Timothy Zahn - Warhorse

“Yes, sir.” She didn’t sound like she believed it. “I’m ready to boost orbit whenever you’re ready.”

Roman gave his helm display a quick scan. After four hours of a hard three-gee acceleration/deceleration drive through Arachne system from their arrival Jump point, Amity had finally reached the planet itself. The tactical showed their course swinging close in to cut across Yamoto’s own geosynchronous orbit… “You might as well just sit tight there,” he decided. “It’ll probably be faster for us to catch up than for you to fiddle with your orbit.” Though what the hurry was for, Roman really couldn’t say—by Yamoto’s numbers, Ferrol and the Scapa Flow were a good six hours ahead of them already, and Amity’s chances of tracking them down at this point were just fractionally above absolute zero. “We’ll be alongside in about ten minutes.”

“Yes, sir.”

At the helm, Kennedy half turned. “Captain? I’ve got a probable vector for them now, if you’d like to take a look.”

“Thank you.” For a minute Roman studied the tactical and visual maps she’d produced. In the direction indicated—

Was, basically, nothing. “How probable is this?” he asked.

“Only about seventy-five percent, actually,” she admitted. “The tapes Yamoto made of Epilog’s Jump are good and sharp, but you can only be so accurate from half a kilometer away. Computer gives a ninety-nine percent probability for this area”—a small circle appeared on the visual, centered around the original vector—“but there are at least fifteen stars in there that ought to be visible to a space horse.”

“Even one as young as Epilog?” Roman asked.

Kennedy shook her head. “I don’t know. Neither do the Tampies; I asked them.”

And of course they wouldn’t do anything so vulgar as to speculate… Roman clenched his teeth, fighting down a sudden surge of anger at the aliens. This wasn’t their fault, either. “Get me everything we have on those stars,” he directed Kennedy. “Let’s see if we can figure out what Ferrol’s up to.”

He hadn’t expected there to be much; and there wasn’t. Estimated sizes, estimated distances, spectral classes, estimated probabilities of solar systems—each listing had barely half a dozen lines. “Not much there anyone could want,” Marlowe muttered.

“Unless Ferrol knows something about one of them we don’t,” Roman pointed out.

“Kennedy, do you have a list yet of what those datapacks he had might have been?”

“Near as I can tell, all he accessed from the Amity were the navigational locator program and the full Cygni Telescope stellar mapping list,” Kennedy said. “Plus the Arachne data he gave Yamoto. She told us he took six datapacks with him, which would be about right for dumps of the nav and Cygni packages.” She eyed Roman. “Which implies to me that whichever of these stars he Jumped to was just a transition point to somewhere else.”

Roman nodded, his throat tight with frustration and bitterness. He’d already come to the same depressing conclusion… and if Ferrol was doing a multi-stage Jump here, then he was gone. Period.

His console two-toned a proximity alert: the Amity was coming alongside Yamoto’s lifeboat. “Kennedy, have the hangar doors opened; as soon as we’ve matched velocities Yamoto can go ahead and bring the boat in.”

And when she was aboard, he knew, the decision would have to be made. Whether to fight the massive probabilities stacked against them and try and go after Ferrol, or to accept that any such attempt would be a useless gesture.

To accept that, whatever Ferrol was up to, he’d won.

I should have stopped him, Roman thought wearily. And he could have done it, too—that was what galled the most. He could have had Ferrol off his ship right from the very beginning, or at any point since then. It was his own damn fault—all of it.

The intercom pinged. “Rro-maa?”

Roman looked down at the lopsided alien face. Here it comes, he thought, bracing himself. The accusation—delivered, no doubt, in the usual quiet/polite Tampy manner—that through lack of foresight or simple plain stupidity he’d just lost them a priceless space horse calf… “Yes, Rrin-saa, what is it?” he said.

“Is it your wish that we follow Ffe-rho?”

“It’s hardly a question of wishes at this point, Rrin-saa,” he growled. So that was how the Tampies were going to play this. Nothing so crass as accusing the captain outright of negligence; Rrin-saa was simply going to throw out innocent-sounding questions until Roman wound up confessing the fact on his own. “Ferrol and Epilog are long gone.” He raised his eyebrows. “Unless, of course, you’d happen to know where they went.”

“I do not,” Rrin-saa said. “But Sleipnninni does.”

Roman stared at the screen. The question had been nothing but pure sarcasm…

“Say again?”

“Sleipnninni knows where Epilog has gone,” Rrin-saa said. “He can follow, if you wish.”

Roman glanced up, caught Marlowe’s disbelieving frown, looked back down again.

“I don’t understand,” he told Rrin-saa. “Epilog Jumped six hours ago. How can Sleipnir possibly know where it went?”

“I do not know,” Rrin-saa said. “I know that he knows; that is all.”

Roman rubbed thumb and forefinger together, looked up again. “Marlowe?

Opinion?”

The other shook his head. “You got me, sir. Sounds like pure voodoo.”

“Does, doesn’t it?” he agreed. “Kennedy?”

She shrugged. “I’d vote voodoo, too,” she said. “But on the other hand, what have we got to lose?”

What, indeed? “All right, Rrin-saa, you’re on. Get Sleipnir into position; as soon as Yamoto and the lifeboat are aboard, we’ll Jump.”

The Tampy’s face was, as usual, unreadable. “Your wishes,” he said quietly, “are ours.”

It took the Scapa Flow six Jumps over nearly eighteen hours to get to Cygnus X-l, the first black hole on Ferrol’s list.

It was, for Ferrol, highly reminiscent of the pre-nova system Amity had gone into all those months ago. Blazing away to one side was the black hole’s companion, a huge blue-white star of perhaps twenty solar masses; to the other side was the black hole itself, a pinprick of equally bright blue light. Surrounding both was a textured swirl of gas being ripped from the star by the black hole’s gravity, thickest in a curved corridor directly between the two bodies, the entire mass of it fluorescing brilliantly under the steady blast of ionizing X-rays pouring from the black hole.

The star was brighter on that side, and noticeably elongated as well. The cloud of gas enclosed the two masses like a free-form cage; and though most of it moved too slowly for human eyes to follow, right in close to the blue pinprick it could be seen visibly swirling in, falling from infinity to disappear from the universe, giving up its gravitational potential energy as it did so to feed the outward flow of radiation.

Impressive as hell. And just about as dangerous.

Earlier, in one of the systems they’d passed through on the way here, Ferrol had had Epilog pull the Scapa Flow an extra six million kilometers further out from that system’s star, knowing that doing so would put them proportionally farther out along the X-l system’s gravity well when they finally arrived. Now, listening to the creaking of heat-stressed hull plates and watching as, one by one, the outside radiation detectors overloaded and burned out, he wondered if perhaps he should have taken the time to move them even further out.

They didn’t stay long. A fifteen-minute run with the anomalous-motion program was enough to show that there was none of Ferrol’s hoped-for life within a million kilometers of the ship, and it was already abundantly clear that even if they found something outside that radius the ship would never hold together long enough to go investigate it.