Warhorse

Chapter 4

At precisely 0812 the next morning, the Amity cast off its moorings on the Tampy corral. Trailing a kilometer behind their space horse, Pegasus, on deceptively thin tether lines, the ship headed out into deep space.

Roman had already known that the view from outside a space horse ship was impressive. What he hadn’t expected was that the ride was even more so.

It was quieter, obviously; but the reality of it far outstripped the expectation. Over the years Roman had grown accustomed to the many levels of noise a ship’s fusion drive was capable of putting out, from the dull but still permeating drone of standby to the steady thunder of full acceleration. It was a sound that never ceased as long as the ship was under power, and to be pulling a steady 0.6-gee acceleration without even a whisper of that familiar noise was awe-inspiring and just a little scary.

No drive noise also meant no deck vibration, of course; less obviously, it also meant none of the gentle rolling motion that came of the computer sensing and compensating for slight imbalances in thrust between the different drive nozzles. It was, in fact, for all the world like sitting in a full-size simulator back at the Academy.

“We’ve cleared the far edge of the corral enclosure,” Kennedy reported from the helm. “Signaling the Handler to increase acceleration to 0.9 gee.”

Roman nodded acknowledgment. He’d rather expected Kennedy to take the helm herself on this leg of the trip, and he hadn’t been disappointed. Clearly, she was serious about getting space horse experience. “What’s ETA to the scheduled Jump point?” he asked her.

“One hour twenty minutes,” she told him as their weight began a smooth increase.

“That is, if we stick to our current minimum-energy course.”

“We’re in no particular hurry, Lieutenant,” Roman told her. “Besides, I want to put Pegasus through a variety of maneuvers during the voyage. Minimum energy, minimum time, straight-line—you know the list.”

Ferrol half turned from his station. “I trust you’re not expecting the space horse to run into some kind of limit,” he offered. “I’ve heard of them pulling five gees without any noticeable strain.”

Roman shook his head. “I’m not looking for limits, Commander. Just differences.”

He turned his attention to the man at the scanner station. “Lieutenant Marlowe, how’s the signal from the contact feed repeater?”

“Coming in strong, sir,” Riddick Marlowe confirmed. “I’ve got it going to two separate recorders, as per orders.”

Roman nodded and turned back, to find a thoughtful frown on Ferrol’s face.

“Comment, Commander?” he invited.

Ferrol hesitated, then shook his head minutely. “No, I’m wrong,” he said, almost as if to himself. “If recording the traces from an amplifier helmet was all there was to it, someone would have compiled a library of them long before now.”

Roman nodded. “Agreed. It’s apparently not just a matter of getting a list of the right commands—the direct and immediate touch of a Tampy mind seems to be necessary for proper space horse control.” He cocked an eyebrow, “You have an interest in space horse control?”

“Of course,” Ferrol said. “And so should anyone else. If humanity’s ever going to expand farther than a few dozen light-years from home, we’re either going to need our own space horses or a lot of redesign of the Mitsuushi.”

“Or else a long-term rental agreement with the Tampies,” Kennedy put in.

Ferrol’s eyes flicked to her. “Renting is fine in its place,” he said evenly. “I don’t think full-scale colonization fits in that column.”

“Certainly not if they’d want to sit over the colonists’ shoulders and complain about their development schemes,” Marlowe agreed, almost under his breath.

“Sometimes I swear the Tampies think of us as a bunch of eight-year-olds, with them as our mothers.”

Kennedy chuckled. Ferrol didn’t. “You may have a point, Lieutenant,” Roman told Marlowe. “Bear in mind, though, that occasionally we do indeed act like eight-yearolds.”

“Agreed, Captain,” Marlowe shrugged. His eyes flicked to Roman’s face, as if trying to gauge his new commander’s tolerance to bridge chatter. “I’d argue in turn that most of the time that kind of behavior comes about because we have a sense of humor, something the Tampies don’t seem to know anything about.”

“Perhaps,” Roman conceded. Whatever form the Tampy sense of humor took—if they had one at all—it had so far managed to remain hidden.

And speaking of Tampies and things hidden…

Unstrapping, he got to his feet. “Commander, you have the bridge,” he told Ferrol, making one final check of the instruments. “I expect to be back before we Jump.”

“Acknowledged, sir,” Ferrol said. “May I ask where you’ll be?”

“Port side,” Roman told him. “It’s about time I paid a courtesy call on the Tampies.”

There were four connections between Amity’s human and Tampy halves, each equipped with a standard air lock. Beside the lock was a rack of filter masks; choosing one, Roman put it on, making sure the flexible seals fitted snugly around nose and cheeks and jaw. He’d heard stories of what Tampies in an enclosed space smelled like, and it would be embarrassing to gag on his first visit. The air lock went through its cycle, replacing most of the human-scented air with a purer oxygen/nitrogen mix, signaling ready after perhaps thirty seconds. Taking a careful breath through the filter mask, Roman keyed the door to open.

Beyond it was another world.

For a minute he just stood there, still inside the lock, taking it all in. The lighting was muted, indirect, and restful; the air cool and dry, with wisps of movement that reminded Roman somehow of forest breezes. Various art-type items—small sculptures as well as flats—were scattered at irregular intervals across the walls and ceiling. Irregular; yet despite the lack of symmetry, the whole arrangement still somehow managed to maintain a unified, balanced look. Every square centimeter of wall and deck space not otherwise used was covered with soft-looking green carpet. The latter, at least, Roman recognized from Amity’s spec sheets: a particularly hardy variety of moss which had been adopted by the Tampies as a lowtech air filtration and renewal system. But even here, expectation was incomplete—instead of something with the faintly disgusting appearance of terrestrial mosses, the Tampy version looked far more like just some exotic synthetic carpeting.

The pro-Tampy apologists often claimed that the aliens’ aesthetic sense was not only highly developed but also entirely accessible to humans. If this was a representative sample, Roman thought, that claim was an accurate one.

“Rro-maa?” a grating voice came from outside the lock.

This was it. Steeling himself, Roman stepped out onto the moss—it yielded to his feet just like carpeting, too—and turned in the direction the voice had come from.

And for the first time in his life was face-to-face with a Tampy.

It was, actually, something of a disappointment. What with the conflict between races that had slowly been building over the past ten years—and with the contentions of people like Ferrol that the Tampies were a looming threat to humanity—Roman had apparently built up a subconscious image of Tampies as creatures who, despite being shorter than humans, nevertheless projected an aura of strength or even menace.

The short part he had right; but the rest of it was totally off target. The Tampy whose misshapen face was turned up to him was thin and delicate-looking, his narrow shoulders hunched slightly forward in a caricature of old age, his hands crossed palms-up at his waist. His skin was pale—a sickly, bedridden sort of pale—and the cranial hair tufts poking out at irregular intervals looked for all the world like bunches of fine copper wire.

The overall image was one of almost absurd frailty, and in that first moment it seemed utterly incredible to Roman that such creatures should even be taken seriously, much less considered a threat.

And then he remembered Prometheus… and the half-comical picture vanished in a puff of smoke. No, the Tampies were indeed creatures to be taken seriously.

Belatedly, he focused on the yellow-orange tartan neckerchief knotted loosely around the Tampy’s neck. That particular color combination belonged to—“Rrinsaa?”

he tentatively identified the other.

“I am,” the Tampy acknowledged. “You are Rro-maa?”

“Yes, I’m Captain Roman,” Roman nodded. “I wasn’t expecting to be met here.”

The Tampy made a quick fingers-to-ear gesture—the aliens’ equivalent of a shrug, Roman remembered.“Do you wish to see all?”

It was, actually, a tempting offer. If the rest of the Tampies’ decor was as unusual and imaginative as that in the corridors, it might well be worth taking the complete tour. But that would have to wait for another time. “No, thank you, Rrin-saa,” he said. “For now, I’d just like to see your command center.”

“I do not understand.”

“Command center. Control room?—where you keep track of the Amity’s movement and issue any necessary orders.”

“I do not issue orders, Rro-maa,” Rrin-saa said. “I do not rule.”

For a moment Roman was tongue-tied. “Ah… I’m sorry. I thought you were the one in charge of this half of the ship.”

Rrin-saas’s mouth opened wide, as if in parody of a human smile—the Tampy equivalent of shaking his head. “I speak for all,” Rrin-saa said. “I do not rule.”

“I see,” Roman said, although he didn’t, exactly. Anarchy, or even rule by consensus, didn’t seem a good way to run a starship. “But if you don’t rule, who does?”

Fingers to ear. “You do, Rro-maa.”

“Uh… huh,” Roman said. It was slowly becoming clearer… “You mean that since your people agreed to put a human—me—in command of the Amity, then I’m to give you all your orders?”

“That is correct.”

It couldn’t be entirely correct, Roman knew. At the very least, they’d arranged their own billeting and duty rosters without any input from the human half of the ship, and almost certainly such simple housekeeping operations would continue to be so handled.

Which implied some sort of chain of command… which Rrin-saa didn’t seem interested in talking about. “Where are the repeater instruments from the bridge, then?” he asked.

“With the Handlers.”

Roman nodded. “Take me there, then, if you would.”

The Handler room was just aft of the bow instrument packing, in a mirror-image position to Amity’s bridge. Sitting in the center of the room, a Tampy sporting a green-purple neckerchief sat humming atonally to himself, his eyes wide open but paying no attention to Roman or Rrin-saa. To the left, arranged in random patterns against the inner wall, were the repeater instruments; to the right, a second Tampy sat pressed against the outer wall, his face turned at a painful-looking angle to stare forward out the viewport, his head engulfed by a large multi-wired helmet. The wires of which went to a basket-mesh case, inside of which—

Roman forced himself to look… and actually, it wasn’t too bad. Provided he remembered that the hairless, piglet-sized creature was supposed to look that way; and that it was safely asleep, not dead; and that its wired-up brain neurons had as much sheer computing capability as the Cordonale’s best mainframes.

The Tampies’ computer, he knew, used basically the same arrangement. Not so simple, but still elegant.

“Sso-ngu,” Rrin-saa said, raising both hands toward the helmeted Tampy. “He speaks with Pegasunninni.”

“Pega—? Ah,” Roman interrupted himself. Pegasunninni would be the Tampies’

name for the space horse: Pegasus, with the proper identifying suffix tacked on.

“And the other is Hhom-jee?” he added, hoping he was pulling the proper neckerchief color scheme out of memory.

“That is correct,” Rrin-saa confirmed. “He is resting.”

“Ah,” Roman said again, eying the humming Tampy with interest. Tampy sleep was both more physically active than the human equivalent and also came at semiirregular intervals around the clock. A far cry from the normal terrestrial circadian rhythm, and one that had helped to poison quite a few of the early attempts at interspecies cooperation. Human workers could never quite believe the Tampies weren’t simply goofing off, and Roman would bet that the human habit of going into a coma for a straight thirty percent of the day had been equally annoying to the Tampies. Though no one knew for sure; the Tampies had never discussed the matter. “I gather he’s here to take over when Sso-ngu needs sleep?”

“That is correct,” Rrin-saa said. He repeated his earlier two-handed gesture, this time toward Hhom-jee. “There is one other who talks to Pegasunninni.”

“Yes, I remember that there were three Handlers listed on the crew roster.” Roman nodded toward Sso-ngu and the hairless caged animal. It wasn’t so bad the second time. “I’d like to take a closer look at the amplifier helmet, if it wouldn’t disturb him.”

“Do not approach.”

Roman paused, halfway into a step. “Why not?”

“He speaks with Pegasunninni,” Rrin-saa said.

“And…?”

“You are a predator,” Sso-ngu said.

Roman started; he hadn’t realized the Handler was paying any attention to the conversation. “Is that why we haven’t been able to control space horses? Or even to keep them alive in captivity?”

“I do not know,” Sso-ngu said. “I know that humans sometimes have bothered space horses; that is all.”

Roman pursed his lips. “Um.”

For a moment he hesitated, at a loss for something to say or do. He turned away from Sso-ngu; and as he did so, the repeater instruments caught his eye, and he stepped over for a closer look. They were labeled in Tampy script, of course, but his crash course in things Tamplisstan had included some of that, and it took only a minute to locate the ones he was interested in. “I’d better be getting back to the bridge,” he told Rrin-saa. “We’re getting close to our scheduled Jump point.”

“I understand,” Rrin-saa said. “Rro-maa… this voyage is of great importance to the Tamplissta. We understand you; you do not understand us. This failing of harmony cannot continue.”

Roman nodded. “I agree,” he said. “We’ll work together on this, Rrin-saa. With luck… maybe we can find some of that understanding for my people.”

“That is the Tamplisstan hope. For if not…” He touched fingers to ear, and left the sentence unfinished.

“I understand,” Roman said.

If not, Ferrol would likely get the war he wanted.

They still had nearly half an hour to the scheduled Jump position when the captain finally returned to the bridge. “Captain,” Ferrol nodded, unstrapping from the command chair and standing up. “Still running on schedule; twenty-seven minutes to Jump. I gather from Kennedy’s course plan that we weren’t going to decelerate to zero vee before the Jump.”

“Correct, Commander,” Roman said. “Space horses routinely Jump while in motion, sometimes with rather high velocities relative to their departure star.”

A feat which Ferrol had probably had a lot more experience with than the captain.

He’d lost several space horses that way before he’d figured out how to sneak up without spooking them. “Yes, sir. I presume you’ll want to at least kill our acceleration first?”

Roman started to speak; paused. “That’s a good point,” he said thoughtfully. “Any idea whether or not space horses can Jump while accelerating?”

Ferrol frowned, searching his memory. He remembered at least one out in the Tampies’ yishyar who’d been going damned fast when it Jumped away from his net. But whether it had actually been accelerating when he lost it… “I’m not sure,”

he told Roman. “I don’t remember reading anything about it one way or the other. I don’t know why they couldn’t, though.”

“Neither do I. Let’s try it and see.”

And if the Tampies would rather we didn’t find out for sure? Ferrol wondered sardonically. But there was no point in asking the question aloud. The official line was that the Tampies were honest and open and eager to share all knowledge with their beloved human brothers; and if there was one thing guaranteed about this voyage it was that the captain would be an expert at tracking along the official line.

“Yes, sir,” Ferrol said. “Shall I inform the Tampies?”

For a moment he thought Roman would take him up on his offer. But—“Thank you, Commander; I’ll do it.” He seated himself in the command chair, made a quick sweep of the displays.

Across at the scanner station, Marlowe looked up. “As long as you’ve got them anyway, Captain,” he said, “you might want to double-check that all this dust isn’t going to block Pegasus’ view of the target star.”

“There shouldn’t be that much dust this far off the ecliptic,” Roman frowned, reaching over to call up the appropriate readouts.

“That’s what I thought, sir,” Marlowe nodded. “But there is. We seem to be heading into it, too—the density’s been slowly increasing.”

Ferrol peered over Roman’s shoulder as the numbers came up. “It won’t be a problem,” he told the other. “That’s nothing but Pegasus’ own dust sweat.”

Roman looked up at him. “I didn’t realize dust sweat got that dense.”

Ferrol shrugged. “We’re working Pegasus pretty hard here, sir, whether it shows the strain or not,” he pointed out. “And there’s an awful lot of surface area out there for it to sweat through.”

“And of course under acceleration like this the whole mass of it falls straight back on top of us,” Roman nodded understanding. “Interesting. One of the many things about space horse transport no one’s really thought about. I’m sure we’ll be finding more of these tidbits over the next few months.”

I can’t wait, Ferrol thought. Leaving Roman’s side, he returned to his own station, listening with half an ear as the captain discussed the Jump/acceleration question with the Tampies. No, they didn’t know whether it was possible, either, but the Handler was willing to try it.

Oh, of course they don’t know, Ferrol thought, a touch of bitterness clouding his vision. It was only the first thing anyone considering space horse warfare would think to investigate; but, no, the Tampies hadn’t done that.

And of course Roman would accept it all at face value. Roman didn’t think about space horse warfare, either.

“Commander?”

Ferrol remembered to smooth out his face before turning around. “Yes, Captain?”

For just a second Roman seemed to study him, as if he’d somehow divined Ferrol’s train of thought. “I’d like us to get a sample of that dust,” he said. “Please inform the survey section, then stay on the intercom and monitor the operation.”

Ferrol glanced at the chrono. “You want the sample taken before or after the Jump, sir?”

Roman pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Good point,” he nodded. “The composition may be different at different times. Let’s take one each before and after the Jump; and then have them continue to take two samples per day for the rest of the voyage.” His eyes shifted to the main display. “Given their meteoroid diet, it might be instructive to see just what they consider to be waste products.”

“Especially if some of it turns out to be gold or platinum or iridium?” Kennedy suggested.

Roman nodded. “The possibility had occurred to me, yes,” he agreed.

Ferrol turned his face back to his board, keying the intercom for Amity’s survey section as he allowed his lip to twist with contempt. The eternal and single-minded goal of profit. Ancient Rome, he’d read somewhere, had also been hard at work trading with its enemies… just before those same enemies destroyed it.

Those who don’t know history, he quoted bitterly to himself, are condemned to repeat it.

Amity was listed on paper as a research/survey ship, and its overlarge scientific contingent turned out to be better at their jobs than Ferrol had really expected. They had the first sample into the ship, onto the lab table, and through a preliminary analysis ten minutes before the Jump… and Ferrol found quiet satisfaction in the feet that the dust, while loaded with strange and exotic silicates, contained not a single scrap of gold, platmium, or iridium.