“Trouble has been here,” she explained. “There is no station in this system, just orbiting debris. Emission patterns indicate many destroyed ships concentrated in one area only a short distance out from the inhabited planet, so the system fleet must have put up a fight to buy time. I cannot yet say whether or not the Dreadnought has had time to move on. That will depend mostly upon the length of time since this attack, and it has not been very long.”
“Recommendations?” Schyrran asked. Since this affair had begun, he had been depending far more upon her centuries of experience. Of course, their command of the ship was a joint one.
“I say that we should go straight in,” she said without hesitation. “I must know how long it has been since the attack, and if the Dreadnought is still here. That will tell me whether or not I might be able to beat that beast to its next destination.”
“Do you know where it is likely to go next?”
“I have reason to be very certain,” Theralda said. “A likely target system is only eleven light years from here. The next closest targets are at least three times as far. I am sending my first achronic message out to the other carriers now.”
A long moment passed as they waited for the Vardon to enter the system. Theralda brought her camera pod around sharply. “Commander, we have the first variation in the Dreadnought’s pattern of attack. Locations on the surface have been hit as well.”
“The poor devils would have never expected that,” Schyrran commented. “What did it hit? Was there anything on that planet that would have attracted special attention?”
“Nothing that it has not seen before,” the ship answered. “Comparing the locations of attacks with my maps of this planet—which is sometimes all I have left for identification— there is a pattern of high-energy installations that have been destroyed. Three planet-side military bases are gone, and almost two hundred manufacturing, mining and power-production facilities have been hit as well.”
Commander Schyrran glance up at the viewscreen as the Vardon dropped out of starflight and began braking sharply. They had come in relatively close, although the planet was still too far a way to be seen. “Then the Dreadnought has changed its tactics to wreck the planet as well as system traffic?”
“No, I would not say that it has wrecked this planet,” Theralda insisted, “Two hundred or so major targets might seem like quite a lot, especially for a lightly populated colony. But out of the whole, that amount of damage is more like a threat or warning. What it all suggests to me, unfortunately, is that the Dreadnought is capable of a great deal more planned thought and subtlety than we first anticipated. Even so, I am not yet convinced that it is fully sentient.”
“Sentience is not an indication of a machine’s ability to plan its own strategies, even fairly complex ones,” Schyrran pointed out. “A machine that is not self-aware can still be very dangerous.”
“That is true enough,” the ship agreed. “Even so, I still believe that self-awareness and even some emotional responses are necessary for a machine to be truly devious. That might be our advantage.”
“If so, that machine must be programmed for deviousness,” he said. “I do not know what else to say about a ship that develops one impression of its abilities and tactics and then abruptly changes. That is devious.”
The Vardon had cut her speed considerably and was now making her final approach to the planet. At this range, she was finally able to make a detailed scan of the planet itself and the general area of attack. Now that she was able to get better information on some of the more subtle details, she began to realize that matters here were rather more complex than she had first anticipated. That also taught her a lesson on being more cautious, and she began to devote more of her attention to space about her, especially behind. That was no reassurance. If the Dreadnought was still lurking, she would not know until she was attacked.
Wondering what she could do to guard herself better, she recalled what she had seen in the reports on the attacks on the Carthaginian and the Kerridayen. She checked her files for the recognition code that the Kerridayen had used to hail the Dreadnought, modified that slightly and broadcast it in the achronic bands. When she received no response, she felt somewhat better about the situation. But not entirely.
“Commander, I have recognized a second change in the attack patterns of the Dreadnought,” she said. “Emissions and dispersal patterns indicate two separate attacks, over a full day apart. The main attack, the destruction of the station and most of the ships, occurred first. A second, smaller group of ships was destroyed some time later. I cannot say when the attacks on the surface took place, since dispersion patterns in atmospheric conditions are too irregular to predict. Because very few fires are still burning in the debris, I would predict that most if not all of the surface strikes took place during the initial attack.”
“What would you make of that?” Schyrran asked.
She brought her camera pod back around. “Subtlety. I would say that the Dreadnought withdrew after the first attack, hid itself, and waited for more ships to come blundering into the system. It might still be lurking about, for that matter. The last attack was only a few hours ago. Because those emissions are fresh, I mistook them at first as the time frame for one single attack.”
He looked up at her camera pod. “What is it thinking? If you were the Dreadnought, what would be your priorities?” Theralda considered that briefly. “I have seen and fought a Starwolf carrier. I would consider the Starwolves to be the only real threat facing me in the performance of my mission, as far as they have been a threat. I might or might not be aware of how many carriers there actually are, but one of my greatest priorities would be the destruction of those ships. And I have only just realized where we might have been making a very serious mistake.”
“What is that?”
“We have been treating the achronic channels as being entirely our own property, simply because it has been so for so long,” she explained. “And we have been exchanging large amounts of information by achronic means, quite literally everything we know and plan to do. If the Dreadnought has been receiving and translating those messages, then it knows more about us than we would like. It will know our exact number, our general locations at any time, and all of our various facts and speculations about it, our enemy. It will even know that the Methryn is being fitted with a new scanner. And when she comes out to find it, then it will know that as well.”
Schyrran crossed both sets of his arms on his chest, looking displeased about the situation. “Continue your reports as usual, but compose a message about your suspicions and send it on a very tight beam to Alkayja station. If that thing is listening to us, then we might be able to mislead it with false information.”
During that time, the Vardon had braked to an orbital speed some distance out from the planet. She began broadcasting in the common Union commercial and military bands in the hope that someone on the planet could supply her with a more accurate timetable on the attacks. She was soon given to wonder if the Dreadnought’s double attack had spooked the locals into being too terrified of their communicators to respond, for fear that the transmissions might draw the monster back. She might have spooked them herself; she had already met some resistance to accepting the idea that Starwolves were no longer enemies but allies. But she had not recorded a single scanner beam on her way into the system. As long as she used the Terran language and did not identify herself, they had no way of knowing who she was.
“Military shuttle AK-2110 D reporting,” a reply came at last.
“Report your position, shuttle,” she ordered sharply, encouraging them to believe that she was herself a Union military ship.
“We were evacuating from the station, and we were coming down to Forestan Base. When we saw that the base was under attack, then we decided to settle down into the mountains and wait.”
“Then there was time to evacuate the station?” she asked.
“Hardly. I know of only two more s
huttles that got away. There were pods all over the place. But there was a large munitions store at the station, and that went early on. I think the explosion took out most of the pods before they could get clear.”
“But there was a second attack?” Theralda asked. She was certain of that, but she wondered if they knew.
“Yes, a small military convoy came in about five hours ago. They called down, just like you did, and the Dreadnought attacked while we were talking to them. Are your sure it’s gone now?”
“It seems to be, and I have even hailed it,” she responded. “You say that the last attack was about five hours ago?”
“Yes.”
“Then listen to me. You can begin spreading the word that the Dreadnought seems to be gone, and it is unlikely to attack the planet itself again anyway. Try to get things up and running again as soon as possible. I would like to stay and help you, bill I must try to race the Dreadnought to the next system likely to come under attack and order an evacuation.”
“You can’t out-run that thing.”
“I am the Starwolf Carrier Vardon,” she said.
“Oh.” That was followed by a very long pause that Theralda found vaguely amusing. “Then they will probably accept your word that everything is safe enough now.”
“If you cannot trust a Starwolf, who can you trust?” she asked, knowing that it was unkind of her to tease humans in distress. “I am leaving orbit presently. Your own fleet should be here within a couple of days.”
Theralda shifted her attention back to her own bridge. Commander Schyrran had stepped down from his station and was comparing notes with the navigator and the first officer at the navigational station. They all looked up at her camera pod as the Vardon engaged her main drives and began to move swiftly out of orbit. She brought her pod closer.
“It has been about five hours since the last attack,” she announced. “My own suspicion is that the Dreadnought left this system to proceed to its next target immediately after that. It had been waiting for Starwolves, and they did not come.”
“You said that you know where it is going,” Schyrran reminded her.
“I believe that I do,” she said. “And if it continues on for a third attack in this group, then it will hit Norden within a week at most.”
That was very bad news. While Norden was not a Sector Capital, it was still one of the most important and populous worlds in this Sector, a crossroad of trade as well as a center of high-tech industry. If the Dreadnought did hit there, this Sector would lose two major commercial spaceports, and orbital manufacturing complexes in addition to a large military station. And if the attack was not anticipated, the losses would likely include not only the system fleet but a very large portion of the Sector Fleet as well, as many as twelve hundred heavier ships, and perhaps another two thousand commercial vessels caught at the stations. A major shipyard would be gone as well, and that loss would effect this Sector’s ability to recover quickly from its damages.
“Will you call ahead for support?” Schyrran asked.
“I will, but I doubt that any other carrier will get there sooner than myself,” she said. “Perhaps the damage might be less if I did not, but I still must proceed to the second system in this sequence and warn them that the Dreadnought is probably on its way. There is nothing I can help them to do otherwise.”
He nodded his agreement. “But what about Norden? Are you thinking about trying to fight?”
“No, I cannot fight the Dreadnought,” she admitted reluctantly. “Just the same, it very much goes against my nature to run away and allow that machine to have its way in a major system. That used to be my job.”
Several hours later, and with her star drives coming dangerously close to overheating, the Vardon arrived at her next destination. She was unable to know the speed of the Dreadnought, but with every previous indication being that it moved fairly slowly, she should have expected to arrive well in advance of the mysterious ship. But since she now had some reason to believe that the Dreadnought spent some time after its initial attack loitering about, waiting for more prey to appear, that implied that the Dreadnought might be capable of moving very quickly between systems. Knowing the time of its last attack, she wanted very much to learn when it had actually arrived in the next system.
She would not, however, be able to wait around to find out. This next system was a relatively unimportant one, the local station and traffic load smaller even than what it had been in the system she had just left. She felt obliged to deliver her warning and press on to Norden, where the danger was far greater, and every hour that she saved in getting there would allow the locals to salvage that much more. They should at least be able to get their ships to safety. Given enough time, they might even be able to dismember and tow away the stations, which lacked the ability to move under their own power and were too sprawling to tow intact. The problem, of course, was that in a system of that size, traffic that could not be warned away in advance was going to be coming in constantly, and the Dreadnought was going to snap those up even if it could not find anything else. And whether or not it would again attack surface installations, and how much damage it might do, might depend upon getting the major power sources shut down in time.
And of course, it might also depend on whether the locals were willing to listen to the advice of Starwolves. Commander Schyrran persisted in pointing out that pessimistic view, and Theralda could not deny that he might be correct. As far as either the Starwolves or their ships could determine, humans were largely motivated by greed, and could take some enormously ill-founded risks by weighing profit against danger as if the comparison was valid. The promise of profit did not reduce a risk, but humans could not always be convinced of that. If the local officials were unwilling to close to commercial traffic, much less haul away their stations, because of the threat of lost revenue, then they would find endless, and to them very valid reasons to question Theralda’s judgement that the Dreadnought was coming their way.
Frankly, the Starwolves themselves could not care less. They would fight to the death to protect the innocent, but they were not in the business of protecting people from their own stupidity. They were, of course, such clever people by genetic design that they did not really understand stupidity. The Kelvessan were generally great magnets for information, with a thought process that was largely comparative. They had their own form of stupidity, usually reserved for when they missed some important detail, and then their mistakes tended to be both monumental and memorable.
Theralda Vardon went into that first system aware that she could find trouble but not really expecting it, and trouble was exactly what she found. She could not see the Dreadnought directly, but the fact that the planet itself was under attack and the station was already gone argued that it was there. She cut the very low-intensity scans that she had been using and was grateful for having been warned to maintain her shields at stealth intensity. There was nothing she could do here, so she kept her engines idle and settled into a long, gentle loop that would take her back out of the system fairly quickly, setting her course for her next destination. She did not dare to engage her star drives until she was well out of the area.
“Trouble again,” she warned the bridge crew. “Our belligerent friend is already here.”
Commander Schyrran looked up from his monitors. “Running the ship in a permanent class two battle alert certainly is convenient. It saves having to wait for the crew to prepare itself. I suppose that there is nothing we can do here. At least now that we know we are ahead of the Dreadnought, I suppose that we should just keep going.”
“Yes, that was my thought,” the ship agreed. “I am already bringing us around on the best course for Norden. And I do not even want to know what the Dreadnought is doing to that poor planet. This can all be very hard on a ship like myself, you know. I am used to being able to stomp anything I wish.”
Theralda had no reason to expect that anything should be that easy, and she was right. The Dreadnou
ght betrayed itself directly by suddenly sweeping all space around it with a powerful scan. Theralda had already wondered if its reason for loitering in that first system was to catch any Starwolves that might come along on a regular patrol, and it knew also from its fight with the Kerridayen that the carriers could cloak themselves with stealth-intensity shields. When that impulse sweep came around and registered on her passive scanners, she knew that it was looking for her. And if the Dreadnought was looking for Starwolves, there was certainly no difficulty in guessing why it wanted them.
The Vardon responded in about the only way she could, engaging her main drives to take her speed back up to a point where she could make a smooth, quiet transition into starflight. Her actual distance from the Dreadnought was over two light hours, since she had not penetrated very deeply into the system and was now looping around to head back out. Theralda assumed, or at least hoped, that she was out of the Dreadnought’s effective range. Achronic-based weaponry could be fired across light-years without serious loss of power or definition; the problem was finding the target precisely after the first few hundred thousand kilometers. Given enough distance, a variation of even a millionth of a degree became a significant miss.
“Impulse scan contact,” Theralda warned, although the members of the bridge crew had already noted her acceleration. “A second contact followed the first by several seconds, so I have to assume that I have been seen. The attack on the planet ceased at that same moment.”
“Is it following us?” Commander Schyrran asked as he returned to the Commander’s station on the upper bridge.
“I have no way of knowing,” she admitted. “If it is, the best evidence will come when it begins shooting at us.”
“You have us accelerating back to starflight?”. Schyrran assumed. “Take us through quickly, but try to be discreet about our course. Head somewhat away and then change course fiVe minutes into starflight.”
“Moving into starflight now.”
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