldn’t take more than 1.5 g’s without cracking its mostly hollow bones.
Which might be tempting, but they had Tlisi-tlas-tin in charge along with the ‘Preciousness,’ whatever it was, and the reason doubtless that No’shto-shti-stlen hadn’t put the Preciousness aboard a kifish ship was the very well-known habit of kif changing loyalties when unthreatened, unwatched, and seeing a point of advantage.
And likewise for the mahendo’sat—if the Preciousness was in any sense religious, keep it away from mahen hands: the mahendo’sat knew that game too well—and some of them were crazier than others.
The methane-folk? Who knew? The stsho, maybe, knew, who had dealt more with the methane-breathers than anyone. And if the honorable Tlisi-tlas-tin had to go with the Preciousness and the honorable had to breathe oxygen, then maybe that answered that question in a very practical way.
Which left hani—since stsho traders refused to take their own ships beyond Hoas. Stupid hani. Credulous hani. Hani who hadn’t been in space until the mahendo’sat (with no one’s leave) landed on Anuurn and pitched them from wooden exploration ships into star-faring trade.