Timothy Zahn - Warhorse

The bridge had gone quiet again. “Consider it noted, Lieutenant,” Roman told her.

“Let’s just hope it doesn’t come to that.”

“Yes, sir.”

She and Marlowe turned back to their consoles, and the background hum of conversation resumed… and Roman found himself studying the back of Kennedy’s head. Wishing her file had spelled out her previous military service a little more explicitly. She’d served on mainline warships, certainly; probably seen actual combat in one of the plethora of interplanet squabbles that had popped up with depressing regularity all over the Cordonale before the Tampy problem had taken everyone’s attention away from all such minor disagreements.

It was entirely possible she’d had to abandon people to death before.

He shivered. Yes, let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, he told himself fervently. So far he’d never been forced to send men to die, and he had no real interest in starting now.

And then memory hit him like a splash of ice water, and he felt his face warm with embarrassment and shame.

No, he hadn’t sent men to die. Just Tampies.

For a long moment he stared at his intercom, stomach muscles knotting painfully.

But the call was long overdue, and putting it off any longer would only make it worse.

As usual, it was Rrin-saa who answered. “Rro-maa, yes?”

“Yes, Rrin-saa,” Roman nodded. “I wanted to offer my condolences on the deaths of eight of your people.”

“Eleven. Three more have died of internal injuries. We mourn them.”

Eleven. “I’m sorry; I didn’t know.” He hesitated. “I’m afraid there’s more bad news from the planet. It appears your research base here was completely destroyed by the first great flare.”

Rrin-saa gave the Tampy equivalent of a nod. “This is as expected.”

Roman frowned. “You already knew?”

Rrin-saa closed his eyes briefly. “If the Tamplissta had survived there would have been no need for a rescue, Rro-maa. They would have transported themselves and the humans alike to safety.”

“Oh. Of course.” Which meant, Roman realized, Rrin-saa and the others must have known or at least suspected as soon as the distress call came through. But he hadn’t bothered to ask their thoughts on the matter… and Tampies seldom volunteered such information. “Again, I’m sorry. I wish things had gone differently.”

“As do we. I must leave now, Rro-maa. The mourning continues.” The screen went dark.

Stolt’s face on the intercom screen looked haggard and vaguely uncertain—the face of a man juggling a dozen crises, all of them clamoring for immediate attention.

But there was nothing vague or uncertain about his words. “There’s no way, Captain,” he said, shaking his head carefully. “Between the spare drive plates, shielding sections, and spray-on ablative material we’ve got maybe enough stuff to add two extra centimeters to the outer hull. Assuming, that is, that we could spread it all out evenly, which of course we can’t.”

Roman nodded heavily. “I didn’t think we’d have enough, but it seemed worth checking. Any progress on that reflector umbrella you proposed earlier?”

“We’re still doing simulations, but it’s not looking especially hopeful,” Stolt admitted. “Every material we try can handle either the light or the radiation, but not both. Woller’s setting up a trial with a multi-sandwiched sort of layering, but I’m not optimistic.”

“Captain?” Kennedy spoke up, turning to face him. “Would there be enough spare shielding to adequately cover a lifeboat?”

And then fly it across to Shadrach, cram the scientists in somehow and fly back…

“How about it, Stolt?”

The answer was prompt enough to show that Stolt had already considered that approach. “No good,” he said. “It’d be a mess to fly, for starters—we could only shield one side of the boat, which would throw the center of mass ‘way to hell and gone. And even then, you’d only have enough shielding for a one-way trip—too much of the stuff would boil off on the way for you to make it back.”

“Unless Lowry’s group has something they could use to protect it on the return trip,” Kennedy persisted.

Stolt snorted. “If they had, don’t you think it would have occurred to them to use the stuff on their own lander?”

“Maybe not,” Kennedy countered. “They’re astrophysicists, not engineers. Maybe they’ve got something that would work but don’t realize it.”

“It wouldn’t hurt to suggest it,” Roman agreed. “Have one of your people call down to Lowry and get a complete list of the materials they have on hand.”

“Yes, sir,” Stolt said.

Roman keyed the intercom off and turned to Marlowe. “The radiation going down at all out there, Lieutenant?”

“Ah… yes, sir, a little,” Marlowe said distractedly, his eyes steady on one of his screens. “Not fast enough, though. Captain, I’ve just picked up something in orbit around Shadrach. I think you’d better take a look.”

Roman frowned at his scanner repeater. A flashing circle marked the spot… “A

space horse?”

“That’s what I thought,” Marlowe agreed. “Probably the one the Tampy expedition brought with them—you can just barely see what’s left of a ship trailing behind it.

The question is, why is the thing still here?”

Roman chewed the back of his lip. For an instant a crazy image flashed through his mind, that of the space horse standing faithfully by like a pet dog, protecting its departed masters… “It’s probably dead,” he said aloud, shaking the picture away.

“Killed the same time as the Tampies.”

“Or else there’s someone still alive on that ship Handling it,” Kennedy murmured.

It wasn’t impossible, Roman knew. The attached ship looked to be half melted, but if it had been lucky enough to be in the space horse’s shadow when the star blew, one or more of the Tampies could indeed still be alive in there.

Which led immediately to the question of why any such theoretical survivors hadn’t either rescued Lowry’s group or ignored them and gotten the hell out of the system. “Have you tried contacting the ship yet?” he asked.

“Been transmitting since it first came out from around the planet’s limb,” Marlowe said. “No response yet.”

Roman grimaced. Rrin-saa and the rest of Amity’s Tampies would still be mourning their comrades’ deaths, and he’d already interrupted them once. But something told him that this couldn’t wait.

Rrin-saa wasn’t in the Handler room, but the intercom monitor made quick work of tracking him down. “Rro-maa, yes?” he whined. If he was annoyed at being again taken away from the funeral service, he didn’t show it.

“We’ve found your expedition’s space horse,” Roman told him. “It’s still in orbit around Shadrach. Any ideas as to why it hasn’t Jumped?”

For a long moment the alien just stood there, his lopsided face running through a series of subtle and—to Roman, at least—unreadable changes. “There is a possibility,” he said at last. “The space horse would have been set in stationary orbit above the ground observers, with six or fewer Tamplissta as Handlers. When all died…” He paused, and his expression again altered. “You must know that we feel more deeply toward life than humans seem to. The sudden deaths of their companions may have caused a perasiata reaction in the Handlers and, through them, in the space horse.”

Catatonia, in the middle of a dying system. So the vaunted Tampy empathy could occasionally be a handicap. “When will they all come out of it?”

“The Tamplissta will not. They will be dead now.”

Roman hissed between his teeth. For a moment he’d dared to hope they’d found their ticket out of this mess. “I’m sorry,” he told the Tampy. “I suppose the space horse is dead, too?”