Tactical Error

by Thorarinn Gunnarsson

  Keflyn rushed to Addesin’s side, carefully turning him over. She was surprised enough to find that he was still alive, although she doubted that they could get him to the limited help available on this world in time to save him. She took the precaution of confiscating the gun, not trusting what he might try even yet.

  “Your Feldennye friend will be here with the sky van very soon,” Quendari said, drawing the probe back a short distance. “I was leading him, since he had no way to track your position accurately. He will see your fire.”

  Keflyn shook her head slowly. “It is too late.”

  “Keflyn?”

  Addesin was looking up at her, his pain obvious. She had nothing to spare him even that.

  “It might be ridiculous to ask that you forgive me,” he said. Each breath he drew to speak brought searing pain; she suspected that the sonics must have nearly burned out his heart and lungs. “I got what I had meant for you, but that bolt would have still been in your back if you had not jumped. It took me a long time to talk myself into shooting you. All in all, I still wish that it had been you instead of me.”

  Keflyn drew back in surprise. “You are right. I do not forgive you. But I might yet, if you will just tell me why.”

  “Oh, not my idea,” he insisted, trying to cough and finding even that impossible. “You see, Union Intelligence monitors my ship very closely. They have known what this place really is for a long time now. When the underground came to make arrangements to get you on board my ship, they told me to take you. I never wanted to be a part of that. The Free Traders are supposed to be neutral, and not answerable to the Union. But they have their ways. To assure my loyalty, they keep a third of my crew detained at any time.”

  “Yes, I can understand,” Keflyn assured him.

  “I never wanted to be involved in this,” he repeated bitterly. “First they told me to keep you occupied any way I could, show you anything, just as long as I kept you here. Then new orders came in. There is a fleet of seven Fortresses and some new SuperFortress coming in to destroy the planet. First they said to just abandon you here. Then they said that I have to kill you.”

  “You have been in communication with them?” Keflyn asked.

  “Couriers have been coming and going from the start, slipping into the edge of the system and sending it in their orders in tight-beam transmissions.” He closed his eyes, panting heavily as if to catch his painful breath. “They will be here some time later tomorrow. They say that they will most likely destroy the planet, and they certainly won’t let anyone here live. You can use the Thermopylae to evacuate the colonists.”

  He opened his eyes, looking up at her. “I thought that I could just ride it through, and everything would be fine. I thought that they would never dare to touch a Starwolf, that they would just have me show you a lot of nothing and send you on your way no more enlightened than before. If I had known, I could have done something to frighten you away that first time you came on board my ship. Please forgive me.”

  Keflyn closed her eyes and nodded, knowing that he really never had any choice, that he was just trying to survive a game that he had always known would kill him in the end. “I forgive you.”

  Keflyn sat alone on the bridge of the Valcyr, waiting for the world to end. During the night, Quendari’s scanners had watched while a stingship interceptor had dropped out of starflight just long enough to launch a single missile, and the Thermopylae had ceased to exist in a single, fiery instant. Now there was no possible escape from this world, for either the Feldenneh colonists or even for Keflyn. Derrighan had elected to return to the settlement to warn the Feldenneh colonists, knowing that he probably would not get there in time. Keflyn had given him the hope that the Union might only seek to occupy this world and not destroy it. She had little enough hope for that herself.

  Quendari’s camera pod turned to watch her from time to time, otherwise moving her gaze aimlessly about the bridge. She had spent an eternity in grief and silent brooding, yet she seemed at a loss in the face of the despair of others. Now she began to realize what she had done to herself, and the mistake she had made in the depth of time. She had been very young and inexperienced, confused with thoughts and emotions that had been new to her. She had known grief, but not what to do with it. In her innocence, she had allowed her grief and guilt to become her entire existence, with no idea of how to find an end to her pain.

  Suddenly the pain was nearly gone, and that, too, was something which she did not really understand. Perhaps it was just because she had something new to occupy herself, and no longer relived endlessly in her mind the pain of her loss. Perhaps seeing the loss and despair of another had given her a new perspective. For all that she was hundreds of centuries old, she had still been only a child in many ways, new and inexperienced. And experience was the substance upon which the sentient computer systems of the carriers pieced together bit by bit the fabric of their own minds and hearts. All that she had ever been given the chance to learn was simple love and simple grief, and her world was taking on whole new shades of complexity.

  “You loved him?” Quendari asked at last, a hint of innocent wonder in her voice.

  Keflyn looked up at her in complete surprise. “Jon Addesin? No, not at all. He was a very interesting person in his way, and very different from anyone I had ever known. But there was also a shallowness to him that became tiresome after a time. I pitied him in the end, knowing how he hated the cowardly person they had driven him to become.”

  “Then perhaps you love the Feldennye, Derrighan?”

  Keflyn had to consider that, and nodded. “I suspect that I love him very much. If he had been Kelvessan or if I had been Feldennye, we would have done very well together.”

  “So it is that simple?” Quendari mused. “The one you could love, and you can walk away from that without regret. The other died trying to kill you, and you pity him.”

  “Life is like that,” Keflyn said, looking up at the camera pod hovering only a short distance away. “Things happen. People come and go all the time. I am a fighter pilot, you see. As High Kelvessan, they tell me that I could easily live to be two or even four thousand years old. But because I fly with the packs, I have always had to keep in mind that I could die at any time. I guess that helps to keep the weight of the past in perspective. In some ways, it is not so much what happens to you but what you make of it. It is your decision, whether if something that has happened is unbearable pain that haunts your life, or if something was good and pleasant, or if it really does not mean much at all.”

  “Then what do you feel?” Quendari asked.

  Keflyn sighed, looking away. “I do feel sorry for those poor Feldenneh colonists. Feldenneh are such quiet, polite people, but they always seem to be in need of someone to take care of them. I feel sorry for myself, because I did want to live longer than this. But more than anything, I feel sorry for you. You have lived such a long time, yet you have hardly lived at all. You must hold some sort of record in the history of the universe. You have managed to make an absolute waste of fifty thousand years of life.”

  Quendari looked away, rotating her lenses aimlessly as she realized that Keflyn’s accusation was absolutely true. She had thought herself very busy and very important with her eternal grief. Now it just seemed like the most colossal waste of time in the history of intelligent thought.

  “I suppose that I did,” she agreed. “Instead of degrading my love by continuing with my life, I only cheated myself of whole centuries of life and companionship. Is that so?”

  Keflyn nodded. “Who did you love so much? You plagued me with that question, so now you tell me.”

  “Her,” Quendari answered, lifting her camera pod and rotating around to face the blackness of the main viewscreen. “That was the grandest day of my whole life, when she walked onto my bridge and was so kind. I had only been a dull machine until then, with only technicians for my companions. She woke me up and made me feel like a person. She walked right up to me and
tied that ribbon around my camera pod. She said it made me look pretty.”

  Keflyn remembered the red velvet ribbon that had crumbled to dust the first time that she had stepped onto this bridge. Quendari had cherished it through the centuries, making it into some sacred relic of a lost friend until the weight of time had taken it from her, dried up and rotted with neglect because she had held it too holy to be put away and preserved.

  “There was nothing I could do,” she complained softly, weakly.

  Keflyn nodded slowly, staring at the floor. “It often works that way.”

  After forty thousand years of sleep inside this bed of ice, Quendari suddenly felt that it was time to do something different. Her scanners worked quite well in spite of being buried so deeply within the glacier, and she knew that the fleet of Fortresses had just left starflight and were moving quickly but silently into the system. There was a distinct sense of determination in the way they moved, and Quendari no longer doubted that they had come to destroy this world.

  The banks of silent, lifeless consoles on the Valcyr’s bridge slowly began to come to life. The engineering station came up first, the handful of lights that had been barely visible expanding across its entire bank of monitors and consoles, the single largest station on the bridge. Defense and scanning came fully into the grid, followed by running systems and environmentals. The double navigation stations followed, then the helm console on the central bridge. Even the weapons station came up. Finally the main view-screen was brought up with a snap of static, although the scanner-enhanced image was dark and hazy.

  Keflyn looked up suddenly when Quendari brought the lighting up to the normal level, surprised to see the bridge coming back to life. She stared in complete confusion. Quendari swung her camera pod around, bringing it in closely. “Commander, will you take your station on the upper bridge? I have suddenly found that it is not in my nature to give up without a fight.”

  “But I have no command experience,” Keflyn protested.

  “You have far more battle experience than myself,” Quendari corrected her. “I have never fought. I need your help.”

  “What do you intend to do?” Keflyn asked as she rose and began to climb the steps to the commander’s station uncertainly. “I mean, you can hardly bring your own weapons to bear on the ice to free yourself.”

  “I am better prepared than you might think.”

  As soon as Keflyn had lifted herself into the commander’s station by the overhead supports, Quendari rotated her camera pod around as if to face a bridge crew that was not there. Carefully at first, she began to bring her main generators on line. The large units responded willingly enough, one by one adding their power to the line of indicators at the engineering station. A distant vibration began to stir through the Valcyr’s space frame; that feeling of life that Keflyn had missed in this ship was returning quickly.

  “This could be the end of you,” Keflyn warned when Quendari brought her camera pod into the upper bridge. She still remembered the ribbon that had fallen away in dust.

  “It will be the end of me if I do nothing,” Quendari answered. “This way, at least I tried.”

  She brought up her shields gradually. They strained against the weight of ice, collapsed completely against the hull of the ship, but she continued to add power until the ice began to snap. The surface of the glacier above the Valcyr suddenly lifted in a long, law dome. Quendari relaxed the shields, allowing the ice to settle, and suddenly brought them to battle intensity. The ice was thrown aside, splitting into large fissures, massive blocks of it along the forward edge collapsing to slide off the curve of her exposed hull into the cold lake far below.

  Quendari engaged her field drives, and those systems responded with the same flawless ease. Pushing against the weight of ice still riding on her upper hull, she began to lift herself slowly straight out of her ancient bed. Massive blocks of ice, some dozens of meters across and weighing hundreds of tons, began to fall away in the white fog of crushed powder that cascaded from the wreckage in sheets and streams like waterfalls. Deep black against the white, the Valcyr rose proudly from the clouds of powder, the last small boulders of ice rolling from her hull as she rotated around to the east, the doors in her shock bumper that covered her immense forward lights and high-intensity scanners folding back as she faced into the planetary angle of rotation. Engaging all four of her main drives in a sudden flare of power, the Valcyr began to climb toward the stars.

  “We are free and clear,” Quendari reported. “All systems are operating perfectly. Power at less than five percent, all generators on line. Weapons systems standing by. Present altitude is twenty kilometers at an ambient speed of two thousand.”

  Keflyn stared at her questioningly. “How did you manage?... “

  “I am not in so bad a shape as you seemed to think,” the ship explained. “Although my conscious systems were shut down, my automatic computer systems continued to care for this ship, providing constant maintenance and even fabricating new parts. Constant internal shields have protected my hull and space frame against deterioration and fatigue. My present condition is as good as if I had just completed a major overhull.”

  Keflyn nodded to herself. “How are you doing?”

  “The Valcyr is clear of planetary orbit,” the ship responded. “What recommendation would you make on our present situation?”

  “My inclination is that we should run like hell,” Keflyn said candidly. “I did tell you about Fortresses. You have no shield detonation missiles to strip them of their quartzite shielding. That means that they will have both their hull shielding and their shell, both of which can easily turn a single shot from a conversion cannon. And you will have possibly only one shot from your own cannon, with whatever conversion missiles you might possess. You have no hope.”

  “I see,” Quendari remarked thoughtfully. “My scanners report seven of these Fortresses, in addition to one ship that is even larger. It looks like this.”

  She cleared her main viewscreen, replacing the image with the schematic of a very large ship. Seen in side view, it was obviously a ship of vast proportions, in most ways like the complex matrix of sharp edges and flat hull plates joined by shallow angles of the Fortresses. It appeared at first to be much lower in height than a Fortress, giving it the very long, slender appearance of a stingship. Then she realized that the height of the two ships was about the same, but this ship was nearly twice as long.

  “Typical Union military thought,” she remarked. “When you find a weapon that works, make one twice as big, although I cannot imagine why Trace would bother. It does him no more good to have a larger one, certainly not as much good as two of the regular type would have.”

  “Donalt Trace? He is the one who has been after your father these past few years?” Quendari asked. “What do your carriers do about these ships?”

  “Sequential firing,” Keflyn explained. “Two carriers working together, or one of the new carriers that has two conversion cannons. The battle shells of the Fortresses can take anything you throw at them, but not for long. Operating under a load, they can only endure a matter of seconds before they have to come down. The sustained blast of a sequential firing overloads the shell and allows you to get at the meat. But that only works if you have already stripped them of their quartzite shielding.”

  Quendari considered that for a moment. “So, I have to destroy eight invincible ships with only one shot, when one shot is not enough to destroy even one.”

  “You do not have the power,” Keflyn reminded her. “But is there somewhere you can get it? Or is there some way that we could just render them harmless to the planet?”

  “I think that I just might have a plan,” Quendari said. “But I need for them to follow me. Can we manage that?”

  “We can try,” Keflyn agreed. “Put on your best aggressive stance and move out to meet them. Do something to make yourself inviting. They cannot afford to miss the chance to destroy a carrier.”

  Th
e Valcyr was already clear of the atmosphere by that time, free to pile on speed with complete impunity. She engaged her main drives at full power, fairly leaping out of the gravity well and hurtling into open space. It felt good to be able to stretch herself in this way, a pleasure that she had not enjoyed in a long time. A curious and entirely extravagant portion of her personality programming had been designed to interpret an array of sensory feedbacks, from the stress of acceleration on her space frame to the sudden thrust of power to her engines, as a pleasurable response. Such subtle things were the substance of life, the portion of her own self that she had once forgotten she possessed.

  She circled wide, then hurled herself directly toward the group of Fortresses, accelerating rapidly to near light speed. The Fortresses were moving in a fairly tight formation, so vast in size that the kilometers which separated them seemed tight and confining. They had none of their riders out, not even stingships to scout their path or cruisers running vanguard. Their stance was a singularly aggressive one, suggesting that they were going into battle and would allow nothing to stop them.

  “That Donalt Trace you mentioned,” Quendari said. “He is calling on a visual channel. He says he wants to talk.”

  “Oh?” Keflyn was honestly surprised to hear that name. She suspected there was more about this business than there seemed, to bring him out, even considering how important the battle for the possession or destruction of Terra would be. He had learned to let better warriors do his actual fighting, freeing him to be the strategist. According to her father, he had always been a poor tactician once battle was engaged. “Have you declared your identity to him?”

  “No, no return contact on my part at all.”

  “If you really want him to chase you to the exclusion of all else, then give me a visual link,” she said. “Focus the camera very firmly on me, and make a little bridge noise.”