The overall image was one of almost absurd frailty, and in that first moment it seemed utterly incredible to Roman that such creatures should even be taken seriously, much less considered a threat.

And then he remembered Prometheus… and the half-comical picture vanished in a puff of smoke. No, the Tampies were indeed creatures to be taken seriously.

Belatedly, he focused on the yellow-orange tartan neckerchief knotted loosely around the Tampy’s neck. That particular color combination belonged to—“Rrinsaa?”

he tentatively identified the other.

“I am,” the Tampy acknowledged. “You are Rro-maa?”

“Yes, I’m Captain Roman,” Roman nodded. “I wasn’t expecting to be met here.”

The Tampy made a quick fingers-to-ear gesture—the aliens’ equivalent of a shrug, Roman remembered.“Do you wish to see all?”

It was, actually, a tempting offer. If the rest of the Tampies’ decor was as unusual and imaginative as that in the corridors, it might well be worth taking the complete tour. But that would have to wait for another time. “No, thank you, Rrin-saa,” he said. “For now, I’d just like to see your command center.”

“I do not understand.”

“Command center. Control room?—where you keep track of the Amity’s movement and issue any necessary orders.”

“I do not issue orders, Rro-maa,” Rrin-saa said. “I do not rule.”

For a moment Roman was tongue-tied. “Ah… I’m sorry. I thought you were the one in charge of this half of the ship.”

Rrin-saas’s mouth opened wide, as if in parody of a human smile—the Tampy equivalent of shaking his head. “I speak for all,” Rrin-saa said. “I do not rule.”

“I see,” Roman said, although he didn’t, exactly. Anarchy, or even rule by consensus, didn’t seem a good way to run a starship. “But if you don’t rule, who does?”

Fingers to ear. “You do, Rro-maa.”

“Uh… huh,” Roman said. It was slowly becoming clearer… “You mean that since your people agreed to put a human—me—in command of the Amity, then I’m to give you all your orders?”

“That is correct.”

It couldn’t be entirely correct, Roman knew. At the very least, they’d arranged their own billeting and duty rosters without any input from the human half of the ship, and almost certainly such simple housekeeping operations would continue to be so handled.

Which implied some sort of chain of command… which Rrin-saa didn’t seem interested in talking about. “Where are the repeater instruments from the bridge, then?” he asked.

“With the Handlers.”

Roman nodded. “Take me there, then, if you would.”

The Handler room was just aft of the bow instrument packing, in a mirror-image position to Amity’s bridge. Sitting in the center of the room, a Tampy sporting a green-purple neckerchief sat humming atonally to himself, his eyes wide open but paying no attention to Roman or Rrin-saa. To the left, arranged in random patterns against the inner wall, were the repeater instruments; to the right, a second Tampy sat pressed against the outer wall, his face turned at a painful-looking angle to stare forward out the viewport, his head engulfed by a large multi-wired helmet. The wires of which went to a basket-mesh case, inside of which—

Roman forced himself to look… and actually, it wasn’t too bad. Provided he remembered that the hairless, piglet-sized creature was supposed to look that way; and that it was safely asleep, not dead; and that its wired-up brain neurons had as much sheer computing capability as the Cordonale’s best mainframes.

The Tampies’ computer, he knew, used basically the same arrangement. Not so simple, but still elegant.

“Sso-ngu,” Rrin-saa said, raising both hands toward the helmeted Tampy. “He speaks with Pegasunninni.”

“Pega—? Ah,” Roman interrupted himself. Pegasunninni would be the Tampies’

name for the space horse: Pegasus, with the proper identifying suffix tacked on.

“And the other is Hhom-jee?” he added, hoping he was pulling the proper neckerchief color scheme out of memory.

“That is correct,” Rrin-saa confirmed. “He is resting.”

“Ah,” Roman said again, eying the humming Tampy with interest. Tampy sleep was both more physically active than the human equivalent and also came at semiirregular intervals around the clock. A far cry from the normal terrestrial circadian rhythm, and one that had helped to poison quite a few of the early attempts at interspecies cooperation. Human workers could never quite believe the Tampies weren’t simply goofing off, and Roman would bet that the human habit of going into a coma for a straight thirty percent of the day had been equally annoying to the Tampies. Though no one knew for sure; the Tampies had never discussed the matter. “I gather he’s here to take over when Sso-ngu needs sleep?”

“That is correct,” Rrin-saa said. He repeated his earlier two-handed gesture, this time toward Hhom-jee. “There is one other who talks to Pegasunninni.”

“Yes, I remember that there were three Handlers listed on the crew roster.” Roman nodded toward Sso-ngu and the hairless caged animal. It wasn’t so bad the second time. “I’d like to take a closer look at the amplifier helmet, if it wouldn’t disturb him.”

“Do not approach.”

Roman paused, halfway into a step. “Why not?”

“He speaks with Pegasunninni,” Rrin-saa said.

“And…?”

“You are a predator,” Sso-ngu said.

Roman started; he hadn’t realized the Handler was paying any attention to the conversation. “Is that why we haven’t been able to control space horses? Or even to keep them alive in captivity?”

“I do not know,” Sso-ngu said. “I know that humans sometimes have bothered space horses; that is all.”

Roman pursed his lips. “Um.”

For a moment he hesitated, at a loss for something to say or do. He turned away from Sso-ngu; and as he did so, the repeater instruments caught his eye, and he stepped over for a closer look. They were labeled in Tampy script, of course, but his crash course in things Tamplisstan had included some of that, and it took only a minute to locate the ones he was interested in. “I’d better be getting back to the bridge,” he told Rrin-saa. “We’re getting close to our scheduled Jump point.”

“I understand,” Rrin-saa said. “Rro-maa… this voyage is of great importance to the Tamplissta. We understand you; you do not understand us. This failing of harmony cannot continue.”

Roman nodded. “I agree,” he said. “We’ll work together on this, Rrin-saa. With luck… maybe we can find some of that understanding for my people.”

“That is the Tamplisstan hope. For if not…” He touched fingers to ear, and left the sentence unfinished.

“I understand,” Roman said.

If not, Ferrol would likely get the war he wanted.

They still had nearly half an hour to the scheduled Jump position when the captain finally returned to the bridge. “Captain,” Ferrol nodded, unstrapping from the command chair and standing up. “Still running on schedule; twenty-seven minutes to Jump. I gather from Kennedy’s course plan that we weren’t going to decelerate to zero vee before the Jump.”

“Correct, Commander,” Roman said. “Space horses routinely Jump while in motion, sometimes with rather high velocities relative to their departure star.”

A feat which Ferrol had probably had a lot more experience with than the captain.

He’d lost several space horses that way before he’d figured out how to sneak up without spooking them. “Yes, sir. I presume you’ll want to at least kill our acceleration first?”

Roman started to speak; paused. “That’s a good point,” he said thoughtfully. “Any idea whether or not space horses can Jump while accelerating?”

Ferrol frowned, searching his memory. He remembered at least one out in the Tampies’ yishyar who’d been going damned fast when it Jumped away from his net. But whether it had actually been accelerating when he lost it… “I’m not sure,”