Warhorse (24 page)

“All right,” he told Sso-ngii between dry lips. “Let's get a little closer. Just a little, and take us in slowly. And let me know if Quentin shows any signs of spooking.
Any
signs—if we Jump out of this system
Amity
'll never be able to track us down.”

“Oh, God, we'd be lost forever,” Demothi murmured, his voice more muffled than usual by his filter mask. Ferrol half turned to tell him to shut up—

“Movement!” Kennedy snapped suddenly. “Small objects—lots of them—moving toward us from the other space horse.”

Ferrol spun back, a curse catching in his throat. Under attack—? “How small?” he demanded, shaking hands fumbling with his controls.

“Five to ten meters across,” Kennedy told him. “Way too small to be space horses themselves.”

Ferrol had the proper display centered now, and for a long, horrifying moment he thought the approaching dots were somehow multiplying before his eyes… “What are they doing, collecting boulders?”

“Looks like it,” Kennedy agreed. “Telekening them as they come.”

Ferrol nodded, his hands curling into fists as he watched. Like a starburst skyrocket the dots spread apart; and then, to his surprise, they began to coalesce again. “Coming together about thirty kilometers ahead of us,” Kennedy read off the numbers.

And there was no longer any choice left. A Jump, no matter how carefully planned, was damned risky, and could very well leave them lost for good. But it was less risky than sitting here and maybe getting slaughtered. “Get Quentin ready to move, Sso-ngii,” Ferrol ordered, keying for an astronomical display. If he could find a small, nearby star—

“Hang on, Ferrol, they're not attacking,” Kennedy told him. “Or at least the edge we can see around Quentin isn't. They're holding position relative to us, about twenty-seven kilometers out.”

Ferrol switched back to the tactical display. Sure enough, the rangefinder showed them to be clustered together in front of Quentin, their speed perfectly matched with the calf s.

So it was not, in fact, an attack. Or at least it wasn't an attack yet. “Any idea what those things are? Anybody?” he added, looking back at the Tampies.

“I do not know,” Wwis-khaa answered for both of them.

Ferrol turned back in disgust, wondering why he'd even bothered to ask. “They're probably related to the space horses, anyway,” Kennedy offered. “Motive power seems the same, not to mention the telekening of those rocks.”

“And they must understand space horses,” Demothi said quietly.

Ferrol twisted his head to look at the other. “Why must they?” he demanded.

Demothi gazed back without flinching. “Adult space horse telekene range is usually twenty kilometers, occasionally extending to twenty-five.” He nodded toward Quentin. “You said those creatures were staying twenty-seven kilometers away.”

A cold shiver ran up Ferrol's back. “They're staying out of telekene range,” he said. “Deliberately.”

For a moment the lander was silent. Then Kennedy stirred. “On the other hand,” she reminded them, “if they're out of Quentin's range, then we're probably outside of theirs, too.”

“Point,” Ferrol admitted. “Well, then…let's keep going toward that space horse out there and see what happens. Sso-ngii?”

“Your wishes are ours,” the Tampy replied.

A thought occurred to Ferrol as a mild surge of acceleration pushed him slightly into his seat: that if the creatures out there couldn't recognize that Quentin was a calf with only a fraction of an adult's telekene range, then they couldn't be very intelligent. It was something to keep in mind.

“We're moving,” Kennedy reported unnecessarily. “The creatures out there…moving with us.”

Ferrol frowned at his displays. He'd expected the creatures to hold their current position and try to prevent the lander's approach. But Kennedy was right: they were sticking like paste, moving like slaved machines exactly twenty-seven kilometers in front of Quentin.

Directly
in front of Quentin…

“Kennedy,” he said slowly, “give us a little boost, will you?—forward and starboard. I want to move around Quentin a bit.”

“Sure.” The lander's drive hissed briefly, and as the rein lines slackened and they moved around Quentin Ferrol kept his eyes on the tactical display.

No mistake. The creatures and their attendant boulders didn't care at all about the lander's position.

He turned, to find Kennedy's eyes on him. “They're staying with Quentin,” he told her.

She nodded, her lips compressed together into a pale line. “I think,” she said, “that we'd better run a check on just how opaque that clump of stuff out there is.”

“There is no need,” Sso-ngii said softly. “You are correct. Quentin cannot see through them.”

“What?”
Demothi demanded, his voice halfway between a gasp and a snarl. It was, Ferrol thought, the most emotion he'd ever heard in the man's voice. “Why the bloody hell didn't you say so before?”

“To what purpose?” the Tampy asked reasonably. “We could not have Jumped—it is here that the
Amity
will come to search for us.”

Demothi took a shuddering breath, clearly fighting for control. “We could have kept them from getting in front of Quentin in the first place,” he bit out. “We could have turned around and tried to get away. Instead, we've got—” He waved vaguely forward and sputtered to a halt.

“All right, calm down,” Ferrol told him. “It might have been nice to know what was going on a little earlier, but once the things out there were in place it was too late to do anything about it. And Sso-ngii's right; it would have been dangerous to try to Jump.” Dimly, a part of his mind noted the irony of him having to take the Tampies' side of an argument, but it wasn't something he had time to dwell on. “When the
Amity
gets here it shouldn't have any trouble getting rid of the things; until then, there doesn't seem to be anything immediately dangerous about them.”

“I'm not so sure about that,” Kennedy said suddenly, her voice taut. “You'd better have a look at this, Ferrol.”

Ferrol swiveled back to his console. In the past few minutes, while his attention had been on the creatures ahead, they'd covered a fair amount of the distance to the quiescent space horse. Enough so that the computer enhancement program could finally provide a reasonably sharp picture of the creature.

Or rather, of the two-thirds of it that remained. Where the rest should have been was a ragged-edged hole.

K
ENNEDY SWORE GENTLY UNDER
her breath. “Recommendation, Ferrol: let's get the hell out of here.”

“No argument,” Ferrol said grimly. “Sso-ngii, turn Quentin around and ease us away. Take it slow and gentle—we don't want to provoke those things with any sudden movements.”

“Your wishes are ours.”

Quentin began a leisurely turn, and Ferrol felt himself pushed gently against his chair's side restraints. He watched the tactical display just long enough to confirm the cloud ahead was matching their maneuver, then turned to face the Tampies. An idea was tugging at the back of his brain… “Wwis-khaa,” he said, choosing his words carefully, “you told me you didn't know anything about these creatures. Correct?”

“It is correct,” the Tampy replied.

“All right. Can you tell me, then, if
other
Tampies know anything about these creatures?”

The alien hesitated. “I do not know for sure,” he said slowly. “I know that some have claimed to; that is all.”

Ferrol grinned humorlessly to himself. “So what would one of those Tampies tell me about the creatures, if they were here?”

There was a long silence, as if Wwis-khaa was trying to decide whether or not that came under the dreaded name of speculation. “I'll remind you,” Ferrol said into the silence, “that our lives could depend on knowing what we're facing.” A flash of inspiration—“Quentin's life, too, of course.”

Wwis-khaa exhaled, teeth chattering together. “They are spoken of as…carrion-eaters. As—” He fumbled for words.

“Vultures,” Kennedy supplied. “Terran carrion birds.”

“Yes,” Wwis-khaa said. “They were said to be observed beside a dead space horse in the asteroids of a distant system. No recordings were made.”

“Did these vultures make any move against the Tampy ship?” Ferrol asked.

“They moved toward it, but the space horse Jumped before they came near. The Handler afterward reported fear.”

Ferrol thought a minute. “Did the Tampies actually see the dead space horse die?”

“No. He was dead and being consumed when they arrived.”

“Have there been any other sightings?” Kennedy asked. “Has anyone witnessed a space horse dying before the vultures showed up?”

“I do not know,” Wwis-khaa said.

“I also do not know,” Sso-ngii put in. “I know I have heard of no such reports; that is all.”

“You think they're more than just carrion-eaters?” Ferrol asked Kennedy.

“They're small, but there are a hell of a lot of them,” Kennedy pointed out thoughtfully. “The literature says that the Tampies have had some of their space horses in captivity for seven hundred years now; no one even
knows
what their natural life span is. To assume the vultures just
happen
to show up at the exact place and time a space horse dies is stretching things a little far.”

“But we don't know that's the case,” Demothi spoke up, his voice uneasy. “This space horse could have been dead hundreds of years before the vultures found it. Or perhaps they exist in huge numbers all over the galaxy, drifting in suspended animation like spores until a space horse dies nearby. Or maybe a dying space horse gives out a telepathic pulse or something that attracts them. We just don't
know
.”

Kennedy threw Ferrol a look. He nodded agreement; Demothi was trying just a little too hard to talk himself into believing the vultures were harmless. And under the circumstances, wishful thinking wasn't a luxury they could afford to put up with. “You're talking like a Tampy thinks,” Ferrol told him, taking surprisingly little pleasure in popping the other's bubble. “Before you get all misty-eyed over the infinite variety of the universe and the need to refrain from preconceived ideas, let me remind you that these allegedly passive carrion-eaters have very effectively locked us into this system.”

“Looking us over, probably,” Kennedy said.

“Or else waiting for Quentin to tire,” Ferrol said. “Though trying to starve a space horse in a
yishyar
system strikes me as pretty stupid.” Quentin had completed its turn now, and Ferrol felt himself being pushed back into his seat as the calf began to pick up speed. “The vultures stay with us the whole time?” he asked Kennedy.

“Like they were welded there,” she confirmed. “Quentin's just too slow on turns to get ahead of them. Even with them having to lug that optical net of boulders along with them.”

An optical net. An odd term…but that was exactly what it was. A semisolid disk that had them trapped as thoroughly as if they were inside the webbing back at the Tampies' Kialinninni corral.

Trapped…but why?

“Kennedy,” he said slowly, “is that locator program still running?”

She checked. “Yes. Still nothing registering.”

“Can the anomalous-motion section be extracted and run alone?”

Kennedy gave him a hard look. “You think,” she said, dropping her voice, “that the vultures might be holding us here for something else?”

“I can't see them breaking off a good meal just for the fun of it,” Ferrol told her, matching his volume to hers.

She nodded and got to work; and a second later Ferrol was slammed briefly into his seat as Quentin jerked. “What was that?” he snapped, twisting his head to look at the Tampies.

Sso-ngii's mouth moved soundlessly for a handful of heartbeats before any words came out. “I do not know,” he said. “I know that I have never felt such intensity of feeling in a space horse before; that is all.”

“Well, what's it
like
?” Ferrol snarled. “Is it like fear, or concern, or happiness—?”

“Movement!” Kennedy snapped. “One object, very large; bearing one hundred starboard, thirty nadir, range 170 kilometers. Closing!”

Ferrol had the object on his own display now; the scale clicked on—

“Ffe-rho!—Quentinninni is afraid—I cannot hold him—”

“Give it its head!” Ferrol barked. “Just don't let it Jump—”

The rest of his words were blown out with his wind as Quentin shot forward, ramming him two gee's-worth back into his seat. “Kennedy!” he managed as his body struggled to adjust to weight again.

“No contest,” she said, her voice tight. “The thing's doing at least seven gees toward us.”

Ferrol got a hand to his display, keyed for tactical. Two gees or not, the vultures were still staying with them. And the scale on the intruder— “My God,” he said. “Damn thing's almost two kilometers long.”

“I'd say we've found our space horse killer,” Kennedy agreed. “That thing's bearing down on us like a hungry shark.”

“Yeah, well, let's see if we can discourage it a little.” Fighting the extra weight in his arms, Ferrol keyed the comm laser for a full-intensity unmodulated pulse and set it to tracking the shark, wishing to hell he had some real weaponry to work with. “We got anything aboard this teacup besides the laser?” he asked.

“Not that I know of,” Kennedy said. “But we're running directly away from it now, which means the main drive's pointing straight down its throat.”

“Good.” The tactical showed the laser locked firmly on the elongated mass overtaking them. “Be sure to balance with the forward jets—we don't want to ram Quentin.”