Warhorse

“Wwis-khaa!” Ferrol snapped, his eyes on the displays. “Do it!”

“Quenti

“Damn!” Ferrol slammed an impotent fist onto the edge of the console, watching helplessly as the webbing swept through the mess of vultures without obvious effect. “It’s not working. It’s not working.”

“I see the problem,” Ke

Ferrol hissed between his teeth. “Yeah. Damn. And now they’re wriggling out the open end and going back to the main swarm. We need three or four missiles, or one really big one, to make this work.”

“And a way to seal the end after it’s collected them,” Ke

“We got it all,” Roman acknowledged. “I think you’ve got the right idea; we’ll see if engineering and Tenzing’s people can improve on the model. Hopefully before the shark catches up with us.”

Which would be fine for the Amity, Ferrol thought. But for them… “We’ve already used all the webbing we had aboard, Captain,” he told Roman.

“I assumed that,” the other said. “We’ll think of something.”

“For starters,” Ke

Roman seemed to ponder that. “That’ll bring Quentin in uncomfortably close to the shark,” he pointed out. “Are you sure you want to risk that?”

“It’s a damn sight better risk than hoping you can outrun the shark the whole way here,” Ferrol countered.

“Point,” the other conceded. “Yamoto?”

“Ready, sir,” was Yamoto’s prompt reply. “Lieutenant?”

“Go,” Ke

“Good,” Roman said. “Looks like a rendezvous of… an hour fifty minutes.”

With the projected shark intercept at just under two hours away. “Pretty tight,”

Ferrol grunted. “Especially if the shark decides to speed up.”

“Yes, well, Man o’ War can do six gees if necessary,” Roman reminded him.

And the shark could do seven… “There’s one more thing you should do, Captain,”

Ferrol said, the words coming out with difficulty. “In the underbed storage of my cabin is a lockbox—combination seven-two-seven-three-three. In it is a datapack—” he braced himself—“that shows the effects of excessive radiation and heat on space horses. If the shark’s physiology is similar enough, the data may give you a handle on how to fight it.”

He held his breath, waiting with dread for the obvious question. But Roman had a better sense of priorities than that. “Thank you, Commander; I’ll get it to the survey section right away,” he said. “Let’s hope it helps.”

Ferrol nodded silently at the console, a hollow sensation in the pit of his stomach.

So much for secret politics and secret weapons, he thought blackly. But this was a matter of survival—his and Amity’s both. Just for once, politics could go to hell.

And if the Senator didn’t like it, he could go to hell, too.

Chapter 19

Four gees meant four times normal weight, which meant Amity’s scientists had to work from acceleration couches, which in the past had usually prompted bitter complaints and long delays. But for once there were no complaints; and in less than half an hour the preliminary reports began coming in.

“It’s two thousand fifteen meters long,” Tenzing told Roman, the intercom screen showing a familiar tapered-cylinder shape. “About two and a half times the length of the average space horse, with similar proportions. Sensory clusters are arranged in similar axial rings fore and aft, though from the diameter of each cluster it appears that the feeding orifices are proportionally much larger than those of space horses.” The diagram vanished, replaced by Tenzing’s drawn face.

Roman grimaced. “So if current theory is right about telekene strength scaling with volume, we’re talking a creature fifteen times stronger than Man o’ War.”

Tenzing nodded heavily. “We can hope it’s not that bad, but it’s certainly bad enough. The lander’s data proves that much.”

“Agreed. What about the vultures?”

Tenzing shrugged as best he could in four gees. “The shark seems to be covered with the things,” he said. “It appears my remora theory was at least partly right.”

“Except that in this case the scavengers play an active part in the hunt.”

“Right,” Tenzing agreed. “And that’s going to give us some trouble. We estimate the shark’s carrying about four times as many vultures as we’ve got sitting in front of Man o’ War right now. That’s considerably more than the net missile we’re building will be able to web up, particularly if they come at us in waves.”

Roman rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Though as long as the waves come in far enough apart to give us a Jump window, the trick should still work.”

“Maybe,” Tenzing said. “Depends some on how close the shark is to us at the time—and on what, if anything, it can do to counter the web missile.”

And that was, indeed, what it all ultimately came down to: whether the shark was instinct-controlled, or whether it possessed a genuine, creative intelligence. “You think it can reason that way?” he asked Tenzing.

“Professional opinion?” Again, Tenzing shrugged. “I don’t know, Captain, I really don’t. Intelligence generally scales upward with brain size, but there’s no rule that says it has to, and there are some major exceptions.” He nodded toward the display.

“Your shark, here, retreated back to the dead space horse after its encounter with the lander; but then it must have left again right away to have been where it was when we first spotted it. So: did it fall back, do a little feeding, and then wander around licking its wounds? Or did it go back to collect the rest of the vultures so as to have its full attack force ready for the unknown thing that had fought back so strangely?” He shook his head. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

Roman looked at the tactical display. Still an hour and twenty minutes to go till their rendezvous with the lander… and the shark was still closing. “What about the information in Commander Ferrol’s datapack?” he asked Tenzing. “Anything there we can use?”

“Oh, there’s plenty there,” Tenzing snorted. “Whether we can use it is something else entirely. It seems clear that heavy dosages—and I mean heavy dosages—of ionizing radiation and dense relativistic-particle fluxes can disable or kill space horses, with the sensory clusters being especially vulnerable. But Amity didn’t come equiped with X-ray lasers and fine-tune particle accelerators. ”

Roman nodded. “Lander? You getting all this?”

“Yes, sir,” Ferrol said a few seconds later, his voice grim. “Doesn’t sound especially hopeful, does it?”

“We’re not dead yet,” Roman reminded him. “Engineering will have the drive at full power well before the shark reaches us, and there’s enough particle radiation in there to give it at least a hefty slap in the face. And we’re trying to build an X-ray laser from parts of the aft comm laser—theoretically, that’s supposed to be possible.”

“I’ve seen it done,” Ke

“We’re already doing that with the spare comm laser,” Roman told her. “You have anything else, Dr. Tenzing?”

“As a matter of fact, I do,” the scientist said. “And for a change, this tidbit may actually turn out to be useful. It seems that our shark is a sprinter.”

Roman frowned. “Come again?”

“A sprinter,” Tenzing repeated. “As opposed to a long-distance ru