Tactical Error

by Thorarinn Gunnarsson

“I keep that always and ever in mind,” Velmeran commented, mostly to himself. “What about Lenna?”

  “Lenna Makayen is not here,” Bill answered. Strike two.

  “Any word from Lenna Makayen?” Velmeran asked, putting the two parts of his previous question together in what seemed to be a precise and reasonable manner.

  “Careful.” Strike three.

  Velmeran frowned, for all the good that did machines. “What were Lenna’s last words to you?”

  “By the balls of Saint Peter!” Bill obliged, speaking in Lenna’s own voice before returning to his own. “Then there was a very big explosion, and the channel went dead.”

  Velmeran sighed – very loudly – and very studiously ignored the fact that all the members of the special tactics team were staring at him expectantly. The end of civilization as they knew it was hidden somewhere in this ice-bound warren. But unless someone was here to lead them to it, they might as well go home. He just wished that Lenna had been there to meet them. Although Bill probably knew as much on the subject as Lenna, somehow he just could not bring himself to ask the sentry to lead them. Perhaps because he felt that dealing with the collapse of civilization as they knew it would be easier for him to deal with than the automaton’s obtuse logic. He also felt obliged to wait as long as he could for Lenna, since he was her only ride home.

  “Are we going to look for Lenna?” Baressa asked.

  “I was just wondering about that,” he admitted.

  Well, there was no hope for it. Time was of the essence. The essence of what, Velmeran could hardly guess, but time was passing and important matters could not wait, and they had to be on with it. Even if it meant matching wits with Bill the automaton, who had the cold, calculating intellect of a machine and the conversational talents of an ape.

  He looked up at Bill, his reluctance very plain. “Bill, will you take us to where you would expect to find Lenna?”

  “I think that she is dead,” the sentry replied without hesitation. “I would not know where to look.”

  “Heaven or hell, take your choice,” Baress quipped. “I know where I would look first.”

  Velmeran waved him aside impatiently. “Bill, take me to the place where you think Lenna was at the time of the explosion.”

  “I will attempt that.”

  “Keep to the larger corridors,” Velmeran told him. “We will be following in our ships. Proceed.”

  Bill turned and started off, circling wide around their small, tight group and heading across the bay, to the other side of the parked ships. Intent upon his task, he walked right past Lenna Makayen without a word or a glance as she stood behind Venn Keflyn’s large, lanky armored form, having just arrived quietly and unnoticed. She just stood for a long moment, looking very disheveled in a torn and slightly singed Union uniform, watching Bill setting off on his quest with quiet determination.

  “Miss Makayen, if you... “ Velmeran paused, seeing that Bill was not going to stop. “Oh, Great Spirit of Space. I told that mechanical idiot to lead us to the place where he thinks that you executed your little diversion. Bill, come back!”

  “I am sorry, Commander,” Lenna said. “Things got rather out of hand.”

  Velmeran sensed that she was somewhat contrite and even calm in her behavior, having surprised herself that she was still alive and still somewhat dazed by the explosion. He considered it an improvement.

  “You can tell us about it after we stop the collapse of civilization as we know it,” he told her. “Take me to see this great secret of yours, so we can get out of here before they come looking for us.”

  “You can get there from here through the freight tram tunnels,” she explained simply. “I suppose that I can guide you from the transport.”

  He nodded. “The word, I am told, is haste. Get to it.”

  “Come along, Bill,” Lenna called to the sentry as she followed Trel and Marlena to the transport. The other pilots hurried to their own fighters, but Venn Keflyn hesitated a moment.

  “I sense something familiar in this place,” she said. “Something that has since gone away, leaving only a shadow of its presence.”

  Velmeran glanced at herjn surprise. “Strange. Somehow, I sense that I have been here before. How do you sense yourself, as you would seem to another Kelvessan?”

  Since the others were already in their ships, they did not have the time to discuss it further. Velmeran thought his answers lay ahead, wherever Lenna meant to take them. Venn Keflyn thrust her vulpine head back inside her helmet as she pulled herself into the main hatch on the underside of her ship. Velmeran hurried to his own fighter, knowing that the transport would be ready to leave as soon as Lenna had her mechanical companion strapped down in the cargo compartment.

  All the same, Velmeran knew that he was in trouble. One major key to his two decades of consistent success was that he had never allowed himself to be distracted by thoughts of failure. He made his plans thoroughly, and he took all surprises as they came. Fear, anticipation of failure, and compulsive haste were the greatest enemies of anyone operating under pressure, but he never allowed himself to respond to such impulses. This time he was working almost completely blind, with no more plans to guide him and no idea of what he had yet to face. He was at Lenna’s mercy, and she was determined to keep her secrets until she could show him what she had discovered.

  More than that, he was afraid. That odd, shadowy presence he sensed, that seemed in some unexplainable way to be himself, had disturbed him more than he wanted to admit. He was afraid, and that fear had awakened apprehensions of his ability to deal with any surprises. He tried to put such thoughts and fears from his mind, knowing that they only distracted him from his true business, and yet they remained, demanding attention that he could not spare.

  The transport rose and began moving slowly across the width of the bay, its speed hardly more than a hover. Velmeran lifted his own fighter from the floor of the bay, leaving his landing gear down as a caution against bumping the down-swept portions of his wings against the ground. The Starwolf ships were maneuverable, but these tunnels would still demand all the skills of the Methryn’s best pilots. He was most worried about Venn Keflyn. Her interceptor was twice as large as a transport, and wider by half again than the short-winged fighters.

  He reminded himself that she had well over five hundred years of flying experience. It was like having a fox-faced Methuselah for a pilot. He hoped that she was bringing up the rear. Her big ship could settle down and shield itself like a turtle, or rotate to bring the firepower of a cruiser to bear on anything coming up behind.

  Lenna led the transport into the larger tunnels of the freight trams, working their way around the burning areas of the installation. Velmeran did not like having to take the tram passages, and he would have trusted them even less if he had known what Lenna had done with a runaway security tram. Under the circumstances, he simply had no choice. At least they were able to make fairly good speed through the wider tunnels, and Lenna led them to their destination within a matter of minutes.

  The transport slowed, then turned off down a side passage that led within a hundred meters to a landing bay, one that was vast in size. When Velmeran settled his fighter in the center of the bay, he guessed that it must be some 250 meters deep, 800 wide and more than 1,200 long. The bay was several times the size of the Union’s largest ships of war, except of course for the immense Fortresses. Four or possibly five of their largest carriers could be brought down side by side in this bay, with room left over for a small fleet of cruisers.

  The most startling aspect was that no large warship in the Union fleet had the capabilities of landing itself planetside.

  He unstrapped from his seat as quickly as he could and dropped down from the cockpit of his fighter. Lenna was already waiting for him, staring up at the tremendous double doors that closed the ceiling of the bay. She seemed to be very pleased with herself, in a grim manner.

  “Commander, this bay was meant to service a singl
e ship,” she told him. “There are sixteen bays exactly like this one located in a sub-complex in this section of the installation, which is separated from the main base by several kilometers. When this area was active – until about two months ago – no one except military personnel with special clearances were allowed through the very limited numbers of tunnels into this section. There are certain things that I do not have to tell you about a ship this size being able to land itself, but the ship that once filled this bay is by no means the Union’s secret weapon. It is only a tool for transporting and servicing that weapon.”

  With that flourish of melodramatics out of the way, Lenna turned to lead him across the bay. Only Venn Keflyn followed, leaving the others to watch the ships.

  “I went ahead and assembled some important pieces of evidence here, so that we would not have to spare the time for me to drag you over a wide area of this place,” she explained.

  “Good,” Velmeran said quietly. Lenna might be used to it, but he did not care for walking about a major Union installation as if all the time in the world was his own.

  They left the bay through a pair of wide doors in the very center of one long side, beneath entire banks of observation decks. Lenna seemed to know her way very well as she led them some distance along the wide corridor, turning off abruptly into an area which looked to be a large complex of apartments and personal support facilities. Suddenly the shapes of corridors, rooms and equipment reminded him less of the older portions of the installation and more of the interior of a ship, as if some effort had been made to surround those who had once lived here with an environment that was always familiar and comfortable to those who lived their entire lives in space. It was not standard Union practice to house any personnel so near to a landing area, except for small interceptors employed in defense that might need to launch on a moment’s notice. No ship made to fit that bay could have fallen into that category.

  They entered yet another area of the complex, this part clearly a pilot’s training area. One large room contained a row of simulators along one wall, all complete with large, vision domes over their cockpits and multidirectional artificial gravity units to mimic the inertia of turns. Unfortunately, the simulators were entirely utilitarian on the outside and gave no hint of the size or form of the ship they imitated.

  “As you can see, this is the larger training room where both pilots and service personnel were made familiar with their ships,”

  Lenna explained. She indicated for them to wait as she walked toward one long door along the back wall. “They did have actual examples of their new fighters, presumably for their technicians to have to tear down and put back together again.”

  Lenna pressed a button on the wall, and the wide, high door began to lift slowly into the ceiling. The keen eyes of both the Starwolf and, to a lesser extent the Kelvessan, could pierce the shadows somewhat, revealing to them a dim, massive form of sleek lines and sharp angles, clearly some manner of fighter possessing atmospheric control surfaces. Once the door was completely raised, Lenna pressed a second button and the lights inside the chamber came on.

  After Lenna’s dramatic posturings, they had expected the worst. Velmeran felt oddly disappointed, if this was supposed to represent the end of civilization as they knew it. It looked, for all practical purposes, to be only a copy of a Starwolf fighter, slightly larger with more massive engine housings under its wings and a larger stardrive, the same dull, nonreflective black. To Velmeran, it all came back to that same old problem that the Union had always faced. No human pilot had the reflexes to match the enhanced abilities of the Starwolves, and the Union had never possessed the genetic technology to engineer pilots of their own, nor could they build computer control systems that could outfly a Starwolf.

  He frowned mightily. “Lenna Makayen, pull down your pants to give me an unobstructed target and bend over. I am going to kick you all the way to Vannkani, and you can tell Donalt Trace personally that it will not work.”

  Lenna looked extremely hurt. “Trust me to know my business better than that, Commander. This is just another tool, the fighters that go with that big new carrier. The real secret weapon is already gone, and you’ll not be finding any examples of the art lying about this place just waiting to make your acquaintance.”

  She turned and stalked off toward one side of the chamber, leaving both Velmeran and Venn Keflyn to hurry after her.

  “Then what in the name of the great Spirit of Space is it?” he demanded.

  “Donalt Trace figured it out all for himself twenty years ago. What in all the universe is the only thing that can fly and fight and think as good and as quick as a Starwolf?”

  In answer to her own question, she pulled open the double doors of a metal cabinet standing against the wall just inside the room. Inside, hanging on its rack, was an armored suit very much like that worn by the Starwolves. Most importantly, it had the same double set of arms.

  “Oh, so there have been Kelvessan here!” Venn Keflyn exclaimed with surprise and tremendous delight for solving that mystery. Then, realizing what she had said, she glanced over at Velmeran very contritely, her large ears laid back. “You know, it might very well be the end of civilization as we know it.”

  “Bill was able to get these figures for us,” Lenna said as she began spreading papers across the table in the training room. “The Union has all sixteen of their Mock Starwolf carriers in operation. Each carrier has the capabilities of carrying 1,000 fighters. At the moment, of course, they have only about 200 pilots to each ship, making a total of some 3,350 pilots. The Starwolves, of course, have some 5,000 trained pilots, so you are ahead of them there. Now the Union refers to their Mock Starwolf carriers as Special Assault Cruisers. The ships are about a third the size and weight of a ship like the Methryn, about as heavily armed and armored. They are slower in starflight, and of course they have no jump drives. But there are indications that they are just a bit faster and more maneuverable than your carriers. They don’t have conversion cannons, but they do carry a much larger array of conventional, nuclear, and conversion warheads in starflight-capable missiles.”

  “I suppose that they have no sentient computer control,” Velmeran dared to ask, wondering just how many surprises he was in for this day.

  “They have the same semi-sentient computer complexes used in the Fortresses,” she answered. “Of course, the Mock Starwolves take complete control over their ships during battle. The Mock Starwolves and their carriers are designed to work, at least in major battles, as the perfect complement to the Union’s Fortresses.”

  “Where did Donalt Trace get Kelvessan of his own?” Venn Keflyn asked.

  “They all came from Commander Velmeran,” Lenna responded.

  The Valtrytian twitched her ears with surprise, and turned to look at him. “My, but you have been busy.”

  “Well, more specifically, they all came from the genetic material from that hand that Trace got from the Commander more than twenty years ago,” Lenna explained. “Rather than just endlessly cloning perfect replicas of Commander Velmeran, they decoded the genetic material to the best of their abilities to clone new individuals with a relatively wide area of genetic variations. There are more than ten thousand in all, about evenly male and female, and no two are exactly alike.”

  Velmeran frowned. “How very convenient for them.”

  Lenna nodded. “To make matters even more interesting, while they might be Mock Starwolves, they are real Kelvessan. They are beginning to successfully reproduce among themselves, and they could just as easily reproduce with other Kelvessan.”

  Velmeran stood for a moment, staring at the diagrams of the Mock Starwolf cruiser. He had to admit that the ship did have its virtues. It possessed all of the advantages of the Starwolf Carriers, in a package more dedicated to the role of fighting ship, patrol cruiser, and scout. Over a third of a Carrier’s interior space was devoted to massive bays and cargo holds. By deleting much of that empty space and by carrying a smaller and
less specialized fleet of support vessels, the cruisers were a third the size of a Carrier, but with engines and generators that were only half as large. In comparative scale, the Cruiser had the potential of being the faster, more maneuverable, and more efficient fighting ship. At least it also possessed the handicap of Union technology.

  But just how much a threat were ten thousand Mock Starwolves in sixteen Cruisers? He had fifty thousand Starwolves or more in twenty-three Carriers. The answer, unfortunately, was hardly that simple. He might have twenty-three superior ships, but they were spread over a vast area of space. If sixteen Cruisers came all at once against a single Carrier, or even two or three, then he did not doubt he would lose ships.

  Life just became much more complicated, and it was up to him to find the best possible answer in a hurry. What were his priorities? Did he call in Starwolf Carriers from their patrols, where they were needed to protect the small, independent worlds from Union expansion, so that they could hunt the false Starwolves in powerful packs? He also needed those Carriers behind him when he returned to Alkayja to force the resignation of the present government and save the Kelvessan from slavery and extermination. And where were those Mock Starwolves right now? Were they coming up behind the Methryn at that very moment?

  “What manner of control is Donalt Trace using against his Starwolves?” he asked after a long moment.

  “The most subtle and cunning,” Lenna answered, her voice hard and angry. “I suppose that he never completely trusted his ability to just order them around like machines, as much as he might have wanted. No, he brought them up with a lifetime of instruction to believe that they are the true Starwolves, created by the noble Union to finally destroy a band of renegade genetic mutants released by a vile, alien enemy during an ancient war. The only way to control Kelvessan, actually. You just encourage them to believe that they are doing the right thing. Like Trace has done, you give them their freedom and then ask them to help you. As a gesture of his supreme and benevolent trust in them, his Mock Starwolves are answerable to no human commanders short of the Defense Council, and no humans ever go on board their ships. Autonomy of this nature does more than anything to encourage them to believe that they are on the side of right.”