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“Dead.”
“Kif hit a hani ship. They wanted you, Tully. They wanted you. Don’t you think I should ask questions? This is my ship. You came to it. Don’t you think you owe me some answers?”
He said nothing. Meant to say nothing, that was clear. His lips were clamped. Sweat had broken out on his face, glistening in the dim light.
“Gods rot this translator,” Pyanfar said after a moment. “All right, so somebody treated you badly too. Is it better on this ship? Do we give you the right food? Have you enough clothes?”
He brushed at the trousers. Nodded unenthusiastically.
“You don’t have to agree. Is there anything you want?”
“Want my door #.”
“What, open?”
“Open.”
“Huh.”
His shoulders sagged. He had not expected agreement on that, it was evident. He made a vague motion of his hand about their surroundings. “Where are we? The sound…”
The dust brushing past the hull. It had been background noise, a maddening whisper they lived with. Down in lower-deck, he would have heard a lot of it. “We’re drifting,” she said. “Rocks and dust out there.”
“We sit at a jump point?”
“Star system.” She reached and cut on the telescope in the observation bubble, bringing the image onto the main screen. The scope tracked to Urtur itself, the inferno of energy in the center of the dusty lens-shaped system, a ringed star which flung out tendrils the movement of which took centuries, ropy filaments dark against the blaze of the center. The image cast light on the Outsider’s face, a moment of wonder: Urtur deserved that. She saw his face and rose to her feet, moved to the side of this shaggy-maned Outsider — a calculated move, because it was her art, to trade, to know the moment when a guard was down. “I tell you,” she said, catching him by the arm — and he shivered, but he made no protest at being drawn to his feet. He towered above her as she pointed to the center of the image. “Telescope image, you see. A big system, a horde of planets and moons — The dark rings there, that’s where the planets sweep the dust and rocks clear. There’s a station in that widest band, orbiting a gas giant. The system is uninhabited except for mahendo’sat miners and a few k
“Authority.” His skin was cold under her fingerpads, his muscles hard and shivering, whether from the relative coolness of the bridge’s open spaces or from some other cause. “Authority of this system. Hani?”
“Mahendo’sat station. They don’t like the kif much either. No one does, but it’s not possible to get rid of them. Mahendo’sat, kif, hani, tc’a, stsho, k
He listened, silent, for whatever he could understand of what she said. Com sputtered again, the whistles and wailing of the k
“Some of them,” Pyanfar said, “are stranger than you. But you don’t know the names, do you? This whole region of space is strange to you.”
“Far from my world,” he said.
“Is it?”
That got a misgiving look from him. He pulled away from her hand, looked at her and at the others.
“Wherever it is,” Pyanfar said in nonchalance. She looked back at Haral and Hilfy. “I think that’s about enough. Our passenger’s tired. He can go back to his quarters.”
“I want talk you,” Tully said. He took hold of the cushion nearest, resisting any attempt to move him. “I want talk.”
“Do you?” Pyanfar asked. He reached toward her. She stood still with difficulty — but he did not touch. He drew the hand back. “What is it you want to talk about?”
He leaned, standing, against the cushion with both hands. His pale eyes were intent and wild, and whatever the precise emotion his face registered, it was distraught. “You #### me. Work, understand. I stay this ship and I work same crew. All you want. Where you go. # give me ####.”
“Ah,” she said. “You’re offering to work for your passage.”
“Work on this ship, yes.”
“Huh.” She thrust her hands within her waistband and would have looked down her nose at him, but it was a matter of looking up. “You make a deal, do you? You work for me, Outsider? You do what I say? All right. You rest now. You go back to your cabin and you learn your words and you think how to tell me what the kif want with you — because the kif still want this ship, you understand. They want you, and they’ll come after this ship.”
He thought about that a moment. Almost he looked as if he might speak. His lips shaped a word and took it back again, and clamped shut. And something sealed in behind his eyes when he did that, a bleakness worse than had ever been there.
It sent a prickle down her spine. This creature is thinking of dying, she thought. It was the look from against the wall, from the corner in the washroom, but colder still. “Hai,” she said, in her best dockside ma
There was a glimmering then, a sudden break in that seal. He reached out quite unexpectedly and seized her other hand, his blunt fingers both holding and exploring it, the furred web he lacked, the pads of the tips. Pressure hit the center of her hand and the claws came out, only slightly: she was careful, though her ears flattened in warning. To her further distress he set his other hand on her shoulder, then let go both holds and looked about at Haral and Hilfy, then back at her again. Crazy, she judged him; and then she thought about kif, and reckoned that he had license for a little strangeness. “I’ll tell you something,” she said, “for free. Kif followed you across the Meetpoint dock to my ship; they followed my ship here to Urtur, and right now we’re sitting here, just trying to be quiet so the kif don’t find us. Trying to decide how best to get out of here. There’s one kif in particular, in command of a ship named Hinukka. Akukkakk…”
“Akukkakk,” he echoed, suddenly rigid. The sound came as names must, from the other ear, his own voice. His eyes were dilated.
“Ah. You do know.”
“He want take me his ship. Big one. Authority.” “Very big. They have a word for his kind, do you know it? Hakkikt. That means he hunts and others pick up the scraps he leaves. I lost something at Meetpoint: a hani ship and my cargo. So did this great hakkikt, this great, this powerful kif. You escaped him. You ran from him. So it’s more than profit that he wants out of this. He wants you, Tully, to settle accounts. It’s his pride at stake, his reputation. For a kif, that’s life itself. He’s not going to give up. Do you know, he I tried to buy you from me. He offered me gold, a lot of gold. He might even have kept the deal straight and not delayed for piracy afterward. He’s that desperate.” Tully’s eyes drifted from her to the others and back again. You deal with him?”
“No. I want something for dead hani and lost cargo. I want this great hakkikt. You hear me, Tully?”
“Yes,” Tully said suddenly, “/want same.”
“Aunt,” Hilfy protested in a faint voice.
“You want to work,” Pyanfar said, ignoring her niece’s disquiet. “There’ll be the chance for that. But you wait, Tully. You rest. At shift change, I’ll call you again. You come eat with us. Meal, understand? But you get some rest first, hear? You work on my ship, you take orders first. Follow instructions. Right?”
“Yes,” he said.