Warhorse

by Timothy Zahn

  “I was almost sixteen,” Ferrol cut him off. “Quite old enough to know the months and days of the week, thank you—and to know how to translate local dates into Earth Standard ones.” He glared at the other. “There’s no mistake, Captain. The public image the Tampies portray of themselves as peace-loving, passive friends of nature is a lie. I know it, the Senate knows it…and the rest of the Cordonale deserves to know it, too.”

  “And how far do you intend to go to prove it?” Roman asked bluntly.

  Ferrol took a deep breath, dragging his anger back under control. “You mistake my intentions, sir,” he said evenly. “I’m not here to goad the Tampies into showing their true character. I won’t have to—being locked up in close proximity to a shipful of humans for three months ought to do it for me.” He locked eyes with the captain. “I’m here only to make sure that that evidence doesn’t somehow get itself snowbound.”

  “I see,” Roman nodded. If he was offended by the implied slur on his integrity, he made no sign of it. “Then there’s just one more question I have to ask: given your feelings about the Tampies, are you certain you’re willing to trust your life to them?”

  Ferrol frowned. “In what way would I be doing that?”

  Roman frowned in turn. “You didn’t know? The Amity’s a modified in-system freighter, without a Mitsuushi StarDrive. All interstellar travel will be via the space horse…and the systems we’ll be going to are all well beyond normal Mitsuushi range.”

  Something cold settled into the pit of Ferrol’s stomach. “I wasn’t told that, no,” he murmured. All travel via their tame space horse…and only the Tampies able to control or communicate with the giant creature. “That seems…a bit foolhardy, sir,” he managed.

  “Perhaps.” Roman was giving him an all too understanding look. “Under the circumstances, if you’d like to resign the post, I’ll certainly understand.”

  Ferrol glared back, a flash of anger burning away the fear. That grandfatherly expression, reducing him to a child again—“Thank you, sir, but I’ll be staying.”

  Roman seemed to measure him with his eyes, then nodded. “Very well, Commander,” he said gravely. “Welcome aboard the Amity. We leave at 0800 tomorrow; I’ll want you on the bridge two hours before that.”

  “Understood, Captain.”

  “I’ll see you then. Dismissed.”

  It was a long walk from the captain’s office aft to the officers’ section, a walk made all the more difficult by the subtly shifting weight and Coriolis effects Ferrol had to contend with. It was a standard enough procedure, certainly: altering a ship’s rotational speed was a quick way to simultaneously test the spin jets, flywheel, and structural integrity. But he wasn’t in the mood to be lenient with standard procedures. Even ones that worked.

  In politics, lying was apparently one of the standard procedures. It often worked, too.

  They’d lied to him. Deliberately. A lie of omission, but a lie nonetheless—and what really killed him was that part of the blame had to sit squarely on his own neck. Not once had it even occurred to him to ask whether the Amity would have a Mitsuushi backup.

  Damn them.

  He reached his cabin and went in, privacy-sealing the door behind him and flopping down on the bed. Beneath him, the cabin’s tiny port showed a dizzying panorama as the stars swept past in time to Amity’s rotation; but it was to the side bulkhead that he found his attention drawn. A normal, everyday bulkhead…except that, by an accident of room assignments, Ferrol’s cabin was at the edge of the human half of the ship.

  Beyond that wall—six centimeters of metal and soundproofing away—was the Tampy section.

  Tampies. Misshapen faces, stupid-looking tartan neckerchiefs, infuriatingly whining voices, strange and vaguely nauseating odors. Bio-engineered “technology” which just barely deserved the name. High-minded ideals, noble-sounding words…and quietly ruthless actions. Memories flooded back, sharp and clear, and for a teetering moment the fears of Prometheus loomed over him like thunderclouds.

  But this wasn’t Prometheus…and he was no longer a helpless sixteen-year-old.

  No longer helpless at all.

  Rolling over, he reached down and pulled open the closest of the underbed storage drawers, withdrawing a thin black box from beneath a pile of shirts. He wouldn’t have put it past Roman to have had his luggage examined…but, no, the indicator built into the lock showed it hadn’t been touched. He tapped in the proper code, heard the gentle snick of the lock, and lifted the lid.

  He pulled out the compact needle pistol first, making sure it pointed away from him as he laid it arm’s length away on the bed. The spare clip came out next, along with the special permit for him to carry the gun. Beneath the hardware was the false bottom; and beneath that was the envelope.

  The gun was a conversation piece. The envelope was his weapon.

  There was a single line of instructions on the front of the envelope, written in the Senator’s small and geometrically precise script: To be used when deemed necessary. Ferrol gazed at the words, letting the Senator’s calm strength and infinite confidence flow from the handwriting into him. No, this wasn’t Prometheus and helplessness. This was the Amity…and the chance to turn the Tampies’ quiet undeclared war right back on them.

  If he was lucky. Somehow, Ferrol thought he would be.

  For a long minute after Ferrol left, Roman sat quietly in his chair, gazing at the door and listening to the sound of his heart pounding in his chest. He’d expected anti-Tampy from the other, of course—virulent anti-Tampy, even.

  He hadn’t expected absolute ice-packed hatred.

  Even now, with Ferrol gone from his sight, the memory of the emotional turmoil he’d sensed in the younger man made him wince. Ferrol’s pain and anger were as fresh as if he’d been thrown off Prometheus only yesterday, the emotions kept alive for eight years by the certain knowledge that the Senate had lied through its collective teeth about what had happened to the colony.

  About that, at least, he was right. Roman had seen the official documents.

  He dropped his gaze to the intercom, feeling temptation tugging at him. A single touch of a button—a short, probably very painful, conversation—and Ferrol would be gone. The Antis’ time bomb gone from his ship, the faction itself absolutely furious at him—

  And their revenge would be to scuttle Amity. And with it perhaps mankind’s last chance to stay out of war with the Tampies.

  Roman closed his eyes tiredly. No, it was too risky. For now, at least, the only prudent course would be to play along with Ferrol. Give him all the leeway he wanted…and hope that whenever he made his move—whatever that move was—that there would be a chance to block him.

  And until that happened, Roman still had a ship to run. Putting Ferrol out of his mind as best he could, he keyed his display to the status report menu and got back to work.

  And tried not to notice how remarkably similar his wait-and-see plan was to the pro-Tampy Senators’ own method of dealing with the problem.

  Chapter 4

  AT PRECISELY 0812 THE next morning, the Amity cast off its moorings on the Tampy corral. Trailing a kilometer behind their space horse, Pegasus, on deceptively thin tether lines, the ship headed out into deep space.

  Roman had already known that the view from outside a space horse ship was impressive. What he hadn’t expected was that the ride was even more so.

  It was quieter, obviously; but the reality of it far outstripped the expectation. Over the years Roman had grown accustomed to the many levels of noise a ship’s fusion drive was capable of putting out, from the dull but still permeating drone of standby to the steady thunder of full acceleration. It was a sound that never ceased as long as the ship was under power, and to be pulling a steady 0.6-gee acceleration without even a whisper of that familiar noise was awe-inspiring and just a little scary.

  No drive noise also meant no deck vibration, of course; less obviously, it also meant none of the gentle rolling motion that
came of the computer sensing and compensating for slight imbalances in thrust between the different drive nozzles. It was, in fact, for all the world like sitting in a full-size simulator back at the Academy.

  “We’ve cleared the far edge of the corral enclosure,” Kennedy reported from the helm. “Signaling the Handler to increase acceleration to 0.9 gee.”

  Roman nodded acknowledgment. He’d rather expected Kennedy to take the helm herself on this leg of the trip, and he hadn’t been disappointed. Clearly, she was serious about getting space horse experience. “What’s ETA to the scheduled Jump point?” he asked her.

  “One hour twenty minutes,” she told him as their weight began a smooth increase. “That is, if we stick to our current minimum-energy course.”

  “We’re in no particular hurry, Lieutenant,” Roman told her. “Besides, I want to put Pegasus through a variety of maneuvers during the voyage. Minimum energy, minimum time, straight-line—you know the list.”

  Ferrol half turned from his station. “I trust you’re not expecting the space horse to run into some kind of limit,” he offered. “I’ve heard of them pulling five gees without any noticeable strain.”

  Roman shook his head. “I’m not looking for limits, Commander. Just differences.” He turned his attention to the man at the scanner station. “Lieutenant Marlowe, how’s the signal from the contact feed repeater?”

  “Coming in strong, sir,” Riddick Marlowe confirmed. “I’ve got it going to two separate recorders, as per orders.”

  Roman nodded and turned back, to find a thoughtful frown on Ferrol’s face. “Comment, Commander?” he invited.

  Ferrol hesitated, then shook his head minutely. “No, I’m wrong,” he said, almost as if to himself. “If recording the traces from an amplifier helmet was all there was to it, someone would have compiled a library of them long before now.”

  Roman nodded. “Agreed. It’s apparently not just a matter of getting a list of the right commands—the direct and immediate touch of a Tampy mind seems to be necessary for proper space horse control.” He cocked an eyebrow. “You have an interest in space horse control?”

  “Of course,” Ferrol said. “And so should anyone else. If humanity’s ever going to expand farther than a few dozen light-years from home, we’re either going to need our own space horses or a lot of redesign of the Mitsuushi.”

  “Or else a long-term rental agreement with the Tampies,” Kennedy put in.

  Ferrol’s eyes flicked to her. “Renting is fine in its place,” he said evenly. “I don’t think full-scale colonization fits in that column.”

  “Certainly not if they’d want to sit over the colonists’ shoulders and complain about their development schemes,” Marlowe agreed, almost under his breath. “Sometimes I swear the Tampies think of us as a bunch of eight-year-olds, with them as our mothers.”

  Kennedy chuckled. Ferrol didn’t. “You may have a point, Lieutenant,” Roman told Marlowe. “Bear in mind, though, that occasionally we do indeed act like eight-year-olds.”

  “Agreed, Captain,” Marlowe shrugged. His eyes flicked to Roman’s face, as if trying to gauge his new commander’s tolerance to bridge chatter. “I’d argue in turn that most of the time that kind of behavior comes about because we have a sense of humor, something the Tampies don’t seem to know anything about.”

  “Perhaps,” Roman conceded. Whatever form the Tampy sense of humor took—if they had one at all—it had so far managed to remain hidden.

  And speaking of Tampies and things hidden…

  Unstrapping, he got to his feet. “Commander, you have the bridge,” he told Ferrol, making one final check of the instruments. “I expect to be back before we Jump.”

  “Acknowledged, sir,” Ferrol said. “May I ask where you’ll be?”

  “Port side,” Roman told him. “It’s about time I paid a courtesy call on the Tampies.”

  There were four connections between Amity’s human and Tampy halves, each equipped with a standard air lock. Beside the lock was a rack of filter masks; choosing one, Roman put it on, making sure the flexible seals fitted snugly around nose and cheeks and jaw. He’d heard stories of what Tampies in an enclosed space smelled like, and it would be embarrassing to gag on his first visit. The air lock went through its cycle, replacing most of the human-scented air with a purer oxygen/nitrogen mix, signaling ready after perhaps thirty seconds. Taking a careful breath through the filter mask, Roman keyed the door to open.

  Beyond it was another world.

  For a minute he just stood there, still inside the lock, taking it all in. The lighting was muted, indirect, and restful; the air cool and dry, with wisps of movement that reminded Roman somehow of forest breezes. Various art-type items—small sculptures as well as flats—were scattered at irregular intervals across the walls and ceiling. Irregular; yet despite the lack of symmetry, the whole arrangement still somehow managed to maintain a unified, balanced look. Every square centimeter of wall and deck space not otherwise used was covered with soft-looking green carpet. The latter, at least, Roman recognized from Amity’s spec sheets: a particularly hardy variety of moss which had been adopted by the Tampies as a low-tech air filtration and renewal system. But even here, expectation was incomplete—instead of something with the faintly disgusting appearance of terrestrial mosses, the Tampy version looked far more like just some exotic synthetic carpeting.

  The pro-Tampy apologists often claimed that the aliens’ aesthetic sense was not only highly developed but also entirely accessible to humans. If this was a representative sample, Roman thought, that claim was an accurate one.

  “Rro-maa?” a grating voice came from outside the lock.

  This was it. Steeling himself, Roman stepped out onto the moss—it yielded to his feet just like carpeting, too—and turned in the direction the voice had come from.

  And for the first time in his life was face-to-face with a Tampy.

  It was, actually, something of a disappointment. What with the conflict between races that had slowly been building over the past ten years—and with the contentions of people like Ferrol that the Tampies were a looming threat to humanity—Roman had apparently built up a subconscious image of Tampies as creatures who, despite being shorter than humans, nevertheless projected an aura of strength or even menace.

  The short part he had right; but the rest of it was totally off target. The Tampy whose misshapen face was turned up to him was thin and delicate-looking, his narrow shoulders hunched slightly forward in a caricature of old age, his hands crossed palms-up at his waist. His skin was pale—a sickly, bedridden sort of pale—and the cranial hair tufts poking out at irregular intervals looked for all the world like bunches of fine copper wire.

  The overall image was one of almost absurd frailty, and in that first moment it seemed utterly incredible to Roman that such creatures should even be taken seriously, much less considered a threat.

  And then he remembered Prometheus…and the half-comical picture vanished in a puff of smoke. No, the Tampies were indeed creatures to be taken seriously.

  Belatedly, he focused on the yellow-orange tartan neckerchief knotted loosely around the Tampy’s neck. That particular color combination belonged to—“Rrin-saa?” he tentatively identified the other.

  “I am,” the Tampy acknowledged. “You are Rro-maa?”

  “Yes, I’m Captain Roman,” Roman nodded. “I wasn’t expecting to be met here.”

  The Tampy made a quick fingers-to-ear gesture—the aliens’ equivalent of a shrug, Roman remembered. “Do you wish to see all?”

  It was, actually, a tempting offer. If the rest of the Tampies’ decor was as unusual and imaginative as that in the corridors, it might well be worth taking the complete tour. But that would have to wait for another time. “No, thank you, Rrin-saa,” he said. “For now, I’d just like to see your command center.”

  “I do not understand.”

  “Command center. Control room?—where you keep track of the Amity’s movement and
issue any necessary orders.”

  “I do not issue orders, Rro-maa,” Rrin-saa said. “I do not rule.”

  For a moment Roman was tongue-tied. “Ah…I’m sorry. I thought you were the one in charge of this half of the ship.”

  Rrin-saas’s mouth opened wide, as if in parody of a human smile—the Tampy equivalent of shaking his head. “I speak for all,” Rrin-saa said. “I do not rule.”

  “I see,” Roman said, although he didn’t, exactly. Anarchy, or even rule by consensus, didn’t seem a good way to run a starship. “But if you don’t rule, who does?”

  Fingers to ear. “You do, Rro-maa.”

  “Uh…huh,” Roman said. It was slowly becoming clearer… “You mean that since your people agreed to put a human—me—in command of the Amity, then I’m to give you all your orders?”

  “That is correct.”

  It couldn’t be entirely correct, Roman knew. At the very least, they’d arranged their own billeting and duty rosters without any input from the human half of the ship, and almost certainly such simple housekeeping operations would continue to be so handled.

  Which implied some sort of chain of command…which Rrin-saa didn’t seem interested in talking about. “Where are the repeater instruments from the bridge, then?” he asked.

  “With the Handlers.”

  Roman nodded. “Take me there, then, if you would.”

  The Handler room was just aft of the bow instrument packing, in a mirror-image position to Amity’s bridge. Sitting in the center of the room, a Tampy sporting a green-purple neckerchief sat humming atonally to himself, his eyes wide open but paying no attention to Roman or Rrin-saa. To the left, arranged in random patterns against the inner wall, were the repeater instruments; to the right, a second Tampy sat pressed against the outer wall, his face turned at a painful-looking angle to stare forward out the viewport, his head engulfed by a large multi-wired helmet. The wires of which went to a basket-mesh case, inside of which—