Timothy Zahn: Warhorse

That’s three months right there, plus whatever time we have to spend waiting at the yishyar for your poacher to show up.”

“Are you suggesting your crew can’t handle a few weeks in deep space?” Pankau asked, his tone challenging.

“No, sir,” Roman said evenly. “I’m suggesting that it would save us a couple of those weeks if you’d ask Ccist-paa to take a side trip to Solomon and drop you off.”

Pankau seemed a little taken aback. “Ah. I see.”

“Unless, of course,” Roman said, looking the other straight in the eye, “you don’t think you can handle a few hours in a Tampy ship.”

For a moment he thought the professional facade was going to crack. But Pankau had better control than that. “That will hardly be a problem, Captain. If you’ll set up the radio…?”

Ten minutes later, it was all arranged. An hour after that, Roman sat at his bridge station and watched the space horse Jump.

It was about the only thing about space horses that was, at least visually, totally unspectacular. One instant the space horse and ship were on the displays; the next instant they were gone.

“I wish to hell we could do that,” Trent muttered.

Roman gazed at the display, at the empty spot where the Tampy ship had been.

“You and everyone else in the Cordonale,” he agreed soberly. Totally unspectacular… until you stopped to think about what had actually happened.

Instantaneous travel, over interstellar distances… and with no known distance limit except the ability of the space horse to see its target star. The whole concept sent a shiver up Roman’s back. “Maybe when the Amity project gets started we’ll pick up some insights on how to tame and control them.”

Trent snorted. “Fat chance. Sir.”

Roman eyed him. “You don’t think humans and Tampies can learn to work together aboard the same ship, Commander?”

“I don’t think it’ll ever come to that, sir,” Trent said bluntly. “In my opinion, Amity’s nothing but a smoke screen the Tampies and pro-Tampy senators dreamed up to try and look like they’re doing something about the shared-worlds problem.

The Starforce’s never going to finish fitting out the ship; and even if they do, odds are the crew will be so badly biased that the results of the test voyage will be completely fraudulent.”

“And if neither happens…?”

Trent looked him square in the eye. “Then, sir… no, I don’t believe humans and Tampies can work together. Not without killing each other.”

Roman grimaced. “You leave the Cordonale very few options.”

“Appeasement, or war,” Trent agreed quietly. “And even a Senate as spineless as this one won’t appease them forever.”

Roman looked at the display, at the place where the space horse had been a minute ago, wishing he could argue with any of Trent’s assessment. But he couldn’t. And even if he could, it was clear the other’s mind was already made up.

As were many other minds across the Cordonale.

“Just be sure to keep an open mind, Commander,” he warned the other. Even to his own ears the words sounded lame. “You never know when an alternative may present itself. Until then… we have a mission to carry out. Let’s go track us down a poacher.”

“This,” Stefain Reese growled to no one in particular, “is starting to get ridiculous.”

A wave of tired irritation rippled through the general boredom that had settled in around the Scapa Flow’s bridge crew. From his command chair Chayne Ferrol watched his men glare at Reese or pointedly ignore him, according to individual preference, and stifled a curse of his own. Like everyone else, he was roundly sick of Reese; unfortunately, political necessity dictated that someone remain on speaking terms with the man. “ ‘Haven’t caught anything in five hours?’ ” he quoted the old fisherman’s joke. “ ‘Don’t worry—I haven’t caught anything in eight hours.’ ”

The attempt at humor was wasted. “Save it, Ferrol,” Reese snorted. “I’ve heard that tired old joke at least five times in the last twenty-two days, and it wasn’t funny the first time.”

With an effort Ferrol hung on to his temper. “Mr. Reese, we made it very clear to you at the outset what it was you were letting yourself in for. Even a yishyar system doesn’t play host to more than a few space horses at a time, and there are four hundred billion cubic kilometers of asteroid belt out there for them to feed in.

You can’t expect one to Jump right in on top of us the first day here.”

“And yet we’ve had at least fifteen of them Jump in close enough to register on the anomalous-motion program,” Reese countered. “You didn’t go after any of them, either.”

At the helm, Malraux Demarco stirred. “There’s a hell of a lot of difference between picking up a target blip and sneaking up on it,” he bit out. “None of us is exactly crazy about floating around out here watching the rocks go by, either. Try not to forget that you asked to come along.”

“Yes, well it wasn’t exactly my idea,” Reese shot back. “The Senator wanted me to come and observe—”

The slap of Ferrol’s hand on his armrest echoed briefly through the bridge, cutting off the growing argument in mid-sentence. “What?” Reese demanded, throwing a defiant glare in Ferrol’s direction.

For a long minute Ferrol just stared at the other, watching as the angry defiance faded into discomfort and then into the first twitchings of genuine fear. “You are not,” he said at last, the words quiet but icy cold, “to mention the Senator in connection with this ship, its crew, or its mission. Not here, not anywhere else.

Ever. Do you understand?”

Reese swallowed visibly. “Yes,” he said.

Ferrol let the silence hang in the air a moment longer before turning back to Demarco. “Did we ever get anything more on that blip Randall picked up and then lost?”

Demarco shook his head. “The computer’s equipment check came up negative,” he said. “It may have been a space horse that Jumped in for a snack and immediately left.” He paused. “Or it may have been another ship.”

Ferrol nodded. The latter was his own gut-level conclusion. “You think they spotted us?”

Demarco shrugged. “Two and a half hours should have been plenty of time for them to have recalculated their position, looped around on Mitsuushi and come roaring in on us,” he pointed out. “Given that they haven’t, I expect it was just another poacher who spotted us and got nervous.”

“Or else an unusually patient Starforce captain who wants to catch us with our hands on the goodies,” Ferrol said. “We’ll have to keep our eyes open.”

“That’s all you’re going to do?” Reese asked.

Ferrol looked over at him. “What do you suggest, Mr. Reese?” he asked mildly.

“That we turn tail and run home empty-handed—and without even knowing what it was we ran from?”

Reese clenched his teeth. “I was suggesting you might want to take some practical precautions,” he gritted. “Like putting some shielding over the Mitsuushi ring, for instance.”

“We have any Mitsuushi shielding, Mai?” Ferrol asked Demarco.

“That’ll block a warship’s ion beams? Not hardly.”

Ferrol looked back at Reese. “Any other suggestions?”

From the expression on Reese’s face the suggestion he was toying with would have been a ripe one. But even as he took the necessary breath to make it—

“Anomalous motion, Chayne!” Demarco snapped. “It’s—God, it’s practically on top of us. Bearing twenty-three mark six, fifteen mark two; range, fifty-six kilometers.”

“A warship?” Reese demanded, his voice half an octave higher than normal.