Chanur's Venture by C. J. Cherryh

Author:C. J. Cherryh [Cherryh, C. J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781101660829
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 1987-01-05T20:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

There were hazard lights blinking urgent alarm, and Haral’s voice protesting—

“—Captain—”

—Plaintively, as if she had not heard the beeps and already begun to reach. There was perhaps some mercy in being human and drugged out of one’s mind….

“Got it,” Pyanfar coughed, though her throat had gone to stone in the long slow leak of time past the instruments, in the inside out of jumpspace. “Location?” One went lethargic, grew fatally tranquil in that dizzy flow where one could do nothing, nothing but watch and take a subjective day moving a finger. There was an itch at the tip of her nose just as important as their collective lives….

But the intellect knew what the will forgot. The mind was primed with a sequence of things she had waited two months to do. The right hand reached the control she had meant two months ago to reach and brought the field up while they still had power, long before they had gotten buoy signal. The eyes sought instruments, diverging lines that had to meet—

The fields of Mahn, yellow in the sun, the woods, the dappled shade….

The vine outside the wall of Chanur, that branched like a river, from one great gnarled trunk; and generations of Chanur had climbed it, branch to branch to branch—

“We’re on.” That was Geran’s mumble confirming destination. “We’re in the jump range.”

Location: need the vector.

“We’re alive,” Hilfy murmured. “We’re going to make it, going to make it—”

—as if she were utterly surprised.

There it was, that red line trued right on.

“Huh.” Pyanfar coughed her throat clear and blinked away the haze.

“Of course we did,” Geran said. “Have any doubt, kid?”

There were safety procedures for a ship to follow when coming in from dust-ringed Urtur and they were not following them. They were coming into a system with c-charged dust in their company. Some of it would slip the smaller field of their dump and go through Kshshti system like a hard-radiation storm.

“One more dump,” she murmured, pleaded with the ship. “Stand by”—thinking of a ship she had seen die—of a ship which had had a vane shot to flinders, and jumped without a chance in a mahen hell of slowing down.

Nothing to do then but capsule the crew and hope—

She shoved the dump in and felt her eyes roll as the field cycled up…. come on, come on, ship, hold it—

More failure lights blinked and held steady.

Branches on the wall….

“Got to be that Y unit,” she muttered to Haral, to no one in particular, and had visions of that dying ship again.

None of that crew was alive now. Those the mahendo’sat had hauled down in their capsule and saved—they had died at Gaohn, standing off the kif.

She moved an arm and did a third dump, watching in bleary-eyed fascination as the lines on the scopes crept together and merged like silken threads, red and blue, as The Pride dragged at the interface and let the bubble go.

Down again, and the wail of alarms calling her back to life.

“Still over mark,” Haral muttered.

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