“And besides,” Reese said softly, “you hoped the extra jolt might kill the calf?”
The bridge had gone silent. The charge, Ferrol knew, might indeed have killed the calf. The thought twisted his stomach… but he was damned if he was going to show that kind of sentimentality in front of Reese. “We captured that space horse,”
he told the other, biting out each word as if he really meant it. “If we don’t get it…
neither do the Tampies.”
Reese took a careful breath. “I see,” he said stiffly.
“I doubt that,” Ferrol told him. “But frankly, I don’t much care whether you do or don’t… and you’re excused from the bridge for the remainder of the voyage.”
His face rigid, Reese unstrapped and made his way back to the bridge door. “The Senator will hear about this,” he warned.
“I don’t doubt it,” Ferrol said. “At this point, I don’t much care about that, either.”
The door closed behind him, and Ferrol turned back to the main display with a tired sigh. It was, perhaps, the beginning of the end. Even the Scapa Flow’s backers no longer truly understood how thin the razor-edge was that the Cordonale was balanced on. Even they were starting to be lulled by the Tampy protestations of peace and friendship.
Or else they’d lost their nerve. Either way…
Either way, there was going to have to be some serious discussion when the Scapa Flow reached home.
Some very serious discussion indeed.
For a long moment the bridge was silent, with the kind of silence Roman usually associated with sheer stunned disbelief.
At least, that was what he himself was feeling. Disbelief… and a deep and personal chagrin.
The poacher had beaten him.
He took a deep breath. “Lieutenant Nussmeyer, did we get anything like a departure vector through all that?”
“Ah—I believe so, sir, yes,” the other said. “Though if he’s smart he won’t stay on that course for long.”
Roman focused on Nussmeyer’s profile. There was something that looked suspiciously like awe in the other’s face. “And you expect he is that smart, I gather?”
Nussmeyer flushed slightly. “Sorry, sir,” he said. “I just—” He waved a hand helplessly. “You can’t help but admire a man who takes a gamble that big and pulls it off.”
“I can’t?”
Nussmeyer flushed again and fell silent… but even as Roman looked around the bridge he saw that it was a losing battle. The poacher’s crack about their orders coming from the Tampies had subtly but noticeably shifted their sympathies—in his favor—that, along with the Tampy ship’s damnably bad timing in showing up when it did. It was just as well, Roman thought darkly, that there was no chance anyway of tracking the renegade down. It wouldn’t be an operation his crew could tackle wholeheartedly.
Damn the Tampies, anyway. Abruptly, he reached to his console, keyed the radio.
If the Tampies were here to keep tabs on his hunting—“Tampy ship, this is Captain Haml Roman aboard the C.S.S. Dryden,” he identified himself, his tone harsher than he’d intended it to be. “Your presence in this part of the system is not exactly conducive to our mission of hunting poachers. Would it be at all possible for you to shift your own operations elsewhere?”
“I hear,” the whining alien voice came promptly. “We conduct no operations here, Rro-maa; we bring a message for you from your people.”
Roman blinked. That wasn’t exactly the reply he’d been expecting. “I see. Go ahead, we’re ready to receive it.”
An indicator came on briefly and went off “Farewell,” the Tampy said, and a moment later vanished from the displays.
The message was short, but no less a bombshell for all that. Roman read it twice before raising his eyes from his screen. “Lieutenant, lay in a course back to Solomon,” he ordered Nussmeyer. “Head out as soon as the Mitsuushi’s ready to go.”
“Trouble?” Trent asked.
“I’m not sure,” Roman shook his head. “The message just says that we’re to return, that the refitting for the Amity project has been finished.”
Trent’s forehead furrowed. “That’s it? So what do they want from us?—a flyby to send it off?”
“Not really,” Roman said. “Mostly, what they want is me… to be Amity’s captain.”
Chapter 3
The courier ship that had brought Roman from Solomon to the Tampies’
Kialinninni system had been an old one, right on the edge of being retired or possibly a bit past it; and if appearances and the occasional creaking from the bracing struts were any indication, the shuttle now arrowing him toward Kialinninni’s sun and the Tampy space horse corral was of similar vintage. A
continual and sobering reminder that the Amity project was looked upon with scorn or even suspicion by a significant part of the Senate and Starforce… and that it was that faction that controlled the appropriations. “I hope,” he commented, “that the Amity’s in better shape than this thing.”
The pilot chuckled. Like the shuttle he, too, was unspectacular: a middle-aged lieutenant who’d apparently reached the peak of his capabilities years before and had just sort of stayed there. Unlike the hardware, though, there was something more beneath his surface; some quietly flickering flame of excitement or optimism that official contempt and slashed budgets had been unable to dampen.
Roman had seen such borderline-religious faith before among the more rabid pro- Tampy supporters. He had yet to decide whether he found it encouraging or frightening.
“Not to worry, sir,” the pilot assured him. “The Amity is a beauty—brand-new, topline in-system freighter, modified down centerline and out. You’ll have better equipment and accomodations than most anything flying. Certainly better than anything I’ve ever flown on.”
Which might not, of course, be saying much. “Glad to hear it,” Roman said, eyes searching the view out the shuttle’s control bubble. “Can we see it from here?”
“Just barely, sir,” the other said, touching the wraparound viewport. “That’s Amity over there—that line of reflected sunlight right at the edge of the corral.”
Roman frowned. “That’s part of the corral? I assumed that was the corral over there.” He pointed thirty degrees further to the left, where the edge of a cylindrical space station was visible in the dim red light. Beside it, the shapes of three space horses could be seen, with a small ship trailing behind each. Couriers, almost certainly; the Tampies had consistently refused the Cordonale’s offer of tachyon transceivers to handle their interstellar communication.
“Oh, that’s just the central part of it,” the lieutenant explained. “The Focus, they call it. It holds the administrative offices, quarters for on-duty Handlers, and the medical/scientific study center. The corral enclosure itself extends a good three hundred kilometers further in both directions.” He grinned. “Plenty of room for even space horses to get their exercise.”
Still frowning, Roman studied the indicated area. Sure enough, now that he was looking for them he could see a few space horses drifting individually around in what looked for all the world like empty space. “What keeps them in, netting mesh?”
“Mainly, sir. It’s a double thickness of netting, wrapped around a geodesic support framework that keeps it from losing its shape.”
Roman squinted at the dim red star. “So what keeps them from simply Jumping out? The fact that they’re at a low gravitational potential this close in to the star?”
“That’s part of it, sir,” the other said. “Jumps are between equipotential surfaces, and practically any star the space horses can see from here is a lot bigger and hotter. That’s why the Tampies put their corral in this system—the sun is cool but very dense, and any Jump from the enclosure would put the space horse pretty close to its target star. But there’s more.” He did something to the navigational display, and a schematic of a section of netting appeared. “Those nodules—at the framework intersections, here and here—those are the ends of lightpipes. The other ends are connected to lenses pointed outward at particular stars.”