Warhorse (18 page)

“Is the umbrella helping any?” Roman asked him.

“Definitely,” Marlowe replied. “Particularly against the visible light, but it's absorbing a decent fraction of the neutron flux, too.”

Roman nodded. The “umbrella” had been the inspiration of someone in Stolt's engineering section: a thin layer of silvered plastic held a couple of meters out from
Amity
's hull by a central strut and stiffened by ribs of memory plastic. The latter had been the big obstacle to the operation—
Amity
's synthesizers could generate the stuff only so quickly—until someone had thought to check the survey section's records. The organic memory bones and muscles that had so startled everyone on that first planetary survey two months ago had turned out to be not only easier and faster to synthesize than the standard varieties, but also had a significantly larger neutron-capture cross section, as well. “Keep an eye on it,” he instructed Marlowe. “We'll want to jettison it if and when it becomes more trouble than it's worth.” He keyed for the lifeboat. “Rrin-saa? This is the captain. How's the space horse doing?”

There was a long pause. “His condition is worsening,” Rrin-saa said, the words coming out with difficulty. On the display his eyes seemed flat and oddly glazed. “I do not know if he will survive the trip.”

Roman rubbed his thumb and forefinger together. “MacKaig?”

“I have to agree, Captain,” she said grimly. “We started with an acceleration of barely 0.1 gee; our deceleration at rendezvous was three-quarters that. The way things are going, we'll be lucky to reach Shadrach in eighteen hours.”

Eighteen hours to Shadrach, and then twenty-five back to the
Amity…
with the nova possibly going off as early as forty-six hours from now. Their leeway was getting thinner by the minute. “Marlowe? Radiation status?”

“Still too hot out there for a solo trip to Shadrach,” the other shook his head. “The hull plates would last maybe an hour or two.”

And they would need to keep some of that strength in reserve for the twenty-five-hour trip back to Pegasus. “That's it, then,” Roman said. “We stay with the space horse as long as possible and keep our fingers crossed. Kennedy, you'd better start updating the ETA every fifteen minutes and feeding the numbers to Lowry's group—I want them ready to make orbit as soon as we're in position to pick them up.”

“Yes, sir.”

MacKaig was right: the space horse was definitely losing strength. There were periods when it simply drifted, allowing itself to be pulled by Shadrach's gravity; and as the hours dragged by those periods began to stretch ever longer.

And finally, with Shadrach's disk filling the displays, the creature gave up.

“I'm sure it's dead, Captain,” MacKaig said, her voice under tight control. “It hasn't done anything but fall planetward for the past twenty minutes. And Rrin-saa…he doesn't look right.”

Roman frowned at the appropriate display. Rrin-saa's face beneath the amplifier helmet was strangely blank. “Rrin-saa?” he called. “Rrin-saa, what's happening?”

There was no response. “Sievers, get that helmet off him,” Roman ordered, already keying his intercom for
Amity
's Tampy section. “I'll find out from the Tampies how to break him out of this.” He leaned toward the intercom—

“There is no need.”

Roman jerked his eyes back to the display, throat muscles tightening reflexively. Rrin-saa's whiny voice was very alien; dry and brittle and almost animalistic—a voice that Roman had never heard before. And yet, behind the alienness there was at the same time a rich and very human sadness. It was an unnerving combination, and it sent a chill up Roman's back. “Are you all right?” he asked when he could get his tongue moving again.

“Yes, Rro-maa,” the Tampy assured him. Already his voice was returning to normal. “He is dead.”

Roman took a careful breath. “I'm sorry,” he said. “MacKaig? That's it, then. Pop your tether line and get back here. We'll stay in the shadow until you're aboard, then probably have to make a run for it. Kennedy?”

“The space horse will enter Shadrach's shadow before it hits,” Kennedy said promptly, “but if we stay with it the whole way we'll go too deep into the planet's gravity well.”

“Plot us a compromise,” Roman told her. “Something that'll expose us to minimum sunlight without using up large amounts of fuel.”

“Already plotted, sir. We'll leave the space horse's shadow in exactly eighteen minutes.”

“Good. Stand by to execute as soon as the boat is aboard. And inform Dr. Lowry that this is it.”

Thirty-seven minutes later, securely planted in a stable orbit,
Amity
waited as the dagger of blue flame that marked Lowry's lander rose to meet it.

The rendezvous was an anticlimax, but a distinctly welcome one. Roman had worried that the smaller craft wouldn't be able to match
Amity
's horizontal velocity and would crash violently into the forward hangar at bulkhead-smashing speed. But Lowry's pilot had planned correctly, spending the last of his fuel in a burst of acceleration as
Amity
swept down on him. The meeting was accompanied by a great deal of noise and a considerable jolt, but nothing vital was broken.

“Welcome aboard,” Roman called via intercom to the hangar. “You'll be shown to acceleration couches; strap into them immediately. Acceleration in five minutes.”

He switched off and turned to Kennedy. “You ready?”

“Yes, sir,” she said, her course plot appearing on Roman's helm repeater display. “We break orbit and drive straight away from Shadrach, staying in its umbra as long as we can. Then we blast laterally to get back to Pegasus. That gives B more time to cool down and also puts us farther out before the hull gets any direct sunlight.”

“Even then,” Marlowe put in, “we'll probably still have to shut down the drive occasionally and rotate sternward to B to let the hull cool.”

Kennedy nodded. “I've figured that in. We should reach Pegasus in approximately twenty-seven hours.”

Trimming their leeway time down to just about an hour. “How's the radiation look out there?” Roman asked Marlowe.

“Dropping off nicely,” the other said. “We shouldn't have any real problem with that.” He craned his neck to look at Roman. “It should be safe enough now for Commander Ferrol to sneak a quick look now and then from around Pegasus' side.”

Roman had already come to that conclusion. In fact, his own calculations indicated that that safety level had been reached nearly an hour ago.

Without bringing any message from Ferrol.

“He may decide to play it safe, though,” Kennedy said into his quiet fears. “Or his laser may not be able to cut through the interference out there—it wasn't designed for this kind of soup.”

Or perhaps Pegasus had gotten well, and had already Jumped. If Sso-ngii and the other Tampies hadn't been able to adequately control it… “There's no point in speculating about it,” he said. “Whatever's going on out there, we'll know all about it in twenty-seven hours…and until then, there's not a damn thing we can do about it anyway. Sound your warnings, Kennedy, and let's get out of here.”

“C
OMMANDER?”

The voice was little more than a husky whisper, and for a long moment Ferrol wasn't sure whether it was real or merely another of the surrealistic dreams that skittered continually through the deadly twilight consciousness that seemed to be suffocating the life out of him. But, “Commander?” the voice came again; and this time the dream also contained a gentle shaking of his arm. Wearily, resentfully, he dragged his eyes open.

It was Yamoto, her face drawn and shiny with sweat. “Commander, it's my turn on duty,” she croaked.

“Ah,” Ferrol said. He took a careful breath, and immediately wished he hadn't: the air was even more like the residue of a blast furnace than he remembered. “How're things back there?” he asked, licking parched lips.

Yamoto shrugged. Like everyone else on the lander, she'd long since taken off her tunic, but Ferrol hardly noticed the view. “About the same as an hour ago,” she said. “People keep drifting in and out of consciousness.”

“Like me, for instance,” Ferrol nodded, fumbling with the straps pinning him to the helm chair. For some reason of shape or focus, the lander's bow was about five degrees hotter than its stern, and he'd had to order that command duty up here be limited to an hour at a stretch.

That order not including the Tampies, of course. For a moment he gazed at them, huddled together at the very tip of the bow, and not for the first time it occurred to him that nothing he could have done with his needle gun could possibly have been worse than what they were going through at the moment.

Visible out the forward viewport beyond the Tampies, sheltering together in what there was of the lander's shadow, were the lifeboats, looking for all the world like baby ducks beneath their mother's wing. Briefly, Ferrol wondered how they were faring, then put it out of his mind. Exposed to slightly less of the godawful sunlight, and with a larger surface-to-volume ratio for dumping their excess heat, the lifeboats were probably doing at least as well as the lander. And even if they weren't, there wasn't anything he could do about it until the
Amity
returned.

If it ever did.

“Radiation counter's gone out again,” Yamoto said.

Ferrol focused on the control panel, and with some effort found the proper display. Sure enough, it was blank, its electronics having given up the ghost. “Last time I checked it we were way below any danger level,” he assured her, trying to remember exactly when he'd made that check. “That shell of matter the star blew off way back when was the worst of it—the levels started dropping as soon as that passed.” He gave the rest of the instruments a cursory check, noting that despite having rigged extra heat radiators the lander's interior temperature had still risen another half degree in the past hour.

“Nothing more from the
Amity
?”

Ferrol waved his hands, the gesture half frustration and half resignation. “As long as they stick with the laser exclusively, how could there be? We were lucky to have picked up the one transmission from Shadrach's moon.”

“I suppose so. Are we still broadcasting a homing—? Oh, there it is,” she broke off her question as her eyes found the radio display board.

“For all the range it's got out there,” Ferrol grimaced. “They've probably got as good a chance of picking us up visually as they do of finding a beacon signal in all that static.”

Assuming, of course, that there would actually be someone out there to look for them…

“Commander?”

With an effort, Ferrol brought his attention back to her. “Sorry,” he muttered, reaching for the straps before remembering he'd already loosened them. “Never thought growing up in a planet's temperate zone would someday turn out to be a handicap.” He got a grip on the chair arm, eased himself out of the squishy clutch of the molded contours—

He had just about worked himself free when there was a quiet beep from the radio display.

The panel beeped again before his numbed mind even registered the sound; and it wasn't until the fourth beep that he realized that it was coming from the beacon's transponder.

The
Amity
had arrived.

He dived for the panel, fingers fumbling with the main transceiver switch. “Lander to
Amity
,” he called toward the microphone, hoping fervently that the visual display was still operational. “Lander to
Amity
.”

“
Amity
to lander,” Roman's voice boomed out of the speaker. “Commander Ferrol?”

“Yes, Captain,” Ferrol said. Behind him, he could hear a sudden stirring as crewers on the brink of heatstroke dragged themselves awake to the realization that the long ordeal was almost over. “It's good to hear your voice, sir.”

“Same here,” Roman said. Belatedly, the visual came on; and through the static Ferrol could see the frown on the captain's face. “We have visual contact with you now…” His voice hesitated, and the frown deepened noticeably.

“You're wondering about Pegasus?” Ferrol prompted.

Roman looked briefly to the side, to where Marlowe was probably saying something. “We seem to be having some problem with our scale program,” he told Ferrol.

Ferrol shook his head. “No, sir, it's not the scale,” he assured the other. “Pegasus is gone, all right. Jumped about fifty-three hours ago.”

Roman's frown shifted a fraction, toward what was probably the scanner repeater display. “Then what—?”

“—is that thing out there?” Ferrol finished for him. “A farewell gift from Pegasus, actually.” He looked at the aft-camera display, at the short cylindrical shape framed aura-style by the sunlight behind it. “Captain; meet Junior. Pegasus' calf.”

He looked back at Roman…and thanked whichever gods had permitted the visual display to function. The expression on the captain's face was all he could have hoped for.

For the tenth time—Ferrol had kept track—the tiny needle poked not quite unobtrusively into his skin; and then, thankfully, it was all over.

“That's the last of them,”
Amity
's medical officer said briskly, throwing the release lever and swinging up the top of the automed. “Ten precancerous growths, Commander. Not bad, really, considering all the radiation exposure you had out there. We got them all, of course.”

“Glad to hear it,” Ferrol said, getting gingerly out of the shiny box and pulling on his pants. The worst thing about automeds, he'd often thought—aside from their resemblance to high tech coffins—was the way the damn things demanded the total surrender of one's dignity. “I'd hate to have put up with those needles for nothing. I gather there wasn't anything deeper?”