Warhorse (31 page)

“I'll be leaving the
Defiance
in two hours,” Ferrol told him, successfully fighting the automatic urge to apologize. For once he wasn't going to let the Senator put him on the defensive right from word one. “Sometime in the next twelve hours
Amity
'll get her orders, and it'll be off to God knows where, for God knows how long. Breaking up a meeting was the only way I was ever going to get to talk to you.”

The Senator lifted an eyebrow. “And what makes you think we have anything to talk about?”

For a long minute Ferrol stared at him. “I don't understand.”

The Senator's lip twisted. “Then let me spell it out in block letters: you, Chayne, are no longer in my service.”

Ferrol felt his mouth fall open. “What?” he whispered. “But…why not?”

“Does it matter?” the other asked.

Ferrol swallowed hard, moisture in his eyes making the room swim. The air around him had turned abruptly cold, filled with ice and disapproval and contempt. Suddenly he was a child again, facing his father's anger.…

He fought the feeling back. He was not a child, and the man facing him was not his father. “Yes,” he gritted out between clenched teeth—clenched so that they wouldn't chatter with emotion. “It matters. For years now I've been one of your best agents—”

“ ‘Best'?” The Senator snorted in a genteel sort of way. “Oh, come now, Chayne, you don't even fool yourself on
that
one. You were useful, certainly, but hardly one of the best. That status takes far more years of experience than you've even been alive.”

“And I won't be having any more of that experience now, will I?” Ferrol countered. The helpless childlike feeling was fading, leaving behind a growing anger. “Why?”

“For one thing, there's a little matter of confidence,” the Senator said, his manner shifting abruptly from daunting to idly offhanded. Perhaps he'd recognized the other approach wasn't working. “When an agent of mine freely offers classified information to an opponent—well, I'm sure you can see how that could make me reluctant to keep such an agent on.”

It took Ferrol a second to realize just what the hell the other was talking about. “Senator, we were facing a life and death situation out there,” he growled. “Would you rather I have played dumb with Kheslav's data and let the shark eat
Amity
and me both?”

“From what Captain Roman has testified, Kheslav's data didn't really seem to help him much.”

“No, it didn't,” Ferrol conceded. “But that was hardly something I could have known in advance.”

“Perhaps. The fact remains that the datapack was private information, and that you had no business possessing a copy of it in the first place.”

“And that's the
real
issue here, isn't it,” Ferrol said. “The fact that I had illegally obtained information that could be traced to you.”

He expected a reaction of some sort—anger, caution;
something
that would give him a glimpse into what the other was thinking. But as usual, the Senator denied him even that much. “Illegally obtained?” he asked mildly. “Come now, Chayne—how on Earth can information about a creature orbiting an unclaimed planet be illegally obtained? And as for tracing it back to me, don't be absurd. I cover my tracks better than
that
.” The Senator shook his head. “No, Chayne, the real issue here, as you put it, is not whether you and your past activities—any of them—can be linked to me. It's not even whether or not I can still trust you to function on my behalf; I really only brought up the Kheslav thing to air my disappointment with how you handled the situation. The
real
issue—” he paused dramatically—“is that we've won.”

Ferrol frowned. “What do you mean, we've won? Won what?”

“Our undeclared, non-shooting war with the Tampies, of course,” the other said. “Come now; surely the implications of these sharks on space horse transport haven't been lost on you.”

“There are implications there, all right,” Ferrol nodded, “but not the ones you seem to be thinking of. The sharks didn't just spring up last week out of sawdust somewhere, and if the Tampies have been running space horses all these centuries without bumping into them, they must be pretty rare. At least around here.”

“Agreed; but their abundance or lack of it may not be the important factor. According to Captain Roman's testimony, the Tampies have a rather lopsided sense of almost contractual responsibility toward their space horses, to the extent that they'll let the animals go free if they feel their side of the bargain has been violated. Whatever the hell kind of bargain you can make with a non-intelligent animal, that is,” he added with dimly veiled contempt.

So that was why Roman and Rrin-saa had turned Quentin loose…and perhaps why Roman had been so evasive to Ferrol about his reasons. If the mere existence of the sharks could really induce the Tampies to dismantle their space-going capability… “So what are you going to do?” he asked. “Web a shark and drag it to the Tampies' Kialinninni corral system?”

The Senator smiled dimly. “Give me credit for a
little
common sense, Chayne,” he said dryly. “Besides which, I don't think anything that drastic or dangerous will be necessary. The sharks are predators, after all, and predators must have
some
way of locating their prey. In time, they'll find Kialinninni on their own.”

“At which point we settle for a draw.”

The Senator lifted an eyebrow. “Meaning…?”

“Meaning no space horses for us
or
for the Tampies. They'll be stuck inside their systems, and we'll be stuck with our Mitsuushi snaildrive.”

The Senator's face darkened. “At least we'll have the stars.”

“Some of them. Not very many.”

“We'll have enough,” the other said firmly. “All the planets we'll ever need are within our reach right now. Provided, that is, we don't have the Tampies standing over us telling us what we can and cannot do with them.”

Ferrol's thoughts flashed back to the discoveries
Amity
had brought back from its first voyage—discoveries that had been overshadowed in both public and official minds by the excitement of Pegasus' calving. “Oh, we'll have enough room, all right,” he snorted. “But we'll be giving up the rest of the universe in the process. And maybe for nothing. Now that we know about sharks, the problems Demothi and everyone before him has had trying to control space horses make sense.”

“Yes; your ‘predator invading a non-predator's mind' theory,” the Senator said. “You brought that up about every third question. So what do you suggest we do?—web a shark and offer Demothi a chance to ride it?”

Ferrol clamped his mouth shut, the presentation he'd so carefully prepared and rehearsed over the past two days dying in his throat. The Senator was truly and totally uninterested in obtaining space horse capabilities for the Cordonale; his only interest was in robbing the Tampies of theirs. Period.

Had that always been his goal? Probably. Dimly, Ferrol wondered why he'd never recognized that. “Given your obvious disinterest,” he said tightly, “I suppose there's really nothing to discuss.”

“As I said when you came in,” the Senator reminded him, standing up. “Now if you'll excuse me—”

“I presume my commission with the
Amity
is still valid,” Ferrol continued, not moving. “If only because dropping me out now might attract unwelcome attention. So. What about my ship?”

The Senator frowned. “What ship is—? Oh, you mean the
Scapa Flow.
What about it?”

“You told me when I signed onto the
Amity
that you'd be using it for private courier work,” he reminded the other. “Is that agreement still valid, or are all of my crewers officially off the payroll now, too?”

The other favored him with a long, speculative look. “I've never been impressed by people who try to keep their foot in the door on their way out,” he said coldly.

“I have no interest whatsoever in keeping my foot in with you,” Ferrol countered, matching the Senator's tone. “I'm interested solely in the well-being of my crew. You owe them some measure of financial security, at least as long as I'm still watching out for your interests aboard the
Amity
.”

The Senator's lip twisted, but he nodded. “I
owe
them nothing; but I suppose I can go ahead and buy out their contract. If that will be satisfactory…?” he added with thinly veiled sarcasm.

“Quite satisfactory,” Ferrol nodded in return, getting to his feet. “Thank you, Senator; and for your time, as well.” He turned to go—

“Chayne?”

He turned back. “Yes?”

“If I were you,” the other said quietly, “I wouldn't count on the
Amity
remaining in service for too much longer.”

Ferrol stared at him. “I don't understand.”

The Senator smiled faintly. “You will.”

Two hours later Ferrol left the
Defiance
with the others and headed back toward the
Amity.
It was a long shuttle ride, which was fine with him. It gave him time to think.

An hour after arriving at the
Amity
, he was in the ship's main communications room with a short, laboriously hand-coded message.

Even with their skyhook prices, the Cordonale's tachyon transceivers were normally so jammed with messages that delays of twenty-four to forty-eight hours were not uncommon. But Ferrol's status as exec of a major Starforce ship gave him an impressive priority factor, and barely thirty minutes later the central Earth transceiver relayed an acknowledgment of the message from the
Scapa Flow.

The Senator might be willing to settle for a draw. Ferrol wasn't…and if no one else was interested, then he and the
Scapa Flow
would just have to do it on their own.

F
OR THE NEXT FOUR
days the
Amity
remained in Earth orbit, waiting for orders, while conflicting rumors as to what those orders might be swept through the ship like a sequential set of gas leaks. When they finally came, it was a distinct anticlimax:
Amity
would return to Solomon to trade Man o' War for its next space horse. The breeding program, apparently, would continue.

They were back in Solomon system an hour later, and within a few more had made orbit around the planet. There they were met by a Tampy ship and the cumbersome but reasonably straightforward process of switching space horses was performed. Man o' War and the Tampy ship left, leaving Sso-ngii and the other Handlers to settle in for a few hours of taking turns under the amplifier helmet—introducing themselves to the newcomer, Rrin-saa had once tried to explain it. The same hours on
Amity
's human half were considerably less filled, with activities consisting mainly of last minute checks, idle conversation, and practice in saying “Sleipnir” instead of “Man o' War” when referring to the source of the ship's main motive power.

Several days were normally allotted for the welcoming/acclimation procedure. But Sleipnir was a quick study; or else the extensive practice
Amity
's assembly-line schedule had forced on its Handlers was beginning to pay off. Whichever, within a single day—less than forty-eight hours after leaving Earth—
Amity
was ready.

And for the next six weeks, as per orders, that was how it remained. In Solomon orbit, and ready.

“Sorry to wake you, sir,” the bridge officer said apologetically. “But the overcode on this was marked ‘urgent.' Ë®

“That's all right,” Roman assured her, rubbing the last bits of sleep from his eyes and shrugging on a robe before switching on the intercom's visual. He keyed in to the laser comm circuit— “Solomon tachyon station, this is Captain Roman,” he identified himself. “Acceptance code follows.” He keyed the sequence into his terminal.

“Acknowledged,” the station said a few seconds later. “Beginning transmission.”

Roman leaned forward, mentally crossing his fingers. If this wasn't, in fact, some kind of orders—

TO RESEARCH SHIP
AMITY,
SOLOMON: FROM COMMANDER STARFORCE BORDERSHIPS EXTENSION, PRE-PYAT:

:::URGENT-ONE:::URGENT-ONE:::URGENT-ONE:::

HUMAN/TAMPLISSTA STUDY TEAM AT NCL
9862
OVERDUE.
AMITY
TO PROCEED IMMEDIATELY PREPYAT; CONTINUE ON TO
9862
WITH RESEARCH SHIPS
ATLANTIS, STARSEEKER,
AND
JNANA
IN TOW.

FURTHER INFORMATION AVAILABLE FROM RESEARCH SHIPS.

VICE-ADMIRAL MARCOSA, COMBOREX, PREPYAT CODE/ VER
*@7882//53

2:16
CMT///ESD
6
MAY
2336

Roman read the message twice, a cold chill settling into his stomach. There was something wrong here. Something
very
wrong…

“Any orders, sir?” the bridge officer's voice prompted. From her tone, it was clear she was desperately hoping there were some.

Roman took a deep breath. “Alert the Handler,” he told her. “We're Jumping to Prepyat as soon as he and Sleipnir are ready. Number One web crew to start prepping their equipment—we'll be taking three ships in tow, and we'll need to run tether lines to them.” He hesitated. “And wake Lieutenant Kennedy. Tell her I want her dressed and on the bridge in fifteen minutes.”

The three ships were grouped tightly together a hundred meters away from the
Amity
, holding to an almost perfect zero-vee-relative as the two web boats moved among them fixing tether lines. Standing on the velgrip beside the command station, Kennedy studied the activity on Roman's display. “Opinion, Lieutenant?” Roman asked her quietly.