Warhorse

Chapter 10

Amity was still four hundred thousand kilometers from Shadrach, and Roman was catnapping in his chair, when B burped.

“You’re sure?” he frowned, studying his displays as he fought to brush the cobwebs from his brain. B’s energy output curve didn’t seem to have changed significantly.

“Yes, sir.” Marlowe touched a key, and a velocity plot appeared on Roman’s scanner repeater display. “The dwarfs blown off a thin shell of plasma, and it’s expanding outwards at nearly four hundred kilometers per second. For the moment the shell’s blocking off the extra radiant energy, but that won’t last long. As soon as it spreads itself thin enough for the light to get through… well, we’ll be in a little trouble.”

“How long?” Roman asked, punching for course status.

“A few minutes at the most.”

Roman nodded grimly. Amity was already decelerating toward Shadrach, but at the two gees she was pulling it would take them an hour and forty-six minutes to reach the safety of the planet’s umbra. “Kennedy?”

Her fingers were already moving across the helm keys. “We could turn the ship, sir, and accelerate for a few minutes before turning again and decelerating.” she offered doubtfully. “But flipping over twice would almost certainly eat anything we gained in the process.”

And simply increasing their deceleration rate wouldn’t do any good, either, Roman knew: it would bring Amity to a stop sooner, but leave them stranded far short of the planet.

Unless…

He keyed for a large-scale position plot, holding his breath… and the gods were indeed kind. The larger of Shadrach’s two moons was almost directly on Amity’s heading, and was a good three hundred thousand kilometers closer to them than Shadrach itself. “Course change, Kennedy,” he ordered. “We’re going to try for the dark side of Shadrach’s moon. Execute as soon as you’ve got the numbers, then compute deceleration and ETA and see how much time that’ll buy us. Marlowe, get me an estimate of B’s brightness behind that expanding shell and send the numbers back to Stolt—I want to know how long the hull will be able to take it. Then check Kennedy’s ETA and see if it’s going to be enough.”

He felt a slight sideways tilt as Amity began the task of changing its direction the required few degrees. The bridge creaked a bit as it rotated slightly to accomodate; and then the straight-line motion came back, and Roman fought against the opposite tilt until the bridge finished the inverse correction. “Course change executed,” Kennedy reported. “If we run a constant eight-gee deceleration from here we’ll reach the moon in just under twenty-seven minutes.”

“Marlowe?”

“It’ll be damned tight, sir,” Marlowe grunted. “The drive nozzles will take the brunt of it, and they’re a lot more heat-resistant than the hull itself. But we’re not exactly dead-on to the star; and even if we rotate slowly so that each section of the hull gets equal exposure, we’ll still reach the theoretical danger point in fifteen to twenty minutes.”

Roman nodded. “What else have you got, Kennedy?”

“Not much, sir,” she shook her head. “We can cut it to twenty minutes by shutting down the drive and maintaining our current speed for nine minutes, but that’ll mean doing the last eleven at twelve gees.”

Eleven minutes of twelve gees. Eleven minutes of hell for the ship and its human crew… and maybe far worse for the Tampies still aboard. Could Tampies even survive twelve gees? Roman keyed his intercom. “Rrin-saa?”

The alien’s face appeared. “I hear, Rro-maa.”

“Rrin-saa, we’re in a crisis situation here,” Roman told him. “We’re going to have to pull eleven minutes at twelve gees or Amity isn’t going to make it. Can your people take that?”

A shadow of emotion might have crossed Rrin-saa’s face; Roman couldn’t tell for sure. “I do not know,” he said. “I know Tamplissta have survived eight gees for short times; that is all.” He paused. “Your wishes are ours, Rro-maa. You must do what is necessary.”

Roman gritted his teeth. “Lay in your course, Kennedy. Signal for dangerous acceleration. Rrin-saa… good luck.”

The drive cut off; and as the warning alarm began to hoot, Roman’s chair unfolded into its acceleration couch mode. He snuggled down into it as best he could in zerogee, feeling the contour cushions adjust to his body, and watched the displays.

He’d done everything he could, and now there was nothing to do but wait as the laws of physics played themselves out.

A minute later, right on schedule, the expanding plasma shell broke.

The hull temperature numbers skittered upward, higher than Roman had ever seen them, before falling abruptly as all sunside sensors either cut out or flared into uselessness. The pattern of destruction repeated itself around the entire circumference as the slow rotation Kennedy had put Amity into gave each section of hull the same deadly exposure in its turn. Within minutes the outer reflective layer was beginning to show signs of blistering, and the temperature within the ship was rising faster than the cooling system could dump it.

And then the fusion drive kicked back in… and Roman gasped for breath as the giant invisible hand jammed him hard into his couch. Jammed him, held him down, did its damnedest to crush the life out of him…

The last thought to flicker through his mind before the blackness overtook him was that putting his ship and crew through this high-pressure volcano was a hell of a way to run a rescue mission.

Slowly, as if in disbelief at her survival, Amity began to pull herself together.

“—Damage control reports over twenty buckled hull plates. Repair crews are working on the worst of it.”

“—Breakage of improperly stowed gear is pretty high, Captain, but nothing vital seems to be lost. We’re cleaning it up.”

“—The landing was a little rough, but didn’t cause any damage to the drive nozzles. We’re a few kilometers southeast of the center of the moon’s dark side.

Rotation period is about nine days, so we can stay put for as long as we’ll need.”

“—Casualties, Captain. The Tampies report eight dead during deceleration. No deaths on our side, but a number of broken bones and minor internal injuries. A

medical team’s gone portside to assist the Tampy doctors.”

Eight dead. Roman swore, uselessly, under his breath. Eight dead… and the fact that they were Tampies almost made it worse. He would have to call Rrin-saa and give his official condolences, of course—

“Captain?” Marlowe called. “I’ve managed to punch a laser carrier through all that ion-soup static out there. We’ve got Dr. Lowry’s group.”

Roman jabbed at his intercom. “This is Captain Haml Roman of the Cordonale Research Ship Amity. Dr. Lowry?”

“Here, Captain.” The static cleared slightly, giving Roman a glimpse of a snowyhaired man in full pressure suit. His face—what could be seen of it through the helmet—looked haggard. “You can’t know how happy we are you’re here.”

“I’m glad we made it. Where are you?”

“Dark side of the planet. I can give you our latitude and longitude, but that won’t help you much—Shadrach rotates once every forty-two hours and we have to keep moving to stay out of the light.”

“Yeah.” Roman had looked through the viewport at the planet only once. Low in the sky, showing about half a disk, and shining only by light reflected from fairly dark rock, it had still damn near blinded him. “I assume you have some sort of lander down there?”

“Yes—a Sinor-Grayback TL-1. A little cozy for all fifty of us at once, but we can manage.”

“Kennedy?” Roman murmured.

“A bit on the large side, sir,” she said promptly, “but with our own lander gone there’ll be enough room for it in the hangar.”

“Thank you. We can handle that, Doctor. How’s your fuel situation?”

“We had to abandon a lot of it at the base, and we’ve used some since then to keep out of the sunlight, but we’ve got enough left to meet you in orbit whenever you’re ready. Assuming it’s not too high an orbit, that is.”

“I think we’ll be able to accomodate you,” Roman said. “Now, I understand there’s a Tampy group down there, too. Are they with you?”

Lowry shook his head. “I’m afraid they’re beyond help, Captain,” he said tiredly.

“Their encampment was on the sunside when the dwarf first flared up. They’re all dead.”

Roman felt his stomach tighten into a hard knot. “You’re certain?”

Lowry’s sigh was just barely audible, and even through the static and pressure suit Roman could swear he saw the other shudder. “We’re certain. We went to their encampment as soon as it had rotated to the dark side. They had no warning whatsoever, no chance to escape. If the flare hadn’t blown off Shadrach’s minuscule atmosphere and sent shock waves through the ground we’d have been caught the same way ourselves.” Lowry’s hand reached up, as if to run his fingers through his hair, then dropped in obvious embarrassment. “We don’t know why the dwarf triggered so soon; it should have been all right for at least another month—”

“We can sift through the details later, Doctor. Are the rest of your people all right?”

Lowry visibly drew himself together. “We’re fine—or we will be as soon as we can get out of here. Just tell us when we should lift to meet you.”

“It’ll be a while yet, I’m afraid,” Roman told him, glancing at his scanner repeater display. “We’ll have to wait until the light intensity goes down enough for us to get across to you. We’re presently on your larger moon’s dark side.”

Lowry stared. “You’re not over Shadrach itself? Captain—” He swallowed and took a deep breath. “Captain, you can’t wait that long. Our calculations show that the next flare-up will be the final one.”

Roman’s mouth felt suddenly dry. “The nova?”

Lowry nodded. “And the intensity won’t decrease more than a magnitude or so before that.”

The bridge had gone very quiet. “How long have we got?” Roman asked.

“As best as we can estimate, between sixty and seventy hours.”

Sixty hours. And it would take a minimum of twenty-five of those to get back to Pegasus… “All right, Doctor, we’ll see what we can do. Amity out.”

He tapped the disconnect key, and the static abruptly shut off. It made the silence in the bridge that much more noticeable. Turning carefully—the twelve-gee run had left aches in every muscle—he looked at Marlowe. “You heard all that,” he said.

“You and Stolt get your heads together and find out how much more the hull can take.”

“We’ve already done that, Captain,” Marlowe said. The light-intensity curve on Roman’s repeater display disappeared and was replaced by a second curve and a column of numbers. “Commander Stolt estimates the drive nozzles could handle another fifteen hours or so without damage,” Marlowe continued, indicating the appropriate part of the curve with his mousepen. “Unfortunately, we can’t go from here to Shadrach’s shadow in that position—the maneuvering jets don’t generate enough thrust.”

“How about the rest of the hull?”

Marlowe’s cheek twitched. “In twenty minutes she’d start popping seams.”

Roman pursed his lips. “What about it, Kennedy?”

“No good, sir,” she replied, shaking her head carefully. “If I stay below eight gees we can’t make it in less than an hour. And any higher acceleration will just kill more of the Tampies.”

Which reminded him, he had some unpleasant news to break to the aliens. He’d have to make time for that soon. “What about putting extra shielding on the hull?”

he asked Marlowe. “I know we’ve got some spare drive plates.”

Marlowe’s lips compressed briefly. “I doubt we’ve got enough spares to do any real good, sir, but I’ll check.” He hesitated, his eyes flicking to Kennedy, and for a moment he seemed to be teetering on the brink of saying something else. The uncertainty won, and he started to turn away—

“You worried about the nova, Lieutenant Marlowe?” Roman asked mildly.

The other seemed to stiffen, and the wince that crossed his face was probably not entirely due to sore muscles. Again his eyes went to Kennedy, a hint of pleading in them.

“I believe, sir,” Kennedy spoke up, “that the lieutenant wished to point out that the higher resistance of the drive section means we can head away from B anytime we wish to. We have adequate fuel left to do a straight-line drive all the way back to Pegasus, provided we don’t waste any of it on the way.”

Roman locked eyes with her. “That would leave fifty people stranded on Shadrach, of course,” he said. “Are you recommending that we abort the mission? Either of you?”

Just inside Roman’s peripheral vision, Marlowe looked thoroughly uncomfortable.

Kennedy, directly under his gaze, didn’t flinch. “Not at this point, sir,” she said evenly. “But if we can’t get to them in thirty hours that will have to be my recommendation.”

The bridge had gone quiet again. “Consider it noted, Lieutenant,” Roman told her.

“Let’s just hope it doesn’t come to that.”

“Yes, sir.”

She and Marlowe turned back to their consoles, and the background hum of conversation resumed… and Roman found himself studying the back of Kennedy’s head. Wishing her file had spelled out her previous military service a little more explicitly. She’d served on mainline warships, certainly; probably seen actual combat in one of the plethora of interplanet squabbles that had popped up with depressing regularity all over the Cordonale before the Tampy problem had taken everyone’s attention away from all such minor disagreements.

It was entirely possible she’d had to abandon people to death before.

He shivered. Yes, let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, he told himself fervently. So far he’d never been forced to send men to die, and he had no real interest in starting now.

And then memory hit him like a splash of ice water, and he felt his face warm with embarrassment and shame.

No, he hadn’t sent men to die. Just Tampies.

For a long moment he stared at his intercom, stomach muscles knotting painfully.

But the call was long overdue, and putting it off any longer would only make it worse.

As usual, it was Rrin-saa who answered. “Rro-maa, yes?”

“Yes, Rrin-saa,” Roman nodded. “I wanted to offer my condolences on the deaths of eight of your people.”

“Eleven. Three more have died of internal injuries. We mourn them.”

Eleven. “I’m sorry; I didn’t know.” He hesitated. “I’m afraid there’s more bad news from the planet. It appears your research base here was completely destroyed by the first great flare.”

Rrin-saa gave the Tampy equivalent of a nod. “This is as expected.”

Roman frowned. “You already knew?”

Rrin-saa closed his eyes briefly. “If the Tamplissta had survived there would have been no need for a rescue, Rro-maa. They would have transported themselves and the humans alike to safety.”

“Oh. Of course.” Which meant, Roman realized, Rrin-saa and the others must have known or at least suspected as soon as the distress call came through. But he hadn’t bothered to ask their thoughts on the matter… and Tampies seldom volunteered such information. “Again, I’m sorry. I wish things had gone differently.”

“As do we. I must leave now, Rro-maa. The mourning continues.” The screen went dark.

Stolt’s face on the intercom screen looked haggard and vaguely uncertain—the face of a man juggling a dozen crises, all of them clamoring for immediate attention.

But there was nothing vague or uncertain about his words. “There’s no way, Captain,” he said, shaking his head carefully. “Between the spare drive plates, shielding sections, and spray-on ablative material we’ve got maybe enough stuff to add two extra centimeters to the outer hull. Assuming, that is, that we could spread it all out evenly, which of course we can’t.”

Roman nodded heavily. “I didn’t think we’d have enough, but it seemed worth checking. Any progress on that reflector umbrella you proposed earlier?”

“We’re still doing simulations, but it’s not looking especially hopeful,” Stolt admitted. “Every material we try can handle either the light or the radiation, but not both. Woller’s setting up a trial with a multi-sandwiched sort of layering, but I’m not optimistic.”

“Captain?” Kennedy spoke up, turning to face him. “Would there be enough spare shielding to adequately cover a lifeboat?”

And then fly it across to Shadrach, cram the scientists in somehow and fly back…

“How about it, Stolt?”

The answer was prompt enough to show that Stolt had already considered that approach. “No good,” he said. “It’d be a mess to fly, for starters—we could only shield one side of the boat, which would throw the center of mass ‘way to hell and gone. And even then, you’d only have enough shielding for a one-way trip—too much of the stuff would boil off on the way for you to make it back.”

“Unless Lowry’s group has something they could use to protect it on the return trip,” Kennedy persisted.

Stolt snorted. “If they had, don’t you think it would have occurred to them to use the stuff on their own lander?”

“Maybe not,” Kennedy countered. “They’re astrophysicists, not engineers. Maybe they’ve got something that would work but don’t realize it.”

“It wouldn’t hurt to suggest it,” Roman agreed. “Have one of your people call down to Lowry and get a complete list of the materials they have on hand.”

“Yes, sir,” Stolt said.

Roman keyed the intercom off and turned to Marlowe. “The radiation going down at all out there, Lieutenant?”

“Ah… yes, sir, a little,” Marlowe said distractedly, his eyes steady on one of his screens. “Not fast enough, though. Captain, I’ve just picked up something in orbit around Shadrach. I think you’d better take a look.”

Roman frowned at his scanner repeater. A flashing circle marked the spot… “A

space horse?”

“That’s what I thought,” Marlowe agreed. “Probably the one the Tampy expedition brought with them—you can just barely see what’s left of a ship trailing behind it.

The question is, why is the thing still here?”

Roman chewed the back of his lip. For an instant a crazy image flashed through his mind, that of the space horse standing faithfully by like a pet dog, protecting its departed masters… “It’s probably dead,” he said aloud, shaking the picture away.

“Killed the same time as the Tampies.”

“Or else there’s someone still alive on that ship Handling it,” Kennedy murmured.

It wasn’t impossible, Roman knew. The attached ship looked to be half melted, but if it had been lucky enough to be in the space horse’s shadow when the star blew, one or more of the Tampies could indeed still be alive in there.

Which led immediately to the question of why any such theoretical survivors hadn’t either rescued Lowry’s group or ignored them and gotten the hell out of the system. “Have you tried contacting the ship yet?” he asked.

“Been transmitting since it first came out from around the planet’s limb,” Marlowe said. “No response yet.”

Roman grimaced. Rrin-saa and the rest of Amity’s Tampies would still be mourning their comrades’ deaths, and he’d already interrupted them once. But something told him that this couldn’t wait.

Rrin-saa wasn’t in the Handler room, but the intercom monitor made quick work of tracking him down. “Rro-maa, yes?” he whined. If he was annoyed at being again taken away from the funeral service, he didn’t show it.

“We’ve found your expedition’s space horse,” Roman told him. “It’s still in orbit around Shadrach. Any ideas as to why it hasn’t Jumped?”

For a long moment the alien just stood there, his lopsided face running through a series of subtle and—to Roman, at least—unreadable changes. “There is a possibility,” he said at last. “The space horse would have been set in stationary orbit above the ground observers, with six or fewer Tamplissta as Handlers. When all died…” He paused, and his expression again altered. “You must know that we feel more deeply toward life than humans seem to. The sudden deaths of their companions may have caused a perasiata reaction in the Handlers and, through them, in the space horse.”

Catatonia, in the middle of a dying system. So the vaunted Tampy empathy could occasionally be a handicap. “When will they all come out of it?”

“The Tamplissta will not. They will be dead now.”

Roman hissed between his teeth. For a moment he’d dared to hope they’d found their ticket out of this mess. “I’m sorry,” he told the Tampy. “I suppose the space horse is dead, too?”

“I do not know. I know he may be dead or still in perasiata; that is all.”

Roman glanced at Marlowe, pointed at the other’s displays. The other nodded understanding and got to work. “Suppose the space horse is indeed in perasiata,”

he said to Rrin-saa. “How could we get it to wake up?”

“I did not say he was in perasiata,” the Tampy reminded Roman. “I do not know.”

Roman clenched his jaw against a flash of anger. This was not the time for Tampy verbal reticence. “Pretend just for argument’s sake that it is,” he growled. “Tell me how we would wake it up.”

“There are methods,” Rrin-saa said. “Handlers are taught them.”

Terrific. Handlers could do it… except that Amity’s Handlers were all back with Pegasus. “I don’t suppose any of your people here have had any of that training.”

Rrin-saa hesitated. “Even if the space horse could be made to move, he would not have the strength to pull Amity any great distance.”

“It won’t need to,” Roman shook his head. “All we need is its shadow to hide in—we have more than enough fuel to fly to Shadrach under our own power. All we’d need is someone with Handler training who’d be willing to ride a heavily shielded lifeboat over there and try to wake the space horse up.”

Again, Rrin-saa’s face went through its subtle contortions. “Very well,” he said at last. “Prepare your lifeboat. I will go.”

Roman blinked. “You?”

“I have had Handler training. It is my task.”

Roman gazed at him. A short, ugly creature whose features hovered midway between the macabre and the thoroughly ridiculous… calmly volunteering to risk his life to save what was, to him, a group of semi-dangerous aliens. “I can’t order you to go out there, you know,” he reminded the other, moved by some vaguely insistent impulse to make sure the Tampy understood fully what he was letting himself in for. “It’ll be dangerous—possibly fatal—”

Something in Rrin-saa’s face made him stop. “Do you still not understand us, Rromaa?”

the Tampy said softly. “Our duty is to all living things; to respect them, and the balances and natural hierarchies within which they exist. As sentient creatures we have great power to alter these balances. With such power comes equally great responsibility. We do not choose the role of caretaker. It is, instead, thrust upon us as the price paid for the gift of sentience.”

It was a philosophy Roman had heard many times before. But always from Tampy apologists and supporters, never from one of the Tampies themselves. “And so you risk your life to help save a group of humans?”

Rrin-saa touched fingers to ear: a shrug. “You are neither creature nor caretaker, Rro-maa; and yet are both. We do not yet fully understand you. But we are learning.”

Unbidden, a shiver ran up Roman’s back. He’d often wondered just what the Tampies’ motivation had been in agreeing to join the Amity project. Dimly, he wondered what sort of report Rrin-saa would be bringing back. “I appreciate your willingness to go,” he told the other. “Let’s hope it works.”

“For the space horse’s sake, as well as the humans‘,” Rrin-saa said. “He, too, is worth saving, if such is possible.”

“Agreed,” Roman nodded. And if it wasn’t possible to save it, the creature might still have enough strength left in it for one last Jump. If it did, Amity might not have to run that perilous gauntlet all the way back to Pegasus.

Assuming, of course, that Pegasus had recovered from whatever was bothering it.

For a moment his thoughts went back to Ferrol and the others waiting for them…

Resolutely, he forced his mind away. Whatever was happening back there was far beyond either his control or his assistance. “We’ll get the lifeboat ready,” he told Rrin-saa. “It’ll take an hour or so—we’ll let you know.”

“I will be ready,” Rrin-saa said.

Roman blanked the screen and looked up at Marlowe. “Anything?”

“There’s no way to tell, sir,” the other said, shaking his head in obvious frustration.

“All the readings I can get through that plasma soup out there come up ambiguous.

It could be alive; it could be dead.”

“All right. Call Stolt and have them get started on the lifeboat.” Bracing himself, he turned to Kennedy. Now came the sticky part. “We’re going to need a volunteer to fly this thing,” he told her. “A pilot who can handle something as lopsided as the boat’s likely to turn out.”

“MacKaig’s the one you want,” Kennedy said promptly. “She’s had experience with both tugboats and minesweepers. I’ll call her up here.”

Roman stopped her with an upraised hand. “Make it crystal clear to her that if the space horse out there is dead this is a suicide mission.”

Kennedy smiled tightly. “She’ll go,” she said. “She’s not exactly what you’d call trusting when it comes to Tampies.”

It was a long time before Roman understood the logic behind that last cryptic comment. It wasn’t until the lifeboat was ready to launch, in fact, that it and Rrinsaa’s reference to saving the space horse finally clicked together.

There was no simpler way for the Tampies to save the space horse, after all, than to wake it up and let it Jump.