Chanur's Homecoming Read Online Free PDF Page B

sorting through that crazy sequence, something small and black ran right over her foot on its way into her room. "Hyaa!" she yelled in revulsion, and the kif dived for the wall beside her as she swung to keep a bead not on the thing but on the kif. A hurtling mass of her friends overtook her from behind-not to help her, to her vast bewilderment: they grabbed her and the gun, while the kif flinched and pasted himself tight to the wall, making himself the smallest possible target.
    "Chur," her sister Geran was pleading with her, and she supposed that it was Geran prying the gun loose from her fingers: she was dizzy and her vision fuzzed. She heard her cousin Tirun's voice, and human jabber, which was her friend Tully; and she dazedly let herself be dragged one step and another into the room, someone else taking the skein of tubes. A bell was going off: the infernal machine was telling off on her, that she was stressed.
    "Gods rot it," she cried, remembering. "There's something in here." And then she remembered that she had seen little black things before, on the bridge, and could not remember whether they were hallucinations or not, or whether her sister took her seriously. It was embarrassing to see hallucinations. And the cursed machine kept pouring sedative into her, so that they were going to leave her alone in here and drugged, with whatever-it-was: she did not want that either.
    "Look under the bed," Geran said, while Geran was putting her back into it, and she could not remember where the gun had gotten to, which was against ship's rules, which was against all the regulations, to lose track of a firearm; and there was a kif trying to crawl under her bed. A sweat broke out on her, cold on her ears and nose and fingertips. "Where's my gun?" she asked hazily, trying to sit up again; and "There it is!" someone shouted from the floor.
    "My gods," Chur murmured, and her sister put her flat on her back again. She blinked, blinked again in the crazed notion that there was a kif on his hands and knees at her bedside and people were trying to get her hallucination out from under her bed.
    "Sorry," Geran said fervently. "Stay down. We've got it."
    "You're crazy," Chur said. "You're stark crazy, all of you." Because none of it made sense.
    But something let out a squeal under her bed, and something bumped against the secure-held braces, and there was an ammonia smell to the room which was no illusion, but a kif's real presence.
    "He got," said Tully's voice, and he loomed up by her bedside. "Chur, you all right?"
    "Sure," Chur said. She remembered at least where she was now, tied to a machine in na Khym's cabin because she was, since the kif had shot her on a dock at Kshshti, too sick to be down in crew quarters; and Goldtooth had given them this fine medical equipment when he had met them here at Kefk, which was before the docks blew up in a firefight and she had been holding the bridge singlehanded when the little black things started coming and going like a nasty slinking nightmare. There was a kif aboard, his name was Skkukuk, he was a slave and a gift from the hakkikt and he stood there with his black snout atwitch and his Dinner clutched in both bony hands as he stared at her. She curled her lip and laid her cars back, head scantly lifted. "Out!"
    The kif hissed and clicked and retreated in profound offense, teeth bared, and Chur bared hers, coming up on her free elbow.
    "Easy," Geran said, pushing her back; and Tirun chased the kif on out, Haral's sister Tirun, big enough to make a kif think twice about any argument, and owing that slight limp to a kifish gun some years back: Chur felt herself safe if Geran was by her and Tirun was between her and the kif. She looked up at Tully's gold-bearded face and blinked placidly.
    "Gods-be kif," Geran said. "Readout jumping like crazy- Tully, here, get this gun out of here."
    "No," Chur said. "Drawer. Put it back in the drawer, Tully."
    "Out of here," Geran said.
    "Gods rot," Chur