Timothy Zahn - Warhorse

The double crack! rocked the ship; and the sound was still echoing in Ferrol’s ears as the main display lit up with a brilliant flash. “We just lost the netting and tether!” Demarco shouted as the hull-stress alarm began its warbling. “The current must have vaporized them.”

“Get ready!” Ferrol shouted back, his eyes on the surface charge indicator. Ahead of the Scapa Flow, two capacitors’ worth of free electrons combined with those from the vaporized netting fibers, the whole mass of them rushing at Van de Graaff speeds toward the most electron-deficient object anywhere around them—

The hull-stress alarm tone was moving up the scale, but Ferrol hardly heard it. On his screen the Mitsuushi sensors showed the positive charge dropping like a rock straight toward—

“Hull’s neutral!” he barked at Demarco. “Go!”

And an instant later the space horse calf, the Dryden, and the stars all vanished.

They’d made it.

Ferrol took a deep breath. I’ll be damned, he thought. It worked. “Status?”

“Mitsuushi’s clean but shaky,” Visocky’s voice reported from the engine room. “If we don’t make breakout in an hour the equipment’ll do it for us. All that charge the capacitors dumped on the middle hull has to be bled off sometime soon, too.”

Ferrol nodded. “We’ll make breakout in three minutes, alter course and go another ten. At that point we should be able to take as much cleanup time as we need without worrying about unexpected company.”

He switched off, and turned to find Reese looking at him. His expression—“You have something to say, Reese?”

“We’re heading home now, I take it?”

“There’s not much point in doing anything else,” Ferrol told him. “Eventually, the pro-Tampies will ease up on this yishyar patrol; until then, there’s not much we can do. Unless you want to start scouring systems at random?”

“Not really.” Reese glanced at the blackness on the main display. “That was a hell of a chance you just took. I may not know all that much about starships, but I do know that triggering what amounted to a major lightning bolt between the space horse and the Scapa Flow could have taken out both the hull’s micro seams and the Mitsuushi ring in the bargain.”

Ferrol gazed at him. “You’re absolutely right, Mr. Reese. You don’t know much about starships.”

Reese’s eyes hardened. “You could have shunted the capacitor charge directly to the outer hull,” he said, his voice edging into accusation. “You didn’t need to vaporize the netting and tether line.”

“I wanted the extra electron cloud between us and the Dryden in case they tried bringing up the ion beam again,” Ferrol said, keeping his voice level. “Besides, shunting directly to the hull would have carried its own set of risks.”

“And besides,” Reese said softly, “you hoped the extra jolt might kill the calf?”

The bridge had gone silent. The charge, Ferrol knew, might indeed have killed the calf. The thought twisted his stomach… but he was damned if he was going to show that kind of sentimentality in front of Reese. “We captured that space horse,”

he told the other, biting out each word as if he really meant it. “If we don’t get it…

neither do the Tampies.”

Reese took a careful breath. “I see,” he said stiffly.

“I doubt that,” Ferrol told him. “But frankly, I don’t much care whether you do or don’t… and you’re excused from the bridge for the remainder of the voyage.”

His face rigid, Reese unstrapped and made his way back to the bridge door. “The Senator will hear about this,” he warned.

“I don’t doubt it,” Ferrol said. “At this point, I don’t much care about that, either.”

The door closed behind him, and Ferrol turned back to the main display with a tired sigh. It was, perhaps, the beginning of the end. Even the Scapa Flow’s backers no longer truly understood how thin the razor-edge was that the Cordonale was balanced on. Even they were starting to be lulled by the Tampy protestations of peace and friendship.

Or else they’d lost their nerve. Either way…

Either way, there was going to have to be some serious discussion when the Scapa Flow reached home.

Some very serious discussion indeed.

For a long moment the bridge was silent, with the kind of silence Roman usually associated with sheer stunned disbelief.

At least, that was what he himself was feeling. Disbelief… and a deep and personal chagrin.

The poacher had beaten him.

He took a deep breath. “Lieutenant Nussmeyer, did we get anything like a departure vector through all that?”

“Ah—I believe so, sir, yes,” the other said. “Though if he’s smart he won’t stay on that course for long.”

Roman focused on Nussmeyer’s profile. There was something that looked suspiciously like awe in the other’s face. “And you expect he is that smart, I gather?”

Nussmeyer flushed slightly. “Sorry, sir,” he said. “I just—” He waved a hand helplessly. “You can’t help but admire a man who takes a gamble that big and pulls it off.”

“I can’t?”

Nussmeyer flushed again and fell silent… but even as Roman looked around the bridge he saw that it was a losing battle. The poacher’s crack about their orders coming from the Tampies had subtly but noticeably shifted their sympathies—in his favor—that, along with the Tampy ship’s damnably bad timing in showing up when it did. It was just as well, Roman thought darkly, that there was no chance anyway of tracking the renegade down. It wouldn’t be an operation his crew could tackle wholeheartedly.

Damn the Tampies, anyway. Abruptly, he reached to his console, keyed the radio.

If the Tampies were here to keep tabs on his hunting—“Tampy ship, this is Captain Haml Roman aboard the C.S.S. Dryden,” he identified himself, his tone harsher than he’d intended it to be. “Your presence in this part of the system is not exactly conducive to our mission of hunting poachers. Would it be at all possible for you to shift your own operations elsewhere?”

“I hear,” the whining alien voice came promptly. “We conduct no operations here, Rro-maa; we bring a message for you from your people.”

Roman blinked. That wasn’t exactly the reply he’d been expecting. “I see. Go ahead, we’re ready to receive it.”

An indicator came on briefly and went off “Farewell,” the Tampy said, and a moment later vanished from the displays.

The message was short, but no less a bombshell for all that. Roman read it twice before raising his eyes from his screen. “Lieutenant, lay in a course back to Solomon,” he ordered Nussmeyer. “Head out as soon as the Mitsuushi’s ready to go.”

“Trouble?” Trent asked.

“I’m not sure,” Roman shook his head. “The message just says that we’re to return, that the refitting for the Amity project has been finished.”

Trent’s forehead furrowed. “That’s it? So what do they want from us?—a flyby to send it off?”

“Not really,” Roman said. “Mostly, what they want is me… to be Amity’s captain.”

The courier ship that had brought Roman from Solomon to the Tampies’

Kialinninni system had been an old one, right on the edge of being retired or possibly a bit past it; and if appearances and the occasional creaking from the bracing struts were any indication, the shuttle now arrowing him toward Kialinninni’s sun and the Tampy space horse corral was of similar vintage. A

continual and sobering reminder that the Amity project was looked upon with scorn or even suspicion by a significant part of the Senate and Starforce… and that it was that faction that controlled the appropriations. “I hope,” he commented, “that the Amity’s in better shape than this thing.”