Chanur's Venture (20 page)

Don't you walk it. If they don't give you a car, you call and I'll see they do.

Tell them priority. Tell them Personage."

"Right," said Chur.

She walked into the lock with them, pushed the button for the second door on

alternate-set, so that the first closed behind them. She took no chances. Not

now. The yellow accessway gaped like a ribbed gullet. The chill hit like a wall.

"Hurry it."

"Pyanfar," Tully said of a sudden, and turned and balked. She put a hand on his

back and propelled him ahead of her.

"Come on, come on, Tully. It's all right." She walked by him with her crewwomen

trailing after, kept her arm at his back and kept him moving down the accessway.

He was cold already. She felt the stiffness in his movements as they hit the

slant and headed down to the rampway. "Won't be long. Bodies will heat up the

car." --Chatter to keep him distracted. She saw the gray of the docks like docks

anywhere, the pair of vehicles with the strobes flashing. "Translator's going to

be out of range awhile, but they'll get you hooked up again when you get to

station central. There's an outside chance -- a small chance, understand? -- it

might be more than twenty hours. Might be, might be -- they might have to shift

you to some mahen ship. I don't think so--"

He balked again as they came down the last few steps, turned and gave her a

panicked look.

"Captain," Chur said from behind, sharp and urgent: she heard the engines at the

same time, looked toward the sound down the dock.

Another car, headed their way in a great hurry, from up-dock.

"Gods rot," she muttered, grabbed Tully by the arm and pulled him on. "Fast,

Tully." The mahendo'sat in the cars got out, excepting the two drivers, one

curly brown, a tasunno mahe, smaller than the others and rare this side of Iji;

an officer and four others the gods-knew-what race of generations-back spacers,

black and tall and bearing badges and sidearms on the usual harness. Not

friendly-looking. Like one black wall. Tully balked again, looked about in panic

as the moving car hummed up and braked, resisted again as two of the mahe

grabbed him and pulled him toward the open door of the second mahen car.

"Pyanfar!" he cried.

Hilfy started forward, but Pyanfar caught her arm and held her as the

number-three car door slid down and three Ehrran crew got out in haste.

"Hold it," the senior said. "Hold it there."

Pyanfar shrugged and faced them. She had let go Hilfy's arm, and everyone had

stopped -- the mahe trying to get Tully into the car, the Ehrran who had bailed

out of their vehicle.

"Go on," Pyanfar said to Hilfy, and moved the hand at her side. "Chur, Hilfy.

It's all right. Sorry, Ehrran. You've been preempted. Station-master's

intervened."

"You," the foremost Ehrran said, gesturing at the mahendo'sat. "Where's the

authorization?" The mahe officer said something in one of Iji's manifold

languages, waved a hand. The rest pulled Tully into the car and Chur and Hilfy

piled in after. Doors began to close. "Chanur," the Ehrran said. Pyanfar gave a

second shrug, displayed empty hands. "Out of my control."

"That's your personnel,"

"Just to keep him quiet on the way. You'll have to take it up with station

offices."

There were limits. Cursing a captain to her face was one; calling her a liar was

another. The Ehrran did neither, but it was in her eyes, that were lambent

brass. The mahen vehicles snugged up the doors and began to move. Ehrran cast a

wild look that way, waved an arm at her crewmates and they dived back into their

own car.

"Evidently the Ehrran haven't got a com in there," Pyanfar observed to Geran,

who had stood fast by her left. "Gods be!"

The hani vehicle swerved wildly about and cut close to the mahendo'sat, dropped

back as the mahendo'sat refused to be passed on the narrow dock.

"Cheeky lot," Geran said.

"Won't go well out here. Gods-rotted black-breeches thinks it's Anuurn. Ought to

be interesting when they get news to their captain, oughtn't it?"

Geran turned a quizzical look her way

"I rather imagine they had trouble getting a car," Pyanfar said. "For some

reason." Up the row there was another swerve, visible as the cars went up the

curving deck, headed for the curtaining tangle of lines that would cut off the

view. "Gods rot--"

"They're crazy," Geran said.

"Come on," she said, spun on her heel and headed up the ramp, with quickening

long strides.

"Put me through to Vigilance," she said when she hit the bridge, not out of

breath, not quite, but blowing through her nostrils. Geran was still with her,

equally disarranged.

"Got that on vid," Haral said with quiet satisfaction, the while Khym stared in

confusion and Tirun moved past his seat to reach com. "That maneuver going out."

"Sharp," she said. Haral smiled and powered her chair back round to business

with the damage check.

"They don't answer," Tirun said, half turning in her seat. "No response."

"Log that. Call the station office and file a protest."

"Hazard to our personnel?"

"That'll do." She drew a quieter breath, hands on hips. Looked at Khym and saw a

gleam in his eye she had not seen since Mahn. She stood a breath taller, walked

over to lean over Haral's shoulder. "Next thing's that repair crew. Any sign

yet?"

Kshshti docks passed in a blur of gray and brown, of dingy fronts obscured by

the shielding of the car windows as the vehicle hummed along, buzz-thump-thump

as the soft tires hit the joints of unshielded deck plating with manic speed in

time to Hilfy Chanur's heart. She leaned to look back again as far as the

shield-dimmed car window afforded: the Ehrran vehicle had fallen in behind them,

no longer attempting to pass, but staying close on their tail. Tully's leg

pressed hers on the left, the three of them occupying the back seat with Chur on

the far side. Two of the mahen guards sat in front with the driver. The escort

car filled much of the forward view, they ran so close to its tail: the strobe

atop that lead car limned objects and the three mahendo'sat in front in

unreality and blocked out the outside so that it had no color. Beside them

office fronts and gantry machinery passed in a blur.

"Easy." She felt a shiver from Tully and patted his leg as she straightened

around to look his way. "Safe, Tully. It's all right." The translator had

stopped working as they passed out of range. But some words he understood on his

own. "Safe, hear?"

He nodded, glancing distractedly her way. He had his plastic bundle clutched

firmly in his arms and they sat close to him to keep him warm. The white flash

from the front of the car glanced off his pale skin and pale hair and turned his

nervous movements into something surreal.

"I--" he began, and the car lurched, swerved, threw them all forward and left

with a suddenness that brought the rear of the escort car up in Hilfy's view as

she turned her head, the car, the mahendo'sat driver fighting to turn, the

guards flinging up arms to protect themselves as the car slewed into angled

impact, glanced, hooked itself perversely into the escort car's torn body and

kept slewing round, grating metal as a tire stripped off the rim and jolted over

deckplates. Things blurred, snapped clear in a howl from the mahendo'sat, and a

fist slammed them; the back of the seat flew up in Hilfy's face and she grabbed

for Tully as her head hit the padding with the shock of explosion whumping

through the air and the whole car tilting and slamming down again.

"They're firing!" Chur yelled and that reality got through to Hilfy's brain,

sent her hand clawing for the gun in her pocket, numb-fingered from a shock to

her elbow somewhere in the spin. The car had stopped. The forward window was

cracked. The driver was slumped; both guards were alive. . . . "Stay inside,"

Chur was yelling from the other side as one guard worked at the door on that

side. A shock hit the car and blossomed in a fireball beyond the cracked front

window and Hilfy got the gun out as the stench of ozone roiled through the door

in silver smoke. The door opened on manual, slammed down as the smoke poured in

and the mahe sprawled as he went out in a pop of weaponsfire through the smoke:

his comrade fired from inside and another shock hit the car, fire bloomed,

deafening.

"Hilfy!" Tully dragged at her as cold air hit from the other direction, as Chur

got the door open on the sheltered side and bailed out of the car. Hilfy flung a

look in the other direction, pasted shot after shot at the flutter of black kif

robes amid the smoke, intending to go when she had stopped that.

But alien hands seized the waist of her trousers and skidded her sharply

backward across the slick seat even as she fired. An arm whipped round her waist

and jerked her from the door backwards as she got off a last few shots. Tully

tried to carry her, but she twisted free, got her feet on the ground and ran for

herself, Tully beside her, Chur--

Another shock blossomed by her, and she was flying through the air, the deck

coming up under her hands and under her face as something heavy came down on her

and sprawled.

She was running then after a blank space, her legs working, not knowing how she

had gotten there or where she was going until the gray of a girder came up and

hit her shoulder and she spun, flailed for balance and caromed into Tully, arms

about him as she decided on cover and kept falling, crawling then, along the

base of the gantry over deckbolts. She gripped the hard edge of the base rim,

hitched herself along, lay still then. Smoke roiled along the overhead where red

alarm strobes flashed, staining girders and smoke alike. Sounds were distant,

through the ringing in her ears. She felt small distant pains, saw Tally's face

twisted with exertion and with pain. "Chur?" he said, twisting on his elbow to

look back. In panic: "Chur?" And Hilfy rolled over to look through the obscuring

smoke, wiping her eyes and trying to see and hear.

"Chur?" she cried.

The red-gray smoke gave up a momentary view of tangled vehicles and other

wreckage, of running figures, of fire from various quarters. She heard the dim

chitter of kif commands, flinched as a shot came their way and reached to her

pocket for the gun, but it was gone.

"Hilfy--" Tully cried, and pulled her further back as kif poured past them to

take up position.

"O gods," she breathed. "We're behind the wrong gods-rotted line!"

Shots popped off the wall behind them and ricocheted wildly. She ducked down and

in the first pause in fire she grabbed Tully by the shirt, scrambled up and ran

with him while the smoke held -- but that smoke was not dissipating as it

should, the fans were not working, and it dawned on her battered skull that they

were cut off, shut down: section doors had sealed.

"Where?" Pyanfar shouted into the com as if volume could help, aware of Tirun

and Khym and Geran at her back and a great silence elsewhere on the bridge.

"What 'stay still'? You gods-rotted incompetent -- Where around the rim?"

--Babble poured into her ear. She whirled round as her eye caught movement, saw

Haral's running arrival on the bridge and waved a furious hand at her crew.

"Arm! Move it!"

"Got section seal go," the mahen official was saying into her ear. "Got no

chance kif get away, you wait report--"

"You authorize us past that seal. Hear?"

"Office got no authority--"

"Get it!" She cut the official off in midword and shoved her way past Khym.

Geran had the sidearms out of the locker. "Get the rifles," she said. They had

them. It was illegal, a defense they never admitted to port authorities they

had.

"Aye," Haral said, and ran.

"Pyanfar--" Khym said.

She put the lock on controls, spun about and ran. Khym was with them and she had

no desire to stop him. Not in this.

* * *

The huge section doors were shut, red and amber strobes on their surface

spearing through the wafts of smoke that reached even here. Sirens wailed and

echoed in the vastness of the docks. "They're shut, they're sealed," Hilfy

gasped, blinking smoke-tears and half-carrying the human who half-carried her,

the two of them weaving past the clutter of dockside bins and chutes as they

tried to get the break they needed to get past the line of fire. "We can't get

out -- Tully, stop!"

Shots broke out from a new direction. She dragged him off his balance. They both

staggered, thumped into the echoing side of a bin and she landed hard on her

rump as Tully collapsed with a gasp. Flesh stank. He rolled over, clutching at

his arm and she kept pulling at him, claws hooked into his shirt as she worked

toward the corner--

O gods, that there be shelter there--

There was an alleyway of a kind, a recess for freight loading, a door with a