Roman nodded and keyed himself a copy of the data. “What about their own ship?”

“They haven’t got one,” Ferrol said. “They had to hire a Tampy ship to give them transport—the system’s a good thousand light-years outside Mitsuushi range.”

“And that ship isn’t available to them?”

“I’d say that’s almost irrelevant at the moment, sir,” Ferrol said. It wasn’t, really, but with luck the captain wouldn’t notice that. “They called Earth; Earth called us.

It’s in our laps now.”

“So it would seem,” Roman grunted. “Do we have the system located yet?”

“Yes, sir,” MacKaig spoke up from the helm. She tapped a key, and the relevant page of the New Cygni Listing appeared on Ferrol’s helm repeater display. “Eleven hundred sixty-five light-years away, longitude minus 2.6 degrees, latitude 5.9 degrees,” she said. “We can’t Jump directly to it from here—not visible enough—but Pegasus can see Deneb from here, and it ought to be able to see 1148 from there.”

Roman studied the listing for a moment before nodding. “Should work. Feed the direction and maps down to Hhom-jee and tell him to Jump as soon as Pegasus is ready.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, and busied herself with her intercom.

Beside Ferrol, the computer signaled that the problem he’d set for it a minute ago had been completed. He turned back as a map of the 1148 system appeared on the display, framed by four-decimal numerical listings of current planetary locations.

Adjusting the scale, he took a good look.

The system consisted of two stars—a smallish red giant and a white dwarf—plus three planets of the usual variety of sizes and orbits. The two stars were so close together, the dwarf circling perilously close to the giant’s outer atmosphere, that there was little or no room for a stable planetary orbit between them. All the planets revolved around both stars, an arrangement with enough perturbations to make hash out of a standard orbit calculation, and Ferrol gave silent thanks that the team out there had been thinking straight enough to include updated numbers with their tachyon distress call. The base was on the innermost planet, which the team had dubbed Shadrach: a roughly Mars-sized chunk of lifeless rock with a pair of moons, orbiting some five hundred million kilometers out from the center of the giant.

“We’re starting to come around,” MacKaig announced. “Lining up for the Jump to Deneb.”

“Good,” Roman said. “Commander Ferrol?”

“Sir?” Ferrol said, eyes still on the display.

“Do you know this Admiral Marcosa?”

Ferrol felt his back go abruptly stiff. He forced the muscles to relax, glad his face was away from the captain. “I’ve heard of him, sir, but never met him,” he said. It was more or less true.

“Anti-Tampy?”

Ferrol suppressed a grim smile. Certainly he was anti-Tampy—rabidly so, in fact.

Marcosa was one of the Senator’s closest friends within the Admiralty, a quiet ally in everything from the Scapa Flow’s poaching runs to the backstairs maneuvering that had gotten Ferrol aboard Amity… and the fact that the new orders had come in over Marcosa’s name was almost certainly not a coincidence. “I’d guess so, sir,” he said aloud. “Why do you ask?”

He could feel Roman’s eyes on the back of his neck. “I wondered why he took the chance of waiting for us,” Roman said, almost offhandedly, “instead of asking the Tampies to send one of their ships.”

There was opportunity here for a dig at the whole question of Tampy speed and efficiency, but there were too many other things on Ferrol’s mind for him to be bothered. “I’ve got a suggestion, Captain, about our approach.” Without waiting for permission, he sent the planetary schematic to Roman’s station. “If we Jump to

1148 directly from Deneb we’ll arrive someplace along this line—” he traced a line from the double star outward with a mousepen—“depending on how the gravitational equipotential surfaces work out. That’ll put us a minimum of a hundred million kilometers away from the planet itself.”

“Whereas if we shuttle back and forth between appropriately positioned stars we should be able to come in considerably closer?”

Ferrol nodded, impressed in spite of himself. Maybe Roman was smarter than his blind pro-Tampy sentiments would indicate. “Yes, sir,” he acknowledged. “I’ve found a couple of good possibilities, but I’m not sure which one would be the best.”

“Ensign?” Roman invited.

MacKaig was frowning at Ferrol’s schematics and preliminary numbers, fingers skating across her own keys. “Looks like the second one will get us closer,” she said slowly. “Not by much, though—maybe half a million kilometers at the most.”

“We’ll take anything we can get at this point,” Roman said, a grim edge to his voice. “Put it into visual format and send it down to Hhom-jee. We’ll want to do the Jumps one-two-three, as fast as we can get in position for each one.”

“Yes, sir.” She hesitated. “That assumes, of course, that Pegasus can do three Jumps in a row.”

“A fair question,” Roman agreed, reaching for his intercom. “Let’s find out, shall we?”

Ferrol keyed himself into the circuit just as a Tampy face appeared. “Rro-maa, yes?” he grated.

“Yes,” Roman nodded. “The Amity’s just been called on for an emergency rescue mission, Rrin-saa. Had you been informed?”

“Ffe-rho has told us, yes,” Rrin-saa confirmed.

“All right. We’ll be doing three Jumps in a row, and I need quick answers to two questions. First: will Pegasus need to rest between the Jumps?”

“I do not know,” the Tampy whined. “I know space horses have Jumped twice without rest; that is all.”

“I see,” Roman said, with no sign of impatience at yet another example of Tampy waffling. Perhaps, Ferrol thought cynically, he was to the point of considering that an adequate answer. “I guess we’ll find out together,” the captain continued. “So: second question. Given that space horses absorb a high percentage of the solar energy that hits them, will a nova or pre-nova star be too bright for Pegasus to handle?”

Ferrol swallowed. That thought hadn’t even occurred to him, and he found himself holding his breath as he waited for the answer.

He needn’t have bothered. “I do not know, Rro-maa,” the other said. “I know that they come close to normal stars; that is all.”

“Yes, well… thank you. Captain out.”

Ferrol keyed off his intercom with a snort of disgust. “You didn’t really expect to get anything useful from them, did you?” he growled.

Roman sent him a thoughtful look, turned to the helm. “Status, Ensign?”

“We’re in line for Deneb,” MacKaig reported. “Hhom-jee signals Pegasus is ready.”

Roman nodded. “Jump.”

The Jump to Deneb went off without a hitch, and from the new location MacKaig was able to refine her numbers for the remaining two Jumps. A half-hour’s drive through normal space put Amity in position for the second Jump, to a dim and unnamed star.

It seemed to Ferrol that it took longer for Hhom-jee to get Pegasus ready for that one. By the time they were ready for the third Jump, to 1148 itself, there was no doubt.

For the first time in the voyage, Pegasus was showing signs of fatigue.

“Rrin-saa, we’ve been in position for the past five minutes,” Roman said into the intercom, his voice carefully showing no signs of either irritation or nervousness.

“What seems to be the trouble?”

“There is not trouble,” the Tampy’s reply came faintly. “Pegasunninni is in mild perasiata—it will be only another few moments.”

Roman hissed quietly between his teeth. “Have Hhom-jee push it as much as he can. There’s no guarantee as to how much time we’ve got.”

“Your wishes are ours.”

Roman broke the connection and turned to Ferrol. “Any word from below on the latest dust sweat analysis?”

“The composition’s definitely changing,” Ferrol told him, the sour taste of irony in his mouth. He’d argued—loudly, in fact—against all of the dust sweat work; now, suddenly, it was turning out to be of more than academic curiosity, after all. It left Roman looking brilliantly foresighted; and it left him, Ferrol, looking wrong. It was a toss-up as to which part of that he hated more. “Overall output is up, but at the same time there’s been a sharp drop in several of the trace elements.”