“Yes, sir.” She hesitated. “That assumes, of course, that Pegasus can do three Jumps in a row.”
“A fair question,” Roman agreed, reaching for his intercom. “Let’s find out, shall we?”
Ferrol keyed himself into the circuit just as a Tampy face appeared. “Rro-maa, yes?” he grated.
“Yes,” Roman nodded. “The Amity’s just been called on for an emergency rescue mission, Rrin-saa. Had you been informed?”
“Ffe-rho has told us, yes,” Rrin-saa confirmed.
“All right. We’ll be doing three Jumps in a row, and I need quick answers to two questions. First: will Pegasus need to rest between the Jumps?”
“I do not know,” the Tampy whined. “I know space horses have Jumped twice without rest; that is all.”
“I see,” Roman said, with no sign of impatience at yet another example of Tampy waffling. Perhaps, Ferrol thought cynically, he was to the point of considering that an adequate answer. “I guess we’ll find out together,” the captain continued. “So: second question. Given that space horses absorb a high percentage of the solar energy that hits them, will a nova or pre-nova star be too bright for Pegasus to handle?”
Ferrol swallowed. That thought hadn’t even occurred to him, and he found himself holding his breath as he waited for the answer.
He needn’t have bothered. “I do not know, Rro-maa,” the other said. “I know that they come close to normal stars; that is all.”
“Yes, well… thank you. Captain out.”
Ferrol keyed off his intercom with a snort of disgust. “You didn’t really expect to get anything useful from them, did you?” he growled.
Roman sent him a thoughtful look, turned to the helm. “Status, Ensign?”
“We’re in line for Deneb,” MacKaig reported. “Hhom-jee signals Pegasus is ready.”
Roman nodded. “Jump.”
The Jump to Deneb went off without a hitch, and from the new location MacKaig was able to refine her numbers for the remaining two Jumps. A half-hour’s drive through normal space put Amity in position for the second Jump, to a dim and unnamed star.
It seemed to Ferrol that it took longer for Hhom-jee to get Pegasus ready for that one. By the time they were ready for the third Jump, to 1148 itself, there was no doubt.
For the first time in the voyage, Pegasus was showing signs of fatigue.
“Rrin-saa, we’ve been in position for the past five minutes,” Roman said into the intercom, his voice carefully showing no signs of either irritation or nervousness.
“What seems to be the trouble?”
“There is not trouble,” the Tampy’s reply came faintly. “Pegasunninni is in mild perasiata—it will be only another few moments.”
Roman hissed quietly between his teeth. “Have Hhom-jee push it as much as he can. There’s no guarantee as to how much time we’ve got.”
“Your wishes are ours.”
Roman broke the connection and turned to Ferrol. “Any word from below on the latest dust sweat analysis?”
“The composition’s definitely changing,” Ferrol told him, the sour taste of irony in his mouth. He’d argued—loudly, in fact—against all of the dust sweat work; now, suddenly, it was turning out to be of more than academic curiosity, after all. It left Roman looking brilliantly foresighted; and it left him, Ferrol, looking wrong. It was a toss-up as to which part of that he hated more. “Overall output is up, but at the same time there’s been a sharp drop in several of the trace elements.”
Roman nodded. So far he’d passed up any snide comments on the demise of Ferrol’s side of the dust sweat argument. Not that anyone on the bridge really needed reminding. “Sounds like a buildup of fatigue wastes,” he suggested.
“Dr. Tenzing says that’s one of the possibilities.”
“Mm. Well, we’ll just have to wait and see how fast it clears up.”
“Yes, sir. So what’s this perasiata scam, anyway?”
“It’s hardly a scam,” Roman said, his voice a little stiff. “It’s a kind of withdrawal of consciousness the space horses sometimes experience. Something like the way the Tampies sleep, or so they’ve described it.”
Ferrol nodded to himself. So there was a limit to how hard you could push a space horse. Interesting. Even more interesting that no one had discovered it before now.
“Captain?” MacKaig spoke up. “Hhom-jee signals we’re finally ready to Jump.”
“Very good. Execute.”
The words were barely out of Roman’s mouth when the sunlight did its abrupt and instantaneous change… and they were there.
To the naked eye, 1148 was merely a bright reddish star; seen through Amity’s sunscope, it was a truly awesome sight. Shrouded in a brightly lit haze, seemingly meshed together by roiling tendrils of colored vapor, the twin stars seemed to project both the ultimate in unity and the ultimate in conflict. A child in its mother’s arms; or two fighters literally tearing the life from each other.
With a shiver, Ferrol forced the images down. The last thing he needed going into a pre-nova system was an overactive imagination.
“Interesting view,” Roman remarked from behind him. “Ensign, do we have Shadrach on the scope yet?”
“Yes, sir,” MacKaig told him. “About three degrees off a direct line to the stars, range approximately forty million kilometers.”
“About as close as we were likely to get,” Roman said. “Good job. Feed the numbers to Hhom-jee and have him get us going.” He tapped his intercom, indicating to Ferrol to join the circuit. “Dr. Tenzing? Have your people come up with any theories as to what’s going on out there?”
“Guesses only at this stage, Captain,” Tenzing grunted. The scientist’s expression, Ferrol thought, seemed to be hovering midway between scientific eagerness and a very unscientific desire to be several light-years away. “Two things seem pretty certain, though. One: both stars, especially B—the dwarf—are much hotter than they should be; and two, B is also cooling down fairly rapidly. That suggests we’re looking at some variant of a classical Anselm Cycle, either gravitationally or thermally driven.”
“The Anselm Cycle being…?”
“Well, it’s never actually been observed, as far as I know, but the scenerio goes something like this. Some of the gas envelope material from A—the giant—falls past the gravitational equipoint onto B and triggers a burst of energy, which both heats B’s surface and blows off a shell of material. The extra radiant energy from that burp heats up A slightly, causing it to expand a bit more and therefore dump even more material onto B. Eventually—or so the theory goes—one of these cycles will dump enough matter onto B to trigger a proton-proton nuclear reaction in the surface. At that point, B goes nova, increases its brightness a factor of fifty thousand or so, and fries everything in the system.”
Roman seemed to digest that. “Seems reasonable enough. When can we expect the next of these burps?”
“We don’t know,” Tenzing admitted. “Best estimate is that the last one happened sixty to eighty hours ago, which turns out to be roughly two-thirds of what the theory would predict for the cycle. That would indicate the next one should come within thirty or forty hours, but I really can’t say for certain.”
“How much warning will it give us before it goes?”
Tenzing’s eyes flicked to the side. “Again, none of my people can say for certain.
Probably a few minutes at the most.”
“I see. Any idea as to which of these burps will trigger the nova itself?”
Tenzing’s face tightened. “Not really. We don’t have the equipment to take accurate readings on the plasma dynamics going on out there, and without a better feel for the Lagrange surfaces and expansion coefficients all we can really do is guess. It could go on the very next burp, or it could hold off for a couple of weeks.”
Roman nodded grimly. “Thank you, Doctor,” he said. Cutting the circuit, he swiveled to face the engineering monitor. “How’s the ship taking this?”
“Hull temperature’s going up, but not dangerously,” the ensign manning the station reported. Dangerous or not, he wasn’t taking his eyes off the readouts. “As long as B continues to cool down we should be all right. Particle radiation is marginal, but within safety limits.”
Which was all right, Ferrol knew. Spaceship hulls were built to take a lot of that kind of abuse; and if worse came to worse they could move into Pegasus’