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.