Warhorse (19 page)

“Not that we could detect,” the doctor assured him. “Though we'll be doing follow-up tests on you for the next few weeks, just to be sure. Or, rather,
someone
will be doing them,” he amended, a bit wistfully.

“Right,” Ferrol grunted, busying himself with the fasteners on his tunic. Of course the other would be sorry that the
Amity
's mission was nearly over—he'd always been one of the more simpering pro-Tampy types aboard. “You'll excuse me; the captain left orders I was to report to him as soon as I was finished here.”

He escaped to the corridor, and air not quite so thick with maudlin sentiment, and made his way forward to Roman's office.

“Commander,” the other nodded gravely as Ferrol entered. “I don't suppose I have to tell you that you've made it into the history books.”

“
Amity
has, anyway,” Ferrol demurred politely. “I don't expect to be more than a referenced footnote, myself.”

“You're too modest,” Roman said. His eyes seemed to search Ferrol's face. “The man in charge of the first captive breeding of a space horse will certainly rate more than just a footnote.”

Ferrol forced himself to match the other's gaze. “May I assume Sso-ngii told you I threatened to kill them before the calving?”

Roman's face didn't change. “Not in so many words, but I'm slowly learning how to read between Tampy lines. You want to tell me why?”

“You mean why I threatened them? As in, why would I threaten creatures who blandly told me to, in effect, destroy our exit ticket out of hell, but who then wouldn't offer the slightest explanation as to why I should do so?”

“They wouldn't because they couldn't,” Roman interjected mildly. “The Tampies have never been able to breed their space horses.”

Ferrol shrugged. Perhaps; but on the other hand, he wasn't yet willing to believe that the Tampies hadn't had at least an inkling of what was happening before the bulge in Pegasus' side had made it obvious. After all, the term “calving” came directly from the Tampies—a reference to the similarity between space horse reproduction and glacial splitting—and to Ferrol that implied strongly that, somewhere along the line, the aliens had witnessed the entire birth process. Possibly even including the parent space horse's physiological distress…which Rrin-saa had also denied having any knowledge of.

None of which was provable, of course, at least not from aboard the
Amity.
“The fact remains, sir,” he said instead, “that I had no way of knowing whether they were right, wrong, or lying through their teeth. Going for some sort of ritual mass suicide, maybe, and inviting us along for the ride.”

“Though it turned out that they
were
right,” Roman pointed out.

“
This
time, yes,” Ferrol countered. “And even then, some of us damn near died.”

“Yes, I've read the preliminary medical report,” Roman said soberly. “In hindsight it would have been nice if we'd thought to leave you some extra shielding or reflector material. But of course we had no way of knowing you were going to trade in an eight-hundred-meter space horse for a hundred-meter calf.”

Ferrol felt his hackles smoothing back down. Apparently Roman had been merely interested in his side of the incident, not spoiling for a confrontation. “Yes, sir,” he said. “It was just dumb luck that we were able to free Pegasus and get Junior webbed up before they oriented themselves and Jumped off somewhere together.”

“Yes, Sso-ngii was impressed with your crew's speed.” Again Roman seemed to search Ferrol's face. “He said you seemed to know exactly what you were doing.”

“As I said, dumb luck,” Ferrol told him evenly. “And a good EVA crew.” If the captain was hoping for some guilty confession of Ferrol's past poaching activities, he was going to be disappointed.

Though if he was, he didn't show it. “And you kept Junior instead of Pegasus because…?”

“I thought that Pegasus' pre-nova problems might not all have been related to the calving process,” Ferrol said. It wasn't the whole truth, but it was plausible enough to pass as such. “If so, we'd have a better chance of getting Junior to Jump us out of there when the time came.”

“A gamble,” Roman agreed. “That's the way of life, it seems. We stack the odds as best we can, then just throw the dice and see what happens.” He glanced up and out his viewport, toward the netting and Junior. “In this case, we seem to have broken the bank.”

Ferrol nodded. They had indeed. “By the way, where exactly are we?”

“Oh, just a minor midway system,” Roman told him. “It was the fastest and easiest place to Jump to after we linked back up with you. A red dwarf star, a couple of frozen planets—nothing of any real interest. We'll spend a couple of days swinging around it to get into position, then do what Kennedy says will be a quick double Jump to first Sirius and then Solomon.”

“Good.” Ferrol got to his feet, balancing carefully in the half-gee Junior's acceleration was giving the ship. “Then with your permission, I'll get started on the debriefing.”

Roman frowned. “What debriefing is that?”

“Dr. Lowry's team, of course,” Ferrol said. “I assumed it would be standard procedure in a case like this to get their verbal reports down on tape as soon as possible. And since you
did
assign me to be ship's science liaison, it seems to me that I should be the one handling it.”

“That's not exactly what I had in mind when I gave you the assignment,” Roman pointed out, still frowning. “And anyway, after what you've been through you probably ought to spend the rest of the trip either in sick bay or in your own bed.”

“I appreciate your concern, sir,” Ferrol said stiffly, giving his voice what he hoped was just the right touch of professional pride. “May I remind the captain that everyone else aboard—himself included—has had an equally rough time of it the past four days?”

A faint smile touched the captain's lips. “Point noted,” he conceded dryly, easing what Ferrol guessed were probably still rather stiff shoulder muscles. That twelve-gee race to Shadrach's moon he'd heard stories about was one for the books. “Very well, Commander. The last thing I want right now is any more heat—from anywhere. If you want to do the debriefings, you're welcome to them.”

It took until nearly the end of the debriefing interviews, but eventually Ferrol found the man he knew had to be there.

His name was Kheslav, and he was one of Lowry's equipment technicians. “I was afraid the Senator would just throw me to the lions,” he muttered, his face twitching as he looked around the conference room for at least the fifth time since Ferrol had shut off the recorder. “Abandon me to face whatever happened alone.”

“Well, obviously he didn't,” Ferrol told him. “Almost too obviously, as a matter of fact. The message about your predicament came in over Admiral Marcosa's signature, with a thirty-hour time delay to boot. He might as well have put neons all over it and officially invited a backtrack.”

Kheslav's head jerked back around, his eyes wide with nervous guilt. “You think anyone will do that?” he breathed.

“Probably not,” Ferrol growled, sorry he'd even mentioned it. Kheslav was rapidly showing himself to be a mixture of all the personality characteristics that Ferrol hated most in people: lack of any real conviction or commitment to whatever it was the Senator had sent him out here to do, lack of any courage whatsoever, and a blathering tongue on top of it. “So tell me why Marcosa wanted the
Amity
—and presumably that means he wanted
me
—to be here when you were picked up.”

Kheslav licked his lips. “I have a datapack in my cabin,” he said, his voice lowering conspiratorially. “Lowry never knew, but my real job on Shadrach was to study the Tampies' space horse. It was going to be there for several months, you know—day in and day out, in the same place, where we could monitor it continuously—”

“Yes, I understand,” Ferrol cut him off. “Part of the
Amity
's job was to do the same sort of thing.”

“Right.” Kheslav looked around the room again. “The thing is, we had some monitors attached to the space horse's webbing—without the Tampies knowing, of course—with everything funneled back to a receiver either direct or through a pair of tight-beam relay satellites. When B blew the first time—and all the Tampies died?—well, I have a complete record of the light intensities and types of radiation the space horse took, as well as a lot of the stuff going up and down the rein lines.” He lowered his voice still further. “And since some of the instruments were on the shielded side, away from the light, and you were in line of sight with us when you came over in the space horse's shadow…some of that data goes right up until the end.” He fixed Ferrol with a suddenly intense stare. “You understand what that means?”

Ferrol did indeed. It meant that, for the first time ever, humanity would know exactly how to kill a space horse.

It was like a moment of truth, a moment that should have been filled with a deep and profound silence. Typically, Kheslav babbled right on through it. “You see the problem, then, with me trying to take the datapack home myself,” he said, waving his hands helplessly. “With all the publicity and attention—especially now with this calving thing—I'm not going to be able to just walk past the university people with a private datapack I'm not letting anyone see—”

“So I gather you want me to take charge of it?” Ferrol cut through the flood.

“If you would,” Kheslav said, obvious relief on his face. “I figure you can just hide it somewhere aboard the ship for now, and then later get it to the Senator—”

“Yes, thank you, I think I can handle it,” Ferrol growled. “When I've finished interviewing the rest of your party I'll come by your cabin and pick it up.” He let his gaze harden, just a bit. “And after that I don't expect to see or talk to you for the rest of the trip.”

“Sure.” Kheslav nodded with puppy dog eagerness. “Sure, I understand. I really appreciate this, Commander—”

“
Good-bye
, Kheslav.”

“Yeah.” Awkwardly, Kheslav got to his feet. “Uh.…yeah. Good-bye.”

For a wonder, he was silent as he left the room.

Two hours later Ferrol was back in his cabin, wedging the datapack with only moderate difficulty alongside the needle gun in his lockbox. Alongside the gun, on top of the Senator's envelope…and for a moment Ferrol paused, staring at the bulkhead separating him from the Tampy section as he savored the bittersweet taste of irony. The Senator had placed him aboard the
Amity
for the express purpose of sabotaging the ship's mission; of making sure that, with or without his direct intervention, this experiment in human-Tampy cooperation was a total and embarrassing disaster.

Instead, it had succeeded in doing something no human or even Tampy had ever done before…and with that event, Ferrol's task had turned on its head.

Now, he was going to have to do his damnedest to make sure that the
Amity
experiment was allowed to continue.

He smiled tightly as one more irony of it struck him. He'd had a space horse calf within his grasp once before—had seen then the possibilities such a creature presented—and it had been Roman who snatched it from him. Now, it was that same man whose ship had given humanity this second shot at building its own space horse fleet.

And even if space horse calves proved uncontrollable by human handlers…Ferrol's gaze dropped once more to the datapack. It would be unfortunate, but it wouldn't be a total disaster. With the Pegasus calving, and now Kheslav's data, the Tampy domination of space travel had come to an end.

One way or another, it had come to an end.

Sealing the lockbox, he replaced it in its underbed storage drawer, and returned to his duties.

T
HE SHUTTLE'S ENGINES GAVE
one final burp and cut off, and for a few seconds Ferrol fought the usual brief battle with nausea as his system made its adjustment back to free-fall. The adjustment seemed to take longer than usual…but then, he was seldom this weary during such transitions.

He sighed, and looked around him. A shuttle, the Senate crewers had called it; but they might as well have labeled it a yacht and been done with it. A rich man's yacht, drafted into allegedly public service with a few rows of seats bolted into what had probably once been a dining room or conference room or something. Not that the alterations had done much to dent the atmosphere—infinitely-adjustable seats with individual built-in entertainment systems were hardly likely to be mistaken for standard Starforce-issue acceleration couches. Listening to the rumbling in his stomach, Ferrol wondered sourly if having someone throw up all over their flying glitter-room would do anything to bring the visiting senators back into the real world. From the evidence to date, he doubted it.

“Commander Ferrol?”

Ferrol looked up before he realized the voice was coming from the seatback behind him. “Yes?” he said.

“Captain Mendez's compliments, sir; he'd like to see you on the bridge at your earliest convenience.”

Ferrol frowned. Some kind of trouble? “On my way.”

He found the release and pulled it, staying where he was for the couple of seconds it took the safety harness to remold itself and retract smoothly into the seat again. The bridge, he'd seen when they entered, was three compartments forward, just ahead of a ready room and a closet-sized box the yacht's downgrade renovation had left apparently unused. Easing to the aisle, he gave himself a push forward and headed for the door.

It opened as he reached it, closing behind him almost before he'd gotten fully inside. A flicker of light—identity scan, possibly—and then the inner door slid open and he floated through into the ready room.