Warhorse (27 page)

“Right.” Ferrol took a careful breath. “Let's do it, Kennedy.”

She nodded. “Move us out,” she ordered Wwis-khaa, who had taken Sso-ngii's place under the helmet. “Turn Quentin about thirty degrees port, seventeen nadir— big bluish star standing all alone.”

“Your wishes are ours.”

A minute later Quentin was in position, at least as well as Wwis-khaa could tell with the vultures' interference. “Missile ready,” Ferrol read off, mentally crossing his fingers. “Okay, Kennedy:
fire
.”

With a flash of maneuvering fire their creation crawled away from the lander. A minute later, the low-level fusion drive kicked in, sending the missile leaping outward like a scalded bat. It streaked past Quentin as Wwis-khaa twitched the calf aside; then, with the delicacy of a surgeon, the Tampy turned Quentin back again until the optical net was directly in line with the oncoming missile. Ferrol held his breath…and a second before impact the miniature star suddenly blossomed into a filigree of space horse webbing. At five hundred meters per second the human-rigged net collided with the vultures' optical one—

“Wwis-khaa!” Ferrol snapped, his eyes on the displays. “Do it!”

“Quentinninni cannot yet see the star,” the Tampy said.

“Damn!” Ferrol slammed an impotent fist onto the edge of the console, watching helplessly as the webbing swept through the mess of vultures without obvious effect. “It's not working. It's not
working
.”

“I see the problem,” Kennedy told him. “The webbing caught a bunch of them, all right, but before it could drag them clear the rest filled in the hole.”

Ferrol hissed between his teeth. “Yeah. Damn. And now they're wriggling out the open end and going back to the main swarm. We need three or four missiles, or one really big one, to make this work.”

“And a way to seal the end after it's collected them,” Kennedy added. “You copying all this,
Amity
?”

“We got it all,” Roman acknowledged. “I think you've got the right idea; we'll see if engineering and Tenzing's people can improve on the model. Hopefully before the shark catches up with us.”

Which would be fine for the
Amity,
Ferrol thought. But for them… “We've already used all the webbing we had aboard, Captain,” he told Roman.

“I assumed that,” the other said. “We'll think of something.”

“For starters,” Kennedy said, “there's no real point any more in our skulking around out here. Recommend we head in and meet you halfway.”

Roman seemed to ponder that. “That'll bring Quentin in uncomfortably close to the shark,” he pointed out. “Are you sure you want to risk that?”

“It's a damn sight better risk than hoping you can outrun the shark the whole way here,” Ferrol countered.

“Point,” the other conceded. “Yamoto?”

“Ready, sir,” was Yamoto's prompt reply. “Lieutenant?”

“Go,” Kennedy told her. Again the incoming-data light flicked on and off. “Got it.”

“Good,” Roman said. “Looks like a rendezvous of…an hour fifty minutes.”

With the projected shark intercept at just under two hours away. “Pretty tight,” Ferrol grunted. “Especially if the shark decides to speed up.”

“Yes, well, Man o' War can do six gees if necessary,” Roman reminded him.

And the shark could do seven…“There's one more thing you should do, Captain,” Ferrol said, the words coming out with difficulty. “In the underbed storage of my cabin is a lockbox—combination seven-two-seven-three-three. In it is a datapack—” he braced himself— “that shows the effects of excessive radiation and heat on space horses. If the shark's physiology is similar enough, the data may give you a handle on how to fight it.”

He held his breath, waiting with dread for the obvious question. But Roman had a better sense of priorities than that. “Thank you, Commander; I'll get it to the survey section right away,” he said. “Let's hope it helps.”

Ferrol nodded silently at the console, a hollow sensation in the pit of his stomach.
So much for secret politics and secret weapons
, he thought blackly. But this was a matter of survival—his and
Amity
's both. Just for once, politics could go to hell.

And if the Senator didn't like it, he could go to hell, too.

F
OUR GEES MEANT FOUR
times normal weight, which meant
Amity
's scientists had to work from acceleration couches, which in the past had usually prompted bitter complaints and long delays. But for once there were no complaints; and in less than half an hour the preliminary reports began coming in.

“It's two thousand fifteen meters long,” Tenzing told Roman, the intercom screen showing a familiar tapered-cylinder shape. “About two and a half times the length of the average space horse, with similar proportions. Sensory clusters are arranged in similar axial rings fore and aft, though from the diameter of each cluster it appears that the feeding orifices are proportionally much larger than those of space horses.” The diagram vanished, replaced by Tenzing's drawn face.

Roman grimaced. “So if current theory is right about telekene strength scaling with volume, we're talking a creature fifteen times stronger than Man o' War.”

Tenzing nodded heavily. “We can hope it's not that bad, but it's certainly bad enough. The lander's data proves that much.”

“Agreed. What about the vultures?”

Tenzing shrugged as best he could in four gees. “The shark seems to be covered with the things,” he said. “It appears my ramora theory was at least partly right.”

“Except that in this case the scavengers play an active part in the hunt.”

“Right,” Tenzing agreed. “And that's going to give us some trouble. We estimate the shark's carrying about four times as many vultures as we've got sitting in front of Man o' War right now. That's considerably more than the net missile we're building will be able to web up, particularly if they come at us in waves.”

Roman rubbed his chin thoughtfully: “Though as long as the waves come in far enough apart to give us a Jump window, the trick should still work.”

“Maybe,” Tenzing said. “Depends some on how close the shark is to us at the time—and on what, if anything, it can do to counter the web missile.”

And that was, indeed, what it all ultimately came down to: whether the shark was instinct-controlled, or whether it possessed a genuine, creative intelligence. “You think it can reason that way?” he asked Tenzing.

“Professional opinion?” Again, Tenzing shrugged. “I don't know, Captain, I really don't. Intelligence generally scales upward with brain size, but there's no rule that says it has to, and there are some major exceptions.” He nodded toward the display. “Your shark, here, retreated back to the dead space horse after its encounter with the lander; but then it must have left again right away to have been where it was when we first spotted it. So: did it fall back, do a little feeding, and then wander around licking its wounds? Or did it go back to collect the test of the vultures so as to have its full attack force ready for the unknown thing that had fought back so strangely?” He shook his head. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

Roman looked at the tactical display. Still an hour and twenty minutes to go till their rendezvous with the lander…and the shark was still closing. “What about the information in Commander Ferrol's datapack?” he asked Tenzing. “Anything there we can use?”

“Oh, there's plenty there,” Tenzing snorted. “Whether
we
can use it is something else entirely. It seems clear that heavy dosages—and I mean
heavy
dosages—of ionizing radiation and dense relativistic-particle fluxes can disable or kill space horses, with the sensory clusters being especially vulnerable. But
Amity
didn't come equipped with X-ray lasers and fine-tune particle accelerators.”

Roman nodded. “Lander? You getting all this?”

“Yes, sir,” Ferrol said a few seconds later, his voice grim. “Doesn't sound' especially hopeful, does it?”

“We're not dead yet,” Roman reminded him. “Engineering will have the drive at full power well before the shark reaches us, and there's enough particle radiation in there to give it at least a hefty slap in the face. And we're trying to build an X-ray laser from parts of the aft comm laser—theoretically, that's supposed to be possible.”

“I've seen it done,” Kennedy put in. “But even if
Amity
has all the necessary equipment, you almost certainly don't have the time that kind of conversion will take. Recommend you concentrate on rebuilding the laser for multi-pulse capability, and then use it to fire on the shark's sensory clusters.”

“We're already doing that with the spare comm laser,” Roman told her. “You have anything else, Dr. Tenzing?”

“As a matter of fact, I do,” the scientist said. “And for a change, this tidbit may actually turn out to be useful. It seems that our shark is a sprinter.”

Roman frowned. “Come again?”

“A sprinter,” Tenzing repeated. “As opposed to a long-distance runner. Here, I'll show you.” Tenzing's face vanished from the intercom again, to be replaced by a graph superimposed on a tactical diagram. “This is an analysis of the lander's scuffle with the shark,” he continued. “You'll note that the thing waited until the lander reached the closest approach to its position before attacking; and, furthermore, that tremendous seven-gee acceleration it chased them with was already dropping a minute or so before it grabbed Quentin. Even now—” the diagram changed— “you can see that the shark seems to be deliberately pacing itself, pulling just enough gees to keep gaining on us.”

“Interesting,” Roman said slowly as the display cleared and Tenzing's face came back on. “What you're saying is that, even though the shark is faster, there's actually a chance we can outrun it?”

“I'm not sure I'm saying
that
,” Tenzing cautioned. “Remember that we're talking about a predator here, Captain. Any predator that could be easily outrun by its prey wouldn't be a predator for very long.”

“Um,” Roman grunted. “Point. On the other hand, a predator might not expect its prey to slow down while being pursued, either. We've got a turnover and deceleration coming up; maybe that'll confuse it.”

“Maybe,” Tenzing said doubtfully. “I wouldn't count on in though.”

“I don't intend to,” Roman told him. “I'm hoping we can get clear from our optical nets before the shark runs us to ground. Lander, is your vulture squad still holding at twenty-seven kilometers?”

“Like it was nailed there,” Ferrol said.

“Same with ours,” Roman said. “Sitting just outside Man o' War's telekene range. So. Yamoto came up with this one a few minutes ago: what happens if we run Man o' War and Quentin nose to nose with each other?”

For a long moment the laser carrier hummed with silence. “What happens,” Ferrol said, his voice thoughtful, “is that, at fifty-four kilometers, the two optical nets intersect. Closer than that…the nets either have to pass through each other or else have to pull closer in to their individual targets. Either way, both sets have to eventually wind up inside somebody's telekene range.”

Roman nodded. “That was the same conclusion we came to,” he told Ferrol. “We'll find out for sure in…just under seventy-five minutes.”

“Unless, of course,” Tenzing warned, “the shark is smart enough to see what we're planning and moves in to cut us off before we get close enough.”

Roman grimaced. That was, indeed, the crucial question. “If so,” he said, “we'll find
that
out somewhat sooner.”

Privately, Roman still held on to the hope that the shark would be confused by
Amity
's turnover and deceleration; but it was a hope that died a quick and quiet death. Within thirty seconds of Man o' War's turnover, the shark had duplicated the maneuver, decelerating into a slightly altered course that
Amity
's computers indicated would bring it to zero-gee relative at almost exactly their own projected rendezvous point.

And thus it was down to a race. Sitting at his station, squeezed into his chair by four gees' worth of weight, Roman watched his displays, listened to the running commentary from the engineering and survey sections, and ran endless calculations. From all indications, the race was going to be very, very close.

“Got the lander on visual,” Marlowe announced, hunched over his displays. “Range, fifty-five kilometers. Our respective optical nets should pass each other any time now.”

As yet, the mass of vultures on Roman's tactical display showed no change. “Yamoto?—what's your reading on the shark?”

“Coming in fast,” she said, her voice fighting to be calm but not succeeding very well. “Range, two thousand kilometers; decelerating at five gees. We've got under five minutes if it holds that.”

“Lander?” Roman called.

“We're ready,” Ferrol said.

Roman tapped his intercom. “Hhom-jee?—
now
.”

Almost immediately there was a pull to the side as Man o' War began a gentle starboard turn. A minute later
Amity
straightened out again and continued on toward Quentin, who the tactical display showed had performed a similar circling maneuver. “Marlowe?—what's the lander's heading?”

“Projected as being dead-on to Deneb,” the other confirmed.

“Good. Ferrol, as soon as you get a clear window, go. If we're not there in two hours, continue on home.”

“Yes, sir.”

And this was it. Clenching his teeth, Roman returned his attention to the tactical display. “Optical nets intersecting,” he told Ferrol. “Starting to pass each other…no …no, cancel that—they're sticking together. Holding position in a single mass between us.”