“Yes, I understand,” Ferrol cut him off. “Part of the Amity’s job was to do the same sort of thing.”

“Right,” Kheslav looked around the room again. “The thing is, we had some monitors attached to the space horse’s webbing—without the Tampies knowing, of course—with everything funneled back to a receiver either direct or through a pair of tight-beam relay satellites. When B blew the first time—and all the Tampies died?—well, I have a complete record of the light intensitites and types of radiation the space horse took, as well as a lot of the stuff going up and down the rein lines.”

He lowered his voice still further. “And since some of the instruments were on the shielded side, away from the light, and you were in line of sight with us when you came over in the space horse’s shadow… some of that data goes right up until the end.” He fixed Ferrol with a suddenly intense stare. “You understand what that means?”

Ferrol did indeed. It meant that, for the first time ever, humanity would know exactly how to kill a space horse.

It was like a moment of truth, a moment that should have been filled with a deep and profound silence. Typically, Kheslav babbled right on through it. “You see the problem, then, with me trying to take the datapack home myself,” he said, waving his hands helplessly. “With all the publicity and attention—especially now with this calving thing—I’m not going to be able to just walk past the university people with a private datapack I’m not letting anyone see—”

“So I gather you want me to take charge of it?” Ferrol cut through the flood.

“If you would,” Kheslav said, obvious relief on his face. “I figure you can just hide it somewhere aboard the ship for now, and then later get it to the Senator—”

“Yes, thank you, I think I can handle it,” Ferrol growled. “When I’ve finished interviewing the rest of your party I’ll come by your cabin and pick it up.” He let his gaze harden, just a bit. “And after that I don’t expect to see or talk to you for the rest of the trip.”

“Sure.” Kheslav nodded with puppy dog eagerness. “Sure, I understand. I really appreciate this, Commander—”

“Good-bye, Kheslav.”

“Yeah.” Awkwardly, Kheslav got to his feet. “Uh… yeah. Good-bye.”

For a wonder, he was silent as he left the room.

Two hours later Ferrol was back in his cabin, wedging the datapack with only moderate difficulty alongside the needle gun in his lockbox. Alongside the gun, on top of the Senator’s envelope… and for a moment Ferrol paused, staring at the bulkhead separating him from the Tampy section as he savored the bittersweet taste of irony. The Senator had placed him aboard the Amity for the express purpose of sabotaging the ship’s mission; of making sure that, with or without his direct intervention, this experiment in human-Tampy cooperation was a total and embarrassing disaster.

Instead, it had succeeded in doing something no human or even Tampy had ever done before… and with that event, Ferrol’s task had turned on its head.

Now, he was going to have to do his damnedest to make sure that the Amity experiment was allowed to continue.

He smiled tightly as one more irony of it struck him. He’d had a space horse calf within his grasp once before—had seen then the possibilities such a creature presented —and it had been Roman who snatched it from him. Now, it was that same man whose ship had given humanity this second shot at building its own space horse fleet.

And even if space horse calves proved uncontrollable by human handlers…

Ferrol’s gaze dropped once more to the datapack. It would be unfortunate, but it wouldn’t be a total disaster. With the Pegasus calving, and now Kheslav’s data, the Tampy domination of space travel had come to an end.

One way or another, it had come to an end.

Sealing the lockbox, he replaced it in its underbed storage drawer, and returned to his duties.

Chapter 14

The shuttle’s engines gave one final burp and cut off, and for a few seconds Ferrol fought the usual brief battle with nausea as his system made its adjustment back to free-fall. The adjustment seemed to take longer than usual… but then, he was seldom this weary during such transitions.

He sighed, and looked around him. A shuttle, the Senate crewers had called it; but they might as well have labeled it a yacht and been done with it. A rich man’s yacht, drafted into allegedly public service with a few rows of seats bolted into what had probably once been a dining room or conference room or something. Not that the alterations had done much to dent the atmosphere—infinitely-adjustable seats with individual built-in entertainment systems were hardly likely to be mistaken for standard Starforce-issue acceleration couches. Listening to the rumbling in his stomach, Ferrol wondered sourly if having someone throw up all over their flying glitter-room would do anything to bring the visiting senators back into the real world. From the evidence to date, he doubted it.

“Commander Ferrol?”

Ferrol looked up before he realized the voice was coming from the seatback behind him. “Yes?” he said.

“Captain Mendez’s compliments, sir; he’d like to see you on the bridge at your earliest convenience.”

Ferrol frowned. Some kind of trouble? “On my way.”

He found the release and pulled it, staying where he was for the couple of seconds it took the safety harness to remold itself and retract smoothly into the seat again.

The bridge, he’d seen when they entered, was three compartments forward, just ahead of a ready room and a closet-sized box the yacht’s downgrade renovation had left apparently unused. Easing to the aisle, he gave himself a push forward and headed for the door.

It opened as he reached it, closing behind him almost before he’d gotten fully inside. A flicker of light—identity scan, possibly—and then the inner door slid open and he floated through into the ready room.

“Good evening, Chayne.”

Ferrol reached out a hand to steady himself on one of the nearby seats, relief that there wasn’t an emergency mixing with annoyance that he’d jumped to that conclusion in the first place. In retrospect, he should have expected something like this. “Good evening, Senator,” he replied, coolly polite. “Been promoted to captain, have you?”

The Senator’s lip twitched in a momentary smile. “It seemed safer to have the call put in the captain’s name. Personal entertainment systems aren’t supposed to leak over, but there’s no reason to take unnecessary risks.”

Ferrol pulled himself down into a seat, his eyes flicking to the bridge door a couple of meters away as he strapped himself in. “I’d have thought your being here at all would come under that heading, sir.”

“They’re all my people in there,” the Senator assured him, raising one hand to study a fingernail. “You know, Chayne—forgive my bluntness—you seem rather less than satisfied with the way the hearings went today.”

Ferrol snorted. “You noticed that, did you?”

Deliberately, the Senator raised his eyes from his examination. “We’ve noticed.

Believe me. All of us.”

Ferrol felt his face growing warm. “Sorry,” he muttered.

For a long moment the Senator eyed him without speaking. “I’m sure you’ll understand,” he said at last, “that you’re the last person we would have expected to see passionately arguing a Tampy point of view. I’m sure you’ll also understand how such an abrupt change in attitude is likely to make our friends nervous.”

“I am not arguing a Tampy point of view,” Ferrol growled. “I’m arguing that, in this particular case, we happen to have as much to gain from an extension of Amity’s mission as do the Tampies. I don’t know how to make that any clearer than I already have.”

“Oh, your position is clear enough,” the Senator shrugged. “It’s your judgment that’s in question.”