Like what Moon Rising might do to her credit with the hakkikt if it ran.
“I vouched for you,” Pyanfar said, “way out on the cliff’s edge.”
“We’re with you, I said.”
She looked long into Tahar’s shadowy face, as the final contact boomed home, as the hatch opened and her crew unbuckled. She calculated again that they might be recorded: she gestured with her eyes toward the overhead, saw the little lowering of Dur Tahar’s lids that acknowledged she was also thinking of it. “There’s one ship in particular I want,” Pyanfar said.
“Meaning Vigilance,” said Tahar.
“Meaning Vigilance.”
“No argument from me.”
“Huh.” An orange glare flooded in from overhead as the lighter hatch whined open. She turned and reached for the ladder without a courtesy to the kifish crew, as Haral scrambled up it ahead of her, where the pale circle of The Pride’s hatch was mated up to the dark access-clamps. Haral whipped a wad of kifish cloth from her pocket, grasped the space-cold lever and yanked. The hatch retracted in a puff of unmatched airpressure, a breath of clean cold wind. Haral looked down from the top of the ladder, in a bath of white light; Pyanfar waved her on, protocols be hanged; and Haral clambered up and through.
Pyanfar scrambled after, feeling the ladder shake as someone else hit it in haste. She came up in the brilliant white light of The Pride’s emergency airlock, turned round with Haral to pull Tirun through, and Geran next, and Tully, and Hilfy, and Khym with his arm bleeding again after the quick plasm-spray the kif had given it. She forgot, she outright forgot and had straightened to see to Khym when she heard something else hit the ladder and saw a shadow scramble up to them.
She bent and offered her hand: Haral was not about to. Skkukuk’s dark, bony fingers hooked to hers and he sprang up into the hatch with kifish agility, head up and wide-eyed.
So the captain helped him with her own hand. Skkukuk’s eyes glittered and his nostrils flared in excitement, and she felt a frustrated disgust. The hatch whined-down and thumped into seal under Haral’s pushbutton command. The inner hatch shot open on the E-corridor. “Geran,” Pyanfar said on the instant, turning. “Get!”
“Aye!”
And the smallish woman headed out of the lock at a dead run ahead of them. “Seal us!” Pyanfar yelled at the crew in general, leaving security to them, and lit out on Geran’s heels, headed for topside, for-gods help them, whatever there was to find up there on the bridge.
She heard the hatch seal. Lights came on in the corridor ahead as the monitor picked up the sound of Geran’s running footsteps and stayed on to the sound of hers.
The E-lift was in place, automatically downsided by the hatch-open command. The lift door opened instantly to Geran’s push of the call button, and Pyanfar skidded in after and emergencied the door shut as Geran punched the code to send them on their way, up and then sideways as the car shot down the inner tracks for the main lift shaft.
Geran was panting. Her ears were laid flat, her eyes showing white at the corners. She was close to panic and she would not look Pyanfar’s direction, staring only at the sequencing marker-lights as the lift ran its course up, up-ship and up again to the main lift-shaft and the corridor to the bridge.
There was no time for comfort now. And no use in it.
They hit the main-corridor running-a small, dark thing squealed and eeled away down a side passage, and another scuttled ahead of them in panic-gods, what is it?-Pyanfar let it go, her mind on one thing and only that; and one quick glance into the open door as they passed Chur’s borrowed room-showed where Chur was not. The bed was empty, sheets flung back, tubes left hanging, the lifesupport machinery flashing with malfunction lights. Pyanfar spun on one foot and ran all-out after Geran, on and pell-mell onto the bridge, where a thin, red-brown figure lay slumped in Hilfy’s chair, head-down on the counter. A pistol lay by Chur’s shoulder. Her arm hung limp over the chair arm.