“You should have just told melt-face it was an order, and that you were his superior officer, and that was that,” Demarco sniffed. “That’s all the explanation the stupid plant-lovers deserve.”
Ferrol frowned at the other, a strange feeling curling through his stomach.
Somehow, he didn’t remember Demarco as being quite this crude. “If I’m right,”
he said quietly, “we’ve probably got a good chance of running into some sharks along the way. Wwis-khaa and the others deserve to know what they’re letting themselves in for.”
Demarco raised his eyebrows. “I see some of the Amity’s heart-bleeding has rubbed off on you. Sir. So if we’re not recruiting watchdogs for the melt-faces, what the hell do we want these miniature sharks for?”
“We want them for transport, of course,” Ferrol growled. Demarco was teetering right on the edge of insubordination here. “We’ve been in a long, dead-end track here, trying to capture and train space horses. Human beings are predators, and the space horses can’t or won’t stand for that. But a space-going predator species might. Clear now?”
Demarco snorted. “If you say so. Sounds like the sort of wishy-wok stuff your meltfaced chummies would spout, though. If you ask me.”
Quite suddenly, Ferrol decided he was tired of Demarco. “All right then; try this,”
he said coldly.
“We’re going because I’ve given you an order, and I’m your captain, and that’s that.”
Demarco’s lip twisted, but he nodded. “Yes, sir,” he muttered, and turned back to his console.
“Chayne?” Randall spoke up tentatively. “Your melt-fa—your Tampy signals he’s ready to go.”
Ferrol took a deep breath, fighting for calm. “Tell him to go ahead and Jump,” he ordered.
And wondered what had happened to his crew in the past year, to make them so harshly bigoted.
Chapter 25
“Arachne’s director said they’d alerted Earth and Prepyat via tachyon,” Yamoto’s voice came over the comm laser. She sounded tired, and about as emotionally drained as Roman felt. Not really surprising, under the circumstances. “I guess the message didn’t get through.”
“It got through, all right,” Roman told her. “Just not soon enough.”
Yamoto sighed. “My fault, Captain. I should have alerted the colony as soon as we arrived in the system, and the hell with any consequences.”
Roman shook his head. “It wouldn’t have helped. Once we’d Jumped to Sirius and then back to Solomon system, we were already out of position to hit anywhere near Arachne itself. We couldn’t have gotten here in time to stop Ferrol no matter when you blew the whistle. It wasn’t in any way your fault.”
“Yes, sir.” She didn’t sound like she believed it. “I’m ready to boost orbit whenever you’re ready.”
Roman gave his helm display a quick scan. After four hours of a hard three-gee acceleration/deceleration drive through Arachne system from their arrival Jump point, Amity had finally reached the planet itself. The tactical showed their course swinging close in to cut across Yamoto’s own geosynchronous orbit… “You might as well just sit tight there,” he decided. “It’ll probably be faster for us to catch up than for you to fiddle with your orbit.” Though what the hurry was for, Roman really couldn’t say—by Yamoto’s numbers, Ferrol and the Scapa Flow were a good six hours ahead of them already, and Amity’s chances of tracking them down at this point were just fractionally above absolute zero. “We’ll be alongside in about ten minutes.”
“Yes, sir.”
At the helm, Kennedy half turned. “Captain? I’ve got a probable vector for them now, if you’d like to take a look.”
“Thank you.” For a minute Roman studied the tactical and visual maps she’d produced. In the direction indicated—
Was, basically, nothing. “How probable is this?” he asked.
“Only about seventy-five percent, actually,” she admitted. “The tapes Yamoto made of Epilog’s Jump are good and sharp, but you can only be so accurate from half a kilometer away. Computer gives a ninety-nine percent probability for this area”—a small circle appeared on the visual, centered around the original vector—“but there are at least fifteen stars in there that ought to be visible to a space horse.”
“Even one as young as Epilog?” Roman asked.
Kennedy shook her head. “I don’t know. Neither do the Tampies; I asked them.”
And of course they wouldn’t do anything so vulgar as to speculate… Roman clenched his teeth, fighting down a sudden surge of anger at the aliens. This wasn’t their fault, either. “Get me everything we have on those stars,” he directed Kennedy. “Let’s see if we can figure out what Ferrol’s up to.”
He hadn’t expected there to be much; and there wasn’t. Estimated sizes, estimated distances, spectral classes, estimated probabilities of solar systems—each listing had barely half a dozen lines. “Not much there anyone could want,” Marlowe muttered.
“Unless Ferrol knows something about one of them we don’t,” Roman pointed out.
“Kennedy, do you have a list yet of what those datapacks he had might have been?”
“Near as I can tell, all he accessed from the Amity were the navigational locator program and the full Cygni Telescope stellar mapping list,” Kennedy said. “Plus the Arachne data he gave Yamoto. She told us he took six datapacks with him, which would be about right for dumps of the nav and Cygni packages.” She eyed Roman. “Which implies to me that whichever of these stars he Jumped to was just a transition point to somewhere else.”
Roman nodded, his throat tight with frustration and bitterness. He’d already come to the same depressing conclusion… and if Ferrol was doing a multi-stage Jump here, then he was gone. Period.
His console two-toned a proximity alert: the Amity was coming alongside Yamoto’s lifeboat. “Kennedy, have the hangar doors opened; as soon as we’ve matched velocities Yamoto can go ahead and bring the boat in.”
And when she was aboard, he knew, the decision would have to be made. Whether to fight the massive probabilities stacked against them and try and go after Ferrol, or to accept that any such attempt would be a useless gesture.
To accept that, whatever Ferrol was up to, he’d won.
I should have stopped him, Roman thought wearily. And he could have done it, too—that was what galled the most. He could have had Ferrol off his ship right from the very beginning, or at any point since then. It was his own damn fault—all of it.
The intercom pinged. “Rro-maa?”
Roman looked down at the lopsided alien face. Here it comes, he thought, bracing himself. The accusation—delivered, no doubt, in the usual quiet/polite Tampy manner—that through lack of foresight or simple plain stupidity he’d just lost them a priceless space horse calf… “Yes, Rrin-saa, what is it?” he said.
“Is it your wish that we follow Ffe-rho?”
“It’s hardly a question of wishes at this point, Rrin-saa,” he growled. So that was how the Tampies were going to play this. Nothing so crass as accusing the captain outright of negligence; Rrin-saa was simply going to throw out innocent-sounding questions until Roman wound up confessing the fact on his own. “Ferrol and Epilog are long gone.” He raised his eyebrows. “Unless, of course, you’d happen to know where they went.”
“I do not,” Rrin-saa said. “But Sleipnninni does.”
Roman stared at the screen. The question had been nothing but pure sarcasm…
“Say again?”
“Sleipnninni knows where Epilog has gone,” Rrin-saa said. “He can follow, if you wish.”
Roman glanced up, caught Marlowe’s disbelieving frown, looked back down again.
“I don’t understand,” he told Rrin-saa. “Epilog Jumped six hours ago. How can Sleipnir possibly know where it went?”
“I do not know,” Rrin-saa said. “I know that he knows; that is all.”
Roman rubbed thumb and forefinger together, looked up again. “Marlowe?
Opinion?”
The other shook his head. “You got me, sir. Sounds like pure voodoo.”
“Does, doesn’t it?” he agreed. “Kennedy?”
She shrugged. “I’d vote voodoo, too,” she said. “But on the other hand, what have we got to lose?”