Trent held his gaze a second longer, then turned back to his displays without another word. Reaching again to his own controls, Roman turned one of the telescope cameras onto the space horse, keying it to track with the meteor’s projected intercept point. Trent’s paranoia aside, he had no doubt as to what the space horse wanted the rock for… and like the space horse itself, it was something he very much wanted to see. The display shifted slightly as the intercept vector was updated, came to rest on one of the sensory clusters: eight impressively colored organs, each a few square meters in area, grouped around a large expanse of otherwise unremarkable gray skin.

For a moment nothing happened… and then, without warning, all the organs darkened in color and the blank central region abruptly split open, its edges ridging upward in an odd puckering sort of motion. From off-camera the meteor appeared, to drop neatly into the opening. The edges smoothed down, the split vanished, and the organs resumed their original colors.

“Secure from alert,” Roman ordered, and as the trilling was silenced he looked over at Trent. The other’s back was stiff, angry looking. Probably had hoped the Tampies really were attacking the Dryden.

Had hoped to have his prejudices justified.

“I’d like you to run a complete analysis on the event we’ve just recorded, Commander,” Roman said into the silence. “Concentrate on the meteor movements—vector changes, interaction with local gravitational gradients, and so on. There’s a great deal we don’t know about space horse telekinesis, and it’s a blank area we very much need to get filled in.”

Some of the tension went out of Trent’s back. “Yes, sir,” he said. “I’ll get the programs set up right away.”

The tension level in the bridge faded noticeably, and Roman permitted himself a moment of satisfaction. A smart commander, he’d once been told, never rubbed a subordinate’s nose in an error when it wasn’t absolutely necessary to do so. In this case, it wasn’t.