Warhorse

Chapter 13

“Commander?”

The voice was little more than a husky whisper, and for a long moment Ferrol wasn’t sure whether it was real or merely another of the surrealistic dreams that skittered continually through the deadly twilight consciousness that seemed to be suffocating the life out of him. But, “Commander?” the voice came again; and this time the dream also contained a gentle shaking of his arm. Wearily, resentfully, he dragged his eyes open.

It was Yamoto, her face drawn and shiny with sweat. “Commander, it’s my turn on duty,” she croaked.

“Ah,” Ferrol said. He took a careful breath, and immediately wished he hadn’t: the air was even more like the residue of a blast furnace than he remembered. “How’re things back there?” he asked, licking parched lips.

Yamoto shrugged. Like everyone else on the lander, she’d long since taken off her tunic, but Ferrol hardly noticed the view. “About the same as an hour ago,” she said. “People keep drifting in and out of consciousness.”

“Like me, for instance,” Ferrol nodded, fumbling with the straps pinning him to the helm chair. For some reason of shape or focus, the lander’s bow was about five degrees hotter than its stern, and he’d had to order that command duty up here be limited to an hour at a stretch.

That order not including the Tampies, of course. For a moment he gazed at them, huddled together at the very tip of the bow, and not for the first time it occurred to him that nothing he could have done with his needle gun could possibly have been worse than what they were going through at the moment.

Visible out the forward viewport beyond the Tampies, sheltering together in what there was of the lander’s shadow, were the lifeboats, looking for all the world like baby ducks beneath their mother’s wing. Briefly, Ferrol wondered how they were faring, then put it out of his mind. Exposed to slightly less of the godawful sunlight, and with a larger surface-to-volume ratio for dumping their excess heat, the lifeboats were probably doing at least as well as the lander. And even if they weren’t, there wasn’t anything he could do about it until the Amity returned.

If it ever did.

“Radiation counter’s gone out again,” Yamoto said.

Ferrol focused on the control panel, and with some effort found the proper display.

Sure enough, it was blank, its electronics having given up the ghost. “Last time I checked it we were way below any danger level,” he assured her, trying to remember exactly when he’d made that check. “That shell of matter the star blew off way back when was the worst of it—the levels started dropping as soon as that passed.” He gave the rest of the instruments a cursory check, noting that despite having rigged extra heat radiators the lander’s interior temperature had still risen another half degree in the past hour.

“Nothing more from the Amity?”

Ferrol waved his hands, the gesture half frustration and half resignation. “As long as they stick with the laser exclusively, how could there be? We were lucky to have picked up the one transmission from Shadrach’s moon.”

“I suppose so. Are we still broadcasting a homing—? Oh, there it is,” she broke off her question as her eyes found the radio display board.

“For all the range it’s got out there,” Ferrol grimaced. “They’ve probably got as good a chance of picking us up visually as they do of finding a beacon signal in all that static.”

Assuming, of course, that there would actually be someone out there to look for them…

“Commander?”

With an effort, Ferrol brought his attention back to her. “Sorry,” he muttered, reaching for the straps before remembering he’d already loosened them. “Never thought growing up in a planet’s temperate zone would someday turn out to be a handicap.” He got a grip on the chair arm, eased himself out of the squishy clutch of the molded contours—

He had just about worked himself free when there was a quiet beep from the radio display.

The panel beeped again before his numbed mind even registered the sound; and it wasn’t until the fourth beep that he realized that it was coming from the beacon’s transponder.

The Amity had arrived.

He dived for the panel, fingers fumbling with the main transceiver switch. “Lander to Amity,” he called toward the microphone, hoping fervently that the visual display was still operational. “Lander to Amity.”

“Amity to lander,” Roman’s voice boomed out of the speaker. “Commander Ferrol?”

“Yes, Captain,” Ferrol said. Behind him, he could hear a sudden stirring as crewers on the brink of heatstroke dragged themselves awake to the realization that the long ordeal was almost over. “It’s good to hear your voice, sir.”

“Same here,” Roman said. Belatedly, the visual came on; and through the static Ferrol could see the frown on the captain’s face. “We have visual contact with you now…” His voice hesitated, and the frown deepened noticeably.

“You’re wondering about Pegasus?” Ferrol prompted.

Roman looked briefly to the side, to where Marlowe was probably saying something. “We seem to be having some problem with our scale program,” he told Ferrol.

Ferrol shook his head. “No, sir, it’s not the scale,” he assured the other. “Pegasus is gone, all right. Jumped about fifty-three hours ago.”

Roman’s frown shifted a fraction, toward what was probably the scanner repeater display. “Then what—?”

“—is that thing out there?” Ferrol finished for him. “A farewell gift from Pegasus, actually.” He looked at the aft-camera display, at the short cylindrical shape framed aura-style by the sunlight behind it. “Captain; meet Junior. Pegasus’ calf.”

He looked back at Roman… and thanked whichever gods had permitted the visual display to function. The expression on the captain’s face was all he could have hoped for.

For the tenth time—Ferrol had kept track—the tiny needle poked not quite unobstrusively into his skin; and then, thankfully, it was all over.

“That’s the last of them,” Amity’s medical officer said briskly, throwing the release lever and swinging up the top of the automed. “Ten precancerous growths, Commander. Not bad, really, considering all the radiation exposure you had out there. We got them all, of course.”

“Glad to hear it,” Ferrol said, getting gingerly out of the shiny box and pulling on his pants. The worst thing about automeds, he’d often thought—aside from their resemblance to high tech coffins—was the way the damn things demanded the total surrender of one’s dignity. “I’d hate to have put up with those needles for nothing. I gather there wasn’t anything deeper?”

“Not that we could detect,” the doctor assured him. “Though we’ll be doing followup tests on you for the next few weeks, just to be sure. Or, rather, someone will be doing them,” he amended, a bit wistfully.

“Right,” Ferrol grunted, busying himself with the fasteners on his tunic. Of course the other would be sorry that the Amity’s mission was nearly over—he’d always been one of the more simpering pro-Tampy types aboard. “You’ll excuse me; the captain left orders I was to report to him as soon as I was finished here.”

He escaped to the corridor, and air not quite so thick with maudlin sentiment, and made his way forward to Roman’s office.

“Commander,” the other nodded gravely as Ferrol entered. “I don’t suppose I have to tell you that you’ve made it into the history books.”

“Amity has, anyway,” Ferrol demurred politely. “I don’t expect to be more than a referenced footnote, myself.”

“You’re too modest,” Roman said. His eyes seemed to search Ferrol’s face. “The man in charge of the first captive breeding of a space horse will certainly rate more than just a footnote.”

Ferrol forced himself to match the other’s gaze. “May I assume Sso-ngu told you I threatened to kill them before the calving?”

Roman’s face didn’t change. “Not in so many words, but I’m slowly learning how to read between Tampy lines. You want to tell me why?”

“You mean why I threatened them? As in, why would I threaten creatures who blandly told me to, in effect, destroy our exit ticket out of hell, but who then wouldn’t offer the slightest explanation as to why I should do so?”

“They wouldn’t because they couldn’t,” Roman interjected mildly. “The Tampies have never been able to breed their space horses.”

Ferrol shrugged. Perhaps; but on the other hand, he wasn’t yet willing to believe that the Tampies hadn’t had at least an inkling of what was happening before the bulge in Pegasus’ side had made it obvious. After all, the term “calving” came directly from the Tampies—a reference to the similarity between space horse reproduction and glacial splitting—and to Ferrol that implied strongly that, somewhere along the line, the aliens had witnessed the entire birth process.

Possibly even including the parent space horse’s physiological distress… which Rrin-saa had also denied having any knowledge of.

None of which was provable, of course, at least not from aboard the Amity. “The fact remains, sir,” he said instead, “that I had no way of knowing whether they were right, wrong, or lying through their teeth. Going for some sort of ritual mass suicide, maybe, and inviting us along for the ride.”

“Though it turned out that they were right,” Roman pointed out.

“This time, yes,” Ferrol countered. “And even then, some of us damn near died.”

“Yes, I’ve read the preliminary medical report,” Roman said soberly. “In hindsight it would have been nice if we’d thought to leave you some extra shielding or reflector material. But of course we had no way of knowing you were going to trade in an eight-hundred-meter space horse for a hundred-meter calf.”

Ferrol felt his hackles smoothing back down. Apparently Roman had been merely interested in his side of the incident, not spoiling for a confrontation. “Yes, sir,” he said. “It was just dumb luck that we were able to free Pegasus and get Junior webbed up before they oriented themselves and Jumped off somewhere together.”

“Yes, Sso-ngu was impressed with your crew’s speed.” Again Roman seemed to search Ferrol’s face. “He said you seemed to know exactly what you were doing.”

“As I said, dumb luck,” Ferrol told him evenly. “And a good EVA crew.” If the captain was hoping for some guilty confession of Ferrol’s past poaching activities, he was going to be disappointed.

Though if he was, he didn’t show it. “And you kept Junior instead of Pegasus because…?”

“I thought that Pegasus’ pre-nova problems might not all have been related to the calving process,” Ferrol said. It wasn’t the whole truth, but it was plausible enough to pass as such. “If so, we’d have a better chance of getting Junior to Jump us out of there when the time came.”

“A gamble,” Roman agreed. “That’s the way of life, it seems. We stack the odds as best we can, then just throw the dice and see what happens.” He glanced up and out his viewport, toward the netting and Junior. “In this case, we seem to have broken the bank.”

Ferrol nodded. They had indeed. “By the way, where exactly are we?”

“Oh, just a minor midway system,” Roman told him. “It was the fastest and easiest place to Jump to after we linked back up with you. A red dwarf star, a couple of frozen planets—nothing of any real interest. We’ll spend a couple of days swinging around it to get into position, then do what Kennedy says will be a quick double Jump to first Sirius and then Solomon.”

“Good.” Ferrol got to his feet, balancing carefully in the half-gee Junior’s acceleration was giving the ship. “Then with your permission, I’ll get started on the debriefing.”

Roman frowned. “What debriefing is that?”

“Dr. Lowry’s team, of course,” Ferrol said. “I assumed it would be standard procedure in a case like this to get their verbal reports down on tape as soon as possible. And since you did assign me to be ship’s science liaison, it seems to me that I should be the one handling it.”

“That’s not exactly what I had in mind when I gave you the assignment,” Roman pointed out, still frowning. “And anyway, after what you’ve been through you probably ought to spend the rest of the trip either in sick bay or in your own bed.”

“I appreciate your concern, sir,” Ferrol said stiffly, giving his voice what he hoped was just the right touch of professional pride. “May I remind the captain that everyone else aboard—himself included—has had an equally rough time of it the past four days?”

A faint smile touched the captain’s lips. “Point noted,” he conceded dryly, easing what Ferrol guessed were probably still rather stiff shoulder muscles. That twelvegee race to Shadrach’s moon he’d heard stories about was one for the books. “Very well, Commander. The last thing I want right now is any more heat—from anywhere. If you want to do the debriefings, you’re welcome to them.”

It took until nearly the end of the debriefing interviews, but eventually Ferrol found the man he knew had to be there.

His name was Kheslav, and he was one of Lowry’s equipment technicians. “I was afraid the Senator would just throw me to the lions,” he muttered, his face twitching as he looked around the conference room for at least the fifth time since Ferrol had shut off the recorder. “Abandon me to face whatever happened alone.”

“Well, obviously he didn’t,” Ferrol told him. “Almost too obviously, as a matter of fact. The message about your predicament came in over Admiral Marcosa’s signature, with a thirty-hour time delay to boot. He might as well have put neons all over it and officially invited a backtrack.”

Kheslav’s head jerked back around, his eyes wide with nervous guilt. “You think anyone will do that?” he breathed.

“Probably not,” Ferrol growled, sorry he’d even mentioned it. Kheslav was rapidly showing himself to be a mixture of all the personality characteristics that Ferrol hated most in people: lack of any real conviction or commitment to whatever it was the Senator had sent him out here to do, lack of any courage whatsoever, and a blathering tongue on top of it. “So tell me why Marcosa wanted the Amity—and presumably that means he wanted me—to be here when you were picked up.”

Kheslav licked his lips. “I have a datapack in my cabin,” he said, his voice lowering conspiratorily. “Lowry never knew, but my real job on Shadrach was to study the Tampies’ space horse. It was going to be there for several months, you know—day in and day out, in the same place, where we could monitor it continuously—”

“Yes, I understand,” Ferrol cut him off. “Part of the Amity’s job was to do the same sort of thing.”

“Right,” Kheslav looked around the room again. “The thing is, we had some monitors attached to the space horse’s webbing—without the Tampies knowing, of course—with everything funneled back to a receiver either direct or through a pair of tight-beam relay satellites. When B blew the first time—and all the Tampies died?—well, I have a complete record of the light intensitites and types of radiation the space horse took, as well as a lot of the stuff going up and down the rein lines.”

He lowered his voice still further. “And since some of the instruments were on the shielded side, away from the light, and you were in line of sight with us when you came over in the space horse’s shadow… some of that data goes right up until the end.” He fixed Ferrol with a suddenly intense stare. “You understand what that means?”

Ferrol did indeed. It meant that, for the first time ever, humanity would know exactly how to kill a space horse.

It was like a moment of truth, a moment that should have been filled with a deep and profound silence. Typically, Kheslav babbled right on through it. “You see the problem, then, with me trying to take the datapack home myself,” he said, waving his hands helplessly. “With all the publicity and attention—especially now with this calving thing—I’m not going to be able to just walk past the university people with a private datapack I’m not letting anyone see—”

“So I gather you want me to take charge of it?” Ferrol cut through the flood.

“If you would,” Kheslav said, obvious relief on his face. “I figure you can just hide it somewhere aboard the ship for now, and then later get it to the Senator—”

“Yes, thank you, I think I can handle it,” Ferrol growled. “When I’ve finished interviewing the rest of your party I’ll come by your cabin and pick it up.” He let his gaze harden, just a bit. “And after that I don’t expect to see or talk to you for the rest of the trip.”

“Sure.” Kheslav nodded with puppy dog eagerness. “Sure, I understand. I really appreciate this, Commander—”

“Good-bye, Kheslav.”

“Yeah.” Awkwardly, Kheslav got to his feet. “Uh… yeah. Good-bye.”

For a wonder, he was silent as he left the room.

Two hours later Ferrol was back in his cabin, wedging the datapack with only moderate difficulty alongside the needle gun in his lockbox. Alongside the gun, on top of the Senator’s envelope… and for a moment Ferrol paused, staring at the bulkhead separating him from the Tampy section as he savored the bittersweet taste of irony. The Senator had placed him aboard the Amity for the express purpose of sabotaging the ship’s mission; of making sure that, with or without his direct intervention, this experiment in human-Tampy cooperation was a total and embarrassing disaster.

Instead, it had succeeded in doing something no human or even Tampy had ever done before… and with that event, Ferrol’s task had turned on its head.

Now, he was going to have to do his damnedest to make sure that the Amity experiment was allowed to continue.

He smiled tightly as one more irony of it struck him. He’d had a space horse calf within his grasp once before—had seen then the possibilities such a creature presented —and it had been Roman who snatched it from him. Now, it was that same man whose ship had given humanity this second shot at building its own space horse fleet.

And even if space horse calves proved uncontrollable by human handlers…

Ferrol’s gaze dropped once more to the datapack. It would be unfortunate, but it wouldn’t be a total disaster. With the Pegasus calving, and now Kheslav’s data, the Tampy domination of space travel had come to an end.

One way or another, it had come to an end.

Sealing the lockbox, he replaced it in its underbed storage drawer, and returned to his duties.