Warhorse

Chapter 8

“… Although I feel the experience was worthwhile, I don’t think I would enjoy working with the Tampies again. There are just too many differences, too many ways for us to irritate each other.”

The words flowing across the display ceased, and Roman braced himself. That was the last of them. Now came the moment he’d been dreading: the computer’s scorecard. Tapping the appropriate key, he watched as the results appeared. Twentyeight favorable, ninety-seven unfavorable, as compared to an original pre-flight score of sixty to sixty-five. Nearly twenty-six percent of Amity’s crew had switched from pro- to anti-Tampy.

Damn.

He leaned back in his chair, gazing out at the shadowy bulk of Pegasus just visible at the edge of the viewport. So it had failed, this grand experiment in familiarity breeding respect—failed beyond the ability of even the most grimly optimistic to argue. Virtually all of the originally pro-Tampy crewers had had their enthusiasm toward the aliens dampened, to one degree or another, while at the same time every single one of the anti-Tampies had had their prejudices strengthened.

I should have taken firmer control, he told himself; but deep down he knew it wouldn’t have made any difference. There was no way he could have forced friendship between the races on his ship, and it would have been useless to even try. Rrin-saa’s words about Amity’s importance echoed in his mind, and for a moment he felt a brief stirring of anger toward the Tampies. Certainly some of the blame rested with them—they hadn’t made the slightest effort to tone down their opposition to the way human beings interacted with the rest of the universe. In fact, they’d more than once gone borderline hysterical about it.

He was still staring blackly at the final data when the office was abruptly filled with the soft but pervasive warbling of ship’s alert.

For a pair of heartbeats he just sat there, mind wrenching away from interstellar politics and back to his immediate responsibilities. He reached for his intercom; but it came on even before his hand got there. “Captain here,” he said.

“Bridge, sir,” Ferrol said, his face and voice tight. “We’ve got a tachyon message coming in from Solomon—Urgent One level.”

A chill ran up Roman’s back. There was only one reason he could think of why anyone would need to shoot Amity a message of such priority… “Acknowledged,”

he said, keying the proper acceptance code into his terminal. “Bring it in,” he instructed Ferrol. “Pipe it back here to me and to the bridge crew—nowhere else.”

For an instant his eyes and Ferrol’s met, and there was a brief spark of mutual understanding. If the simmering fires on the human-Tampy frontier had indeed exploded into full conflict, both men wanted some time to think before breaking the news to Amity’s Tampies. “Yes, sir,” Ferrol said, dropping his gaze to his keys.

“Here it comes.”

Ferrol’s face disappeared from the screen, to be replaced by—

TO RESEARCH SHIP AMITY, SOLOMON: FROM COMMANDER STARFORCE BORDERSHIPS

EXTENSION, PREPYAT:

:::URGENT-ONE:::URGENT-ONE:::URGENT-ONE::: PROCEED IMMEDIATELY NCL1148, EMERGENCY RESCUE OF

SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH STATION ON THIRD PLANET. NCL 1148-B

PREPARING TO GO NOVA.

“Holy hell,” someone on the bridge muttered in the background.

“Quiet,” Ferrol’s voice growled back.

FURTHER DATA ON SYSTEM AVAILABLE FOR FEED FROM SOLOMON

STARFORCE STATION. ABSOLUTELY VITAL PICKUP BE MADE BY

AM77T.

VICE-ADMIRAL MARCOSA, COMBOREX, PREPYAT CODE/VER

*@7882//53

8:22 GMT///ESD 3 APRIL 2335

“Commander, contact the station and get us that data feed,” Roman ordered, feeling the knots in his stomach begin to relax a bit. Heading into a system on the brink of stellar explosion was hardly cause for joy, but it was a far cry from the call to arms he’d envisioned. “And alert the Tampies; I want Pegasus ready to Jump just as soon as we know where it is we’re Jumping to.”

“Yes, sir,” Ferrol said, his voice still tight. “Shall I secure from yellow alert?”

“Yes, you’d better,” Roman agreed. The warbling siren had probably driven most of the crewers to the same conclusion that he and Ferrol had already jumped to, and things were likely pretty tense back there. “Go ahead and read the message over the general intercom, too—if the star is really this close to going critical, we’re going to want everyone running at top efficiency.”

“Acknowledged.”

Roman keyed off the intercom and unstrapped, and as his feet found the nearest velgrip patch the warbling faded and was replaced by Ferrol’s voice announcing the sudden change in Amity’s planned schedule.

And for a moment Roman paused beside his desk, frowning at the stars outside.

8:22 GMT, the message datestamp had said, on Earth Standard Date 3 April 2335.

Something over thirty hours ago… and in the time the message had sat around waiting for the Amity to make its appearance at Solomon, Marcosa could have sent the message to the Tampies via a space horse-equipped courier and had a rescue ship already in the 1148 system, possibly even at the research station itself.

So why hadn’t they?

Politics, he thought darkly. Politics and pride, and a hell/highwater unwillingness to ask the Tampies for help. Damn foolishness, by any reasonable standard; and if the survey team lost their lives because of it—

It would be Amity that would get the blame.

Ferrol had skimmed through the entire data feed, distributed the appropriate sections to the appropriate people, and had started a more careful reading when Roman finally arrived. “The team consists of roughly fifty people, under the direction of Dr. Jamen Lowry of Cambridge,” he told the captain as the latter floated to his command chair and strapped in. “They set up there because the star was thought to be in a pre-nova stage and they wanted to study it. Apparently, the thing’s going off sooner than theory predicted.”

Roman nodded and keyed himself a copy of the data. “What about their own ship?”

“They haven’t got one,” Ferrol said. “They had to hire a Tampy ship to give them transport—the system’s a good thousand light-years outside Mitsuushi range.”

“And that ship isn’t available to them?”

“I’d say that’s almost irrelevant at the moment, sir,” Ferrol said. It wasn’t, really, but with luck the captain wouldn’t notice that. “They called Earth; Earth called us.

It’s in our laps now.”

“So it would seem,” Roman grunted. “Do we have the system located yet?”

“Yes, sir,” MacKaig spoke up from the helm. She tapped a key, and the relevant page of the New Cygni Listing appeared on Ferrol’s helm repeater display. “Eleven hundred sixty-five light-years away, longitude minus 2.6 degrees, latitude 5.9 degrees,” she said. “We can’t Jump directly to it from here—not visible enough—but Pegasus can see Deneb from here, and it ought to be able to see 1148 from there.”

Roman studied the listing for a moment before nodding. “Should work. Feed the direction and maps down to Hhom-jee and tell him to Jump as soon as Pegasus is ready.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, and busied herself with her intercom.

Beside Ferrol, the computer signaled that the problem he’d set for it a minute ago had been completed. He turned back as a map of the 1148 system appeared on the display, framed by four-decimal numerical listings of current planetary locations.

Adjusting the scale, he took a good look.

The system consisted of two stars—a smallish red giant and a white dwarf—plus three planets of the usual variety of sizes and orbits. The two stars were so close together, the dwarf circling perilously close to the giant’s outer atmosphere, that there was little or no room for a stable planetary orbit between them. All the planets revolved around both stars, an arrangement with enough perturbations to make hash out of a standard orbit calculation, and Ferrol gave silent thanks that the team out there had been thinking straight enough to include updated numbers with their tachyon distress call. The base was on the innermost planet, which the team had dubbed Shadrach: a roughly Mars-sized chunk of lifeless rock with a pair of moons, orbiting some five hundred million kilometers out from the center of the giant.

“We’re starting to come around,” MacKaig announced. “Lining up for the Jump to Deneb.”

“Good,” Roman said. “Commander Ferrol?”

“Sir?” Ferrol said, eyes still on the display.

“Do you know this Admiral Marcosa?”

Ferrol felt his back go abruptly stiff. He forced the muscles to relax, glad his face was away from the captain. “I’ve heard of him, sir, but never met him,” he said. It was more or less true.

“Anti-Tampy?”

Ferrol suppressed a grim smile. Certainly he was anti-Tampy—rabidly so, in fact.

Marcosa was one of the Senator’s closest friends within the Admiralty, a quiet ally in everything from the Scapa Flow’s poaching runs to the backstairs maneuvering that had gotten Ferrol aboard Amity… and the fact that the new orders had come in over Marcosa’s name was almost certainly not a coincidence. “I’d guess so, sir,” he said aloud. “Why do you ask?”

He could feel Roman’s eyes on the back of his neck. “I wondered why he took the chance of waiting for us,” Roman said, almost offhandedly, “instead of asking the Tampies to send one of their ships.”

There was opportunity here for a dig at the whole question of Tampy speed and efficiency, but there were too many other things on Ferrol’s mind for him to be bothered. “I’ve got a suggestion, Captain, about our approach.” Without waiting for permission, he sent the planetary schematic to Roman’s station. “If we Jump to

1148 directly from Deneb we’ll arrive someplace along this line—” he traced a line from the double star outward with a mousepen—“depending on how the gravitational equipotential surfaces work out. That’ll put us a minimum of a hundred million kilometers away from the planet itself.”

“Whereas if we shuttle back and forth between appropriately positioned stars we should be able to come in considerably closer?”

Ferrol nodded, impressed in spite of himself. Maybe Roman was smarter than his blind pro-Tampy sentiments would indicate. “Yes, sir,” he acknowledged. “I’ve found a couple of good possibilities, but I’m not sure which one would be the best.”

“Ensign?” Roman invited.

MacKaig was frowning at Ferrol’s schematics and preliminary numbers, fingers skating across her own keys. “Looks like the second one will get us closer,” she said slowly. “Not by much, though—maybe half a million kilometers at the most.”

“We’ll take anything we can get at this point,” Roman said, a grim edge to his voice. “Put it into visual format and send it down to Hhom-jee. We’ll want to do the Jumps one-two-three, as fast as we can get in position for each one.”

“Yes, sir.” She hesitated. “That assumes, of course, that Pegasus can do three Jumps in a row.”

“A fair question,” Roman agreed, reaching for his intercom. “Let’s find out, shall we?”

Ferrol keyed himself into the circuit just as a Tampy face appeared. “Rro-maa, yes?” he grated.

“Yes,” Roman nodded. “The Amity’s just been called on for an emergency rescue mission, Rrin-saa. Had you been informed?”

“Ffe-rho has told us, yes,” Rrin-saa confirmed.

“All right. We’ll be doing three Jumps in a row, and I need quick answers to two questions. First: will Pegasus need to rest between the Jumps?”

“I do not know,” the Tampy whined. “I know space horses have Jumped twice without rest; that is all.”

“I see,” Roman said, with no sign of impatience at yet another example of Tampy waffling. Perhaps, Ferrol thought cynically, he was to the point of considering that an adequate answer. “I guess we’ll find out together,” the captain continued. “So: second question. Given that space horses absorb a high percentage of the solar energy that hits them, will a nova or pre-nova star be too bright for Pegasus to handle?”

Ferrol swallowed. That thought hadn’t even occurred to him, and he found himself holding his breath as he waited for the answer.

He needn’t have bothered. “I do not know, Rro-maa,” the other said. “I know that they come close to normal stars; that is all.”

“Yes, well… thank you. Captain out.”

Ferrol keyed off his intercom with a snort of disgust. “You didn’t really expect to get anything useful from them, did you?” he growled.

Roman sent him a thoughtful look, turned to the helm. “Status, Ensign?”

“We’re in line for Deneb,” MacKaig reported. “Hhom-jee signals Pegasus is ready.”

Roman nodded. “Jump.”

The Jump to Deneb went off without a hitch, and from the new location MacKaig was able to refine her numbers for the remaining two Jumps. A half-hour’s drive through normal space put Amity in position for the second Jump, to a dim and unnamed star.

It seemed to Ferrol that it took longer for Hhom-jee to get Pegasus ready for that one. By the time they were ready for the third Jump, to 1148 itself, there was no doubt.

For the first time in the voyage, Pegasus was showing signs of fatigue.

“Rrin-saa, we’ve been in position for the past five minutes,” Roman said into the intercom, his voice carefully showing no signs of either irritation or nervousness.

“What seems to be the trouble?”

“There is not trouble,” the Tampy’s reply came faintly. “Pegasunninni is in mild perasiata—it will be only another few moments.”

Roman hissed quietly between his teeth. “Have Hhom-jee push it as much as he can. There’s no guarantee as to how much time we’ve got.”

“Your wishes are ours.”

Roman broke the connection and turned to Ferrol. “Any word from below on the latest dust sweat analysis?”

“The composition’s definitely changing,” Ferrol told him, the sour taste of irony in his mouth. He’d argued—loudly, in fact—against all of the dust sweat work; now, suddenly, it was turning out to be of more than academic curiosity, after all. It left Roman looking brilliantly foresighted; and it left him, Ferrol, looking wrong. It was a toss-up as to which part of that he hated more. “Overall output is up, but at the same time there’s been a sharp drop in several of the trace elements.”

Roman nodded. So far he’d passed up any snide comments on the demise of Ferrol’s side of the dust sweat argument. Not that anyone on the bridge really needed reminding. “Sounds like a buildup of fatigue wastes,” he suggested.

“Dr. Tenzing says that’s one of the possibilities.”

“Mm. Well, we’ll just have to wait and see how fast it clears up.”

“Yes, sir. So what’s this perasiata scam, anyway?”

“It’s hardly a scam,” Roman said, his voice a little stiff. “It’s a kind of withdrawal of consciousness the space horses sometimes experience. Something like the way the Tampies sleep, or so they’ve described it.”

Ferrol nodded to himself. So there was a limit to how hard you could push a space horse. Interesting. Even more interesting that no one had discovered it before now.

“Captain?” MacKaig spoke up. “Hhom-jee signals we’re finally ready to Jump.”

“Very good. Execute.”

The words were barely out of Roman’s mouth when the sunlight did its abrupt and instantaneous change… and they were there.

To the naked eye, 1148 was merely a bright reddish star; seen through Amity’s sunscope, it was a truly awesome sight. Shrouded in a brightly lit haze, seemingly meshed together by roiling tendrils of colored vapor, the twin stars seemed to project both the ultimate in unity and the ultimate in conflict. A child in its mother’s arms; or two fighters literally tearing the life from each other.

With a shiver, Ferrol forced the images down. The last thing he needed going into a pre-nova system was an overactive imagination.

“Interesting view,” Roman remarked from behind him. “Ensign, do we have Shadrach on the scope yet?”

“Yes, sir,” MacKaig told him. “About three degrees off a direct line to the stars, range approximately forty million kilometers.”

“About as close as we were likely to get,” Roman said. “Good job. Feed the numbers to Hhom-jee and have him get us going.” He tapped his intercom, indicating to Ferrol to join the circuit. “Dr. Tenzing? Have your people come up with any theories as to what’s going on out there?”

“Guesses only at this stage, Captain,” Tenzing grunted. The scientist’s expression, Ferrol thought, seemed to be hovering midway between scientific eagerness and a very unscientific desire to be several light-years away. “Two things seem pretty certain, though. One: both stars, especially B—the dwarf—are much hotter than they should be; and two, B is also cooling down fairly rapidly. That suggests we’re looking at some variant of a classical Anselm Cycle, either gravitationally or thermally driven.”

“The Anselm Cycle being…?”

“Well, it’s never actually been observed, as far as I know, but the scenerio goes something like this. Some of the gas envelope material from A—the giant—falls past the gravitational equipoint onto B and triggers a burst of energy, which both heats B’s surface and blows off a shell of material. The extra radiant energy from that burp heats up A slightly, causing it to expand a bit more and therefore dump even more material onto B. Eventually—or so the theory goes—one of these cycles will dump enough matter onto B to trigger a proton-proton nuclear reaction in the surface. At that point, B goes nova, increases its brightness a factor of fifty thousand or so, and fries everything in the system.”

Roman seemed to digest that. “Seems reasonable enough. When can we expect the next of these burps?”

“We don’t know,” Tenzing admitted. “Best estimate is that the last one happened sixty to eighty hours ago, which turns out to be roughly two-thirds of what the theory would predict for the cycle. That would indicate the next one should come within thirty or forty hours, but I really can’t say for certain.”

“How much warning will it give us before it goes?”

Tenzing’s eyes flicked to the side. “Again, none of my people can say for certain.

Probably a few minutes at the most.”

“I see. Any idea as to which of these burps will trigger the nova itself?”

Tenzing’s face tightened. “Not really. We don’t have the equipment to take accurate readings on the plasma dynamics going on out there, and without a better feel for the Lagrange surfaces and expansion coefficients all we can really do is guess. It could go on the very next burp, or it could hold off for a couple of weeks.”

Roman nodded grimly. “Thank you, Doctor,” he said. Cutting the circuit, he swiveled to face the engineering monitor. “How’s the ship taking this?”

“Hull temperature’s going up, but not dangerously,” the ensign manning the station reported. Dangerous or not, he wasn’t taking his eyes off the readouts. “As long as B continues to cool down we should be all right. Particle radiation is marginal, but within safety limits.”

Which was all right, Ferrol knew. Spaceship hulls were built to take a lot of that kind of abuse; and if worse came to worse they could move into Pegasus’

shadow—

He spun around to face Roman; and in the captain’s face he could see that they’d both caught it at the same time. Roman got to the intercom first. “Rrin-saa? This is the captain. Why aren’t we moving?”

Ferrol keyed himself into the circuit, and for a long moment the display remained blank. Then, abruptly, it cleared to show a contact-helmeted Tampy wearing a green/purple neckerchief. “Rro-maa, yes,” he grated.

“Hhom-jee, why aren’t we moving?” Roman demanded again. “Ensign MacKaig sent you the direction several minutes ago.”

“Pegasunninni will not move.”

Roman swore under his breath. “Hhom-jee, we have got to get in there. Is Pegasus worried about getting closer to the hot star?—if so, we may be able to shield it from—”

“Pegasunninni is not worried about star,” Hhom-jee said. “He will not move. Any direction. He does not seem to be well.”

Roman looked up at Ferrol, his eyes abruptly tight… and Ferrol felt his stomach twist into a hard knot. Without Pegasus, Amity was trapped in this system.

With a star preparing itself to explode.