Chapter 27

Kialinninni’s sun was a dim red star marked on Roman’s helm display by a flashing circle, moving with the rest of the stars across the screen as Sleipnir came around in a gentle arc to line up with it. For a moment, before the space horse blocked it, the star was visible in the forward port, and Roman threw a quick look out at it. It was even harder to see there than it was on the display. “Sso-ngu, are you sure Sleipnir can see the target star?” he asked into the intercom.

“He can,” the Tampy replied.

Roman frowned again at the helm display; but Sso-ngu ought to know what he was talking about. “All right. Stand by to Jump at my command. And let me know immediately if this procedure startles or frightens Sleipnir.” He keyed engineering into the circuit. “Commander Stolt; Dr. Tenzing—you ready?”

“Just waiting for the order, sir,” Stolt replied. “The boats are all tanked up and ready to go, and Dr. Tenzing’s double-checked the spray pattern.”

“Very good. Launch.”

“Yes, sir. Launching… now.”

Roman shifted his attention to the tactical display. From Amity’s hanger came Stolt’s two gimmicked boats, flying together in close formation as they came up Amity’s hull. They passed the bow and began to split apart; and by the time they reached Sleipnir they were on opposite sides of the space horse’s bulk.

“Starting the gas spray,” Stolt announced.

On Roman’s display the two boats, moving up opposite sides of Sleipnir’s cylindrical mass now, began to trail what showed up on the screen as a cohesivelooking mist. Smoothly, and in perfect synch, the boats altered direction, and as Roman watched began tracing out a double-helix pattern a few meters above the space horse’s surface. The mist spread slowly out behind them as they circled near Sleipnir’s head and started back, and by the time they were once again traveling alongside the rein lines the mist had settled in around Sleipnir, circling and engulfing the creature like a halo from some strange medieval painting.

“Boats almost back,” Stolt said. “ETA one minute.”

Roman nodded. “Marlowe?”

“Cloud holding together nicely,” the other reported. “Expanding just enough to fill in the whole gap around Sleipnir.”

“Good.” A thought occurred to him—“When you get a minute, you probably ought to let the Scapa Flow know what we’re doing—we don’t want them to be startled.”

“Yes, sir.” Marlowe turned to his intercom.

Roman returned his attention to the tactical. “Sso-ngu? Is Sleipnir bothered at all by the gas mixture?”

“He is not. He is facing the Kialinninni star, Rro-maa, and is ready to Jump.”

And was meanwhile busy exuding all the information any passing shark would ever need to find the Tampy corral. If this scheme Tenzing had dreamed up didn’t work…

And the irony of it all was that if it did work they would probably never know it.

On the tactical, the boats hovering close beside Amity’s hull disappeared. “Boats aboard, Captain,” Stolt announced. “Hangar door sealing… we’re ready here.”

“Sso-ngu?”

“I hear, Rro-maa.”

Roman settled himself and shifted his eyes to the forward viewscreen. “All right, then. Everyone ready; fire, and Jump.”

At the edge of the screen the comm laser lanced out, its passage marked just visibly by the flicker of ionized hydrogen atoms in its path. The dim line shifted inward, touched the edge of the gas cloud ahead—

And, abruptly, Sleipnir was sheathed in flame.

It wasn’t a terribly hot fire, as fires went—Tenzing had made sure of that when preparing his mixture. The temperature at Sleipnir’s skin would be no more than six hundred degrees Celsius, Roman knew—hardly worth a space horse’s notice, but more than enough to char and scramble the complex molecules in the dust sweat beyond any possible reconstruction.

Or so the logic went. But for that first flaring instant, none of the chemistry or biology or logic really mattered. For that one single instant Sleipnir was a glimpse into semi-mythic racial memories of humanity’s past: an echo of ancient Viking funeral pyres, or of the self-immolation of the Phoenix, or of the fiery horror of Dante’s Inferno.

The flame flickered out, and the vision faded, and Roman took a deep breath, feeling vaguely foolish. He glanced around the bridge, wondering if anyone had noticed. But all were still huddled over their consoles, busy with the usual tasks of a Jump.

The Jump. Belatedly, Roman dropped his eyes back to his displays, giving them a quick scan. If the trick hadn’t worked…

It had. Dead ahead on the nav display was the dim globe of Kialinninni’s sun; and a check of the timeline showed that the Jump had taken place at virtually the height of the flash fire.

He looked up, to find Ferrol’s eyes on him. “It seems to have worked,” he commented to the other.

“Looks that way,” Ferrol nodded. “So. Now what?”

“We find the corral,” Roman told him, tapping keys on his console. If Kennedy’s projections had been on the mark the corral ought to be somewhere off to starboard…

“Got it, sir,” Marlowe announced. “Bearing—well, the nearest edge of the enclosure’s about thirty-nine starboard, ten nadir; range, ninety-five thousand kilometers.”

Roman nodded as the corral—or, rather, the ovoid computer-enhanced shape marking its invisible boundaries—appeared, centered, on the scanner display. He tapped for a tenfold magnification; repeated the procedure—

“Good God,” Kennedy murmured, peering at her own display. “When they say they’re going to bring the space horses home, they don’t fool around, do they?”

“No, they don’t,” Roman agreed, feeling just a little staggered himself. The last time he’d seen the corral, back when he’d arrived to take command of the Amity, there’d been perhaps a half-dozen space horses wandering around inside the enclosure; now, the place was almost literally packed with them. Moving restlessly about, visible only as pale slivers of reflected light from the system’s star, it was oddly reminiscent of the view through a microscope at a drop of swamp water.

Distantly, Roman wondered if the Tampies had ever noticed that; but almost certainly they had. The recurring and circular patterns of life and nature were, after all, the backbone of Tampy philosophy.

“Must be two hundred space horses in there,” Marlowe commented, sounding awed.

With an effort, Roman shook the philosophic contemplations from his mind. There was work to be done. “It’s supposed to be the bulk of the Tampy herd,” he told Marlowe. “Or fleet; or whatever it is they call it. Anyway. Get on the radio and contact that space station headquarters of theirs—we need to warn them about the dust sweat trails their space horses have been leaving.” He tapped the intercom.

“Dr. Tenzing?”

“Right here, Captain,” the other said, sounding distracted. “Hang on a minute; the spectroscopic data from the fire is starting to come in.”

Which would show—or perhaps only hint at—whether or not Sleipnir’s own dust sweat trail had been adequately destroyed by the fire. Though even if it had…

Roman grimaced. Even if it had, the worst part of the job was still ahead. Tracking down and obliterating the trails from all the systems the Tampies had brought that many space horses in from would be a horrendous task, quite possibly beyond the aliens’ own capabilities. But if the Starforce could be persuaded to help—in exchange, perhaps, for continued access to space horses—

“Captain?” Across the bridge Marlowe half-turned, a frown creasing his forehead.

“I’m not getting any response from the corral station.”

“Keep trying,” Roman ordered, something cold settling into his stomach as he turned to his scanner display. The station’s cylindrical shape was centered in the view, looking just about the way he remembered it from the last time.