Timothy Zahn - Warhorse

Keying off, bracing himself, he looked at Roman. Once again, the other passed up the opportunity to gloat. “Thank you, Commander,” Roman said gravely.

Ferrol nodded acknowledgment. He’d been right: he did, indeed, feel like a damn fool. “With your permission, sir,” he said, trying to keep his voice from trembling,

“I’ll confine myself to quarters until you’re ready for the Scapa Flow to clear away the vultures.”

He started to get to his feet; paused as Roman waved him back. “Lieutenant, what’s the Jump situation?” the captain asked, turning to Kennedy. “Are we too deep in the gravity well to get out of the system?”

She shook her head. “Not really, though we’ll scorch Amity’s hull pretty good no matter where we Jump to from here.” She looked at Ferrol. “But Ferrol was right about one thing: if we ever had time to call up help from the Star-force, we don’t any more.”

Roman nodded slowly, his thumb and forefinger rubbing gently together as his eyes stared at nothing in particular. “In that case—” He stood up. “It’s time we got back to the bridge. You included, Commander.”

Ferrol got to his feet, feeling his stomach tighten up again. To have to face the rest of the bridge crew again… “Yes, sir,” he said. “I’ll have the Scapa Flow get ready.”

“Thank you,” Roman shook his head, “but I don’t believe we’ll be needing their services just yet. We still have an errand of mercy to carry out before we can leave.”

Ferrol stared at him… and suddenly he understood. “You mean we’re going to turn all the space horses loose anyway?”

Roman eyed him, a tight smile playing at the corners of his mouth. “As I told you yesterday, Commander, I’ve learned a great deal about your character and judgment over the past year. You’ve hated the Tampies for a long time; but through all that you’ve never hated the space horses themselves.” He nodded toward the viewport, and the distant corral beyond it. “Your instinct toward the space horses was one of mercy. I’m willing to trust instincts like that.”

Ferrol nodded, as if he genuinely understood. For two whole minutes there he’d felt he knew exactly where he stood with respect to Roman, the Tampies, and the universe at large. Now, once again, he was totally lost. “I see, sir,” was all he could think of to say.

“Good,” Roman said, moving toward the door. “Let’s get going, then. By my count we have about forty minutes until we reach the corral. You, Commander, have just that long to find us a way to punch a hole in it.”

“Just about ready here,” Demarco’s voice came through the speaker on Ferrol’s console. “Townne and Hlinka have the cables hooked up to the corral mesh, and they’re coming back in. Main capacitors showing full charge, backups showing ninety-eight percent.”

“Acknowledged.” Ferrol looked over his shoulder at Roman. “It’ll be just another minute, Captain.”

Roman nodded and looked over at Marlowe. “ETA on the sharks?”

“Twenty-eight minutes for the leader,” the other said tightly. “A few minutes later for the others.”

Ferrol looked at his tactical display, feeling an odd mixture of frustration and melancholy. There were a total of ten Tampy ships harrassing the sharks now, but for all the effect they’d had on the predators’ progress they might just as well have stayed away. The sharks were still coming, the Tampies’ clumsy snare webbing hanging uselessly off their vulture vanguards or else simply vanished long behind them. Still coming… and on Amity’s other side, the corralled space horses very clearly knew it. Their restless milling about the enclosure had ceased; now, as if somehow divining what the Amity and Scapa Flow had in mind, they were pressed abnormally close together around the spot where, if all went well, a section of their cage was about to be vaporized.

And when that happened…

Ferrol bit at his lip, eyes suddenly brimming with moisture. In the wake of his confrontation with Roman and Kennedy everything he’d ever known or thought he’d known about the Tampies had collapsed into chaos, leaving his emotions far too tangled for him to really know anymore how he felt about them. But amid all the turmoil one fact stood out crystal clear.

The Senator, with all his cold-blooded conniving, had won. And the thought of that made Ferrol ill.

“Backup at full,” Demarco said. “All boards show green.”

Angrily, Ferrol blinked the moisture from his eyes. “They’re ready, Captain,” he said, not turning around.

“Very good, Commander,” the other said, his voice steady. “You may give the order.”

Ferrol gritted his teeth, shifting his attention to the visual display. “All right, Mai.

Get ready… fire.”

From the radio came the faint crack of the Scapa Flow’s capacitors; and on the visual a faint spiderweb of brilliant blue coronal discharge abruptly appeared as the massive jolt of current vaporized a half-dozen square kilometers of webbing. For a second the blue light illuminated the dark masses grouped silently behind it. Then the spiderweb was gone… and in the dim red light of the dwarf star Ferrol could see the masses moving toward the opening.

At the helm, Kennedy exhaled audibly. “There it is,” she murmured. “The end of an era.”

Ferrol nodded. They were beginning to flow through the gap now, the individual space horses making up the mass angling off in all directions as soon as they were clear of the webbing. He glanced at the tactical, wondering vaguely if the Tampies running before the sharks out there had noticed that their precious herd had been stampeded. Wondered if they would see it as a betrayal, or as a painful but necessary kindness.

He didn’t know. For that matter, he didn’t even know which way he’d originally meant it.

So much, he thought bitterly, for trustworthy instincts.

“They can come back,” Marlowe said. But not as if he believed it. “They got to space once before without the space horses. Surely they can do it again.”

Ferrol turned to see Kennedy shake her head. “Not without our help,” she said.

“The first time was a fluke—a space horse wandered into one of their systems and stayed there long enough for them to figure out how to catch it. They’ve never had any mechanical StarDrive of their own.”

“We can hope they had enough foresight to keep a few of their space horses out of this fight,” Roman said. “On the other hand…” He hesitated, a muscle in his cheek twitching once.

“Quentin?” Ferrol said quietly.

Almost reluctantly, Roman nodded. “It may not really matter how many they come out of this with,” he agreed soberly. “The very fact that there are creatures out there they can’t defend their space horses against may force them to turn the last ones loose anyway.”

For a minute the bridge was silent. The logjam at the exit hole had cleared out now, Ferrol saw, and the fifty or so space horses that still remained inside were flowing smoothly and swiftly out. In seven hundred years, he’d heard once, none of the Tampies’ space horses had ever died… which meant it had taken them all seven hundred of those years to assemble this stock.

And now they were all leaving; chunks of lumpy air from a punctured balloon. The end of an era, indeed.

“And speaking of ships without a mechanical StarDrive,” Roman said into his thoughts, “it’s time we cleared away those vultures and got out of here ourselves.

Commander?”

“Yes, sir.” Ferrol took a deep breath, watching the tactical as he keyed the radio.

“Amity to Scapa Flow; Mai, we’re pulling out. Get the net guns ready, and then—”

He broke off. Something on the tactical display…