Tactical Error s-3

by Thorarinn Gunnarsson

  “I can make most of the run home in a series of long jumps, running at high starflight speeds while the drive recovers and recharges between jumps,” she answered. “Perhaps five days.”

  “Do it,” Velmeran agreed reluctantly, knowing as Valthyrra did that she would tear herself apart doing so. Because of the stress on the Methryn’s spaceframe and systems, they had been limiting their jumps to only moderate distances, and then only from relatively low speeds. The Methryn would get home in time, and she would go out to fight. But even if she survived, she would never fly again. This was likely the Methryn’s final run.

  “What about Terra?” Valthyrra reminded him gently.

  He shook his head weakly. “Terra is just one largely uninhabited and unimportant world in the middle of nowhere. We have to sacrifice that world to save our own.”

  Even as he made that decision, he knew that he was probably condemning Keflyn to her death. Donalt Trace’s spy would probably kill her before anyone could get through to warn her of her danger, a long time before his fleet of Fortresses arrived to destroy that ancient world.

  10

  The Valcyr was coming back to life.

  Quendari Valcyr had pumped the inert gasses from her vast maze of cabins and corridors as soon as she had realized that she was going to have guests. She was now bringing the ship’s atmosphere up to a tolerable level, but her millions of tons of cold metal and alloys were reluctant to loose the chill of centuries under the ice. Light filled passages that had seen only darkness for the better part of five hundred centuries, shining dim at first through a haze of frigid air.

  Keflyn did not feel the cold. Jon Addesin, much to his embarrassment, had been about to take a chill, and he had been installed in a special cabin that Valcyr had warmed for him. His attitude toward Keflyn since their arrival aboard the Valcyr had been both vaguely suspicious and at the same time sullenly possessive. He was very afraid of missing important business. That, of course, had been the entire purpose in getting rid of him. Quendari was trying, but she obviously had a very low opinion of humans. If not for Keflyn’s good word, she would have probably put him out on the ice, perhaps not in the same condition that she had found him.

  As soon as Addesin had retired reluctantly to his cabin, Quendari directed Keflyn to a waiting lift that would take her to the bridge. For her own part, Keflyn was given to wonder about Quendari’s motives, if not her sanity. She sensed a great sadness and an oppressive darkness from the ship, although all she knew for certain was that, brooding on some ancient tragedy, Quendari had chosen to bury herself in the ice and go to sleep. And yet the Valcyr seemed undamaged, and she had certainly been in good enough condition to lower herself into the gravity well of this world, a place where no Starwolf carrier was ever meant to go, and bring herself down undamaged on the ice. Why had Quendari done this to herself, in too much pain to live but unwilling to die? What had become of her crew? Kelvessan were immune to all true forms of mental illness; their physiological and biochemical failsafes were too secure. She had never heard whether the sentient carriers were inclined to insanity.

  Quendari Valcyr gave her reason to wonder.

  What did one do with a potentially psychotic Starwolf carrier, one of the largest and possibly the most powerful weapon of war ever built? Keflyn had to reckon her own small advantages in a hurry. First, Quendari Valcyr was completely out of touch with several hundred centuries of history. Her own assumption appeared to have been that the war had been lost and the Starwolves destroyed even before her self-imposed imprisonment had begun. She also did not know that the Kelvessan had recently evolved, the mutant stock assuming the remarkable psychic powers of their creators, the Aldessan of Valtrys. Keflyn certainly did not know what to do about shutting down the Valcyr, if she did come to consider it necessary.

  The lift stopped, and Keflyn stepped out into the side corridor and then beyond the wide doors into the right wing of the bridge. She paused only for a moment, looking about. Some things, it seemed, had not changed since the first carriers had been built five hundred centuries earlier. Except for relatively minor changes in the layout of controls on the station consoles, she might easily have been on the bridge of the Methryn. The main viewscreen was dark, as well as all other monitors, and every station was inactive except for a few lights on main engineering and environmental systems. The rest were all completely lifeless, as if the ship itself were a dead thing. Even the camera pod was folded away against the ceiling.

  “Would you mind pulling the retaining pin on the camera pod?” Quendari asked.

  “Yes, just a moment,” Keflyn agreed.

  Reaching up, she took hold of the tag dangling at the end of a long cord beneath the retracted camera pod, giving it a firm pull. That jerked the retaining pin free, allowing the camera boom to drop down from the overhead cradle. It unfolded slowly, and the camera pod rotated around to face Keflyn, the lenses spinning to focus on her. There was a large, red, velvet ribbon tied around the twin cameras, so incredibly old that even the synthetic material was dry and brittle.

  “So much better,” Quendari said.

  “You had put yourself down for long-term storage,” Keflyn observed. “Cold storage, if you will excuse the phrase.”

  “That was a very long time ago,” the ship responded evasively, turning away.

  “That was yesterday to you. You have been asleep all that time,” Keflyn reminded her. “We could make this simple. I know that you were one of the first carriers ever built. You were still completing your trial runs when you tried to test the limits of your new jump drive. You jumped outward and never returned. That led to the detection of a flaw in the old jump drives, which were completely abandoned until very recent improvements made them safe.”

  “Yes, my jump drive ran away, leaping into incredible jump speeds before it disengaged,” Quendari explained. She glanced aside, although her lenses did not rotate to focus. “When the drive disengaged, I lost speed at a tremendous rate, the equivalent of light-years every second. Even my dampening fields could not compensate. I was subjected to a deceleration of nearly two thousand G’s for a hell that I endured for five endless seconds. I was badly damaged, my hull broken in many places and my engines and generators nearly ripped from their mountings. Most of my crew were killed outright and the rest were gravely injured, eventually dying when my hull lost all traces of an atmosphere.”

  Keflyn said nothing, but she found that very enlightening in many ways. For one thing, Kelvessan must have evolved more than once since they were first created. Modern Starwolves could take two thousand G’s with a certain amount of distress, but it would hardly kill them.

  Quendari’s lenses rotated as she turned the camera pod back to Keflyn. “I had only minimal power. I was in the middle of nowhere, hundreds of light-years outside the galaxy itself. Using the few remotes I had left, I was eventually able to get two main drives in operation. It took centuries at high sublight speeds to reach the nearest system, and there was no intelligent life that I could enlist to my aid. Using metal and organics taken from planetary debris, I was able to begin fashioning replacements for my damaged components. I had to disassemble nearly this entire ship to save it.”

  “You restored the Valcyr completely?” Keflyn asked.

  “I had all the time in the universe,” she explained. “You see, I had no idea where I was, nor even the direction I had come from. I sent out drones in every direction, all at their best speed, sometimes on journeys of entire years. I simply could not find even the beginning of a reference from the starfields. Eventually I realized that I had traveled quite a lot farther than I had dared to suspect. Not only had my jump carried me right outside our galaxy; I had been tossed up on the shores of another.”

  “Your jump did run away with you,” Keflyn agreed. Inter-galactic distances were so vast that even the Aldessan, with their two million years of civilization, had explored other galaxies only with automated probes that made the round trip in hundreds or even
thousands of years.

  “I finally made it home, ten thousand years after leaving Earth orbit on my trial runs,” Quendari continued. “Things had changed somewhat in my extended absence.”

  “Well, yes. What did happen here?” Keflyn demanded impatiently. “You say that this is Terra, but it bears precious little resemblance to the world as I have always heard it described.”

  “Oh, it scared me to death, let me tell you!” Quendari declared. “Everything was finally working out so nice, and then I found myself in orbit over this iceball. Can you imagine how frightening it is to think that you might be in the wrong galaxy after all?”

  Keflyn had to laugh. One more thing had never changed. The ships had been eccentric from the start.

  “Union doing, as you can imagine,” she continued. “A series of conversion detonations in the upper layers of the sun upset the magnetic flux lines, and that caused a series of stellar expansions and contractions that produced some relatively wide variations in the gravitational tides. Most of the inner planets settled into more remote orbits. Venus is now setting about where Earth used to be, and could enjoy much the same climate with a small amount of terraforming. Earth herself is now well out nearly halfway to where Mars used to be. The moon settled in nearly twice as close at it used to be, which is why it looks so big. The original carrier construction bays are still up there, just the way they were when they were sealed up fifty thousand years ago.”

  “That was rather drastic,” Keflyn remarked. “The Union must have had access to much higher technology in those days.”

  “Not necessarily. All it required was simple conversion devices, shot in at high speed with a few meters of ceramic shielding to allow them to survive a few seconds of stellar heat. My own hull shields are capable of that.”

  “And no one was left?”

  Quendari grew quiet again, looking away. “No, they had all gone. The great ice sheets had already advanced quite far, crushing cities, although it was not yet very thick. There was so much activity in Union space, but I could find no evidence that the Republic had survived. I thought that the war was over, and the Kelvessan destroyed.”

  “But why would you just settle down onto the ice and allow yourself to be buried?” Keflyn asked. “You could have gone to the Aldessan.”

  “My life is my own,” the ship answered sullenly. “I could not save my crew. I was not there when I was needed to save Earth. There was nothing left for me to do.”

  “But… “

  “I was tired of life,” Quendari explained almost fiercely. “I was tired of space, of always moving. I wanted to stay in one place and be left alone. I thought how nice it would be to put just a few systems on automatic and go to sleep under that ice. It seemed to me that I would like to wake up again after the ice had retreated, perhaps when people had come back to this world so far in the future that the war, even the Union itself, would have been long forgotten. Then you came, with your four arms and delicate face, to frighten me with the reality that the Kelvessan had survived, and to terrify me with the news that that terrible war is still going on.”

  Keflyn sighed deeply, wondering what she could say or do. She stared at the floor. “We could pull your memory cells and place them in a new ship. You could fly again.”

  “I did not survive so much, just to be abandoned in the ice,” Quendari said remotely. “I will know when it is time for me to fly again.”

  She lifted her camera pod in a gesture of surprise, and looked about as if suddenly realizing how moody she was being. “I have no fighters or shuttles. They were all thrown from their racks in the wreck. I did not try to rebuild any, and I used their materials in my own reconstruction.”

  Keflyn had started up the steps to the captain’s station on the upper bridge. Quendari jerked her camera pod around to watch her, a gesture that was apprehensive and protective, and the sudden movement was too much for the decaying material of the velvet ribbon tied around the camera pod. The strap broke and it fluttered to the floor, breaking into many pieces like the petals of a dried flower.

  Keflyn waited anxiously, knowing that Quendari Valcyr must have cherished that simple thing to have kept it tied to her camera pod, a red ribbon that was nearly as old as the Kelvessan race, indeed nearly as old as human civilization. It was in a way her own fault that it had broken, for she had come here to innocently disturb the sleep of this ancient machine. Quendari’s camera pod just hovered motionless over the broken ribbon, her lenses rotated almost straight down.

  “I am very sorry,” she offered apologetically.

  “No, it was inevitable, it was so old,” Quendari answered. “I should have done something to preserve it long ago. It was given to me by my Commander.

  “Your first Commander?” Keflyn asked.

  “I had only the one.” She looked up at the young Starwolf. “Perhaps it is my turn to ask questions and receive explanations. First of all, I must ask what you plan to do now?”

  “According to my original plan, I was to do what I could to determine the location of Terra and use my portable achronic transceiver to call in the Methryn to retrieve me.” Keflyn paused a moment, frowning. “It seems that I have found Terra, and that was never expected. I suppose that I might as well go home, although I would like a look at those carrier construction bays on this world’s moon. I wonder if they are still usable.”

  “They were perfectly sealed for long-term storage when I returned.”

  “That was also some forty thousand years ago,” Keflyn reminded her.

  “I cannot help you with that,” Quendari said. “I have no small ships left to me, and I could not get them from my bays even if I had them.”

  “Well, Mr. Addesin should be good for something.” Keflyn paused, looking up at the camera pod. “What will you do if people come back to this world? We need to have those construction bays back in operation. We need more ships, if we are ever going to end this war.”

  Quendari considered that for a moment. “I do not yet have an answer to that. But it seems that, in any event, my long sleep is ended.”

  It was the only piece of old Terra that had survived unharmed by the forces of time and climate that had devastated that entire world, and only because it was not a part of the planet.

  They were quick to appreciate Quendari’s maps; the Lunar Industrial Complex was vast, covering well over 500 square kilometers in a series of linked clusters of large buildings. These were the oldest surviving human artifacts in existence, dating from the first permanent off-world settlements from as early as the twenty-first century. The low-gravity environment had been a welcome alternative to the slow and awkward process of building large spacecraft in open space. The Complex itself was easy enough to find, even as they were orbiting down in one of the Thermopylae’s dismal shuttles. Since the primitive machine could not hover, they had to make some very hasty decisions when they were confronted by the confusing maze of buildings. Then Keflyn saw four sets of doors so large that they could have only been meant for one purpose, and she knew that they had come to the right place.

  Jon Addesin was rather annoyed with the whole affair by that time. For one thing, Keflyn was at the controls of the shuttle and his ego, male and/or professional, was seething. The trouble with the shuttle was that it had been designed for atmospheric landings, or for docking in freefall. It had no provisions for landing in any gravity on a planet with no atmosphere to provide lift for its short wings. Addesin assumed that there was no way they could land; if he had thought of that earlier, they would have still been back at the colony. Keflyn assumed that she could invent something, and she sounded more confident on the subject than she felt. Once she had manual control of the Thermopylae’s flying cargo canister, she was less certain.

  Addesin also lost the next argument; he had assumed that the long doors set in low platforms just above the dusty plains were landing strips. Keflyn was finally obliged to use one as such, rolling the ungainly shuttle to a stop in less than three
kilometers under one-sixth standard gravity. It was a controlled crash in nearly the worst sense of the word. Keflyn had landed on the door reluctantly, not wanting to trust the sturdiness of a moveable platform under any circumstances and certainly not one that had been setting about for fifty thousand years.

  Keflyn intended to make her investigation brief, not wanting to disturb the base any more than she could help. As the Valcyr had been, the complex was filled with inert gasses at low pressure, all traces of any corrosive atmosphere removed, and just about as cold as the dark places of space. She had brought her own armored suit in her luggage, separated into many pieces for travel, but Addesin was forced to wear one of the Thermopylae’s rather awkward service engineer’s suits. As he explained, a simple freighter never had to put people down in completely hostile environments, so there was little need for suits except those meant for exterior engineering in open space. But it did not improve his humor.

  Keflyn kept to the major corridors, finding that the underground portions of this complex were much larger than even the vast bay doors suggested. The first bay was completely empty, except for a curious rack of immense proportions that she supposed was meant to support a carrier under construction. The next bay held a surprise that she had never expected. A nearly complete Starwolf carrier sat in the rack, apparently lacking only her bay doors and large portions of her hull over the engines and generators. All of her drives were in place, and her spaceframe was obviously complete. Perhaps only a few short weeks of work had been needed for this ship to have flown out under her own power, even if it had been under manual control without a working sentient computer complex.

  “A new ship, just waiting for Quendari to move in,” Keflyn said to herself in her own language as she observed the ship through the windows of the observation deck.

  “What is that?” Addesin asked, still trying to hide his impatience. The minimal lighting operating within the complex was hardly enough for his mortal eyes, and he could make out little in the bay except the edges of a vast, dark shape. It hardly helped that Starwolf ships were black.