Warhorse

Chapter 16

Quentin subsided, and the maneuvering jets cut off, and for a long minute the lander was silent. A hundred curses chased each other through Ferrol’s mind, none of them strong enough to adequately cover the impossibility that had just happened. Ahead, the edge of a brilliant blue-white star blazed painfully at them around Quentin’s bulk; slowly, Ferrol turned from it to focus on Kennedy’s profile.

Perhaps sensing his movement, she turned to face him, and for a moment they just gazed at each other in silence. Apparently, a small section of Ferrol’s mind decided, Kennedy’s repertoire of curses didn’t cover this situation, either.

“Well,” he said to her at last, “shall we see what we’ve got here?”

She took a deep breath. “Right. Okay.” Slowly, as if still half paralyzed by the shock of it, her fingers began to move across her keys. Ferrol watched them a moment, then turned around.

The two Tampies were sitting quietly, the helmet on Sso-ngu‘s head showing all green. Between them, Demothi had the expression over his filter mask of a small child who has insisted on carrying the family heirloom crystal and then dropped it.

“We’ll dispense with any spilled-milk recriminations for now,” Ferrol said, fighting to keep his voice calm and controlled. “Wwis-khaa, I want to know how Quentin managed that Jump.”

“I do not know—”

“Yes, you do,” Ferrol cut him off harshly. “You know, or at least have a good idea.

What is it, that space horse calves can Jump at birth, but just can’t see well enough to lock onto a target star?”

Wwis-khaa tilted his head. “It is possible.”

“But it is only a thought,” Sso-ngu cautioned. “The Tamplissta do not know for certain.”

“I’ll settle for good half-assed theories at this point,” Ferrol countered. “So. How well could Quentin see? Wwis-khaa?”

The Tampy hesitated. “I do not believe he could see very well,” he said at last, mouthing the speculation with obvious reluctance.

Ferrol carefully unclenched his teeth. “Look,” he said, fighting hard against a sudden urge to wrap his fingers around someone’s neck. “I understand how you hate to repeat anything you don’t personally know to be a fact. But try and get it through your heads that we are lost; and the only way we’re going to find our way back is if we have some answers.”

Silence. “Demothi, keep working on them,” Ferrol growled, the rage turning into disgust. “Do something useful for a change.” Turning away, he focused on Kennedy. “Got anything yet?”

“Not really.” Her voice, he noted with relief, was back to its usual iron control.

“The computer’s still checking the brightest stars, but I doubt the nav program’s complete enough to have any real chance of locating us. If this was the Amity I could get it for you in three minutes; as it is, all I can say is that we’re in a system with a B4 star, we’re more than eight hundred light-years from where we started, and we’re almost certainly still in the Milky Way.”

Eight hundred light years. Ferrol shivered. “Okay,” he said. “So. Assume you’re Captain Roman, and you come back to find us gone. What do you do?”

Kennedy pursed her lips. “Well… if you’re right, that it’s the calf’s vision that limits its Jumping ability, then it should be pretty straightforward. All the Amity has to do is pick out the brightest stars visible from the 11612 system and start Jumping until they find the right one.”

Ferrol gritted his teeth. Straightforward enough… unless Roman decided that this was all some elaborate scheme he, Ferrol, had cooked up with Demothi to steal a space horse calf. If the captain thought that, he might try some other response entirely. Such as starting his search with the Cordonale and nearby stars…

With an effort he shook the thought from his mind. They were in enough trouble already without going shopping for more. “If that’s the case,” he said, “I guess our logical response is to conserve our resources and wait.” Off in a far corner of his panel, out of the way, was the red-rimmed emergency beacon switch. Reaching over, he flipped it on. “Let’s just hope the captain’s smart enough to figure it out.”

“He is,” Kennedy said.

Ferrol winced at the conviction in her voice. Roman was smart enough, all right.

The only question was whether he was too smart to waste time with obvious red herrings.

But there was no point in mentioning that to Kennedy. “Well,” he said, trying to sound as calm as she did, “as long as we’re just sitting here, we might as well get something useful done. I’m going to go back and get the telescope set up; you load the survey program into the computer and get it running. Let’s see if this system has anything worth looking at.”

Roman watched the outrider recording twice, a cold knot settling all the harder into the pit of his stomach. Gone. A space horse calf, three humans and two Tampies—all impossibly vanished. “Marlowe?” he asked.

He looked up to see the other straighten from his console and shake his head.

“Sorry, Captain. The image is just too distant for the computer to scrub it any cleaner.”

“So there’s no way you can tell me which way Quentin was pointing when they Jumped.”

He hadn’t meant the words to sound like an accusation, but Marlowe winced anyway. “No, sir,” he admitted. “I’m sorry.”

Roman looked back at his display, the taste of defeat souring his mouth. So Demothi had been an agent of the anti-Tampies, after all. With a mission of stealing a space horse calf… and Roman had sat idly by and let him do it.

But how in hell’s name had he gotten Man o’ War to Jump? For that matter, how had he gotten Quentin to Jump?

Shutting off the useless outrider recording, he keyed for the Tampy section. A

moment later Rrin-saa’s face and yellow-orange neckerchief appeared. “Rro-maa, yes?” the other grated.

“Rrin-saa, I need some information,” Roman said. “Everything we thought we knew about space horse calves said that one as young as Quentin couldn’t Jump.

How did it do that?”

“I do not know,” came the all-too-predictable response.

Roman gritted his teeth. “Is Hhom-jee there? Hhom-jee, can you hear me?”

“I hear,” a voice came from the background.

“Hhom-jee, how was Quentin able to Jump?” Roman repeated his question.

“I do not know,” the other said. “I know only that the space horse calves I have touched have not felt ready to Jump, even though their fear was at first great. That is all.”

Roman glowered at Rrin-saa’s silent image. “Thank you,” he managed, switching off.

“Lot of help they are,” Marlowe murmured.

“They could have been more informative,” Roman agreed grimly. “Looks like we’re on our own here, people. Spin me a theory, Lieutenant.”

“The simplest explanation, it seems to me, is that new calves don’t Jump because they can’t see where they’d be Jumping to,” Marlowe suggested. “If so, all we need to do is make a list of the brightest stars visible from here and start checking them out.”

Roman nodded. It was in many ways a default hypothesis; but it was the only one where the logical response was both obvious and at the same time something they could handle. “Lieutenant Yamoto?” he invited.

“I agree with Marlowe, sir,” she said, tapping a key. “Here’s the list of stars, in order of decreasing brightness, down to about first magnitude.”

For a moment Roman studied the list. There were fifteen entries, topped by three Bclass stars: a Bl, a B4, and a B6. Halfway down the list…

“Shall I have Hhome-jee set course for number one, Captain?” Yamoto asked into his thoughts.

Roman pursed his lips. “No,” he said slowly. “We’ll start with number six.”

Marlowe turned to frown at him. “Vega?”

“Yes,” Roman told him. “If they’re not there I want to be close enough to the Cordonale to Jump back and get the alert out on tachyon.”

Marlowe’s forehead furrowed. “Yes, sir,” he said, a little uncertainly.

“Yes,” Roman said quietly, answering the unspoken question he could read in the other’s face and voice. “I think it’s entirely possible the whole thing was an attempt by Demothi to steal the calf… and if so, chances are he’ll be heading back to the Cordonale to deliver it.”

Marlowe’s face hardened. “I understand, sir. We’ll want to get after him as fast as we can, try and cut him off.”

“Right.” Roman shifted his eyes back to the helm. “Alert Hhom-jee, Lieutenant. I want to Jump as soon as he can get Man o’ War lined up properly.”

“Yes, Captain.” Yamoto hesitated. “Sir… what if it really was just an accident, though? They’ll be stuck out there somewhere, waiting for us to come find them.”

“And we will,” Roman told her shortly. “After we’ve checked out the other possibilities.”

She colored slightly. “Yes, sir,” she said, and turned back to her console.

Roman regarded the back of her head, a slight twinge of conscience poking through the high-speed mental shuffling of plans and possibilities and contingencies. She was right, of course; if it had been just an accident Ferrol and the others were in for a few tense hours. But the lander was routinely kept well stocked, and with only five of them aboard they could hold out a couple of weeks if absolutely necessary.

They would survive just fine. Bored, certainly; but boredom, contrary to popular belief, was seldom fatal.

“Ffe-rho?”

Ferrol made one last adjustment on the telescope’s remote hookup and floated above it to look forward. “What is it, Sso-ngu?”

“Quentinninni has found a food supply and wishes to feed. May he?”

Ferrol frowned. “Where does it want to go?”

“Approximately fifty thousand kilometers in—” the Tampy paused, and then raised a hand—“that direction.”

“Kennedy?”

“It’s an asteroid belt,” she answered promptly. “Reflection data implies high metal content, as asteroids go.”

Good feeding for a space horse, then. “What kind of rock density are we talking about?” he asked her. “Bearing in mind the limited amount of shielding this teacup has.”

“Shouldn’t be dangerous,” Kennedy assured him. “Provided Quentin doesn’t go twitchy again and try to drag us through it retrograde. It’s as good a place as any to wait for the Amity.”

“Okay,” Ferrol said, giving himself a push forward.

“Give me a minute to strap in, Sso-ngu, and we’ll go and feed the baby.”

They had arrived nearly twenty degrees off the ecliptic plane and with a slight retrograde motion that had them drifting leisurely toward the central star. A potentially deadly situation for a normal ship with a normal fuel supply; not even worth comment for a craft tethered to a space horse. Under Sso-ngu’s guidance Quentin pulled them toward the asteroid belt at a steady 0.5 gee for just under an hour, turned around and decelerated for the same length of time, and finally accelerated again to match speeds with the drifting stream of rocks.

Floating at one of the side viewports, Ferrol watched as Quentin telekened a small boulder into one of its rear feeding orifices. He’d never before been this close to a feeding space horse, and it was one hell of an impressive sight. “You gotten a firstorder analysis on those rocks yet?” he asked Kennedy.

He turned to look as Kennedy fiddled with her keyboard. “Should be just about finished… yes, here it is. Um. Very interesting—no wonder Quentin was panting to get here. Unusually high percentages of iron and nickel; exceptionally high concentrations of bismuth, tellurium, thallium, and a dozen other trace metals.

Especially right here—the stuff we passed while Quentin was matching speeds didn’t register as nearly this good.”

And exceptionally high concentrations of trace metals meant… Craning his neck, Ferrol looked over at the Tampies. Even with filter masks plastered across their faces he could still see the sudden interest there. “A yishyar system?” he suggested.

“Certainly by textbook definitions,” Kennedy agreed, turning to look at the Tampies too. “Sso-ngu?”

“Yes,” the Tampy murmured. His raspy voice was dry and very alien, as if surprise or excitement had driven all attempts at human overtones from it.

Ferrol could well understand their interest; his own mind was already simmering with the possibilities. A brand-new yishyar system—more to the point, a yishyar system eight hundred light-years outside of Tampy-claimed space. If the Senator could keep the Cordonale from meekly handing it over to the aliens—and if he could figure out a way to get back to the damned place himself—then maybe Demothi’s idiot experiment might yield something useful, after all.

“Ferrol?”

He blinked the grand schemes out of his mind and focused on Kennedy. “Sorry.

You said…?”

“I said I think we’ve got a space horse locator program aboard,” she repeated. “A

simple one, probably: an anomalous-motion program coupled with a shaperecognition package. You want me to get it up?”

And look for any other space horses that might be feeding here? “Good idea,” he nodded. “And don’t forget to tie in the recorders. Sso-ngu, let’s have Quentin boost speed a little—a few kilometers an hour shouldn’t affect the feeding any, and it’ll let us survey more of the belt.”

“Your wishes are ours.” The Tampy paused. “Ffe-rho, Quentinninni is not happy.

Something is disturbing him.”

Ferrol pushed himself away from the viewport. “Something from in here?” he asked, bringing himself to a halt in front of them.

“No,” Sso-ngu said. He hesitated, then removed the helmet and handed it past Demothi to Wwis-khaa. “It is something outside, something that causes…” He stopped again and made a gesture Ferrol had never seen before.

“Uneasiness,” Wwis-khaa supplied, the word seeming to come out with difficulty.

“Quentinninni is uneasy. Perhaps… fearful.”

Something hard settled into the base of Ferrol’s throat. He’d seen space horses get skittish, spooked, and stressed… but never before had he seen one afraid. Or heard of one being afraid.

What the hell out there could scare even a baby space horse?

The lander was suddenly very quiet. Everyone else, apparently, was wondering the same thing. And perhaps coming to the same conclusion. “All right,” he said as Wwis-khaa handed the helmet back. “Stay on that feeling, Sso-ngu, and let me know the minute it changes or gets any clearer. Kennedy, get that locator going, but alternate it with the regular scan program. I don’t want us to miss something important just because it’s not shaped like a space horse.”

“Right,” Kennedy said, and got to work. Her voice was still calm, but there was a hardness beneath it.

They traveled for a time in silence, with questions and replies delivered in low tones. Outside the viewports several hundred asteroids could be seen at any given time, the nearest handful as irregular lumps, the rest as pinpoints of reflected light from the distant sun.

Ferrol had spent more time than he cared to remember sitting around asteroid belts exactly like this one without the slightest touch of claustrophobia; but as the minutes dragged into hours he found the white dots on the monitor seeming to press ever closer and more oppressively around the lander. The air coming in through his filter mask felt to be growing ever hotter, and he found himself continually plotting updated escape routes through the moving boulders. A side effect of having to wear the mask for so long, he tried to tell himself; but down deep he knew better.

And four hours after they began their search, they found the space horse.

“It doesn’t seem to be moving at all,” Kennedy said, gazing closely at the readouts.

“Just drifting with the asteroids.”

Ferrol nodded, keying the enhancement program one more time. Again the fuzzy image of the distant creature sharpened just a bit; again, the computer was unable to resolve a section of its outline.

He wasn’t sure exactly what that meant. But he knew already he didn’t like it. “Ssongu, has Quentin detected the other space horse yet?” he asked over his shoulder.

“Yes. His uneasiness is increasing.”

Ferrol chewed hard at his lip, uncertainty twisting at his stomach. The last thing he wanted to do was to take the lander any closer to that thing out there than he had to… but on the other hand, if the space horse was merely injured and not dead, there was every chance in the world it would detect them and Jump before Amity and its remote probes could arrive to study it. And if that happened, their chance of finding out what had done such damage to it would be gone. Probably forever.

“All right,” he told Sso-ngu between dry lips. “Let’s get a little closer. Just a little, and take us in slowly. And let me know if Quentin shows any signs of spooking.

Any signs—if we Jump out of this system Amity’ll never be able to track us down.”

“Oh, God, we’d be lost forever,” Demothi murmured, his voice more muffled than usual by his filter mask. Ferrol half turned to tell him to shut up—

“Movement!” Kennedy snapped suddenly. “Small objects—lots of them—moving toward us from the other space horse.”

Ferrol spun back, a curse catching in his throat. Under attack—? “How small?” he demanded, shaking hands fumbling with his controls.

“Five to ten meters across,” Kennedy told him. “Way too small to be space horses themselves.”

Ferrol had the proper display centered now, and for a long, horrifying moment he thought the approaching dots were somehow multiplying before his eyes… “What are they doing, collecting boulders?”

“Looks like it,” Kennedy agreed. “Telekening them as they come.”

Ferrol nodded, his hands curling into fists as he watched. Like a starburst skyrocket the dots spread apart; and then, to his surprise, they began to coalesce again.

“Coming together about thirty kilometers ahead of us,” Kennedy read off the numbers.

And there was no longer any choice left. A Jump, no matter how carefully planned, was damned risky, and could very well leave them lost for good. But it was less risky than sitting here and maybe getting slaughtered. “Get Quentin ready to move, Sso-ngu,” Ferrol ordered, keying for an astronomical display. If he could find a small, nearby star—

“Hang on, Ferrol, they’re not attacking,” Kennedy told him. “Or at least the edge we can see around Quentin isn’t. They’re holding position relative to us, about twenty-seven kilometers out.”

Ferrol switched back to the tactical display. Sure enough, the rangefinder showed them to be clustered together in front of Quentin, their speed perfectly matched with the calf’s.

So it was not, in fact, an attack. Or at least it wasn’t an attack yet. “Any idea what those things are? Anybody?” he added, looking back at the Tampies.

“I do not know,” Wwis-khaa answered for both of them.

Ferrol turned back in disgust, wondering why he’d even bothered to ask. “They’re probably related to the space horses, anyway,” Kennedy offered. “Motive power seems the same, not to mention the telekening of those rocks.”

“And they must understand space horses,” Demothi said quietly.

Ferrol twisted his head to look at the other. “Why must they?” he demanded.

Demothi gazed back without flinching. “Adult space horse telekene range is usually twenty kilometers, occasionally extending to twenty-five.” He nodded toward Quentin. “You said those creatures were staying twenty-seven kilometers away.”

A cold shiver ran up Ferrol’s back. “They’re staying out of telekene range,” he said. “Deliberately.”

For a moment the lander was silent. Then Kennedy stirred. “On the other hand,”

she reminded them, “if they’re out of Quentin’s range, then we’re probably outside of theirs, too.”

“Point,” Ferrol admitted. “Well, then… let’s keep going toward that space horse out there and see what happens. Sso-ngu?”

“Your wishes are ours,” the Tampy replied.

A thought occurred to Ferrol as a mild surge of acceleration pushed him slightly into his seat: that if the creatures out there couldn’t recognize that Quentin was a calf with only a fraction of an adult’s telekene range, then they couldn’t be very intelligent. It was something to keep in mind.

“We’re moving,” Kennedy reported unnecessarily. “The creatures out there…

moving with us.”

Ferrol frowned at his displays. He’d expected the creatures to hold their current position and try to prevent the lander’s approach. But Kennedy was right: they were sticking like paste, moving like slaved machines exactly twenty-seven kilometers in front of Quentin.

Directly in front of Quentin…

“Kennedy,” he said slowly, “give us a little boost, will you?—forward and starboard. I want to move around Quentin a bit.”

“Sure.” The lander’s drive hissed briefly, and as the rein lines slackened and they moved around Quentin Ferrol kept his eyes on the tactical display.

No mistake. The creatures and their attendant boulders didn’t care at all about the lander’s position.

He turned, to find Kennedy’s eyes on him. “They’re staying with Quentin,” he told her.

She nodded, her lips compressed together into a pale line. “I think,” she said, “that we’d better run a check on just how opaque that clump of stuff out there is.”

“There is no need,” Sso-ngu said softly. “You are correct. Quentin cannot see through them.”

“What?” Demothi demanded, his voice halfway between a gasp and a snarl. It was, Ferrol thought, the most emotion he’d ever heard in the man’s voice. “Why the bloody hell didn’t you say so before?”

“To what purpose?” the Tampy asked reasonably. “We could not have Jumped—it is here that the Amity will come to search for us.”

Demothi took a shuddering breath, clearly fighting for control. “We could have kept them from getting in front of Quentin in the first place,” he bit out. “We could have turned around and tried to get away. Instead, we’ve got—” He waved vaguely forward and sputtered to a halt.

“All right, calm down,” Ferrol told him. “It might have been nice to know what was going on a little earlier, but once the things out there were in place it was too late to do anything about it. And Sso-ngu‘s right; it would have been dangerous to try to Jump.” Dimly, a part of his mind noted the irony of him having to take the Tampies’ side of an argument, but it wasn’t something he had time to dwell on.

“When the Amity gets here it shouldn’t have any trouble getting rid of the things; until then, there doesn’t seem to be anything immediately dangerous about them.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” Kennedy said suddenly, her voice taut. “You’d better have a look at this, Ferrol.”

Ferrol swiveled back to his console. In the past few minutes, while his attention had been on the creatures ahead, they’d covered a fair amount of the distance to the quiescent space horse. Enough so that the computer enhancement program could finally provide a reasonably sharp picture of the creature.

Or rather, of the two-thirds of it that remained. Where the rest should have been was a ragged-edged hole.