by Timothy Zahn
Demarco sent him a frown. “They can’t do that, can they?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Ferrol advised him. “With the route we’ll be taking they won’t have a hope in hell of following us.”
On his console the intercom pinged. “Chayne, we’ve got the intercom connection to the lander now,” someone reported.
“Thank you.” Ferrol keyed the proper switch. “Wwis-khaa? This is Commander Ferrol. Are you and the others doing all right?”
“We are well, Ffe-rho.”
With Ferrol and Yamoto gone from the lander, the three aliens had removed their filter masks; briefly, Ferrol wished he was better at reading Tampy expressions. “I’m sorry we have to keep you back there in the lander,” he apologized. “But without enough filter masks to go around we really can’t let you into the main part of the ship.”
“No scitte,” Demarco muttered under his breath. “It’d take months to scrub the stench out of the air system.”
Ferrol threw him a glare. “You should have received the next target star on your display by now,” he continued to Wwis-khaa. “Can Epilog see it all right?”
“He can.” Wwis-khaa paused. “Ffe-rho, I would like to know what it is you are asking us to do.”
“A fair question,” Ferrol agreed. “Very simply, I’m asking you to help your people. Your people, and your space horses. Have you ever heard of an Earth creature called the dog?”
“A domesticated carnivore of the Canis group,” Wwis-khaa said promptly. “Its ecological position is usually as a companion or pet to humans.”
“Right,” Ferrol nodded, vaguely impressed that the alien would know that. “They’re mostly pets now, but originally they were used by herders and shepherds to help guard food animals from dangerous predators. Still are, in some places.”
He’d expected Wwis-khaa to catch his drift; and he wasn’t disappointed. “You seek to find such creatures in space?” the Tampy asked, his head tilting to one side in a gesture Ferrol had never seen before. “Small predators to protect our space horses from sharks?”
“That’s it,” Ferrol nodded. “Granted, we don’t know if such things even exist; but now that we know there are at least three species of space-going creatures, it seems reasonable that there should be others. True?”
“I do not know,” Wwis-khaa said. “How do you presume to search for such creatures throughout the vastness of space?”
“I don’t,” Ferrol said. “We’re going to leave space and normal star systems alone and concentrate instead on a much more select group of places: namely, the accretion disks around large black holes.”
Demarco twisted his head around, a stunned look on his face. “I think it makes sense,” Ferrol continued, ignoring the other. “That’s where space horses are supposed to have originated; and if so, there must be some remnant of the ecology left. You game to take a look?”
For a long moment Wwis-khaa was silent. Ferrol held his breath, fully and painfully aware that if the Tampies refused the whole thing would die right here and now. “Your wishes are ours,” the alien said. “When do you wish to leave?”
Quietly, Ferrol exhaled. “As soon as Epilog is in position,” he told the other. “Let the helmer—Randall—know when you’re ready.”
“Your wishes are ours,” Wwis-khaa repeated.
Feeling a little limp, Ferrol switched off the intercom. It had worked…and they were on their way. He looked up—
To find Demarco gazing hard at him. “I trust,” the other said carefully, “that all of that was just so much spun sugar.”
“Some of it was,” Ferrol said. “Most of it wasn’t. We are going to poke around a few black holes, and we are hunting for a scaled-down version of a shark. But not for the reason I gave Wwis-khaa—that was just to get his cooperation.”
“You should have just told melt-face it was an order, and that you were his superior officer, and that was that,” Demarco sniffed. “That’s all the explanation the stupid plant-lovers deserve.”
Ferrol frowned at the other, a strange feeling curling through his stomach. Somehow, he didn’t remember Demarco as being quite this crude. “If I’m right,” he said quietly, “we’ve probably got a good chance of running into some sharks along the way. Wwis-khaa and the others deserve to know what they’re letting themselves in for.”
Demarco raised his eyebrows. “I see some of the Amity’s heart-bleeding has rubbed off on you. Sir. So if we’re not recruiting watchdogs for the melt-faces, what the hell do we want these miniature sharks for?”
“We want them for transport, of course,” Ferrol growled. Demarco was teetering right on the edge of insubordination here. “We’ve been in a long, dead-end track here, trying to capture and train space horses. Human beings are predators, and the space horses can’t or won’t stand for that. But a space-going predator species might. Clear now?”
Demarco snorted. “If you say so. Sounds like the sort of wishy-wok stuff your melt-faced chummies would spout, though. If you ask me.”
Quite suddenly, Ferrol decided he was tired of Demarco. “All right then; try this,” he said coldly. “We’re going because I’ve given you an order, and I’m your captain, and that’s that.”
Demarco’s lip twisted, but he nodded. “Yes, sir,” he muttered, and turned back to his console.
“Chayne?” Randall spoke up tentatively. “Your melt-fa—your Tampy signals he’s ready to go.”
Ferrol took a deep breath, fighting for calm. “Tell him to go ahead and Jump,” he ordered.
And wondered what had happened to his crew in the past year, to make them so harshly bigoted.
Chapter 25
“ARACHNE’S DIRECTOR SAID THEY’D alerted Earth and Prepyat via tachyon,” Yamoto’s voice came over the comm laser. She sounded tired, and about as emotionally drained as Roman felt. Not really surprising, under the circumstances. “I guess the message didn’t get through.”
“It got through, all right,” Roman told her. “Just not soon enough.”
Yamoto sighed. “My fault, Captain. I should have alerted the colony as soon as we arrived in the system, and the hell with any consequences.”
Roman shook his head. “It wouldn’t have helped. Once we’d Jumped to Sirius and then back to Solomon system, we were already out of position to hit anywhere near Arachne itself. We couldn’t have gotten here in time to stop Ferrol no matter when you blew the whistle. It wasn’t in any way your fault.”
“Yes, sir.” She didn’t sound like she believed it. “I’m ready to boost orbit whenever you’re ready.”
Roman gave his helm display a quick scan. After four hours of a hard three-gee acceleration/deceleration drive through Arachne system from their arrival Jump point, Amity had finally reached the planet itself. The tactical showed their course swinging close in to cut across Yamoto’s own geosynchronous orbit… “You might as well just sit tight there,” he decided. “It’ll probably be faster for us to catch up than for you to fiddle with your orbit.” Though what the hurry was for, Roman really couldn’t say—by Yamoto’s numbers, Ferrol and the Scapa Flow were a good six hours ahead of them already, and Amity’s chances of tracking them down at this point were just fractionally above absolute zero. “We’ll be alongside in about ten minutes.”
“Yes, sir.”
At the helm, Kennedy half turned. “Captain? I’ve got a probable vector for them now, if you’d like to take a look.”
“Thank you.” For a minute Roman studied the tactical and visual maps she’d produced. In the direction indicated—
Was, basically, nothing. “How probable is this?” he asked.
“Only about seventy-five percent, actually,” she admitted. “The tapes Yamoto made of Epilog’s Jump are good and sharp, but you can only be so accurate from half a kilometer away. Computer gives a ninety-nine percent probability for this area”—a small circle appeared on the visual, centered around the original vector—“but there are at least fifteen stars in there that ought t
o be visible to a space horse.”
“Even one as young as Epilog?” Roman asked.
Kennedy shook her head. “I don’t know. Neither do the Tampies; I asked them.”
And of course they wouldn’t do anything so vulgar as to speculate…Roman clenched his teeth, fighting down a sudden surge of anger at the aliens. This wasn’t their fault, either. “Get me everything we have on those stars,” he directed Kennedy. “Let’s see if we can figure out what Ferrol’s up to.”
He hadn’t expected there to be much; and there wasn’t. Estimated sizes, estimated distances, spectral classes, estimated probabilities of solar systems—each listing had barely half a dozen lines. “Not much there anyone could want,” Marlowe muttered.
“Unless Ferrol knows something about one of them we don’t,” Roman pointed out. “Kennedy, do you have a list yet of what those datapacks he had might have been?”
“Near as I can tell, all he accessed from the Amity were the navigational locator program and the full Cygni Telescope stellar mapping list,” Kennedy said. “Plus the Arachne data he gave Yamoto. She told us he took six datapacks with him, which would be about right for dumps of the nav and Cygni packages.” She eyed Roman. “Which implies to me that whichever of these stars he Jumped to was just a transition point to somewhere else.”
Roman nodded, his throat tight with frustration and bitterness. He’d already come to the same depressing conclusion…and if Ferrol was doing a multi-stage Jump here, then he was gone. Period.
His console two-toned a proximity alert: the Amity was coming alongside Yamoto’s lifeboat. “Kennedy, have the hangar doors opened; as soon as we’ve matched velocities Yamoto can go ahead and bring the boat in.”
And when she was aboard, he knew, the decision would have to be made. Whether to fight the massive probabilities stacked against them and try and go after Ferrol, or to accept that any such attempt would be a useless gesture.
To accept that, whatever Ferrol was up to, he’d won.
I should have stopped him, Roman thought wearily. And he could have done it, too—that was what galled the most. He could have had Ferrol off his ship right from the very beginning, or at any point since then. It was his own damn fault—all of it.
The intercom pinged. “Rro-maa?”
Roman looked down at the lopsided alien face. Here it comes, he thought, bracing himself. The accusation—delivered, no doubt, in the usual quiet/polite Tampy manner—that through lack of foresight or simple plain stupidity he’d just lost them a priceless space horse calf… “Yes, Rrin-saa, what is it?” he said.
“Is it your wish that we follow Ffe-rho?”
“It’s hardly a question of wishes at this point, Rrin-saa,” he growled. So that was how the Tampies were going to play this. Nothing so crass as accusing the captain outright of negligence; Rrin-saa was simply going to throw out innocent-sounding questions until Roman wound up confessing the fact on his own. “Ferrol and Epilog are long gone.” He raised his eyebrows. “Unless, of course, you’d happen to know where they went.”
“I do not,” Rrin-saa said. “But Sleipnninni does.”
Roman stared at the screen. The question had been nothing but pure sarcasm… “Say again?”
“Sleipnninni knows where Epilog has gone,” Rrin-saa said. “He can follow, if you wish.”
Roman glanced up, caught Marlowe’s disbelieving frown, looked back down again. “I don’t understand,” he told Rrin-saa. “Epilog Jumped six hours ago. How can Sleipnir possibly know where it went?”
“I do not know,” Rrin-saa said. “I know that he knows; that is all.”
Roman rubbed thumb and forefinger together, looked up again. “Marlowe? Opinion?”
The other shook his head. “You got me, sir. Sounds like pure voodoo.”
“Does, doesn’t it?” he agreed. “Kennedy?”
She shrugged. “I’d vote voodoo, too,” she said. “But on the other hand, what have we got to lose?”
What, indeed? “All right, Rrin-saa, you’re on. Get Sleipnir into position; as soon as Yamoto and the lifeboat are aboard, we’ll Jump.”
The Tampy’s face was, as usual, unreadable. “Your wishes,” he said quietly, “are ours.”
It took the Scapa Flow six Jumps over nearly eighteen hours to get to Cygnus X-l, the first black hole on Ferrol’s list.
It was, for Ferrol, highly reminiscent of the pre-nova system Amity had gone into all those months ago. Blazing away to one side was the black hole’s companion, a huge blue-white star of perhaps twenty solar masses; to the other side was the black hole itself, a pinprick of equally bright blue light. Surrounding both was a textured swirl of gas being ripped from the star by the black hole’s gravity, thickest in a curved corridor directly between the two bodies, the entire mass of it fluorescing brilliantly under the steady blast of ionizing X-rays pouring from the black hole. The star was brighter on that side, and noticeably elongated as well. The cloud of gas enclosed the two masses like a free-form cage; and though most of it moved too slowly for human eyes to follow, right in close to the blue pinprick it could be seen visibly swirling in, falling from infinity to disappear from the universe, giving up its gravitational potential energy as it did so to feed the outward flow of radiation.
Impressive as hell. And just about as dangerous.
Earlier, in one of the systems they’d passed through on the way here, Ferrol had had Epilog pull the Scapa Flow an extra six million kilometers further out from that system’s star, knowing that doing so would put them proportionally farther out along the X-l system’s gravity well when they finally arrived. Now, listening to the creaking of heat-stressed hull plates and watching as, one by one, the outside radiation detectors overloaded and burned out, he wondered if perhaps he should have taken the time to move them even further out.
They didn’t stay long. A fifteen-minute run with the anomalous-motion program was enough to show that there was none of Ferrol’s hoped-for life within a million kilometers of the ship, and it was already abundantly clear that even if they found something outside that radius the ship would never hold together long enough to go investigate it.
Four more Jumps took them to the next system on the list: a far quieter one, this, with the black hole’s companion star too far away to lose such massive amounts of itself to the gravitational tugging and a correspondingly gender flow of radiation. They stayed longer here; but again, there was no trace of life.
Nor was there in the third system. Or in the fourth, or in the fifth.
In the sixth…they found it.
“I’ll be damned,” Demarco breathed. “I’ll be damned.”
Ferrol nodded absently, a tingling thrill of excitement flooding through him as he alternated his attention between visual, tactical, and scanner-composite screens. Three flashing circles marked anomalous motion within the haze of gravel and rock that made up the black hole’s accretion disk; even as he watched, two more circles appeared. “It’s the rocks,” he said. “Got to be. It’s the only thing about this system that’s different.”
Demarco seemed to pull himself together. “Well, it’s not the only thing,” he countered. “The black hole itself is a hell of a lot quieter, radiation-wise, than any of the others we’ve seen. For starters.”
Ferrol gritted his teeth momentarily, the flash of reflex anger breaking the spell and bringing him jokingly back to the real world. “That’s true,” he agreed, forcing his voice to remain calm. The thrill of excitement wasn’t what was important right now; neither was the irritating—and possibly deliberate—habit Demarco had fallen into these past few days of challenging everything Ferrol said or did. What was important was that they not squabble this opportunity away…and what that meant was investigating the system and its life as carefully and thoroughly as possible. With a maximum of care, and a minimum of interpersonal conflict. “I’m sure the lower radiation makes the environment a lot more stable,” he added. “Randall? You got a profile on the accretion disk yet?”
“Only first-order details so far,” the other told him, “but it’s looking pretty much like a normal asteroid belt. At least out this far; you start getting in too close and the radiation and gravitational effects start fouling things up good.” He turned to look at Ferrol. “I think you’re right, too, that it’s the lumpiness of this particular disk that’s the critical factor. At least two of the movements we’ve tracked so far definitely started out from the dark side of boulders. Probably helps to have a place to hide from the radiation when you’re built smaller than a space horse—less shielding mass, and all that.”
“Yeah,” Ferrol nodded. “Take a look at the black hole itself; get me some idea what exactly we’re dealing with.”
“Right.” Randall turned to his scanners, and Ferrol keyed for the cargo bay and lander. Speaking of space horses…“Wwis-khaa? You there?”
A Tampy face appeared on the screen, or what was visible of a face sandwiched between the amplifier helmet and a gold-blue neckerchief. “Ffe-rho?”
“Yes, Ppla-zii,” Ferrol acknowledged. “Wwis-khaa resting, I take it?”
“He is,” the Tampy replied. “He rests too much.”
“You all rest too much,” Demarco muttered.
Ferrol threw him a glare. “I know, Ppla-zii, and I’m sorry,” he said to the Tampy. “I realize that what we’ve put Epilog through these last few days has been hard on the three of you, too. But it’s paid off. We’ve found what looks very much to be the space-creature community we’ve been looking for.”
“I know,” Ppla-zii said. “Epilonninni has already seen.”
Something that sounded like a snort of derision came from Demarco’s direction. “I see,” Ferrol growled, not even bothering with the glare this time. “Glad to hear it. What else does Epilog tell you?”
“I do not understand.”
“I want to know what impressions Epilog has of this place,” Ferrol amplified. “Does it feel uneasy or pained in any way by the black hole’s radiation, for instance? Or is it bothered by the fact that the gravitational fields even at this distance are slightly warped?” He glanced at the flashing circles on the display. “More importantly, does it feel danger from any of the life-forms around us?”
