Timothy Zahn - Warhorse

They were planning something—of that much Ferrol was certain. The only question was… what?

Kicking off the wall, he headed forward, and with unexpected luck managed to intercept Tenzing between orders. “Doctor,” he nodded. “How are your people doing?”

“We’re almost set up,” the other said, his voice sounding a little hoarse. “We should be able to get going in, say, ten or fifteen minutes.”

“Good. I presume I don’t have to tell you to push it.”

Tenzing’s face wrinkled, and Ferrol guessed that beneath the filter mask the other was probably giving him a tight smile. “I hold a minor degree in astrophysics, Commander,” the scientist said. “I know considerably better than you do just exactly what a nova does to its immediate neighborhood.”

“I don’t want to see it close up, either,” Ferrol agreed. “Let’s make sure we don’t have to.”

He gave his handhold a push and floated over to the port side, where Garin was hovering at the midship viewport. “How’s everything look?” he asked.

“As good as can be expected,” Garin grunted. “I was just giving the lifeboat tethers a visual inspection. They seem solid enough.”

“All right. When you’ve got a minute I want you to go find Yamoto and have her move us around into Pegasus’ shadow. No particular rush, but make it soon—we don’t have Amity’s shielding, and there’s no point in sitting out here picking up heat and radiation when we don’t have to.”

“Yes, sir,” Garin nodded. “And after that?”

Ferrol pursed his lips. “After that… I want you to keep an eye on the Tampies for me.”

Garin’s eyebrow twitched. “Anything in particular I’m supposed to watch for?”

“Something underhanded. Attempting to Jump without the Amity, if and when we get Pegasus back to normal. Maybe some kind of crazy sabotage scheme—for all we know, Rrin-saa may have saddled us with a suicide squad here. I don’t know what they’re up to—but they’re up to something. I can feel it.”

Garin looked at the group of Tampies. “Me, too, sir. Don’t worry; I’ll watch them.”

“Good. And if you catch them at anything—” Ferrol hesitated. “Well, just let me know. Privately.”

“Yes, sir,” Garin said softly. “I’ll do that.”

Ferrol nodded and pushed away. In his inner tunic pocket, the tiny needle gun felt very large.

Amity was still four hundred thousand kilometers from Shadrach, and Roman was catnapping in his chair, when B burped.

“You’re sure?” he frowned, studying his displays as he fought to brush the cobwebs from his brain. B’s energy output curve didn’t seem to have changed significantly.

“Yes, sir.” Marlowe touched a key, and a velocity plot appeared on Roman’s scanner repeater display. “The dwarfs blown off a thin shell of plasma, and it’s expanding outwards at nearly four hundred kilometers per second. For the moment the shell’s blocking off the extra radiant energy, but that won’t last long. As soon as it spreads itself thin enough for the light to get through… well, we’ll be in a little trouble.”

“How long?” Roman asked, punching for course status.

“A few minutes at the most.”

Roman nodded grimly. Amity was already decelerating toward Shadrach, but at the two gees she was pulling it would take them an hour and forty-six minutes to reach the safety of the planet’s umbra. “Kennedy?”

Her fingers were already moving across the helm keys. “We could turn the ship, sir, and accelerate for a few minutes before turning again and decelerating.” she offered doubtfully. “But flipping over twice would almost certainly eat anything we gained in the process.”

And simply increasing their deceleration rate wouldn’t do any good, either, Roman knew: it would bring Amity to a stop sooner, but leave them stranded far short of the planet.

Unless…

He keyed for a large-scale position plot, holding his breath… and the gods were indeed kind. The larger of Shadrach’s two moons was almost directly on Amity’s heading, and was a good three hundred thousand kilometers closer to them than Shadrach itself. “Course change, Kennedy,” he ordered. “We’re going to try for the dark side of Shadrach’s moon. Execute as soon as you’ve got the numbers, then compute deceleration and ETA and see how much time that’ll buy us. Marlowe, get me an estimate of B’s brightness behind that expanding shell and send the numbers back to Stolt—I want to know how long the hull will be able to take it. Then check Kennedy’s ETA and see if it’s going to be enough.”

He felt a slight sideways tilt as Amity began the task of changing its direction the required few degrees. The bridge creaked a bit as it rotated slightly to accomodate; and then the straight-line motion came back, and Roman fought against the opposite tilt until the bridge finished the inverse correction. “Course change executed,” Kennedy reported. “If we run a constant eight-gee deceleration from here we’ll reach the moon in just under twenty-seven minutes.”

“Marlowe?”

“It’ll be damned tight, sir,” Marlowe grunted. “The drive nozzles will take the brunt of it, and they’re a lot more heat-resistant than the hull itself. But we’re not exactly dead-on to the star; and even if we rotate slowly so that each section of the hull gets equal exposure, we’ll still reach the theoretical danger point in fifteen to twenty minutes.”

Roman nodded. “What else have you got, Kennedy?”

“Not much, sir,” she shook her head. “We can cut it to twenty minutes by shutting down the drive and maintaining our current speed for nine minutes, but that’ll mean doing the last eleven at twelve gees.”

Eleven minutes of twelve gees. Eleven minutes of hell for the ship and its human crew… and maybe far worse for the Tampies still aboard. Could Tampies even survive twelve gees? Roman keyed his intercom. “Rrin-saa?”

The alien’s face appeared. “I hear, Rro-maa.”

“Rrin-saa, we’re in a crisis situation here,” Roman told him. “We’re going to have to pull eleven minutes at twelve gees or Amity isn’t going to make it. Can your people take that?”

A shadow of emotion might have crossed Rrin-saa’s face; Roman couldn’t tell for sure. “I do not know,” he said. “I know Tamplissta have survived eight gees for short times; that is all.” He paused. “Your wishes are ours, Rro-maa. You must do what is necessary.”

Roman gritted his teeth. “Lay in your course, Kennedy. Signal for dangerous acceleration. Rrin-saa… good luck.”

The drive cut off; and as the warning alarm began to hoot, Roman’s chair unfolded into its acceleration couch mode. He snuggled down into it as best he could in zerogee, feeling the contour cushions adjust to his body, and watched the displays.

He’d done everything he could, and now there was nothing to do but wait as the laws of physics played themselves out.

A minute later, right on schedule, the expanding plasma shell broke.

The hull temperature numbers skittered upward, higher than Roman had ever seen them, before falling abruptly as all sunside sensors either cut out or flared into uselessness. The pattern of destruction repeated itself around the entire circumference as the slow rotation Kennedy had put Amity into gave each section of hull the same deadly exposure in its turn. Within minutes the outer reflective layer was beginning to show signs of blistering, and the temperature within the ship was rising faster than the cooling system could dump it.

And then the fusion drive kicked back in… and Roman gasped for breath as the giant invisible hand jammed him hard into his couch. Jammed him, held him down, did its damnedest to crush the life out of him…