Timothy Zahn - Warhorse

Good feeding for a space horse, then. “What kind of rock density are we talking about?” he asked her. “Bearing in mind the limited amount of shielding this teacup has.”

“Shouldn’t be dangerous,” Kennedy assured him. “Provided Quentin doesn’t go twitchy again and try to drag us through it retrograde. It’s as good a place as any to wait for the Amity.”

“Okay,” Ferrol said, giving himself a push forward.

“Give me a minute to strap in, Sso-ngu, and we’ll go and feed the baby.”

They had arrived nearly twenty degrees off the ecliptic plane and with a slight retrograde motion that had them drifting leisurely toward the central star. A potentially deadly situation for a normal ship with a normal fuel supply; not even worth comment for a craft tethered to a space horse. Under Sso-ngu’s guidance Quentin pulled them toward the asteroid belt at a steady 0.5 gee for just under an hour, turned around and decelerated for the same length of time, and finally accelerated again to match speeds with the drifting stream of rocks.

Floating at one of the side viewports, Ferrol watched as Quentin telekened a small boulder into one of its rear feeding orifices. He’d never before been this close to a feeding space horse, and it was one hell of an impressive sight. “You gotten a firstorder analysis on those rocks yet?” he asked Kennedy.

He turned to look as Kennedy fiddled with her keyboard. “Should be just about finished… yes, here it is. Um. Very interesting—no wonder Quentin was panting to get here. Unusually high percentages of iron and nickel; exceptionally high concentrations of bismuth, tellurium, thallium, and a dozen other trace metals.

Especially right here—the stuff we passed while Quentin was matching speeds didn’t register as nearly this good.”

And exceptionally high concentrations of trace metals meant… Craning his neck, Ferrol looked over at the Tampies. Even with filter masks plastered across their faces he could still see the sudden interest there. “A yishyar system?” he suggested.

“Certainly by textbook definitions,” Kennedy agreed, turning to look at the Tampies too. “Sso-ngu?”

“Yes,” the Tampy murmured. His raspy voice was dry and very alien, as if surprise or excitement had driven all attempts at human overtones from it.

Ferrol could well understand their interest; his own mind was already simmering with the possibilities. A brand-new yishyar system—more to the point, a yishyar system eight hundred light-years outside of Tampy-claimed space. If the Senator could keep the Cordonale from meekly handing it over to the aliens—and if he could figure out a way to get back to the damned place himself—then maybe Demothi’s idiot experiment might yield something useful, after all.

“Ferrol?”

He blinked the grand schemes out of his mind and focused on Kennedy. “Sorry.

You said…?”

“I said I think we’ve got a space horse locator program aboard,” she repeated. “A

simple one, probably: an anomalous-motion program coupled with a shaperecognition package. You want me to get it up?”

And look for any other space horses that might be feeding here? “Good idea,” he nodded. “And don’t forget to tie in the recorders. Sso-ngu, let’s have Quentin boost speed a little—a few kilometers an hour shouldn’t affect the feeding any, and it’ll let us survey more of the belt.”

“Your wishes are ours.” The Tampy paused. “Ffe-rho, Quentinninni is not happy.

Something is disturbing him.”

Ferrol pushed himself away from the viewport. “Something from in here?” he asked, bringing himself to a halt in front of them.

“No,” Sso-ngu said. He hesitated, then removed the helmet and handed it past Demothi to Wwis-khaa. “It is something outside, something that causes…” He stopped again and made a gesture Ferrol had never seen before.

“Uneasiness,” Wwis-khaa supplied, the word seeming to come out with difficulty.

“Quentinninni is uneasy. Perhaps… fearful.”

Something hard settled into the base of Ferrol’s throat. He’d seen space horses get skittish, spooked, and stressed… but never before had he seen one afraid. Or heard of one being afraid.

What the hell out there could scare even a baby space horse?

The lander was suddenly very quiet. Everyone else, apparently, was wondering the same thing. And perhaps coming to the same conclusion. “All right,” he said as Wwis-khaa handed the helmet back. “Stay on that feeling, Sso-ngu, and let me know the minute it changes or gets any clearer. Kennedy, get that locator going, but alternate it with the regular scan program. I don’t want us to miss something important just because it’s not shaped like a space horse.”

“Right,” Kennedy said, and got to work. Her voice was still calm, but there was a hardness beneath it.

They traveled for a time in silence, with questions and replies delivered in low tones. Outside the viewports several hundred asteroids could be seen at any given time, the nearest handful as irregular lumps, the rest as pinpoints of reflected light from the distant sun.

Ferrol had spent more time than he cared to remember sitting around asteroid belts exactly like this one without the slightest touch of claustrophobia; but as the minutes dragged into hours he found the white dots on the monitor seeming to press ever closer and more oppressively around the lander. The air coming in through his filter mask felt to be growing ever hotter, and he found himself continually plotting updated escape routes through the moving boulders. A side effect of having to wear the mask for so long, he tried to tell himself; but down deep he knew better.

And four hours after they began their search, they found the space horse.

“It doesn’t seem to be moving at all,” Kennedy said, gazing closely at the readouts.

“Just drifting with the asteroids.”

Ferrol nodded, keying the enhancement program one more time. Again the fuzzy image of the distant creature sharpened just a bit; again, the computer was unable to resolve a section of its outline.

He wasn’t sure exactly what that meant. But he knew already he didn’t like it. “Ssongu, has Quentin detected the other space horse yet?” he asked over his shoulder.

“Yes. His uneasiness is increasing.”

Ferrol chewed hard at his lip, uncertainty twisting at his stomach. The last thing he wanted to do was to take the lander any closer to that thing out there than he had to… but on the other hand, if the space horse was merely injured and not dead, there was every chance in the world it would detect them and Jump before Amity and its remote probes could arrive to study it. And if that happened, their chance of finding out what had done such damage to it would be gone. Probably forever.

“All right,” he told Sso-ngu between dry lips. “Let’s get a little closer. Just a little, and take us in slowly. And let me know if Quentin shows any signs of spooking.

Any signs—if we Jump out of this system Amity’ll never be able to track us down.”

“Oh, God, we’d be lost forever,” Demothi murmured, his voice more muffled than usual by his filter mask. Ferrol half turned to tell him to shut up—

“Movement!” Kennedy snapped suddenly. “Small objects—lots of them—moving toward us from the other space horse.”

Ferrol spun back, a curse catching in his throat. Under attack—? “How small?” he demanded, shaking hands fumbling with his controls.

“Five to ten meters across,” Kennedy told him. “Way too small to be space horses themselves.”

Ferrol had the proper display centered now, and for a long, horrifying moment he thought the approaching dots were somehow multiplying before his eyes… “What are they doing, collecting boulders?”