Warhorse

Chapter 18

The B1 star had been big and almost viciously bright, and even though its dim white-dwarf companion had orbited well outside the larger star’s photosphere, the whole thing had still evoked unpleasant memories of the Amity’s fun-filled tour through Dr. Lowry’s pre-nova system. Not in his mind alone, Roman had noted; it was reasonably clear from their quiet and hurried efficiency that Yamoto and Marlowe felt it, too, and had set themselves the mutual goal of doing their search as quickly as possible and getting out.

The B4 star that was second on their list wasn’t a lot dimmer, but at least it had no companion. No companion, but something considerably more surprising.

It was, according to Rrin-saa, a yishyar system.

“Interesting indeed, Rrin-saa,” Roman agreed. The alien face centered in his intercom seemed more twisted than usual, he noticed. Excitement? Probably.

“Would Quentin have been able to detect that from the 11612 system?—maybe come here deliberately so that it could feed?”

“I do not know, Rro-maa.”

“Captain,” Marlowe spoke up, an odd tone in his voice. “Anomalous-motion program just triggered.”

“Quentin?” Roman asked, keying for the proper screen.

There was a long pause. “No, sir. It’s… I’ll be damned. Captain, there’s more than one—my God, it’s a whole bunch of them.” He swiveled around, his eyes shining.

“Captain, this is something absolutely new—another species of space-going creatures.”

Roman shook his head in wonderment. First the space horse calvings, and now this.

Amity was indeed a charmed ship. “Rrin-saa, take a look at your display. Have the Tampies ever run into these things before?”

“I… do not know.”

Roman looked back at the intercom. There’d been an uncharacteristic hesitation there. “Rrin-saa?”

Another hesitation. “I know that others have claimed to have seen them; that is all.”

Roman glanced at Marlowe. “And what would those others say about them?” he asked Rrin-saa.

“They are said to be carrion eaters.”

Something hard settled into Roman’s stomach. “Quentin?”

“I do not know.”

Roman gritted his teeth. “Marlowe?”

“No sign of their emergency beacon yet,” the other said. “But their range here will be pretty restricted, with the solar wind that star’s blasting out and all.”

Roman nodded, forcing the fears back. Chances were that Quentin and the lander were perfectly safe. “Okay, Yamoto, you know where their theoretical entry point was. Figure us a spiral search path in toward it and feed the numbers to the Handler.”

“Yes, sir,” she said. “Suggestion, Captain: instead of aiming for their Jump point, perhaps we should focus on the nearest section of the asteroid belt to that point.”

“The assumption being that all that exercise would have made Quentin hungry?” It was, Roman decided, a fair assumption. “Very good. Figure your course and let’s get started. Marlowe, you getting anything on our visitors yet?”

“It’s starting to come in, sir,” Marlowe told him. “Survey section computers are working on a—ah; here it is.” A fairly undetailed computer rendition of top, side, and bottom views appeared on Roman’s display.

Roman hunched forward to study them. Approximately eight meters across, the creatures were generally disk-shaped, with flat, roughly triangular wing-like appendages pointing outward in four directions from the edge, and with what looked like a single large feeding orifice and sensory ring taking up much of the flat underside. “Reminds me of a tailless manta ray,” he commented to no one in particular. “Rotated through ninety degrees to give it those other two wings. Odd that a creature that size has such a large feeding orifice.”

“I noticed that, too,” Marlowe nodded. “And you’ll note they’re staying solidly with us.”

Roman felt his forehead wrinkle as he called up a tactical display. Man o’ War had started its turn toward the asteroid belt now, and the creatures out there were indeed matching the maneuver. Staying directly in front of them, some twenty-seven kilometers out.

The hairs on the back of Roman’s neck began to tingle, just a little. Calling back the computer’s schematic of the creatures, he keyed his intercom for the survey section. A moment later Tenzing’s face appeared. “Yes, what is it?” he asked, sounding distracted.

“I wondered what you made of our visitors, Doctor,” Roman said.

“They’re beautiful,” Tenzing replied, his eyes watching something outside the range of the intercom camera. “A brand-new species of space-going creature. What else would you like to know?”

“I’m interested mainly if they could be predators.”

Tenzing looked back at the intercom camera, his expression a combination of impatience and a slightly supercilious amusement. “I’d say that was highly unlikely, Captain. What on earth would have given you that impression?”

“The relative size of the feeding orifice, for one thing,” Roman said, determined not to let the other make him feel like an idiot. “That, plus the fact that they’re sitting out there as if poised for attack.”

Tenzing shrugged. “I doubt the positioning’s significant,” he said, his shoulders shifting as he fiddled with his keyboard. “As to the size of the orifice, my guess is that the creature’s a sifter-type of feeder; floats through space and either just lets gravel and dust flow in or else telekenes it the last few centimeters from close range. That would explain those triangular body extentions, too: they could reach out and help scoop material in toward the center.”

“They could also be used to hold the thing against a space horse while it eats its way in,” Marlowe put in. “Captain, we’re reading some extra structure on those extensions now. Could be a cluster of octopus-type suction cups.”

Roman frowned at the revised schematic. “Dr. Tenzing? Comments?”

With an almost visible effort—a slightly resentful effort, at that—Tenzing tore his attention from his displays again. “Yes, they could be suction cups,” he conceded, a touch of professorial pique coloring his voice. “Or they could be any of a hundred other things. Maybe these creatures are the space-going version of remoras—hitchhiking fish that attach themselves to turtles or sharks or whatever for easy transport. But they’re most definitely, emphatically not predators, Captain—certain not on the level you’re obviously worried about. They’re far too small and fragile to even think of taking on anything as big as a space horse. Man o’ War could telekene them to shreds before they got halfway in.”

Roman rubbed his thumb and forefinger together thoughtfully. He had to admit the other’s arguments sounded reasonable enough. And yet… “But if they’re hoping to hitch a ride,” he asked slowly, “then why are they hanging so far back?”

“Maybe they’re not,” Tenzing countered impatiently, “Maybe it’s Man o’ War who’s holding them away. Captain, we’re really very busy down here, collecting data and all, so unless you have something else to discuss with me, I’d like to get back.”

“Of course, Doctor,” Roman said, forcing down his own annoyance. “Enjoy yourselves.”

The image vanished, and for a moment Roman glowered at the place where it had been. The size of Amity’s scientific section had been steadily shrinking as the ship’s missions had gradually shifted from straight survey work to survey-plusbreeding to straight breeding, and Tenzing’s resentment of the Starforce’s tinkering had risen with every cut. Roman could sympathize, but it didn’t make the man any easier to put up with.

His eyes drifted back to the visual display. There were at least twenty of the creatures out there; more, possibly, hidden in among the boulders that the group seemed to be lugging along with them. Tenzing’s last comment… Reaching over, he keyed the intercom for the Tampy section. “Rrin-saa?”

“I hear,” the alien said.

“Rrin-saa, is Man o’ War holding those things out there away from us?”

“He is not,” an off-camera voice answered. Hhom-jee, probably—he was on Handler duty at the moment.

So much for Tenzing’s remora theory. “Thank you,” Roman told him. He was just reaching for the off-switch—

“Rro-maa?”

“Yes, Hhom-jee?”

There was a long pause. “Rro-maa, Manawanninni is afraid.”

Roman stared at Rrin-saa’s unreadable alien face in the intercom screen. “What do you mean, afraid?” he asked carefully. “Afraid of what?”

Another pause. “I do not know.”

Roman pursed his lips, his eyes flicking to the visual display. Ramoras, Tenzing had called them. Harmless to a space horse… “Try and find out,” he told Hhomjee.

“Or see if you can get a location or direction or something.”

“Your wishes are ours,” Rrin-saa said.

Roman keyed off and looked over at Marlowe. “Full scan,” he ordered quietly. “I want you to take a good look at everything within ten thousand kilometers of us.”

“Yes, sir,” Marlowe nodded grimly, and turned to his task.

Roman shifted his gaze to Yamoto. “There’s a combat-operations file in the helm library,” he told her. “Dig it out and put it into standby.” He hesitated; but if the remoras were interested in Man o’ War… “And have engineering start the drive activation sequence.”

“Yes, sir.” If she understood the implications of that order, she hid it well.

And for the moment, Roman decided, that was all Amity could do. Until and unless they found Quentin and the lander here—

And right on cue, Marlowe’s console emitted a loud beep. “Captain!” the other called. “Picking up an emergency beacon; bearing inside the asteroid belt.

“We’ve found them.”

It turned out not to require any miracles, after all; Ferrol hadn’t realized just how readily the lander’s equipment could be disassembled and recombined, though in retrospect that wasn’t unreasonable for a craft that would often serve as a largecapacity lifeboat. The necessary technical data was stored on one of the datapacks in the survival library kit, and Kennedy’s plan was relatively straightforward besides. But with only two of them available to work on it—the Tampies were useless, of course, and Ferrol flatly refused to let Demothi anywhere near the equipment—the job took nearly three hours to complete. It was a good thing, Ferrol thought more than once, that the shark wasn’t in any hurry.

But finally the oddly shaped missile was finished and mounted to the outer hull.

“Now what?” Demothi asked as Ferrol struggled to strip off his EVA skinsuit in zero-gee.

“What do you think?” Ferrol snorted, tugging at a pant leg that didn’t want to come off. “We wait, that’s what. If this works we’ll have a clear Jump window for only a few seconds, and it would be awfully handy to have some idea where we were Jumping to before we start. Wouldn’t you say?”

“And if the shark attacks before the Amity arrives?” Demothi countered.

“We’ll worry about that if and when it happens,” Ferrol growled, stuffing the EVA

gear into its locker and closing the door. “Until then—”

And beyond Demothi, a blue light suddenly began flashing on the control board.

“Ferrol—they’re here,” Kennedy called.

Ferrol kicked off the locker and shot forward, slapping his hands against successive rows of seats to slow himself down. “Where are they?” he asked, grabbing his seat and shoving himself down into it. From the speaker he could hear Marlowe’s voice hailing them.

“Bearing twenty-four port, thirty zenith,” she read off the numbers. “Haven’t got a range yet. Laser’s tracking them now… there; on target.”

Ferrol jabbed the transmit button. “This is Commander Ferrol aboard Amity lander,” he called toward the microphone. “Come in, Amity.” Eyes on the clock, he counted seconds: four… five…

Marlowe’s voice abruptly vanished. “Ahoy, lander,” Roman said. Even with the distorting crackle of charged-particle static, Ferrol could hear the relief in the captain’s voice. “I gather you’ve never heard it’s impolite to leave a party while the host is out of the room.”

“Sorry, but we didn’t have much choice—our ride was leaving,” Ferrol countered.

A six-second round-trip delay—three seconds each direction—put Amity about nine hundred thousand kilometers away. Timewise, that meant…

“A good four hours away at a two-gee ace/dec course,” Kennedy murmured from beside him.

He nodded his thanks. “Can you tell us where we are?” he called into the mike.

“We’ve got a complete nav dump ready for you,” Roman said six seconds later.

“Here it comes.” A light on Kennedy’s console came on, indicating incoming data.

“As a matter of interest,” Roman continued, “Quentin made almost 1120 lightyears in that Jump. Not bad for a beginner.”

“We’ll contact the record books later,” Ferrol said. “Right now, we all have to get the hell out of this system. Do you have a clear Jump window?”

The delay was longer than six seconds this time. Considerably longer. “No,”

Roman said at last, his voice grim. “We’ve picked up an advance guard of small space-going creatures. They seem to be blocking Man o’ War’s Jump vision.”

Ferrol swore under his breath. Amity was far enough from the dead space horse that the vultures shouldn’t have found the larger ship nearly this soon. Was the whole system swarming with the damn things?

Or had the shark abandoned its prey… ?

“Marlowe, key in a full sweep with your anomalous motion program,” he ordered tightly. “Right now. Captain, recommend you get moving, at whatever gees you can pull. If the vultures found you this quickly, there’s a good chance the shark is somewhere nearb—”

“Motion, Captain,” Marlowe interrupted. “Bearing eighty-seven port, sixty nadir.

It’s… my God.”

“Hhom-jee, go to four-gee acceleration,” Roman’s voice came, glacially calm.

“Yamoto, are we still on course for the lander?”

“Yes, sir,” Yamoto answered, her voice changing midway through with the unmistakable strains of high-gee acceleration. “We’ll need to correct later for the higher acceleration, but it’ll be close enough.”

“Marlowe?”

“The monster just went to four gees, too, Captain,” the other reported. “At current course… intercept in just over two hours.”

“Don’t get overconfident—we’ve seen it do seven gees,” Ferrol warned them. “I’d guess it’s taking its time because it’s not very hungry.”

“We’ll take any small favors we can get,” Roman said. “I take it the—shark?—is a predator?”

Ferrol snorted. “In capital letters, underlined. We got a look at the space horse it’d been feeding on. Or what was left of it.”

“We’ve got some recordings, Captain,” Kennedy added. “They’re not very good, but they’ll give you some idea of what you’re up against.”

“Good. Transmit whenever you’re ready.”

The indicator light went on, then off, and for a few minutes there was silence. “I see what you mean,” Roman acknowledged at last. “I’ll send it down to the survey section, see what they can dig out of it. You have any other recommendations?”

Ferrol licked at his upper lip. “We almost certainly can’t kill the shark, sir,” he said. “The Amity hasn’t got anything that could take out even another spacecraft, let alone something that kills and eats space horses for a living. Our only chance is to try and get rid of these vultures and their optical nets long enough to Jump.” He glanced at Kennedy. “Kennedy’s come up with one possible method. Now that we know where we are and how to get back, I think it’s time we gave it a try.”

“The rough design specs are in the package I just sent you,” Kennedy added.

“Hang on, let me take a look.”

For a minute the carrier was silent. Kennedy took the opportunity to finish the last details of programming for her missile. Ferrol sat and watched her, wishing he had something useful to do, too. “Interesting idea,” Roman grunted at last. “Yes, I agree there’s no point in waiting. Let’s see… if it works, try for Deneb. Give us two hours to catch up with you; if we don’t show, your new nav pack should have enough to get you back to Solomon.”

“Kennedy?” Ferrol murmured.

She nodded. “Deneb it is, Captain,” she called.

“Give us a continual helm dump,” Roman instructed. “If it works, we’ll want to see how. Good luck.”

“Right.” Ferrol took a careful breath. “Let’s do it, Kennedy.”

She nodded. “Move us out,” she ordered Wwis-khaa, who had taken Sso-ngu‘s place under the helmet. “Turn Quentin about thirty degrees port, seventeen nadir—big bluish star standing all alone.”

“Your wishes are ours.”

A minute later Quentin was in position, at least as well as Wwis-khaa could tell with the vultures’ interference. “Missile ready,” Ferrol read off, mentally crossing his fingers. “Okay, Kennedy—fire.”

With a flash of maneuvering fire their creation crawled away from the lander. A

minute later, the low-level fusion drive kicked in, sending the missile leaping outward like a scalded bat. It streaked past Quentin as Wwis-khaa twitched the calf aside; then, with the delicacy of a surgeon, the Tampy turned Quentin back again until the optical net was directly in line with the oncoming missile. Ferrol held his breath… and a second before impact the miniature star suddenly blossomed into a filigree of space horse webbing. At five hundred meters per second the humanrigged net collided with the vultures’ optical one—

“Wwis-khaa!” Ferrol snapped, his eyes on the displays. “Do it!”

“Quentinninni cannot yet see the star,” the Tampy said.

“Damn!” Ferrol slammed an impotent fist onto the edge of the console, watching helplessly as the webbing swept through the mess of vultures without obvious effect. “It’s not working. It’s not working.”

“I see the problem,” Kennedy told him. “The webbing caught a bunch of them, all right, but before it could drag them clear the rest filled in the hole.”

Ferrol hissed between his teeth. “Yeah. Damn. And now they’re wriggling out the open end and going back to the main swarm. We need three or four missiles, or one really big one, to make this work.”

“And a way to seal the end after it’s collected them,” Kennedy added. “You copying all this, Amity?”

“We got it all,” Roman acknowledged. “I think you’ve got the right idea; we’ll see if engineering and Tenzing’s people can improve on the model. Hopefully before the shark catches up with us.”

Which would be fine for the Amity, Ferrol thought. But for them… “We’ve already used all the webbing we had aboard, Captain,” he told Roman.

“I assumed that,” the other said. “We’ll think of something.”

“For starters,” Kennedy said, “there’s no real point any more in our skulking around out here. Recommend we head in and meet you halfway.”

Roman seemed to ponder that. “That’ll bring Quentin in uncomfortably close to the shark,” he pointed out. “Are you sure you want to risk that?”

“It’s a damn sight better risk than hoping you can outrun the shark the whole way here,” Ferrol countered.

“Point,” the other conceded. “Yamoto?”

“Ready, sir,” was Yamoto’s prompt reply. “Lieutenant?”

“Go,” Kennedy told her. Again the incoming-data light flicked on and off. “Got it.”

“Good,” Roman said. “Looks like a rendezvous of… an hour fifty minutes.”

With the projected shark intercept at just under two hours away. “Pretty tight,”

Ferrol grunted. “Especially if the shark decides to speed up.”

“Yes, well, Man o’ War can do six gees if necessary,” Roman reminded him.

And the shark could do seven… “There’s one more thing you should do, Captain,”

Ferrol said, the words coming out with difficulty. “In the underbed storage of my cabin is a lockbox—combination seven-two-seven-three-three. In it is a datapack—” he braced himself—“that shows the effects of excessive radiation and heat on space horses. If the shark’s physiology is similar enough, the data may give you a handle on how to fight it.”

He held his breath, waiting with dread for the obvious question. But Roman had a better sense of priorities than that. “Thank you, Commander; I’ll get it to the survey section right away,” he said. “Let’s hope it helps.”

Ferrol nodded silently at the console, a hollow sensation in the pit of his stomach.

So much for secret politics and secret weapons, he thought blackly. But this was a matter of survival—his and Amity’s both. Just for once, politics could go to hell.

And if the Senator didn’t like it, he could go to hell, too.