Alarms flashed: the siren howled. Pyanfar laid back her ears and reached frantically to controls as Haral synched moves with her to get the numbers ripped loose from scan-comp and embedded in nav. She keyed a confirmation, one press of a button. Alarms died, and The Pride kept going, hellbent on the line–
(“We’re on, we’re on, we’re on!” Tirun breathed-)
-sending a C-charged jumpship on a course straight to Mkks station, a maneuver two stars wide, betting everything they had that Mkks beacon would be accurate. They were racing the lightspeed wavefront of their own arrival, the message which that jumprange beacon back there sent to Mkks-chased that moment down the timeline as fast as any ship could dare, with enough energy bound up in their mass to make one great flare if anything Mkks beacon had not reported should turn up in their path-a nova in miniature, a briefly flaring sun.
Pyanfar let the controls go, flexed aching hands and reached in null G drift for the foil packet she had clamped to the chair arm. It escaped her claws and she snagged it back, bit a hole in it and drank the contents down in several convulsive gulps, shuddering at the taste and the impact on her stomach. It was necessary: the body shed hair, shed skin, depleted its minerals and moisture. Shortly blood sugar would surge and plummet, and she had to be past that point when The Pride’s course reached critical again.
There was no hope now of steering. They were going too fast to skew off to any influence but the star’s, and that pull was plotted into their course. She wiped her mane back and rubbed an itch on her nose that had been there since Kshshti.
“Mkks nine minutes Light,” Haral said.
Nine minutes til Mkks station got the news of their arrival; mahendo’sat authority would take a few minutes more realizing they had not made that critical third velocity dump. In the meanwhile The Pride was shortening the nine minute reply interval. In much less than eighteen minutes, they would run into the outgoing communications wavefront of a frantic station.
That was time as starships saw it: but someone had to call the kif on com; someone had physically to push buttons and get to kif authority, while in each running stride of kifish feet down a corridor an inbound jumpship traveled a planetary diameter.
“Send,” she said to Khym. “The Pride of Chanur inbound to Mkks: requesting shiplist and dock assignment. We want berths clear on either side of us. We have cargo hazard. Send.”
That would confuse them: a ship behaving like vane malfunction and talking like cargo emergency. Eight point nine minutes to get that message to station. Fifteen point something by the time station could so much as reply if they were instantaneous. Someone had to turn a chair, ask a supervisor, report the message. She heard Khym send it out-gods, a male voice from a hani ship: that alone would confound station central. They would not have heard its like before-would be checking their doppler-receivers for potential malfunction, doubting the truth while it hurtled down on them, even techs accustomed to C- fractional thinking-
“Send again: Message to Harukk, Sikkukkut commanding. We have an appointment. We’ve come to keep it. We’ll see you on the docks.”
(Someone deciding to relay that to the kif; kifish feet racing to locate the commander: another moment to decide to undock or sit tight-An instant’s consideration and a planetary diameter flicked by.)
Ten minutes to launch a ship like Harukk if they ripped her loose from dock without preamble: forty more to get her sufficient range from mass to pulse the fields up. Harukk had a star to fight for its velocity, and that star was helping them come in.
Another half minute down.
At this dizzying rate, inside this time-packet, there was a curious sense of slow-motion, of insulation from kif and threats.
And a sense of helplessness. There were things the kif could do. And there was time for those things-like pressing a trigger, or cutting a defenseless throat-
The dizziness hit; the concentrate had reached her bloodstream.
“You sick, Khym?”