“Holding position ahead,” Roman told him. “But they seem to be in a fairly amorphous mass, and not as clearly in two groups as they were before. We may have finally done it.”
“We’ll find out soon enough,” Ferrol said. “Okay, Ppla-zu: give Quentin a small rotation.”
There was no reply. “Ppla-zu?” Ferrol said, twisting around. “—Oh, hell.”
“What?” Roman snapped.
“I’m not sure,” Ferrol growled. “But—Demothi, take a look.”
Demothi was already leaning forward to peer at the Tampy’s face. “No doubt,” he said, his voice trembling noticeably. “It’s perasiata—a sort of deep sleep or coma state.”
“Yeah, we know what perasiata is,” Ferrol gritted. And if the Handler had it, then Quentin was almost certainly out of commission, too. And if Quentin was gone—Roman had apparently followed the same line of reasoning. “Rrin-saa,” he called. “Rrin-saa! What’s happening down there? Is Man o’ War still conscious?”
“No.” Rrin-saa’s voice was quiet, almost calm. “It is the end. The cycle of life closes—”
“We’re not giving up yet,” Roman cut him off harshly. “Marlowe, give Man o’
War a shot from the comm laser—see if that’ll jolt it back to consciousness.”
“Waste of time,” Demothi murmured, more to himself than to anyone else.
“So give us an alternative,” Ferrol told him. “You’re the expert on Tampies here—how do they snap someone out of perasiata?”
“They don’t,” Demothi said bitterly. “They just sit back and let nature take its course.”
Ferrol snorted. Of course. What else would Tampies do?
“In this case nature being a predator bearing down on us at eight gees,” Kennedy put in. “What about an electric shock, transmitted along the rein lines? Any chance that could do it?”
Ferrol shook his head. “I doubt it. A massive enough shock can knock them out, but anything less than that doesn’t seem to have any effect at all.”
Kennedy tapped a fingernail gently against her teeth.
“Maybe a physical jolt, then,” she suggested. “Ramming the lander into Quentin’s hide, for instance.”
Ferrol glanced behind him. Barely two hundred meters behind the lander he could see the gleam of Amity’s nose. “We’re a little close for firing the drive, aren’t we?”
“Never mind Amity’s paint job,” Roman said. “Give it a try.”
“Yes, sir.” Kennedy’s hands brushed across the panel, flicking on all ten pre-fire switches in what appeared to be a single motion. “Hang on.”
The lander lunged forward, gathered speed… and ten seconds later rammed full into Quentin’s smoothly curved end.
The shock threw Ferrol hard against his restraints. “Ppla-zu?” he snapped, twisting his neck to look behind him.
The Tampy’s face hadn’t changed… and peering intently into that face, Demothi shook his head. “No good. He’s still under.”
Ferrol swore and turned back to the tactical display. The shark had stopped accelerating now, and was turning ponderously over for the deceleration phase of its attack. If it decelerated at the same eight gees it had been doing earlier, it would be within telekene range of them in perhaps three minutes.
“Ferrol—look at the vultures,” Kennedy said suddenly.
Ferrol shifted his attention to that part of the display. The lander’s impact with Quentin had angled the calf a couple of degrees out of line with Man o’ War…
And for the first time since they’d appeared, the vultures had failed to match the motion.
Ferrol hissed frustration between his teeth. It was, perhaps, the ultimate irony: the barrier finally lifting just as the engine died. “Great,” he said. “Hooray for us. Too bad there won’t be time to break out the champagne.”
“Knock it off,” Kennedy snarled. “We’ve got two and a half minutes left to snap them out of it—let’s use those minutes.”
Ferrol clenched his jaw tightly enough to hurt. She was right… but the seconds ticked by, and no inspiration came.
And the shark was two minutes away. “There’s a predator bearing down on us,”
Kennedy muttered under her breath, her face tight with concentration. Still not ready to give up. “Self-preservation ought to come into play sometime here.”
“Unless they’re like the Tampies,” Ferrol grunted. “Ready to roll over and die whenever—”
He broke off, head jerking around as it suddenly hit him. “That’s it. They are like the Tampies—they’re both nonpredator species.”
“I don’t see—”
“Demothi!” Ferrol cut her off. “Get that helmet on—now.”
“Lander?” Roman’s voice came sharply. “What’s going on?”
“Maybe a chance to wake Quentin up,” Ferrol shouted over his shoulder. Demothi was fumbling with the helmet—fumbling far too slowly—there; it was off Pplazu‘
s head, and he was easing it over his own. “I think that’s why Quentin originally spooked and Jumped, Captain—it sensed Demothi as being a predator and tried to get away. If he can spook it again—”
Without warning, the lander lurched violently, slamming Ferrol’s teeth down on his tongue. He had just enough time to taste blood—
And suddenly a blue-white star blazed in front of them, a faint luminescent haze outlining Quentin like a halo.
They’d done it.
It took Kennedy and her people an hour to plot their position and figure out a route back to the Cordonale. It took Rrin-saa and his people almost as long to decide what to do with Quentin.
“I don’t understand,” Roman said. His eyes flicked past Rrin-saa, to where Sso-ngu and Hhom-jee sat quietly together under the twin amplifier helmets that now were wired into the Handler room. “I thought it was you who were so dead-set against abandoning Quentin the first place.”
“We could not leave him to the shark,” the Tampy said. “But the danger is now gone.”
“So why release him?” Roman persisted.
“Because he is damaged,” Rrin-saa said. “Not in body, but in his deeper self.”
“All the more reason to bring it back,” Roman countered. “Surely your people can do something to help.”
“It is not a matter of helping,” Rrin-saa said, and Roman could almost hear a note of sadness in the whiny alien inflections. “It is a matter of betrayed trust.”
Roman frowned. “I’m sorry, but I just don’t understand. What happened wasn’t your fault.”
“We brought Quentinninni into our service, Rro-maa. We attached him to a ship, spoke deeply into his mind. In exchange for such service, we promised him care and protection. Instead, we exposed him to great danger. Further, we forced him into such trauma that he entered perasiata as the only way to endure it.” The Tampy gave a wheezing sigh. “How can we now pretend nothing has happened?”
Roman pursed his lips. “It seems to me that circumstances warrant giving yourselves a second chance.”
“We made a promise,” Rrin-saa said simply.
Roman sighed. The Starforce and Senate weren’t going to like this at all… but Amity’s charter specifically stated the Tampies had final say in any decision concerning space horse health. This was close enough. “All right. There’s probably no advantage in sending Quentin off wrapped up in space horse webbing. If you’ll allow me another hour, I’ll send a boat out to remove the stuff properly.”
“That will be acceptable,” Rrin-saa agreed. “Thank you, Rro-maa.”
An hour later, Roman watched from the bridge as Quentin drove swiftly away into the black of space… and wondered if perhaps the Tampies really were too alien for human beings to ever truly understand.
Chapter 22
The hearings convened forty-eight hours later—not in the relative luxury of the Solomon state house this time, but in Earth orbit in the grim starkness of the warship C.S.S. Defiance. At Solomon, the Starforce and Senate had been more or less evenly represented; here, such balance was summarily dispensed with. Military men and women dominated the sessions, with the handful of civilians present participating mainly through intent listening.
The Senator, of course, was one of those civilians. As Ferrol had expected he would be.
But for the first three days they had literally no chance to speak privately. Ferrol’s days were filled to the brim with debriefings; sometimes alone, other times with Roman or Kennedy or Tenzing sharing the stand with him. Nights were likewise filled, with fatigued sleep punctuated by disturbed dreams of sharks and vultures.