The Vardon made a very smooth transition back into starflight. A carrier could make an extremely abrupt transition, due partly to its superior drives and acceleration dampers, but mostly because the Starwolves themselves were able to handle harsh accelerations that would have killed anyone else. But a forced transition, engaging the star drives while the ship was still well below light speed, caused a very turbulent dispersion of emissions from the drives that was easy enough to follow. The Vardon did not want to draw a line leading straight to her destination, especially if the Dreadnought would not have been going on to Norden otherwise.
Theralda brought her camera pod into the upper bridge. “I will not say that I like that. The Dreadnought was ahead of us with no more than a five hour lead, possibly less. That means that it is at least as fast as my own best speed, and I was running my drives to within two percent of risking permanent heat damage to the crystals. How can anything that size be able to move so fast? I wonder what manner of drive it uses?”
“Are we away clear?” Schyrran asked.
“I certainly hope so, but it seems a little early to promise anything.” She lowered her camera pod slightly, a gesture of resignation or defeat. “I no longer know what to make of that machine or just what it might be capable of doing. We had assumed that it was slow because of the interval between attacks, but we now have every reason to believe that it loiters in-system after an attack to see what shows up, and that it actually travels at speeds a carrier would find hard to match. And that is probably only its cruising speed. I hesitate to think what it might be capable of doing in a pinch.”
Schyrran nodded. “Do you know of any reason why we cannot relay that information on a tight beam back to Alkayja station immediately?”
“A tight beam should be safe enough.”
“Then Norden is the next step. Get us there as fast as you can, and we should have two or three days from this point to get things ready before the Dreadnought shows itself.”
“I will need sixteen hours at least to reach Norden,” Theralda warned him. ‘‘My drives are hot. I knew that they would be, but I was anticipating a few hours at least in this last system to let them cool. I will have to reduce power by at least thirty percent to keep drive temperatures from going up any more.”
He nodded. “Do the best you can, but do not damage yourself. If you have a drive go down now, you could be out for months. It might seem like a harsh judgement, but a single carrier in good fighting condition is worth more right now than even a major system.”
Theralda did everything she could to keep her drives running at the best possible speed, keeping the phase rate for each of her two star drives calibrated for the greatest efficiency. She even tried shifting the frequency of her emissions in the attempt to convert some of that heat into a tremendous flare of visible light. In the end, she was finally forced to reduce her speed and keep it down, the one thing that she had not wanted to do. All such judgments were relative to the situation. Ordinarily, she would have considered her present speed to be fairly high, within her upper recommended limits. Now she felt that she was moving at barely a crawl.
More than anything, Theralda was feeling very helpless, and that was an unfamiliar experience for her. She was three kilometers of fighting machine and perfectly able to care for herself even without crew. Her speed was second only to that of her own fighters, and she had the power to destroy worlds. Now a thing that she could not even see was so much bigger, faster and stronger than herself that she could not hope to fight it. She hated to admit even to herself that she was doing nothing more now than making a constructive retreat, desperately struggling to stay ahead of a machine that would probably destroy her if it found her. The Union had come to the Starwolves, even proposed a truce that they would have never accepted otherwise, and the only thing she could do to protect them was to warn them to get out of the way of the engine of destruction following her. It was a lesson in humility. And frustration.
She entered the Norden system cautiously, not knowing what to expect, and so she ran with her shields at stealth intensity and her drives idle to reduce betraying emissions. Having made the run at much lower speed than she would have preferred, she almost expected to find that the Dreadnought had jumped ahead of her and was already attacking the system, or perhaps hiding silent and unseen to ambush her. Her first tentative scanner reports showed that the system was a scene of frantic activity, with hundreds of ships in flight at once, all seeming to be headed in different directions. But she could see no evidence of an attack. She opened a channel to the station. The response she received was unexpected.
“Attention Starwolf carrier. ’* The message was over one of the achronic bands normally reserved by the ships for communication between themselves. “Attention Starwolf carrier. This is the carrier Maeridan.”
“Khallenda?” Theralda asked in response, obviously mystified. “How did you know I was here?”
“Your drives are hot,” the other ship explained. “You might just as well forget stealth for now, since you are leaving the widest trail of secondary emissions I have ever seen. Do you never look behind you?”
“More and more, these days,” Theralda said. “So, when did you come into system?”
“Just a few hours ago. I caught the edge of your message and came running as fast as I could. The Karvand might be along in the next few hours. Are we going to have that much time?”
“I wish that I knew,” Theralda replied, then hesitated. “Could you excuse me for a moment. The System Commander is answering my call. Better yet, you should join us. Then I will only have to explain all of this once.”
“Would you find me a bother?”
“Oh no, not at all. I would consider it a pleasure.” She shifted her achronic channel to the Union’s short-range beams, remembering to speak the Terran language. “Commander? This is Theralda Vardon.”
“Yes, this is System Commander Carrel,” a man with a deep voice responded. “Do you have additional information on this Dreadnought? Is it really on the way here?”
“Yes, I left the Dreadnought eating a small system only sixteen hours ago. It might not be here for days yet. It might be right behind me. Or it might already be here, for all I know,” Theralda explained. “Things have turned out rather differently than we first expected. The Dreadnought is a much more sophisticated machine than we first anticipated, and it has now changed its tactics by attacking not only stations and traffic but major installations on the planet itself. I have also found evidence that it lingers hidden in system for some time after the first attack to ambush ships that might be coming to investigate. My belief is that it is now trying to destroy all the Starwolf carriers it can find.”
“What can we do?” Carrel asked, seemingly too surprised or appalled by what he had just heard to make sense of it.
“You can hardly evacuate the planet, but there is really no need. The Dreadnought has so far only attacked a relatively few planet-side targets. If you close down all major power sources and evacuate the large factories and all military bases, you should be all right. But it does seem to have a priority about military targets.”
“I understand. I will have all planet-side factories and military bases cleared immediately, although I want to continue a cautions evacuation of some important materials.”
“What have you been doing about the stations?” Theralda asked.
“The stations are being broken up into large components,” Khallenda Maeridan reported. “Battleships are being locked into the hulls of the components of the military station and linked by computer to carry those segments away. I am carrying away the segments of the commercial station by locking them down to my upper and lower hulls.”
“Is that a fact?” Theralda asked. “How is that working out?” “Fairly well, actually. I have just returned from my fourth run. If you help me, we could have this entire system carted away in only three more runs each.”
“Where are you hauling away your spoils?
”
“There is a system with no inhabitable planet only two light years over where we have been unloading the components. I was able to transport a full load in little more than an hour, most of that acceleration and deceleration time. With any luck, the Dreadnought will never think to look for it there.”
“That monster is damned clever.” Theralda mused upon that for a moment. “We can put the station components there, but all the evacuated ships have to go somewhere else. If we leave a major emission trail all going to the same place, which is exactly what you will get from large numbers of Union drives, the Dreadnought is probably clever enough to wonder where everyone was going and if they could be caught.”
“Then you will help us move our stations?” Carrel asked eagerly.
“Unfortunately, being your beast of burden is probably the most help that I have to offer,” Theralda said, amused to think that they were chatting up like old friends, devoted allies that had recently been bitter enemies. She found it curiously easy to be sympathetic toward the Union; a very long lifetime of familiarity had led her to pity them.
She had kept the communication open, for the bridge crew to hear. Commander Schyrran was seated at his station on the upper bridge, looking very pensive. He glanced up at her as she brought her camera pod into the upper bridge. “What about your star drives? You will probably be moving your own weight again in station components. Can you manage that?”
“Yes, that should be no problem,” she insisted. “For a two light-year jump, I hardly have the need to push that load to any real speed as long as I can get it moving. My drives are not damaged, and I have all the time they will take to strap down those components for them to cool. Moving that load the final fifteen percent or so up to transition will be the hardest part.”
The Vardon settled herself into orbit quickly, then opened her transport bays and sent her own capture ships to manage the actual placement of the station components against her hull. Following the Maeridan’s orders, the station personnel had divided the stations into sections of fairly precise length so that three long rectangular sections could be carried both above and below the long axis of the hull, while wider sections were fitted above and below the carrier’s wings. The capture ships were narrow-waisted transports. With three pairs of long handling arms mounted to that long middle section, and powerful engines to move heavy loads; these agile little ships and their experienced pilots were perfectly suited to this task.
Under the expert guidance of their own capture crews, both the Vardon and the Maeridan were loaded for flight within an hour and a half. The crews of the capture ships were used to having to shift salvage quickly after a major battle, settling abandoned and disabled Union ships in the massive holding bays of the carriers. The station components were larger, but there were only ten of them to be settled against the flat outer hulls of the carriers. Large inflated shock cushions, that had already been fitted to the components, kept them from direct contact with the hull itself, and heavy straps of braided metal bands were used to tie them tightly to the ship. Having equal numbers and sizes of components above and below kept the carrier in reasonable balance while she struggled to carry her own weight in cargo.
The two Starwolf carriers moved out in nearly opposite directions, laying trails from their taxed engines toward false destinations with the intention of joining up later. The Vardon’s star drives had cooled considerably in the time needed to load her for the flight, and now it was her main drives, hidden under her wings, that had to do the hard work of getting some thirty million tons of carrier and payload up to transition. She was easing her way as much as possible with her damping field, which converted the energy of acceleration that would have otherwise arrested her speed into additional acceleration. No ship would have flown much past half of light speed without energy dampers. They were as essential as the drives themselves. But dampers could only do so much. Even if she could remove all the energy of acceleration, Theralda still had to set that bulk into motion.
Carriers were built for abuse, and this did not stress their limits except in trying to meet the demands of time. Even the amount of dead weight they carried was not a danger to their frames. Integrity fields, like the shields that protected the ship from the outside, where projected through the frame itself, giving the carrier the strength to survive tremendous forces of compression and torsion. Theralda took twenty-two minutes to get herself up to transition, twice as long as what she would have normally considered a gentle run. Once in starflight, she was surprised to find that she did not feel the extra mass at ail.
The Vardon arrived in the uninhabited system less than half an hour later, finding the Maeridan there only a minute ahead of her. The segments of the station that had already been brought through had been left in orbit over a rather dark, cold planet fourth out in the system, and the two carriers left the components they carried to be tied together with this first group. The unloading of the components took considerably less time than the more careful process of strapping them down to the hulls of the large ships, and the two carriers were on their way back to Norden in only about twenty minutes.
The complete transport of the commercial stations could be accomplished in two more runs only by having both of the carriers strap one segment more than they had hauled previously, braced by the components strapped onto the upper and lower hulls, actually across the nose of the ship. Neither of the two carriers were fond of that arrangement, since it completely blocked their forward batteries and left them essentially defenseless. The fact that they were already defenseless against attack from the Dreadnought was their only consolation, if it could be called that. It seemed better than making another trip, considering the time involved and the emission trails that they would be leaving.
While they were being fitted with their final load, they were able to witness the departure of the military station. Being a more solid and less sprawling structure, it could be transported intact by having battleships attach themselves to key points on the station’s frame. These ships were then linked by computer, until they became in essence only the engines for a far larger ship made up by the station itself. The result worked, but it was not very fast, needing eight hours or more to get itself to transition speed. It would not be going into safe-keeping in the same system as the commercial stations, since spreading things about decreased the likelihood of any of them being found.
Because she had been delayed several minutes in getting away, the Vardon had to attend to the duty of making their farewells to the System Commander. “We will not be coming back, I am afraid. There is nothing we can do to help you now. We can do the entire Union more good by keeping ourselves intact and ready to fight when the time comes that we can do something about this Dreadnought.”
“Yes, we understand that,” Carrel agreed. “You have already saved our stations. No matter what the Dreadnought does to the planet, we can rebuild much quicker if we have access to those stations. But I think that we will not bring them back here until the Dreadnought has been destroyed.”
“Perhaps that will be very soon now.”
Theralda made her final run, feeling oddly alone and vulnerable now that the Maeridan was nearly ten minutes ahead of her. That was also a very new experience for her, and she thought that life would be much better when there were no more great, mysterious Dreadnoughts around to frighten honest, hard-work-ing carriers. She eased herself down from transition speeds, grateful to be free of this duty. Her capture ships had been unable to return to their bays and had flown alongside her, and they now flew on ahead to assist in the unloading of the Maeridan.
“Is that how I looked?” Khallenda asked as the Vardon came nearer. “How are the humans taking it?”
“Stoically,” Theralda said. “They just seem to be grateful to have had some warning. And they are very understanding about the fact that we are unable to stay around to try to protect them. I would have never thought that Unioners still possessed any nobler qualities. That
makes it harder for me simply to run away and leave them.”
“They were somewhat less understanding when I first arrived,” the other ship remarked. “And I cannot forget all the times that I have seen them do to others what the Dreadnought is doing to them. A little shaking up might just do them some good.”
“Perhaps . . . ,” Theralda paused. “I just recorded a scanner contact.”
“Are you sure?”
“I have been through this before. Blow yourself out of there.” She turned her attention back to herself, putting her crew on alert at the same time that she brought herself around, away from the direction of that scan. “Commander, we might be doomed. I cannot dump this load. There is simply no way for me to cast lose the straps that are holding down those station components.” “What about the capture ships?” Schyrran asked.
“My capture ships are already on their way back, and the Maeridan is sending me her own since she is already unloaded. It all depends upon how much time we have.”
Schyrran sat back in his head, both sets of his arms crossed. “That thing is a damned nuisance. How did it find us?”
“I suppose that it came into the Norden system, saw what we were doing, and followed me here during our last run. We did not have stealth engaged, so it probably executed an impulse scanner sweep just to be certain that we were alone here.”
The attack came only a moment later. But the Dreadnought seem focused only on the orbiting station segments, blissfully ignoring the Maeridan as she made a very hasty escape out of orbit, letting the one moving target get away while it concentrated on targets that would be going nowhere. There were still times when the Dreadnought behaved like a very stupid machine, and times when it was only too clever. For the moment, it was content to chew away at the tight group of station components drifting in orbit.
Theralda was straining her main drives to work her way back up to light speed and the safety of transition into starflight. She had already dumped nearly half of her speed, and she would need at least six minutes altogether to work her way back up. Barely a couple of minutes had passed before the attack on the station components had ended, and she knew only too well that she was the next tempting target. She was still bearing her full load of components, and that meant that she could not even use her own main weapons. The capture ships had not yet overtaken her, and the Maeridan was far away. She was beginning to wonder what would happen to her if she engaged her star drives early. Ordinarily that would have been no problem to either ship or crew, but those segments might break loose and take large pieces of her hull with them.
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