“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.”
Valthyrra actually seemed surprised. “I had thought that you did not approve of many of the Union’s policies.”
“No, I don’t,” Tarrel told her. “A lot of it is fairly nasty and ruthless, and all for the sake of greed. But it does work fairly well. I’m not sure that anything else would work any better, and there are a lot of systems that would be much worse.”
“The Republic works, and no one has to get hurt to make certain that it does.”
Tarrel nodded. “That is true, and it has given me something to think about. In Union space, we’re taught that the Republic ceased to exist a long time ago, and I’m beginning to suspect that I now know why. But the situation there is just a little different. The Republic has the strong influence of the Kelvessan and your ships. You’re a lot more perfect than we are, but you were built that way. We’re only mortal. I’ve always believed in the Union, in spite of its problems, and I’ve been willing to enforce its policies. Did you think that the Starwolves had liberated me, that I was the Captain of a Union battleship because I was forced to be, or didn’t know any better?”
“Frankly, I have had trouble remembering that you are not just another Starwolf,” Valthyrra admitted. “You seem so much like them, far more so than I had ever expected that a human could be.”
“Perhaps you’re just not used to humans.”
“No, I have seen humans often enough in my life. They are different from either you or the Starwolves. Perhaps it is because you are both warriors.”
Captain Tarrel realized at that moment that she was discussing points of personal philosophy with a machine, and that they both seemed to be having some problem keeping in mind just who they were talking to. Whether naturally or by design, Valthyrra kept her camera pod always moving, changing angle, rotating lenses to focus on some small gesture of expression, all helping to create a strong sense of speaking with a real person who was actually there. In fact, Valthyrra was physically very large and distributed throughout the secure core of the ship. But, for the moment, Tarrel was more impressed with the complexities of Valthyrra’s mind. She had expected the ship to think responsively in the same way as even the most sophisticated computers, all her thought processes generated only in reaction to external events and input. In truth, the ship seemed to engage in quite a lot of independent thought and speculation, and many of her responses seemed more emotional than logical.
“I hesitate to say this, knowing that you could easily find offense in it,” Valthyrra continued. “In my experience, which I have been accumlating now for nearly six decades, I have generally found humans to be dull and very predicable in their lack of sophistication. Kelvessan, and the other ships, are always thinking beyond their own present concerns. They are more likely to tell you things that you would not expert, and they speak more plainly and honestly about what they really think and feel than humans, who seem mostly to feel some need to guard the privacy of their thoughts carefully. Perhaps that is also why you remind me more of the Starwolves.”
Captain Tarrel chuckled to herself. “I could take offense at that, except that I’ve been thinking much the same thing myself lately. It might have something to do with being locked inside a ship with several thousand Starwolves, who are very interesting, contrasted with one human, Wally Pesca, who is definitely not a higher form of life.”
“I was wondering, perhaps, what your opinion might be of my own performance,” the ship began hesitantly. Even the set of her camera pod suggested shyness. “I was aware from the first that you were uncertain about my ability to handle myself, whether because of my lack of experience or just because I am a machine.”
“I don’t trust anything that hasn’t proven itself,” Tarrel told her. “But you did just fine. In fact, you surprised me. Your inventiveness and lack of hesitation was very impressive. You knew what you had to do to save yourself and you did it.” Valthyrra turned her camera pod away. “I admit that I am very embarrassed about my loss of power. That was a careless and stupid mistake that should not have happened.”
“I agree, although it wasn’t your fault. Still, your professional pride forces you to blame yourself. I know I would.”
“I hardly know whether to feel good or bad about that battle,” the ship remarked. “To tell you the truth, except for that whole affair with the fuel element line, I thought that I did very well. I am now willing to take part in a serious attack on the Dreadnought.”
“Yes, I believe that you are ready for that.”
“I just hope that Commander Gelrayen agrees,” Valthyrra complained. “He seems to think that he has to tell me everything, as if I hardly know the first thing about taking care of myself.” Captain Tarrel had to work at hiding her smile. There was still something of a child left in Valthyrra Methryn. Which was really just as well; Starwolf carriers had to grow up so fast.
Valthyrra lifted her camera pod sharply, then rotated only the pod itself to face toward the front of the bridge. Her reaction suggested that she had just become aware of something that had happened somewhere off the bridge, her gesture with camera pod being entirely a reflex. She turned the pod back again after a moment.
“Captain, I have experienced an unexpected problem,” she said. “There has been an unpredicted decompression of an area within my hull. Automatic doors have contained the pressure loss to that one area, but suit telemetry indicates that there is someone trapped within.”
“Suit telemetry?” Tarrel repeated. “Does that mean that this person is in no danger?”
“None for the moment, Captain. I should add that the decompression seems to have been a deliberate act. If I had been aware sooner, I could have used my overrides to prevent it.”
Tarrel nodded. “Where is this? Does it have anything to do with normal repairs?”
“Not, it does not. It happened in a section well forward in the ship.”
“Can you show me where?”
Valthyrra cleared the main monitor on the Commander’s forward console and brought up a schematic of that area of ship. It was like identifying a single block from a large city; relatively speaking, the problem was contained in a very small region. In fact, it was limited to a single chamber of unusual shape and size, perhaps five meters deep but at least thirty meters wide. Even more unusual, a dozen narrow passages or tubes led forward some distance until they emerged through the lower hull of the ship.
“Val, what is that cabin?”
“That is one of four chambers giving access to my forward missile tubes,” she reported. “The missiles are loaded from the storage bay by an automated conveyor rack. When fired, the missiles are kicked down the tube and away from the ship with a high-pressure blast of compressed carbon dioxide, and they do not engage their drives until they are clear.”
“Did you have missiles loaded?”
“Under the circumstances, yes. I loaded a full spread of missiles capable of both high sublight and short-range starflight speeds, directed through an achronic link by my own tracking systems, and armed with conversion warheads of variable intensity up to twenty megatons. One missile has been removed from its tube.”
“What, inside the ship?”
“No, it was pushed along the tube outside
the ship. Both the inner and outer tube hatches have been blown manually, so I cannot close them.”
“I don’t have to ask who,” Tarrel commented to herself as she released the straps from her seat and began climbing out. “I need a lift standing by to take me to the point as close to that launch tube as possible, where I can leave the ship. You need to warn Commander Gelrayen, and suggest having the repair crews get themselves back inside. And launch a pack of fighters to stand by.”
“I have no pilots on board,” Valthyrra told her.
“Well, I suppose that you can fly at least one remotely,” Tarrel said as she collected her helmet and hurried down the steps. “Can you control that missile remotely?”
“Yes, but it can still be fired and detonated manually,” Valthyrra said, swinging her camera pod around to follow while she still could. “What are you going to do?”
“This is my problem,” Captain Tarrel insisted just before she moved out of range, then waited until she was inside the lift. “Val?”
“I can still hear you,” she said through the lift com.
“Wally Pesca is my responsibility,” Tarrel continued. “I brought him on board this ship. I knew that he was having problems, but I was too busy playing with the Starwolves to pay him enough attention. Don’t you try to talk to him through his suit. I’m the only one he might listen to now, and I doubt even that.”
“I will leave him to you, Captain,” Valthyrra promised. “I might remind you that you do not have a weapon.”
“Is he likely to have one?”
“Aside from a conversion missile? No. All of the ship’s small weapons are accounted for, and he did not come aboard with anything.”
Tarrel said nothing, but she wished very much that she did have a weapon of some type. She really did not anticipate that she would be able to save Lt. Commander Pesca unless he surrendered to her voluntarily, and she did not believe that he would. The fact that he was using a conversion device against the Starwolves indicated that he did not expect or intend to survive his own attack; he probably meant to move it into a position where it would do the most damage and detonate it manually. Although she did not know for certain, she suspected that anyone willing to make a suicide attack was probably too devoted to his cause to be talked out of it very easily, or could even be forced to surrender. If threatened, he would simply set off the device immediately.
The fate of entire worlds could well depend upon the survival of these two carriers, two of only sixteen fighting ships left in the Starwolf fleet. In that balance, Walter Pesca’s life was a small concern. If she had had a gun and could have taken him by surprise, Captain Tarrel would have shot him without the slightest hesitation to get him away from that missile. But aside from the rather obvious problem that she did not have a weapon in the first place, Pesca was wearing the best armor there was. Dispatching him quickly and easily was more a problem than it seemed. That was why she wanted heavy firepower in the form of a fighter to back her up, if she could direct the fighter into position before he saw it.
“Captain, this is Valthyrra,” the ship said after a long moment. “I have considered the matter carefully and I have decided not to warn the crews that are working outside, or make any attempt to secure the ship. That would warn your companion that we know what he is doing, and he might be frightened into detonating the device. I have discussed this with Commander Gelrayen and he agrees. We will leave this for you to handle.”
“I appreciate you confidence,” Tarrel said, uncertain whether she intended that sarcastically. “I need some firepower at hand immediately?’
“A fighter is too large and obvious,” Valthyrra explained. “I am sending you a probe, the smallest of my surveillance remote units. It operates entirely by field drive, and it has a mobile camera pod with an attached small cannon.”
“Enough to pierce Starwolf armor on the first shot?”
“It should.”
The lift, which had made four changes of direction already, pulled to a smooth stop and the doors snapped open. Captain Tarrel found herself facing a narrow, dimly-lit corridor in what looked to be a very remote portion of the ship.
“Listen to me quickly,” Valthyrra told her. “The corridor you see gives access to the minor airlocks along the ventral groove, and you are only about three hundred meters back from the nose of the ship. Walter Pesca is moving the missile along the ventral groove a short distance back from your present position, no doubt using the groove as the only effective cover. He probably expects to fire the missile before he begins moving outward along the wing, and I suspect that he intends to target the open bays along the Maeridan’s lower hull.”
“Can he fire that missile with any accuracy?” Tarrel asked, surprised.
“He can try pointing it in the general direction. Considering the range, he has a very good chance of hitting something. Go down the corridor to your left and take the first passage to your right. That will put you at a small airlock leading out into the ventral groove.”
Tarrel found the passage quickly enough, a narrow tube sealed at the inner end by a heavy hatch in the event that the passage between the inner and outer hull was damaged. The airlock itself was hardly more than a service port, small enough that she had to bend slightly to get her helmet under the top. The ventral groove was familiar territory from her visits while the Methryn had still been in her construction bay, larger than the slender line that it looked to be from a distance, with the massive heat-exchange bars of the solid-state cooling system at top and bottom. There was hardly any more detail to be seen, since they were in the smothering darkness and bitter cold of intersteller space. The brilliant floodlights illuminating the area of work about the main drives was still nearly a kilometer away.
“Where is he?” Tarrel asked.
“About fifty meters back from where you stand, moving away from you,” Valthyrra reported. “Since he is carrying the missile, he is moving much slower than you will.”
“Carrying? How large is that missile?”
“Perhaps I should have said that he is pulling it in freefall, since that missile is five meters long and weighs two tons under one standard G. If you stay well back in the darkness of the groove, he might not see you until you are fairly close. Unfortunately, your armor is Command white. His armor will be white with black trim, but the missile itself is dull black.”
“What about that firepower you promised?” Tarrel asked. “Right behind you.”.
Captain Tarrel turned and was startled to see the dark shape of the probe drifting immediately behind her. This machine was much smaller than she had anticipated, an armored, wedge-shaped remote with its folding wings fully extended so that it looked now like some curious flying or aquatic creature. Its camera pod, lifted to regard her, was in a protective flare at the end of a flexible snake-like neck. The focusing lens of a comparatively small gun was located beneath the camera; with power coming up from within the main hull of the machine, it could be a great deal more dangerous than it looked.
“How can I talk with him?” she asked.
“You are aware of the switch for the external speaker on your collar?” Valthyrra reminded her. “When you press that, I will shunt the signal to a second audio channel. It will only work while you are holding the switch, so you will control what you want him to hear. ”
She had to weigh her options very quickly, trying to decide whether to give Pesca a chance to surrender, or if she should take the safest course by simply allowing Valthyrra to ambush him with the remote. But if Valthyrra shot and missed, he would still have time to detonate the missile.
“Val, can you control his suit remotely?” she asked as she hurried along the deep ledge of the ventral groove.
“Yes, it was designed to allow me to care for an injured pilot as best I could, by adjusting temperature and oxygen content.” “Can you vent the suit and suffocate him?”
“No, there was no foreseen value in that function.”
“But you can
cut his oxygen completely?”
Valthyrra considered that briefly. “I can certainly cut down the oxygen content to a level at which a human could not remain conscious. Believe it or not, that really is a useful function with Kelvessan. It will be as much as a couple of minutes before he goes under.”
“Do it, then. Leave all other levels where they are. He might not even notice for some time.”
Tarrel hurried the best that she could; there was no artificial gravity outside the ship, and her boots held to the hull only by an electromagnetic device that was pressure-sensitive to each step. The hold seemed to stick for just a fraction of a second with each step, until the sensors registered the lifting of her leg and released the lock, but it was just enough to slow her down. The probe drifted silently behind her, its lenses glittering in the reflection of the distant lights between the two carriers.
“The missile just began a one-minute delayed count,” Valthyrra reported. “The overload level is full power, twenty megatons or more. Lieutenant Commander Pesca seems to have panicked. His respiratory and cardiac rates are climbing rapidly, and he is pressing buttons on the missile’s manual control apparently at random.”
“He scared himself,” Tarrel observed. “Can I have a channel to him now?”
“The second audio channel is ready.”
“Wally, can you hear me?” she asked, trying to sound both authoritative and strongly reassuring. “Wally, you have to turn the damned thing off. You have it set to overload in less that a minute.”
“I can’t, Captain,” he answered, almost hysterical. “The controls aren’t in Terran. I was trying to fire it, and I don’t know what I did.”
After weeks of trying to find any clue to the secret language of the Starwolves, he had to do it the hard way.
“I can direct him to key in the manual override to lock out the controls and return the missile’s systems to inert status,” Valthyrra said softly over Tarrel’s com.
“Wally, Valthyrra Methryn is going to tell you how to turn the thing off. Will you listen to her?”
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