Valthyrra told the bridge crew. “Beginning a rapid sweep of the full system.”
Tarrel watched the main monitor, which showed the complete Alkayja system, ships in-system that registered on normal scan, and a scale of relative distances. Valthyrra did not have to actually sweep the entire system with a single beam, but leveled herself with the plane of the planetary orbits and fired a rapid, low-power achronic pulse with every impulse scanner along her ventral groove. This should have allowed her to see in every direction at once, with the greatest range ahead and to the sides. Instead, the scanner schematic slowly fuzzed completely out.
“Trouble?” Gelrayen asked, glancing up at her camera pod.
She rotated around to look at him. “I was completely blinded by scatter. Even the normal scanners were obscured.”
The scanner image cleared slowly, then failed again as she tested the impulse scanners a second time.
“Do you know the cause?” he asked.
“No, but the fact that there was scatter from every scanner is an ominous indication that it is not simple mechanical failure. The problem was a very broad band of secondary achronic radiation, which blanked out normal and scanner receivers in a uniform wash of emissions. In other words, I could not see for the glare.”
A third test gave the same results.
Commander Gelrayen was obviously displeased. “Do you have any ideas about the cause of this emission glare?”
“The first indication is that the emission coils continue to radiate uniformly across the achronic range for a brief time after the main pulse, which is emitted along the predicted tight band. This might be an extension of the problem we experienced in the bay.” Even her camera pod looked bemused. “I believe that I just invented self-jamming scanners.”
“The power that holds the coils at stand-by level causes the coils to emit radiation for a short time?” Gelrayen asked. “Can you predict the amount of time that the coils will continue this emission?”
“Yes, the process repeats itself very precisely each time,” Valthyrra said. “I will try re-writing the firing program to cut power to the scanners for the duration of that interval.”
“That was my thought exactly.”
“That is an imperfect solution, since it closes down the cannon entirely for that interval,” Valthyrra added. “Ready to repeat testing. This time I will engage only the main scanner.”
This gave the same results, if to a lesser degree. It was still enough to leave the impulse scanner completely useless, and it still blinded the normal scanners.
“Take us back to the bay,” Gelrayen told her. “The sooner that we get the experts to work on this problem, the sooner we can try again.”
Lt. Commander Pesca was not in his cabin when Captain Tarrel went to check on him, and he did not return for several hours. She had wondered about him briefly during the Methryn’s test run, since there were no acceleration seats in their cabins and the bunk was a poor substitute. Either the Starwolves had remembered him and taken him somewhere for safe-keeping, or else he had survived well enough and he had gone out into the ship in his quest to learn the secret Kelvessan language. Tarrel’s ability to be concerned for him was limited to the hope that he would do nothing to embarrass them both.
She was busy enough herself before long. As soon as the Methryn was safely back inside her bay, the first officer Kayendel took Tarrel down to one of the carrier’s workshops where automated machinery, under Valthyrra’s very precise guidance, fitted armored suits. This was Tarrel’s own turn to get naked, and quite a number of Starwolves came to witness that as measurements were taken for her new suit. Being career military, she was used to being undressed even in social settings; she was not used to being put on exhibition for the curiosity of four-armed aliens who used to be her mortal enemies, but she endured it gracefully. Valthyrra set the machines to work, promising to have the suit prepared by the next day.
Captain Tarrel returned to her own cabin, and was reading when Pesca did finally present himself. He looked rather worn and somewhat beaten up, as if the Methryn’s test flight had been harder on him than it had been on her. She suspected that he had not been adequately protected during the accelerations.
“Are you keeping yourself out of trouble?” she asked without looking up.
“Actually, I’ve been looking for trouble,” Pesca said. “Unfortunately, the joke was on me.”
She glanced at him over the top of her book. “Didn’t they warn you about the test flight?”
“Well, they did,” he admitted reluctantly. “I’ve flown in couriers so often, I wasn’t worried. I spent the first part of the test flight on the floor in various parts of the ship near the fighter bays. Then the Starwolves found me and put me in one of the fighters.”
“Did you learn anything from the controls?”
He shook his head. “No, the power was completely shut down. Besides, I passed out again.”
Tarrel was interested to know that he had passed out, while she had taken those stresses very much in stride. “What did you do after that? Or did the Starwolves let you sleep?”
“Actually, they took me up to the group of cabins shared by their pack,” he explained. “I was hoping to have a look at the books they keep. They do keep books, but every last damned one was in Terran.”
“There probably aren’t enough Kelvessan in existence to justify the printing of books in their own language,” she speculated. “Anything of their own would be kept in the computers, and Valthyrra Methryn has absolute control over those. At this rate, you’re going to get yourself flattened in some back corridor of this ship before you learn a single word. Valthyrra Methryn wants to measure you for a suit anyway, since we didn’t think to bring our own.”
“Have them look in some hold where they throw their loot,” Pesca complained. “They’ve stolen at least a dozen of everything the Union has ever made.”
Tarrel was inclined to laugh. “Now, now. The Starwolves are our good friends, and the only damned thing that can save our butts. You can go back to criticizing their habits once they destroy the Dreadnought, but not one moment before.”
She sent him immediately to present himself to be fitted for his suit, although he seemed curiously reluctant to go for reasons that she could not imagine, as if he considered the suit a threat aimed at him personally. But she was beginning to find his presence increasingly troubling. Since their arrival at Alkayja station, and especially since coming aboard the Methryn, Pesca was becoming increasingly suspicious and sullen. Perhaps it was only his frustration at failing to learn the Kelvessan language. The Starwolves were conspiring against him, and he knew it.
What she found alarming was the degree of his resentment, which seemed to be turning quickly to hate and paranoia. She considered once again whether it would be best to put him off the ship. The Starwolves would take him home soon enough, and he would have human company until then.
Perhaps that, she thought, was the root of his problem, something that she had even seen in the past. Some people simply reacted sharply to a prolonged stay in an all or mostly alien environment, even aliens as human in appearance and habits as the Kelvessan. Then again, she reminded herself, the Starwolves might appear far more alien to Pesca’s eyes. She honestly liked them and enjoyed their company, but Pesca was still very loyal to Union ideals. He had been brought up to hate and fear Starwolves, and a sudden change of policy was not going to influence his deep-seated prejudices that quickly.
The testing of the Methryn presented Tarrel with far more interesting problems to consider, and she forgot about her companion soon enough. Dalvaen and his engineers had come back aboard the^carrier the moment she settled into her bay, and they had the answer to the problem quickly enough. The supercooling of the impulse scanner emitter coils was indeed the problem, as it had been before. lust as superconductivity had caused the cannons to fire prematurely, it was also causing the crystals that those coils influenced to continue to radiate achronic sig
nals even after the coils themselves were no longer under power. The answer was simple. The solid-state super-coolers were removed, and the power needed to fire the impulse cannons was increased to the previous level.
The Methryn was ready to go out again only a few hours later. For the purposes of this second test, she had remained isolated in her bay while the two functional carriers and the Starwolf freighter that were presently in port took themselves to separate portions of the system hidden by stealth-intensity shields. In that way, Valthyrra could not have the slightest idea of where to look for them, and her ability to locate those three ships would be entirely dependant upon the effectiveness of her impulse scanners.
The Methryn backed out of her bay, this time with much greater speed and certainty, and moved slowly into the system to begin her search. If this test was not successful, she would begin to fall behind the schedule that she had been given to keep.
If it was successful, she would not be returning to the station but would turn her long nose toward Union space. Captain Tarrel was once again at the Commander’s station on the bridge, while Gelrayen watched from the surveillance station below.
“The ship is clear and away,” Valthyrra reported. “No contact on normal scan. Are those ships out there?”
“They should be,” Gelrayen told her. “I do not sense them, so they must have their drives shut down and their major power systems at low level.”
“Pardon?” Tarrel asked, mystified, although she had not meant to ask that question out loud.
In fact, she did not know about the hyper-sensitive hearing the Starwolves enjoyed. Seated at the helm station just below, Kayendel had heard her and turned to look up over her shoulder. “We have the ability to sense the size, direction and range of drives and large conversion generators, and without the lag of real-time. It saves us the trouble of having to consult our scan when we fly. We always know where all the ships around us are, even carriers running under stealth.”
“Well, you learn something every day around here,” Tarrel remarked. “That must mean that you cannot sense the Dreadnought, or all of this business would be unnecessary.”
“Exactly. Either its shields defeat even that, or else it uses a type of drive that we cannot sense. We had wondered if it could be a jump drive, but we are supposed to be able to sense even that.”
“You would be able to sense its generators at least,” Tarrel speculated. “It must be the shield.”
That completely upset any hopes she might have had about the possibility of Union warships with stealth-intensity shields. The Starwolves seemed to have answers for everything, except the Dreadnought.
“We are well away from the station,” Valthyrra reported. “I am ready to begin the first level of testing.”
“Have at it,” Gelrayen told her.
The Methryn leveled herself with the plane of planetary orbits and sent out a low-level pulse from all of her perimeter impulse scanners. A long, tense moment passed before they knew that the system schematic on the main viewscreen was not going to simply fuzz out in a backlash of radiation as it had before. Then, one by one, three additional contacts revealed themselves to the impulse scanner. One had been sitting idle, well above the planetary plane, where a perimeter scan had been expected to have trouble finding it.
“The target ships were supposed to report the moment that they detected my impulse beam,” Valthyrra said.
“They have not?” Gelrayen asked.
“No, at least not yet. That might be some indication that I use a less powerful beam than the Dreadnought. Then again, once it locates a ship with a general scan, it might be locking on a tighter beam to make a more detailed identification.”
“Try locking onto a single ship.”
Valthyrra turned slightly, aiming the beam of her main impulse scanner at the most distant target.
“No response from target at low intensity,” Valthyrra reported. “Scan indicates that this ship is a Starwolf carrier. I do get a response at medium intensity. The ship identifies herself as the carrier Baldaen.”
Gelrayen looked up at her camera pod. “What do you make of that?”
“I suspect that she is trying to trick me,” the ship insisted. “That scan indicates a ship that is much too light to be a carrier. There is no muffled return from contact with the heavy plate armor of the hull. I still believe that ship to be a freighter.” “Tell her that and find out what she says,” he suggested. Valthyrra paused. “She admits that she is a freighter. My interpretation of the impulse scan is accurate.”
“Congratulations,” Gelrayen said, and everyone seemed relieved. “Do you feel that the impulse scanner is operating efficiently enough to conclude your testing now?”
She rotated her camera pod fully toward him. “Yes, I do.” “Then contact the station and tell them that the tests have been concluded successfully, and that we will not be returning,” he said. “Tell them that the Methryn is going out to hunt.”
-7-
Captain Tarrel found herself again in familiar territory. The Rane Sector had borne the first series of attacks by the Dreadnought, and chances were good that the Methryn would find it there again. A Starwolf freighter, taking a patrol run to help support the limited carrier fleet, had found the Dreadnought taking apart a lesser system and had been forced to run after being fired upon from a distance. Since the Dreadnought had attacked a system two sectors over only two days earlier, there was reason to believe that it had only just changed its location according to its habit and would strike at least one more system in the immediate area before moving on. Since the Methryn had nearly crossed the gulf separating Union space from the Republic, she was actually the closest fighting ship at hand.
Because the Starwolves had no time to spend on being subtle, they were admitting to a lot of things that they probably would have otherwise wanted to have kept somewhat more secret. Given all that she had been able to infer so far, Captain Tarrel was fairly certain that she could have taken her own ship, set a course out from the Rane Sector, and found herself in Republic space in two or three weeks, even if finding Alkayja and the Starwolf base would not have been so easy. She had serious misgivings about what she should do with that information. The Starwolves were letting slip these clues for the sake of sparing her own people from the destruction of the Dreadnought as quickly as possible; they could have spent extra days to make this journey, giving the sense that the distance was greater, or swung around wide to approach from a different direction.
That left her with the uncomfortable feeling that she owed them a very great favor in return. Knowing the location, size and capabilities of the secret Starwolf base was a major tactical advantage, one that could possibly be exploited as the first step in their eventual destruction. And they knew what she could do to them with that information. But, because the Starwolves had willingly surrendered that information for the sake of protecting the Union, it seemed to her that they were due some equal consideration. At least the decision was entirely her own to make. She doubted very much that Wally Pesca could have found his way back to Starwolf space even if she had told him where to look, and he had no way of knowing much that she did.
The problem for now was finding the Dreadnought and learning some more of its secrets, which they fully intended to exploit. The Methryn changed course immediately for its last known location, increasing her speed even more to try to close the distance between herself and her enemy before it could get ahead of her. The Methryn fully expected to be engaging the Dreadnought in the next two or three days, perhaps as little as four hours if she found it still loitering in that first system.
Tarrel tended to forget that they were not actually going into battle, and that the Dreadnought, unless they were unexpectedly very lucky indeed, would not be destroyed in this round of the contest. All the Methryn proposed to do was to use her impulse scanner to learn more of the Dreadnought’s secrets, its size, its power capabilities and the true nature of its drives, even if she ha
d to present herself as a target just to get in close. In a way, it hardly seemed fair to Valthyrra Methryn. She was the newest ship in the Starwolf fleet, sleek and proud. And yet she was certain to come away damaged from this encounter, perhaps seriously, just for the hope of securing information.
Commander Gelrayen called a last tactical council on the Methryn’s upper bridge, even though his group of experts was very limited in both size and experience. Janus Tarrel was there mostly on the basis that she had seen the Dreadnought more often than anyone else, human or Starwolf. Kayendel had also fought the Dreadnought, acting as helm aboard the Vardon. Valthyrra herself completed the group by rotating her camera boom into the upper bridge.
“What do you think?” Gelrayen asked her bluntly.
Valthyrra lowered her camera pod slightly. “Seriously? I believe that my objective should be to obtain as much information and sustain the least damage that I can, with information being the priority. I keep thinking that I can only play this as it comes, but I suspect that I will have to get in close to the Dreadnought and give it a sustained shot from my three forward cannons before I will see inside that shield.”
“Is there any hope of catching it by surprise?” he asked. “Could we hit it with those cannons from a greater distance if we knew where to expect it, possibly catch it with its shields at a lower intensity? If we just found out where to find it using a very low-intensity sweep, without giving away our own presence, we could hit it with a high-intensity beam before it could react. I am thinking of our success with the last testing of the impulse scanner.”
“I haven’t heard that the Dreadnought ever reduces that shield,” Tarrel said. “Part of its advantage as a weapon is that it’s able to maintain a battle-ready status at all times.”
“I fear that Captain Tarrel is correct,” Valthyrra agreed. “All the same, I still recommend that very tactic as our initial course of action. Certainly I will find it easiest to scan the Dreadnought before it begins shooting at me. I have little hope that the sensors for the impulse scanner will survive for very long once that discharge beam begins hitting my hull.”
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