Warhorse

Chapter 22

The hearings convened forty-eight hours later—not in the relative luxury of the Solomon state house this time, but in Earth orbit in the grim starkness of the warship C.S.S. Defiance. At Solomon, the Starforce and Senate had been more or less evenly represented; here, such balance was summarily dispensed with. Military men and women dominated the sessions, with the handful of civilians present participating mainly through intent listening.

The Senator, of course, was one of those civilians. As Ferrol had expected he would be.

But for the first three days they had literally no chance to speak privately. Ferrol’s days were filled to the brim with debriefings; sometimes alone, other times with Roman or Kennedy or Tenzing sharing the stand with him. Nights were likewise filled, with fatigued sleep punctuated by disturbed dreams of sharks and vultures.

And of Prometheus. It had been this same Defiance which had taken him and the other evicted colonists away from their world. More than once, he wondered if choosing this particular ship for the hearings had been someone’s twisted idea of a joke.

Awake, he talked; asleep, he dreamed… and at all times he waited with growing impatience for the Senator to finally draw him aside. On the fourth day, the last one scheduled, he got tired of waiting.

“I’m sorry,” Stefain Reese said, his tone a combination of firm and bland, “but the Senator is really very busy at the moment.”

“He’ll see me,” Ferrol told him, craning his neck to see past the half-closed door into the other part of the office suite. The Senator was there, all right, in deep conversation with another civilian and two military men in heavily decorated dress uniforms. “Tell him who it is.”

The other hesitated just a second, then picked up his phone and murmured into it.

Straining, Ferrol could hear the tone of the Senator’s speech change—“He says for you to go back to your room, Ferrol, that he’ll call you later.”

A quiet alarm bell went off in the back of Ferrol’s brain. The scheduled return to Amity was barely two hours away. “There isn’t going to be any ‘later,’ ” he told Reese. “Tell the Senator I’ll give him one minute to get rid of his guests. After that, I’ll go on in and state my business in front of all of them.”

Reese gave him a long, thoughtful look, as if weighing the feasibility of calling Security. Ferrol countered with a stare of his own; and after a moment Reese dropped his eyes and spoke again into the phone. A short pause—“He’ll be right with you,” he muttered.

Ferrol nodded and, for no particular reason, began counting off the seconds. Fiftyfive of them later, the Senator’s visitors got to their feet and, with only casual glances in Ferrol’s direction, filed out of the suite.

The Senator remained standing in the inner doorway; and as the last of his guests left, his gaze shifted deliberately to Ferrol. A calm gaze, even and totally devoid of emotion. “Commander,” he nodded in a voice that matched the gaze. “Do come in.”

Silently, Ferrol eased past him into the room. This time, the Senator closed the door all the way. “You interrupted an important meeting,” he told Ferrol, crossing to an ornate metal desk in the corner and seating himself behind it.

“I’ll be leaving the Defiance in two hours,” Ferrol told him, successfully fighting the automatic urge to apologize. For once he wasn’t going to let the Senator put him on the defensive right from word one. “Sometime in the next twelve hours Amity’ll get her orders, and it’ll be off to God knows where, for God knows how long. Breaking up a meeting was the only way I was ever going to get to talk to you.”

The Senator lifted an eyebrow. “And what makes you think we have anything to talk about?”

For a long minute Ferrol stared at him. “I don’t understand.”

The Senator’s lip twisted. “Then let me spell it out in block letters: you, Chayne, are no longer in my service.”

Ferrol felt his mouth fall open. “What?” he whispered. “But… why not?”

“Does it matter?” the other asked.

Ferrol swallowed hard, moisture in his eyes making the room swim. The air around him had turned abruptly cold, filled with ice and disapproval and contempt.

Suddenly he was a child again, facing his father’s anger…

He fought the feeling back. He was not a child, and the man facing him was not his father. “Yes,” he gritted out between clenched teeth—clenched so that they wouldn’t chatter with emotion. “It matters. For years now I’ve been one of your best agents—”

“ ‘Best’?” The Senator snorted in a genteel sort of way. “Oh, come now, Chayne, you don’t even fool yourself on that one. You were useful, certainly, but hardly one of the best. That status takes far more years of experience than you’ve even been alive.”

“And I won’t be having any more of that experience now, will I?” Ferrol countered. The helpless childlike feeling was fading, leaving behind a growing anger. “Why?”

“For one thing, there’s a little matter of confidence,” the Senator said, his manner shifting abruptly from daunting to idly offhanded. Perhaps he’d recognized the other approach wasn’t working. “When an agent of mine freely offers classified information to an opponent—well, I’m sure you can see how that could make me reluctant to keep such an agent on.”

It took Ferrol a second to realize just what the hell the other was talking about.

“Senator, we were facing a life and death situation out there,” he growled. “Would you rather I have played dumb with Kheslav’s data and let the shark eat Amity and me both?”

“From what Captain Roman has testified, Kheslav’s data didn’t really seem to help him much.”

“No, it didn’t,” Ferrol conceded. “But that was hardly something I could have known in advance.”

“Perhaps. The fact remains that the datapack was private information, and that you had no business possessing a copy of it in the first place.”

“And that’s the real issue here, isn’t it,” Ferrol said. “The fact that I had illegally obtained information that could be traced to you.”

He expected a reaction of some sort—anger, caution; something that would give him a glimpse into what the other was thinking. But as usual, the Senator denied him even that much. “Illegally obtained?” he asked mildly. “Come now, Chayne—how on Earth can information about a creature orbiting an unclaimed planet be illegally obtained? And as for tracing it back to me, don’t be absurd. I cover my tracks better than that.” The Senator shook his head. “No, Chayne, the real issue here, as you put it, is not whether you and your past activities—any of them—can be linked to me. It’s not even whether or not I can still trust you to function on my behalf; I really only brought up the Kheslav thing to air my disappointment with how you handled the situation. The real issue—” he paused dramatically —“is that we’ve won.”

Ferrol frowned. “What do you mean, we’ve won? Won what?”

“Our undeclared, non-shooting war with the Tempies, of course,” the other said.

“Come now; surely the implications of these sharks on space horse transport haven’t been lost on you.”

“There are implications there, all right,” Ferrol nodded, “but not the ones you seem to be thinking of. The sharks didn’t just spring up last week out of sawdust somewhere, and if the Tampies have been running space horses all these centuries without bumping into them, they must be pretty rare. At least around here.”

“Agreed; but their abundance or lack of it may not be the important factor.

According to Captain Roman’s testimony, the Tampies have a rather lopsided sense of almost contractual responsibility toward their space horses, to the extent that they’ll let the animals go free if they feel their side of the bargain has been violated. Whatever the hell kind of bargain you can make with a non-intelligent animal, that is,” he added with thinly veiled contempt.

So that was why Roman and Rrin-saa had turned Quentin loose… and perhaps why Roman had been so evasive to Ferrol about his reasons. If the mere existence of the sharks could really induce the Tampies to dismantle their space-going capability…

“So what are you going to do?” he asked. “Web a shark and drag it to the Tampies’

Kialinninni corral system?”

The Senator smiled thinly. “Give me credit for a little common sense, Chayne,” he said dryly. “Besides which, I don’t think anything that drastic or dangerous will be necessary. The sharks are predators, after all, and predators must have some way of locating their prey. In time, they’ll find Kialinninni on their own.”

“At which point we settle for a draw.”

The Senator lifted an eyebrow. “Meaning…?”

“Meaning no space horses for us or for the Tampies. They’ll be stuck inside their systems, and we’ll be stuck with our Mitsuushi snaildrive.”

The Senator’s face darkened. “At least we’ll have the stars.”

“Some of them. Not very many.”

“We’ll have enough,” the other said firmly. “All the planets we’ll ever need are within our reach right now. Provided, that is, we don’t have the Tampies standing over us telling us what we can and cannot do with them.”

Ferrol’s thoughts flashed back to the discoveries Amity had brought back from its first voyage—discoveries that had been overshadowed in both public and official minds by the excitement of Pegasus’ calving. “Oh, we’ll have enough room, all right,” he snorted. “But we’ll be giving up the rest of the universe in the process.

And maybe for nothing. Now that we know about sharks, the problems Demothi and everyone before him has had trying to control space horses make sense.”

“Yes; your ‘predator invading a non-predator’s mind’ theory,” the Senator said.

“You brought that up about every third question. So what do you suggest we do?

—web a shark and offer Demothi a chance to ride it?”

Ferrol clamped his mouth shut, the presentation he’d so carefully prepared and rehearsed over the past two days dying in his throat. The Senator was truly and totally uninterested in obtaining space horse capabilities for the Cordonale; his only interest was in robbing the Tampies of theirs. Period.

Had that always been his goal? Probably. Dimly, Ferrol wondered why he’d never recognized that. “Given your obvious disinterest,” he said tightly, “I suppose there’s really nothing to discuss.”

“As I said when you came in,” the Senator reminded him, standing up. “Now if you’ll excuse me—”

“I presume my commission with the Amity is still valid,” Ferrol continued, not moving. “If only because dropping me out now might attract unwelcome attention.

So. What about my ship?”

The Senator frowned. “What ship is—? Oh, you mean the Scapa Flow, What about it?”

“You told me when I signed onto the Amity that you’d be using it for private courier work,” he reminded the other. “Is that agreement still valid, or are all of my crewers officially off the payroll now, too?”

The other favored him with a long, speculative look. “I’ve never been impressed by people who try to keep their foot in the door on their way out,” he said coldly.

“I have no interest whatsoever in keeping my foot in with you,” Ferrol countered, matching the Senator’s tone. “I’m interested solely in the well-being of my crew.

You owe them some measure of financial security, at least as long as I’m still watching out for your interests aboard the Amity.”

The Senator’s lip twisted, but he nodded. “I owe them nothing; but I suppose I can go ahead and buy out their contract. If that will be satisfactory…?” he added with thinly veiled sarcasm.

“Quite satisfactory,” Ferrol nodded in return, getting to his feet. “Thank you, Senator; and for your time, as well.” He turned to go—

“Chayne?”

He turned back. “Yes?”

“If I were you,” the other said quietly, “I wouldn’t count on the Amity remaining in service for too much longer.”

Ferrol stared at him. “I don’t understand.”

The Senator smiled faintly. “You will.”

Two hours later Ferrol left the Defiance with the others and headed back toward the Amity. It was a long shuttle ride, which was fine with him. It gave him time to think.

An hour after arriving at the Amity, he was in the ship’s main communications room with a short, laboriously hand-coded message.

Even with their skyhook prices, the Cordonale’s tachyon transceivers were normally so jammed with messages that delays of twenty-four to forty-eight hours were not uncommon. But Ferrol’s status as exec of a major Starforce ship gave him an impressive priority factor, and barely thirty minutes later the central Earth transceiver relayed an acknowledgment of the message from the Scapa Flow.

The Senator might be willing to settle for a draw. Ferrol wasn’t… and if no one else was interested, then he and the Scapa Flow would just have to do it on their own.