“How about the rest of the hull?”
Marlowe’s cheek twitched. “In twenty minutes she’d start popping seams.”
Roman pursed his lips. “What about it, Kennedy?”
“No good, sir,” she replied, shaking her head carefully. “If I stay below eight gees we can’t make it in less than an hour. And any higher acceleration will just kill more of the Tampies.”
Which reminded him, he had some unpleasant news to break to the aliens. He’d have to make time for that soon. “What about putting extra shielding on the hull?” he asked Marlowe. “I know we’ve got some spare drive plates.”
Marlowe’s lips compressed briefly. “I doubt we’ve got enough spares to do any real good, sir, but I’ll check.” He hesitated, his eyes flicking to Kennedy, and for a moment he seemed to be teetering on the brink of saying something else. The uncertainty won, and he started to turn away—
“You worried about the nova, Lieutenant Marlowe?” Roman asked mildly.
The other seemed to stiffen, and the wince that crossed his face was probably not entirely due to sore muscles. Again his eyes went to Kennedy, a hint of pleading in them.
“I believe, sir,” Kennedy spoke up, “that the lieutenant wished to point out that the higher resistance of the drive section means we can head away from B anytime we wish to. We have adequate fuel left to do a straight-line drive all the way back to Pegasus, provided we don’t waste any of it on the way.”
Roman locked eyes with her. “That would leave fifty people stranded on Shadrach, of course,” he said. “Are you recommending that we abort the mission? Either of you?”
Just inside Roman’s peripheral vision, Marlowe looked thoroughly uncomfortable. Kennedy, directly under his gaze, didn’t flinch. “Not at this point, sir,” she said evenly. “But if we can’t get to them in thirty hours that will have to be my recommendation.”
The bridge had gone quiet again. “Consider it noted, Lieutenant,” Roman told her. “Let’s just hope it doesn’t come to that.”
“Yes, sir.”
She and Marlowe turned back to their consoles, and the background hum of conversation resumed…and Roman found himself studying the back of Kennedy’s head. Wishing her file had spelled out her previous military service a little more explicitly. She’d served on mainline warships, certainly; probably seen actual combat in one of the plethora of interplanet squabbles that had popped up with depressing regularity all over the Cordonale before the Tampy problem had taken everyone’s attention away from all such minor disagreements.
It was entirely possible she’d had to abandon people to death before.
He shivered. Yes, let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, he told himself fervently. So far he’d never been forced to send men to die, and he had no real interest in starting now.
And then memory hit him like a splash of ice water, and he felt his face warm with embarrassment and shame.
No, he hadn’t sent men to die. Just Tampies.
For a long moment he stared at his intercom, stomach muscles knotting painfully. But the call was long overdue, and putting it off any longer would only make it worse.
As usual, it was Rrin-saa who answered. “Rro-maa, yes?”
“Yes, Rrin-saa,” Roman nodded. “I wanted to offer my condolences on the deaths of eight of your people.”
“Eleven. Three more have died of internal injuries. We mourn them.”
Eleven. “I’m sorry; I didn’t know.” He hesitated. “I’m afraid there’s more bad news from the planet. It appears your research base here was completely destroyed by the first great flare.”
Rrin-saa gave the Tampy equivalent of a nod. “This is as expected.”
Roman frowned. “You already knew?”
Rrin-saa closed his eyes briefly. “If the Tamplissta had survived there would have been no need for a rescue, Rro-maa. They would have transported themselves and the humans alike to safety.”
“Oh. Of course.” Which meant, Roman realized, Rrin-saa and the others must have known or at least suspected as soon as the distress call came through. But he hadn’t bothered to ask their thoughts on the matter…and Tampies seldom volunteered such information. “Again, I’m sorry. I wish things had gone differently.”
“As do we. I must leave now, Rro-maa. The mourning continues.” The screen went dark.
Stolt’s face on the intercom screen looked haggard and vaguely uncertain—the face of a man juggling a dozen crises, all of them clamoring for immediate attention. But there was nothing vague or uncertain about his words. “There’s no way, Captain,” he said, shaking his head carefully. “Between the spare drive plates, shielding sections, and spray-on ablative material we’ve got maybe enough stuff to add two extra centimeters to the outer hull. Assuming, that is, that we could spread it all out evenly, which of course we can’t.”
Roman nodded heavily. “I didn’t think we’d have enough, but it seemed worth checking. Any progress on that reflector umbrella you proposed earlier?”
“We’re still doing simulations, but it’s not looking especially hopeful,” Stolt admitted. “Every material we try can handle either the light or the radiation, but not both. Woller’s setting up a trial with a multi-sandwiched sort of layering, but I’m not optimistic.”
“Captain?” Kennedy spoke up, turning to face him. “Would there be enough spare shielding to adequately cover a lifeboat?”
And then fly it across to Shadrach, cram the scientists in somehow and fly back… “How about it, Stolt?”
The answer was prompt enough to show that Stolt had already considered that approach. “No good,” he said. “It’d be a mess to fly, for starters—we could only shield one side of the boat, which would throw the center of mass ’way to hell and gone. And even then, you’d only have enough shielding for a one-way trip—too much of the stuff would boil off on the way for you to make it back.”
“Unless Lowry’s group has something they could use to protect it on the return trip,” Kennedy persisted.
Stolt snorted. “If they had, don’t you think it would have occurred to them to use the stuff on their own lander?”
“Maybe not,” Kennedy countered. “They’re astrophysicists, not engineers. Maybe they’ve got something that would work but don’t realize it.”
“It wouldn’t hurt to suggest it,” Roman agreed. “Have one of your people call down to Lowry and get a complete list of the materials they have on hand.”
“Yes, sir,” Stolt said.
Roman keyed the intercom off and turned to Marlowe. “The radiation going down at all out there, Lieutenant?”
“Ah…yes, sir, a little,” Marlowe said distractedly, his eyes steady on one of his screens. “Not fast enough, though. Captain, I’ve just picked up something in orbit around Shadrach. I think you’d better take a look.”
Roman frowned at his scanner repeater. A flashing circle marked the spot… “A space horse?”
“That’s what I thought,” Marlowe agreed. “Probably the one the Tampy expedition brought with them—you can just barely see what’s left of a ship trailing behind it. The question is, why is the thing still here?”
Roman chewed the back of his lip. For an instant a crazy image flashed through his mind, that of the space horse standing faithfully by like a pet dog, protecting its departed masters… “It’s probably dead,” he said aloud, shaking the picture away. “Killed the same time as the Tampies.”
“Or else there’s someone still alive on that ship Handling it,” Kennedy murmured.
It wasn’t impossible, Roman knew. The attached ship looked to be half melted, but if it had been lucky enough to be in the space horse’s shadow when the star blew, one or more of the Tampies could indeed still be alive in there.
Which led immediately to the question of why any such theoretical survivors hadn’t either rescued Lowry’s group or ignored them and gotten the hell out of the system. “Have you tried contacting the ship yet?” he asked.
“Bee
n transmitting since it first came out from around the planet’s limb,” Marlowe said. “No response yet.”
Roman grimaced. Rrin-saa and the rest of Amity’s Tampies would still be mourning their comrades’ deaths, and he’d already interrupted them once. But something told him that this couldn’t wait.
Rrin-saa wasn’t in the Handler room, but the intercom monitor made quick work of tracking him down. “Rro-maa, yes?” he whined. If he was annoyed at being again taken away from the funeral service, he didn’t show it.
“We’ve found your expedition’s space horse,” Roman told him. “It’s still in orbit around Shadrach. Any ideas as to why it hasn’t Jumped?”
For a long moment the alien just stood there, his lopsided face running through a series of subtle and—to Roman, at least—unreadable changes. “There is a possibility,” he said at last. “The space horse would have been set in stationary orbit above the ground observers, with six or fewer Tamplissta as Handlers. When all died…” He paused, and his expression again altered. “You must know that we feel more deeply toward life than humans seem to. The sudden deaths of their companions may have caused a perasiata reaction in the Handlers and, through them, in the space horse.”
Catatonia, in the middle of a dying system. So the vaunted Tampy empathy could occasionally be a handicap. “When will they all come out of it?”
“The Tamplissta will not. They will be dead now.”
Roman hissed between his teeth. For a moment he’d dared to hope they’d found their ticket out of this mess. “I’m sorry,” he told the Tampy. “I suppose the space horse is dead, too?”
“I do not know. I know he may be dead or still in perasiata; that is all.”
Roman glanced at Marlowe, pointed at the other’s displays. The other nodded understanding and got to work. “Suppose the space horse is indeed in perasiata,” he said to Rrin-saa. “How could we get it to wake up?”
“I did not say he was in perasiata,” the Tampy reminded Roman. “I do not know.”
Roman clenched his jaw against a flash of anger. This was not the time for Tampy verbal reticence. “Pretend just for argument’s sake that it is,” he growled. “Tell me how we would wake it up.”
“There are methods,” Rrin-saa said. “Handlers are taught them.”
Terrific. Handlers could do it…except that Amity’s Handlers were all back with Pegasus. “I don’t suppose any of your people here have had any of that training.”
Rrin-saa hesitated. “Even if the space horse could be made to move, he would not have the strength to pull Amity any great distance.”
“It won’t need to,” Roman shook his head. “All we need is its shadow to hide in—we have more than enough fuel to fly to Shadrach under our own power. All we’d need is someone with Handler training who’d be willing to ride a heavily shielded lifeboat over there and try to wake the space horse up.”
Again, Rrin-saa’s face went through its subtle contortions. “Very well,” he said at last. “Prepare your lifeboat. I will go.”
Roman blinked. “You?”
“I have had Handler training. It is my task.”
Roman gazed at him. A short, ugly creature whose features hovered midway between the macabre and the thoroughly ridiculous…calmly volunteering to risk his life to save what was, to him, a group of semi-dangerous aliens. “I can’t order you to go out there, you know,” he reminded the other, moved by some vaguely insistent impulse to make sure the Tampy understood fully what he was letting himself in for. “It’ll be dangerous—possibly fatal—”
Something in Rrin-saa’s face made him stop. “Do you still not understand us, Rro-maa?” the Tampy said softly. “Our duty is to all living things; to respect them, and the-balances and natural hierarchies within which they exist. As sentient creatures we have great power to alter these balances. With such power comes equally great responsibility. We do not choose the role of caretaker. It is, instead, thrust upon us as the price paid for the gift of sentience.”
It was a philosophy Roman had heard many times before. But always from Tampy apologists and supporters, never from one of the Tampies themselves. “And so you risk your life to help save a group of humans?”
Rrin-saa touched fingers to ear: a shrug. “You are neither creature nor caretaker, Rro-maa; and yet are both. We do not yet fully understand you. But we are learning.”
Unbidden, a shiver ran up Roman’s back. He’d often wondered just what the Tampies’ motivation had been in agreeing to join the Amity project. Dimly, he wondered what sort of report Rrin-saa would be bringing back. “I appreciate your willingness to go,” he told the other. “Let’s hope it works.”
“For the space horse’s sake, as well as the humans’,” Rrin-saa said. “He, too, is worth saving, if such is possible.”
“Agreed,” Roman nodded. And if it wasn’t possible to save it, the creature might still have enough strength left in it for one last Jump. If it did, Amity might not have to run that perilous gauntlet all the way back to Pegasus.
Assuming, of course, that Pegasus had recovered from whatever was bothering it. For a moment his thoughts went back to Ferrol and the others waiting for them…
Resolutely, he forced his mind away. Whatever was happening back there was far beyond either his control or his assistance. “We’ll get the lifeboat ready,” he told Rrin-saa. “It’ll take an hour or so—we’ll let you know.”
“I will be ready,” Rrin-saa said.
Roman blanked the screen and looked up at Marlowe. “Anything?”
“There’s no way to tell, sir,” the other said, shaking his head in obvious frustration. “All the readings I can get through that plasma soup out there come up ambiguous. It could be alive; it could be dead.”
“All right. Call Stolt and have them get started on the lifeboat.” Bracing himself, he turned to Kennedy. Now came the sticky part. “We’re going to need a volunteer to fly this thing,” he told her. “A pilot who can handle something as lopsided as the boat’s likely to turn out.”
“MacKaig’s the one you want,” Kennedy said promptly. “She’s had experience with both tugboats and minesweepers. I’ll call her up here.”
Roman stopped her with an upraised hand. “Make it crystal clear to her that if the space horse out there is dead this is a suicide mission.”
Kennedy smiled tightly. “She’ll go,” she said. “She’s not exactly what you’d call trusting when it comes to Tampies.”
It was a long time before Roman understood the logic behind that last cryptic comment. It wasn’t until the lifeboat was ready to launch, in fact, that it and Rrin-saa’s reference to saving the space horse finally clicked together.
There was no simpler way for the Tampies to save the space horse, after all, than to wake it up and let it Jump.
Chapter 11
THE TINY SPECK OF brilliant light was like a lost diamond floating against the background of icy-cold stars. “Well?” Ferrol demanded as Tenzing pulled back from the telescope panel, blinking as his eyes adjusted from the dazzle of the distant asteroid to the relative darkness of the lander.
“It’s definitely getting dimmer,” the other reported, sounding even wearier than he looked. “I don’t think it would be safe to leave Pegasus’ shadow yet, though.”
“I wasn’t planning on doing that,” Ferrol told him, listening to the frustration rumbling in his stomach as he gazed out at the pinprick of light. Without any tethered instrument packs available aboard the lander—and with the radiation flood from B’s last burp far too intense for anyone to go out from Pegasus’ shadow for a direct measurement—they’d been forced to improvise. Analyzing the reflected light from the asteroid out there was crude, but it was the best they’d been able to come up with. Unfortunately, of all the scientists aboard only Tenzing had ever had actual field experience in estimating stellar magnitudes without instruments, and those days were far in his past.
Not that accuracy was really needed. A single glance at the asteroi
d was all it took to know that B was still too blazingly hot to risk direct exposure to it.
And if the light and radiation this far out was this bad…
“You think Amity could have survived?” Tenzing asked quietly.
Ferrol shook his head, the movement generating a quick flicker of light-headedness. It had been almost thirty hours since Amity’s departure, and he’d had barely five hours of sleep in that time. Not that staying awake to run things had made any appreciable difference. “There’s no way to know until we can move out around Pegasus and try raising them on the radio or laser,” he told Tenzing. “If the captain pushed their acceleration above the two-gee mark for any of the trip, they ought to have had time to get into the planet’s umbra before the balloon went up.”
And if they hadn’t…but there was no need to spell that scenario out. Tenzing and everyone else on the lander and lifeboats had by now run that one out to its logical conclusion.
“Yeah,” Tenzing breathed. “Well…” He shivered.
“What’s the latest on Pegasus?” Ferrol asked, more to change the subject than for any other reason.
“No appreciable change,” Tenzing told him with a sigh. “The dust sweat chemistry is still way off all our standard benchmarks, though it seems like it might be coming back just a little.”
“Anything dramatic happen when the big burst came?”
“No. Not even anything undramatic, as far as we could tell. The Tampies said the same thing regarding its mental condition, by the way.”
“Yes, I’d heard,” Ferrol grunted, passing up the chance to tell Tenzing just how much trust he had in the Tampies’ word. Still, it was looking more and more likely that whatever was bothering Pegasus wasn’t related to the extreme conditions outside. “So that leaves us back where we started: fatigue or illness.”
“Looks that way,” Tenzing agreed soberly. “Unfortunately, without any way to treat either condition, the diagnosis seems more or less academic.”