Cats in Space and Other Places by Bill Fawcett

Author:Bill Fawcett [Fawcett, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780671721183
Amazon: 0671721186
Publisher: Baen Books
Published: 1992-04-02T05:00:00+00:00

"Any word?" Chur asked. She had left the rifle in lowerdecks. To carry the thing was more strength than she had, and there was no enemy aboard. She arrived on the bridge with Tully close behind her and clung to a seat at her regular post. It was a strange captain who turned a worried face toward her. "I'm taking orders," Chur breathed, to settle that, and clung to the chair with her claws, the whole scene wavering in and out of gray in her vision, her heart going like a motor on overload. "Any word on them?"

"Ehrran's threatening to back out of dock and blow us all. Light's threatening to blow Vigilance where she sits. We're supposed to have a kifish ship in her picking up— that. Skkukuk. I've told him that's all we want to do." There was a fine-held edge to Sirany's voice, an experienced captain at the edge of her own limits. "Handle the kif."

"Aye," Chur said, and crawled into the vacant chair between scan and com and livened the aux com panel. With Tauran crew on either side of her. Tully sat one seat down. Other seats were vacant. Fiar's and Sif's.

Handle the kif. Indeed.

Skukkuk thought of himself as crew. He was loyal. Geran had said that much with a grimace. And Chur had gotten her own captain's instructions to the kif on open com. That and the encounter belowdecks was all she had to go on, while the kif waited below in lowerdeck ops, for transfer arrangements to be finalized. But she had been in the deep too long to panic over the unusual or the outré.

One of the black things skittered through the bridge and vanished like a persistent nightmare, long, furred, and moving like a streak.

On scan, one of the kifish ships nearest had just flared with vector shift.

Skkukuk's tight-beamed request for transport had had time to be heard and was evidently being honored.

"Tully," she said, leaning to look down the board where he had settled in. "We don't know when the humans come, right? You record message: record, understand? We send it to system edge, wide as we can, and constant—" She remembered in dismay she was not dealing with Pyanfar. "Your permission, cap'n."

"What?" the snapped answer came back. She had to explain it all again. In more detail. And: "Do it," Sirany said. "Just keep us advised what you do. You got whatever you want."

She drew a larger breath, activated com output and set about explanations, alternately to kif and to human and to The Pride's interim captain. Then there was the matter of communicating with their mahen allies out there, whose disposition and intentions were another question: not many of the mahendo'sat ships had stayed insystem, but such as had were out there face-to-face with the kif, and nominally linked to the hani freighters who were also holding position out there in that standoff. So far they were letting the kifish ship move out where a kifish message with The Pride's wrap on it had indicated it should go.

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