Caroline Cherryh: The Pride of Chanur

“Gods, it’s on us,” the copilot said.

“Closing,” Geran’s voice sounded through the com plug. “Stand by, Luck.”

A proximity alarm started, quickly silenced from the board. Scan broke up.

“O gods,” said the navigator.

Pyanfar tucked, clenching the cushion support with all her strength.

Impact. The Luck rang and leapt and her body left the deck, grip scarcely holding; hit it again, shoved back as the grapples grated, shifted.

Held. There was a comforting silence. Weightlessness.

“Got trouble,” Tirun’s voice said. “Blow that lock out; we’ve got a tube the other side. For the gods’ sake board, abandon ship. We can’t defend you.”

“Haral!” Pyanfar yelled down the core corridor. “ Everyone! get forward!”

“Captain,” Nerafy Rau said.

“Come on,” Pyanfar said, hauled herself to the captain’s cushion and hung there one-handed, staring down at her. “All of you… gods, come with us. We’ll get you back to your ship if there’s a chance of it. If not that, there’s kif to settle with, and those people on the stations — will you die here with no shot fired?”

“No,” the Rau captain said, and started unbuckling. The others did. Pyanfar completed the somersault and looked aft down the corridor, at a white-shirted human sailing up it narrowly in advance of a flood of armed hani. The Rau captain handed her way up from the pit and headed for the nearby lock and Pyanfar grabbed for the board and the mike as the crew left it. “Tirun! Where are the kif?”

“Gods know. Mahijiru’s running far-guard; tell you the rest when you get here.”

The bodies of her companions tumbled about her. The lock powered inward and airshock rammed through in a cold gust. “Coming,” Pyanfar said, and let the mike go, kicked at the nearest conduit and flung herself into the stream of bodies, into the dark and numbing cold of The Pride’s ship-to-ship grapple-tube. Extremities went numb. Breath stung in the lungs and moisture threatened to freeze her eyeballs. It hurt, gods, it hurt. A light glowed green as she arrived in The Pride’s null-g outer frame, a safety beacon, a guidance star far across the dark, marking the location of the personnel lift. A blue chain of glowlights dotted across the blackness toward it, the safety line. “Khym!” Pyanfar shouted, thinking of his inexperience, “blue’s the guideline, Khym… Tully! go to the blue lights!”

“Got him,” Hilfy’s young voice shouted up ahead. “Got them both.”

A door opened onto the lift. Someone had gotten to it. A distant rectangle opened, blinding white, with a score of dark bodies hurtling and struggling along the blue dotted course toward it, large and small with distance, some like swimmers in the air, some using the rope and propelling the swimmers along. Bodies collided and caught each other and kept going, one after the other, into that lift chamber, where they took on color and identity. Pyanfar found herself slung along the final distance, hauled into the lift; and among the last came the Rau, into that blinding glare.

“We’re in,” Chur was shouting into com. Haral shouted a warning and closed the lift door, and suddenly all the floating bodies tended floorward as the car moved. “Brace!” Pyanfar snapped at the novices, but experienced spacers grabbed them, and of a sudden the car thundered and slammed into synch with the rotating inner cylinder. There was full g, and the lift slammed upward again, with a queasy rear-of-the-car acceleration stress as The Pride put on a gingerly movement. Something banged in the distance. — “Grapple’s clear,” Haral said. The lift went on rising, past lowerdeck, to main. Feet found the floor; bedraggled groundlings hugged those who had a hold on them, ears flat and eyes wild.

The car stopped and opened on main. Pyanfar thrust herself through and out, raced down the main corridor for the archway of the bridge, claws scrabbling on the decking against the gentle thrust. Haral was hard on her heels. “Lowerdeck,” Chur shouted behind them. “Ride it back down where there’s secure space.” The door closed; the lift hummed into function again. Pyanfar did not look back. She hurled herself the last difficult distance, past Geran and Tirun at the number three and two posts as Haral found her place and slid into it. Pyanfar reached her own vacant cushion and flung herself into it without a word. Scan images were coming up on her screens, their position relative to the world and the station — a dot that was knnn-symboled, hovering off apart from the chaos of other dots, two marked mahe, and the horrid hazard near the station, a horde of unidentifieds, debris sweeps that marked the death of ships and the course of their remains.

“Aja Jin took damage,” Tirun said steadily. “Kif invaded traffic control on the station and knocked the scan out. Llun had their hands full; everyone was boarding any ship at all. We broke out of dock and ran with the rest… figured they were screening incoming ships. Strike came in three quarters of an hour ago. Outbound now. We’re headed back in to station, present course: Fortune got a landing party in. Several others got in after them. Proceed?”

“Keep talking. Go as we bear.” She reached and hit the motion warning. “We’re moving,” she said over allship. “Brace; I’m going to keep the com open from our end. We’ve got troubles and I don’t want any stirring about down there. — Tirun, what’s the comp on that kif movement? Got a course plotting?”

The data flashed to the screen. “All stations have killed scan output. Some of the kif are out of dock but we don’t know which. Only good thing in it, with station’s scan stopped a good bit before the strike, they had only our last-known position to go on and the attack missed most of us. Aja Jin got it, being posted stationary; at least one freighter was hit and we think some of the kif, but we don’t know who got hit, because no one’s outputting much chatter and a lot of the freighters are scan-blanked and hiding. I figure they’ll go for the fixed targets on the next pass — the station, Aja Jin’s last position …”

“Anuurn, maybe.”

Tirun threw her an ears-flat look.

“You’ve got it going,” Pyanfar said. “I’ll go with it. Give me the rest of your reckoning. Where do you reckon Akukkakk is?”

“I think he was one that got off station; and he can’t have boosted fast enough to have run with the strikers. I figure he’s one of those ships out there, quiet like all the rest of them. And we find out just which one he is when that strike force comes sweeping back in.”

Pyanfar nodded. To take the maneuver they had handed him — the undocking of the freighters — and to turn it to his own advantage… that was very probable. That was Akukkakk’s style, for which she had begun to acquire a sense: a pattern of movements, a tendency to up the stakes when challenged.

“He’s going to go on sending them in against the station,” she judged, “hammer it into junk. That, for a lesson for us. But he knows rotted well which one we are, cousins: we’re all too conspicuous, and I’ve a notion which way he’ll go when he can — even odds between us and Mahijiru. And since Mahijiru’s got Jik by him …” She cast a glance at scan, where the mahe rode as a double blip hard by the kif position at station. “They’ll be overriding their own scan, that strike force, but Akukkakk’s going to have a good identified image for them. Gods rot him.”

“We drop our people at station,” Haral said from the fourth cushion, “and pull a tight turn, maybe; go sort that crowd out.”