Velmeran frowned. “If Lenna had been able to retrieve the codes that will cause the Mock Starwolf cruisers to self-destruct, then we would have little to worry about. We could have gone hunting for those Fortresses and met them on our own terms. Of course, I am only assuming that those self-destruct codes even exist. Donalt Trace might well be contemplating a long and profitable partnership with his own Starwolves, just as he said.”
“I hope that Venn Keflyn did get him,” Valthyrra muttered in a rather dire voice.
“In a way, Trace has already done his worst to us,” he continued. “I do not like the thought of Kelvessan fighting Kelvessan, no matter what the circumstances.”
The Methryn dropped out of starflight well inside the system and continued her run quickly and under concealment, her main shields brought up to stealth strength. She was already well past the inner line of automated defenses, which had not even taken note of her passage. Circling tightly in her final approach, she braked sharply at the last moment and pulled to a stop barely ten kilometers short of the immense orbital base at the same time that she dropped her cloaking shield. Her appearance was sudden and completely unexpected, designed to use the vast, menacing form of the giant carrier in a subtly threatening gesture.
The Republic had forgotten just how frightening its own Starwolves could be.
“Get me President Delike on the line, and make certain that they understand that I mean now,” Velmeran ordered, watching the main viewscreen. Most of the ships that had been in the area of the station were heading very quickly in the other directions, but one audacious little cutter, painted bright orange for easy visual recognition, was moving to intercept the Methryn. “What does that bold little twit think he is doing?”
“That, Commander, is an automated escort,” Valthyrra explained. “The Port Authority is demanding our surrender.”
“Is that so? Double-check that ship for life signs and destroy it in the most spectacular manner that you can contrive.”
Valthyrra was happy to oblige; she had always considered the bright orange escorts to be a rather officious gesture anyway. She spared it only a single shot from the largest cannon from the main battery in her shock bumper, and the escort disappeared in a flask of bright flame.
“Message delivered and understood,” Valthyrra remarked with deep satisfaction. “President Alac Delike is awaiting your pleasure.”
She moved her camera pod closer, so that Velmeran could speak through her own leads. He elected to follow her lead, launching into an immediate and unrelenting assault. “President Delike, you are caught between a rock and a hard place. You have the Kelvessan angry with you, and you may have just noticed that we have almost all of the Republic’s weapons. And now you have Donalt Trace and the Union coming down on you. An attack force of five Fortresses and sixteen of their new Mock Starwolf cruisers will be here in two days, and their orders are to destroy the Republic.”
“But that’s impossible!” Delike protested. “We have a treaty with them.”
“That treaty was a ploy. Their only interest was using you to get at me. Let me explain things carefully, since you obviously do not have the wit to figure things out for yourself. This is the only supply base for the Starwolves, and the homeworld of the Kelvessan race. They knew that we would not accept exile, but force your surrender, and they have already gotten all they ever wanted from you. They finally know the location of Alkayja, and you have chased away the carriers that could have protected you. Now they plan to destroy you, so that the carriers will have nowhere to turn.”
“What am I going to do?” Delike asked desperately.
“I will make that simple for you,” Velmeran told him. “I am giving you only two choices. You give the Starwolves complete control of defending this base and do everything you can to help us, or I will come in there and pull you out.”
Delike considered that for a long moment, and Velmeran was by no means certain that he would agree. Delike seemed foolish enough to believe that he might still salvage the situation. He could as easily make the Starwolves work to take the base, and attempt to disappear in the confusion. Very much depended upon whether First Senator Saith and Party Chairman Alberes were there to advise him. Velmeran remembered that Delike was only a simple, very impressionable man who thought he was doing the right thing. The other two had impressed him as a pair of crooks out for all they could get from this scheme.
“We will agree, on certain conditions,” Delike answered at last.
“I had anticipated that,” Velmeran answered. “But make it brief. I am not in a generous mood.”
“Just this. First Senator Saith, Chairman Alberes, and myself must have immunity from official prosecution and a ship to leave when it is done. You must not interfere in our departure.”
“I agree,” Velmeran answered readily enough. “But only to those two terms, and to the letter of the agreement. There will be no official prosecution, and you will be given a ship to go where you will.”
“We will be looking forward to meeting you.”
“I just bet,” he muttered under his breath, and sighed. “I want that carrier you have in your docking bay. I just hope for your sake that you have not taken it apart. There is no statute of limitation on stupidity.”
He nodded, and Valthyrra cut the line. He looked up at her. “Move yourself into a docking bay as close to that inactive ship as you can manage. We have to get her ready to fight. Go ahead and put every ship we have overboard right now. I will take a team over to the new ship as soon as we dock and get the bays open. All other crewmembers are to begin moving their personal belongings out of the Methryn immediately.”
“Commander?” Consherra asked, using his title in her surprise.
He shook his head. “There is just no help for it. I want everything out of this ship that is not a part of either the generators, weapons, or drives. All of the racks for the fighters, the tools from the machine shops, and the equipment from the science labs, and the furnishing for the schools and sick bay. Even the simulators. Everything that can be taken from this ship has to go. The Methryn does not have the shielding or the engines of that new ship, and she has just about ruined her spaceframe. The only advantage I can give her now is to strip her of all excess weight. I believe that we might be able to cut her down by as much as three million tons.”
“I agree,” Valthyrra added. “And by having no crewmembers on board, I will be free to run interference for the others and take superficial damage without concern.”
Velmeran looked up at her camera pod, suddenly aware from her words that she knew they would not be coming back to this ship. The Methryn would not fly again. He doubted that she would even survive this battle, however things turned out. The Methryn had been built for war, and perhaps it was only proper for her to die in battle. But Valthyrra would not die with the Methryn, not if he could help it.
He turned to Consherra. “This is your department. I doubt that anyone in this base knows more about the sentient complex of this ship than you, but I will ask about just the same. As soon as we are docked, I want you to begin the process of duplicating Valthyrra’s memory units.”
“There is not time to get Valthyrra installed in that new ship,” Consherra protested.
“No, but we can move her in as soon as this is over,” he told her. “She has to fly the Methryn in this battle, and there is not time to pull her own units before the battle anyway. You know how deeply buried they are. We will pull them out later, if we can. But just in case, I want duplicates.”
The Methryn moved into her docking bay as soon as she had discharged the last of her ships, taking the bay immediately to the left of the carrier that had still been under construction. Tenders were already standing by to begin pulling unused fighters, empty racks, and a mountain of spare parts from the backs of the fighter bays. There was no artificial gravity in the bay itself, only on board the ship, so the Starwolves were able to simply throw a fair amount of crated material overboa
rd to be retrieved by the tenders when they could.
Velmeran took a small crew directly to the new ship, to get the bays open and to take a quick look about the carrier and make certain that she was ready to fight. Fortunately the ship seemed to be in a completely flight-ready condition, lacking only memory cells to begin the slow, careful process of bringing her to life. Those were missing because Velmeran had known for some time that he would have to move Valthyrra into this new ship, and he had asked several months earlier that the new ship not be activated until he could assess the Methryn’s condition at the time of completion and determine whether she could serve a few years more.
There was certainly no lack of help. Many Kelvessan scientists, engineers, and technicians, some only just released from internment awaiting sterilization or even death, hurried to assist in preparing the new carrier for flight. Many more Kelvessan from throughout the station arrived to help in any way they could. They threatened to slow things up in their eagerness to express their appreciation to the Methryn and especially Commander Velmeran, until he made it clear that he needed help more than thanks and that there was not a moment to spare.
“Oh, I know that she is ready to fly,” Admiral Laroose, recently returned from a premature retirement, explained when he found Velmeran touring the ship’s engineering sections. “We had her out twice earlier, before the Senate forbade it.”
“That helps,” Velmeran said. “Two carriers, some 250 fighters, and the automated defense drones. If the gods have elected to forgive me for being inattentive to my duties these past few years, we might just have a chance to win, which does bring me to the next point. The attack force will probably invite us to fight on a single front, but I doubt very much that they will keep to one. If anything comes up behind us, I want those defense drones in position and ready. I very much need for you to coordinate their attack.”
Laroose waved his hands in a gesture of refusal. “No battle experience, old boy!”
“You are still the best I have. Besides, I am adamant about this becoming a strictly Kelvessan battle. The Republic needs a chance to earn back her own honor.”
“Then I accept reluctantly,” Laroose agreed, and frowned. “It’s a damned shame that you had to grant pardons to Delike and his chums. If you had just sent word, me and a few of my boys would have gladly strangled them.”
“It served its purpose,” Velmeran said, looking up at him. “And who says that I pardoned them? I only made a couple of very specific promises about what I will and will not do to them. I still believe that fortune usually finds a way to restore the balance of payments.”
By that time, Consherra had finally made arrangements to begin the transfer of Valthyrra’s memory units. Eight of the massive memory cells were located in separate portions of the carrier’s forward section, each a heavily armored block the size of a large shipping container. The units themselves were secured within their own protective access tube, so heavily shielded that they often survived the complete destruction of the ship itself. Consherra had been able to find eight newly-constructed blank units, ready for installation in a ship of their own. She had two of these moved into each of the Methryn’s four transport bays, where they would be nearest the Methryn’s own units.
There was enough help at hand to have the heavy transfer cables laid out between the blank units in the bays and the access panels to Valthyrra’s units deeper within the ship. Consherra moved quickly, knowing that each passing minute could be depriving Valthyrra of that much more of her memory. The transfer of memory from one unit to another was risky enough under the best of circumstances, ordinarily used only for the replacement of an aging or faulty unit. Attempting the transfer of all eight units at the same time multiplied the risk by that much, and the highspeed encoding method was reserved for only a dire emergency. If the transfer was too incomplete, then Valthyrra’s personality programming would also be too incomplete to engage and return her to life.
“I am ready to enter the first unit,” Consherra announced to the portable com link she wore on her collar. She was standing before a very heavy and secure hatch built into the wall of one of the Methryn’s endless corridors. “This unit access panel is labeled as A3 1121.”
“Tread softly,” Valthyrra answered as she opened the hatch. “You stand before my primary cell. Most of my personality is locked within that unit. You may begin.”
Consherra entered, making her way through the four meters or so of narrow tunnel that led her to a second hatch, trailing the final length of the transfer cable behind her. She lifted a heavy, long-handled tool, in form like an immense socket wrench, and fitted the cylinder-shaped lock at its end into the receptacle in the center of the hatch. It was in its way a large key, never kept on board the ship itself but only under guard at Alkayja Base. With the mechanical key installed, she took a small magnetic card from a compartment in the handle of the key and inserted this in a slot in the wall to the right of the hatch.
The chip inside the card fed its data through the magnetic contacts into the electronic lock, which recognized her right to access to the core. Six heavy latches pulled back one after the other, and Consherra pulled down on the handle of the mechanical lock, releasing its own internal latches. Then she took hold of the massive handles on either side of the hatch and lifted it clear, breaking the airtight seal. The hatch itself weighed nearly two hundred kilograms, a final insurance against the credentials of the one opening the core. It was no burden for the enhanced strength of a Kelvessan or even the four powerful arms of an Aldessan of Valtrys, its original designers. But no human could have lifted it clear.
Inside was a final door, this one fitted with a numeric keypad. Consherra quickly punched in the final access code, the one known only to the Commander, First Officer, and the ship herself. The hatch lifted clear, allowing her to see inside the armored core and the massive memory cell locked securely in its cradle.
“At last,” Consherra remarked softly and she lifted herself through the open hatch. “You could be dead by the time I run this maze eight times.”
“I am comforted by your consideration,” Valthyrra answered sourly. “This is the important one. I could as easily do without the others.”
“Can you estimate your transfer rate?” Consherra asked as she pulled the cable around to one end of the cell, where its main access sockets were located. “That should give you some idea of the extent of transfer in the time allowed.”
“Virtual encoded memory,” the ship explained. “There is no predicting the transfer rate because there is none. The receiving unit sees the entire memory of the master unit all at once, but it takes time to mirror what it sees. Some is mirrored instantly, while some will take hours. And since portions of that same memory file may exist in another cell, I have to access the entire data from all sources before I am able to see the memory myself. It gets complicated when you try to work with it, but it is the key to my ability to think like you mortals.”
Since the new ship had no main computer network in operation, the entire vessel had to be controlled manually. At least there was enough secondary computer operation that the major systems were able to regulate themselves, although the commands for those systems had to be relayed from their master stations on the bridge. In theory, this carrier could fly and fight with a crew of only fourteen, that being the number of stations on the bridge. The weapons systems remained the biggest problem, since there was only just enough computer control to assist in targeting. All the various small cannons in their retractable turrets along the ventral groove, where the upper hull was joined to the lower, were directed by their own gunners.
Because of the difficulties in flying the ship manually, Velmeran decided they would fight this battle with only a minimal crew of officers and technicians. Even the fighters and transports with their support teams were installed in Alkayja Base and would launch from there. Like the Methryn, the new ship would fly stripped for battle.
One problem that had to be sol
ved early on was finding a name for the new carrier, to make references and communications easier and clearer. This new ship was unofficially the Methryn, but there already was one Methryn on hand with a prior claim on the use of that name. Before Velmeran had a chance to decide anything for himself, he found that the codename Alternate was already in general use for the new ship among the pilots, while the base personnel referred to her as Carrier D-Class 2-A, its registration number. Alternate seemed easier to deal with, especially in a hurry. For the duration of the coming battle, the new carrier became known as the Maeridyen, which was the Tresdyland word for Alternate.
The task of flying the Maeridyen fell to Consherra, and she was not pleased with the prospect. She had never had as much direct control over a carrier in her life, since there was ordinarily at least an automatic flight control system to interpret her commands from the manual controls into a series of related actions throughout the ship. She would be in control of actual navigation, engine power, and the jump drive as a method of emergency evasion. The more precise control of the Maeridyen’s main systems would come from Tresha and her assistant at the engineering station. Cargin, from his station beside Consherra’s helm on the central bridge, would have main weapons control, while the defense station would coordinate the ship’s shields. Flight control and navigation would assist Consherra in flying the ship, while the scanning, running systems, and damage control stations would pick up any slack.
With even automatic flight control relying on the ship’s non-sentient computer network to coordinate her systems. Consherra or even Velmeran on the upper bridge could have handled all of those functions alone. There was going to be a great deal of shouting orders and instructions across the bridge, and Velmeran had to direct the battle through this awkward network. All of this was complicated even more by the fact that this was an unfamiliar ship to the crew of the Methryn, with more main drives and a more efficient jump drive than they were used to, and a more complex weapons array that included a second conversion cannon. Consherra was hoping for at least one trial flight before battle, to get some feel for what was in effect a very different ship from the old carriers.
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