“Commander, your ship was rattled,” she told him. “Valthyrra was scared to death, and she nearly froze up.”
Gelrayen frowned fiercely. “She was just concerned that she might have been responsible for damage and injury, all the more so because she knows how important time is right now.”
“I certainly hope so,” Tarrel said guardedly. “If that really is her reaction to danger, then you cannot take this ship into battle. She has a lot of growing up to do.”
The first thing they discovered was that the docking tubes had been ripped away by the concussion. Gelrayen stepped through the airlock and out to the broken end of the tube, then gently propelled himself over the side. Tarrel followed his example with only marginal hesitation; there was no gravity in the bay except for the final two meters or so above the floor, and that final drop was small enough that even she made it easily. At least that gentle descent of over a hundred meters had given them both time for a good look about the bay.
As Gelrayen had predicted, the concussion from the primary impulse cannon had taken out the observation deck and the bay control room, although the nose docking bracket was built heavily enough that it had survived unharmed. The two secondary cannons had added their own power to the blast, and the concussion had swept along the length of the bay and out the main doors. At least the doors had been open at the time; the shock wave had been intense enough to blow out the containment field for a brief moment. There had been two tenders in the bay at the time. One, just coming in, had been kicked back out again. The second tender had already collected one of the immense hull plates, but that had been ripped from its hold by the concussion and had slid along the Methryn’s upper hull until it too passed out the containment field. It had already been collected by the first tender.
Most of the bay crew had already gone to the construction facilities to help prepare the Methryn’s armor. The dozen or so left had all been Kelvessan and hearty enough to survive more than this. Some had very minor injuries due to being tossed about by the concussion or else being hit by debris. There had fortunately been no one in the bay control room or the observation deck at the time; even Starwolves would not have easily survived that. All in all, things could have been worse. If the bay doors had been closed, the entire concussion would have been forced into the station corridors.
Of course, things could have also been much better.
Tenders continued to carry the hull plates out of the way, although a full hour passed before two of the little ships returned with replacements for the docking tubes which had been ripped away. These had simply been disconnected from another bay, but another hour passed before these new tubes were rigged in place and normal traffic in and out of the carrier could resume. By that time, most of the debris from the misfire of the impulse cannons had been cleared away. That was also more than enough time for Fleet Commander Asandi to arrive.
“Do you know yet what happened?” he asked. “I was told that the scanner malfunctioned.”
Gelrayen nodded solemnly. “Valthyrra was powering up the system to see if everything was responding. She says that the cannons pulsed at a much lower power level than anticipated. They should have only been at standby status.”
Asandi frowned at he stared up at the carrier. “I hope that this business does not involve a long delay.”
“Valthyrra says not. According to her expectations, some minor mechanical changes and a primary computer control modification should correct the problem completely. She says that we should close up the hull and take the ship out just as she is, although she recommends certain design changes on the next impulse scanner we build.”
“That sounds promising,” Asandi agreed. “I still want to check everything through the research and design team first, though. Better a delay at this phase than having to bring the Methryn back in later to start over.”
Gelrayen looked up at the new docking tube, which appeared to be complete. “I suppose that I should go back aboard. We have to get to work on finding out just why those cannons fired prematurely.”
“Tell Valthyrra that we really do not need these delays,” Asandi declared. “Her first battle damage, a result of shooting herself in her own construction bay. This is not a promising beginning.”
“Send Dalvaen and his friends in research over and have them tell us why their cannons discharged this much energy at standby level,” Gelrayen responded.
As it happened, Dalvaen had already taken his team of research scientists and engineers onto the Methryn’s hull to look at the impulse cannons, and they had their answer soon enough. The projection coils in the cannons were cooled to very low temperatures within a matter of seconds by solid-state coolers, and the designers had seriously underestimated the increase in efficiency from the super-conductor coils. Power levels that should have held the cannons ready to pulse on command, instead caused them to discharge. That was by no means bad news. Any system that could deliver the same performance on half the power input was an advantage to any ship, and especially so to a fighting ship. Valthyrra simply had to reprogram the automatic systems in the scanner control to feed a reduced power curve to the cannons.
The Methryn had been somewhat more damaged by the concussion than she had first thought, although that damage was still not serious. She was designed to take far worse punishment than she had just received, and the damage was mostly limited to some of the more delicate equipment exposed by the missing hull plates. Wiring and major power leads had been ripped loose from several shield projectors, scanner receivers and perimeter cannons set in retractable turrets within the ventral groove. None of the machinery itself, however, had been damaged, and everything was easily repaired by reconnecting or laying down new wiring.
If no one else was pleased with what had happened to the Methryn, it did at least put Theralda Vardon in a better mood. If nothing else, it encouraged her to hope that everyone else would be too impressed with Valthyrra’s embarrassment to pay much attention to her own stupidity. She was quite mistaken, especially so if she had ever believed that the sight of a Starwolf carrier coming into port with the wreckage of a Union commercial station still strapped to her hull could be ignored. Her crews had actually cut away large parts of the station components already, given the amount of time they were allowed, but nearly every piece of the station she carried had been fused to her armor in several places by the Dreadnought’s discharge beam. And with her shield projectors gone, the wreckage of the station components offered the best protection she had against attack.
Fleet Commander Asandi took one look at her and walked away shaking his head, muttering that the survival of known civilization was in the hands of idiots. Captain Tarrel was beginning to find it all very educational. She had discovered that not only were the Starwolves capable of making mistakes, sometimes they were also just plain unlucky.
“What I regret most, I suppose, is that it happened when we were actually doing so well,” Theralda remarked during an open conference between the carriers. “We were finally doing something constructive, even if we could not fight the Dreadnought itself.”
Although Fleet Commander Asandi had already gone aboard the Vardon to view the damage, Daerran had joined Tarrel and Gelrayen on the Methryn’s bridge for the conference. Valthyrra had channeled images of the Vardon to her main screen as well as the monitors at the Commander’s station on the upper bridge where the group was gathered. It was hard to tell that a Starwolf carrier was actually hidden beneath that wreckage. Theralda had removed only the segment that had been strapped across her nose. Tenders and crews working in suits were working to remove the wreckage as quickly as possible, although the process made some think of old stories they had read about sailing ships, and the removal of barnacles.
“Could you just run through your observations about the Dreadnought step by step,” Commander Asandi suggested.
“Well, the first thing we discovered was that the Dreadnought has begun attacking major surface targets,” Therald
a began. “The damage that I observed was relatively limited, although the Dreadnought does identify and destroy all surface military targets. I have also found evidence that the Dreadnought lingers in system for a time to see what might come along responding to calls for help. That suggests to me that the Dreadnought moves more quickly between systems than we have first anticipated, and that it is capable of more sophisticated planning than suspected. My personal suspicion is that it is loitering about waiting for Starwolves.”
“But I already knew that it was waiting in system,’’ Tarrel added. “When I first encountered the Dreadnought, it attacked the convoy my battleship was escorting hours before it struck the station.”
“We had not forgotten that, even if Theralda had,” Trendaessa Kerridayen remarked.
“There is additional evidence that the Dreadnought is more than just a simple automated weapon,” Theralda continued.
“When I entered the system where I first encountered the Dreadnought, I was discovered when it made a routine impulse scanner sweep. It was looking for Starwolf carriers running with stealth-intensity shields, perhaps as a result of its battle with the Kerridayen. It definitely is more clever than we had assumed, or at least hoped. And being that clever, it is certainly capable of intercepting our achronic transitions and being prepared for what we plan to do.”
“We have to make plans for that possibility,” Asandi agreed, “Anything else?”
“Just more evidence of its intelligence,” she continued. “It followed me to Norden within hours, rather than loiter in the last system it attacked. A change in its usual methods. And when it came into the Norden system and saw the Maeridan and myself carrying away segments of the commercial stations, it followed us to see where we were going before it attacked. Those might all be automatic functions, but they are also evidence of a higher level of sophistication than we had first expected. But, when it did attack, it went after the station components rather than myself or the Maeridan, which gave me time enough to get away. That does not suggest careful planning, and that brings us back to assuming it is an automated machine rather than sentient.”
“I suspect that your assumptions are very accurate,” Asandi agreed. “Perhaps the Methryn can answer those questions more accurately in a couple of weeks. But we do have to be prepared for the fact that we are indeed fighting an enemy that is not just far more technically advanced than ourselves, on a scale of power far beyond ours, but clever enough to anticipate us.”
6
The wide door at the rear of the Methryn’s upper right fighter bay opened, revealing the open doors of the construction bay more than half a kilometer behind. Captain Tarrel stood well to the front of the bay with Commander Gelrayen, waiting for the arrival of the Methryn’s first pack of fighters. The packs were the most well-known of the Starwolves; the pilots in their black armor the only Starwolves that most people of Union space were likely to see. Certainly the packs were the most infamous, the most feared and also the most romanticized of all Starwolves; some believed, without really stopping to think about it, that Starwolves were all pilots.
Since coming aboard the Kerridayen, Tarrel had discovered that most of the massive carriers kept only ten to twelve packs each, ninety to a hundred and eight pilots. Of the carrier’s complete crew of about two thousand, only half were active crewmembers and most of these existed to serve the packs. The ship largely took care of itself, employing a small army of remote units. Each pack was commanded by a pack leader, that being in fact the most commonly-used name, although the official rank was that of Captain. The pack leader always ran in the center of the standard V-formation of the pack, with four fighters sitting to either side in each wing of that formation.
Tarrel had been told that the pack leaders held the rank of Captain, the same as her own, because the packs were intended to operate fairly independently once they were in space and their leader needed the authority to make major strategic decisions without the time-consuming process of consulting the carrier.
For that same reason, the senior officer of the carrier itself was not a Captain but a Commander, ranking higher than the Captains who served under him in the packs. That was supposedly how the Starwolves had received their name, since each carrier was in principle an armored and highly mobile base for a group of wolf packs. Curiously, the Union itself had first given them the name of Starwolves.
“They should be coming around any moment now,” Gelrayen warned.
Captain Tarrel was content to wait, using her time to inspect the bay itself. The bay was many times wider than it was high, giving the illusion that the ceiling was much lower than it actually was. And it was rather low by her estimate; she would not want to fly a relatively large fighter a hundred meters and more down the length of the bay with only twelve meters or so between floor and ceiling. The fighters would land near the front of the bay. Where she now stood, she could see the nine white lines painted on the floor of the bay, with a corresponding set of handling arms on ceiling tracks above. A massive framework called a rack waited to receive the fighter once it was down and secured. The rack had a double function preventing the fighter from being thrown around the inside of the ship by sudden turns, and serving as a launching platform for the fighter. When not in use, the fighters were carried in their racks to a separate holding bay.
“Will the packs be of any help to you in fighting the Dreadnought,” she asked.
Gelrayen shook his head. “No, not at all. I would not even dare to send them out, since even a minor hit from the Dreadnought’s discharge beams would be the end of a fighter.”
“Then you could easily do without them now,” she observed.
“I suppose. We are just so used to thinking of the packs as the carrier’s defense that we will feel better for having them. And you never really know just what you might find useful.”
The arrival of the pack was sudden and rather alarming. The first of the black fighters suddenly whipped around the station in a swift turn, through the outer doors of the construction bay, and directly into the Methryn’s landing bay at a speed that Captain Tarrel would have considered sufficient for an attack run. It dropped its speed quickly once it was inside the landing bay, extending its slender landing gear, its long-legged stance meant to accommodate its down-swept wings. The fighter drew itself to an abrupt halt only three meters from where they stood beside Its rack, hovering for a moment before lowering itself slowly to the deck. The second fighter was already on its way in by that time.
The landing of all nine fighters in the pack was accomplished in less than a minute. The handling arms came in to pin the fighter to the deck, a needless precaution aboard a carrier that was not in flight. Once the engines and generators were shut down, the fighter was lifted so that its landing gear could be retracted and it was then moved forward into its rack. Members of the bay crew hurried in to lock the fighter into the rack and slide forward the boarding platform.
Gelrayen himself tended the middle fighter, ascending the boarding platform as the canopy was raised, helping the pilot to release the seat straps and remove his helmet. Tarrel recalled that he had been a pack leader himself until only a few months earlier, and that, like all Commanders, he still missed flying with the packs and probably always would. As he helped the pack leader remove his helmet, a lone Starwolf fighter slipped relatively sedately into the bay and settled to the deck behind the lead fighter. This arrival was clearly a last-minute addition, since Valthyrra was only just bringing out its rack after it had landed, while two extra members of the bay crew hurried to assist the pilot.
Gelrayen returned a moment later, followed by the pack leader in black armor. “Captain, this is pack leader Teraln. He is to be the Methryn’s new Commander-designate, although the real purpose for his existence is to do all the things that I wish I could be doing for myself.”
“I’m Captain Janus Tarrel,” she introduced herself. “There is no real purpose to my existence at the moment, but I’m supposed to
be useful in the near future. Are the packs only now beginning to transfer aboard?”
“We should all be here within the next couple of days,” Teraln explained. “My pack transferred here with five others aboard the freighter Fyrdenna Lesdryn. The other four should already be on Alkayja station.”
“The first four arrived on station nearly two weeks ago,” Gelrayen said. “Listen, I need your help. I will be giving every moment I can spare to this ship until this business is over. Will you watch over the packs and make certain that they get settled comfortably?”
“Yes, certainly,” Teraln insisted.
The pilot of the lone fighter walked over to join them, a female Kelvessan in full flight armor of command white. Tarrel was surprised to see that, since she had believed that only the pilots flew the fighters. Since her hair was somewhat ruffled from being inside the helmet, she somehow looked even younger and more delicate than most of her kind. Gelrayen was watching her with great interest and some mystification.
“Kayendel, reporting aboard as first officer,” she announced formally, although she did not salute. Starwolves, at least in Tarrel’s experience, never saluted, perhaps because they could not decide upon which arm to use.
“I already have a first officer,” Gelrayen commented. “Not to reflect upon your welcome here, of course. Is there something going on here that I should know about?”
“Because of my previous battle experience with the Dreadnought as the first officer of the Vardon, I have transferred positions with the Methryn’s original first officer,” she explained. “Fleet Commander Asandi and Valthyrra Methryn herself approved the transfer.”
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