The Kerridayen transmitted her message, and the Dreadnought replied in a gesture that seemed almost automatic. Trendaessa identified the source, took the range and fired. The conversion cannon, already charged from a quantity of matter converted directly into a tremendous amount of energy, extended a narrow containment beam toward its target and released that energy in a sustained stream deadly enough to destroy a world. For. a few brief seconds, the alien ship was engulfed in that blinding torrent of raw energy.
“No effect,” Trendaessa declared only a moment after the firing of the conversion cannon ended. “The shield of that machine has some mechanism for shedding energy. It deflected the entire blast out into space. Needless to say, I did not get a scanner image of its interior.”
“Has it opened fire again?” Daerran asked.
“No, I must have blinded it. But it will probably have its scanners cleared and recalibrated in a matter of seconds. I am taking advantage of the time for a close pass.”
The Dreadnought opened fire sooner than Trendaessa would have liked; as the Kerridayen came nearer, her position was easier to determine. A pair of discharge beams connected with her shields in rapid succession.
“That was too much for my power couplings,” Trendaessa reported. “I can no longer hold my shields at stealth intensity, and it can see us clearly.”
“Cut off if it becomes too thick,” Daerran told her. “It might step up the power on those beams any time now, and you are making threatening gestures.”
“If I could, I would make rude gestures,” the ship replied. Unfortunately, the situation had become hopeless with the loss of stealth. Trendaessa stepped up her speed, but the beams were now discharging into her shields at regular intervals. The power load of any one beam was easy enough for her to bear, but the combined effects were beginning to tell. Since her close pass was not going to give her more than she already knew, she abandoned that tactic without consulting her Commander and began a very hasty retreat. She returned fire with the cannons of her rear battery, less in the hope of damaging the Dreadnought than to give her somewhere to shunt the tremendous load of power her shield projectors were trying to contain.
“The battle shields just failed,” she reported. “All I have now are the main hull integrity shields. Those should bring us out of this.”
“Time to starflight?” Daerran asked.
“Let me build my speed another fifteen percent or the acceleration will kill our passengers.”
Tarrel glanced at the Starwolf Commander, but he did not even seem tempted to sacrifice her to save his ship greater harm. The Kerridayen was already accelerating so sharply that Tarrel was pinned to her protective seat, unable even to lift her arms. Her ears were ringing dully, and her vision was dim about the edges.
The release of pressure came suddenly at the same moment that the carrier took a particularly bad hit. They could actually hear the discharge boom and sizzle against the hull. Then the hull shields failed as well, allowing that energy to run directly through the systems of the ship. The monitors and console panels failed, while lights flashed dangerously. Trendaessa’s camera pod began to droop, settling slowly to the floor.
Daerran spat some oath in his own language. “Trendaessa just went down. Engineering, get power to the drives any way you can. Helm, take us out of here the first moment this ship responds.”
Perhaps the only thing that saved them was that the Dreadnought hesitated in its attack, an apparent response to the sudden loss of power on the Starwolf ship. The distance between them had grown steadily until it might have no longer been able to track the carrier accurately without generator and drive emissions to guide its scanners. Kenidayen’s systems began to clear as the discharge faded. The main generators returned first, and that power was immediately directed to the main drives. The carrier moved away quickly on an evasive course, escaping another hit from the devastating weapons of the Dreadnought until she was able to escape into starflight moments later.
Trendaessa lifted her camera pod and looked about, her gesture one of confusion and possibly some embarrassment. “I must have fallen asleep. Did I miss anything important?”
“Possibly your own destruction,” Daerran told her drily as he lifted himself from his station. “Engineering, get repair crews onto our power systems and put everything back into the grid. I want a list of every damaged system divided into those things we can fix and those we cannot. Trendaessa?”
“Our worst damage is to our power systems,” the ship answered. “We have no shields. The main drives are down to sixty percent, and I can get enough power to the star drives for only forty percent. We will not be going anywhere very fast unless we can replace quite a few power couplings. At least the generators are strong.”
Daerran nodded. “Set a course for Home Base.”
Trendaessa turned her camera pod to look at Captain Tarrel. “What about our passengers?”
“Just do it.”
He walked over to join Tarrel, who was stretching in an attempt to relieve cramped joints. “How do you feel?”
“I should live,” she said. “I just won’t like it for a while.” “Captain, we have a problem,” Daerran said, helping her to stand. “I need to take my ship and her information to our main base as quickly as we can get there. I would like to have you along, both as an advisor and a representative of the Union. But you will see and hear many things that you probably should not, and they might not allow me to take you home again. Are you willing to accept that risk? I can still have you put off.”
Tarrel considered that briefly. “If I can do anything to help, then it would be worth the risk. Did we learn anything?”
“We learned that there are a few things that we should never try to do again. I hope that it was worth it.”
3
Trendaessa Kerridayen took fourteen days to make her long, slow way home. Captain Tarrel had no idea of their course, nor did she ask. The location of the Starwolf main base was unknown in the Union, and she believed that it would have to remain unknown if she expected to ever be allowed to go home again. She was not even certain of the carrier’s speed, although she suspected that they were limping along at a pace her own battleship would have found hard to match. The Rane Sector bordered the frontier with the old Republic, an area that was now believed to be Starwolf territory. Fourteen days of travel at the speed and direction she suspected would have taken them well outside of Union space.
The Kerridayen had been in a constant state of repair since her battle with the Dreadnought. Starwolves, as Tarrel discovered to her great surprise, did not sleep, and they were willing to put in some very long hours. Even so, there were fewer than three thousand of them aboard the ship, only two-thirds of that number active crewmembers, and they had a very large ship to maintain. For all their efforts, they made very little progress toward repairing their ship during that long journey home. The greatest part of the damage was not structural but to the ship’s power grid and complex electronics; some of the damaged systems could not be replaced in flight, but would have to wait for a refitting in dock. Superficially the Kerridayen had been badly scorched—* hard to see on her black hull — but she had been far more badly damaged than it seemed.
Kerridayen dropped out of starflight well inside the Alkayja system and began braking smoothly for her approach. There sas none of the usual bravado and intimidation in her manner, such as she would have employed in Union space to remind people like Captain Tarrel that she was too dangerous for them to touch. This was her home, and here she was just a part of the regular local traffic. A small tender, painted bright orange and sporting powerful running lights, fell in just ahead of the carrier to escort her home, while Kerridayen herself ran with both her recognition lamps and the retractable main lights in her shock bumper burning. A Starwolf carrier was a very difficult ship to see, even considering her size, and she had to make her presence well known. It would have been better, of course, if so many of her lights had not burned out i
n the attack.
Alkayja station was rather more compact than the stations that Tarrel was used to seeing, particularly when compared to the kilometers of sprawling tubes and modules that formed the Vinthra Military complex. The main portion of the station consisted of two wide disks, each about twenty-five kilometers across. The thicker disk was lined along the outside with a continuous row of vast bays that allowed the carriers to dock facing in. The smaller disk above that was studded with bays for ships of a more conventional size. And the station was capped above and below with a flattened dome. Although it was a very visible white, Tarrel realized suddenly that the actual station shared certain similarities with the carriers. The flat, rounded domes on top and bottom offered armored protection against attack — just like the large, flat surfaces of the hulls of the carriers — with no sharp angles to catch a bolt that might have otherwise skipped harmlessly off that featureless surface. All machinery, pipes and ducting were within the shell, less vulnerable while keeping the exterior uncluttered. The station probably even had independent interplanetary drive capabilities.
Kerridayen’s maneuverability was compromised from having too many of her field drive projectors burnt out, and so the immense ship had to be moved into a refitting bay by a team of tenders. Since the carrier weighed some fifteen million tons that had to be stopped once it was set into motion, that was a long and difficult process indeed. Half an hour passed just drawing her slowly up the full length of the bay, three kilometers deep, before she nosed into the bracket designed to receive her forward shock bumper. After that, bringing in the braces that steadied the ship’s short wings and finally the two forward docking tubes was fairly easy.
“I hate that,” Trendaessa said when it was done, lowering her camera pod to the floor. “I hate being towed. I hate being pulled and pushed. I hate being shot at. Why could I have not been built a freighter?”
“Freighters are stupid,” Daerran told her. “Freighters are the cattle of the lanes. Do you want to be a cow?”
She lifted her camera pod. “No, not really.”
“Send your data over to the station, and shut yourself down for a few weeks of convalescence,” he told her, then turned to Captain Tarrel. “I would suppose that your stay with us is just about at an end. When you go out from this station again, it will probably be aboard another carrier. For now, we should go into the station and see what they have planned.”
They took a lift down to the main starboard docking tube, which led them, after a walk of nearly a hundred meters along the nose of the carrier and into the station itself, to one side of the bay control station and the observation rooms to either side. It seemed that the station air, which also filled the tube, was something of a compromise. It was warmer than that within the ship, but still slightly cool by human standards.
Whether Commander Daerran had expected it or not, something of a reception committee was waiting for them outside the docking tube. Hasty introductions were made, but these were mostly between some three dozen people who already knew each other at least by name and reputation and Captain Tarrel was able to remember only the most important ones present. There were three other carriers already at the station, including one that was still in the late stages of construction. For reasons that she did not expect, she surprised herself by taking exception to the fact that the Starwolves were actually under the control of a human senior officer, a certain Fleet Commander Dave Asandi. He was a tall man and rather dark, reflecting like all other humans at the station a more direct Terran ancestry than herself, reminding her oddly of the Union’s ruling Sector Families. The Fleet Commander’s entourage of scientific and military advisors was a mixed group, with slightly more Starwolves than humans.
Kelvessan, she reminded herself, that being their name for their race in their mysterious language. A language that, for all the long-suffering Lt. Commander Walter Pesca had been able to determine, did not even exist. He was, for that matter, still in his own cabin aboard the Kerridayen, forgotten and not necessary for the business at hand. Now that she had discovered humans in the station, Tarrel wondered if he might be encouraged to defect.
It seemed that this group had been waiting for the Kerridayen to arrive with her important data on the Dreadnought and the observations of witnesses who had fought the machine. Their first serious strategy meeting was planned to begin immediately. Tarrel found herself walking beside Fleet Commander Asandi, who was openly curious about her. She had found the Starwolves to be very open, uncomplicated people, direct, honest and incapable of duplicity. The humans among them shared many of those same qualities, although it came across almost as a rigidly honest gallantry in them.
“I find you a very uncommon person, Captain,” he said. From anyone else, such flattering comments would have put her on her guard against lechery and requests to borrow money. “You have repeatedly faced two of your most deadly enemies.” “You did not expect that of a Union captain?” she asked, speaking more directly than she would have among her own.
“Frankly, I did not,” he admitted. “That is not to say that I question the courage of your officers. But the limits of your technology would not seem designed to inspire courage, but prudence.”
Tarrel smiled. “To tell you the truth, I believe that the only reason I am alive now is because I have a very accurate sense of knowing when it is time to run.”
“Your own people seem to value you highly,” Asandi told her. “So that you may know how matters stand at this point, we now have a formal truce with the Union. You have been appointed special diplomatic and military advisor. And we are happy to have you. We will be carrying our fight with this Dreadnought into your own space, and we need you to smooth the way with local officials when our ships descend in force upon their systems. I have received a special communication detailing your new duties and special powers. I will add that you can expect any reasonable cooperation from us, including the right to see and to know certain things that we would otherwise have kept to ourselves.”
She hesitated. “If you will excuse me for bringing this up, but it does seem like the proper moment. Commander Daerran indicated that those very matters that you just mentioned might interfere with your ability to allow me to return home again when this matter is settled.”
“He was right to broach that subject with you,” Asandi explained carefully, after a moment’s pause. “It involves certain assurances that he did not have the power to give you himself. He could not promise you something that the Council might then feel compelled to take away.”
“I do understand,” she insisted. “On less immediate matters, there are a few things I have been wondering about.”
“Please speak freely.”
“For one thing, I find it odd that a human would be the supreme commander of the Starwolf fleet. The Kelvessan seem to feel that they are people, not property, and certainly not machines of war.”
“That might require a rather complex explanation,” Asandi said as they filed aboard a tram to take them deeper into the station. Other members of the group continued their own conversation, allowing Asandi and Tarrel the privacy to speak freely. “In theory, the Kelvessan are in fact property and not people, and I am supposed to make their decisions for them. In practice, they make their own decisions among themselves. I serve as a liaison between the Kelvessan and the human worlds of the Republic, which supplies many of their needs. That is why my post has traditionary been led by a human. I am indeed not qualified to act as their military commander. I have never been in Union space and I do not fully understand the situation they face. They tell me what they need and what they would like to have, and I do my best to get it for them.”
“But the Republic no longer exists,” Tarrel insisted. “At least, that’s what I have always been told. The Starwolves are fighting to restore the old Republic, which created them as a long-term weapon of last resort.”
“That is partly true in itself,” he agreed. “But the Republic has never ceased to exi
st. We are the Republic, admittedly only a handful of colonies smaller than a single sector of your Union. For that matter, those that you call the Starwolves are formally the First and Second Special Carrier Fleets.”
“First and Second?”
He smiled wryly. “The First Fleet patrols your space. The Second Fleet, considerably smaller, guards our own space from attack. They have not been needed since the early years of the war, but we keep a few carriers at hand just the same.”
The tram took them well into the interior of the station, and the entire delegation filed quickly into a large conference chamber, taking their seats to suddenly become a committee. Captain Tarrel herself began the discussion by relating the events of her first and second unexpected encounter with the Dreadnought, and her attempt to make contact with it afterward. Then she and Commander Daerran spoke of their observations of the Kerridayen’s attack on the Dreadnought in an attempt to gain information. The scientists of the group took control of the discussion after that, analyzing and debating the data that the Carthaginian and the Kerridayen had collected. Tarrel did her best to keep up with the conversation from that point but matters became a bit thick for her education, especially when they began to explore regions of advanced physics that her own understanding of science told her did not exist. Secondary subspace refractions and achronic resonance seemed to be the topics of the moment, and she had only a vague idea of what those things even meant. She sat back in her chair, listening much but saying nothing as she waited for matters to return to subjects in which she could be useful.
“If you will excuse me for interrupting, it seems to me that your discussion has reached the point that it would proceed best in your laboratories,” Asandi said at last. “Have you in fact reached some consensus upon just what direction your investigations should take?”
“We believe that we have some idea of how to modify our scanners to see through stealth-intensity shielding,” Dalvaen, the Kelvessen research leader, answered. “We could have solved this problem long ago, except that there was never any need. Only our own carriers have the ability to cloak themselves; even our fighters cannot. As long as the Union never developed shielding technology to that level, there was never any need.” “Then you can modify our present scanners?”
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