She sat and listened a time in her cabin, finally contacted Geran belowdecks and turned over the monitoring to her. “Faha,” was Geran’s only comment.

“Hilfy knows,” Pyanfar said.

“So,” Geran murmured. And then: “I’m on. I’ve got it.”

Pyanfar signed off and sighed heavily, sitting on the edge of her bed, arms on her knees — finally took a mild sedative and undressed and curled up in the bowlshaped bed for a precious while of oblivion, trying not to think of emergencies and contingencies and the horde of kif prowling about the system.

That did not work, but the sedative did. She went under like a stone into a pond and came out again startled by the alarm — but it was only the timer going off, and she lay in the bedclothes with her heart slowly stepping back down to normal.

“Any developments?” she asked lowerdeck op by com from her bedside, not even having crawled from beneath the sheets, but thrusting an arm out to push the bottom on the console. “Anything happened while I was off?”

“No, captain.” Haral’s voice answered her. A shift change had occurred in her off time. “The situation seems to be temporary stalemate. Station is broadcasting only operational chatter now. We aren’t getting much from the kif. Nothing alarming. We’d have waked you if there was news.”

So their orders ran. Interpretations of emergency varied; but Haral was the wisest head in the crew, the canniest. Pyanfar lay there staring at the ceiling a moment and finally decided she might take her time. There was nowhere to rush. The rib muscles she had strained in g force had stiffened. “What about systems check? Has anyone had time to get to that?”

“We’re still running the board, captain, but it looks good all the way. The blowout was absolutely clean and the recalibration was right almost to the hair.”

“Better luck than we deserve. What’s the Outsider up to?”

“Back at work at the keyboard. Chur and Geran are off now, and Tirun’s on, but I didn’t feel, by your leave, captain, that Tirun belonged in there with him in her condition, and I’ve had all I can do with visual checks on the separation readouts — again by your leave.”

“You were right.”

“He’s slept a bit. He hasn’t made any trouble… gods, he worked till he nearly dropped over, Chur said; and he’s back at it again this shift, shaky as he is. We fed him right away when he woke up, and he ate it all and went back to his drills, polite as you please. I’ve got his roomcom and his comp monitored from the op station, so we’ve at least got an ear toward him.”

“Huh.” Pyanfar ran a hand through her mane and scowled up at the brightening room light. The alarm had started the day cycle in the room. “Let the Outsider work; if it falls over, then let it rest. How’s Tirun making it?”

“Limping, sore, and working with the leg propped up. She’s still white around the nose.”

“I’m all right,” Tirun’s voice cut in, usurping the same mike.

“You go off,” Pyanfar said, “anytime you feel you ought to. We’re dead drifting, and someone else can take up the slack if those first checks are run. You see to it, Haral. Anything else I should know?”

“That’s the sum of it,” Haral said. “We’re all right so far.”

“Huh,” she said again, got out of the spring-held sheets and cut the com off, pulled on her black trousers and put on her belt, her bracelet, and her several earrings — shook the ear to settle them and gave her mane and beard a quick comb into order. Vanity be hanged. She left the cabin and paid a short visit to the galley, ate a solitary breakfast, feeling somewhat better. She turned the pager to the monitor channel in the meanwhile, listened to the chatter which was reaching them and found it much what Haral had said, a lull in events which in itself contained worrisome possibilities. By now the kif had surely figured out what had happened, and by now they would be hunting in stealth — hence the quiet. The Pride had undergone a great deal of lateral drift from their entry point, but if she were that kif captain, trying to reckon the arrival point of a cargoless fugitive on a jump almost too much for the ship… she would calculate a fringe area jump on a straight string from Meetpoint’s mass to that of Urtur. And that would fine the hunting zone down considerably, from the vast tracts of Urtur’s lenslike system — to a specific zone on the fringe, and the direction of systemic drift, and certain places where a ship seeking cover might move. Time was the other factor; time defined the segment of space in which they might logically be drifting, two points-within-which, which then might be fined down tighter and tighter.

Time, time, and time.

They were running out of it.

She shut off the pager, went back to her cabin, spread out the charts of the last effort and picked up a comp link of her own, started as precise calculations as she could make on the options they had left.

From the hani ship — she interrupted herself to query Haral and Tirun on the point — there had been nothing during the past watch. No transmission at all. Starchaser would be feverishly busy at her own business, stripping down, not provoking anything at this juncture.

Waiting. All incoming transmission indicated that ships of all kinds were moving toward Urtur Station with all possible haste, a journey of days for some ships, and of weeks for others of the insystem operators… but even the gesture spoke to the kif, that the mahe would defend Urtur Station itself, abandoning other points to whatever the kif wished to do. The incoming jumpships had long since made it in, snugged close: armed ships, those… but one at least was stsho, and its arms were minor and its will to fight was virtually nonexistent.

Again, she reckoned, if she were that kif in command, those insystem ships would not go in unchallenged. For all those incoming from the suspect vector where a hani ship lay hidden, there would be closer scrutiny — to make sure a clever hani did not drift in disguised with the rest of the inbound traffic. ID transmission would be checked, identifications run through comp; ships might be boarded… all manner of unpleasantness. Most of them would pass visual inspection: there was precious little resemblance between a gut-blown jump freighter with its huge vanes, and a lumpy miner-processor whose propulsion was all insystem and hardly enough to move it along with its tow full.

Only the miners who might have had the bad luck to come in from the farthest edge of The Pride’s possible location… they might be stopped, have their records scanned, their comp stripped — their persons subjected to gross discomforts until they would volunteer information, if the kif were true to nature.

“Someone’s jumped, captain.”

Tirun’s voice, out of the com unit. Pyanfar dumped a complex calculation from her mind and reached for the reply bar, twisting in her chair. “Who? Where?”

“Just got the characteristic ghost, that’s all. I don’t know. It was farside of system and long ago. No further data; but it fits within our timeline. That close.”

“Give me the image.”

Tirun passed it onto the screen. Nadir range and badly muddled pickup: there was too much debris in the way.

“Right,” she said to Tirun. “No knowing.”

“Out?” Tirun asked.

“Out,” Pyanfar confirmed her, and keyed out the image as well, stared morosely at the charts and the figures which, no matter how twisted, kept coming up the same: that there was no way to singlejump beyond Urtur, however reduced in mass they were now.

That jump-ghost which had just arrived might have been someone successfully running for it. More ships than that one might have jumped from here, lost in the gas and debris of Urtur’s environs.

But quite, quite likely that ship was kif, a surplus ship moving on to arrange ambush at the most logical jump point that they might use.