“To be more precise, a deal was being worked on me,” Ferrol snorted. “It seems the Senate, in a burst of goodwill and friendship, has graciously offered the Scapa Flow and me to the Tampies to help round up their herd.”
Roman whistled under his breath. “Now there’s a job with steady employment.”
“Tell me about it.” Ferrol looked at the viewport. “I think even the Tampies were surprised that as many of the space horses hung around the system as did—more domesticated than anyone had realized, I guess. But they still lost nearly a hundred in those few hours after the battle, and the ones here that haven’t been netted and taken back to the corral yet are starting to leave now, too.”
“And the Scapa Flow, of course, just happened to have made records of the spots where each of them Jumped from?” Roman suggested blandly. “Just in case?”
“Just in case,” Ferrol agreed. “Anyway. At the moment, the plan is for us to lead a Tampy ship to where one of the space horses Jumped from, let their own space horse sniff out the target system from the dust sweat, then piggyback out there with them and round the thing up. We’ll bring it back, turn it in to the corral, and head out for the next one.” He shook his head. “At probably something like a week or more per space horse—well, as you said: really steady employment.”
“All of it, conveniently enough, at great distances from the Cordonale,” Roman pointed out. “Convenient, at least, from the point of view of certain parties to whom you could be an embarrassment.”
“The fact hadn’t escaped my notice,” Ferrol agreed sourly.
Roman eyed him. “The Senate is at least going to pay you for all this, aren’t they?”
Ferrol smiled tightly. “They have some piddling sum in mind, yes. Fortunately, I’ve been able to do a little dealing of my own, directly with the Tampies. For each capture they’ll be giving me—giving me, not the Senate—a credit of three weeks free use of a space horse and Handler team. And I mean free use, with no objections or handwringing or moralizing allowed.”
Roman nodded. Somehow, neither the fee nor the conditions really surprised him.
“You plan to go into the shipping business?”
“Hardly. I was thinking more along the lines of mid-distance planetary exploration, in the one- to two-hundred light-year range—survey stuff, like Amity’s first mission. Maybe keep an eye out for possible colony sites, too, for people who don’t mind being a a little isolated.” His lip twisted sardonically. “Who knows? I might even settle down somewhere out there myself. At a guess, I’d say the Senate would probably offer lots of government assistance to help me relocate off to the backside of nowhere.” He cocked an eyebrow. “What about you? Back to normal Starforce service again?”
“Unless the Senate taps me for the diplomatic corps,” Roman said dryly. “No, I’ll probably just be sent back to bordership duty once the Amity’s been decommissioned.”
Ferrol eyed him. “Not a good place to be if it comes to war,” he warned.
“Especially for someone like you who would hate like crazy to have to blow Tampy ships out of the sky.”
Roman shook his head. “It won’t come to war. Not now.”
Ferrol grimaced. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t put quite that much faith in this upcoming Tampy reassessment of humanity.”
Roman shook his head again. “You miss the point, Commander. I’m not counting on any philosophical reassessment; I’m counting on a very practical enlightened self-interest.”
Ferrol snorted. “I don’t think Tampies believe in enlightened self-interest.”
“Of course they do,” Roman told him. “That’s what species survival means: doing whatever is to the race’s own best interests. For the Tampies that’s always meant minimizing their impact on the environment while at the same time maximizing their benefit from that environment. I think that’s been the crux of our conflict, in fact: they’ve seen our activities as being exactly the opposite of their approach, intrusive without being especially beneficial. Now that we and our technology are going to be of some practical use to them, they’re almost certain to tone down on their criticism of our methods. Not stop entirely, mind you, but perhaps be more diplomatic in the way they present their complaints.”
Ferrol shook his head. “You’re reaching,” he said. “The Tampies have never yet toned down their ethical posturing just because it cost them something.”
Roman smiled. “Of course they have. Why else do you think the shared worlds’
problems haven’t exploded yet?”
Ferrol blinked. “You’ve lost me.”
“Well, just think about what the situation was like out there when Amity was first launched,” Roman reminded him. “A string of bombs, ready to go off—in fact, when that priority message came for us to get Lowry’s group out of that pre-nova system we both assumed it was a notification of war. Now, over a year later the explosion still hasn’t come. So why not?”
Ferrol eyed him suspiciously. “You’re not going to try and tell me that Amity’s space horse breeding program stopped a war, are you?”
“I am indeed,” Roman said. “Because suddenly being overly loud and obnoxious toward us carried the risk of costing something very valuable: space horse calves that they didn’t have to waste years going out and hunting down. And that’s going to be even more the case with the shark repellent. The shark repellent, and the shark tranquilizers, and the vulture repellent, and the space horse calvingstimulator, and all the rest of the things we’ll come up with once we’ve cracked the dust sweat molecular code. On our side of the balance, closer relations with the Tampies will give us increased access to space horses, and all the advantages that come with that.”
His gaze drifted to the viewport. Outside, just visible in the dim red light, he could see one of Amity’s lifeboats carefully skimming along the surface of one of the dead sharks, busily harvesting more of the precious dust sweat. “The universe runs on economics, Chayne,” he said quietly. “Not ethics, not rhetoric, not public opinion; but hard, cold economics. If there’s clear profit to be made on both sides by ending a conflict, the politicians will find reasons to cool the conflict down. If one or both sides see more potential profit in war, then there’ll be war. That’s the way it’s been throughout human history, and I don’t see any reason why it should change now.”
Ferrol exhaled audibly between his teeth. “You have a far more cynical view of the universe than I ever realized, Captain.”
Roman shrugged. “Perhaps. But I’ve always felt that simply refusing to face unpleasant facts doesn’t make you immune to their consequences, just powerless to make constructive use of them. Of course I’d prefer that our peace with the Tampies be built on something a little nobler than money… but I prefer it to having no peace at all. And the rest will follow eventually—the public opinion and political unity and all. It always does… if the economics can buy enough time.” He cocked an eyebrow. “So don’t be too quick to bury yourself away on some colony planet just as soon as you have enough space horse credits to get there. We’re going to need people like you in the next few years—people who are willing to buck the inertia of public opinion to do what they believe in.”
Ferrol smiled lopsidedly. “Even if what those people once believed in was war, warhorses, and genocide?”
Roman shrugged. “As Lieutenant Kennedy said,” he reminded the other quietly, “it is the end of an era.”