Warhorse (11 page)

No
, he told himself. He had to let the mission run its course; had to let
Amity
's crew demolish this last feeble attempt to prove that humans and Tampies could be anything but bitter enemies. A draw would only lead to more stalling on the pro-Tampies' part.

In fact—it suddenly occurred to him—that might even be what Roman was going for with this harassment. Trying to push him into making his move in hopes of that draw, or even of a pro-Tampy backlash.

Ferrol smiled tightly.
Sorry, Captain, but it's not going to be quite that easy.
He would do all that he was told, be a model exec…and wait.

The hangar crew proved ready to receive the lander. With things under control there, and with no particular interest in hanging around waiting for the landing party to make its appearance, Ferrol headed to the survey section's lab complex for a quick check of the lockbox facilities. The scientists and techs there also seemed prepared, though he found he was forced to take their word for most of the technical details; and by the time he returned once more to the hangar the lander had arrived.

“Dr. Sanderson,” he greeted the party's leader as the latter emerged, awkward in the zero-gee as he aimed his feet toward the nearest velgrip patch. “I'm Commander Ferrol; I believe we met yesterday.”

“Yes,” the other nodded vaguely, his mind clearly on other things. “We've got the sample boxes back in the hold—can you get some people to help us carry them to the lab?”

From behind Ferrol the rotation alarm sounded. “If you'll wait a few minutes, Doctor,” he told Sanderson, “we'll have enough gravity to use one of the carts over there.”

“Yes, all right,” Sanderson said, moving to one side as the rest of his team began filing out of the lander. “I'm going ahead to get things ready; Steef—Dr. Burch—will show you how to unpack and load the boxes.”

Ferrol swallowed the retort that came to mind. “Yes, Doctor,” he said instead.

Sanderson nodded again and took off toward the hangar door without another word, and Ferrol headed around to the aft hold door. Unsealing it, he stepped high over the rubber-edged sill and went inside.

The landing party had indeed been busy down there. Packed beneath the cargo netting were nine fifty-liter sample boxes, wedged in together with the remains of the ruined analysis table. Ferrol's lip twisted at the sight of the latter; he was looking forward to seeing how the captain would phrase this one in his log. Unfastening the cargo netting, he guided the mesh as it retracted onto its spool. A movement of air brushed the back of his neck, and he turned—

To find a Tampy standing not thirty centimeters away.

Face to face with a Tampy, for the first time since Prometheus…and in an instant all of his careful mental preparation for this moment collapsed. The lopsided face seemed to press in on him—the slight rasp of the alien's breathing echoed in the enclosed space—the whiff of bitter-sour body odor curdled his stomach—

And as the red haze of memory and anger faded from before his eyes he saw that the Tampy had disappeared. And that there were the sounds of confusion and shock from outside the lander. And that the knuckles of his right fist were tingling…

Damn.

He stepped to the hold door, just in time to see Burch and Llos-tlaa helping the other Tampy back to his feet in the low gravity. A reddish splotch was already becoming visible to the left of the other's twisted mouth. Burch looked up at Ferrol, a disbelieving look on his face. “What happened here?” he asked.

Ferrol took a careful breath, his muscles starting to tremble with adrenaline reaction.
I need to apologize
, he knew; but even as he opened his mouth to do so the words seemed to stick in his throat. To say he was sorry—sorry!—for hitting one of the race that had stolen his home—

“It is all right,” the Tampy grated, raising a hand to stroke his jaw where Ferrol had hit him. “I am not hurt. It is all right.”

Ferrol clenched his teeth, a hint of the blind rage returning to haze his vision. Of course the Tampy was “all right”—he'd say the same from a sick bay bed if he had to. The Tampies were on
Amity
to score points, and proving how good they were at turning the other cheek was the obvious way to twist Ferrol's unthinking reaction back against him.

And he was damned if he was going to add to their warm charitable glow by pretending he was sorry. “Next time don't sneak up on me like that,” he told the alien shortly. “Dr. Burch, whenever you're ready I'll give you a hand with these boxes.”

Burch threw a look at Llos-tlaa. “Ah…right,” he said. “Sure.” With a slight hesitation, and clearly keeping a cautious eye on his coworker, he left the Tampies and joined Ferrol in the hold.

They worked together in silence, removing the boxes from the hold and stacking them outside on the hangar deck. Peyton appeared halfway through the job, but with the cramped conditions making it no more than a two-man job her contribution consisted mainly of fetching a cart from the hangar bulkhead and repeatedly warning them not to step on what was left of her analysis table. Full weight had returned by the time they finished loading the cart, and with Ferrol at the controls they headed toward the lab complex.

They were halfway there before Burch finally spoke. “Why'd you hit Ttra-mii?” he asked, his voice forced-casual.

“I don't like Tampies,” Ferrol said.

“How come? If you don't mind talking about it, that is?”

“As a matter of fact, I
do
mind,” Ferrol said.

He glanced, looked over in time to see Burch swallow. “Ah,” the other said, a bit lamely.

“There's a lot of really interesting stuff down there to study,” Peyton spoke up, clearly trying to steer the conversation onto safer territory. “Were you monitoring us, Commander?”

“I did the computer-scrub on the rabbit's transformation,” Ferrol reminded her.

She reddened slightly. “Oh, yes.”

A pang of guilt poked a small hole in Ferrol's conscience. There was no reason to make this so awkward for Burch and Peyton—it wasn't the scientists he was angry with, after all. On the contrary, it could easily be
Amity
's survey section who would have the best chance of ultimately seeing through the Tampies' facade of peaceful friendliness. Giving them the impression that all anti-Tampies were violent coma-brains would only make it that much harder for them to accept the truth when the facade finally broke. “Those memory-plastic skeletons look particularly intriguing,” he commented. “You think you'll be able to duplicate the material?”

“Oh, sure,” Burch assured him. “If there's one thing human biotechnology has gotten down pat, it's the duplication of interesting molecules and biochemical systems.”

Peyton snorted gently. “Though there's always the tendency to forget that the whole is more than just a collection of commercially useful parts. The Tampies are right about
that
, at least.”

Burch threw her an annoyed look. “Philosophies of life aside, it
is
the commercial results that pay for trips like this, of course.”

“And there should be plenty of that to go around,” Peyton said with a sigh. “Between the memory-skeletons and the organic electric field oscillators we should bring back more than enough to keep the Senate budget watchdogs happy.”

“Even though the Tampies get to keep everything we can't find in the next two weeks?” Ferrol murmured.

Burch hissed gently between his teeth. “Even then,” he said. But he didn't say it like he believed it.

Peyton steered the conversation back to the wonders of Alpha's ecology and animal life after that, and neither the Tampies nor their philosophies were mentioned again before Ferrol helped load the samples into the lockbox lab and took his leave. But it was enough. There would be no need for him to plant seeds of distrust or discontent among the scientists, he saw now—those doubts were clearly already there. His job now was to simply help water those seeds…a job a man on liaison duty would have ample opportunity to carry out over the next two months.

Heading down the corridor back to the bridge, he permitted himself a smile. No, he wouldn't need the envelope or the gun just yet. In fact, he might not need them at all. The way things were going, Captain Roman might wind up doing the bulk of Ferrol's work for him.

Unless
, he thought…and for a moment the smile slipped. Could that be exactly why Roman had given him this liaison job in the first place? To nurture anti-Tampy sentiment among the scientists?

Could Roman in fact be secretly on Ferrol's side?

No
, Ferrol told himself firmly.
Utterly impossible.
The Senator had seen Roman's psych profile, and Roman couldn't possibly have fooled the Starforce's soul-sifters that completely. He was pro-Tampy, all right, and he'd given Ferrol the liaison post either as punishment or else from some misguided idealistic belief that frequent contact with Tampies would somehow mellow his hatred of them. The fool.

Still…

Ferrol had intended to spend his off-duty time the next few days trying to get access to the crew psych files anyway. Assuming he was able to get in, it wouldn't hurt to take a look for himself at Roman's profile. Just to make sure.

F
ERROL HAD FULLY EXPECTED
some kind of official response from Roman over his flooring of the Tampy in the hangar—anything from a blistering reprimand to temporary confinement to quarters or even a complete stripping of rank and imprisonment. To his surprise, though, the captain never even mentioned the incident. Perhaps the popular image of Tampies as cheek-turning forgive-and-forgetters had rubbed off on him; or perhaps he was afraid of making a martyr out of
Amity
's leading anti-Tampy figure. The latter wasn't an unreasonable fear, to Ferrol's mind—emotional reactions and their manipulation could be tricky things to handle, and Roman didn't seem the type to have cultivated such a talent.

Or else Burch and the Tampies, for reasons of tact or point-making, had simply never reported it. It was, he eventually decided, as good an explanation as any.

They spent another two weeks circling Alpha, watching from orbit as the landing parties poked around the planet's desert, forest, and Alpine environments, oohing and ahing at everything in sight. The “Lorelei sticks”—as Dr. Tenzing dubbed the oversized electronic tent stakes
Amity
's techs came up with—worked beautifully, their oscillating electric fields either decoying Alpha's predators away from the landing parties or else leading them directly to net traps, whichever Sanderson's people wanted at a given moment. By the time Pegasus pulled them out of orbit toward deep space the first lab was, as predicted, loaded literally to the ceiling with sample boxes.

The Jump to Beta system went off perfectly, as did the subsequent fifty-hour drive through normal space to the target planet itself. This time Ferrol kept close track of the acceleration/deceleration profile; to his mild surprise, Pegasus held solidly to the 0.9 gee Roman had ordered, never varying more than half a percent from that acceleration. It was a striking and sobering example of just how strong and efficient the Handler/space horse bond really was…an efficiency that was going to be a serious problem for humanity when the war finally came.

The second target world on their list, Beta, was about as different from Alpha as two planets could possibly be, but no less interesting for all that. Circling close in to a bright red-orange star, its life had evolved into exceptionally specialized forms inhabiting exceptionally specialized ecological niches. Specialized to such a degree, in fact, that the landing parties could often cross up to half a dozen distinct variants of a plant in a five-kilometer walk, with virtually no interpenetration between the types. Half of the samples they tried transplanting aboard ship died before
Amity
even left orbit, and few of the others lasted much longer.

It was an ideal pot for stirring up human/Tampy conflicts in, and the results were all Ferrol could have hoped for. With their carefully cultivated image as “Lord Protectors Of Nature” on the line, the Tampies were forced to continually protest the disturbing of such fragile ecological structures. There were sharp words from both sides, and frustration all around, and by the end of the first week there were no longer any Tampies heading down to the surface with Sanderson's landing parries.

Oddly enough, the boycott didn't seem to make any lasting dent in the scientists' own pro or anti attitudes. All the comments Ferrol overheard in his role as liaison indicated a generally tolerant understanding—even sympathy—for the aliens' point of view. In retrospect, he realized he should probably have expected that kind of reaction—even on Prometheus he'd noticed that the colonists who'd worked most closely with the Tampies were sometimes the most easily taken in by the aliens' big nobility act.

But if that kind of emotional infection had been what the pro-Tampies in the Senate had been banking on, they were in for a disappointment…because even as the scientists began mouthing Tampy philosophies and worrying aloud about bruising the grass they walked on, relationships between the Tampies and the rest of
Amity
's crew began a quiet but steady slide downhill.

The signs were there even before the Jump from Alpha system. There had been a fair amount of traffic between the two halves of the ship the first week—some of it simple curiosity, the rest probably an attempt by the pro-Tampies among the crew to stimulate friendly contact. But as curiosity was satisfied, and as Rrin-saa and the other Tampies continued to press Sanderson's people with holier-than-thou warnings against disturbing nature, the number of crewers playing tourist or goodwill ambassador dropped off nearly to zero. The Tampy boycott of the Beta landing parties did nothing to improve that, and by the time Pegasus pulled
Amity
out of orbit a spate of anti-Tampy jokes were beginning to make surreptitious rounds in areas of the ship not frequented by the scientists or senior officers.