Timothy Zahn - Warhorse

Twelve hours later the space horse dipped briefly into the moon’s shadow, keeping well back from the body itself. Amity was waiting, and together they headed back into the deadly passage.

“Getting a little radiation spillover from the space horse’s side,” Marlowe reported as they left the moon’s penumbra. “Not as bad as the simulations had thought it might be, though.”

“Is the umbrella helping any?” Roman asked him.

“Definitely,” Marlowe replied. “Particularly against the visible light, but it’s absorbing a decent fraction of the neutron flux, too.”

Roman nodded. The “umbrella” had been the inspiration of someone in Stolt’s engineering section: a thin layer of silvered plastic held a couple of meters out from Amity’s hull by a central strut and stiffened by ribs of memory plastic. The latter had been the big obstacle to the operation—Amity’s synthesizers could generate the stuff only so quickly—until someone had thought to check the survey section’s records. The organic memory bones and muscles that had so startled everyone on that first planetary survey two months ago had turned out to be not only easier and faster to synthesize than the standard varieties, but also had a significantly larger neutron-capture cross section, as well. “Keep an eye on it,” he instructed Marlowe.

“We’ll want to jettison it if and when it becomes more trouble than it’s worth.” He keyed for the lifeboat. “Rrin-saa? This is the captain. How’s the space horse doing?”

There was a long pause. “His condition is worsening,” Rrin-saa said, the words coming out with difficulty. On the display his eyes seemed flat and oddly glazed. “I do not know if he will survive the trip.”

Roman rubbed his thumb and forefinger together. “MacKaig?”

“I have to agree, Captain,” she said grimly. “We started with an acceleration of barely 0.1 gee; our deceleration at rendezvous was three-quarters that. The way things are going, we’ll be lucky to reach Shadrach in eighteen hours.”

Eighteen hours to Shadrach, and then twenty-five back to the Amity… with the nova possibly going off as early as forty-six hours from now. Their leeway was getting thinner by the minute. “Marlowe? Radiation status?”

“Still too hot out there for a solo trip to Shadrach,” the other shook his head. “The hull plates would last maybe an hour or two.”

And they would need to keep some of that strength in reserve for the twenty-fivehour trip back to Pegasus. “That’s it, then,” Roman said. “We stay with the space horse as long as possible and keep our fingers crossed. Kennedy, you’d better start updating the ETA every fifteen minutes and feeding the numbers to Lowry’s group—I want them ready to make orbit as soon as we’re in position to pick them up.”

“Yes, sir.”

MacKaig was right: the space horse was definitely losing strength. There were periods when it simply drifted, allowing itself to be pulled by Shadrach’s gravity; and as the hours dragged by those periods began to stretch ever longer.

And finally, with Shadrach’s disk filling the displays, the creature gave up.

“I’m sure it’s dead, Captain,” MacKaig said, her voice under tight control. “It hasn’t done anything but fall planetward for the past twenty minutes. And Rrinsaa…

he doesn’t look right.”

Roman frowned at the appropriate display. Rrin-saa’s face beneath the amplifier helmet was strangely blank. “Rrin-saa?” he called. “Rrin-saa, what’s happening?”

There was no response. “Sievers, get that helmet off him,” Roman ordered, already keying his intercom for Amity’s Tampy section. “I’ll find out from the Tampies how to break him out of this.” He leaned toward the intercom—

“There is no need.”

Roman jerked his eyes back to the display, throat muscles tightening reflexively.

Rrin-saa’s whiny voice was very alien; dry and brittle and almost animalistic—a voice that Roman had never heard before. And yet, behind the alienness there was at the same time a rich and very human sadness. It was an unnerving combination, and it sent a chill up Roman’s back. “Are you all right?” he asked when he could get his tongue moving again.

“Yes, Rro-maa,” the Tampy assured him. Already his voice was returning to normal. “He is dead.”

Roman took a careful breath. “I’m sorry,” he said. “MacKaig? That’s it, then. Pop your tether line and get back here. We’ll stay in the shadow until you’re aboard, then probably have to make a run for it. Kennedy?”

“The space horse will enter Shadrach’s shadow before it hits,” Kennedy said promptly, “but if we stay with it the whole way we’ll go too deep into the planet’s gravity well.”

“Plot us a compromise,” Roman told her. “Something that’ll expose us to minimum sunlight without using up large amounts of fuel.”

“Already plotted, sir. We’ll leave the space horse’s shadow in exactly eighteen minutes.”

“Good. Stand by to execute as soon as the boat is aboard. And inform Dr. Lowry that this is it.”

Thirty-seven minutes later, securely planted in a stable orbit, Amity waited as the dagger of blue flame that marked Lowry’s lander rose to meet it.

The rendezvous was an anticlimax, but a distinctly welcome one. Roman had worried that the smaller craft wouldn’t be able to match Amity’s horizontal velocity and would crash violently into the forward hangar at bulkhead-smashing speed. But Lowry’s pilot had planned correctly, spending the last of his fuel in a burst of acceleration as Amity swept down on him. The meeting was accompanied by a great deal of noise and a considerable jolt, but nothing vital was broken.

“Welcome aboard,” Roman called via intercom to the hangar. “You’ll be shown to acceleration couches; strap into them immediately. Acceleration in five minutes.”

He switched off and turned to Kennedy. “You ready?”

“Yes, sir,” she said, her course plot appearing on Roman’s helm repeater display.

“We break orbit and drive straight away from Shadrach, staying in its umbra as long as we can. Then we blast laterally to get back to Pegasus. That gives B more time to cool down and also puts us farther out before the hull gets any direct sunlight.”

“Even then,” Marlowe put in, “we’ll probably still have to shut down the drive occasionally and rotate sternward to B to let the hull cool.”

Kennedy nodded. “I’ve figured that in. We should reach Pegasus in approximately twenty-seven hours.”

Trimming their leeway time down to just about an hour. “How’s the radiation look out there?” Roman asked Marlowe.

“Dropping off nicely,” the other said. “We shouldn’t have any real problem with that.” He craned his neck to look at Roman. “It should be safe enough now for Commander Ferrol to sneak a quick look now and then from around Pegasus’

side.”

Roman had already come to that conclusion. In fact, his own calculations indicated that that safety level had been reached nearly an hour ago.

Without bringing any message from Ferrol.

“He may decide to play it safe, though,” Kennedy said into his quiet fears. “Or his laser may not be able to cut through the interference out there—it wasn’t designed for this kind of soup.”

Or perhaps Pegasus had gotten well, and had already Jumped. If Sso-ngu and the other Tampies hadn’t been able to adequately control it… “There’s no point in speculating about it,” he said. “Whatever’s going on out there, we’ll know all about it in twenty-seven hours… and until then, there’s not a damn thing we can do about it anyway. Sound your warnings, Kennedy, and let’s get out of here.”