Warhorse (42 page)

Keying off, bracing himself, he looked at Roman. Once again, the other passed up the opportunity to gloat. “Thank you, Commander,” Roman said gravely.

Ferrol nodded acknowledgment. He'd been right: he did, indeed, feel like a damn fool. “With your permission, sir,” he said, trying to keep his voice from trembling, “I'll confine myself to quarters until you're ready for the
Scapa Flow
to clear away the vultures.”

He started to get to his feet; paused as Roman waved him back. “Lieutenant, what's the Jump situation?” the captain asked, turning to Kennedy. “Are we too deep in the gravity well to get out of the system?”

She shook her head. “Not really, though we'll scorch
Amity
's hull pretty good no matter where we Jump to from here.” She looked at Ferrol. “But Ferrol was right about one thing: if we ever had time to call up help from the Starforce, we don't any more.”

Roman nodded slowly, his thumb and forefinger rubbing gently together as his eyes stared at nothing in particular. “In that case—” He stood up. “It's time we got back to the bridge. You included, Commander.”

Ferrol got to his feet, feeling his stomach tighten up again. To have to face the rest of the bridge crew again… “Yes, sir,” he said. “I'll have the
Scapa Flow
get ready.”

“Thank you,” Roman shook his head, “but I don't believe we'll be needing their services just yet. We still have an errand of mercy to carry out before we can leave.”

Ferrol stared at him…and suddenly he understood. “You mean we're going to turn all the space horses loose anyway?”

Roman eyed him, a tight smile playing at the corners of his mouth. “As I told you yesterday, Commander, I've learned a great deal about your character and judgment over the past year. You've hated the Tampies for a long time; but through all that you've never hated the space horses themselves.” He nodded toward the viewport, and the distant corral beyond it. “Your instinct toward the space horses was one of mercy. I'm willing to trust instincts like that.”

Ferrol nodded, as if he genuinely understood. For two whole minutes there he'd felt he knew exactly where he stood with respect to Roman, the Tampies, and the universe at large. Now, once again, he was totally lost. “I see, sir,” was all he could think of to say.

“Good,” Roman said, moving toward the door. “Let's get going, then. By my count we have about forty minutes until we reach the corral. You, Commander, have just that long to find us a way to punch a hole in it.”

“Just about ready here,” Demarco's voice came through the speaker on Ferrol's console. “Townne and Hlinka have the cables hooked up to the corral mesh, and they're coming back in. Main capacitors showing full charge, backups showing ninety-eight percent.”

“Acknowledged.” Ferrol looked over his shoulder at Roman. “It'll be just another minute, Captain.”

Roman nodded and looked over at Marlowe. “ETA on the sharks?”

“Twenty-eight minutes for the leader,” the other said tightly. “A few minutes later for the others.”

Ferrol looked at his tactical display, feeling an odd mixture of frustration and melancholy. There were a total of ten Tampy ships harassing the sharks now, but for all the effect they'd had on the predators' progress they might just as well have stayed away. The sharks were still coming, the Tampies' clumsy snare webbing hanging uselessly off their vulture vanguards or else simply vanished long behind them. Still coming…and on
Amity
's other side, the corralled space horses very clearly knew it. Their restless milling about the enclosure had ceased; now, as if somehow divining what the
Amity
and
Scapa Flow
had in mind, they were pressed abnormally close together around the spot where, if all went well, a section of their cage was about to be vaporized.

And when that happened…

Ferrol bit at his lip, eyes suddenly brimming with moisture. In the wake of his confrontation with Roman and Kennedy everything he'd ever known or thought he'd known about the Tampies had collapsed into chaos, leaving his emotions far too tangled for him to really know anymore how he felt about them. But amid all the turmoil one fact stood out crystal clear.

The Senator, with all his cold-blooded conniving, had won. And the thought of that made Ferrol ill.

“Backup at full,” Demarco said. “All boards show green.”

Angrily, Ferrol blinked the moisture from his eyes. “They're ready, Captain,” he said, not turning around.

“Very good, Commander,” the other said, his voice steady. “You may give the order.”

Ferrol gritted his teeth, shifting his attention to the visual display. “All right, Mal. Get ready…fire.”

From the radio came the faint
crack
of the
Scapa Flow
's capacitors; and on the visual a faint spiderweb of brilliant blue coronal discharge abruptly appeared as the massive jolt of current vaporized a half-dozen square kilometers of webbing. For a second the blue light illuminated the dark masses grouped silently behind it. Then the spiderweb was gone…and in the dim red light of the dwarf star Ferrol could see the masses moving toward the opening.

At the helm, Kennedy exhaled audibly. “There it is,” she murmured. “The end of an era.”

Ferrol nodded. They were beginning to flow through the gap now, the individual space horses making up the mass angling off in all directions as soon as they were clear of the webbing. He glanced at the tactical, wondering vaguely if the Tampies running before the sharks out there had noticed that their precious herd had been stampeded. Wondered if they would see it as a betrayal, or as a painful but necessary kindness.

He didn't know. For that matter, he didn't even know which way he'd originally meant it.

So much
, he thought bitterly,
for trustworthy instincts.

“They can come back,” Marlowe said. But not as if he believed it. “They got to space once before without the space horses. Surely they can do it again.”

Ferrol turned to see Kennedy shake her head. “Not without our help,” she said. “The first time was a fluke—a space horse wandered into one of their systems and stayed there long enough for them to figure out how to catch it. They've never had any mechanical StarDrive of their own.”

“We can hope they had enough foresight to keep a few of their space horses out of this fight,” Roman said. “On the other hand…” He hesitated, a muscle in his cheek twitching once.

“Quentin?” Ferrol said quietly.

Almost reluctantly, Roman nodded. “It may not really matter how many they come out of this with,” he agreed soberly. “The very fact that there are creatures out there they can't defend their space horses against may force them to turn the last ones loose anyway.”

For a minute the bridge was silent. The logjam at the exit hole had cleared out now, Ferrol saw, and the fifty or so space horses that still remained inside were flowing smoothly and swiftly out. In seven hundred years, he'd heard once, none of the Tampies' space horses had ever died…which meant it had taken them all seven hundred of those years to assemble this stock.

And now they were all leaving; chunks of lumpy air from a punctured balloon. The end of an era, indeed.

“And speaking of ships without a mechanical StarDrive,” Roman said into his thoughts, “it's time we cleared away those vultures and got out of here ourselves. Commander?”

“Yes, sir.” Ferrol took a deep breath, watching the tactical as he keyed the radio. “
Amity
to
Scapa Flow
, Mal, we're pulling out. Get the net guns ready, and then—”

He broke off. Something on the tactical display…

“What is it?” Roman asked, his voice frowning.

Ferrol stared at the display, wondering if he was imagining things. But there was no mistake. The newly freed space horses, which had been angling sharply away from the approaching sharks' trajectory as they left the corral, had begun to curve back inward toward that vector again. “Captain, take a look at the tactical,” he said carefully. “The escaping space horses…aren't escaping.”

He turned to find Roman frowning at his own displays. For a moment their gazes locked— “Kennedy, are they still in too close to the star to Jump?”

Slowly, she shook her head. “I don't think so, sir,” she said. “Not given what we now know about how much heat and radiation they can handle.”

“They've each picked up an optical net,” Marlowe pointed out doubtfully. “Maybe…” He trailed off.

“But they're not running away.” Kennedy looked over her shoulder at Roman, a vaguely stunned expression on her face. “They're going to
attack
.”

Roman looked at her a moment; then, abruptly, reached for his console. “
Amity
to Tampy ships,” he called. “This is Captain Roman. Pull out of there, right now. You're about to be crushed by your own space horses.”

His answer was a burst of unintelligible whinelike squeaks and moans. “Damn,” he swore under his breath.

“Tie Rrin-saa into the line,” Ferrol suggested. “He can translate for you.”

Roman nodded, already keying for intercom. Ferrol shifted his attention back to the tactical; and a minute later the Tampy space horses began to veer away out of the sharks' path. Out of the sharks' path, and toward the loose sphere of space horses now closing in on the predators like a giant fist. “Make sure all recorders are on,” he told Marlowe. “We're going to want to get all of this.”

And the battle began.

It was, to Ferrol's mind, a surprisingly leisurely confrontation; but perhaps all the more awesome for its slow, inexorable pace. Even as the Tampy ships reached the contracting sphere of space horses the sharks were breaking their own flying formation, angling outward to face their attackers like the fingers of an opening hand. Between the two groups, the vultures swarmed about like smoke in random cross breezes, either unable to maintain their optical nets in the face of the assault or else simply being thrown about by conflicting telekinetic forces.

Without warning, the
Amity
jerked, jamming Ferrol back into his seat. “Rrin-saa!” Roman snapped. “What was that?”

“Sleipnninni wishes to join,” the Tampy's voice came faintly over the intercom. “Sso-ngii is having trouble holding him.”

“He has to,” Roman told him. “We can't risk dragging the
Amity
into the middle of something like that. Change Handlers if Sso-ngii can't hold on—double up if you have to—but
keep Sleipnir here.
Is that understood?”

“Your wishes are ours.”

Kennedy half turned. “We may be fighting a losing battle, Captain,” she said tightly. “The other Tampy space horses have gone back in, too.”

Ferrol swallowed hard. Kennedy was right: freed of the immediate threat of being the closest ones to the sharks, they'd now turned around to join the shrinking sphere, their tethered ships dragged helplessly along behind them like so much tinsel. Like Sleipnir, sensing somehow the group blood lust; unlike Sleipnir, too close to the center to have a hope of ignoring it.

The sphere continued to close…and then, moving in unison, the sharks abruptly veered off their vector, angling toward an edge of the sphere as if attempting to punch their way out. The space horses countered instantly, twenty or so of them shifting over toward the intersect point. Bolstering the forces at that flank…and as he watched the maneuver Ferrol felt a shiver run up his back at the irony of it all.

His dream, scoffed at by everyone from the Senator on down, of creating a fleet of warhorses…

On the tactical, the sharks again changed direction. “They're running,” Kennedy said.

“Or trying to,” Roman corrected grimly as the space horses again shifted to counter the move. “Marlowe, are you getting any indication as to what exactly they're fighting with?”

“No, sir,” Marlowe shook his head. “I'd guess they're all trying to choke or bludgeon each other to death with telekinesis, but we haven't got any instruments that can confirm—”

He broke off as the
Amity
twitched again. “Rro-maa?”

“I'm here, Rrin-saa,” Roman answered. “Still having trouble?”

“Sso-ngii and Hhom-jee cannot hold Sleipnninni for much longer,” the Tampy said, his voice very alien. “He is driven, his mind closed to all else. As if, perhaps, in
perasiata
.”

Ferrol hissed soundlessly between his teeth, throwing a glance at the intercom. The Tampies' first definition of
perasiata
had been as a sort of coma; two hours ago, they'd used the term for Sleipnir's panic reaction to the approaching sharks; and now it had become a berserker-type rage. The same word, for three entirely different reactions…Perhaps, he thought, the Tampies didn't know nearly as much about space horses as they thought they did.

He looked back at the tactical, at the sedate dance of death taking place out there. No; they really
didn't
know as much as they thought they did.

“Tell them they have to hold Sleipnir as long as they can,” Roman was saying to Rrin-saa. “At least for another few minutes. Near as we can tell, the space horses are winning out there, but—”

“I'll be damned.”

Ferrol twisted around. Kennedy's voice had been little more than a whisper, but there'd been something in her tone…“What is it?” Roman asked.

Kennedy took a deep breath. “I believe the battle's over, Captain,” she said, the words coming out with—for Kennedy—unusual difficulty. “As good as over, anyway.”

Ferrol glanced back to see Roman frown at his displays. “Explain.”

She nodded toward her displays. “Look at the vultures,” she said quietly. “It's hard to see—the space horses are blocking most of the view. But you can see enough.”