She walked out.
The lift opened and let her out on the lower main. Tirun was in the corridor. She expected that.
That Tirun waited there with her back against the wall and that trouble-look on her face, she did not expect.
She slowed down, distracted from one crisis for one that confronted her, and Tirun’s ears sank further, tight-folded. “Captain.”
“Spill it.”
“Kif won’t eat the frozen stuff. He wants to talk to you personally.”
She let go a long slow breath. “Wonderful. Tell him we’ll have a long friendly talk at our next port of call.”
“I told him you’re busy.”
“He said?”
“That you were a fool. Captain.” Staring straight ahead, not a twitch of a tightly-folded ear. “I asked who was sitting in the washroom of someone else’s ship. It said hani humor is unsubtle.”
“You leave it the frozen stuff?”
“I left it. Thawed. I could puree the stuff.”
“Kif’s got teeth.” She walked off.
“Captain. I could-bribe a docker, maybe, well, get one of those small live things-”
She looked back, at Tirun standing there with a revolted look. “Reason with it.”
“I tried.”
“Try again.” She headed for the lock, jammed hands in pockets, past the butt of a gun in the righthand one. Gods. Live food. Raw was one thing. Raw and protesting was another.
She entered the short lock corridor and hooked the, recessed button on the panel with a foreclaw. The inner hatch shot back unexpectedly and she glowered at the two Ehrran clanswomen on guard there, who faced her with an aborted leveling of rifles.
“Who you planning on firing on from this side? Escaping crew?”
“Captain.” Politeness must have choked the Ehrran. And when Pyanfar walked through their midst and reached toward the com panel to tell Haral to open up the lock, an Ehrran arm shot into her way: “Captain, begging pardon, but it’s a half hour-”
Pyanfar turned and looked, nose to nose with the Ehrran crewwoman. The ears wilted first, the arm dropped next, and the body went third, a backstep that got the Ehrran not quite out of her reach.
“Haral.”
“Aye, captain.”
“Open us up down here.”
The outer hatch shot back. Pyanfar heard it, felt the chill draft. She still glared at the Ehrran eye to eye. “You,-” she said to the Ehrran. “You want to walk out there into the access and see if captain Nomesteturjai’s anywhere about?”
“I’m not to leave my post.”
“What? Even if I cycle the airlock? You’re a lunatic.”
“I don’t think it’s a case-”
“-about the same. A lot the same.”
“What, captain?”
“Arguing with me. Get!” ,
They flinched, the pair of them; they both flinched, and then it was too late. Pyanfar took the ground they gave, backed them up against the threshold of the open hatch, and it was suddenly a case of resisting a captain on her own deck or moving from their post. “Out!”
For a moment she thought they would actually stand fast, rifles and all; and her claws came out and her nose rumpled into a grin. But-then one Ehrran’s foot hit the hatch-rim and threw her off-balance. The Ehrran caught herself and backed up; the other did, and then they were both in retreat down the chill yellow accessway.
Pyanfar followed in long strides, one hand on the gun in her pocket-it was still a kifish dockside once around that bend and into the rampway. She heard the thunder of hastening feet on the plates; and when she had reached the right-hand turn she saw a tall mahen figure upward bound toward the black-breeched hani, a mahe garishly dressed in red-striped green and laden with gold chains and bracelets and a monstrous large sidearm slung at his hip.
Mahen guards, far below, held the foot of the ramp. Jik strolled up the center, and the outbound hani caught-step to avoid him and passed him in great haste.
Jik stared back over his shoulder, faced forward and came on with a shrug. “What they got?” he asked with a gesture backward,
“Both ears,” Pyanfar spat. She was shaking-gods, she had been in dockside brawls and barfights and a set-to with her son and never lost her head like that. The peripheries around Jik refused to come clear: hunter-vision had set in. Her ears were plastered tight against her skull and her muscles shuddered. Jik stopped-just stopped, dead still and quiet.