“Be sure to start with the big ones. I need all the power I can get.”
“What about the Dreadnought?” Gelrayen asked.
“At least it stopped for a moment to take an accounting of itself,” the ship replied. “I did buy us a little time there. It would have been on top of us already otherwise.”
“Just what did you do to it, anyway?”
“I had the drone ram it,” Valthyrra explained, then turned her camera pod toward the aft image on the main viewscreen. “Another sweep. One last look around for hidden dangers, and here it comes.”
“Valthyrra, you should be getting power now,” Gheldyn told her.
“Yes, the first conversion generator is coming up. And here comes the second.”
Before Valthyrra could do anything with that power, the first discharge beam hit her from behind, connecting squarely on the back of her twin star drives. Unfortunately, she did not have either defensive shields or even her hull integrity shields in place to make some attempt to deal with that wash of tremendous energy; her only protection was the fact that the armored drive doors had been closed. Actual physical damage was limited to simple scoring and burning of the metal. The danger to the Methryn was that the discharge itself was running through her frame and power systems in the form of searing bolts of electrical energy. She brought up her integrity shields first, getting that discharge under control, then engaged her defensive shields at stealth intensity as she accelerated quickly into an evasive path.
“How are we doing?” Gelrayen asked, glancing quickly in Captain Tarrel’s direction. A twenty-two G acceleration had put her out again.
“I, at least, am not doing well,” Valthyrra reported. “Both of my star drives are down. The damage is entirely limited to the power conduits and the main phasing control, but it is nothing that can be repaired quickly and I cannot compensate with redundant systems. My rear battery is down and I have lost almost all ability to scan behind.”
“Can we stay ahead of the Dreadnought long enough for it to lose interest in chasing us?” he asked.
She brought her camera pod closer. “I cannot out-run the Dreadnought in sublight speeds. Indeed, I can only assume that it will lose interest if I can achieve starflight. Commander, I want to try one last stupid idea. It will probably put me down entirely, but it might save this ship and my crew.”
Gelrayen frowned. “I already do not like it.”
“How do you suppose I feel about it?” Valthyrra asked. “I have already overridden the safety lock-outs and I am going to take myself into starflight with my main drives. We do not need to go far. But if I can just get myself past threshold, the Dreadnought will probably break off.”
“We have no choice, do we?”
The lock-out devices that Valthyrra had removed were those intended to prevent feeding too much power to the main drives and burning them out. She knew that she would be damaging herself by this. The drives themselves would probably survive the punishment as long as she did not hold them at this level more than a few minutes; the worst damage would occur after, while they were cooling down. As long as she still had at least one functional drive on each side of the ship, she would still have enough thrust balance to maneuver. But she would never pass threshold if she lost a drive now. The ship began to shake and buck from uneven phasing.
“Coming up on threshold,” Valthyrra reported. “That will be the hardest. Once in starflight, things will smooth out.”
“How are your drives?” Gelrayen asked.
“Doing well. It seems that the Dreadnought cannot target those discharge beams effectively at higher speeds. I have not taken a serious hit since that first time.” She paused. “Ready for transition into starflight. Hold on to something solid, Commander, and kiss Captain Tarrel good-bye. This might be very rough.”
After all of that, her actual transition was not nearly as violent as she had anticipated. The carrier lunged sharply forward for several seconds as it was being pulled, then settled out into fairly smooth starflight.
“We have made it,” Valthyrra reported. “The ship is maintaining extremely low starflight speeds. I will try to hold this for another five minutes and then bring us down. Unfortunately, we might not be underway again any time soon, at least not under our own power.”
“Well, we did survive and even came away knowing more than we did when we started,” Gelrayen said. “I hope that it is worth it.”
“I suppose that it was,” the ship agreed dubiously. “I still wonder about just one thing. Whose stupid idea was all this anyway?”
-9-
When Captain Janus Tarrel first became aware of the fact that she was still alive, she was forced to approach that discovery with a certain ambivalence. One of the objects of the previous exercise had been to survive, so it had been successful in that regard. At the same time, she wondered how anyone who hurt as much as she did could have lived through it. High G accelerations were an enormously successful form of torture.
She tried to open her eyes and made two important discoveries. The first was the fact that her eyes were curiously unwilling to open. And even when she was able to open them, she was unable to see anything and was given to wonder if they had survived the ordeal. The eyes were very vulnerable to hard accelerations, second only to bad hearts and full bladders, and her own eyes certainly hurt enough. Then she discovered by touch that there were some type of medicated pads over them. She was relieved to discover that she really was not blind, although it did mean that she would have to earn her pension the hard way. No early retirement with benefits for her.
“The medic gave you something for the pain,” a female Starwolf told her.
“It didn’t work,” she insisted. “Who is there?”
“Kayendel. The medicated pads are to keep you from getting black eyes. You have only been out for about half an hour, and the medic said that you can take off the pads when you come around.”
“I don’t want to look. ” Tarrel removed the pads, then discovered that she was doomed to spend the next few moments contemplating a very blurry view of the ceiling. “It was a stupid idea, anyway.”
“What?”
“Coming aboard this ship,” she explained. “Starwolves were specifically made to function under conditions that are deadly to creatures like myself. That should have been a strong warning to me about the advisability of trying to exist in your environment. Who took off my clothes, by the way?”
“Oh, we drew lots for that.”
Ask a stupid question, get no satisfaction. “What are you doing nursing the invalid anyway? Don’t you have duties to attend to?”
Kayendel shrugged both sets of arms. “What good is a helm officer in a ship that has no functional drives? We lost both of the star drives to the Dreadnought there near the end, and Valthyrra was able to get us away into starflight with the main drives. Were you still with us up to that point?”
“That was when I decided to take a nap.”
“There is not much else to tell. Valthyrra knew that she might ruin her main drives by running them past their tolerances, and she was correct. We lost three drives to burn-out. The fourth is damaged, and that drive is on the outside. If we try to engage that one, the ship would be pushed so hard on that one side that the field drive steering would not be able to correct the uneven balance. So you see, Valthyrra actually came through this worse off than you did.”
“Serves her right. So, what happens now? Is there any hope of getting the ship repaired enough to take her home again under her own power, or are we waiting for a tow?”
“Well, we do have some hope of getting the star drives running again,” Kayendel explained. “The Maeridan is standing alongside and we have her repair crews on board. They expect to know something very quickly. Unfortunately, pulling off and replacing those damaged main drives will take a couple of days. ” Tarrel glanced over at the Kelvessan. “You have replacements?”
“Of course. There are four perfectly good main drives
facing forward to provide braking thrust, the exact same size and power as the drives we lost. We can take the two inner drives from the front and mount them in place of the outer drives aft. Any two drives can move this carrier perfectly well, even if it takes a little longer to build to speed.”
“I really don’t want to go fast for a while,” Tarrel commented. “What about Wally?”
“He came around a few minutes ago, in an enormously bad mood. He refuses to talk to anyone. At least we had already given him a room of his own.”
Kayendel shortly had to return to her duties, since she was the second in command of this ship. Captain Tarrel got herself up and dressed very soon after that. The normal environment of the ship was just a little too cold for her, after the Starwolves had taken her out of her armor. And she felt responsible for Lt. Commander Pesca, although that responsibility was mostly directed toward keeping him from being a bother to the Starwolves. But she wanted to check his condition for herself, since she did not trust the Kelvessan to completely understand just how serious his problems might become. Unfortunately, he was already gone by the time she was dressed, and she did not find him in his cabin when she looked there.
After that, she got distracted by the efforts to get the Methryn back in flight condition. She knew from one of her previous tours of the carrier that she could see all of the holding and transport bays and much of the forward main drives from the observation decks above either of the fighter bays, which extended below the lower hull of the ship. As it happened, she was treated to a far more spectacular sight than she had anticipated. The Maeridan drifted belly-up only two hundred meters directly below the Methryn; considering the relative size of the carriers, they appeared to be very close indeed. The armor had already been pulled off the Methryn’s two forward drives that were to be removed, although the actual process of physically removing the first drive appeared to be some time off yet.
Since nothing was actually happening on the outside, even a really great view became rather boring after a while, and Captain Tarrel understood that the view would probably be there for a couple of days. The whole trouble, she realized, was that she wanted to return to duty and had none. She was an advisor with no advice to give under the present circumstances, and the only thing she could do to help was to stay out of the way. She decided to go back to the bridge, where she could be in the middle of things and still remain out of the way.
Since their cabins were in the corridors behind the bridge, she decided to stop by on her way and see if Lt. Commander Pesca was about. She was almost surprised that he was there. He was locked inside his cabin and refused to come out at first, although the various thumps and bumps to be heard through the door indicated that he was busy at something. He could hardly be moving the furniture, unless he had unbolted it from the floor. Either his mood improved after the first few moments, or his curiosity got the better of him. He came out of his cabin dressed in armor, looking worn and beaten as if he had not recovered from the ordeal of the Methryn’s battle.
“The ship seems nearly deserted,” he observed, watching her closely.
“You just have to look in the right places,” Tarrel told him. “The ones who are not trying to rebuild the star drives are probably outside the ship dismantling the main drives. They seem determined to take this carrier apart right here, in the middle of space.”
“How long do they expect to take?”
“The first officer told me to expect a couple of days, but I suspect that she’s being optimistic,” she said. “There’s no guarantee yet that the star drives will ever work, although I don’t know what happened to them. We might get to see how you tow three kilometers of Starwolf carrier into starflight. I have been curious about that.”
Pesca gave her another of his disquieting, calculating stares. “You like these Starwolves, don’t you, Captain.”
Tarrel shrugged. “They are interesting, I have to admit.” “Monsters,” Pesca muttered under his breath as he turned back to his room.
Tarrel looked up at him sharply, realizing that things had gone far enough already. “Wally, I’m going to put you off the ship as soon as possible, back at Alkayja station if we don’t meet one of our own sooner. There’s no point putting you through all of this. The Starwolves aren’t going to let you have what you want anyway.”
“No, they probably won’t,” he agreed, looking embarrassed. “I guess I never was meant for this.”
“If it’s any consolation, I feel worse than I look,” she assured him. “You might as well come out of that armor. Unless you plan to go outside with the Starwolves, you hardly need it in a ship that can’t move.”
In spite of the advice that she had just given, Captain Tarrel put herself back inside her own armor. When the Starwolves got around to moving one of those massive drives, she did indeed intend to go outside for a look. For as long as she had been in space aboard ships, she had actually been outside only very seldom, and that was true of just about everyone. Ship to station transfers were done through docking tubes, and most repairs were done inside pressurized repair bays not unlike the one where the Methryn had been built. Except for salvage and some emergency repairs, there was simply never any need to go outside a ship.
As she had expected, the bridge was nearly deserted. There was hardly any need for even a token watch, since Valthyrra herself would always be there anyway. Kayendel was on the bridge and apparently acting as the officer in charge, although the Kelvessan hurried over to join Tarrel as she shuffled her armored self onto the bridge. To her surprise, the first officer stopped before her and performed a reasonable facsimile of a salute.
“Captain, can you be on the bridge for the next few hours?” she asked.
Tarrel was almost too surprised to know what to think. “Yes, I suppose that I could be.”
“Well, I was wondering if you would mind taking the watch on the bridge,” Kayendel explained. “You do have command experience. And since you are a captain, you have the same technical rank as myself or any of the pack leaders and that makes you qualified to take the watch.”
“What, me? Command a Starwolf carrier?” Tarrel asked, and smiled. “I can hardly make a mess of things, under the circumstances. I don’t suppose that a Union Captain ever commanded a Starwolf carrier before. What does her worship think about this?”
“It was her idea,” Kayendel said very softly. “There is no trick to this, since Valthyrra is in charge of the ship anyway. In theory, your only concern is to advise the ship and watch over the crew. Valthyrra knows what she needs to be doing and most of the crew is outside with Commander Gelrayen, and still under his command.”
“Well, if I’m going to sit in the chair, I might as well earn it,” Tarrel commented. “My word, I wish circumstances could have been different. When I think of how much fun it would have been to go sliding into the Vinthra space complex in this ship—and a new ship at that, with less than a hundred light years on her—I feel better already.”
“You do not get to keep her,” Kayendel said on her way to the lift.
As far as it went, Captain Tarrel knew that she was only just sitting in the Commander’s seat, but she could still appreciate the irony of the situation. The perfect complement to an inexperienced carrier unable to move herself was, of course, a captain from the enemy fleet. She certainly could not imagine her people’s protocol allowing someone like Gelrayen or Kayendel to command a Union military ship, no matter what the circumstances; Starwolves were so refreshingly practical. But it made for a remarkable situation, just the same.
She carried herself up the steps to the Commander’s station, aware that Valthyrra’s camera pod was turning slowly to watch her, every heavy step of the way. Ignoring her for the moment, Tarrel secured her helmet in the rack behind the seat, before lifting herself in. She adjusted the angle of the seat until she was fairly comfortable, then settled back to enjoy her brief tour of duty as the Commander of a Starwolf carrier. After serving in hell, she now had a chan
ce to rule in heaven.
Valthyrra moved her camera pod well into the upper bridge, holding it just above the main console of the station. “What course, Captain?”
“Right up the middle of the Rane Sector,” Tarrel told her boldly. “I want to make life miserable for some incompetent Union Captains and their backward little ships.”
“You know, I might be the only carrier who will never have fired upon a Union ship,” Valthyrra observed, almost wistfully.
“You worry me,” Tarrel remarked. “That’s not the first time you’ve said something to that effect. But cheer up! The truce will never last. You’ll be hunting Union ships within two months, after you destroy the Dreadnought. Just do me one favor. If you ever run across the battleship Carthaginian, you might think merciful thoughts.”
“Then you honestly believe that the war will return?”
“Of course. The Union is fundamentally greedy and ruthless. Many of the colonies are going to take advantage of our sudden misfortune to declare their independence. People like me will be sent out to punish them by dropping a few bombs on their heads, and people like you feel required to punish us in return and protect their independence. Unless, of course, our interplanetary network falls completely apart because the Dreadnought has destroyed so much.”
“And then we end up having to take care of you on a longterm basis,” the ship observed.
“Are there enough of you?” Tarrel asked. “You know, if you people are smart about this, you would move through as soon as you destroyed the Dreadnought and disable every Union military ship you can find. Then you could tell us how you expect us to behave, and we would have to listen. But I don’t believe that you could make yourselves do that.”
“The circumstances are different than they have ever been,” Valthyrra insisted. “Perhaps they would agree that it would be best to end the war as soon as it starts again, if you told them.” “Wait just a moment. You seem to forget just whose side I’m on. As soon as you destroy the Dreadnought, my mission here is complete and I’ll go back to my own ship.”
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