Warhorse (2 page)

“Tampy lander away,” Trent reported. “Trajectory…right on the money.”

“Acknowledged,” Roman nodded. “Stay on it, Commander—make sure it stays that way.”

The other threw Roman a glance before turning back to his displays. “You think Pankau knows something we don't?” he asked over his shoulder.

Roman shrugged. “I'd guess he's just being cautious. On the other hand, there
has
been at least one incidence of violence down there already.”

Trent snorted. “And since Pankau's instructions are probably to give the Tampies whatever they want…?”

Roman shrugged again.
Ours is not to reason why
, he quoted silently to himself. Though that didn't mean any of them had to like it.

Ten kilometers away, their orbit just below the
Dryden
's, the Tampy ship was pulling slowly away. “Keep us with him, Lieutenant,” Roman instructed Nussmeyer, studying the velocity readouts on his tactical display. A kilometer ahead of the alien ship floated the dark mass of their space horse.… “On second thought, let's do more than just catch up,” he corrected himself suddenly. “I want a closer look at that space horse. Slow approach, parallel course, and keep us about two kilometers away.”

The background hum of quiet conversation abruptly cut off. Nussmeyer looked at Trent, and Trent looked at Roman. “Something, Commander?” Roman asked mildly.

Trent's lip twitched. “The Tampies aren't going to be pleased if we spook their space horse.”

“That's why we're staying two kilometers away,” Roman told him.

“What if that's not far enough?”

Roman cocked an eyebrow and glanced around the bridge. “We're not exactly going to be sneaking up on it, gentlemen. The Tampy Handlers should certainly be able to hold onto it, or at the very least figure out that they can't in time to warn us off. Besides, space horses aren't
that
skittish.”

Trent's expression was stony, but he turned back to his work without further argument. Roman watched his back for a moment, then shifted his attention to the helm. “Lieutenant?”

“Maneuver plotted and fed in,” Nussmeyer reported, his voice a little strained. Like Trent, he clearly wasn't happy about this; unlike the executive officer, he wasn't in a position to argue about it.

“Very good,” Roman said. “Execute.”

Through the hull plates the whisper of the drive on minimal power could be felt, bringing with it an equally faint echo of returning weight. Slowly, the
Dryden
moved forward and planetward, passing the Tampy ship and the kilometer of nearly invisible webbing.

And within a few minutes, they were paralleling the space horse itself.

It was something of a cliché—a twenty-year-old cliché, at that—that no camera or holo could truly capture the awesome majesty of a space horse. Roman had heard it probably a hundred times since joining the Starforce; but it was only now that he finally understood why everyone who'd seen one close up seemed so insistent on repeating the standard line.

The creature was
huge
, for starters. Nine hundred twenty meters long, built roughly like a cylinder with rounded ends and a slight taper from front to rear, the space horse totally dwarfed the small Tampy ship trailing it. The delicate webbing linking the two was essentially invisible, even on the telescope screen, but as the fibers caught the sunlight there were occasional glints from it that added a fairy tale sparkle to the scene.

It was the things that
didn't
show up on long-range scans, though, that Roman found most fascinating. The space horse's skin, for one: though in holos it invariably turned out a flat gray, it was in fact strangely iridescent, in a way that reminded him of silk. The sensory clusters, located in axial rings at either end of the cylinder, were likewise far more delicately colored than holos could adequately capture, with colors ranging from a pale blue to a dark burgundy to a surprisingly bright yellow to an utterly dead black.

“Getting an absorption readout now,” Trent reported into Roman's thoughts. His voice, still disapproving, was nevertheless beginning to show some grudging interest. “The skin seems to be soaking up about 96 percent of the sunlight hitting it, holding to that same percentage over the complete electromagnetic spectrum.”

Roman nodded. Space horses were supposed to be able to absorb radiation of virtually any wavelength—one of the power sources that kept the huge beasts going. “Any idea what that shimmer effect is?” he asked the other.

“Probably a diffraction effect caused by the dust sweat,” Trent said. “Or so goes the theory, anyway. Let me see if I can get some kind of direct reading on that.”

He was reaching for his console when the
Dryden
's alarms suddenly began to trill.

“Anomalous motion, Captain,” Nussmeyer snapped. Unbidden, the main screen shifted to a tactical display, the laser targeting crosshairs swinging up over and past the bulk of the space horse.

“Easy, gentlemen,” Roman said, flicking over to the indicated screen even as his muscles tensed with anticipation. The anomalous-motion program had originally been designed to detect slow-moving ambush missiles; but this close to a space horse… “I doubt we're being threatened here.”

“It's a meteor, sir,” Trent identified it even as the telescope screen locked and focused on the object.

“As I said,” Roman nodded. “Nothing to do with us.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” Trent countered darkly. “It occurs to me that the Tampies could just as easily have something besides space horse fodder in mind for that rock. Like having the space horse telekene it through our hull.”

Roman frowned at him, a vaguely unpleasant sensation creeping into the pit of his stomach. Unthinking prejudice against the Tampies had been growing steadily across the Cordonale in the past few years, and he'd long since resigned himself to its existence. But to find it here on his own bridge…

“Lieutenant Nussmeyer,” he said quietly, “do you have a vector on that meteor yet?”

“Bearing toward the space horse, sir,” the helmer reported, sounding a little uneasy himself. “Projected intersect somewhere in the front-end sensory ring.”

Trent's lip twisted. “Means nothing,” he said, stubbornly defiant. “Sir. The Tampies could be planning to throw it at us at the last second, once our guard is down.”

Roman cocked his head slightly to the side. “In that case, Commander, make sure our guard doesn't
go
down.”

Trent held his gaze a second longer, then turned back to his displays without another word. Reaching again to his own controls, Roman turned one of the telescope cameras onto the space horse, keying it to track with the meteor's projected intercept point. Trent's paranoia aside, he had no doubt as to what the space horse wanted the rock for…and like the space horse itself, it was something he very much wanted to see. The display shifted slightly as the intercept vector was updated, came to rest on one of the sensory clusters: eight impressively colored organs, each a few square meters in area, grouped around a large expanse of otherwise unremarkable gray skin.

For a moment nothing happened…and then, without warning, all the organs darkened in color and the blank central region abruptly split open, its edges ridging upward in an odd puckering sort of motion. From off-camera the meteor appeared, to drop neatly into the opening. The edges smoothed down, the split vanished, and the organs resumed their original colors.

“Secure from alert,” Roman ordered, and as the trilling was silenced he looked over at Trent. The other's back was stiff, angry looking. Probably had hoped the Tampies really
were
attacking the
Dryden.

Had hoped to have his prejudices justified.

“I'd like you to run a complete analysis on the event we've just recorded, Commander,” Roman said into the silence. “Concentrate on the meteor movements—vector changes, interaction with local gravitational gradients, and so on. There's a great deal we don't know about space horse telekinesis, and it's a blank area we very much need to get filled in.”

Some of the tension went out of Trent's back. “Yes, sir,” he said. “I'll get the programs set up right away.”

The tension level in the bridge faded noticeably, and Roman permitted himself a moment of satisfaction. A smart commander, he'd once been told, never rubbed a subordinate's nose in an error when it wasn't absolutely necessary to do so. In this case, it wasn't.

Trent might be bigoted; but even bigots sometimes needed to save a little face.

Ambassador Pankau returned twenty hours later…with an agreement that was fully as much a charade as Roman had expected it to be.

“The Arachne colonists will be moving their power plant about thirty kilometers further downstream,” Pankau said, handing Roman the tapes and signed papers to be filed into the
Dryden's
official records. “Aside from that, they won't have to give up all that much.”

Roman could feel Trent's eyes on him. “What about the settlement itself?” he asked Pankau, accepting the papers. “If they're moving the power plant, won't they have to move with it?”

Pankau grimaced. “Some of them will, yes. Not all.”

“And what,” Trent put in, “will the Tampies be giving up?”

Pankau turned a quietly official glare on him. “It just so happens,” he said evenly, “that on this one, the Tampies turn out to have been right. The power plant
was
interfering with the local migration pattern of at least four different species of birds and animals.”

Trent snorted. “Any animal that can't adapt its life around one lousy power plant
deserves
extinction,” he growled. “It's not like the damn ghornheads are actually useful for anything.”

Pankau kept his temper, but Roman could see it was a near thing. “The ghornheads may not be, no; but the same can't be said for the mrulla. Which keep the rodunis population down to manageable levels in the fields, and which in turn follow the ghornheads around like adoring puppies.” He didn't wait for comment, but turned back to Roman. “Ccist-paa also tells me they're having trouble with human poachers grabbing space horses from their Cemwanninni
yishyar
system.”

“ ‘Their' system?” Trent muttered, just loud enough to hear.

Pankau looked back at him, his gaze hardening. “Yes,
their
system. Like it or not, Commander, the Senate has relinquished all human claims there. The Tampies can make real use of a space horse watering hole; we cannot. Playing dog-in-the-manger is hardly the action of civilized people.”

The words came out, Roman noted, with the automatic fluency of a practiced speech. Probably one Pankau had had to deliver a great many times. “I think we all understand the Senate's rationale,” he put in before Trent could say something he might later regret. “There are equally valid reasons, I think, why renouncing
all
claim to a system is, in general, not a terribly good idea.”

“Well, there's nothing that can be done about it now,” Pankau said, his tone slightly sour.” At any rate, Captain,” he continued, gesturing at the papers in Roman's hand, “you and the
Dryden
now have official Tampy permission to enter the
yishyar…
and as soon as you drop me back at Solomon you're to head out there and see if you can catch this troublemaker.”

Arachne to Solomon to the
yishyar.
This just got better and better. “I appreciate your attempts to soothe the Tampies, Ambassador—”

“My job is
not
to soothe Tampies, Captain,” Pankau cut him off, his voice frosty. “It's to carry out the orders and wishes of the Supreme Senate of the Terran Cordonale—and in this case, the Senate's codified wishes are that unauthorized human ships stay the hell out of Tampy space.” He eyed Roman coldly. “Or are you suggesting that I don't have the authority to send you on such a mission?”

That much, at least, wasn't in question. Roman had seen Senate cartes blanches before, and was fully aware of the range of powers such papers held. “I don't question your authority at all, sir,” he told Pankau. “But we're talking a pretty long tour here for a ship the size of the
Dryden.
Two weeks to get you back to Solomon, six weeks or more from there to the
yishyar
system, plus the six-week return trip. That's three months right there, plus whatever time we have to spend waiting at the
yishyar
for your poacher to show up.”

“Are you suggesting your crew can't handle a few weeks in deep space?” Pankau asked, his tone challenging.

“No, sir,” Roman said evenly. “I'm suggesting that it would save us a couple of those weeks if you'd ask Ccist-paa to take a side trip to Solomon and drop you off.”

Pankau seemed a little taken aback. “Ah. I see.”

“Unless, of course,” Roman said, looking the other straight in the eye, “you don't think
you
can handle a few hours in a Tampy ship.”

For a moment he thought the professional facade was going to crack. But Pankau had better control than that. “That will hardly be a problem, Captain. If you'll set up the radio…?”

Ten minutes later, it was all arranged. An hour after that, Roman sat at his bridge station and watched the space horse Jump.

It was about the only thing about space horses that was, at least visually, totally unspectacular. One instant the space horse and ship were on the displays; the next instant they were gone.

“I wish to hell
we
could do that,” Trent muttered.

Roman gazed at the display, at the empty spot where the Tampy ship had been. “You and everyone else in the Cordonale,” he agreed soberly. Totally unspectacular…until you stopped to think about what had actually happened. Instantaneous travel, over interstellar distances…and with no known distance limit except the ability of the space horse to see its target star. The whole concept sent a shiver up Romans back. “Maybe when the
Amity
project gets started we'll pick up some insights on how to tame and control them.”