“Perhaps.” Roman was giving him an all too understanding look. “Under the circumstances, if you’d like to resign the post, I’ll certainly understand.”
Ferrol glared back, a flash of anger burning away the fear. That grandfatherly expression, reducing him to a child again—“Thank you, sir, but I’ll be staying.”
Roman seemed to measure him with his eyes, then nodded. “Very well, Commander,” he said gravely. “Welcome aboard the Amity. We leave at 0800 tomorrow; I’ll want you on the bridge two hours before that.”
“Understood, Captain.”
“I’ll see you then. Dismissed.”
It was a long walk from the captain’s office aft to the officers’ section, a walk made all the more difficult by the subtly shifting weight and Coriolis effects Ferrol had to contend with. It was a standard enough procedure, certainly: altering a ship’s rotational speed was a quick way to simultaneously test the spin jets, flywheel, and structural integrity. But he wasn’t in the mood to be lenient with standard procedures. Even ones that worked.
In politics, lying was apparently one of the standard procedures. It often worked, too.
They’d lied to him. Deliberately. A lie of ommission, but a lie nonetheless—and what really killed him was that part of the blame had to sit squarely on his own neck. Not once had it even occurred to him to ask whether the Amity would have a Mitsuushi backup.
Damn them.
He reached his cabin and went in, privacy-sealing the door behind him and flopping down on the bed. Beneath him, the cabin’s tiny port showed a dizzying panorama as the stars swept past in time to Amity’s rotation; but it was to the side bulkhead that he found his attention drawn. A normal, everyday bulkhead… except that, by an accident of room assignments, Ferrol’s cabin was at the edge of the human half of the ship.
Beyond that wall—six centimeters of metal and soundproofing away—was the Tampy section.
Tampies. Misshapen faces, stupid-looking tartan neckerchiefs, infuriatingly whining voices, strange and vaguely nauseating odors. Bio-engineered
“technology” which just barely deserved the name. High-minded ideals, noblesounding words… and quietly ruthless actions. Memories flooded back, sharp and clear, and for a teetering moment the fears of Prometheus loomed over him like thunderclouds.
But this wasn’t Prometheus… and he was no longer a helpless sixteen-year-old.
No longer helpless at all.
Rolling over, he reached down and pulled open the closest of the underbed storage drawers, withdrawing a thin black box from beneath a pile of shirts. He wouldn’t have put it past Roman to have had his luggage examined… but, no, the indicator built into the lock showed it hadn’t been touched. He tapped in the proper code, heard the gentle snick of the lock, and lifted the lid.
He pulled out the compact needle pistol first, making sure it pointed away from him as he laid it arm’s length away on the bed. The spare clip came out next, along with the special permit for him to carry the gun. Beneath the hardware was the false bottom; and beneath that was the envelope.
The gun was a conversation piece. The envelope was his weapon.
There was a single line of instructions on the front of the envelope, written in the Senator’s small and geometrically precise script: To be used when deemed necessary. Ferrol gazed at the words, letting the Senator’s calm strength and infinite confidence flow from the handwriting into him. No, this wasn’t Prometheus and helplessness. This was the Amity… and the chance to turn the Tampies’ quiet undeclared war right back on them.
If he was lucky. Somehow, Ferrol thought he would be.
For a long minute after Ferrol left, Roman sat quietly in his chair, gazing at the door and listening to the sound of his heart pounding in his chest. He’d expected anti-Tampy from the other, of course—virulent anti-Tampy, even.
He hadn’t expected absolute ice-packed hatred.
Even now, with Ferrol gone from his sight, the memory of the emotional turmoil he’d sensed in the younger man made him wince. Ferrol’s pain and anger were as fresh as if he’d been thrown off Prometheus only yesterday, the emotions kept alive for eight years by the certain knowledge that the Senate had lied through its collective teeth about what had happened to the colony.
About that, at least, he was right. Roman had seen the official documents.
He dropped his gaze to the intercom, feeling temptation tugging at him. A single touch of a button—a short, probably very painful, conversation—and Ferrol would be gone. The Antis’ time bomb gone from his ship, the faction itself absolutely furious at him—
And their revenge would be to scuttle Amity. And with it perhaps mankind’s last chance to stay out of war with the Tampies.
Roman closed his eyes tiredly. No, it was too risky. For now, at least, the only prudent course would be to play along with Ferrol. Give him all the leeway he wanted… and hope that whenever he made his move—whatever that move was—that there would be a chance to block him.
And until that happened, Roman still had a ship to run. Putting Ferrol out of his mind as best he could, he keyed his display to the status report menu and got back to work.
And tried not to notice how remarkably similar his wait-and-see plan was to the pro- Tampy Senators’ own method of dealing with the problem.
Chapter 4
At precisely 0812 the next morning, the Amity cast off its moorings on the Tampy corral. Trailing a kilometer behind their space horse, Pegasus, on deceptively thin tether lines, the ship headed out into deep space.
Roman had already known that the view from outside a space horse ship was impressive. What he hadn’t expected was that the ride was even more so.
It was quieter, obviously; but the reality of it far outstripped the expectation. Over the years Roman had grown accustomed to the many levels of noise a ship’s fusion drive was capable of putting out, from the dull but still permeating drone of standby to the steady thunder of full acceleration. It was a sound that never ceased as long as the ship was under power, and to be pulling a steady 0.6-gee acceleration without even a whisper of that familiar noise was awe-inspiring and just a little scary.
No drive noise also meant no deck vibration, of course; less obviously, it also meant none of the gentle rolling motion that came of the computer sensing and compensating for slight imbalances in thrust between the different drive nozzles. It was, in fact, for all the world like sitting in a full-size simulator back at the Academy.
“We’ve cleared the far edge of the corral enclosure,” Kennedy reported from the helm. “Signaling the Handler to increase acceleration to 0.9 gee.”
Roman nodded acknowledgment. He’d rather expected Kennedy to take the helm herself on this leg of the trip, and he hadn’t been disappointed. Clearly, she was serious about getting space horse experience. “What’s ETA to the scheduled Jump point?” he asked her.
“One hour twenty minutes,” she told him as their weight began a smooth increase.
“That is, if we stick to our current minimum-energy course.”
“We’re in no particular hurry, Lieutenant,” Roman told her. “Besides, I want to put Pegasus through a variety of maneuvers during the voyage. Minimum energy, minimum time, straight-line—you know the list.”
Ferrol half turned from his station. “I trust you’re not expecting the space horse to run into some kind of limit,” he offered. “I’ve heard of them pulling five gees without any noticeable strain.”
Roman shook his head. “I’m not looking for limits, Commander. Just differences.”
He turned his attention to the man at the scanner station. “Lieutenant Marlowe, how’s the signal from the contact feed repeater?”
“Coming in strong, sir,” Riddick Marlowe confirmed. “I’ve got it going to two separate recorders, as per orders.”