Warhorse

Chapter 5

Roman touched a button and watched the preliminary analysis of the dust sweat display itself across his screen. Silicon and iron, mainly, with trace amounts of calcium, magnesium, and aluminum. Nothing particularly useful, singly or together. “Have they got a molecular structure analysis yet?” he asked.

“Still working on it,” Ferrol said, head cocked toward his intercom. “Got some really complex molecules in there, but nothing of any obvious value.”

“Well, have them map and store everything they can isolate, anyway,” Roman instructed.

“Yes, sir,” Ferrol said, and relayed the order.

Suppressing a grimace, Roman turned his attention back to the main display. He hadn’t been expecting them to find any gold nuggets, of course—after twenty years of contact with Tampies, the dust sweat must have been analyzed dozens of times, by people far more interested in making money from space horses than he was. But it would have been nice. “Lieutenant? Jump status?”

“One minute to Jump, sir,” she said. “Handler’s signaled ready; all ship systems show green.”

“Marlowe?”

“All inboard and outboard sensors on and recording.”

Marlowe reported. “If there’s anything that can be seen during a Jump, we’ll get it.”

Roman nodded. “All right,” he said, automatically bracing himself. “Let’s do it.”

Several months earlier, Roman had discovered that a space horse Jump was completely unspectacular to watch. Now, he discovered, it was equally unspectacular to experience.

There was no sensation. None at all. One second they were pulling 0.9 gee through the Tampies’ Kialinninni system, with a dull red sun off their port stern; the next second, they were doing exactly the same thing except with a dazzling white sun directly ahead. “Marlowe?” Roman asked.

“Nothing, Captain,” the other said, shaking his head. “No glitches or transitions on any of the inboard sensors. Outboard scanners… no transitional data on any of them, either.”

“What’s the time-quantum on the sensors, the standard half picosecond?” Roman asked.

“Better than that, sir,” Marlowe told him. “The manual claims 0.05 picosecond; I’d guess it closer to 0.1, myself.”

A tenth of a picosecond or less. Zero time, by any reasonable definition. “Thank you. Lieutenant Kennedy? We have Alpha located yet?”

“Working on it, sir,” Kennedy said. Her voice was its usual unawed self, as if Jumping space horses was something she did every week. “Computer’s got the ecliptic plane identified, and it’s calculating from the Tampies’ data where the planet ought to be. It’ll be a few more minutes.”

Roman nodded, keying his intercom as mention of the Tampies brought a sudden idea to mind. “Captain to Handler. Sso-ngu, are you able to speak?”

There was a short pause, and then the screen lit up with the Tampy’s image, his twisted face almost lost between the amplifier helmet and the red-white neckerchief. At least the sleeping animal wasn’t in view this way. “I hear, Rromaa,”

Sso-ngu said. “What is your wish?”

“Does Pegasus know where the planet is we’re heading for? Can it sense it, I mean, from here?”

The Tampy’s face was unreadable, as usual. “I do not know,” he whined. “I know space horses can see many distant stars and solid objects within telekene range; that is all.”

“Yeah,” Roman grunted, annoyed despite the fact he’d half expected that answer.

One of the more maddening Tampy characteristics was their steadfast and muleheaded refusal to ever speculate aloud unless and until they had absolute proof one way or the other. Pressing Sso-ngu on the subject would do nothing but pull increasingly obscure facts about space horses from him; and while that might be a useful exercise some day, at the moment Roman couldn’t be bothered. “Well, then, just stand by,” he told the Tampy. “We’ll have the location in a few minutes and feed the direction back there. Until then, you might as well have Pegasus stop our acceleration.”

“Your wishes are ours.”

Roman frowned at the screen, wondering if the Tampy was being sarcastic. But that was hardly likely. “Very good. Execute.”

He broke the connection; and an instant later grabbed reflexively at the arms of his chair as the Amity made a stomach-lurching transition to zero-gee.

Belatedly, the deceleration warning went on, and Roman swore under his breath.

Textbook fusion-drive deceleration/cool-down was a five-minute process; once again, old reflexes had betrayed him.

“Captain?” Ferrol cut into his embarrassment. The other’s voice was bland enough… but as Roman turned to face him he could see that the exec was privately enjoying his discomfiture. “Survey section reports they’ve taken the next dust sweat sample,” Ferrol continued. He cocked an eyebrow. “Assuming, that is, you still want them to bother analyzing the stuff.”

Roman eyed him. “Have you received any orders to the contrary, Commander?” he asked mildly.

The skin around Ferrol’s eyes tightened a bit. Perhaps, Roman thought, he’d been hoping for an overreaction. “No, sir,” he said, matching Roman’s tone.

“Then I’d say you could safely assume I still want the dust analyzed. Wouldn’t you agree?”

“Yes, sir,” Ferrol said, the first stirrings of awkwardness starting to appear at the corners of his lips. He was now on the defensive, and didn’t like it a bit. “I just thought the order might be worth checking on, after the negative results of the first sample.”

For a moment Roman just looked at him, watching the discomfort grow. “This is a research ship, Commander,” he said at last. “Its mission is to collect data; on Tampies, Tampy-human interactions, unexplored planets, space horse travel, and space horses themselves. All data, whether it looks to be immediately useful or not.”

“Understood, sir,” Ferrol said, his discomfort starting to edge into a simmering of anger.

“Good,” Roman nodded. He held the eye contact a second longer, then turned back to Marlowe. “Progress on the search for Alpha, Lieutenant?” he asked.

“Another minute, Captain,” the other said promptly, his voice the cadet-precise monotone of someone trying hard to keep himself inconspicuous. “We’ve got the theoretical position calculated, and we’re searching that immediate area with the scopes.”

Roman nodded and keyed his own displays to monitor the search. Thus are drawn the battle lines, he thought darkly. Ferrol had no real reason to care whether or not the survey section was wasting its time with Pegasus’ dust sweat, and he and everyone on the bridge knew it. The question had been nothing less than a challenge to Roman’s command authority, or his judgment, or both.

Or in other words, despite all of his high-sounding statements the previous day, Ferrol wasn’t going to be content with simply letting Amity’s crew make up their own minds about the Tampies on merit alone. He was going to make this into a personal confrontation between himself, the anti-Tampy realist, and Roman, the pro-Tampy military/political hack.

And if Marlowe’s reaction was anything to go by, Ferrol had at the very least managed to sour the atmosphere on the bridge a bit. A subtle but genuine form of damage.

“Got it, Captain,” Kennedy announced. “Bearing 96.4, 15.3. Distance, six hundred thousand kilometers.”

“Send the direction to the Tampies,” Roman told her. “Straight-line path, once we’ve come around, and have Sso-ngu keep acceleration at 0.9 gee.”

He would have thought Ferrol would be willing to quit while he was ahead. He was wrong. “Shall I compute turnover point for them, sir?” the other spoke up. “Their excuse for a computer may not be able to handle the calculation.”

“Let’s find out, shall we?” Roman countered. “Lieutenant, just give Sso-ngu the location and let the Tampies do the rest.” He cocked an eyebrow to Ferrol. “If they can, that is.”

They could, and did… and just under five hours later Pegasus eased the Amity smoothly into geosynchronous orbit around Alpha.

If Ferrol had won the first round of his private duel, the Tampies had clearly won the second.

Roman had seen a fair number of planetary landscapes over the years, either in person or in holos, and he’d found that in almost every case his first impression was of the wild and exotic color combinations alien plant life always seemed able to come up with.

It was a rule that Alpha had proved a glaring exception to. The wide prairielike field the landing party was busy poking around, as well as the forest beyond it, were done entirely in black, white, and shades of gray.

“It’s really rather amazing,” Ells Sanderson commented, and even through the muffling of his filter mask there was no mistaking the excitement in his voice.

“The predominant black-and-gray plant coloration makes considerable sense as far as photosynthesis goes—allows more energy to be collected, including more of the infrared than straight chlorophyll-variants can utilize.”

“Pretty dull as far as looking goes, though,” Roman commented. “Are all the animals and insects naturally color-blind?”

“It’s one of the things we’ll be checking,” Sanderson said. “Though you bring up an interesting point: namely, how pollination takes place without brightly colored flowers to attract the insects.”

“Maybe it’s not done by insects at all,” Roman suggested. “Couldn’t the pollen be airborne, or transmitted by animals that brush by?”

“The anthers of most of these plants are wrong for that,” one of the other scientists put in. Steef Burch, Roman tentatively identified the voice. “Besides which, I can see various insects doing flight patterns through and around clumps of specific plant types.”

“We’re taking some proximity air samples,” Sanderson added. “That should tell us if the flowers are putting out chemical cues.”

“Sounds good.” Roman scanned the multi-split screen that showed all of the lander’s fixed cameras and the landing party’s portable ones, chose one of the two that showed the analysis table that had been set up a dozen meters from the lander’s air lock. He keyed for it, and Sanderson’s close-up of dull gray foliage was replaced by a close-up of a small gray-brown creature that looked like a nightmare blend of aardvark face, turtle shell, short monkey legs, and lobster claws, the whole thing strapped to the table by a covering of mesh net. “Dr. Peyton? How are the animal studies going?”

“Ttra-mu and I are doing just fine,” Miki Peyton said in the vaguely distant voice of someone absorbed in her work. Peyton’s file had put her as marginally anti- Tampy, a fact that had worried Roman more than once as the lander was heading down. The Tampies would be watching this part of the work closely, making sure there was nothing that could be construed as mistreatment, and the last thing Roman wanted was someone who might go all twitchy under the aliens’ lopsided gaze. But Peyton had been the head of the group who’d designed and built this particular analysis table, and she’d made it more than clear that she personally was going to be there for her pet project’s official debut. The risk of friction down on Alpha hadn’t been worth risking civil war on the Amity for, and Roman had reluctantly given in.

But so far it seemed to be working out all right. He just hoped Ttra-mu would have the sense to look but not touch.

“We’ve got the preliminary layer scans done now,” Peyton continued. “Is the data coming through clearly enough up there?‘

“Dr. Tenzing?” Roman invited.

“Coming in very clear,” the voice of the survey section’s chief came promptly over the intercom. “We’ve already started sifting through it.”

“Good. Ttra-mu, how’s your hand?”

“The damage is not serious, Rro-maa,” the Tampy whined. “As I said before, the inner skin was not broken.”

Which ought to eliminate any risk of infection or poisoning, even if there was anything in the lobster-clawed creature that could affect Tampy physiology. “Keep the analyzer on it, anyway,” Roman ordered him. “Dr. Peyton, have you figured out yet how the creature did that?”

“You mean how it could pinch Ttra-mu through the net at a distance further than its claw-arm could physically reach?” she asked dryly. “Not yet; but at least I’ve proved that what happened wasn’t actually impossible. This thing has no bones.”

Roman frowned. “None at all?”

“None at all,” she confirmed. “And very little cartilage, either. Most of its skeletal framework seems to be nothing more or less than an organic type of bi-state memory plastic, which can apparently be rigid or flexible as the need arises.”

Roman eyed the creature on his display with new respect. “Interesting. Is this something unique to this particular species, or do you expect it to be the Alphan norm?”

“Well know in a minute,” a new voice broke into the conversation. “This is Singh, Captain; Llos-tlaa and I are just about to net you a rabbit.”

Roman scanned the split screen, found Audrey Singh’s chest camera and switched to it. Sitting on its haunches among the squat gray ground shrubbery was a creature that bore not a shred of resemblance to an Earth rabbit. “That’s a rabbit, is it?” he asked Singh.

“Well, it looks like it would fill that niche in the ecosystem, anyway.” A hand clutching a net gun appeared at the edge of the screen as Singh eased toward his prey, and across the way Roman could now see Llos-tlaa, similarly armed, moving in from the opposite direction. “Easy, friend,” Singh murmured soothingly under his breath. “We’re not going to hurt you, just take a painless look at your insides.”

He carefully raised the netter—

And the creature abruptly changed into something else and leapt away.

“Bloody hell!” Singh gasped, the view swinging dizzyingly as he spun around to watch the new creature’s bounding escape. “It can’t do that.”

His last word was almost swallowed up by the hoarse sputter of a rapid-fire needle gun. Across the field, the creature jerked in mid-jump and slammed unmoving to the ground. “Hold your fire!” Roman barked. “Who was that?”

There was a moment’s hesitation. “It was me, sir—Garin,” the head of the landing party’s four-man guard detail spoke up. “I figured the scientists would want the thing caught for study—”

“There was no need to kill it!”

Roman jumped. The scream was high-pitched, almost shrill, its tones rich with grief and agony and a sense of frustration and reproach. His eyes skated across the split screen, seeking the creature still netted to the analysis table, his first horrible thought that the scream had somehow come from it. “Who said that?” he demanded.

“Forgive me, Rro-maa.” —And in those three words the shrill pitch of the voice dropped down the scale back to the normal Tampy whine. “I was angered.”

“So I gather, Llos-tlaa,” Roman said, his own anger at Garin’s unauthorized killing vanishing in the shiver running up his back. Nowhere in any of the briefings had there been any hint that Tampy voices could do that. “Garin, unless you’re under a deadly and immediate threat, you will not fire again without orders. Understood?”

“Yes, sir,” Garin growled, his tone just short of surly.

“That goes for the rest of you, too,” Roman reminded the other guards. “Dr. Singh, is there enough of the rabbit left to study?”

Singh was leaning over the creature now, and the close-up view of the needleriddled body made Roman slightly queasy. “We can try, Captain,” he said, working the edge of his net underneath it. “Interesting—you notice it became a rabbit again when it died?”

“Actually, in a sense it was never anything else,” Ferrol spoke up from across the bridge. “I think the landing party ought to see this.”

“We’ve got something, Dr. Singh,” Roman told him. “Switch for reception from here.”

Ferrol had taken the transmission from Singh’s camera, scrubbed it through the computer, and run it at slow motion. It made the rabbit’s transformation easier to follow… but no less astonishing.

“It’s like the skin is flowing,” Singh muttered. “Like some kind of high-stretch elastic or even a semi-fluid.”

“And you can see the skeletal structure changing beneath it, too,” Peyton put in from the analysis table. “I was right—it’s exactly like a bi-state plastic. The muscles must be doing something similar—if they weren’t, the legs couldn’t lengthen like that without losing strength.”

“Muscles, and organs, too,” Singh pointed out. “Notice how the lung capacity has already nearly doubled?”

“It’s becoming a running machine,” Burch breathed, sounding awed.

It was, too. If the creature’s first appearance had reminded Singh of a rabbit, the new form that leaped slow-motion out of the camera’s range reminded Roman of a racing greyhound. “Opinions? Anybody?” he asked.

“It’s pretty obvious we’ve stumbled on something unique here,” Tenzing said.

“We’ll have to do more study to see whether this shape-changing ability is only used for fight/flight situations or whether each creature actually fills two entirely different ecological niches, sharing time between them.”

“Ah, yes,” Burch offered, half under his breath. “A planet called ‘Werewolf.’ ”

“Let’s just leave it at ‘Alpha,’ shall we?” Sanderson said shortly. “I think there’s plenty here to occupy our attention without wasting brainpower on names.

Especially when that’ll be the Tampies’ job, not ours.”

There was a moment of strained silence, an awkwardness Roman could feel as well on the bridge. Caught up in the excitement, everyone seemed to have forgotten the bottom-line reality of the situation. Four hundred thirty light-years from Earth, Alpha was far outside the range of Mitsuushi-equipped ships. Whatever they found down there—whether a site for a future colony, marketable plant and animal life, or even just exotic and exciting biology—it would be the Tampies, not humanity, who would gain from their work.

“They’re not content with just stealing us blind anymore,” Ferrol muttered, just loudly enough for Roman to hear. “Now they’ve got us delivering the loot for them.”

“That’s enough, Commander,” Roman growled, but the damage was already done.

“Dr. Singh, I’ll want you to do a complete microbe check on the rabbit, with an eye toward whether it’ll be safe to bring it back to the Amity. As long as it’s already dead,” he added, to forestall any potential argument from the Tampies, “we might as well make full use of it.”

“If our pre-exit air and soil checks didn’t show anything dangerous, the rabbit isn’t likely to be carrying anything,” Sanderson reminded him.

“I know that,” Roman said. “Do the checks anyway.”

“A-ha” Peyton cut in abruptly. “Got it, I think. Ells, do a quick electric field reading on a couple of the plants out there, will you?”

“Okay,” Sanderson said, his part of the split screen tilting abruptly as he and his chest camera knelt down.

“What, you suggesting an electric sense?” Burch asked, sounding doubtful.

“Why not? You were the one who commented on the high density of ions in the air when we took the first readings, if you’ll remember.”

“Yeah, but it’s nothing like the density you get in seawater, which is where you usually find electric senses,” Burch pointed out. “Terran sharks, et al.”

“Space horses can also sense electric fields,” Ttra-mu said.

“Interesting,” Burch said, a bit tartly, “but hardly relevant to a discussion of animals that evolved inside atmospheres.”

“Regardless, there’s clear and definite evidence of an electric sense in this animal,”

Peyton said. “Ells? Anything?”

“Looks like you may be right,” Sanderson agreed. “The fields are definitely there, with different intensities and oscillation frequencies for different species.”

“Oscillation frequencies?” Tenzing echoed. “You mean the fields aren’t static?”

“Far from it. The three plants I’ve checked have •jrdes ranging from about nine seconds to nearly 0.”

“Organic electric oscillators,” Singh murmured. “Elegant, indeed.”

“Elegant and a half,” Sanderson agreed. “Not to mention potentially useful, if we can figure out the mechanism.”

“Well, pick out a good sampling and bring them aboard,” Tenzing told him. “Do bear in mind, though, that we’ve only got the one lockbox lab per planet, and you’ll be poking around down there for two more weeks. You fill the lab to the ceiling and those of us who have to work in there will spend the next two months cursing your ancestry.”

Sanderson murmured slightly reluctant-sounding agreement, and Roman suppressed a smile. Just like kids in a toy store, he thought.

“Captain?” Marlowe said abruptly. “I’ve got something.”

His tone… “Got it,” Roman acknowledged, keying for scanner repeater. An infrared view of the landing area taken from Amity’s belly cameras… and in the woods beyond the prairie, circled by flashing markers—

“Dr. Sanderson?—hold it a minute,” he called toward the intercom. “You’ve got what looks like three large animals approaching from almost due west.”

The background conversation abruptly vanished. “Confirmed, Captain,” Garin said a moment later, his voice taut. “Still no visual contact, but we’ve got them on scanner. Bearing… directly toward us.”

He paused, and in the silence the snik of needle guns being put on full automatic was clearly audible. “Alert status is still yellow, Garin,” Roman reminded the guard leader. “Let’s not panic until we see what we’ve got here.”

“Acknowledged, sir,” Garin said, his voice tight but under control.

“The animals have picked up speed,” Marlowe reported. “About a minute to visual contact.”

Across the bridge, Roman heard the hiss of exhaled breath. “Comment, Commander?” he invited, keeping his attention on the view from Garin’s camera.

“Shouldn’t we be getting them out of there?” Ferrol asked, his voice tighter even than Garin’s. “At least have them get into the lander where they’ll be safe?”

“It’s too late for that,” Kennedy spoke up. Her tone, Roman noted, seemed more interested than worried. “They’re too spread out for everyone to get back in time.

Besides, if they have to fight, they’ll do better out in the open where they have a clear field of fire.”

“If the Tampies let them shoot,” Ferrol growled.

“That’s enough,” Roman said, punching for a tactical display. The landscape below appeared, with the lander and each of the eight humans and two Tampies marked with colored crosses. Garin and the other three guards, he saw, had deployed themselves in a rough semicircle facing the point where the three approaching animals would emerge from the woods. Well-trained, armed with probably the deadliest small arms in the Cordonale’s arsenal, Roman had little doubt that they could cut the approaching animals to ribbons if it became necessary.

Which meant the big question would be whether it was necessary… and whether the Tampies would see it the same way he did.

“Ells, the analysis table’s instruments are going crazy,” Peyton spoke up. “I think it’s picking up the animals’ electric fields.”

“Can’t be,” Sanderson said, his voice frowning. “Those instruments are shortrange—

they’re not designed to scan anywhere but the table.”

“I know that,” Peyton snapped. “So argue with the instruments, not me.”

“Perhaps,” Llos-tlaa suggested, “Gga-ru can confirm this with his sensor equipment.”

“Don’t bother me, Tampy,” Garin bit out, and in his camera view Roman could see the tip of the other’s needle gun. “I’ve got more important things to worry about at the moment.”

“Do it, Garin,” Roman ordered. “If those animals are radiating strongly enough to be picked up by the analysis table, it’s something worth knowing.”

For a second the muzzle remained where it was. Then, abruptly, it dropped from view. “Yes, Captain,” Garin said, the words coming through obviously clenched teeth. “Checking now… no, there’s nothing there. Must be a malfunction in the table.”

“It is not a malfunction,” Peyton insisted. “Check again, especially at the highfrequency end—fifty hertz and up. There’s not all that much power to it, I don’t think. Directional, maybe, or else it’s the high ion concentration that lets it penetrate this far.”

She’d barely finished her sentence when there was a sudden crackle of displaced branches from the forest; and even as Garin snapped his needle gun up again the bushes ahead were shoved violently aside and three creatures stepped out onto the plain.

If the small animal that Garin had gunned down earlier had been a rabbit, these new ones were huge dogs. Dogs with hairless, elephantine skin and flat muzzles; with large paws whose curved feline claws were visible even two hundred meters away; with long shark-like mouths full of white teeth.

And even as the landing party froze in silence, the dog in the center took a step forward, paused… and changed.

Slower than the rabbit had, and far more awesome because of that. The chest and flank elongated as first the front legs and then the rear stretched to half-again their original length. The extended legs seemed to thicken, as if new muscle was reforming there, and the belly flattened. The wrinkled skin, stretched over all the expansion, smoothed out, becoming sleek and shimmery. The muzzle remained the same, but the sides of the head swelled outward, in an odd way that reminded Roman of a bird fluffing out its feathers. The whole operation took perhaps ten seconds… and at the end of it the dog had become a wolf.

A wolf the size of a large grizzly bear. Rearing up briefly on its hind legs, it raised its head as if uttering a soundless cry. Then, bringing the front paws back down again, it swung its head around slowly, studying the invaders of its world. Its eyes fell on Peyton and Ttra-mu, still standing beside the analysis table and the dead rabbit awaiting their study. It raised its head again, uttered its soundless cry… And started toward them.