Tactical Error

by Thorarinn Gunnarsson

  “Once we knew what to look for from space, the Thermopylae’s scanners were able to trace the remains of over a hundred ancient cities,” Jon Addesin told her over dinner that night. “None were any better than this, and most were buried much deeper. They’re all located in the warmer regions, of course, where the massive continental glaciers never reached.”

  “I recall from the maps that most of the continent regions are actually removed from the equatorial areas,” Keflyn said, struggling with the primitive skills required in cooking over an open fire. Having lived her entire life in a spacecraft, she had never even seen a campfire before this.

  “The map is a bit out of date, to say the least,” he told her. “The sea level is still many meters lower than it used to be, with a lot of water still locked into the remaining glaciers. There’s more land in the tropical regions than there used to be.”

  “Then this used to be a much warmer world, even than it is now,” she concluded.

  Jon Addesin had tried his best to be eager and cooperative. He apparently had not expected that she would spend an entire day digging in old ruins. He had tried to help her, but he had only been embarrassed to see her easily lift blocks of stone several times heavier than he could even begin to shift. The only high point of his day had been sneaking a peek at her while she had been washing the dust of the ruins off herself in a nearby pool. She wondered which had amazed him more, her four-armed body or the fact that she had been swimming in glacial meltwater.

  Keflyn was beginning to feel very frustrated with the whole affair. She had been sent to find the clues that would lead the Starwolves to Terra itseff, only to find an impoverished, ancient world where every clue had been utterly destroyed under the weight of time and ice. All she had found was decayed blocks of stone, a Feldenneh with a fascination for a sexual affair with a Starwolf, and a human who was afraid he might get it in spite of himself.

  At least she knew that this was almost certainly Alameda. “So now what?” Addesin asked, as if he had been following her thoughts.

  She shook her head. “I do not see that I can ever make sense of this. It is a very big world, and we have very little time. I suppose that I can only call in the Starwolves and get the help I need to search this world thoroughly. Perhaps there is some structure or installation in this world that is buried but otherwise intact. The Methryn’s scanners would turn that up in minutes.”

  “What are you looking for?” Addesin asked, then frowned. “Forbidden question. I forgot.”

  He sat for a long moment, so obviously debating some question with himself so fiercely that Keflyn watched him. He did know something, that was obvious enough. She wondered if he would volunteer his little prize of information, or if she would have to force it out of him. One advantage to being a Starwolf was the ability to break just about anyone’s arm.

  Maybe that was her father’s secret for dealing with people.

  “As I say, you can spend the rest of your life just digging through ruins on this world,” he ventured at last. “Artifacts and ancient civilizations are one thing, but there is something here that has scared the Feldenneh half to death ever since they first found it. I promised them that I would take you to it, but I thought that you wanted to establish just which world this used to be first.”

  “I know that this is Alameda,” she told him. “That was not the primary purpose of my mission, but I cannot accomplish anything more without the help of a Starwolf carrier. And I have my doubts even then that we will ever find what we are looking for, this world has been so thoroughly wrecked. I might just as well go to see this thing that scares Feldenneh. What is it?”

  “That’s the surprise that we’ve been saving for you. And it’s so strange, I’m frankly hesitant to tell you about it because you might think that I’m either lying or simply insane. You’ll have to see this one for yourself.”

  Another long day of flight had brought them to the far north of the eastern edge of the mid-continental mountains, on their way to very base of the towering face of the retreating glacier. They had long since returned to lands that, until relatively recent times, had been buried beneath the massive burdens of the continental glaciers. With such a complete lack of information on Alameda, Keflyn had no idea just how far the glaciers had extended at the time of the original colonization. She was only guessing that Alameda was still a colder world than it had been, since she hardly expected that humans would have established a major colony on a world that was so consistently cold. Jon Addesin disagreed with that assumption, pointing out that humans would live anywhere it profited them to live. She thought that might be true for a minor colony like Kanis, but hardly a major one.

  Keflyn hoped that she was not just wasting her time. She had no limits set upon her, but she knew that she could not remain here for more than two or three weeks more at the most. And once the Thermopylae left with the skyvan, her explorations would be at an end... unless she could contrive to borrow or buy the thing from the Traders. But what was she to look for that Addesin and the Feldenneh did not already know? Her best bet was still to let them show her what they would.

  And if this present little trip did not produce results, she was going to begin to get annoyed. Something was out here that the Feldenneh were very eager for her to see, but they were a very secretive folk, slow to give their trust and nearly as cautious with their own kind as with others. According to their own logic, it was infinitely preferable to show than to attempt to tell. She really did not blame them for being so reluctant to part with any secret that they found frightening. For one thing, if trouble came of it, they would be caught in the middle.

  Jon Addesin was a different matter entirely, and she liked him far more than she trusted him. He was frightened about something, facing a point of no return, and it had something to do with both her and what he was bringing her to see. He was playing a game, and she was both the problem and the prize. She suspected that it was just his very sincere interest in her, balanced by a healthy fear of Starwolves. Her natural telepathy was not enough to give her a clear answer, but she believed that he was trying to decide whether to try to seduce her before it was too late – before the reason for their journey together was lost – or whether he should just leave well enough alone. He was certain that she had enjoyed an affair with Derrighan and, for some reason that she could not completely understand, that had stung his pride rather severely. Perhaps he understood that her interests concerning him were only those of curiosity, while her deeper feelings were given to Derrighan.

  She asked herself what she wanted to do. Could she make love to a human without hurting him? It was a very real danger for most Kelvessan, but she was a very gentle lover. Did she want to try? All that she knew about humans argued that they were rather bland, and yet she had always thought that Commander Tregloran and Lenna Makayen made a very odd but generally satisfied pair.

  “How old are you?” she asked suddenly.

  “Older than I look,” Addesin replied without looking away from the skyvan’s controls. “I’m actually 57 standard years. Of course, Traders generally live to be 160 or so.”

  “Oh.” Keflyn could not hide all traces of her dismay... not at his true age but that reminder of his mortality. Standard Kelvessan lived about four centuries. No one knew for certain just how long the High Kelvessan lived, although the best bet was that, like the Aldessan, they would live four to six thousand years.

  He glanced at her. “How old are you?”

  “Twenty.”

  “Oh!” Addesin mocked her with exaggerated dismay.

  “I was just wondering how you came to be the commander of a ship like the Thermopylae,” she said, watching the forest out the side window of the van.

  “A tottering wreck, you mean?” he asked, amused. “I had done very well for myself as the cargo master on board one of the larger family ships. The Thermopylae is exactly the ship she appears to be. Not so old as you might guess, but she fell on hard times because of mismana
gement, went broke, and was finally impounded for failing to pay her port fees. The Traders Affiliate bailed her out and asked around for someone willing to take a chance on a bad bet. I could have had a better ship of my own by waiting a couple of more years, but I thought that I might enjoy the challenge.”

  “How does it go?” she asked, noting his obvious love for that old ship.

  “Oh, we’re on top of things!” he declared, tremendously pleased. “That overhaul you gave her engines and generators will make a big difference. Now we have just about enough saved up to put the Thermopylae into one of our own refitting docks for a complete overhaul, and that old ship will be as good as new.”

  He turned to her with an intent stare. “That’s something that you have to understand about Free Traders. The only thing that any one of us wants is a ship of our own. And nothing and no one ever comes between us, from the captain to the newest crewmember, and our ship. I don’t suppose that it can be quite the same with Starwolves and your big warships.”

  “Are you kidding? Our ships can talk back.”

  Night was already beginning to fall when they arrived, and Keflyn had only a brief glimpse of the immense white cliff face of the glacier, glowing like burnished gold in the fading light. Jon Addesin settled the skyvan into a sheltered depression in the woods a couple of miles away from the edge of the glacier itself, where they would be protected from the worst of frigid air coming directly off the ice. The retreat of the glacier had left this a rough, broken land, full of snaking ridges and sudden depressions littered with sand and rounded boulders.

  A ring of blackened stone marked the fires of a previous camp, a sight that helped to reassure Keflyn that they had found what they were looking for. With night falling quickly, Addesin begged off taking her to see his great secret until the next morning. The light of day was fading quickly, and he seemed to have no ability to see in the dark. He immediately set about converting the back of the van into his private bedroom. Since Keflyn did not sleep, she would once again have to find some way to entertain herself until morning. She was presently more interested in dinner.

  Addesin jumped down from the back of the skyvan and sealed the hatch, then paused a moment to look about at the sky. The sun had only just slipped below the horizon, and the first hints of color were beginning to climb into the night sky.

  “Come with me,” he said eagerly, hurrying to draw Keflyn along with him. “There’s something that I want to show you.”

  “Your great, mysterious what’s-it?” she asked.

  “No, just something pretty and unimportant. Come along.”

  She followed him perhaps half a kilometer through the wooded, rugged land, until they came at last to a small, deep dell. The long, slender ribbon of a waterfall dropped over the rounded boulders of sheer cliff at the opposite end of the canyon, raising a cloud of fine mist as the icy meltwater splashed almost musically into the deep oval pool at the base of the cliff. Addesin led her along the edge of the lake to one side of the waterfall, where they could watch the final moments of daylight through the spray.

  “The Feldenneh are the most quietly decadent people I know,” he said as he sat on a large boulder, as if waiting for a tram. “They have an almost magical talent for finding things like this.”

  “It is nice,” Keflyn agreed. “What does it do, besides give me an overwhelming desire to piss?”

  Addesin afforded her a look of disgust. “Starwolves must be wretched romantics.”

  “We live our entire lives in starships,” she explained. “What we see of nature is generally on a much larger scale. I find this all very interesting, I promise you. I just wondered what you wanted me to think.”

  “I just wanted you to see something quietly unique,” he told her. “Just watch for a moment.”

  A sudden shock of sheet lightning leaped across the sky from east to west, tracing a fiery spider’s web across the dark sky. For one long, sustained moment out of time, the land below stood out in brilliant relief as the rippling flash threw flickering shadows. The harsh glare of lightning faded, and twilight again settled heavily over the land.

  Then it began, slowly at first, as a single, slender column of golden light leaped up from the western horizon. It seemed to linger for a long second, like a fountain of water that ebbed and pulsed, before it sank back down. The glow across the edge of the western sky continued to grow, spreading slowly north and south, and now three columns of light climbed into the night. Each pulse brought an ever-widening fringe of light, spreading slowly north and south until it consumed fully a third of the horizon. Now it alternated in an increasing variety of colors – red, green, and blue, as well as gold.

  And with each pulse of light, the waterfall and its veil of icy mist glowed with the same color that filled the sky behind it. As minutes passed, the changing of color both in the night sky and the waterfall became more rapid and regular. As the evening deepened into darkness, the pulsing of light came faster and faster until it steadied into a ragged curtain of misty illumination that rippled in slowly changing colors.

  Keflyn sat, enthralled, hardly aware of the passing minutes as evening deepened into true night. She had watched this display every night since her arrival, but she had looked upon it as a remarkable display of static energy, filtering down through the planet’s upper atmosphere, the tides of the powerful magnetic forces that raged above this world. She had wondered how the total of those forces compared to the power of a starship. She had wondered if this spectacular display was unique to this one world.

  For the first time, she saw it as a thing of captivating beauty.

  “This is the price we pay, Starwolves and Free Traders, for living always in space,” Jon Addesin said as he slipped away from her side, retreating a few short meters into the forest behind. “We miss the wonders of a worldly life. Even when we see things like this, we tend to see it as we would from the outside. We look out our windows and see whole worlds as small, simple, and largely bland and uniform places. You have to stand here, in a place like this and be surrounded by the immensity of nature, to understand what a vast and complex place a world really is.”

  Keflyn sat in silence, watching the waterfall. At that moment, a sudden sound rang out across the deep valley, an animal sound unlike any that she had ever heard, like the piping of a distant flute. She started, a Kelvessan’s aggressive reaction to fear, as if ready to throw herself into battle with some attacking beast.

  “What is that?” she asked anxiously.

  “What?” Jon Addesin asked, as if he had heard nothing. He laughed. “It was nothing, just a night bird singing in the trees. You’ve heard birds before, I’m sure.”

  “No, not so close,” she answered. Birds were known to this world but very scarce; Keflyn thought that few breeds had survived the violence of the deep ice age.

  He returned a moment later, holding a length of some tough vine of large, dark leaves and half a dozen large, red flowers like roses. He twisted the ends together and slipped it around her neck. “Flowers, growing on the very edge of ice. That’s the remarkable thing. Nature can make a thing of beauty to fill half the sky or small enough to fit in your hands, both of equal complexity. The first is as thin and transparent as mist, yet can rival the power of a starship. The other is fragile enough to crush carelessly in your hands, and yet it thrives within sight of glaciers that crushed an entire civilization from existence. Can Starwolves smell flowers?”

  “Just barely. Our designers saw no great need for that sense.” She still made the gesture of inhaling the soft fragrance, doing honor to the gift. As a matter of fact, she could smell nothing at all. She looked up at him. “I never expected that you would suddenly turn into a poet.”

  “A fair night brings it out in our kind, like wolves howling at the moon.” He stood for a moment, listening to the singing of the night bird. Its call had begun as a series of almost questioning calls, settling now into a simple, fragmentary song, as if answering some music that onl
y it could hear. “They say that there is magic in a night like this.”

  “I have heard that said,” Keflyn agreed. “I never thought there was any truth in that.”

  Addesin offered her his hand. “What do you suppose would happen, if a mortal like myself happened to kiss a Starwolf?”

  Keflyn laid aside the vine with its flowers, which had come apart and fallen from about her neck. She took his hand, rising gracefully to stand close before him. “I expect that nothing at all would happen, as long as a certain Starwolf was careful about her strength.”

  She placed both sets of her arms gently about him and drew him close, a gesture that surprised him with its subtle boldness, and they kissed. Unseen for the moment, the single large moon of that world rose slowly over the eastern edge of the dale. Standing nearly full, it cast a cold, bright light that turned the waterfall golden. Arm in arm, Jon and Keflyn turned away from the secluded pool and sought the simple path leading back to camp.

  Unnoticed in the night, a small, dark shape left the shadows of the woods. As it moved noiselessly into the moonlight, it was revealed as a machine, the rounded, featureless hull of a small automaton with a pair of cameras in a protective housing at the end of a flexible armored neck. It drifted slowly forward, suspended on silent field drives, its snake-like neck bent as it watched the retreating pair. Although it was no part of this world, Keflyn would have found it a familiar sight. It was a probe, the durable all-purpose remote employed by Starwolf carriers as their eyes and ears outside their own hulls. If she had seen it, Keflyn would have wondered why it was there. As far as she knew, there were no Starwolf carriers anywhere in the area, nor would any have cause to hide from her.