Read Online Warhorse by Timothy Zahn - Free Book Online Page B

tongue-tied. “Ah…I’m sorry. I thought you were the one in charge of this half of the ship.”
    Rrin-saas’s mouth opened wide, as if in parody of a human smile—the Tampy equivalent of shaking his head. “I speak for all,” Rrin-saa said. “I do not rule.”
    â€œI see,” Roman said, although he didn’t, exactly. Anarchy, or even rule by consensus, didn’t seem a good way to run a starship. “But if you don’t rule, who does?”
    Fingers to ear. “You do, Rro-maa.”
    â€œUh… huh ,” Roman said. It was slowly becoming clearer… “You mean that since your people agreed to put a human—me—in command of the Amity , then I’m to give you all your orders?”
    â€œThat is correct.”
    It couldn’t be entirely correct, Roman knew. At the very least, they’d arranged their own billeting and duty rosters without any input from the human half of the ship, and almost certainly such simple housekeeping operations would continue to be so handled.
    Which implied some sort of chain of command…which Rrin-saa didn’t seem interested in talking about. “Where are the repeater instruments from the bridge, then?” he asked.
    â€œWith the Handlers.”
    Roman nodded. “Take me there, then, if you would.”
    The Handler room was just aft of the bow instrument packing, in a mirror-image position to Amity ’s bridge. Sitting in the center of the room, a Tampy sporting a green-purple neckerchief sat humming atonally to himself, his eyes wide open but paying no attention to Roman or Rrin-saa. To the left, arranged in random patterns against the inner wall, were the repeater instruments; to the right, a second Tampy sat pressed against the outer wall, his face turned at a painful-looking angle to stare forward out the viewport, his head engulfed by a large multi-wired helmet. The wires of which went to a basket-mesh case, inside of which—
    Roman forced himself to look…and actually, it wasn’t too bad. Provided he remembered that the hairless, piglet-sized creature was supposed to look that way; and that it was safely asleep, not dead; and that its wired-up brain neurons had as much sheer computing capability as the Cordonale’s best mainframes.
    The Tampies’ computer, he knew, used basically the same arrangement. Not so simple, but still elegant.
    â€œSso-ngii,” Rrin-saa said, raising both hands toward the helmeted Tampy. “He speaks with Pegasunninni.”
    â€œPega—? Ah,” Roman interrupted himself. Pegasunninni would be the Tampies’ name for the space horse: Pegasus, with the proper identifying suffix tacked on. “And the other is Hhom-jee?” he added, hoping he was pulling the proper neckerchief color scheme out of memory.
    â€œThat is correct,” Rrin-saa confirmed. “He is resting.”
    â€œAh,” Roman said again, eying the humming Tampy with interest. Tampy sleep was both more physically active than the human equivalent and also came at semi-irregular intervals around the clock. A far cry from the normal terrestrial circadian rhythm, and one that had helped to poison quite a few of the early attempts at interspecies cooperation. Human workers could never quite believe the Tampies weren’t simply goofing off, and Roman would bet that the human habit of going into a coma for a straight thirty percent of the day had been equally annoying to the Tampies. Though no one knew for sure; the Tampies had never discussed the matter. “I gather he’s here to take over when Sso-ngii needs sleep?”
    â€œThat is correct,” Rrin-saa said. He repeated his earlier two-handed gesture, this time toward Hhom-jee. “There is one other who talks to Pegasunninni.”
    â€œYes, I remember that there were three Handlers listed on the crew roster.” Roman nodded toward Sso-ngii and the hairless caged animal. It