Warhorse

“Can it make the round-trip flight out here and back?”

“I do not know. It may be too much for him.” Another sigh. “But we will try.”

“Captain, we’re moving,” MacKaig a

“Confirmed,” Marlowe said a moment later. “ETA… oh, at least ten hours at the acceleration they’re pulling.”

“Good enough,” Roman nodded. It was a bit slow; but on the other hand, Lowry’s calculations indicated they had the time to spare, and pushing the space horse for more speed at this point might be dangerous. “Stay on them, Marlowe. Keep a sharp eye for any problems.”

“Yes, sir.”

He gave the display one last look, then keyed for a status readout. Amity’s repairs were progressing well; with luck, the ship would be ready by the time the space horse reached them. “Ke

“Yes, sir,” Ke

“I realize that,” Roman told her. “But we have to try. They don’t know that the next burp will be the nova, and by the time they figure it out it’s likely to be too late.”

“Understood, sir.” For a moment her eyes locked with his, and it wasn’t hard to read the thought there: if the space horse limping in from Shadrach had indeed been crippled by overexposure to the double star’s radiation, what was that same radiation doing to Pegasus?

It was a question Roman didn’t really want to think about.

Twelve hours later the space horse dipped briefly into the moon’s shadow, keeping well back from the body itself. Amity was waiting, and together they headed back into the deadly passage.

“Getting a little radiation spillover from the space horse’s side,” Marlowe reported as they left the moon’s penumbra. “Not as bad as the simulations had thought it might be, though.”

“Is the umbrella helping any?” Roman asked him.

“Definitely,” Marlowe replied. “Particularly against the visible light, but it’s absorbing a decent fraction of the neutron flux, too.”

Roman nodded. The “umbrella” had been the inspiration of someone in Stolt’s engineering section: a thin layer of silvered plastic held a couple of meters out from Amity’s hull by a central strut and stiffened by ribs of memory plastic. The latter had been the big obstacle to the operation—Amity’s synthesizers could generate the stuff only so quickly—until someone had thought to check the survey section’s records. The organic memory bones and muscles that had so startled everyone on that first planetary survey two months ago had turned out to be not only easier and faster to synthesize than the standard varieties, but also had a significantly larger neutron-capture cross section, as well. “Keep an eye on it,” he instructed Marlowe.

“We’ll want to jettison it if and when it becomes more trouble than it’s worth.” He keyed for the lifeboat. “Rrin-saa? This is the captain. How’s the space horse doing?”

There was a long pause. “His condition is worsening,” Rrin-saa said, the words coming out with difficulty. On the display his eyes seemed flat and oddly glazed. “I do not know if he will survive the trip.”

Roman rubbed his thumb and forefinger together. “MacKaig?”

“I have to agree, Captain,” she said grimly. “We started with an acceleration of barely 0.1 gee; our deceleration at rendezvous was three-quarters that. The way things are going, we’ll be lucky to reach Shadrach in eighteen hours.”

Eighteen hours to Shadrach, and then twenty-five back to the Amity… with the nova possibly going off as early as forty-six hours from now. Their leeway was getting thi

“Still too hot out there for a solo trip to Shadrach,” the other shook his head. “The hull plates would last maybe an hour or two.”

And they would need to keep some of that strength in reserve for the twenty-fivehour trip back to Pegasus. “That’s it, then,” Roman said. “We stay with the space horse as long as possible and keep our fingers crossed. Ke

“Yes, sir.”

MacKaig was right: the space horse was definitely losing strength. There were periods when it simply drifted, allowing itself to be pulled by Shadrach’s gravity; and as the hours dragged by those periods began to stretch ever longer.

And finally, with Shadrach’s disk filling the displays, the creature gave up.

“I’m sure it’s dead, Captain,” MacKaig said, her voice under tight control. “It hasn’t done anything but fall planetward for the past twenty minutes. And Rrinsaa…

he doesn’t look right.”

Roman frowned at the appropriate display. Rrin-saa’s face beneath the amplifier helmet was strangely blank. “Rrin-saa?” he called. “Rrin-saa, what’s happening?”

There was no response. “Sievers, get that helmet off him,” Roman ordered, already keying his intercom for Amity’s Tampy section. “I’ll find out from the Tampies how to break him out of this.” He leaned toward the intercom—

“There is no need.”

Roman jerked his eyes back to the display, throat muscles tightening reflexively.

Rrin-saa’s whiny voice was very alien; dry and brittle and almost animalistic—a voice that Roman had never heard before. And yet, behind the alie

“Yes, Rro-maa,” the Tampy assured him. Already his voice was returning to normal. “He is dead.”

Roman took a careful breath. “I’m sorry,” he said. “MacKaig? That’s it, then. Pop your tether line and get back here. We’ll stay in the shadow until you’re aboard, then probably have to make a run for it. Ke

“The space horse will enter Shadrach’s shadow before it hits,” Ke

“Plot us a compromise,” Roman told her. “Something that’ll expose us to minimum sunlight without using up large amounts of fuel.”

“Already plotted, sir. We’ll leave the space horse’s shadow in exactly eighteen minutes.”

“Good. Stand by to execute as soon as the boat is aboard. And inform Dr. Lowry that this is it.”

Thirty-seven minutes later, securely planted in a stable orbit, Amity waited as the dagger of blue flame that marked Lowry’s lander rose to meet it.

The rendezvous was an anticlimax, but a distinctly welcome one. Roman had worried that the smaller craft wouldn’t be able to match Amity’s horizontal velocity and would crash violently into the forward hangar at bulkhead-smashing speed. But Lowry’s pilot had pla

“Welcome aboard,” Roman called via intercom to the hangar. “You’ll be shown to acceleration couches; strap into them immediately. Acceleration in five minutes.”

He switched off and turned to Ke

“Yes, sir,” she said, her course plot appearing on Roman’s helm repeater display.

“We break orbit and drive straight away from Shadrach, staying in its umbra as long as we can. Then we blast laterally to get back to Pegasus. That gives B more time to cool down and also puts us farther out before the hull gets any direct sunlight.”