HUNTER OF WORLDS BY C. J. CHERRYH

Life-support/cooling had shut down entirely save for the control room. Lights were out everywhere but the panel even there. In the base ship Tesyel and the remaining crew huddled on the bridge, five degrees cooler than Chaikhe’s command center. The amaut with Tesyel suffered cruelly in the heat, mopping dry skin with moistened cloths, lying still, listless. Communications were almost out. Only the sensors that maintained the field and the shields were still fully operative.

The attack slacked off. It did so at irregular intervals, and Chaikhe allowed the automatic cutback to the secondary shields. But groundscan was picking up movement in what had been a dead zone; Chaikhe mentally reached for the image and the dark silhouette of an iduve appeared on the screen—no human, that lean quick shadow. Takkhenes reached and confirmed it: she saw the image hesitate at the touch, felt the ferocity that was Ashakh.

Chimele’s orders! Rakhi sent. Break, break contact, now! And Chimele in the paredre was on her feet, her face dark with anger. Chaikhe flinched from the wrath Rakhi transmitted; but her attack reflexes had reacted before Rakhi’s cooler counsel prevailed, shunted power to the attack and expended heavily against Tejef’s shields.

Think! Rakhi sent. Nothing can live amid those energies. Hold back before you kill Ashakh.

She cut back suddenly—return fire damaged systems. She began to replot. But in another part of her mind she knew Ashakh still alive, about to die if she kept her shields extended as she must. Warn him, warn him, she thought. Does he expect me to lower defenses for him and die? What is he doing?

Calm! Rakhi insisted, and winced from the fury of her mind, m’melakhia for Ashakh in deadly conflict with that for the child in her, fury washing out reason. Kill! The impulse surged through her being, but Rakhi’s singleminded negative imposed control and she extended her mind to watch Ashakh’s progress.

More of the witless humans were creeping out from cover, as if the lesson of scores of human and amaut dead were not enough to teach them the peril of the field about the embattled ships; and like the stubborn creatures they were they moved out, stalking Ashakh and his two companions.

Aiela, Chaikhe recognized the azure-skinned being that moved beside Ashakh, but the small person with them, an amaut—

Tesyel, she sent by the idoikkhe: Have you dispatched any okkitan-as to Weissmouth?

“Negative,” came the nas kame’s voice. “We had no time. I scan that one, but I do not know him.”

A Priamid amaut. Ashakh’s witlessness appalled her, his lack of m’melakhia for Ashanome in taking on such a servant sent waves of heat to her face. Ashakh! she hurled an impact of mind at him that he had no means to receive, but perhaps takkhenes itself carried her anger. Ashakh hesitated, looked full toward the ship.

—And arched his back and fell, trying even in the motion to bring his weapon to bear. Chaikhe gave a shrill hiss of rage, seeing the humans that had done it, a shot from beyond him. Ashakh fired: a hundred ehsim of port landscape became a hemisphere of light and a handful of humans and an amaut aircraft were not there when it imploded into darkness, nor again when normal light returned, Tejef’s shields tightened and flared at the rippling of that energy, sucked outward toward Ashakh. Chaikhe reacted instantly, aware of the distant figures of the nas kame and the amaut trying to drag Ashakh back out of the exposed area. She hit at Tejef’s shields, and as her searching mind found no consciousness in Ashakh a rage grew in her, a determination to destroy everything, to force Ashanome to wipe out akites and port and population entire. If her sra was to die, it deserved that for serach, she and Ashakh and her child.

“No!” Rakhi shouted into her mind. “Chimele forbids! Chimele forbids, Chaikhe!”

She gave a moan, a keening of rage, and desisted. But another impulse seized her, a fierceness to vaikka upon the power against whom she and Ashakh struggled, be it Chimele, be it Tejef.

Chaikhe! Rakhi cried. Through his mind Chimele radiated terrible anger. But Chaikhe wrapped herself in the chill of her own arastiethe, suddenly diverted power from the shields to communications, playing mental havoc with the circuitry of the ship until she patched into amaut communications citywide. The whole process took a few blinks of an eye. The frightened chatter of amaut voices came back to her.

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