On his console the intercom pinged. “Chayne, we’ve got the intercom connection to the lander now,” someone reported.

“Thank you.” Ferrol keyed the proper switch. “Wwis-khaa? This is Commander Ferrol. Are you and the others doing all right?”

“We are well, Ffe-rho.”

With Ferrol and Yamoto gone from the lander, the three aliens had removed their filter masks; briefly, Ferrol wished he was better at reading Tampy expressions.

“I’m sorry we have to keep you back there in the lander,” he apologized. “But without enough filter masks to go around we really can’t let you into the main part of the ship.”

“No scitte,” Demarco muttered under his breath. “It’d lake months to scrub the stench out of the air system.”

Ferrol threw him a glare. “You should have received the next target star on your display by now,” he continued to Wwis-khaa. “Can Epilog see it all right?”

“He can.” Wwis-khaa paused. “Ffe-rho, I would like to know what it is you are asking us to do.”

“A fair question,” Ferrol agreed. “Very simply, I’m asking you to help your people.

Your people, and your space horses. Have you ever heard of an Earth creature called the dog?”

“A domesticated carnivore of the Canis group,” Wwis-khaa said promptly. “Its ecological position is usually as a companion or pet to humans.”

“Right,” Ferrol nodded, vaguely impressed that the alien would know that.

“They’re mostly pets now, but originally they were used by herders and shepherds to help guard food animals from dangerous predators. Still are, in some places.”

He’d expected Wwis-khaa to catch his drift; and he wasn’t disappointed. “You seek to find such creatures in space?” the Tampy asked, his head tilting to one side in a gesture Ferrol had never seen before. “Small predators to protect our space horses from sharks?”

“That’s it,” Ferrol nodded. “Granted, we don’t know if such things even exist; but now that we know there are at least three species of space-going creatures, it seems reasonable that there should be others. True?”

“I do not know,” Wwis-khaa said. “How do you presume to search for such creatures throughout the vastness of space?”

“I don’t,” Ferrol said. “We’re going to leave space and normal star systems alone and concentrate instead on a much more select group of places: namely, the accretion disks around large black holes.”

Demarco twisted his head around, a stunned look on his face. “I think it makes sense,” Ferrol continued, ignoring the other. “That’s where space horses are supposed to have originated; and if so, there must be some remnant of the ecology left. You game to take a look?”

For a long moment Wwis-khaa was silent. Ferrol held his breath, fully and painfully aware that if the Tampies refused the whole thing would die right here and now. “Your wishes are ours,” the alien said. “When do you wish to leave?”

Quietly, Ferrol exhaled. “As soon as Epilog is in position,” he told the other. “Let the helmer—Randall—know when you’re ready.”

“Your wishes are ours,” Wwis-khaa repeated.

Feeling a little limp, Ferrol switched off the intercom. It had worked… and they were on their way. He looked up—

To find Demarco gazing hard at him. “I trust,” the other said carefully, “that all of that was just so much spun sugar.”

“Some of it was,” Ferrol said. “Most of it wasn’t. We are going to poke around a few black holes, and we are hunting for a scaled-down version of a shark. But not for the reason I gave Wwis-khaa—that was just to get his cooperation.”

“You should have just told melt-face it was an order, and that you were his superior officer, and that was that,” Demarco sniffed. “That’s all the explanation the stupid plant-lovers deserve.”

Ferrol frowned at the other, a strange feeling curling through his stomach.

Somehow, he didn’t remember Demarco as being quite this crude. “If I’m right,”

he said quietly, “we’ve probably got a good chance of running into some sharks along the way. Wwis-khaa and the others deserve to know what they’re letting themselves in for.”

Demarco raised his eyebrows. “I see some of the Amity’s heart-bleeding has rubbed off on you. Sir. So if we’re not recruiting watchdogs for the melt-faces, what the hell do we want these miniature sharks for?”

“We want them for transport, of course,” Ferrol growled. Demarco was teetering right on the edge of insubordination here. “We’ve been in a long, dead-end track here, trying to capture and train space horses. Human beings are predators, and the space horses can’t or won’t stand for that. But a space-going predator species might. Clear now?”

Demarco snorted. “If you say so. Sounds like the sort of wishy-wok stuff your meltfaced chummies would spout, though. If you ask me.”

Quite suddenly, Ferrol decided he was tired of Demarco. “All right then; try this,”

he said coldly.

“We’re going because I’ve given you an order, and I’m your captain, and that’s that.”

Demarco’s lip twisted, but he nodded. “Yes, sir,” he muttered, and turned back to his console.

“Chayne?” Randall spoke up tentatively. “Your melt-fa—your Tampy signals he’s ready to go.”

Ferrol took a deep breath, fighting for calm. “Tell him to go ahead and Jump,” he ordered.

And wondered what had happened to his crew in the past year, to make them so harshly bigoted.

Chapter 25

“Arachne’s director said they’d alerted Earth and Prepyat via tachyon,” Yamoto’s voice came over the comm laser. She sounded tired, and about as emotionally drained as Roman felt. Not really surprising, under the circumstances. “I guess the message didn’t get through.”

“It got through, all right,” Roman told her. “Just not soon enough.”

Yamoto sighed. “My fault, Captain. I should have alerted the colony as soon as we arrived in the system, and the hell with any consequences.”

Roman shook his head. “It wouldn’t have helped. Once we’d Jumped to Sirius and then back to Solomon system, we were already out of position to hit anywhere near Arachne itself. We couldn’t have gotten here in time to stop Ferrol no matter when you blew the whistle. It wasn’t in any way your fault.”

“Yes, sir.” She didn’t sound like she believed it. “I’m ready to boost orbit whenever you’re ready.”

Roman gave his helm display a quick scan. After four hours of a hard three-gee acceleration/deceleration drive through Arachne system from their arrival Jump point, Amity had finally reached the planet itself. The tactical showed their course swinging close in to cut across Yamoto’s own geosynchronous orbit… “You might as well just sit tight there,” he decided. “It’ll probably be faster for us to catch up than for you to fiddle with your orbit.” Though what the hurry was for, Roman really couldn’t say—by Yamoto’s numbers, Ferrol and the Scapa Flow were a good six hours ahead of them already, and Amity’s chances of tracking them down at this point were just fractionally above absolute zero. “We’ll be alongside in about ten minutes.”

“Yes, sir.”

At the helm, Kennedy half turned. “Captain? I’ve got a probable vector for them now, if you’d like to take a look.”

“Thank you.” For a minute Roman studied the tactical and visual maps she’d produced. In the direction indicated—

Was, basically, nothing. “How probable is this?” he asked.

“Only about seventy-five percent, actually,” she admitted. “The tapes Yamoto made of Epilog’s Jump are good and sharp, but you can only be so accurate from half a kilometer away. Computer gives a ninety-nine percent probability for this area”—a small circle appeared on the visual, centered around the original vector—“but there are at least fifteen stars in there that ought to be visible to a space horse.”

“Even one as young as Epilog?” Roman asked.

Kennedy shook her head. “I don’t know. Neither do the Tampies; I asked them.”