Dreadnought
Starwolves 04
By Thorarinn Gunnarsson
Prologue
They were the Starwolves. Hunters of the Stars. Warriors of the Endless Night.
They were bred for war, designed to function at ease under the deadly conditions of high speeds and sharp, crushing turns demanded in spaceflight. No living being could compete with them in battle. Not even the most complex computer guidance system could out-fly them. Created to serve as simple machines of war, they would in time evolve into the greatest and most noble of races, most deadly of enemies but truest of friends, champions of justice but cold and merciless warriors.
But eighteen centuries before Velmeran, Commander of the legendary carrier Methryn, insisted that he and his people were not machines and brought the ancient war of the Starwolves to an end, matters were very different indeed. The Starwolves were smaller, weaker and less clever than they would become, never thinking to question the single purpose of existence which they had been designed to fulfill. They fought their battles in blind faith, failing to consider the greater strategies that would have ended that unending war.
Then a greater menace came from beyond unknown stars, destroying all things for the sake of destruction alone, giving battle without any greater purpose than to seek out and ravage all civilized life. And so it was that the Starwolves were called upon to defend the very enemy they had been created to destroy. But how they would respond, and just how much their own will could influence the instincts that had been programmed into their very nature, were matters impossible to predict. ...
-1-
The convoy began dropping out of starflight, each ship a minute behind the one before it. Mostly they were medium bulk freighters, small enough to be quick and agile but large enough to be useful, although every fifth ship was a powerful Union battleship or heavy carrier. Each ship coasted for a few minutes after emerging to carry itself clear of the area of emergence, before braking with forward engines just in time to join up with the main convoy, drifting deeper into the system that was its destination. Twenty-seven had already gone sub-light and eight more would join up with the group in the next few minutes. If all went well, they would all settle into orbit within six hours, making a less tempting target for the Starwolves.
Union Fleet Command had some odd and rather ineffectual notions about the true definition of subtlety. The transport of millions of tons of chemical explosive ordinance could have been done more quietly by moving a ship or two at a time; a convoy under military protection only called attention to itself, no matter how quietly and quickly it tried to move. And if the Starwolves discovered the convoy, three battleships and two carriers could hardly offer even the slightest protection.
A curious state of war had existed between the Starwolves and the Union for over thirty thousand years, sometimes in active and merciless hostility, and sometimes in a tense truce that might exist for centuries. The Starwolves were self-appointed protectors. As long as the Sectors and their vast trade monopolies dealt fairly and peacefully with the lesser colonies, the independents and the few aliens within the space they controlled, then the Starwolves were willing enough to keep the truce. But the Sector families and their monopolies existed for the sake of greed; they preferred to take what they did not own, destroy the competition offered by the independents, and the Starwolves were always swift to punish tyranny. No one knew what motivated the Starwolves, except perhaps some instinct for altruism that had been programmed into them.
Perhaps that was the whole point; the Starwolves were an artificial race, created for the purpose of fighting the Union. Although vaguely human in appearance, they had been bred by complex genetic engineering methods, for quickness, endurance and tremendous strength, to make them perfectly suited for the crushing accelerations of space-flight. The Union could not begin to match the technology of their immense carriers and nimble black fighters. Or even if they had, the Union still possessed no pilot capable of flying against a Starwolf nor even of surviving the deadly conditions aboard such a ship. Indeed the Starwolves would have won their war long ago, except that the Union was able to resist them by size and numbers alone. The Starwolves were thought to have only eighteen ships, with perhaps ten packs of fighters aboard each. With its limitless resources, the Union could afford to lose a small fleet more easily than the Starwolves could lose a single fighter.
But that was never to suggest that the Union accepted such losses, not when its ultimate goal was to defeat the Starwolves either by slow, steady attrition or an overwhelming cascade of resources. There seemed to be some small hope in that scheme, for the Starwolves were inexplicably unwilling to be ruthless. They might prey upon shipping, or make occasional strikes at important military targets, but they would not take the war into the Union itself, and destroy its ability to make war by removing its means to renew its lost resources.
Therefore the loss of several million tons of explosives, or even the ships that carried it, was hardly a matter of great concern in the larger scheme of things . . . except, of course, to the crews of those ships. If the Starwolves did find them, the escort of three battleships and two carriers would have been futile, even laughable. Starwolves seemed to have an uncanny way of knowing in advance things that the Union tried to keep secret. They were too clever to fool, too swift to evade and too powerful to fight.
Such thoughts had been very much on the mind of Captain Janus Tarrel every moment of the journey. Hers was the ultimate responsibility, not just as captain of her own battleship, the Carthaginian, but as executive commander of the entire convoy. The official position at that moment was that a state of moderate tension existed between the Union and the Starwolves, which was to say that certain greedy Sectors had been trying to expand at the expense of the colonies and the Starwolves had responded predictably. That response had so far taken the form of a general, unpredictable attack on military and company shipping, a tactic designed to defeat the Union’s ability to take a hostile stance. The Starwolves would not hesitate to utterly destroy this convoy with its cargo of explosives destined to subdue unruly colonies.
“All ships are down from starflight,” the surveillance officer reported. “The convoy will be firming up within five minutes.” “What surveillance contacts do you have?” Captain Tarrel asked, knowing that she would have been told of anything new or unusual as a matter of normal procedure.
“Three contacts running in system, all identified commercial ships on the established shipping lanes. No contacts at all within two point seven light hours.”
Captain Tarrel found that less reassuring than she had wished. She would have felt better if she could rely upon having any warning, but the Starwolves had a habit of dropping out of starflight right on top of their prey. They possessed accurate achronic scanners that could see across whole light years without a time delay. Her own scanners had an increasing lag that made them worthless past a few light hours, and were almost blind to a ship still in starflight.
“Time to destination?” she asked.
“Five hours, forty-seven minutes,” the helm officer responded, channeling the navigational grid to the main viewscreen.
Chagin, the first officer, walked quietly over to join her at the central station where they could see the viewscreen clearly. “Do you wish to increase our speed and arrive sooner?”
Tarrel shook her head impatiently. “This many large engines flaring in such tight formation would shout our presence to Starwolf scanners three sectors over. It would be better for us to just coast in.”
“Is there any reason to be nervous?”
“Nothing beyond the obvious,” she said. “For all the good that we can do, they might just as well not include a military escort. I suppose tha
t it gives the freighters some time to scatter while the Starwolves take us apart.”
A flash of light flickered across the viewscreen, and several seconds later a concussion like distant thunder rolled along the length of the ship like a wave. The members of the bridge crew paused for a moment at their stations, waiting until they were certain that it was not themselves that had been hit. Captain Tarrel just waited, knowing that the surveillance officer was already consulting his scanners, although one thing was immediately clear. One of the freighters, and her cargo of perhaps a million tons of deadly ordnance, had exploded.
“That was Velvet Queen by process of elimination,” surveillance reported after a moment. “She had been running six kilometers left and slightly down from our position. Scanners record very little debris of any size, so she must have been largely vaporized by the blast.”
“What contacts?” Tarrel demanded.
“No contacts before, after or during the explosion. No drive emissions. No weapons paths. I see no indication yet that Velvet Queen was destroyed by external forces.”
“Then you rule out the possibility of attack?”
“By no means. I simply have no evidence of attack at this time.”
Tarrel nodded. “Try to obtain confirmation of that from the other ships in the fleet. And get visual identification of as many ships as possible on the various viewscreens.”
These were tense moments, hardly less frightening than being under open attack. Tarrel had to make some very quick decisions about the safety of her convoy, and she did not yet know for certain that they had indeed come under fire. Accidents did happen. Velvet Queen had been carrying nearly two hundred thousand orbit-to-surface guided bombs of five tons each, all in unpressurized cargo bays open to various forms of radiation and extremes of temperature. At the same time, that was hardly a fragile cargo. Those bombs had been designed to penetrate planetary atmospheres without projected shielding, just their own tough ceramic shells. With no other supporting information, the only way that Captain Tarrel had of judging whether or not they were under attack was to wait and see. She stood in the center of the bridge, glancing about at the viewscreens of various sizes that now showed different sections of the fleet.
This time, she happened to be looking right at one of the bulk freighters as electrical discharges rippled over its hull hardly a second before the vast ship disappeared in a brilliant flash.
“Disperse the convoy!” she ordered without hesitation. Starwolves could chase down only so many targets at a time. “Group the military vessels with carriers in the center. Stand by at red alert.”
“Same as before,” the surveillance officer reported. “No contacts. No evidence of physical or energy-based weapons being fired. No drive emissions. This time I did record a sudden flare of energy from the ship itself, as if it was being destroyed from within.”
“Do the Starwolves have any weapons like that?” Tarrel asked.
“Not that I know of.”
“Is there any way you know of that Starwolves could attack a ship without showing themselves?”
“They would have to be firing from very low starflight speeds, but still fast enough to evade our scanners. Even at that, they would have to deliver one shot from extremely close range, less than two hundred meters. Not even Starwolves are that precise. ”
Tarrel had to agree. The situation seemed completely hopeless. They could not fight an enemy they could not even see, and grouping the fighting ships had not diverted the attack to themselves. She weighed her options very quickly and decided upon the only scheme that might save at least a portion of the convoy. Bulk freighters continued to explode all about them, at widely separate locations about the dispersing fleet as if the enemy was all about them . . . or perhaps standing off at a great distance and taking shots. Perhaps the Starwolves had invented a weapon which was undetectable in its deployment, and useful from such a distance that the attacking ship was not required to reveal itself.
“Order the convoy into starflight as quickly as they can get there,” she directed. “Any destination that lies in their path. Signal our sister ships to stand by to run at any moment. We’ll be going as soon as the convoy looks safe.”
“What are we doing?” her first officer asked. “Can’t we fight?”
“If you have any constructive ideas on how to fight this, you tell me,” she said. “About all we can do for those freighters is to sit close and try to draw the fire.”
Fortunately they had kept their speed to eighty percent that of light to decrease the time needed for their final run to their destination. They needed only a final sharp acceleration to carry themselves up to starflight threshold, a matter of only a couple of minutes even for bulk freighters. As soon as those ships began disappearing without exploding, Captain Tarrel knew that the survivors were safe. By that time, only four seemed likely to make it clear. But the unseen enemy had left the military ships completely alone, either saving them for sport or simply picking off, the freighters before they could escape. She found that a disquieting observation in itself.
“Order the other ships to break and flee into starflight,” she ordered. “Let’s get the hell out of here as fast as we can. Relay to the battleships to circle around once they are clear. We have to make some determination about the status of the station and remaining system traffic.
“All ships acknowledging.”
“Then let’s scatter.”
Tarrel had already predicted two events. The escape of the fighting ships would be noted, especially now that the freighters were gone, and the larger, slower carriers would lag behind and find themselves selected as the most inviting targets. The five military ships suddenly darted away, each one in a different direction, and it turned out that she was wrong in her second estimate. The intelligence of their enemy was cold, calculating and merciless. The battleships were most likely to escape, generators normally reserved for heavy cannons and shields pouring vast amounts of power into their over-sized engines, and so they were targeted first. The first went in a matter of seconds, overloaded generators exploding with enough force to put a sizeable dent in a planet. The second battleship lost power and was left adrift for a long moment while lightning rippled over its hull. Observing this final attack visually, Captain Tarrel wondered if she could protect her ship.
“Standing to threshold?” she asked.
“Ninety-seven percent at this moment, Captain.”
“Full power to the hull shields, even if the diversion of power slows our transfer into starflight.”
“Captain?” Chagin asked, surprised. *
“Do it now,’’ she snapped.
That order was obeyed only just in time. In the next moment, a tremendous rush of energy washed over Carthaginian’s hull. The shields took the initial assault, and forces that would have ripped the giant ship apart erupted over her hull. The shields held only a matter of seconds before they failed, power couplings burned out from the overload. But the ship escaped in that same instant into starflight, her transitional shock wave shaking off the devastating effects of the weapon discharge.
Carthaginian had barely survived. Devastated by the attack, she was still spaceworthy but in no condition to fight. Too many of her high-power systems had been destroyed trying to shed an overload of energy, even though she had caught only the edge of that devastating weapon’s force. After circling in starflight for a full hour, Captain Tarrel had her brought back into system as close to the inhabited planet and its meager station as safely possible. A parabolic loop around the system’s star and then around the planet itself helped to cut the immense ship’s speed with a minimum use of the drives and their betraying energy signatures.
Tarrel had already relayed her warning ahead to the station, sending the local traffic to cover and dampening all major energy emissions. But closing the system to traffic did not solve the problem of ships already in flight, not when most commercial vessels needed a couple of hours either to get themselves to tran
sition velocity or make they way back to the station. The matter was largely irrelevant under any circumstances. There was no indication that making a ship emission-silent decreased its visibility even to known Starwolf technology, only that unobtrusiveness made it a less inviting target when more tempting ones were at hand. Captain Tarrel had always felt helpless enough in dealing with Starwolves, but that was nothing compared with the helplessness of this situation.
Ignoring normal approach protocol, Carthaginian made a rapid advance to the station, matching velocities during a final, crushing loop about the planet, and nosed in to a docking sleeve. Captain Tarrel had been required to trust a great deal to the abilities of her bridge crew in that maneuver, and almost as much to luck. The echoes of that hard docking were still ringing through the ship as she left the bridge for the nose lock. Only a couple of minutes later she reached the military command post and the offices of the Sector Commander. Dan Varnoy was a man she had known well in the past, the captain of the first ship on which she had served as a senior officer, the same ship that was her present command. She knew that she could talk to him easily, and that he would believe her assessment of the seriousness of the situation. He had agreed quickly enough with her recommendation to close the system.
“Jan, what have you been doing out there?” he asked the moment she entered the main office. “We saw ships exploding in rapid succession, but there seemed to be something strange about the whole affair. We never recorded any weapon flashes. ” “Neither did we,” Tarrel said. “Nor did we see any attacking ships, as if we were being picked off by something still in starflight. No ships, and no weapons traces. It was as if we were being hit with a weapon that poured a tremendous amount of destructive power into a ship’s hull without the need for either the attacking ship or the download beam making itself known. But I am only guessing. There are certainly other possible weapons that might have had the same effect.”
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