Warhorse

by Timothy Zahn

  The pilot chuckled. Like the shuttle he, too, was unspectacular: a middle-aged lieutenant who’d apparently reached the peak of his capabilities years before and had just sort of stayed there. Unlike the hardware, though, there was something more beneath his surface; some quietly flickering flame of excitement or optimism that official contempt and slashed budgets had been unable to dampen.

  Roman had seen such borderline-religious faith before among the more rabid pro-Tampy supporters. He had yet to decide whether he found it encouraging or frightening.

  “Not to worry, sir,” the pilot assured him. “The Amity is a beauty—brand-new, top-line in-system freighter, modified down centerline and out. You’ll have better equipment and accommodations than most anything flying. Certainly better than anything I’ve ever flown on.”

  Which might not, of course, be saying much. “Glad to hear it,” Roman said, eyes searching the view out the shuttle’s control bubble. “Can we see it from here?”

  “Just barely, sir,” the other said, touching the wraparound viewport. “That’s Amity over there—that line of reflected sunlight right at the edge of the corral.”

  Roman frowned. “That’s part of the corral? I assumed that was the corral over there.” He pointed thirty degrees further to the left, where the edge of a cylindrical space station was visible in the dim red light. Beside it, the shapes of three space horses could be seen, with a small ship trailing behind each. Couriers, almost certainly; the Tampies had consistently refused the Cordonale’s offer of tachyon transceivers to handle their interstellar communication.

  “Oh, that’s just the central part of it,” the lieutenant explained. “The Focus, they call it. It holds the administrative offices, quarters for on-duty Handlers, and the medical/scientific study center. The corral enclosure itself extends a good three hundred kilometers further in both directions.” He grinned. “Plenty of room for even space horses to get their exercise.”

  Still frowning, Roman studied the indicated area. Sure enough, now that he was looking for them he could see a few space horses drifting individually around in what looked for all the world like empty space. “What keeps them in, netting mesh?”

  “Mainly, sir. It’s a double thickness of netting, wrapped around a geodesic support framework that keeps it from losing its shape.”

  Roman squinted at the dim red star. “So what keeps them from simply Jumping out? The fact that they’re at a low gravitational potential this close in to the star?”

  “That’s part of it, sir,” the other said. “Jumps are between equipotential surfaces, and practically any star the space horses can see from here is a lot bigger and hotter. That’s why the Tampies put their corral in this system—the sun is cool but very dense, and any Jump from the enclosure would put the space horse pretty close to its target star. But there’s more.” He did something to the navigational display, and a schematic of a section of netting appeared. “Those nodules—at the framework intersections, here and here—those are the ends of lightpipes. The other ends are connected to lenses pointed outward at particular stars.”

  “Uh-huh,” Roman said as understanding came. “So the space horses can look in and see a normal stellar spectrum, but because they aren’t actual stars there’s nothing there for them to lock onto and Jump to. However the hell it is they do that.”

  “Right, sir,” the lieutenant nodded. “Also, the fake starlight tends to mask the real stars behind them—sort of an extra bonus. Simple but elegant.”

  Roman felt his lip twitch. Simple but elegant—the standard stock phrase used by pro-Tampies to describe Tampy technology. Simpleminded and primitive was the equally standard anti-Tampy retort. “Well, it obviously works,” Roman conceded. “How’d you learn all this stuff, anyway?”

  The other’s forehead creased slightly. “I asked the Tampies, of course. They’re extremely eager to teach us their ways.”

  “Provided one genuinely wants to learn?”

  The other threw him an odd look. “Well, yes, sir,” he said. “You don’t think they’d force their viewpoint down our throats, do you?”

  “They do a fair job of it on the shared worlds,” Roman said, moved by a strange impulse to play devil’s advocate. “Passive resistance is still resistance.”

  It was as if someone had flipped a switch on the lieutenant’s personality. “Yes, sir,” he said, his tone abruptly stiff and formal.

  Roman let the cool silence hang in the air a moment longer. “You know, Lieutenant,” he said, keeping his voice conversational, “a person who can’t understand both sides of an argument hasn’t got a chance of cutting through all the emotion and rhetoric and finding common ground.”

  “There may not be any common ground on this one. Sir.”

  “There’s always common ground,” Roman said bluntly. “And it can always be found if someone’s willing to search for it. Always.”

  He watched the other’s profile, saw the stiffness and anger fade. “Understood, sir,” he muttered. He glanced over at Roman, and a tentative smile brushed his lips. “In this case, I take it, that someone is you?”

  A half-crew’s worth of human beings: thoroughly— perhaps even violently—polarized in their feelings for or against Tampies…who would be making up the other half of the crew. “Perhaps,” he said. “Peacemaker is certainly one of the two possible roles I’ve been cast for here.”

  The lieutenant frowned. “What’s the other?”

  Roman grimaced. “Scapegoat.”

  The woman was tall and slender, in her mid-forties, with graying dark hair, piercing eyes, and an air of confidence about her as she glided easily to the center of Roman’s office. “Lieutenant Erin Kennedy, Captain,” she identified herself. “Reporting for preflight interview as ordered.”

  “Welcome aboard, Lieutenant,” Roman nodded to her. “Or should I say ‘Commander’?”

  Her eyebrows twitched. “ ‘Lieutenant’ will be fine, sir,” she said. “I was told that the reduction in rank wouldn’t be mentioned in my file.”

  “It wasn’t,” Roman told her. “It happens that one of my friends served on a ship where you were exec some years back, and your name stuck with me.” He cocked an eyebrow. “I presume the demotion was voluntary?”

  “Yes, sir,” she said. “I was originally slated to be Amity’s exec, but at the last minute I was bounced—one faction of the Senate battling with another, I gather, and my supporters lost. That left me the choice of either accepting a demotion to second officer or not coming at all.”

  “I see.” Roman eyed her thoughtfully. “And riding with the Amity was that important to you?”

  “Yes, sir,” she nodded. “But not for the reason everyone else signed on.”

  “You don’t particularly care one way or the other about Tampies.” It was a statement, not a question. Kennedy’s psych profile had put her almost dead-center neutral on her feelings about Tampies, a glaring anomaly among Amity’s emotion-churned majority.

  She shrugged, an infinitesimal movement of her shoulders. “Not really, sir. Though it might be more accurate to just say that I know enough for the things I like and the things I dislike to balance out.”

  In many ways an echo of Roman’s own feelings about the aliens. Fleetingly, he wished Kennedy hadn’t lost in her bid to be Amity’s exec. “You see yourself as a peacemaker between the Pros and Antis, then?” he probed gently.

  She smiled faintly. “And get shot at by both sides? Not me, sir. Actually, the main reason I wanted to come was for the hands-on experience of flying a space horse. With commercial shipping companies already experimenting with space horse-and-Tampy rentals, this looks to be the direction interstar travel is going.”

  “Perhaps.” Or perhaps not; the handful of companies who had actually tried hiring space horses instead of using Mitsuushi-equipped ships had indeed raked in substantial profits…and had lost customer goodwill in roughly equal measure in the process. At the moment it was considered a toss-up as to the directio
n the private-sector experiment would ultimately go.

  Just one more burden, Roman thought sourly, resting on his and Amity’s shoulders. “Space horse experience, at any rate, I think I can safely guarantee you. Have you had a chance to look through our voyage plan yet?”

  “Of course, sir.” She seemed surprised he would have to ask. “I’ve also read the initial survey reports on the four planets we’ll be looking over. Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Delta, the reports designate them.”

  “The designations weren’t my idea,” Roman assured her dryly. “I would have picked something with a little more class.”

  She smiled again. “Yes, I’ve had some experience with bureaucracies and report factories myself, sir,” she said. “One question, if I may: everything in those reports came via the Tampies?”

  “Right. We’ll be the first humans to visit any of the four systems.”

  “So everything in them—such as it is—is written from the Tampy point of view.”

  “It’s something to keep in mind when we get there,” Roman agreed. “Any other comments on either the plan or the reports?”

  She considered. “Not really, sir. I did notice several places where the timetable or even the mission plan itself seemed a bit vague. May I assume that was deliberate?”

  “You may indeed,” Roman nodded. “I wanted to leave us enough room to play things by ear. Don’t forget, Lieutenant, that this is the first time something like this has been tried. You’re going to be helping to make history here.”

  Or at least a footnote to history, her look seemed to say. “Yes, sir,” she said instead, her voice suitably neutral.

  “We’ll be examining the voyage plan at regular intervals once we’re actually underway,” Roman continued. “I’ll look forward to your input then, and at any other time you have a comment, of course. So.” He glanced at his desktop display, checking to see if there were any other questions he’d wanted to ask her. “How’s your organization of piloting staff and helmers going? Any problems cropped up yet?”

  “Nothing significant,” she shook her head. “Certainly not when you consider the potential for psychological clashes aboard.”

  “Yes, some of that’s already surfaced back in engineering,” Roman said grimly.

  “I’ve heard,” she nodded. “I don’t think you’ll have to worry about anything that bad in the helmer staff. I’ve had to handle worse conflicts on some of the warships I’ve served on.”

  “Good,” Roman said. “Then unless you have any questions, I’ll let you get back to your duties.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said. “Are we still scheduled for an 0800 departure tomorrow?”

  “Provided the Tampies are all aboard and have the space horse tethered to us by then,” Roman said, suppressing a flash of annoyance. The Tampies, he’d discovered to his mild chagrin, had their own idea as to what constituted top speed, a level that was considerably below human expectations. “You can assume we’re on schedule unless and until you hear anything to the contrary.”

  “My people will be ready whenever you need us.”

  “I’m sure they will. Thank you for coming by, Lieutenant. Dismissed.”

  She glided to the door and exited, and Roman turned with a sigh to his desktop display. A hundred twenty-three interviews down; just one more to go…but this last one was likely to be a beaut.

  Amity’s exec. The man who Senate infighting had succeeded in putting in as second in command, despite the record and obvious competence of Erin Kennedy. The man who, unlike the rest of the ship’s officers and crew, had arrived barely twenty-four hours before the ship’s scheduled departure, too late to help with any of the pre-flight preparations.

  The man who’d brought with him a personal file and psych profile that practically simmered with Tampy-hatred.

  It was, unfortunately, the kind of politically-twisted logic that Roman should have expected. The Senate’s anti-Tampy faction would have demanded that Roman’s own pro-Tampy inclinations be balanced by an opposite bias in Amity’s executive officer, and it was clear from Kennedy’s own comments that such a demand had indeed been made and yielded to. Still, for the past few days he’d dared to hope that they might have given up that concession at the last minute; that the continuing border troubles would have convinced them that they could safely give Amity a fair trial without the need to stack the deck. Clearly, they hadn’t been interested in taking that chance.

  And coming at the last minute like this, there wasn’t a lot Roman could do about it. Keying the man’s file onto his display, he scanned it one last time to refresh his memory, then touched the intercom switch. “Is the exec there yet?” he asked the yeoman manning the outer desk.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Mentally, Roman braced himself. “Send him in.”

  The door slid open and a young man stepped through, moving with somewhat less certainty and grace than had Erin Kennedy before him. Less experience with ships in low-rotation mode, Roman noted automatically, filing the datum away for possible future reference. “Welcome aboard, Commander,” he said. “I’m Captain Haml Roman.”

  “Lieutenant Commander Chayne Ferrol,” the other identified himself, his voice formal, stiff, and cool. “I’m looking forward to serving with you, Captain.”

  Ferrol had argued long and hard with the Senator and his friends about this assignment—had brought up a hundred reasons why it wouldn’t work, a hundred more why he didn’t want to serve under the man who’d come within a hair of nailing him and the Scapa Flow three months earlier. They’d assured him there would be no problem, convinced him he was the only man for the job…but now, standing there under Roman’s unblinking gaze, Ferrol wished he hadn’t given in. Those eyes were far too intelligent, far too discerning, and for that first awful moment Ferrol was sure the captain somehow knew exactly who he was. He braced himself for the accusation as Roman opened his mouth— “We’re looking forward to having you aboard, Commander,” the other said.

  The tightness in Ferrol’s chest eased, and he began to breathe again. So much for paranoia, he thought, annoyed with himself for jumping so easily to conclusions. “Thank you, Captain,” he said. “My apologies for arriving at the last minute like this.”

  Roman waved the apology aside. “I imagine the fault lies with those who sent you.” His eyes dipped to his desk display. “You’ll forgive me if I say that at twenty-four you’re a bit young for your rank.”

  “The commission is honorary,” Ferrol said. That was technically supposed to be a secret, but Roman could hardly have failed to figure it out. “I have, however, had six full years in the merchant fleet, two of them as captain of a small ship of my own. I think you’ll find me fully capable of serving as Amity’s executive officer.”

  “Oh, I’m sure you are,” Roman said mildly. “It’s just that your file is oddly vague on these details, and I wanted to get some of them cleared up. The size of your former command, for instance.”

  “It was a small interstellar tug with a crew of fifteen,” Ferrol told him.

  Roman nodded. “I know the type. Close-knit crew, everyone friends, captain basically God—and everyone likes it or quits at the next port. There are a lot of people who think that’s the ideal starship size.”

  His voice was casual, almost bantering…but his eyes were anything but. “It would probably save time, Captain,” Ferrol said evenly, “if you’d just go ahead and ask me why I’m here.”

  Roman cocked an eyebrow. “Oh, I know why you’re here, Commander. What I want to ask is why you hate the Tampies so much.”

  Even eight years later, the memory of it was still a hot needle beneath his skin. “You have my file there,” Ferrol said, forcing his voice to remain calm. “You should be able to figure it out.”

  Roman studied him. “I gather you’re referring to the Prometheus treaty.”

  “Treaty?” Ferrol snorted. “That was hardly a treaty, Captain. It was an act of war.” He nodded curtly at Roman’s desk display. “R
ead the official papers sometime, Captain, if you can manage to dig them out of the Starforce’s snowpile. Read the fairy tale about how the Tampies decided one day that they wanted Prometheus—never mind that we’d just spent three years working damned hard to build a colony there. Read how the Senate meekly agreed and sent the Defiance to forcibly take us off.” His voice was starting to shake, and he took a careful breath to calm it. “I doubt you’ll be able to read that having their life’s goal kicked out from under them was what ruined my parents’ health and killed them two years later. Official papers don’t usually bother with trivialities like that.”

  “I’m sorry,” Roman said.

  Even through the blur of emotion Ferrol could tell the other meant it. “I’m not after sympathy, Captain,” he growled. “And before you get the wrong idea, I’m not after revenge, either. What I want is for the Cordonale to understand the Tampies the way I do.”

  “And that is…?”

  Ferrol locked eyes with him. “There’re two small facts that the official version conveniently leaves out. First, that it wasn’t the Defiance’s crewers who forced us out of our homes and off our world. It was a Tampy task force. A very efficient, very cold, very military task force. And second…that they forced us out a full four days before the date that’s on the treaty.”

  For a moment Roman was silent. “You’re saying,” he said at last, “that the Tampies jumped the gun?”

  “I’m saying,” Ferrol corrected grimly, “that they took unilateral action against us…and that the Senate backed off and let them get away with it.”

  Roman rubbed his thumb and forefinger together gently. “Is it possible you could have been mistaken as to the timing involved? After all, you were fairly young at the—”