Warhorse

And right on cue, Marlowe’s console emitted a loud beep. “Captain!” the other called. “Picking up an emergency beacon; bearing inside the asteroid belt.

“We’ve found them.”

It turned out not to require any miracles, after all; Ferrol hadn’t realized just how readily the lander’s equipment could be disassembled and recombined, though in retrospect that wasn’t unreasonable for a craft that would often serve as a largecapacity lifeboat. The necessary technical data was stored on one of the datapacks in the survival library kit, and Ke

But finally the oddly shaped missile was finished and mounted to the outer hull.

“Now what?” Demothi asked as Ferrol struggled to strip off his EVA skinsuit in zero-gee.

“What do you think?” Ferrol snorted, tugging at a pant leg that didn’t want to come off. “We wait, that’s what. If this works we’ll have a clear Jump window for only a few seconds, and it would be awfully handy to have some idea where we were Jumping to before we start. Wouldn’t you say?”

“And if the shark attacks before the Amity arrives?” Demothi countered.

“We’ll worry about that if and when it happens,” Ferrol growled, stuffing the EVA

gear into its locker and closing the door. “Until then—”

And beyond Demothi, a blue light suddenly began flashing on the control board.

“Ferrol—they’re here,” Ke

Ferrol kicked off the locker and shot forward, slapping his hands against successive rows of seats to slow himself down. “Where are they?” he asked, grabbing his seat and shoving himself down into it. From the speaker he could hear Marlowe’s voice hailing them.

“Bearing twenty-four port, thirty zenith,” she read off the numbers. “Haven’t got a range yet. Laser’s tracking them now… there; on target.”

Ferrol jabbed the transmit button. “This is Commander Ferrol aboard Amity lander,” he called toward the microphone. “Come in, Amity.” Eyes on the clock, he counted seconds: four… five…

Marlowe’s voice abruptly vanished. “Ahoy, lander,” Roman said. Even with the distorting crackle of charged-particle static, Ferrol could hear the relief in the captain’s voice. “I gather you’ve never heard it’s impolite to leave a party while the host is out of the room.”

“Sorry, but we didn’t have much choice—our ride was leaving,” Ferrol countered.

A six-second round-trip delay—three seconds each direction—put Amity about nine hundred thousand kilometers away. Timewise, that meant…

“A good four hours away at a two-gee ace/dec course,” Ke

He nodded his thanks. “Can you tell us where we are?” he called into the mike.

“We’ve got a complete nav dump ready for you,” Roman said six seconds later.

“Here it comes.” A light on Ke

“As a matter of interest,” Roman continued, “Quentin made almost 1120 lightyears in that Jump. Not bad for a begi

“We’ll contact the record books later,” Ferrol said. “Right now, we all have to get the hell out of this system. Do you have a clear Jump window?”

The delay was longer than six seconds this time. Considerably longer. “No,”

Roman said at last, his voice grim. “We’ve picked up an advance guard of small space-going creatures. They seem to be blocking Man o’ War’s Jump vision.”

Ferrol swore under his breath. Amity was far enough from the dead space horse that the vultures shouldn’t have found the larger ship nearly this soon. Was the whole system swarming with the damn things?

Or had the shark abandoned its prey… ?

“Marlowe, key in a full sweep with your anomalous motion program,” he ordered tightly. “Right now. Captain, recommend you get moving, at whatever gees you can pull. If the vultures found you this quickly, there’s a good chance the shark is somewhere nearb—”

“Motion, Captain,” Marlowe interrupted. “Bearing eighty-seven port, sixty nadir.

It’s… my God.”

“Hhom-jee, go to four-gee acceleration,” Roman’s voice came, glacially calm.

“Yamoto, are we still on course for the lander?”

“Yes, sir,” Yamoto answered, her voice changing midway through with the unmistakable strains of high-gee acceleration. “We’ll need to correct later for the higher acceleration, but it’ll be close enough.”

“Marlowe?”

“The monster just went to four gees, too, Captain,” the other reported. “At current course… intercept in just over two hours.”

“Don’t get overconfident—we’ve seen it do seven gees,” Ferrol warned them. “I’d guess it’s taking its time because it’s not very hungry.”

“We’ll take any small favors we can get,” Roman said. “I take it the—shark?—is a predator?”

Ferrol snorted. “In capital letters, underlined. We got a look at the space horse it’d been feeding on. Or what was left of it.”

“We’ve got some recordings, Captain,” Ke

“Good. Transmit whenever you’re ready.”

The indicator light went on, then off, and for a few minutes there was silence. “I see what you mean,” Roman acknowledged at last. “I’ll send it down to the survey section, see what they can dig out of it. You have any other recommendations?”

Ferrol licked at his upper lip. “We almost certainly can’t kill the shark, sir,” he said. “The Amity hasn’t got anything that could take out even another spacecraft, let alone something that kills and eats space horses for a living. Our only chance is to try and get rid of these vultures and their optical nets long enough to Jump.” He glanced at Ke

“The rough design specs are in the package I just sent you,” Ke

“Hang on, let me take a look.”

For a minute the carrier was silent. Ke

“Ke

She nodded. “Deneb it is, Captain,” she called.

“Give us a continual helm dump,” Roman instructed. “If it works, we’ll want to see how. Good luck.”

“Right.” Ferrol took a careful breath. “Let’s do it, Ke

She nodded. “Move us out,” she ordered Wwis-khaa, who had taken Sso-ngu‘s place under the helmet. “Turn Quentin about thirty degrees port, seventeen nadir—big bluish star standing all alone.”

“Your wishes are ours.”

A minute later Quentin was in position, at least as well as Wwis-khaa could tell with the vultures’ interference. “Missile ready,” Ferrol read off, mentally crossing his fingers. “Okay, Ke

With a flash of maneuvering fire their creation crawled away from the lander. A

minute later, the low-level fusion drive kicked in, sending the missile leaping outward like a scalded bat. It streaked past Quentin as Wwis-khaa twitched the calf aside; then, with the delicacy of a surgeon, the Tampy turned Quentin back again until the optical net was directly in line with the oncoming missile. Ferrol held his breath… and a second before impact the miniature star suddenly blossomed into a filigree of space horse webbing. At five hundred meters per second the humanrigged net collided with the vultures’ optical one—