Ferrol gritted his teeth. Straightforward enough… unless Roman decided that this was all some elaborate scheme he, Ferrol, had cooked up with Demothi to steal a space horse calf. If the captain thought that, he might try some other response entirely. Such as starting his search with the Cordonale and nearby stars…
With an effort he shook the thought from his mind. They were in enough trouble already without going shopping for more. “If that’s the case,” he said, “I guess our logical response is to conserve our resources and wait.” Off in a far corner of his panel, out of the way, was the red-rimmed emergency beacon switch. Reaching over, he flipped it on. “Let’s just hope the captain’s smart enough to figure it out.”
“He is,” Kennedy said.
Ferrol winced at the conviction in her voice. Roman was smart enough, all right.
The only question was whether he was too smart to waste time with obvious red herrings.
But there was no point in mentioning that to Kennedy. “Well,” he said, trying to sound as calm as she did, “as long as we’re just sitting here, we might as well get something useful done. I’m going to go back and get the telescope set up; you load the survey program into the computer and get it running. Let’s see if this system has anything worth looking at.”
Roman watched the outrider recording twice, a cold knot settling all the harder into the pit of his stomach. Gone. A space horse calf, three humans and two Tampies—all impossibly vanished. “Marlowe?” he asked.
He looked up to see the other straighten from his console and shake his head.
“Sorry, Captain. The image is just too distant for the computer to scrub it any cleaner.”
“So there’s no way you can tell me which way Quentin was pointing when they Jumped.”
He hadn’t meant the words to sound like an accusation, but Marlowe winced anyway. “No, sir,” he admitted. “I’m sorry.”
Roman looked back at his display, the taste of defeat souring his mouth. So Demothi had been an agent of the anti-Tampies, after all. With a mission of stealing a space horse calf… and Roman had sat idly by and let him do it.
But how in hell’s name had he gotten Man o’ War to Jump? For that matter, how had he gotten Quentin to Jump?
Shutting off the useless outrider recording, he keyed for the Tampy section. A
moment later Rrin-saa’s face and yellow-orange neckerchief appeared. “Rro-maa, yes?” the other grated.
“Rrin-saa, I need some information,” Roman said. “Everything we thought we knew about space horse calves said that one as young as Quentin couldn’t Jump.
How did it do that?”
“I do not know,” came the all-too-predictable response.
Roman gritted his teeth. “Is Hhom-jee there? Hhom-jee, can you hear me?”
“I hear,” a voice came from the background.
“Hhom-jee, how was Quentin able to Jump?” Roman repeated his question.
“I do not know,” the other said. “I know only that the space horse calves I have touched have not felt ready to Jump, even though their fear was at first great. That is all.”
Roman glowered at Rrin-saa’s silent image. “Thank you,” he managed, switching off.
“Lot of help they are,” Marlowe murmured.
“They could have been more informative,” Roman agreed grimly. “Looks like we’re on our own here, people. Spin me a theory, Lieutenant.”
“The simplest explanation, it seems to me, is that new calves don’t Jump because they can’t see where they’d be Jumping to,” Marlowe suggested. “If so, all we need to do is make a list of the brightest stars visible from here and start checking them out.”
Roman nodded. It was in many ways a default hypothesis; but it was the only one where the logical response was both obvious and at the same time something they could handle. “Lieutenant Yamoto?” he invited.
“I agree with Marlowe, sir,” she said, tapping a key. “Here’s the list of stars, in order of decreasing brightness, down to about first magnitude.”
For a moment Roman studied the list. There were fifteen entries, topped by three Bclass stars: a Bl, a B4, and a B6. Halfway down the list…
“Shall I have Hhome-jee set course for number one, Captain?” Yamoto asked into his thoughts.
Roman pursed his lips. “No,” he said slowly. “We’ll start with number six.”
Marlowe turned to frown at him. “Vega?”
“Yes,” Roman told him. “If they’re not there I want to be close enough to the Cordonale to Jump back and get the alert out on tachyon.”
Marlowe’s forehead furrowed. “Yes, sir,” he said, a little uncertainly.
“Yes,” Roman said quietly, answering the unspoken question he could read in the other’s face and voice. “I think it’s entirely possible the whole thing was an attempt by Demothi to steal the calf… and if so, chances are he’ll be heading back to the Cordonale to deliver it.”
Marlowe’s face hardened. “I understand, sir. We’ll want to get after him as fast as we can, try and cut him off.”
“Right.” Roman shifted his eyes back to the helm. “Alert Hhom-jee, Lieutenant. I want to Jump as soon as he can get Man o’ War lined up properly.”
“Yes, Captain.” Yamoto hesitated. “Sir… what if it really was just an accident, though? They’ll be stuck out there somewhere, waiting for us to come find them.”
“And we will,” Roman told her shortly. “After we’ve checked out the other possibilities.”
She colored slightly. “Yes, sir,” she said, and turned back to her console.
Roman regarded the back of her head, a slight twinge of conscience poking through the high-speed mental shuffling of plans and possibilities and contingencies. She was right, of course; if it had been just an accident Ferrol and the others were in for a few tense hours. But the lander was routinely kept well stocked, and with only five of them aboard they could hold out a couple of weeks if absolutely necessary.
They would survive just fine. Bored, certainly; but boredom, contrary to popular belief, was seldom fatal.
“Ffe-rho?”
Ferrol made one last adjustment on the telescope’s remote hookup and floated above it to look forward. “What is it, Sso-ngu?”
“Quentinninni has found a food supply and wishes to feed. May he?”
Ferrol frowned. “Where does it want to go?”
“Approximately fifty thousand kilometers in—” the Tampy paused, and then raised a hand—“that direction.”
“Kennedy?”
“It’s an asteroid belt,” she answered promptly. “Reflection data implies high metal content, as asteroids go.”
Good feeding for a space horse, then. “What kind of rock density are we talking about?” he asked her. “Bearing in mind the limited amount of shielding this teacup has.”
“Shouldn’t be dangerous,” Kennedy assured him. “Provided Quentin doesn’t go twitchy again and try to drag us through it retrograde. It’s as good a place as any to wait for the Amity.”
“Okay,” Ferrol said, giving himself a push forward.
“Give me a minute to strap in, Sso-ngu, and we’ll go and feed the baby.”
They had arrived nearly twenty degrees off the ecliptic plane and with a slight retrograde motion that had them drifting leisurely toward the central star. A potentially deadly situation for a normal ship with a normal fuel supply; not even worth comment for a craft tethered to a space horse. Under Sso-ngu’s guidance Quentin pulled them toward the asteroid belt at a steady 0.5 gee for just under an hour, turned around and decelerated for the same length of time, and finally accelerated again to match speeds with the drifting stream of rocks.
Floating at one of the side viewports, Ferrol watched as Quentin telekened a small boulder into one of its rear feeding orifices. He’d never before been this close to a feeding space horse, and it was one hell of an impressive sight. “You gotten a firstorder analysis on those rocks yet?” he asked Kennedy.
He turned to look as Kennedy fiddled with her keyboard. “Should be just about finished… yes, here it is. Um. Very interesting—no wonder Quentin was panting to get here. Unusually high percentages of iron and nickel; exceptionally high concentrations of bismuth, tellurium, thallium, and a dozen other trace metals.