Warhorse

Chapter 11

The tiny speck of brilliant light was like a lost diamond floating against the background of icy-cold stars. “Well?” Ferrol demanded as Tenzing pulled back from the telescope panel, blinking as his eyes adjusted from the dazzle of the distant asteroid to the relative darkness of the lander.

“It’s definitely getting dimmer,” the other reported, sounding even wearier than he looked. “I don’t think it would be safe to leave Pegasus’ shadow yet, though.”

“I wasn’t planning on doing that,” Ferrol told him, listening to the frustration rumbling in his stomach as he gazed out at the pinprick of light. Without any tethered instrument packs available aboard the lander—and with the radiation flood from B’s last burp far too intense for anyone to go out from Pegasus’ shadow for a direct measurement—they’d been forced to improvise. Analyzing the reflected light from the asteroid out there was crude, but it was the best they’d been able to come up with. Unfortunately, of all the scientists aboard only Tenzing had ever had actual field experience in estimating stellar magnitudes without instruments, and those days were far in his past.

Not that accuracy was really needed. A single glance at the asteroid was all it took to know that B was still too blazingly hot to risk direct exposure to it.

And if the light and radiation this far out was this bad…

“You think Amity could have survived?” Tenzing asked quietly.

Ferrol shook his head, the movement generating a quick flicker of lightheadedness.

It had been almost thirty hours since Amity’s departure, and he’d had barely five hours of sleep in that time. Not that staying awake to run things had made any appreciable difference. “There’s no way to know until we can move out around Pegasus and try raising them on the radio or laser,” he told Tenzing. “If the captain pushed their acceleration above the two-gee mark for any of the trip, they ought to have had time to get into the planet’s umbra before the balloon went up.”

And if they hadn’t… but there was no need to spell that scenerio out. Tenzing and everyone else on the lander and lifeboats had by now run that one out to its logical conclusion.

“Yeah,” Tenzing breathed. “Well…” He shivered.

“What’s the latest on Pegasus?” Ferrol asked, more to change the subject than for any other reason.

“No appreciable change,” Tenzing told him with a sigh. “The dust sweat chemistry is still way off all our standard benchmarks, though it seems like it might be coming back just a little.”

“Anything dramatic happen when the big burst came?”

“No. Not even anything undramatic, as far as we could tell. The Tampies said the same thing regarding its mental condition, by the way.”

“Yes, I’d heard,” Ferrol grunted, passing up the chance to tell Tenzing just how much trust he had in the Tampies’ word. Still, it was looking more and more likely that whatever was bothering Pegasus wasn’t related to the extreme conditions outside. “So that leaves us back where we started: fatigue or illness.”

“Looks that way,” Tenzing agreed soberly. “Unfortunately, without any way to treat either condition, the diagnosis seems more or less academic.”

“And of course the Tampies don’t know anything that could help.”

Tenzing gave him an odd look—the words must have come out with more venom than Ferrol had intended. “They’re doing what they can, Commander,” he said.

“You have to realize that none of them has ever seen a space horse in this condition, either.”

“Sure.” Or at least, Ferrol thought sourly, they won’t admit to it. The thought still nagged at the back of his mind that Amity’s Tampy contingent had been selected as a suicide crew, though what the Tampies could hope to gain by Amity’s destruction he couldn’t guess. “I gather nothing ever came of the vanadium test?”

“Not a whisper,” Tenzing said with a grimace. “As far as the dust sweat goes, the stuff just disappeared.”

Ferrol nodded. Vanadium had been one of the trace elements in Pegasus’ normal dust sweat that hadn’t been seen since the Jump to this system. On Dr. Sanderson’s recommendation Ferrol had ordered some instruments and tools rich in vanadium to be dumped overboard. Pegasus had promptly telekened them into a feeding orifice, but there had been no other reaction from the huge creature. Then, or in the six hours since. “Maybe we should try again with a different trace element,” he suggested. “Pegasus has stopped passing, what, eight of them?”

Tenzing shrugged. “We could try, but I really think we’d be wasting our time.

Nutritional deficiencies just don’t come on that quickly.”

“Maybe not with normal animals,” Ferrol growled. “With space horses, who can tell? Besides, it’s as good a way to waste our time as any, at least until we find out the real problem.”

“There’s that,” Tenzing conceded. “Though if the Tampies can’t figure it out, I doubt that we—”

He broke off in midsentence as Ferrol’s hand lashed out to clamp hard around his upper arm. “I don’t want to hear that again,” Ferrol told him icily. “Not from you, not from any of your people. The Tampies aren’t omniscient, they aren’t supermen, and you damn well will not behave or think otherwise. So they commune with nature and love all the humble creatures of the universe?—fine. We bend nature, and do what we like with it; and if Pegasus doesn’t want to Jump, we will damn well find a way to make it Jump. With or without the Tampies’ help.”

“Understood, Commander,” Tenzing muttered, his eyes wary.

“Make sure you do,” Ferrol said, releasing his arm. “Now get back there and find me a cure.”

Tenzing swallowed. “Yes, sir,” he said. Without another word, he turned and kicked off back to the impromptu laboratory.

I shouldn’t have chewed his head off, Ferrol thought, a touch of embarrassment seeping through the frustration and fatigue and worry. But Tenzing had more than once shown a quiet awe toward Tampy opinions that occasionally flirted with hero worship, and Ferrol had no intention of letting the aliens’ passive wait-and-seewhat- happens attitude soak into the only people who could get a handle on Pegasus’ mysterious ailment.

His eyes strayed to the bow of the lander and the Tampies… and abruptly he forgot about both embarrassment and the subtle dangers of defeatism.

The aliens were no longer merely sitting cross-legged in a rough three-dimensional circle around the Handler. Instead, they were clumped tightly together, each with a solid-looking grip on one of the Handler’s arms or legs. The Handler himself was rigid, distorted face contorted into something even stranger.

And on the amplifier helmet, half the indicator lights had gone red.

“Garin!” Ferrol snapped, launching himself toward the bow; but he was too late.

Without warning Pegasus gave a violent lurch, throwing the lander sideways and pitching Ferrol headlong into the back of one of the couches.

He was still scrambling for a handhold when the space horse lurched again, throwing him back into the air. The warble of the acceleration warning cut through the sudden confused babble, and Ferrol had barely enough time to get a grip on a couch headrest before a burst from the lander’s engines shoved the craft forward.

Yamoto, on pilot duty, was fighting to keep the lander in Pegasus’ shadow.

“Everyone strap in!” Ferrol bellowed over the dull roar. Not that anyone needed to be told. The burst lasted perhaps three seconds before cutting off, returning them to zero-gee. “Garin!” Ferrol barked again.

“Here, sir,” Garin’s voice snapped from right behind him. “What the hell’s happening?”

“I don’t know,” Ferrol returned, pulling hard on the headrest and hoping fervently that there wouldn’t be any more bumps until he reached the bow and could strap into one of the seats there. “Come on—let’s find out.”

Pegasus lurched again before he got there, but this time Yamoto was ready for it and was able to use the maneuvering jets to smooth most of the jolt out. Reaching the row of command chairs, Ferrol jammed himself into one and grabbed for the straps. “Sso-ngu?” he called, eyes searching the freshly jumbled tangle of Tampy bodies for the chief Handler’s red-white tartan neckerchief. “Sso-ngu, where the hell are you?”

“I hear, Ffe-rho,” the grating voice came from near the middle as the Tampies took advantage of the momentary lull to untangle themselves.

“Glad to hear it,” Ferrol snarled. “What the hell was that all about?”

“Pegasunninni is not… well,” Sso-ngu said, hesitating noticeably on the last word.

“Oh, really,” Ferrol snorted. “It seems a damn sight healthier than it’s been for the past day and a half.”

“You do not understand, Ffe-rho,” Sso-ngu said. “Pegasunninni is not well. We must release him.”

Ferrol felt something cold run up his back. “We must what?”

“We must release—”

“Yes, I heard you,” Ferrol cut him off. “I just didn’t believe it—not even from Tampies. What do you mean, release it? Release it where?”

“Release him to—release him to be free,” Sso-ngu said, uncharacteristically stumbling over the words. His slight form seemed unnaturally tense, but whether from fear or something else Ferrol couldn’t tell. “He must be made free or he will die.”

At Ferrol’s side, Garin snorted. “Oh, right,” he said. “Let it go, just like that? What kind of scitte-headed idiots do you think—”

Ferrol waved a hand in front of Garin to shut him up. “Why must Pegasus be freed?” he demanded, forcing his voice to remain calm. Sso-ngu‘s tension was strangely contagious.

For a moment Sso-ngu hesitated. Then, almost reluctantly, he opened his mouth wide behind his filter mask—the Tampy equivalent of a shaking head. “I do not know,” he said.

“What do you mean, you don’t know?”

“I cannot explain it, Ffe-rho—” The Tampy broke off as Pegasus again lunged and Yamoto again fought to keep the lander and attached lifeboats in the space horse’s protective shadow. “I do not know why he will die. Only that he will.”

Ferrol twisted to look over the chair back. “Tenzing!” he called. “What’re you getting on Pegasus’ dust sweat?”

“There wasn’t anything new in the last sample,” Tenzing called back, his voice trembling against obvious efforts to control it. “But that was nearly an hour ago.

What’s happening?”

“We don’t know,” Ferrol told him shortly, thinking hard. The way Pegasus was lurching around, Tenzing’s usual collection method was probably out of the question. “Garin, get an EVA team suited up,” he told the man beside him. “I want them to get over to Pegasus and take a fresh sample.”

“Yes, sir,” Garin said. Ducking his head once to glance out the forward viewport at Pegasus, he unstrapped and kicked off aft, collecting a pair of crewers on the way.

“You must allow Pegasunninni to be freed, Ffe-rho.”

Ferrol turned back to face him. In his pocket, the little needle gun was a hard lump against his side. “Do you know what’ll happen if we unweb the space horse?” he asked quietly. “It’ll Jump, that’s what. Leaving us here to fry in the light and radiation out there.”

Sso-ngu floated silently for a moment. “I do not believe Pegasunninni will Jump,”

he said at last. “Not immediately. He does not yet have the strength and ability to do so.”

“It’s got more than enough strength to whip us around like a kid’s pull-toy,” Ferrol countered. “What makes you think it can’t Jump?”

“I do not know,” Sso-ngu answered, a trace of something that sounded almost like frustration in his voice. “I know he must be freed; that is all.”

“And you’d stand by that recommendation?” Ferrol demanded. “Even if it means you yourself will die? And I mean right now, and in considerable pain.”

The Tampy’s face twisted even further than usual, into something that could have been interpreted as a vaguely sardonic smile. “You waste time, Ffe-rho,” he whined. “There are no threats. If I am wrong, and Pegasunninni Jumps, then all of us will die.”

Ferrol glared at him… and for a handful of heartbeats all of his anger and contempt for the Tampy race seemed to narrow itself into laser-focus on the single individual floating before him. Calmly devious, unreadably tight-lipped, blandly unconcerned with risks—Sso-ngu was for that instant everything Ferrol hated about Tampies.

His hand hovered beside his pocket, and the needle gun hidden there, and he had the almost overwhelming urge to draw it. To draw it, to see if that lopsided face would show any fear before he shredded it beyond recognition.

But he resisted the urge… because in the midst of all the churning emotion within him he knew that he had no real choice. Releasing Pegasus was a hell of a risk to take, but if they didn’t do so one of the space horse’s twitches would be violent enough to throw the lander and lifeboats out into full sunlight.

And if remaining webbed did indeed somehow kill the space horse, then everyone in the system was dead. Themselves, the Amity, the trapped scientists; everyone.

Guaranteed.

Sso-ngu was right… and Ferrol hated that the most.

“Garin!” Ferrol called, twisting to look over his shoulder, the bitter taste of defeat in his mouth. “Suit up three more crewers—people with EVA-work experience.

We’re going to loosen the webbing around Pegasus, see if that helps any.”

“And if it does not?” Sso-ngu asked.

Ferrol grimaced. “Then I guess we’ll have to try taking it off entirely,” he said without turning around. “For now, you just concentrate on getting the damn beast back under control.”

“Your wishes are ours,” Sso-ngu said, and fell silent.

Ferrol ground his teeth together, his eyes on Garin and his EVA crew. Given your feelings about the Tampies, Roman had asked him at the beginning of this voyage, are you certain you’re willing to trust your life to them?

Ferrol hadn’t been sure of the answer then. Now he was.

And if Sso-ngu was lying—if Pegasus Jumped and left the men and women under his command to die—then it was as sure as hell that the Tampies would be the first to go. In as much agony as Ferrol could arrange.

Guaranteed.