Timothy Zahn - Warhorse

Roman rubbed his thumb and forefinger together thoughtfully. He had to admit the other’s arguments sounded reasonable enough. And yet… “But if they’re hoping to hitch a ride,” he asked slowly, “then why are they hanging so far back?”

“Maybe they’re not,” Tenzing countered impatiently, “Maybe it’s Man o’ War who’s holding them away. Captain, we’re really very busy down here, collecting data and all, so unless you have something else to discuss with me, I’d like to get back.”

“Of course, Doctor,” Roman said, forcing down his own annoyance. “Enjoy yourselves.”

The image vanished, and for a moment Roman glowered at the place where it had been. The size of Amity’s scientific section had been steadily shrinking as the ship’s missions had gradually shifted from straight survey work to survey-plusbreeding to straight breeding, and Tenzing’s resentment of the Starforce’s tinkering had risen with every cut. Roman could sympathize, but it didn’t make the man any easier to put up with.

His eyes drifted back to the visual display. There were at least twenty of the creatures out there; more, possibly, hidden in among the boulders that the group seemed to be lugging along with them. Tenzing’s last comment… Reaching over, he keyed the intercom for the Tampy section. “Rrin-saa?”

“I hear,” the alien said.

“Rrin-saa, is Man o’ War holding those things out there away from us?”

“He is not,” an off-camera voice answered. Hhom-jee, probably—he was on Handler duty at the moment.

So much for Tenzing’s remora theory. “Thank you,” Roman told him. He was just reaching for the off-switch—

“Rro-maa?”

“Yes, Hhom-jee?”

There was a long pause. “Rro-maa, Manawanninni is afraid.”

Roman stared at Rrin-saa’s unreadable alien face in the intercom screen. “What do you mean, afraid?” he asked carefully. “Afraid of what?”

Another pause. “I do not know.”

Roman pursed his lips, his eyes flicking to the visual display. Ramoras, Tenzing had called them. Harmless to a space horse… “Try and find out,” he told Hhomjee.

“Or see if you can get a location or direction or something.”

“Your wishes are ours,” Rrin-saa said.

Roman keyed off and looked over at Marlowe. “Full scan,” he ordered quietly. “I want you to take a good look at everything within ten thousand kilometers of us.”

“Yes, sir,” Marlowe nodded grimly, and turned to his task.

Roman shifted his gaze to Yamoto. “There’s a combat-operations file in the helm library,” he told her. “Dig it out and put it into standby.” He hesitated; but if the remoras were interested in Man o’ War… “And have engineering start the drive activation sequence.”

“Yes, sir.” If she understood the implications of that order, she hid it well.

And for the moment, Roman decided, that was all Amity could do. Until and unless they found Quentin and the lander here—

And right on cue, Marlowe’s console emitted a loud beep. “Captain!” the other called. “Picking up an emergency beacon; bearing inside the asteroid belt.

“We’ve found them.”

It turned out not to require any miracles, after all; Ferrol hadn’t realized just how readily the lander’s equipment could be disassembled and recombined, though in retrospect that wasn’t unreasonable for a craft that would often serve as a largecapacity lifeboat. The necessary technical data was stored on one of the datapacks in the survival library kit, and Kennedy’s plan was relatively straightforward besides. But with only two of them available to work on it—the Tampies were useless, of course, and Ferrol flatly refused to let Demothi anywhere near the equipment—the job took nearly three hours to complete. It was a good thing, Ferrol thought more than once, that the shark wasn’t in any hurry.

But finally the oddly shaped missile was finished and mounted to the outer hull.

“Now what?” Demothi asked as Ferrol struggled to strip off his EVA skinsuit in zero-gee.

“What do you think?” Ferrol snorted, tugging at a pant leg that didn’t want to come off. “We wait, that’s what. If this works we’ll have a clear Jump window for only a few seconds, and it would be awfully handy to have some idea where we were Jumping to before we start. Wouldn’t you say?”

“And if the shark attacks before the Amity arrives?” Demothi countered.

“We’ll worry about that if and when it happens,” Ferrol growled, stuffing the EVA

gear into its locker and closing the door. “Until then—”

And beyond Demothi, a blue light suddenly began flashing on the control board.

“Ferrol—they’re here,” Kennedy called.

Ferrol kicked off the locker and shot forward, slapping his hands against successive rows of seats to slow himself down. “Where are they?” he asked, grabbing his seat and shoving himself down into it. From the speaker he could hear Marlowe’s voice hailing them.

“Bearing twenty-four port, thirty zenith,” she read off the numbers. “Haven’t got a range yet. Laser’s tracking them now… there; on target.”

Ferrol jabbed the transmit button. “This is Commander Ferrol aboard Amity lander,” he called toward the microphone. “Come in, Amity.” Eyes on the clock, he counted seconds: four… five…

Marlowe’s voice abruptly vanished. “Ahoy, lander,” Roman said. Even with the distorting crackle of charged-particle static, Ferrol could hear the relief in the captain’s voice. “I gather you’ve never heard it’s impolite to leave a party while the host is out of the room.”

“Sorry, but we didn’t have much choice—our ride was leaving,” Ferrol countered.

A six-second round-trip delay—three seconds each direction—put Amity about nine hundred thousand kilometers away. Timewise, that meant…

“A good four hours away at a two-gee ace/dec course,” Kennedy murmured from beside him.

He nodded his thanks. “Can you tell us where we are?” he called into the mike.

“We’ve got a complete nav dump ready for you,” Roman said six seconds later.

“Here it comes.” A light on Kennedy’s console came on, indicating incoming data.

“As a matter of interest,” Roman continued, “Quentin made almost 1120 lightyears in that Jump. Not bad for a beginner.”

“We’ll contact the record books later,” Ferrol said. “Right now, we all have to get the hell out of this system. Do you have a clear Jump window?”

The delay was longer than six seconds this time. Considerably longer. “No,”

Roman said at last, his voice grim. “We’ve picked up an advance guard of small space-going creatures. They seem to be blocking Man o’ War’s Jump vision.”

Ferrol swore under his breath. Amity was far enough from the dead space horse that the vultures shouldn’t have found the larger ship nearly this soon. Was the whole system swarming with the damn things?

Or had the shark abandoned its prey… ?

“Marlowe, key in a full sweep with your anomalous motion program,” he ordered tightly. “Right now. Captain, recommend you get moving, at whatever gees you can pull. If the vultures found you this quickly, there’s a good chance the shark is somewhere nearb—”

“Motion, Captain,” Marlowe interrupted. “Bearing eighty-seven port, sixty nadir.

It’s… my God.”

“Hhom-jee, go to four-gee acceleration,” Roman’s voice came, glacially calm.

“Yamoto, are we still on course for the lander?”

“Yes, sir,” Yamoto answered, her voice changing midway through with the unmistakable strains of high-gee acceleration. “We’ll need to correct later for the higher acceleration, but it’ll be close enough.”