Free Pride of Chanur by C. J. Cherryh Page B

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.
    Rot Akukkakk. She recalled the flat black eyes, red-rimmed, the long gray face, the voice very