Warhorse (23 page)

“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 B-class 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-ngii?”

“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-ngii, 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-ngii'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 first-order 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-ngii?”

“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 shape-recognition 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-ngii, 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-ngii 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-ngii, 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. “Sso-ngii, 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.