C Cherryh - Chanur's Homecoming

Kif were vastly changed, that was the truth, even from a few years ago: then they had been scattered and petty pirates, dockside thieves a hani could bluff into retreat, kif whose style was to whine and accuse and frequently to launch lawsuits in stsho courts which might make a freighter pay out of court settlement just to get the matter clear. That was the style of kifish banditry before Akkukkak.

Now she walked onto this dock in the company of a prince’s escort, and had her own bodyguard—Skukkuk walking along with her, armed with the gun he had taken from a kif in the fighting, looking like every other kif in his black robe and his hood and the plainness of his gear: if she looked about and if Skkukuk and one of her escort had changed places, she would not be able to tell them apart at any casual glance. That was another effect of kifish dress: of black hoods that deeply shaded the face and left only the gray-black snout in the light; it made targets hard to pick.

And from Aja Jin’s berth—nothing of that ship was visible nor any of the others, only the tangle of lines and gantries that held those lines aloft to the several ports that valved through to the ship—from behind that tangle came another pair, mahen, one of them male. The other was Soje Kesurinan, Jik’s second in command. Kesurinan was a tall black mahe, scarred and missing half an ear, but handsome in the way she carried herself—dour as Jik was cheerful, but she lifted her chin as she saw Pyanfar, and her diminutive mahen ears, whole and half, flicked in salutation.

“Kesurinan,” Pyanfar said quietly, as Kesurinan walked up to her. And: “Kkkkt,” from her kifish escort. “Tahar is on her way. An escort is going to pick her up; we can go on down.”

“Got,” Kesurinan said, which was agreement, economical and expressionless in a woman who had to be worried. Very worried. But they had to play everything to the kif who watched them, and give away nothing. Pyanfar nodded to the escort, and they started walking then, along the dock, the belt of the AP gun heavy about her hips, a pocket pistol thumping against her leg on the other side. Kif went armed to the teeth and so did she and so did Kesurinan, and, kifish taste and kifish eyesight notwithstanding, she had used that trip to her room to put on a pair of dress trousers, silk and not the coarse crewwoman’s blues she had taken to wearing aboard; silk

trousers, her best belt, the cord-ends of which were semiprecious stones and ui, polyp skeletons from Anuurn seas, and worth more than rubies off Anuurn: hani were not divers, as a rule, but they were traders, and knowing the substance, had suspected the stsho would prize this pale rarity-quite correctly, as it developed. In this splendor and with a couple of gold bracelets and a silver one, not mentioning the array of earrings, she headed for a meeting with the self-appointed prince of pirates, in all the arrogance a hani captain owned.

She had gotten out the door in good order, had gone down the lift, joined Hilfy in the short lock corridor and informed the kif that she was expecting her own escort, while Haral used the intercom and the central board’s unlock-commands to release Skkukuk from his prison and to direct him to the lift by the farside corridor, where Tirun brought his gun to him-all managed so that it saved Skkukuk’s dignity. The ammonia-smelling rascal had come strolling up on them from the direction she had come, armed and suitably arrogant with his fellow kif: after all, his captain had an appointment with the hakkikt and he had just been chosen over all the other crew as her escort: he was positively cheerful.

Hilfy, on the other hand—

Hilfy’s ears had gone flat when she saw what was toward, and there had been starkest horror in her eyes, which the kif might well have attributed to seeing herself shunted aside for a kifish escort-correct; but for the wrong reasons.

But the kid, in fact, had kept her mouth clamped shut and taken it all in grim silence. Gods knew Hilfy would probably say something considerable when she got topside, which was probably where she had gone the moment that lock shut, topside so fast the deck would smoke.

A strobe light began to flash behind them, pulses hitting the gantries and the girders; she knew what it was, knew when Kesurinan turned, and when the kif turned in one move- “Kkkt,” one said, “kkkt--”

And looked back at her again as the others did, head lifted in threat, tongue darting in nervousness: his rifle slid to his hands.

Pyanfar only stood there. Grinned at him, which was not humor in a hani as it was in a mahendo’sat or a human; but which at this moment approached it. The Pride of Chanur had just powered up and the sensors on the gantry-fed power lines had just shut off the flow and triggered an alarm, the same alarm that would have sounded when Goldtooth’s Mahijiru and Ehrran’s Vigilance had powered up to leave dock-if the station had not been too occupied for anyone to react to it. “We’re not leaving,” she said to the kif quite cheerfully. “It’s honorific. So you know who you’re dealing with-Praise to the hakkikt.”

Kif might be blind to a great many things: not to sarcasm and not to arrogance and not to a gesture made to the whole of Kefk station and the whole of the hakkikt’s power. They would not rally to their hakkikt in the sense that hani would rally round a leader; she bet her life on that; he was just The Hakkikt and there might arise another without warning. Kif would not defend him against someone of status enough to make that kind of gesture to him: such a status only made them uneasy, in the absence of orders which might have told them how the hakkikt would play the matter. They could anger the hakkikt by creating him a problem, too. She faced a pair of very uneasy kif. And grinned in something very like primate humor as she turned and walked down the dock as she had already done, with the kif at her back, with Kesurinan at her side and Skukkuk guarding her flank, armed and deadly. That was perhaps another very worried kif: his own hakt’-mekt, his great captain, had just defied the highest power in local space.

She had just served notice to that Power what the stakes were, by the gods; and what her life was worth to her crew.

That was power of a sort no kif wielded, of a sort no kif could easily foresee.

Martyrdom was a concept that had gotten a shiver even out of Sikkukkut.

“Word from Harukk,” Hilfy said, coldly and calmly as she could, though her hand trembled as it hovered over the com console: “Quote: We demand cause for this violation of regulations.”

“Reply:” said Haral Araun, her low voice quite calm, “We have obeyed instructions from our captain.”

The hair rose on Hilfy Chanur’s spine. She was more fluent in main-kifish than most hani, than most communications officers far senior to her, in fact. And what Haral was telling the kif was precisely the correct response, a very kifish thing to say, whether or not the old spacer knew it: Hilfy would have bet her scant possessions that Haral had calculated it, not by book-learning, but by decades of dockside give and take with the kif. She punched in and rendered it in main-kifish to the hakkikt’s communications officer, who let a considerable stark silence ride after it.

Click.

“Harukk-com just went offline,” Hilfy said, still calmly, though her heart was slamming away at her ribs. Beside her, Tully and Geran and Khym sat keeping an eye on scan, on the limited view they had with their nose into station and the scan output from station. Tirun Araun ran Haral’s copilot functions from her post over by the aft bulkhead, the master-alternate, acting as switcher and sequencer, Haral’s usual job; and Tirun had armaments live back there too. In case.

“Haa,” Khym muttered suddenly.