“Well, what are their chances?” Tarrel asked.
“Very good, I should think.”
Tarrel glanced down at the probe. “Valthyrra, did you ever have a chance to discuss this plan with Fleet Commander Asandi?”
“Yes, I discussed it with him by com during my approach to Alkayja station after my last battle with Dreadnought. He said then that the plan was too dangerous, that the packs would not survive in close range to the Dreadnought. We have already seen that they can. Commander Asandi told me that I should not discuss this plan with the other carriers.”
“I see.” Tarrel turned toward the lift, expecting the probe to follow her. “Did it ever occur to you that Commander Asandi deliberately sent this fleet into a battle that he knew would be too dangerous? To phrase things a little more plainly, do you suspect that it might have been in his interests to commit a portion of his fleet to their own destruction?”
“Is there any reason to suspect why he should?”
“Commander Asadi indicated to me that the Republic fears the Kelvessan and has reason to make certain that they do not prosper. I am betraying his trust in me, but I believe that he has failed in his trust with the Kelvessan and their ships.”
“I had suspected that the Republic, or at least the Fleet Commanders, had a history of failing to encourage Kelvessan scientific and cultural development. I am not convinced that Commander Asandi contrived the destruction of this fleet, only that he displayed poor judgement in refusing to consider my plan more seriously. I must discuss this privately with the other ships.”
Tarrel stepped inside the lift that opened at her approach, then moved aside as the probe drifted in behind her. “You carriers can make up for the lack of support from the Republic.”
Valthyrra looked up. “How?”
“You seem to have made a good start. Don’t let them wear their clothes. Do whatever it takes to keep them thinking about their own racial identity. Talk them into altering their appearance. Just do what you think best.”
The two fighters moved cautiously into position, engaging their main drives no more than absolutely necessary. They really did not believe that they were fooling anyone with such subtlety; least of all the Dreadnought, with its proven instinct for seeking out and destroying any machine it found in space, including many smaller and less obstructive than a Starwolf fighter. Their only hope was that the Dreadnought would remain drifting on its present course and continue to stubbornly ignore anything going on about it, and they simply wanted to encourage that condition to continue for as long as possible by being reasonably discreet.
Considering the fact that the Dreadnought had just devastated a fleet of Starwolf carriers, destroying two and severely damaging a third, the ability of two lone fighters to face and destroy that beast seemed very unlikely.
The Methryn’s scan gave them the Dreadnought’s position easily enough, bringing them slowly in with perfect accuracy, behind the target that they could not see. Eventually as Pack Leader Teraln had said, the Dreadnought could be seen. At very close range, it was darker than background space, and no stars could be seen through that blackness. It had been very considerate so far, staying on course and ignoring their presence if it knew they were there at all. Even Valthyrra had been unable to offer any explanation on what the Dreadnought could be doing while it drifted, seeming to have closed itself tightly inside its shield. It might have been contemplating strategies, believing that it had failed in its mission because it had been unable to destroy all the Starwolf carriers. It might have simply been repairing a wrecked sensor array. Whatever it was doing, it certainly went about it with single-minded determination and an absolute belief in its own invulnerability.
Commander Gelrayen brought his fighter in close behind the Dreadnought, so close that the fighter’s forward lights diffused into the shield only three meters away. The plan now depended completely upon their finding a sensor or scanning device protruding through the shield. Valthyrra had insisted that the Dreadnought would never leave itself completely blind unless it was-trying to protect its array from direct attack. After several moments of frantic search, fearful that the Dreadnought would move away at any time, he finally saw the slender whip of a receiver extended barely half a meter outside the shield. It was black and difficult to see, even in the flood of the fighter's auxiliary lights.
Gelrayen moved quickly, activating the remote device that Valthyrra had designed and built, now attached below the nose of his ship. A long probe extended forward of the ship, far enough that he could see the simple clawed end, and he moved his fighter forward until that claw touched the sensor probe just above the point where it disappeared within the shield. The claw rotated, sharp edges cutting away the insulation until it sensed contact with bare metal, then detached itself from its arm so that the fighter was tethered by a short cable. Gelrayen waited until Teraln’s fighter attached itself in the same manner, and the two ships pivoted carefully until they were facing the shield.
The next step had to be done quickly and nearly in unison, for fear that the Dreadnought might react to the intrusion. The harpoon device under each fighter’s nose opened into a spread of four long, slender legs, each one ending in an electromagnetic pad. The harpoons were launched, driven through the heavy resistance of the shield by their own small solid-fuel engines, but they did pass through and signaled back through the heavy cable trailed behind them that they had locked onto the ship within. The pilots hastily shut down the drives, main generators and major electronic systems of their fighters, then activated the powerful winches that pulled the small ships through the darkness of the shield. There was some static discharge—pale lights that raced along the sharp edges of their hulls—but nothing of consequence. And then they were through.
The device that Valthyrra had designed had included a powerful array of auxiliary lights, enough to flood vast areas of the interior of the Dreadnought’s shield. She had never anticipated that the ship itself would have been illuminated, and yet large areas of the Dreadnought were brilliantly lit. Even the darker regions of the immense ship, especially near the end, were partially lit by icy white sheets of light from small, powerful lamps.
And there was certainly enough to see. After the Methryn’s previous encounter with the Dreadnought, their one brief glimpse inside the shield had been enough to show them a complex array of shapes, rather than the smooth, armored hull they would have expected. Now they could see for the first time that the Dreadnought had no outer hull, and that it was in fact only a sweeping spaceframe containing the ship’s various generators, reactionless drives and other components. The outside of the frame bristled with countless slender towers or projections, no doubt the supports for sensors and probes that could be extended through the shield, and a scattering of machines as large as a Starwolf fighter that were built onto pivoting stands, probably the discharge cannons. The shield itself fit up close against the shell of the Dreadnought, averaging no more than twenty meters of clearance, although somewhat more at the end where the two fighters had penetrated. They were standing almost nose-down against the frame as it was.
“Well, that explains a lot,” Gelrayen commented aloud.
“That explains what?” Teraln asked.
“This ship has no physical hull. The shield must be intended to stay up at all times; the power assembly must be designed to feed it constantly without taking power from any other systems. Under the circumstances, an armored hull would be ten or fifteen million tons of superfluous weight. Of course, it does have one serious defensive flaw that we just exploited. I wonder if their original enemies ever figured that out.”
“Perhaps the Dreadnought has a software problem,” Teraln suggested. “They could have prevented this kind of little problem by having it shoot anything of any size that came within a certain range. But, if they did, that feature is malfunctioning. There is one thing I do wonder about, Commander.”
“Yes?”
“All of these lights. Could t
his machine be an inhabited ship, or might it have been one originally? We knew already that it is nothing more than a giant, automated hazard to navigation. Perhaps it was meant to have supervision in handling more complex problems.”
“I suspect that these auxiliary lights are meant for visual inspection of the ship by its own maintenance remotes,” Gelrayen answered. “Nothing about the Dreadnought is a flaw or deficiency if you consider that this machine was probably built to destroy an enemy whose almost infinite numbers made up for an inferior technology, less complex than our own. If they had been on about the same level as the Union, they never would have been able to track it, much less fight it.”
He disconnected his fighter from the harpoon, jettisoning the entire winch assembly now that the device had served its function, keeping only the rack of auxiliary lights, anticipating a future need for those. Then he rotated his fighter around and began to move slowly forward along the length of the Dreadnought, using only field drive. The fact that the Dreadnought did not have a physical hull made their task a great deal easier, and the effectiveness of their attack potentially considerably greater. The machinery was built on a scale that was vast even by the standards of the Starwolf carriers, with enough room to navigate the fighters slowly through the interior of the ship. The conversion devices could be planted deep inside, where they would do the greatest damage.
As they moved along the length of the Dreadnought, they came soon to the first of four areas that were the most brilliantly lit. This was the result of long rows or grids of crystalline lights set into long, rectangular recessed areas in the side of the ship, obviously designed to serve some function other than simply providing illumination for the maintenance of the ship.
“Radiant intercoolers,” Gelrayen observed.
“You expected to find something like this?” Teraln asked.
“Valthyrra checked her archives and found that radiant intercoolers were associated with experimental jump drives. You might notice that these grids are surrounded by reflective pans designed to direct the light outward into the shield, where it is likely absorbed as energy and directed back into the power grid. Very efficient. Considering the fact that these drives are idle at the moment, I would not want to be here when they are engaged. We would be fried.”
Since he had seen enough of the exterior of the ship, Gelrayen directed his fighter inward, finding an opening around the radiant intercoolers. The passage was often tight or dimly lit, but they were always able to find a way through. The maze of machinery meant little in itself, but Gelrayen was able to begin piecing together a general design of the Dreadnought. He found that it was built in segments; four short segments that appeared to contain the jump drives with their intercooler grids facing outward. To either side of each drive segment was a power segment, containing nothing except stacked arrays of scores of vast conversion generators. The Dreadnought was perhaps ten times the size and weight of a single Starwolf carrier, but its generating capacity was at least a hundred times greater. The armored double tube of the power core ran along the center length of the ship, distributing and directing that tremendous power to where it was needed. The power core was itself surrounded by the bundled tubes of the flux coils that generated the powerful shield.
Gelrayen was able to plot his pattern of destruction easily. He was fearful of trying to destroy any of the conversion generators themselves, knowing that an overload could cascade through that entire array of generators with the power to destroy a large part of that entire system. Instead the two fighters moved along either side of the power core, placing their conversion devices between the shield flux coils and the jump drives. The detonation of those relatively weak devices would wreck the drives and destroy that section of both the flux coils and probably the power core itself, leaving the Dreadnought disabled and fairly harmless. At five second intervals, each of four pair of conversion devices was set to detonate. The shield would almost certainly come down with the first blast, and that would give the two fighters time to get away.
Once the conversion devices were in place, the two Starwolves retreated as far as they could to the back of the Dreadnought, using the ship’s bulk to protect their fighters from the explosion. They had no way back through the shield on their own. Even if they could have reattached the grounding cables, there was no way to pull the fighters back through. And taking an active drive through that shield would have been disastrous.
“Be ready to run the very moment the shield comes down,” Gelrayen warned. “There is still a chance that the generators will overload.”
“It seems a shame to destroy this machine,” Teraln commented.
“The shame is that we did not try this plan sooner. I should have been more supportive of Valthyrra, but too many elements of this plan sounded impractical. I would have never expected the Dreadnought to simply sit still and allow us to destroy it. Coming up on the first round of detonations,”
They engaged the primary generators of their fighters and brought forward engines to hold the ships stationary. As long as the drives were at least idling and warm, they would respond much more quickly to a sudden demand for full power. If the Dreadnought did happen to explode in a massive overload, a blast that would likely be measured in billions of megatons, then the Starwolves would have to race a double shock wave. The first would be a mass of radiation across a wide spectrum, the greatest and most deadly amount being a seemingly solid wall of intense light and heat, and an electromagnetic flare that would wreck a ship’s electronics. This shock wave would be moving at or very near the speed of light, meaning that the fighters would have to get into starflight to outrun it. Pushed to its limits, under an acceleration that even Kelvessan would find hard to endure, a fighter could kick itself over threshold prematurely after a thirty second run. The second wave, superheated plasma—the vaporized remains of the Dreadnought itself—would be much slower and would dissipate fairly rapidly, and so was of no consequence.
“On the mark . . . now!” Gelrayen warned.
There followed a distant flare of light and a deep shudder passed along the frame of the Dreadnought, imperceptible to the fighters isolated in the vacuum of space within the shield. Because that first set of detonations was some ten kilometers up the length of the ship and contained deep within its machinery, the effects were outwardly deceptively restrained. The only drastic result was the abrupt failure of the shield, which collapsed without even an instant of hesitation. As soon as the two pilots could see the stars, they engaged their main drives and accelerated away. They were already well beyond visual range before the next set of explosions wrecked the second jump drive assembly.
“Commander, were you successful?” Valthyrra asked as soon as she was able to identify the two fighters and establish contact.
“Valthyrra, are you anywhere near?” Gelrayen asked in turn. “That machine has an array of generators that could feed an entire Union sector with power, and I cannot say whether or not they will explode.”
“I will maintain a safe distance,” she agreed. “I am detecting a series of major explosions within the Dreadnought.”
“There will be four in all,” he told her. “We set our conversion charges to explode in pairs every five seconds, with the objective of destroying the Dreadnought’s four major reac-tionless drive units as well as the power core and shield coils. That should be the end of it.”
“I am happy to hear that,” Valthyrra commented. “The. Dreadnought is beginning to move, using the drives it still has in operation.”
“Where is it going?” he asked.
“Toward this system’s sun. This might be a self-destruct gesture.”
Perhaps anticipating the loss of self-control, the Dreadnought had set itself on a course that would carry it to certain destruction. Even if it now shut down entirely, leaving it a half-wrecked and drifting hulk, Gelrayen wondered if they would be able to deflect its path in time to avoid that act of self-immolation. Perhaps it would be best to simply l
et it go. Aside from the mystery of its origin and purpose, there was nothing of the Dreadnought’s technology they wanted except the secret of its reactionless drives. And he had already wrecked those.
“Commander, I have detected your final explosion,” Valthyrra announced. “The Dreadnought is completely disabled unless it still possesses field drive, and it has accelerated itself to nearly the speed of light. At this speed, it will destroy itself in less than three minutes.”
“I forgot how fast we expected it might be,” Gelrayen said. “It might have been able to match your best speed using only one of those four drive assemblies. It appeared to have been designed to have a reserve capacity for power and speed several times what it could actually use. Do we have time to attempt to capture that ship and turn it away?”
“It might not be able to move, but it can still fight,” Valthyrra reminded him.
“There seem to be very few actual cannons. The fighters will be able to go in and destroy those in reasonable safety, and then we could shut down that weapon while it is still reasonably intact.”
“I cannot believe that we have the time,” Valthyrra answered. “You know how hard it would be to target those weapons on a ship moving that fast, and then I would still have to come in and attempt to turn it aside. That is not something I care to try at that speed.”
“No, there is not enough time,” Gelrayen agreed. “I was able to collect detailed interior scans. Perhaps that will tell us all that we need to know.”
“Just what are you interested in?” the ship asked. “Are you lusting after reactionless drives?”
“Why not? You are not too new to refuse a refitting.” “Commander, the Dreadnought has begun building power,” she interrupted him. “Entirely too much power for a ship that has no drives.”
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