Gelrayen nodded. “How does it feel?”
“I have not yet powered up the system, so I have not had a chance to get its feel. I am still worried about resonant scatter, however.”
“We will not know if we actually have to modify the impulse cannons until we can get you out of the bay. Anything else?” “At the moment, no. But I do believe that we should begin closing up the hull immediately. Nothing will be served now by keeping the plates off. Any modifications now will not involve internal components, and it might get me out of here two days early to start closing the hull now.”
“Consult the construction chief and tell him that we both recommend that the closing of the hull should begin immediately,” Gelrayen said, then turned to Captain Tarrel. “Would you like to see your cabin now? You can move yourself aboard while I attend to my ship for a while. The diplomatic guest suite here on the bridge level should be ready for use.”
“Of course, Commander,” Tarrel said. “That is probably the same as the suite I was given while I was aboard the Kerridayen. I do know the way, if you need to get to work.”
As it happened, Commander Gelrayen wanted to get to work on the closing of the Methryn’s hull immediately, and he suspected that the construction chief would not be willing, unless he presented his arguments and pleading in person and possibly brought along Fleet Commander Asandi as well. Captain Tarrel found the guest suite to be in the exact corresponding place it had been aboard the Kerridayen, proof that the Starwolves were fairly satisfied with the thirty-thousand-year-old deck plan of their carriers. Since it was in the collection of corridors immediately behind the bridge, that meant that she could be there in half a minute or less without having to bother with the lift. In fact, her cabin was hardly any farther away than that of the Commander himself.
She did not remember Lt. Commander Pesca until she was on her way back into the station to collect her things. He was unobtrusive enough, since she generally ignored him altogether, but she was still responsible for him and made a point of checking on him two or three times a day to see if he was making a nuisance of himself. The trouble was that she found him dull, inept and given to petty complaints—poor company compared to Starwolves—and she easily could have done without him. For one thing, he was not very likely to accomplish his mission of learning their secret language, all the more so because they probably knew exactly what he was trying to do. But Tarrel had no good excuse for leaving him at the station, and she thought it best to keep him close, where she could watch him.
“Pack your bags, Wally,” she declared, finding him in the common lounge of their suite of apartments when she returned. “We’re moving aboard the Methryn right away.”
“Is the Methryn ready to go out?” he asked, looking surprised and curiously worried about her announcement.
“No, not for another week. But I’ve been invited aboard, and I’m not going to leave you wandering about here on your own.” “But is that a good idea?” he asked, still obviously concerned. “I mean, can’t you do your work better here at the main base?” “No, I can do my work better aboard the Methryn when she goes into Union space,” she said, wondering what was bothering him. “If you don’t want to go back into battle, I can probably make arrangements to have you sent home. But I’m not going to leave you here.”
“No, I should go,” he agreed grudgingly. “You might need me. Besides, I seem to be getting nowhere with their language.” “No, you never will,” she told him. “They keep their secrets better than stones.”
The first crisis had occurred by the time Captain Tarrel returned to the Methryn. Kelvessan were running up and down the docking tube, to the point that she spent half the walk through stepping to one side with her bags. A whole crowd of people was outside in the bay itself in what looked like furious inactivity, as if they very much wanted to do something but had no idea just what. None of that was very promising for the Methryn. Captain Tarrel did not know what the problem could be, but her first guess was that the scanner was somehow involved. She doubted that there was anything that she could do to help, except perhaps by staying out of the way. Her compromise to her own curiosity was to stay in her cabin and make herself at home for a couple of hours, time enough for the Starwolves to get over their initial panic and make some sense of the situation.
When Tarrel did finally present herself on the bridge , the crisis had settled itself to a state of desperate industry, which was probably to say that things were very much back to normal.
The work on the new surveillance console was continuing at an unhurried pace, as if nothing had happened, and that seemed to suggest that the trouble had not occurred here. Commander Gelrayen had left a message for her with Valthyrra, instructing her to join him on the floor of the construction bay.
As soon as she could see the interior of the bay, Tarrel had a much better idea of what was happening. Handling arms mounted on tracks on ceiling and floor had been brought in both above and below the ship to begin the work of fitting the remaining hull plates, suspended by the -deceptively slender arms out of range of the artificial gravity that existed only at floor level. More plates were being held in groups by other handling arms, but the work itself appeared to have been suspended. Commander Gelrayen hurried over to join her before she saw him. He was not in Starwolf Commander’s white, and she could not easily tell him from many of the dozens of other Kelvessans on the bay floor.
“We have a problem,” he told her simply. “We have to send these plates back to the construction facilities. These plates were cast and shaped years ago, but this is the first time that they have ever been brought out into the bay.”
“What is the problem?” Tarrel asked. “Don’t they fit?” “They probably fit perfectly,” he told her. “Unfortunately, they have not yet been prepared for final fitting. Do you not see the difference?”
Tarrel looked closely, but the only thing that she could see was that all of the plates were shiny silver on both sides. “I suppose that the new plates haven’t been painted yet. Can’t you do that after they go on?”
“That is not paint,” Gelrayen said. “The plates are bonded to a thick polymer coating that resists impacts and helps to insulate the hull against power discharge. And considering what we have to fight, we will need that coating. We fuse the sheets into a solid piece once it is on, and we can easily repair ripped and burned sections. But this much work has to be sent back to be done properly, and quickly enough to keep us on schedule.” “Can you still keep your schedule?” Tarrel asked.
He nodded. “Yes, we believe so. We began fitting the plates two days ahead of schedule, and that gives us two extra days to make up for our little mistake.”
The main bay doors began to open, the internal atmosphere held by containment fields, while smaller tenders waited just outside to carry away the hull plates. Considering the size of those plates, most of them almost sixty meters'along each edge, this was the only door through which they would fit. Tarrel looked up to see one of the massive plates pass directly over her head, supported at one corner by a handling arm barely half a meter thick. For all the years that she had lived in space, she still had some problems with artificial-gravity environments.
“We might just as well go back aboard,” Gelrayen commented. “There is nothing we can do to help here, except to get out of the way. Valthyrra will be powering up the scanners as soon as the bridge console is finished, and she told me to expect that within the hour.”
Tarrel was interested to watch the tenders move along the length of the Methryn to collect the unfinished hull plates, but she did not necessarily want to be beneath while the plates were being taken away. They took the lift back up several levels to the observation deck, then crossed the docking tube back into the carrier. Tarrel was compensated for not staying below to watch, since the windows along the length of the tube gave her an excellent view of the tenders operating on their own level. Commander Gelrayen indulged her curiosity a moment, stopping to watch. The
only problem with moving the weightless plates was maneuvering their awkward size through the tight areas between the Methryn and the walls of the bay.
“Will Valthyrra be able to fly this ship?” Tarrel asked. “I would think that she would need some practice to get the feel for anything this large and powerful.”
“She has been practicing,” Gelrayen told her. “She has spent the last week moving the Sharvaen in and out through the entire system by remote. She can establish a multi-channel achronic link with any of the other ships that gives her complete input of data and sensory devices and direct control over the other ship’s major systems. So you might say that she really is getting the feel along with the practical experience.”
“Can these ships actually feel?” Tarrel asked, surprised. “I did not use the word in that sense.”
“Oh yes, they can feel,” he insisted. “They have various motion detectors that allow them to judge degrees of accelerations and changes in direction, and they have stress, compression and torsional sensors throughout their frame and hull. They do not feel actual pain, but they know how different areas of the ship are responding to stress. They have a better feel for flying than any other pilot ever could.”
“So all of the concern was only about her actual battle experience?”
“Unfortunately, she cannot learn that from the other ships. Several of them have down-loaded their own experiences to her, but I am told that it is not quite the same. There are some things you can only learn by doing them yourself, and she can hardly take one of the other carriers into battle.”
The first of the tenders retreated from the construction bay, a plate of armor held in each of its short forward handling arms. Each of those plates was probably four or five times as massive as the little ship that was moving two of them out of the bay, lifting to pass over the top of the carrier’s down-swept wing. A second tender started out from the other side of the ship, something that Tarrel had missed seeing so far.
“Will the Starwolves fight to the death against the Dreadnought?” Tarrel asked abruptly.
“No, we have already decided that,” he admitted. “If we realize that we absolutely cannot destroy it, then we will retreat. Our concern then will be the evacuation of enough of Terran civilization, and our own ships along with this station, to start again. You might think that we are cold, but we must be practical. It is better to save something than lose everything.”
The technicians had just finished closing up the panels on the new surveillance console as they returned to the bridge. Valthyrra rotated her camera pod around to look at them, obviously very pleased with the work. “The impulse scanner is installed and ready for the first level of testing. I want to begin bringing it into the main computer grid.”
Gelrayen nodded. “Start getting comfortable with it, then. Anything else to worry about?”
The camera pod somehow managed to look uncomfortable. “Is there a very good estimate on how long the closing of my hull will take?”
Gelrayen regarded her suspiciously. “Probably a week. Why?”
“The Vardon is coming in a few hours from now, and she needs more that a square kilometer of new upper hull.”
“That makes your poor nose look like a garden plot in comparison,” he commented. “What happened to her?”
“Theralda is reluctant to speak of the matter,” Valthyrra said. “She does relay important information regarding the Dreadnought, although it is all more in the area of bad news for us than good news, although still better for us to know. She says that the Dreadnought is now attacking planets, and that it is faster and more clever than we had first anticipated. She also warns us to use only tight-beam achronic transitions, since she believes now that the Dreadnought has been monitoring our wide-beam communications.”
Gelrayen crossed both sets of his arms. “Wonderful! That monster knows everything we plan, then. It will be waiting for us when we go out now, you realize.”
“We can hope that it has not overheard everything,” Valthyrra suggested. “It is easy enough to miss a sweep transition if you are in the wrong place. Thirty-two percent of all such transitions are missed, especially at longer ranges. I am hot speaking from personal experience, of course.”
“Wait a moment,” Tarrel interrupted. “Are your transitions usually in your own language?”
“Yes, of course,” the ship answered.
“Then the Dreadnought understands your language?”
“I suppose that must follow, certainly. It is not difficult to figure out another language, if you can find someone foolish enough to speak it to you. You might try explaining that to your young companion. ”
Captain Tarrel laughed softly. “He can go talk to the Dreadnought, if he wants. But if he stays here, then we’re all better off for letting him have something harmless to keep him busy.” “The Vardon will be here in perhaps eighteen hours,” Valthyrra continued. “We will learn more about the matter then. She is very reluctant to use the achronic to any extent, and she seems honestly frightened. The scanner is fully integrated and nominally functional in as far as I have been able to test it so far.”
“Very well, then,” Gelrayen agreed. “Prepare the scanner for the second level of testing. Are you going to try rapid sequencing?”
“I thought I might. That is a key element in the grid.”
“Take it easy, then,” he warned, stepping back toward the middle bridge to allow members of the crew to take their stations for testing. Captain Tarrel joined him, and he leaned back against the wall with his arms crossed. “The problem is that all of these tests only tell us if we have installed it in the ship properly. We will not know if it actually works until we can take the Methryn out where she can maneuver.”
“Can you take it out to test it now, before they’re ready to put the hull shields back on?” Tarrel asked.
“I wish we could. Unfortunately, we will not know how well we are actually receiving because the receivers are calibrated to work surrounded by that great mass of metal. Besides, Valthyrra is running the ship off of station power. It would take hours to manually reconnect the power couplings and get her running.” “Oh?” Tarrel was surprised to hear that. “Is there some reason to keep the ship isolated from her own power? You certainly would not go to that much trouble for an ordinary docking.”
“There is no need for her to generate her own power, as little as she can use. I suppose that keeping her in this state saves the time needed to change the couplings to station power if the technicians want to modify her power grid.” He shrugged both sets of arms, a serious expression of his own helplessness to know the true reason. “As far as I know, she never has powered up her own generators.”
“Then how do you know that the power grid works properly. “Gelrayen glanced at her impatiently. “Please, do not complicate my life any more than it already is.”
A noise like distant thunder rolled through the frame of the carrier, a sound that made Tarrel think immediately that the Methryn had just taken a hit or some minor impact. Gelrayen seemed to think the same thing, and they both paused to listen intently. Tarrel realized that such a sound was more ominous here than it would have been on her own battleship, since any impact that would have carried through the bulk of this ship probably indicated a much larger blow than she first estimated. Her first thought was that there had been some accident with the tenders removing those massive hull plates, or even that the Dreadnought was attacking the station. She noticed first that all of the images on the main viewscreen looking forward from the nose of the carrier had gone suddenly black, and that sections of the main consoles were beginning to light up in a way that suggested an emergency.
“What do you have, Val?” Gelrayen asked cautiously.
She brought her camera pod around slowly. “The primary and two secondary impulse cannons in the shock bumper fired. There was no reason; they were not powered up nearly far enough to pulse.”
“Something slipped?”
�
��Nothing on my end,” she insisted. “The power levels should have held the impulse cannons in stand-by condition. I cannot see yet how the fault could have been at my end. The cannons discharged prematurely.”
“No one is blaming you,” Gelrayen told her, since she sounded almost as if she was on the edge of panic. “Forget the cannons for now; we should just consider ourselves lucky that it was only the three forward cannons. Tell me about the condition of the bay.”
“I was not greatly damaged by the concussion itself, and my hull is open closest to the blast,” she reported, calmer. “That suggests to me that the damage is not great. I was hit by a hull plate that got away from a tender during the concussion, but the plate defected off with minimal damage and has drifted away. I cannot say what has happened to the construction crew because I am blind to the front. Station control has called me, but I have not yet been contacted by bay control or the observation deck. Would you like to go outside and check conditions for me? I would appreciate it.”
“Yes, I suppose that I should,” he agreed pensively. “I would not expect any response from the observation deck, since those windows were only twenty meters or so away from the primary impulse cannon. Do what you can.”
Although she had not been specifically invited, Captain Tarrel followed quickly as the Starwolf Commander stalked off toward the lift. Once the doors were closed, Gelrayen looked far more annoyed and concerned that he could have afforded to while his ship could see him. He was being protective of Valthyrra, trying to be attentive and commanding enough to make up for her own deficiencies. That made Tarrel even more concerned about what she had just seen.
“Commander, your ship was rattled,” she told him. “Valthyrra was scared to death, and she nearly froze up.”
Gelrayen frowned fiercely. “She was just concerned that she might have been responsible for damage and injury, all the more so because she knows how important time is right now.”
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