Tactical Error

by Thorarinn Gunnarsson

  Speak of the devil and she shall appear. At that very moment the lift door on the right side of the bridge opened, and Venn Keflyn loped in. Her dragon’s form with a spider’s abundance of arms and legs was encased in her own white armored suit, in most ways like the suits worn by the Starwolves, her neck and tail encased in flexible sheaths of overlapping plates. Although her primary duty on board the Methryn was instruction in the psychic arts and ancient history, she was also an occasional member of Velmeran’s special tactics team. She seemed an unlikely addition to that group, but she was full of more tricks than Lenna Makayen.

  “I think that I should go along,” she explained simply before anyone could ask.

  “So I see,” Velmeran commented, staring. “Could I ask why?”

  “Because I really think I should?” she suggested, running that answer by a second time to see if it was good enough.

  Velmeran closed his eyes and sighed heavily.

  “Oh, sure. The more the merrier. I really thought I should go, too.” He turned to Consherra. Do you think you should go?”

  “Really?” she asked incredulously. “You never ask me out any more.”

  “Do you want to go?”

  “No. I still remember the last time.”

  “Good. I need you to watch the ship.”

  “The ship is quite old enough to take care of herself,” Valthyrra remarked tartly.

  “I am going to put on my business armor and check the condition of my fighter,” Velmeran said as he turned away, indicating to Venn Keflyn the direction of the lift. “So, what do you think? What could cause the end of civilization as we know it?”

  “That depends upon how you define civilization,” the Aldessan explained in a scholarly vein as they walked slowly together toward the lift. “You define civilization as one thing, and your enemies as another. To truly understand that question, you must first ask yourself what your enemy believes that civilization means to you, and then how he would attempt to destroy your concept of civilization.”

  “I doubt very much that Donalt Trace entertains any thoughts of defeating me with philosophy. He believes in things that go bang.”

  “Yes, there is that.”

  Lenna Makayen had to think, and she had to think quickly. She had to find some way to distract the Union base from repelling the unexpected arrival of a pack of Starwolf fighters. Ideally, that distraction should be enough to keep an entire base the size of a city from even being aware of the arrival of the Starwolves. That made the answer seem simple enough. She had to arrange an accident that would take out the installation’s surveillance coordination system, particularly that part which correlated scanners and the defensive systems.

  That was a really good idea, but she had never found that particular section of the base.

  Unable to do the damage she wanted, Lenna had to consider other distractions. The best solution seemed to be something that would frighten Union Command, something that would threaten to be very nasty if it got out of hand, something that would draw a lot of attention to itself and cause a fair amount of concern and confusion. Considering the rather stripped and deserted condition of the base, there were very few alternatives. She would have to do something with the warehouses or adjacent underground hangar bays that were still in use.

  Once she determined that, matters became fairly simple. There was one little supply and munitions freighter that had her name on it. Actually, it was named the Fireflower, but that was close enough for her purposes. It seemed to Lenna that a small explosion and fire quite close to that ship would make the locals very nervous for some time. The explosion of the ship itself would take out the entire freighter bay complex. She did not consider that very likely, but she would not worry if things did get out of hand.

  Accompanied by Bill, she took the trams through the installation to the freighter bays. They had been in the heart of enemy territory for some time now, and the complete lack of trouble they had encountered had bred a certain lack of concern on her own part. This was an uninhabited world in a remote system, a fact that had apparently led to a complete lack of suspicion among the base personnel. According to simple logic, no one could possibly be here who did not belong. She had taken advantage of Bill’s enhanced ability to interface with the simpler Union computers to have herself established in the roster as a technical support lieutenant and even assigned a very nice apartment in officer’s territory. Her rank and area of specialty gave her the run of the base, credentials that she could now prove beyond any doubt.

  “What about it, Bill?” she asked as they took the tram to the hangar bay. “Do you think that we should set a fire beside that ship?”

  “No,” Bill answered, simply and frankly. She glanced at him.

  “Why not?”

  “It is not safe.”

  “Then what do you think we should do?” she asked.

  “We should do that. It is safer than other things.”

  Lenna sat back in her seat and sighed. “Why do I even talk to you?”

  Bill’s diligent little processors contemplated that very question for several well-considered nanoseconds. “Because you have no choice.”

  The tram transversed many unseen kilometers deep beneath the ice and rock, through the maze of corridors that Lenna was beginning to know very well and to detest with a passion. She had been wandering about in this warren of high technology with a fairly high degree of impunity, having realized very early on that security was almost non-existent on the inside. Once the Starwolves started on their way down, things were going to become very different in a hurry.

  Lenna paused to look about. Fortunately all Union military installations were perfectly alike in one respect; the instructions were written on the walls. She sometimes wondered if they built these things from kits, with everything labeled. She followed the arrows down the corridor for a few dozen meters and entered a wide door on her left, finding herself on the observation deck overlooking the hangar bay. The freighter filled the nearer half of the bay, surrounded by shipping crates stacked together in small groups.

  “Munitions?” she asked.

  Bill stepped up close to the window, aiming the lenses of his cameras at the scene below. He had the advantage of telescopic vision, with the ability to computer-enhance a frozen image that was too far away for simple optics to identify clearly. “Not many munitions. Those groups of long crates nearest the ship’s middle bay doors are labeled as missiles. The remainder are standard personal supplies and environmental stocks.”

  “Like paper?” Lenna asked, in a tone of voice that indicated she had something in mind.

  “Paper supplies are stacked well to one side, presumably to reduce the risk of fire,” the sentry explained. “One group is labeled as personal paper supplies.”

  “Personal?”

  “Very personal,” Bill explained. He was a very discreet machine indeed. Lenna wondered about that. He had been rebuilt and programmed by Starwolves, who were not entirely discreet.

  “That might be a very good place to start,” she commented to herself, then turned to the sentry. “Shall we go and have a look, my good automaton. Lead the way.”

  Although there were crews on the deck, she saw no more than half a dozen or so cargo handlers. Lenna elected that a bold assault was probably the best course. She doubted that anyone would cast a suspicious thought at a technical officer in the company of one of their own automated sentries. Sneaking about was out of the question. One thing that Bill had never learned to do at all well was to sneak successfully.

  The shipping crates were stacked neatly near one wall, well away from the front of the ship or any of the major corridors leading into the bay. Everything looked very promising, so far. The crates themselves were of light plastic, not the metal for heavier cargo, and their tops were locked down by simple spring clips. Lenna checked the labels on the ends of the crates and chose one that indicated the paper products that Bill had succinctly described, releasing the clips to look
inside.

  “Yes, this will do nicely,” she commented, then glanced at Bill. “I’ll be all right. You go over to freighter bay twelve and see what you can do about opening the overhead doors. You’re to go ahead and guide the Starwolves down when I send you the word, whether I can get there before they land or not. We are going to have to move quickly when things start.”

  “You will need a com link,” Bill reminded her, stepping around close and popping open his computer interface access panel.

  Lenna reached in and removed one of the small com units. The one she took had only limited range, but it was also designed to look like a perfectly ordinary pen to the point that it could actually write. Its limitations would not be a problem to her, under the present circumstances. The access panel began to close.

  “Be off with you, now,” she told the sentry. “You be very quiet and very careful, the best you’ve ever done. I know that you can do it.”

  “I will be careful,” Bill promised her as he prepared to turn away. Then he paused, as if in a moment of contemplation. “Sure now, and you be careful to keep your bony ass out of trouble as well.”

  Seemingly quite pleased with himself, the sentry then hurried away on his errand, leaving Lenna to contemplate the arcane complexities of Kelvessan computer technology. Somewhere, from out of the muddled depths of his primary processors, Bill had considered that bout of nonsense logical.

  Lenna turned back to her work, looking about for convenient mayhem. One interesting point that she noted immediately was the close proximity of the crates to a major power link. There were five separate levels of power available at this cluster of outlets. The lowest setting was meant for power tools and other pieces of portable equipment. The highest was intended only to jumpstart the total conversion generators of small spacecraft. The more powerful connections were occasionally known to short out, the high levels of energy they contained sometimes arcing across the two poles of their quick-connect socket. She knew that for a fact; she had in the past encouraged many such shorts.

  As spectacular as such an electrical short could be, they were not usually very dangerous and were easily brought under control as soon as coordinating computers detected the power drain and shut down the line. Lenna meant to encourage things to get a little more out of hand, by moving the lightweight, but quite flammable, plastic shipping containers and their equally-flammable cargo just a little closer to the outlets.

  Bending over the cluster of outlets, she used the manual shutdown switch to close off power to those lines. A single, slender strand of copper wire, as thin as a hair, was all she needed to encourage the short between the positive and negative connections of the direct current lines. The most difficult part of the process was simply removing the six screws of the main access plate over the cluster of power links. After that, she would slip the length of copper wire between the connections and replace the access plate. When she restored the power, the arc would strike. The beauty of the system was that the arc itself would remove all evidence of her tampering when the wire was melted... along with a large portion of the connection itself. “Here, what are you doing?”

  Lenna paused, and frowned fiercely. Things had been going so perfectly for so long, she should have been suspicious. She glanced over her shoulder, and saw two pairs of black boots. Looking somewhat higher, she found that her fears were justified. Two of the biggest men she had ever seen, dressed in the dark uniforms of security, were standing over her, staring at her with expressions that were more confused than suspicious.

  “Didn’t you know that this is a closed security bay?”

  Lenna’s rather candid expression indicated that this tidbit of news came very much as a surprise, and by no means a welcome one.

  Things proceeded rather better from that point than Lenna could have hoped. She was handcuffed and searched, then taken to the nearest security substation, where her idents were fed into the terminal for a very thorough processing. What encouraged her was the fact that the two guards appeared to be giving her the benefit of the doubt. They were treating her very nicely, obviously working on the assumption that her idents would check out clear and she would be sent on her way, the victim of a simple misunderstanding during the confusion of shutting down the base. They had not even submitted her to a strip-search, and that was a common enough practice even in polite company.

  She had been rather looking forward to it.

  As far as it went, she was not particularly worried. Her idents were real enough, and the computer records on her were quite extensive. She was high enough in rank that she was ordinarily answerable only to written orders. They even knew her in Technical Support, where she had put in regular appearances and a very real eight hours of trouble-shooting each day. What she did with her free time was entirely her own affair, not to the extent that she had used it, but no one at this base would know about that. When nothing came up on her ident check, she would be released with vague warnings to be more careful. Under the circumstances, a strip search would have been the high point of this little adventure.

  She would have been feeling very good about the whole affair, except that she was very worried about what the Starwolves might be thinking, and what they could well be doing in her absence. She was very much afraid that Bill would go ahead and open the overhead doors on bay twelve, not waiting for orders. She doubted that Bill possessed the intelligence or complexity of thought to contact the Methryn on his own initiative, but she did believe that they would contact him and determine his latest orders. If she was lucky, she would be released before any of those dire things could happen.

  “We’re to take you to the tram,” said the senior of the two guards, identified to Lenna only by the name Barg on his ident tag, as he entered the room where Lenna sat politely handcuffed to a chair. It was, at least, the most comfortable of the four chairs in the room. The other guard, Salgey, had sat brooding in one of the other chairs.

  “Why is that?” Lenna asked just a little nervously, wondering if something was going wrong. Years of experience had taught her that the person she was supposed to be would have been expected to be just a little nervous by this time, wondering if she was about to be run over by the ponderous, uncaring wheels of military bureaucracy for a mistake that she did not consider to be her fault.

  “Standard procedure,” Barg explained as he released the handcuffs from around the arm of the chair. “A security tram is being sent around to take us to Main Security, if the officer on duty thinks that it’s necessary. It’s most likely that he will just ask you a few of the usual, stupid questions and send you back to work.”

  Lenna stood up, and her hands were again cuffed. At least this time her hands were cuffed in front, less awkward and much more comfortable. She was taken through the corridors to the tram station, not the smaller passenger trams, but the wide, double-tracked tunnels of the immense freight trams. One small, single-unit tram, like a flattened silver oval resting on its massive magnetic tracks, was pulled up to the loading platform. The front and rear of the top of the tram’s armored hull were dominated by its massive turrets; at need, the machines could be rolled out onto the surface tracks to repel a major attack. Lenna was directed through its main door.

  Inside, the tram was fitted with benches along its outer walls and in small islands in the center, leaving a considerable amount of open space between. This was a transport for security forces, with room for supplies and for guards to get into their gear. Lenna was directed to the enclosed control cabin in the front of the tram. From there, the operator could set the tram’s destination with the central computer control, or guide the vehicle directly through remote-control switches at the track junctions.

  “Here we go,” Barg said, directing her to the seat before the communications panel. “You can speak to the old bastard here.”

  “Don’t let him hear you say that,” Lenna warned him, with a noticeable respect for the wrath of superiors.

  “Oh, not to worry,” he insis
ted. “The com is on standby from our end.”

  He pressed a single button, and the small monitor in the center of the unit came to life. A middle-aged man with a rather gaunt face and large nose afforded her the briefest of glances before looking back down at something he had been reading. “So. Kalen Makensee, lately of Balarn. Nineteen years of impeccable service in technical support. Graduated with honors with a degree in engineering from the Service Academy.”

  “Ah, only seventeen years, sir,” Lenna offered the correction as she recognized the simple trap, hoping that she remembered the facts of this alternate persona properly.

  “Yes, my mistake.” He glanced at her only briefly, turning back to the hard copy that he now held within view of the monitor. “It says here that you have been at this base for only four months. Long enough to know better, I would assume.”

  “Sir, the bay was not properly sealed for security,” she said, which was all perfectly true. “There were no standard lights or signs, and the doors were all wide open.”

  “That is right, sir,” Barg offered.

  The officer turned off the sound at his end for a moment while he spoke to someone she could not see. He glanced back at Lenna, this time a somewhat hard stare. “Just what were you doing in that bay anyway? Admitting that you are assigned to random trouble-shooting, what led you to start tampering with high-power outlets?”

  “I’ve known those outlets to short, more than once,” she explained. “A little dirt or moisture in the connections, and you have quite an arc on your hands. Starts fires about half the time, since a lot of fools on the deck will stack goods too close to the things. And I wanted to double-check all of the connects in the base, seeing as how we’re supposed to be putting everything in hold for a long time.”

  “I see,” the officer agreed vaguely, then turned off the sound a second time while he listened to some brief report. He turned back to her in a somewhat more congenial frame of mind. “Yes. Well, the mistake does seem to be our own, and everything does seem to check out just fine. I’ll go ahead and clear you to finish your work in that bay.”