It flourished a wide black sleeve: follow. It headed for its own ranks.
Pyanfar started walking and heard a soft-footed whisper of pads on decking behind her as her crew followed, with the rattle of gunstrap rings.
“Captain.” A patter of non-retracting claws. The Voice caught her arm again. “No go-”
“Keep the kif away from my ship. You want this station in one piece?”
The Voice fell behind. “You crazy,” the outcry pursued her, echoing off the dockside walls, the gray emptiness. “You crazy go that place!”
II
Kif fell in and walked as an escort about them, their black robes like a moving wall in the dockside twilight. A dry paper and ammonia smell rose about them, mingled with the; scent of pungent incense and oil. Weapons rattled as they went, rifles and sidearms as illegal as their own.
They had docked in the same section as Harukk, without a section door to pass. The twilit deck stretched out in the! upward-tending horizon of all station docks, up to a towering section seal that blinked red lights: hazard, hazard, hazard-precaution against riot and catastrophe. Mkks braced itself.
On the rows opposite the docks, in that space usual for services and bars such as spacers used, doorways filled with kif who lounged there with hateful eyes and whispers. Windows glowered with neon, with sodium- and argon-light; the girders overhead were palled with smoke no ventilation coped with, a haze about the glaring suns of the dock’s floodlamps.
“Gods-rotted mahen hell,” Haral muttered, striding along at Pyanfar’s side. “The place is all kif.”
The kif cluttered and clicked among themselves in some obscure accent. Not main-kifish. Pyanfar knew words enough of that, and lost this entire.
They passed other doors from which came different, grass-eater smells; and strange moans and wailings: animals, kept and pent here. Hunter-kind that hani were, it turned Pyanfar’s stomach. Kif fed on live food. While it lived.
Even on their own kind, in defeat. So rumor had it.
The kif in the lead tended toward the inner wall and a side corridor; they followed into that narrower passage, among armed kif who loitered in small clusters along the wall and stood away from it as they passed.
“Kk-kk-kk,” one said, insulting them. Khym broke step: “No,” Pyanfar hissed; and Geran grabbed his arm. They went further, with kif closing in at their backs and in front of them. The safeties were already off the guns and had been off, since the airlock. But there was nothing to win here. Not even for the kif.
Doors opened for them, on a room sodium-lit and reeking of kif-stink. The distinctive chatter and. clicking of kif came out to them; and a high wail that was not kif died in a sudden squeak.
“Here,” their hooded guide said, beside that open door, extending a wide-sleeved arm. “The hakkikt will welcome you.”
“Huh,” Pyanfar said, and stepped inside, into the murk, slid sideways of the door and sideways still as Haral and the rest followed, in amongst a crowd of kif, in amongst deeper shadows and that old-paper scent and scent of ammonia and incense so strong they blinded the nose to other cues.
There were chairs, tables: seated kif, standing kif.
And standing at the far end of the long room, amid the hellish glare and drift of incense, two paler figures, one pale-skinned, one red-brown.
Abruptly Pyanfar’s rifle tumbled from carry to her hands and rifles and guns moved with one rattle that sounded round the room in rapid sequence, a hundred-fold. Five of them were hers. The ready-lights on rifle stocks glowed like a scatter of bloody stars.
Nothing moved after that. Their backs were at the wall; and Hilfy and Tully were thrust back amid a ring of kif with rifles all about them.
“Sikkukkut!” Pyanfar yelled. “You here, hakkikt?”
One kif had remained seated in a many-legged chair. That one unfolded upward and stepped from among its legs, one hand lifted. “You amaze me, Chanur. Now what will you do? Ask me to let them go?”
“Oh, no. I’m going to stand here. We’re all going to stand here like this, and no one moves, until my friends get here.”