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VI
…and spat them up again, a dizzying percept of elsewhere. A shimmer before her eyes, that was the screen, and the automated instruments were searching. Keep conscious, don’t go out, not now, keep the hand on controls… “Working,” Haral’s low voice drifted to her out of infinity. “O gods.” That was someone else. Hilfy? A star came into brackets on the screen and wobbled out again. “Check referent,” Pyanfar said. Her blurring eyes sought instruments. A red light was on. “Got a problem,” Haral said, sending cold chills along her back. “No positive ID on referent.”
“Brace.” She started aborting the proposed second jump, dumping speed sufficient for the sca
Dark mass was ahead of them, the mass which had pulled them in from jump, coming up in their faces. Sensors realized it: alarms went off, di
“Turning,” she warned the crew. The Pride veered in her next skip, and blood started in Pyanfar’s nose, internal organs and joints and flesh hauled in independent motion. She spat and struggled with the muscles of her eyes to keep focused, fought a strained muscle to keep her hand at the controls. Scan showed hairbreadth miss now and she trimmed ship and let it ride, hurtling for a virtual skim of the obstacle.
A kif voice came in over com. “Identify: urgent.” Someone was waiting in this place, stationed to guard, another of Akukkakk’s long arms.
“Aunt,” Hilfy’s voice came weakly, bubbling liquid. “Kif…”
“Got it.” Pyanfar sniffed blood or sweat, licked salt from her mouth, staring at the screens which showed the dark mass hoving up at them… tight skim, incredibly tight. Their own output was still k
“Got it!” Haral exclaimed suddenly; a star showed up in the bracket.
“Can’t do it,” Pyanfar said: the mass was too close. They had no choice now but to skim past and hope.
“Identify,” the kif voice insisted.
Instruments flared of a sudden, screens going static. “That was fire,” Pyanfar said to Hilfy, “onto our former vector, thank the gods.”
A second flaring: The Pride had returned a shot, automatic response. Of a sudden the alarms went again, crescendo of mechanical panic.
“Mass proximity,” Pyanfar said into allship, for those riding it out below. “We’re going to miss it.”
The solidity was there, a sudden jump in every mass/drive instrument on the bridge, lights flaring red, a static washout on the number four screen: Kita Point mass, a chunk of rock, a cinder radiating only the dimmest warmth into the dark, light-less, lonely, and far, far too big for The Pride to drag with her into jump…
Vid picked up flares of light, massive spots like the glow of a sun in that dark, illumining the surface of Kita mass. Rock boosted in their field out of Urtur had not changed vector. It hit the dark mass at near c, pyrotechnics which flowered the dark.
They passed in that flare of impact, slingshotted with a wrench which brought a new flood of blood to Pyanfar’s throat… grayout…
…back again. “Haral!”
A frantic moment. “There!” Then referent was back in bracket. A kif voice clicked and chattered out of phase with what they should be getting: that was then a second ship, lying off Kita zenith.
Fire hit them.
Pyanfar slammed the drive back in, with the howl of the kif in her ears, the static spit of instruments trained on the chaos in their wake. She tried with all her wits to keep oriented, a .slow reach of a sore arm while matter came undone about them, while they were naked to the between and time played games with the senses. No way that the kif could have followed. They had run the gauntlet. They were through the worst. After Kita it was one of three destinations and after the next, one of two more; and the choices multiplied, and the kif had harder and harder shift to bring numbers to bear against them…
“We’re fading,” Haral said, words which stretched through infinity, emotion-dulled, nowhere: this was the way it went when ships lost themselves, when they jumped and failed to come out again… perhaps some mathematical limbo… or straight into mahendo’sat hell, where four-armed demons invented horrors… Pyanfar dragged her wits together, watched for another such wobble. Damage they had taken under fire could have done something to the vanes, robbed them of capacity, might lose them permanently…
…second arrival, a blurring downdrop of the senses into here and when again. Pyanfar reached for the panel and ordered scan search. Differential com was already getting signal: it was the marker of Kirdu System, wondrous, beautiful mahendo’sat voice, the buoy of the jump range.
“We’re in!” Hilfy cried. “We’re in.”
“Clear and in the range,” Pyanfar said, smug. She hit the jump pulse to throw off velocity and the smugness evaporated somewhat: the pulse was queasy, less powerful than it ought to be.
“Captain?” Haral’s voice.
“I feel it.”
“Maintain k
“Yes.” Pyanfar kept her eyes on the readout, hit the pulse again. “Plot entry vector,” she ordered Tirun. “We might have trailed some debris with us.”
“Reckon we dumped most of the rocks on Kita,” Tirun muttered. She started sending the schematic over, fired off a comp-signal warning for what good it would do a slow ship in the path of their debris-attended entry. The dump went on, sickly pulses which finally began to count.
“That’s better,” Pyanfar said, swallowing against the stress. “Hilfy, got a lag estimate?”
“Approximate,” Hilfy said in a thin voice. “Thirty-minute roundtrip to station, estimate.”
Close, by the gods, too close. Pyanfar kept the dump pulses going at the closest possible intervals, kept her eyes nowhere but the center screen now, the relayed scan from the station buoy which plotted the location of ships and planets and large objects in the system. Automation had added in the warning The Pride had sent out, a hazard zone in a cone headed transzenith of system.
“Getting refinement on course,” Haral said as a schematic came up on number two screen. It took only a little bending: check velocity, the warning kept flashing. Pyanfar coaxed another dump out of The Pride and made the slight correction, her senses swimming now with the prolonged strain of high-velocity reckonings, with stringing her mind along those distances and speeds which the ship’s own comp handled in special conflict-dumping mode.
“Down the slot!” Tirun cried as the lines matched.
They were dead on at last, free and safe and headed down the approach path station had preassigned the next incomer in that area of the range. Pyanfar afforded herself a lighter breath, still with her eyes fixed on the scan, trying to figure how much more they could dump and how fast. Let one miner be where he ought not to be, let one skimmer have gone off for some private reason without advising station in advance, some idiot crossing the entry lanes, some mad k
Sweat ran, or blood. She sniffed and wiped at her nose, eyes still fixed and hand on the button. They rode the odds; they came in like a shot, counting on statistics and blind luck and traffic being exactly where it ought: one could do that a few times in a lifetime and not run out of luck.