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A hani voice objected a question.
Hani!
Pyanfar sprang from the bedside, the walls of her cabin immaterial before her vision of that station with a hani ship at dock; with kif able to move on it at will. The hani spoke… had spoken long ago, in the timelag. Whatever would happen… had long since taken place. Time as well as space lay between The Pride and that hani ship and the kif, and there was nothing she could do, blind, from a dead drift, to help it.
“Gods!” she spat, and hurled the desk chair forward on its track with a crash. It was a Faha vessel in port; Faha’s Starchaser, and that was a house and a company allied to Chanur. Her brother Kohan’s first wife was Huran Faha. Hilfy’s mother, for the gods’ sakes! There were bonds, compacts, agreements of alliance…
And Hilfy.
The mahendo’sat at Urtur Station urged the hani ship to keep calm. The mahe had, they avowed, no intention of becoming involved in a kif quarrel, and they were not going to let a rash hani involve them.
The hani demanded information; kif hunted a Chanur ship: the Faha had been listening and fretting under restraint this long, and wanted answers — knew this was going out over com, as the station knew what the Faha were doing, making vocal trouble, making sure information got out into the dark where Chanur ears might pick it up.
O gods, o gods. There was an ally, doing the best for them that could be done at the moment… and they were both helpless to come at the enemy.
Pyanfar pulled the chair out again, sat down, lost in listening for a while. There was no further information. They had gotten that spurt on the station’s longrange or on Starchaser’s… information like a beacon fired off into outsystem, deliberately. If they had it figured The Pride was here… then so did the kif.
There were echoes, repetitions of the message: com was sorting them out, transmissions of differing degrees of clarity, and the hair prickled on Pyanfar’s neck, sudden, grateful realization: ships all over the system had begun relaying that message, letting it off like multiple ripples in still water, massive defiance of the kif — and the kif had not ordered silence… on this timeline. They could not enforce such a demand, at the present limits of their aggression at Urtur: but those limits could change. The information was going out like a multiplied shout… had gone out, long ago, and was still traveling.
She found Hilfy for once where she was supposed to be, in her own quarters, asleep. She hesitated when the sleepy voice answered the doorcom hail, no more than hesitated. “Up,” she said into the com. “I’ve somewhat to tell you.”
Hilfy was quick to the door. It whipped opened and Hilfy hung there, disheveled from bed and grimacing in the full light of the corridor. She had not paused for clothes.
Pyanfar walked in past her, waited while Hilfy brightened the interior lighting, and held up a restraining hand, that the brightening need not be permanent or full. It was a room Hilfy had made her own, a great deal of Chanur style in this cabin, more than in her own quarters, mementoes affixed to the walls, pictures of homeworld’s mountains and the broad plains of the Chanur holdings… the Holding itself, gold stone, shaded with vines. Pyanfar looked about her, and looked at Hilfy. “Briefly,” Pyanfar said, “I have to tell you a thing; and there’s nothing can be done about it, I’ll tell you that first. We’ve picked up signal from a Faha ship docked at station. They’re in the middle of the kif, and they fired a message off for station that I think they meant we should hear: noisy chatter. I think they know we’re out here and in what kind of trouble. But there’s the kif between us, and there’s no way we can do much for each other. You understand?”
Hilfy’s eyes had stopped flinching at the light. She stared, amber-rimed about the black, and her ears flattened and pricked up again with effort. For a young woman and roused naked out of sleep, she acquired a quiet dignity in getting her wits collected. “Do you know which ship, aunt?”
“Starchaser. That’s Lihan Faha in command.”
Hilfy nodded. The ears flinched, ringless. Her face stayed composed. “They’ll be in danger. Like Voyager. And they won’t know it. No one would expect that kind of attack.”
“Lihan’s no tyro, imp, believe it. We don’t play their hand; they don’t interfere in ours. Can’t. Nothing we can do out here.”
“We could throw them a warning and run.”
“I don’t take that as an option at the moment. We send it from distance and the kif will have it before Starchaser has a chance. And public defiance, involving Starchaser in our leaving — the kif would be obliged to react. Revenge is part of their mindset. You have to calculate that into it. No. Starchaser’s riding her own luck. I don’t plan to push it for her. So go back to bed, hear?”
Hilfy stood a moment without moving. Nodded after a moment, her dignity still about her.
“Good,” Pyanfar said tightly, and walked out. She heard the door close after her, and walked the upcurving corridor which led from Hilfy’s quarters to her own, across the main topside corridor and down a short distance.
So she might have cost Hilfy her sound sleep, and the meal she had eaten lay like lead at her own stomach; but Faha involvement in the hazard was not something for Hilfy to find out later, like a child, spared adult unpleasantnesses. Hilfy’s face stayed before her; the pager unit at her hip kept up its static babble, dying echoes of the message, occasional-spurts of closer transmission, but rarer and rarer. A stsho ship had come into the system. The kif disdained to harass it; it begged instructions of Urtur Station, anxious to scud in before the storm.
A lot of mahe in the system might have the same idea, miners who had already reckoned it time to head for port, getting themselves out of the way of the kif s hunt.
It was a vast system out there. Most of the ships in it were incapable of jump, insystem operators only. So far, everyone was keeping remarkably calm, even the hani at the eye of that storm.
Gods grant a great many ships pulled inward… and afforded the kif a harder target if they wanted to raid Station in search of one hani ship. That was one hope. Lihan Faha of Starchaser was too old, too wary to rush out to mismatched battle. Lihan would not expect stupidity of The Pride. The Faha would expect them to fend for themselves and above all not touch anything off prematurely. The Faha needed time: there was a chance that they could offload cargo and strip that ship down for speed, given time, shed mass without the need to lose a cargo. They would not expect help more than that.
That was logic speaking.
But it hurt.