Cats in Space and Other Places by Bill Fawcett (the first e reader txt) 📕

Gods, could Jik have told him? No. No. He surely wouldn't. Not to someone that smart and that canny. They cooperated with limits. It was convenient for both sides. For separate reasons.

But why did Sikkukkut value me from the beginning? Why did he and the mahendo'sat both value me enough to keep us alive and set me here, with this much power?

Is Sikkukkut a fool? He was never a fool. Neither is Jik. Nor Goldtooth.

If Sikkukkut lost too many ships fighting for power, my gods, he'd find some other kif gnawing up his leg the moment he looked weak. That's what the mahendo'sat are doing to him, whittling away at him. It's the kif's chief weakness, that aggressiveness of theirs. Does Sikkukkut know that? Can a species see its own deficiencies?

Look about us at ours, at this pitiful spectacle, hani against hani spears and arrows flying in the sun, banners aflutter—

I see what keeps us from being what we might be.

Can he?

Can—?

"Look OUT!" someone yelled; and fire spattered from the end of the corridor.

"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.

Blind acquiescence was asking a lot, of both mahendo'sat and hani. And even of the kif.

But things had to stay stable. More, they had to sort themselves out into some kind of defense, both internal and external. The next large group of ships to come in, at any given moment, could be Akkhtimakt's kif in a second strike, which would swing the whole kifish allegiance in the other direction; or it might be Sikkukkut, having disposed of Goldtooth; or Goldtooth and the humans. Or either without the other. Gods knew what else. Panicked stsho, for all they knew. Or tc'a.

Far better that whatever-it-was should meet an already existing wavefront of information designed to provoke discussion instead of indiscriminate fire.

Handle the kif, the woman said.

She sent it wide. In half a dozen languages and amplified via whatever ships would relay it, to all reaches of the system, continuously, since Gaohn station relays and apparently those of the second outsystem station and both buoys were not cooperating. She was talking to more than those insystem and those arriving; she was talking also to a certain mahen hunter, who had lost himself and gone invisible.

Chanur is taking Gaohn Station. This solar system is under control of Chanur and its allies and its subordinates. You are entering a controlled space. Identify yourselves.

"Hold fire!" Pyanfar yelled, turning, her back to the sidewall, the AP up in both hands where it bore on a flat-eared, white-round-the-eyes cluster of hani black- breeches, Immunes, who were framed in the corridor opening and vulnerable as stsho in a hailstorm. A shot popped past her, high; one streaked back. "Hold!" Khym yelled, and: "Hold it!" Kohan Chanur echoed, two male voices that rumbled and rattled off the corridor walls in one frozen and terrible instant where slaughter looked likely.

But they were kids who had run up on them.