Timothy Zahn - Warhorse

To find a Tampy standing not thirty centimeters away.

Face to face with a Tampy, for the first time since Prometheus… and in an instant all of his careful mental preparation for this moment collapsed. The lopsided face seemed to press in on him—the slight rasp of the alien’s breathing echoed in the enclosed space—the whiff of bitter-sour body odor curdled his stomach—

And as the red haze of memory and anger faded from before his eyes he saw that the Tampy had disappeared. And that there were the sounds of confusion and shock from outside the lander. And that the knuckles of his right fist were tingling…

Damn.

He stepped to the hold door, just in time to see Burch and Llos-tlaa helping the other Tampy back to his feet in the low gravity. A reddish splotch was already becoming visible to the left of the other’s twisted mouth. Burch looked up at Ferrol, a disbelieving look on his face. “What happened here?” he asked.

Ferrol took a careful breath, his muscles starting to tremble with adrenaline reaction. I need to apologize, he knew; but even as he opened his mouth to do so the words seemed to stick in his throat. To say he was sorry—sorry!—for hitting one of the race that had stolen his home—

“It is all right,” the Tampy grated, raising a hand to stroke his jaw where Ferrol had hit him. “I am not hurt. It is all right.”

Ferrol clenched his teeth, a hint of the blind rage returning to haze his vision. Of course the Tampy was “all right”—he’d say the same from a sick bay bed if he had to. The Tampies were on Amity to score points, and proving how good they were at turning the other cheek was the obvious way to twist Ferrol’s unthinking reaction back against him.

And he was damned if he was going to add to their warm charitable glow by pretending he was sorry. “Next time don’t sneak up on me like that,” he told the alien shortly. “Dr. Burch, whenever you’re ready I’ll give you a hand with these boxes.”

Burch threw a look at Llos-tlaa. “Ah… right,” he said. “Sure.” With a slight hesitation, and clearly keeping a cautious eye on his coworker, he left the Tampies and joined Ferrol in the hold.

They worked together in silence, removing the boxes from the hold and stacking them outside on the hangar deck. Peyton appeared halfway through the job, but with the cramped conditions making it no more than a two-man job her contribution consisted mainly of fetching a cart from the hangar bulkhead and repeatedly warning them not to step on what was left of her analysis table. Full weight had returned by the time they finished loading the cart, and with Ferrol at the controls they headed toward the lab complex.

They were halfway there before Burch finally spoke. “Why’d you hit Ttra-mu?” he asked, his voice forced-casual.

“I don’t like Tampies,” Ferrol said.

“How come? If you don’t mind talking about it, that is?”

“As a matter of fact, I do mind,” Ferrol said.

He glanced, looked over in time to see Burch swallow. “Ah,” the other said, a bit lamely.

“There’s a lot of really interesting stuff down there to study,” Peyton spoke up, clearly trying to steer the conversation onto safer territory. “Were you monitoring us, Commander?”

“I did the computer-scrub on the rabbit’s transformation,” Ferrol reminded her.

She reddened slightly. “Oh, yes.”

A pang of guilt poked a small hole in Ferrol’s conscience. There was no reason to make this so awkward for Burch and Peyton—it wasn’t the scientists he was angry with, after all. On the contrary, it could easily be Amity’s survey section who would have the best chance of ultimately seeing through the Tampies’ facade of peaceful friendliness. Giving them the impression that all anti-Tampies were violent comabrains would only make it that much harder for them to accept the truth when the facade finally broke. “Those memory-plastic skeletons look particularly intriguing,” he commented. “You think you’ll be able to duplicate the material?”

“Oh, sure,” Burch assured him. “If there’s one thing human biotechnology has gotten down pat, it’s the duplication of interesting molecules and biochemical systems.”

Peyton snorted gently. “Though there’s always the tendency to forget that the whole is more than just a collection of commercially useful parts. The Tampies are right about that, at least.”

Burch threw her an annoyed look. “Philosophies of life aside, it is the commercial results that pay for trips like this, of course.”

“And there should be plenty of that to go around,” Peyton said with a sigh.

“Between the memory-skeletons and the organic electric field oscillators we should bring back more than enough to keep the Senate budget watchdogs happy.”

“Even though the Tampies get to keep everything we can’t find in the next two weeks?” Ferrol murmured.

Burch hissed gently between his teeth. “Even then,” he said. But he didn’t say it like he believed it.

Peyton steered the conversation back to the wonders of Alpha’s ecology and animal life after that, and neither the Tampies nor their philosophies were mentioned again before Ferrol helped load the samples into the lockbox lab and took his leave. But it was enough. There would be no need for him to plant seeds of distrust or discontent among the scientists, he saw now—those doubts were clearly already there. His job now was to simply help water those seeds… a job a man on liaison duty would have ample opportunity to carry out over the next two months.

Heading down the corridor back to the bridge, he permitted himself a smile. No, he wouldn’t need the envelope or the gun just yet. In fact, he might not need them at all. The way things were going, Captain Roman might wind up doing the bulk of Ferrol’s work for him.

Unless, he thought… and for a moment the smile slipped. Could that be exactly why Roman had given him this liaison job in the first place? To nurture anti- Tampy sentiment among the scientists?

Could Roman in fact be secretly on Ferrol’s side?

No, Ferrol told himself firmly. Utterly impossible. The Senator had seen Roman’s psych profile, and Roman couldn’t possibly have fooled the Starforce’s soul-sifters that completely. He was pro-Tampy, all right, and he’d given Ferrol the liaison post either as punishment or else from some misguided idealistic belief that frequent contact with Tampies would somehow mellow his hatred of them. The fool.

Still…

Ferrol had intended to spend his off-duty time the next few days trying to get access to the crew psych files anyway. Assuming he was able to get in, it wouldn’t hurt to take a look for himself at Roman’s profile. Just to make sure.

Ferrol had fully expected some kind of official response from Roman over his flooring of the Tampy in the hangar—anything from a blistering reprimand to temporary confinement to quarters or even a complete stripping of rank and imprisonment. To his surprise, though, the captain never even mentioned the incident. Perhaps the popular image of Tampies as cheek-turning forgive-andforgetters had rubbed off on him; or perhaps he was afraid of making a martyr out of Amity’s leading anti-Tampy figure. The latter wasn’t an unreasonable fear, to Ferrol’s mind—emotional reactions and their manipulation could be tricky things to handle, and Roman didn’t seem the type to have cultivated such a talent.

Or else Burch and the Tampies, for reasons of tact or point-making, had simply never reported it. It was, he eventually decided, as good an explanation as any.

They spent another two weeks circling Alpha, watching from orbit as the landing parties poked around the planet’s desert, forest, and Alpine environments, ooh-ing and ahing at everything in sight. The “Lorelei sticks”—as Dr. Tenzing dubbed the oversized electronic tent stakes Amity’s techs came up with—worked beautifully, their oscillating electric fields either decoying Alpha’s predators away from the landing parties or else leading them directly to net traps, whichever Sanderson’s people wanted at a given moment. By the time Pegasus pulled them out of orbit toward deep space the first lab was, as predicted, loaded literally to the ceiling with sample boxes.