Warhorse

by Timothy Zahn

  Still…

  Ferrol had intended to spend his off-duty time the next few days trying to get access to the crew psych files anyway. Assuming he was able to get in, it wouldn’t hurt to take a look for himself at Roman’s profile. Just to make sure.

  Chapter 7

  FERROL HAD FULLY EXPECTED some kind of official response from Roman over his flooring of the Tampy in the hangar—anything from a blistering reprimand to temporary confinement to quarters or even a complete stripping of rank and imprisonment. To his surprise, though, the captain never even mentioned the incident. Perhaps the popular image of Tampies as cheek-turning forgive-and-forgetters had rubbed off on him; or perhaps he was afraid of making a martyr out of Amity’s leading anti-Tampy figure. The latter wasn’t an unreasonable fear, to Ferrol’s mind—emotional reactions and their manipulation could be tricky things to handle, and Roman didn’t seem the type to have cultivated such a talent.

  Or else Burch and the Tampies, for reasons of tact or point-making, had simply never reported it. It was, he eventually decided, as good an explanation as any.

  They spent another two weeks circling Alpha, watching from orbit as the landing parties poked around the planet’s desert, forest, and Alpine environments, oohing and ahing at everything in sight. The “Lorelei sticks”—as Dr. Tenzing dubbed the oversized electronic tent stakes Amity’s techs came up with—worked beautifully, their oscillating electric fields either decoying Alpha’s predators away from the landing parties or else leading them directly to net traps, whichever Sanderson’s people wanted at a given moment. By the time Pegasus pulled them out of orbit toward deep space the first lab was, as predicted, loaded literally to the ceiling with sample boxes.

  The Jump to Beta system went off perfectly, as did the subsequent fifty-hour drive through normal space to the target planet itself. This time Ferrol kept close track of the acceleration/deceleration profile; to his mild surprise, Pegasus held solidly to the 0.9 gee Roman had ordered, never varying more than half a percent from that acceleration. It was a striking and sobering example of just how strong and efficient the Handler/space horse bond really was…an efficiency that was going to be a serious problem for humanity when the war finally came.

  The second target world on their list, Beta, was about as different from Alpha as two planets could possibly be, but no less interesting for all that. Circling close in to a bright red-orange star, its life had evolved into exceptionally specialized forms inhabiting exceptionally specialized ecological niches. Specialized to such a degree, in fact, that the landing parties could often cross up to half a dozen distinct variants of a plant in a five-kilometer walk, with virtually no interpenetration between the types. Half of the samples they tried transplanting aboard ship died before Amity even left orbit, and few of the others lasted much longer.

  It was an ideal pot for stirring up human/Tampy conflicts in, and the results were all Ferrol could have hoped for. With their carefully cultivated image as “Lord Protectors Of Nature” on the line, the Tampies were forced to continually protest the disturbing of such fragile ecological structures. There were sharp words from both sides, and frustration all around, and by the end of the first week there were no longer any Tampies heading down to the surface with Sanderson’s landing parries.

  Oddly enough, the boycott didn’t seem to make any lasting dent in the scientists’ own pro or anti attitudes. All the comments Ferrol overheard in his role as liaison indicated a generally tolerant understanding—even sympathy—for the aliens’ point of view. In retrospect, he realized he should probably have expected that kind of reaction—even on Prometheus he’d noticed that the colonists who’d worked most closely with the Tampies were sometimes the most easily taken in by the aliens’ big nobility act.

  But if that kind of emotional infection had been what the pro-Tampies in the Senate had been banking on, they were in for a disappointment…because even as the scientists began mouthing Tampy philosophies and worrying aloud about bruising the grass they walked on, relationships between the Tampies and the rest of Amity’s crew began a quiet but steady slide downhill.

  The signs were there even before the Jump from Alpha system. There had been a fair amount of traffic between the two halves of the ship the first week—some of it simple curiosity, the rest probably an attempt by the pro-Tampies among the crew to stimulate friendly contact. But as curiosity was satisfied, and as Rrin-saa and the other Tampies continued to press Sanderson’s people with holier-than-thou warnings against disturbing nature, the number of crewers playing tourist or goodwill ambassador dropped off nearly to zero. The Tampy boycott of the Beta landing parties did nothing to improve that, and by the time Pegasus pulled Amity out of orbit a spate of anti-Tampy jokes were beginning to make surreptitious rounds in areas of the ship not frequented by the scientists or senior officers.

  By the time Amity left orbit around the third planet, Gamma, the connecting doors were being used solely for occasional ship’s business, and the jokes were being told openly around the crewer mess tables.

  And by the time the last samples from Delta were aboard, it was clear that the hopes of Amity’s pro-Tampy supporters had come to exactly nothing.

  “Hhom-jee reports Pegasus is ready to Jump,” Ensign Connie MacKaig reported over her shoulder from the helm.

  Ferrol nodded. “Tell him to go ahead whenever he’s ready,” he instructed her.

  “Yes, sir.”

  She turned to her intercom, and Ferrol took a deep breath. It was over. Over. Roman could sit down there in his office all day sifting through the final crewer questionnaires if he wanted to, but there was no way in hell that the results could add up to anything other than total failure. He knew it, Roman knew it, and anyone who’d been paying any attention at all to the ship’s atmosphere these past few weeks knew it.

  Ahead, the bridge displays flickered in unison as Delta system’s orange sun vanished and was replaced by the yellow dwarf of Solomon system. “Jump completed,” MacKaig announced. “Range to Solomon…3.5 million kilometers.”

  Ferrol did a quick calculation. About eleven hours round trip at the 0.9 gee the Tampies seemed to prefer. “Inform Solomon that we’ve arrived, Ensign,” he told her, “and have the Handler take us in. The usual 0.9 gee acc/dec profile will do.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  And with this little side trip finally over, it would be time to get back to the Scapa Flow and pick up where he’d left off. Assuming, of course, the Starforce patrols in the Tampies’ yishyar system had faded away…and assuming the Senator let him go back.

  Ferrol grimaced at the memory. The Senator had made no secret of the fact that he hadn’t liked the way Ferrol had handled his ship’s near-capture by Roman and the Dryden, and had gone so far as to suggest that Ferrol was getting too reckless. The discussion had been tabled by the whole Amity thing, but now that that was over it was bound to be rekindled. And if he couldn’t convince the Senator that he was still trustworthy—

  “Commander?” MacKaig spoke up, her voice suddenly tight. “Solomon reports a tachyon message waiting for us—Level One Urgent.”

  War. The word came unbidden to Ferrol’s thoughts, and for a split second his blood seemed to freeze. The war had come, and he was trapped on a Tampy-crewed ship…“Sound yellow alert,” he ordered, fighting down the tremor in his voice. “I’ll get the captain.”

  And as the alert warble sounded, and he fumbled with his intercom, the word again ran through his mind.

  War.

  Chapter 8

  “…ALTHOUGH I FEEL THE experience was worthwhile, I don’t think I would enjoy working with the Tampies again. There are just too many differences, too many ways for us to irritate each other.”

  The words flowing across the display ceased, and Roman braced himself. That was the last of them. Now came the moment he’d been dreading: the computer’s scorecard. Tapping the appropriate key, he watched as the results appeared. Twenty-eight favorable, ninety-seven unfavorable, as c
ompared to an original pre-flight score of sixty to sixty-five. Nearly twenty-six percent of Amity’s crew had switched from pro- to anti-Tampy.

  Damn.

  He leaned back in his chair, gazing out at the shadowy bulk of Pegasus just visible at the edge of the viewport. So it had failed, this grand experiment in familiarity breeding respect—failed beyond the ability of even the most grimly optimistic to argue. Virtually all of the originally pro-Tampy crewers had had their enthusiasm toward the aliens dampened, to one degree or another, while at the same time every single one of the anti-Tampies had had their prejudices strengthened.

  I should have taken firmer control, he told himself; but deep down he knew it wouldn’t have made any difference. There was no way he could have forced friendship between the races on his ship, and it would have been useless to even try. Rrin-saa’s words about Amity’s importance echoed in his mind, and for a moment he felt a brief stirring of anger toward the Tampies. Certainly some of the blame rested with them—they hadn’t made the slightest effort to tone down their opposition to the way human beings interacted with the rest of the universe. In fact, they’d more than once gone borderline hysterical about it.

  He was still staring blackly at the final data when the office was abruptly filled with the soft but pervasive warbling of ship’s alert.

  For a pair of heartbeats he just sat there, mind wrenching away from interstellar politics and back to his immediate responsibilities. He reached for his intercom; but it came on even before his hand got there. “Captain here,” he said.

  “Bridge, sir,” Ferrol said, his face and voice tight. “We’ve got a tachyon message coming in from Solomon—Urgent One level.”

  A chill ran up Roman’s back. There was only one reason he could think of why anyone would need to shoot Amity a message of such priority…“Acknowledged,” he said, keying the proper acceptance code into his terminal. “Bring it in,” he instructed Ferrol. “Pipe it back here to me and to the bridge crew—nowhere else.”

  For an instant his eyes and Ferrol’s met, and there was a brief spark of mutual understanding. If the simmering fires on the human-Tampy frontier had indeed exploded into full conflict, both men wanted some time to think before breaking the news to Amity’s Tampies. “Yes, sir,” Ferrol said, dropping his gaze to his keys. “Here it comes.”

  Ferrol’s face disappeared from the screen, to be replaced by—

  TO RESEARCH SHIP AMITY, SOLOMON:

  FROM COMMANDER STARFORCE BORDERSHIPSEXTENSION, PREPYAT:

  :::URGENT-ONE:::URGENT-ONE:::URGENT-ONE:::

  PROCEED IMMEDIATELY NCL1148; EMERGENCY RESCUE OF SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH STATION ON THIRD PLANET. NCL 1148-B PREPARING TO GO NOVA.

  “Holy hell,” someone on the bridge muttered in the background.

  “Quiet,” Ferrol’s voice growled back.

  FURTHER DATA ON SYSTEM AVAILABLE FOR FEED FROM SOLOMON STARFORCE STATION. ABSOLUTELY VITAL PICKUP BE MADE BY AMITY.

  VICE-ADMIRAL MARCOSA, COMBOREX, PREPYAT CODE/VER *@7882//53

  8:22 GMT///ESD 3 APRIL 2335

  “Commander, contact the station and get us that data feed,” Roman ordered, feeling the knots in his stomach begin to relax a bit. Heading into a system on the brink of stellar explosion was hardly cause for joy, but it was a far cry from the call to arms he’d envisioned. “And alert the Tampies; I want Pegasus ready to Jump just as soon as we know where it is we’re Jumping to.”

  “Yes, sir,” Ferrol said, his voice still tight. “Shall I secure from yellow alert?”

  “Yes, you’d better,” Roman agreed. The warbling siren had probably driven most of the crewers to the same conclusion that he and Ferrol had already jumped to, and things were likely pretty tense back there. “Go ahead and read the message over the general intercom, too—if the star is really this close to going critical, we’re going to want everyone running at top efficiency.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  Roman keyed off the intercom and unstrapped, and as his feet found the nearest velgrip patch the warbling faded and was replaced by Ferrol’s voice announcing the sudden change in Amity’s planned schedule.

  And for a moment Roman paused beside his desk, frowning at the stars outside. 8:22 GMT, the message datestamp had said, on Earth Standard Date 3 April 2335. Something over thirty hours ago…and in the time the message had sat around waiting for the Amity to make its appearance at Solomon, Marcosa could have sent the message to the Tampies via a space horse-equipped courier and had a rescue ship already in the 1148 system, possibly even at the research station itself.

  So why hadn’t they?

  Politics, he thought darkly. Politics and pride, and a hell/highwater unwillingness to ask the Tampies for help. Damn foolishness, by any reasonable standard; and if the survey team lost their lives because of it—

  It would be Amity that would get the blame.

  Ferrol had skimmed through the entire data feed, distributed the appropriate sections to the appropriate people, and had started a more careful reading when Roman finally arrived. “The team consists of roughly fifty people, under the direction of Dr. Jamen Lowry of Cambridge,” he told the captain as the latter floated to his command chair and strapped in. “They set up there because the star was thought to be in a pre-nova stage and they wanted to study it. Apparently, the thing’s going off sooner than theory predicted.”

  Roman nodded and keyed himself a copy of the data. “What about their own ship?”

  “They haven’t got one,” Ferrol said. “They had to hire a Tampy ship to give them transport—the system’s a good thousand light-years outside Mitsuushi range.”

  “And that ship isn’t available to them?”

  “I’d say that’s almost irrelevant at the moment, sir,” Ferrol said. It wasn’t, really, but with luck the captain wouldn’t notice that. “They called Earth; Earth called us. It’s in our laps now.”

  “So it would seem,” Roman grunted. “Do we have the system located yet?”

  “Yes, sir,” MacKaig spoke up from the helm. She tapped a key, and the relevant page of the New Cygni Listing appeared on Ferrol’s helm repeater display. “Eleven hundred sixty-five light-years away, longitude minus 2.6 degrees, latitude 5.9 degrees,” she said. “We can’t Jump directly to it from here—not visible enough—but Pegasus can see Deneb from here, and it ought to be able to see 1148 from there.”

  Roman studied the listing for a moment before nodding. “Should work. Feed the direction and maps down to Hhom-jee and tell him to Jump as soon as Pegasus is ready.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said, and busied herself with her intercom.

  Beside Ferrol, the computer signaled that the problem he’d set for it a minute ago had been completed. He turned back as a map of the 1148 system appeared on the display, framed by four-decimal numerical listings of current planetary locations. Adjusting the scale, he took a good look.

  The system consisted of two stars—a smallish red giant and a white dwarf—plus three planets of the usual variety of sizes and orbits. The two stars were so close together, the dwarf circling perilously close to the giant’s outer atmosphere, that there was little or no room for a stable planetary orbit between them. All the planets revolved around both stars, an arrangement with enough perturbations to make hash out of a standard orbit calculation, and Ferrol gave silent thanks that the team out there had been thinking straight enough to include updated numbers with their tachyon distress call. The base was on the innermost planet, which the team had dubbed Shadrach: a roughly Mars-sized chunk of lifeless rock with a pair of moons, orbiting some five hundred million kilometers out from the center of the giant.

  “We’re starting to come around,” MacKaig announced. “Lining up for the Jump to Deneb.”

  “Good,” Roman said. “Commander Ferrol?”

  “Sir?” Ferrol said, eyes still on the display.

  “Do you know this Admiral Marcosa?”

  Ferrol felt his back go abruptly stiff. He forced the muscles to relax, gl
ad his face was away from the captain. “I’ve heard of him, sir, but never met him,” he said. It was more or less true.

  “Anti-Tampy?”

  Ferrol suppressed a grim smile. Certainly he was anti-Tampy—rabidly so, in fact. Marcosa was one of the Senator’s closest friends within the Admiralty, a quiet ally in everything from the Scapa Flow’s poaching runs to the backstairs maneuvering that had gotten Ferrol aboard Amity…and the fact that the new orders had come in over Marcosa’s name was almost certainly not a coincidence. “I’d guess so, sir,” he said aloud. “Why do you ask?”

  He could feel Roman’s eyes on the back of his neck. “I wondered why he took the chance of waiting for us,” Roman said, almost offhandedly, “instead of asking the Tampies to send one of their ships.”

  There was opportunity here for a dig at the whole question of Tampy speed and efficiency, but there were too many other things on Ferrol’s mind for him to be bothered. “I’ve got a suggestion, Captain, about our approach.” Without waiting for permission, he sent the planetary schematic to Roman’s station. “If we Jump to 1148 directly from Deneb we’ll arrive someplace along this line—” he traced a line from the double star outward with a mousepen—“depending on how the gravitational equipotential surfaces work out. That’ll put us a minimum of a hundred million kilometers away from the planet itself.”

  “Whereas if we shuttle back and forth between appropriately positioned stars we should be able to come in considerably closer?”

  Ferrol nodded, impressed in spite of himself. Maybe Roman was smarter than his blind pro-Tampy sentiments would indicate. “Yes, sir,” he acknowledged. “I’ve found a couple of good possibilities, but I’m not sure which one would be the best.”

  “Ensign?” Roman invited.

  MacKaig was frowning at Ferrol’s schematics and preliminary numbers, fingers skating across her own keys. “Looks like the second one will get us closer,” she said slowly. “Not by much, though—maybe half a million kilometers at the most.”