Timothy Zahn - Warhorse

“I can’t let you do the docking,” Ferrol told her quietly. “So far everything you’ve done comes under the heading of innocently obeying orders from a superior officer.

I don’t want you in any deeper than that.”

“Your concern is touching,” Yamoto growled. “But soothe your conscience—I’m not doing it for you.” She jerked her head back toward the Tampies. “You’ve got three innocents at risk here—four, if you count me. I’m doing the docking, and that’s final.”

Behind the filter mask, Ferrol grimaced, glad the expression wasn’t visible. Of course; it had to have been something like that. Not simply that she was willing to trust him or his judgment.

But then, no one seemed willing to trust his judgment these days. Why should Yamoto be different?

“In that case,” he told her, “I accept.”

“Sure as hell taking her time pulling away,” Demarco growled, gazing at his displays. “You know, I don’t think she’s planning to head planetside at all.”

Ferrol glanced at the screen. Demarco was right: Yamoto was just letting her lifeboat drift. “Probably decided she’d do as well to wait for the Amity to show up,” he told Demarco. “Probably also figures that if she can record our Jump direction it’ll give them a shot at tracking us down.”

Demarco sent him a frown. “They can’t do that, can they?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Ferrol advised him. “With the route we’ll be taking they won’t have a hope in hell of following us.”

On his console the intercom pinged. “Chayne, we’ve got the intercom connection to the lander now,” someone reported.

“Thank you.” Ferrol keyed the proper switch. “Wwis-khaa? This is Commander Ferrol. Are you and the others doing all right?”

“We are well, Ffe-rho.”

With Ferrol and Yamoto gone from the lander, the three aliens had removed their filter masks; briefly, Ferrol wished he was better at reading Tampy expressions.

“I’m sorry we have to keep you back there in the lander,” he apologized. “But without enough filter masks to go around we really can’t let you into the main part of the ship.”

“No scitte,” Demarco muttered under his breath. “It’d lake months to scrub the stench out of the air system.”

Ferrol threw him a glare. “You should have received the next target star on your display by now,” he continued to Wwis-khaa. “Can Epilog see it all right?”

“He can.” Wwis-khaa paused. “Ffe-rho, I would like to know what it is you are asking us to do.”

“A fair question,” Ferrol agreed. “Very simply, I’m asking you to help your people.

Your people, and your space horses. Have you ever heard of an Earth creature called the dog?”

“A domesticated carnivore of the Canis group,” Wwis-khaa said promptly. “Its ecological position is usually as a companion or pet to humans.”

“Right,” Ferrol nodded, vaguely impressed that the alien would know that.

“They’re mostly pets now, but originally they were used by herders and shepherds to help guard food animals from dangerous predators. Still are, in some places.”

He’d expected Wwis-khaa to catch his drift; and he wasn’t disappointed. “You seek to find such creatures in space?” the Tampy asked, his head tilting to one side in a gesture Ferrol had never seen before. “Small predators to protect our space horses from sharks?”

“That’s it,” Ferrol nodded. “Granted, we don’t know if such things even exist; but now that we know there are at least three species of space-going creatures, it seems reasonable that there should be others. True?”

“I do not know,” Wwis-khaa said. “How do you presume to search for such creatures throughout the vastness of space?”

“I don’t,” Ferrol said. “We’re going to leave space and normal star systems alone and concentrate instead on a much more select group of places: namely, the accretion disks around large black holes.”

Demarco twisted his head around, a stunned look on his face. “I think it makes sense,” Ferrol continued, ignoring the other. “That’s where space horses are supposed to have originated; and if so, there must be some remnant of the ecology left. You game to take a look?”

For a long moment Wwis-khaa was silent. Ferrol held his breath, fully and painfully aware that if the Tampies refused the whole thing would die right here and now. “Your wishes are ours,” the alien said. “When do you wish to leave?”

Quietly, Ferrol exhaled. “As soon as Epilog is in position,” he told the other. “Let the helmer—Randall—know when you’re ready.”

“Your wishes are ours,” Wwis-khaa repeated.

Feeling a little limp, Ferrol switched off the intercom. It had worked… and they were on their way. He looked up—

To find Demarco gazing hard at him. “I trust,” the other said carefully, “that all of that was just so much spun sugar.”

“Some of it was,” Ferrol said. “Most of it wasn’t. We are going to poke around a few black holes, and we are hunting for a scaled-down version of a shark. But not for the reason I gave Wwis-khaa—that was just to get his cooperation.”

“You should have just told melt-face it was an order, and that you were his superior officer, and that was that,” Demarco sniffed. “That’s all the explanation the stupid plant-lovers deserve.”

Ferrol frowned at the other, a strange feeling curling through his stomach.

Somehow, he didn’t remember Demarco as being quite this crude. “If I’m right,”

he said quietly, “we’ve probably got a good chance of running into some sharks along the way. Wwis-khaa and the others deserve to know what they’re letting themselves in for.”

Demarco raised his eyebrows. “I see some of the Amity’s heart-bleeding has rubbed off on you. Sir. So if we’re not recruiting watchdogs for the melt-faces, what the hell do we want these miniature sharks for?”

“We want them for transport, of course,” Ferrol growled. Demarco was teetering right on the edge of insubordination here. “We’ve been in a long, dead-end track here, trying to capture and train space horses. Human beings are predators, and the space horses can’t or won’t stand for that. But a space-going predator species might. Clear now?”

Demarco snorted. “If you say so. Sounds like the sort of wishy-wok stuff your meltfaced chummies would spout, though. If you ask me.”

Quite suddenly, Ferrol decided he was tired of Demarco. “All right then; try this,”

he said coldly.

“We’re going because I’ve given you an order, and I’m your captain, and that’s that.”

Demarco’s lip twisted, but he nodded. “Yes, sir,” he muttered, and turned back to his console.

“Chayne?” Randall spoke up tentatively. “Your melt-fa—your Tampy signals he’s ready to go.”

Ferrol took a deep breath, fighting for calm. “Tell him to go ahead and Jump,” he ordered.

And wondered what had happened to his crew in the past year, to make them so harshly bigoted.

“Arachne’s director said they’d alerted Earth and Prepyat via tachyon,” Yamoto’s voice came over the comm laser. She sounded tired, and about as emotionally drained as Roman felt. Not really surprising, under the circumstances. “I guess the message didn’t get through.”

“It got through, all right,” Roman told her. “Just not soon enough.”

Yamoto sighed. “My fault, Captain. I should have alerted the colony as soon as we arrived in the system, and the hell with any consequences.”

Roman shook his head. “It wouldn’t have helped. Once we’d Jumped to Sirius and then back to Solomon system, we were already out of position to hit anywhere near Arachne itself. We couldn’t have gotten here in time to stop Ferrol no matter when you blew the whistle. It wasn’t in any way your fault.”