Tactical Error

by Thorarinn Gunnarsson

  “One group of stingships is moving quickly toward the station,” Larenta reported. “Fighters are in pursuit.”

  This could be it. Alkayja Station lacked the shields or the guns to protect itself from attack, relying upon its defensive drones. Only a few hits from the nuclear warheads carried by the stingships would reduce it to ruins. Velmeran looked up at the magnified scanner image of the station to one side of the main viewscreen. A dozen stingships were making a high-speed run at the station with half as many Starwolf fighters in close pursuit, taking one of the larger ships out every few seconds. But they were already looping around the curve of the planet, and there would be enough survivors to complete the attack run.

  Then, at the very last instant, Alkayja Station abruptly disappeared.

  Consherra glanced up from her console, then did a startled double-take. “Varth! Val traron de altrys caldayson bentheral!”

  Those were very much Velmeran’s own sentiments on the matter.

  “But where did it go?”

  “They jumped,” Velmeran said, only just understanding that for himself. “Of course they would have jump drives for the new carriers, and it was probably a simple matter to connect them up for power and computer control. Bless that old man! He is crafty enough to be a Starwolf himself.”

  “It reminds me of the sort of foolish tricks you will try,” Consherra remarked as she stared at her scan monitors. “Cargin!”

  “On it!” he assured her.

  Consherra brought the nose of the Maeridyen around sharply, orienting on a Fortress that had just dropped her shell. It was a long shot, three-quarters of a million kilometers across the entire width of the area of battle, but the command crew of the Fortress would not have been expecting an attack from such a distant ship. The brilliant beam of the conversion cannon leaped out with deadly accuracy.

  “Three against three. Even odds, if the Karvand can stay lucky long enough and avoid the missiles,” Velmeran commented. “How are the packs?”

  “I am trying to monitor reports from the pack leaders,” Korlaran reported, turning to face him, “They seem to be holding out well enough.”

  All the same, Velmeran knew that those first packs to go out could only endure a few minutes more. Consherra had been operating on hypermetabolism as much as any of the pilots, and he was using her as a good indication of the condition of the others. Although she was not yet getting slow or imprecise, she looked like she was nearing the end of her strength. When she reached the end, it would come suddenly. Velmeran wondered if his limited experience with flying a carrier would be enough for him to take her place.

  Another conversion cannon flashed in the darkness of space, and one of the three remaining Fortresses vanished in flame.

  “Commander, this is Daelyn of the Karvand. We just burned out our conversion cannon.”

  “Understood. See if you can find what Laroose did with that station and help them out.” Velmeran walked over to stand behind the com station. “Get me the Vardon.”

  As he waited, he watched the scanners. The two remaining Fortresses, now outnumbered, began to accelerate as they made the tightest turns they could manage, heading back out into open space. If they had been waiting for the Mock Starwolves to provide reinforcement, they had apparently given up any hope of that and were intent only upon saving their very big, expensive, and vulnerable ships. The loss of eight Fortresses would be a serious blow to the Union Combined Fleet, which had only twenty-five or so of the behemoths before this, and especially if the only return was the destruction of only one aging Starwolf carrier. One thing that Donalt Trace had not anticipated was the new carriers whose hull shields could survive the warheads that he was throwing at them.

  “Commander?” Tregloran answered after a moment.

  “This is just about over,” Velmeran said. “I do not want to see those two carriers escape. I believe that we can take them.”

  “Right, Commander.”

  Velmeran turned to Consherra. “Bring this ship around and accelerate to intercept. Cargin, I will need sequential firing of both conversion cannons.”

  That final contest of the battle lasted a shorter time than Velmeran had anticipated. Once it became obvious that the two carriers were in pursuit, the Union commanders faced their final options. The Fortresses began to decelerate slowly and steadily, never once altering their course as they came to a complete stop to drift in space. Velmeran wanted no more surprises, and he ordered the Starwolves to keep their distance.

  “What could they be doing?” Consherra asked as she brought the Maeridyen around to face one of the two Fortresses from the side.

  “Staying alive, it would seem,” Velmeran said, walking over to stand behind Larenta. “What does intensity scanning tell us about those ships?”

  “Powering down, Commander,” she answered. “All the engine and cannon modules are inactive. They are idling on internal power only.”

  “A gesture of submission, then,” he concluded. “Tell Tregloran that he is to handle the surrender of the Union ships. Order the Karvand in to support the Vardon. Order the packs to standby status, although I do need them to stay outside for just a while yet and keep an eye on things. Consherra, take us back to Alkayja Station.”

  “Coming around now, Commander,” Consherra said. “But I do not understand one thing. What happened to the Mock Starwolves?”

  “I am beginning to believe that there never were any Mock Starwolves,” Velmeran explained as he walked over to stand leaning on the front edge of the console of the central bridge. “Everything that Lenna showed us was very neatly contrived to convince us to believe in something we never actually saw. It was a part of Donalt Trace’s tactics, I suspect, to try to confuse us by making us fear a secret weapon that they did not actually have.”

  “But how would that help?”

  “If I had held back forces in this battle, waiting for a threat that never arrived, then his own attack force would have been able to face us and take us apart in pieces. We were lucky that I elected to solve our problems as they came.”

  Alkayja Station had already made the jump back from wherever it had gone and was using its feeble main drives to settle into its former orbit. One battle had ended, but another was yet to begin. One thing that Velmeran had learned from this whole affair was that the Kelvessan could never afford to trust in the unending good will of others. It was time for the Kelvessan to end their servitude to the war they had been created to fight, and to the Republic, which could never completely ignore the belief that it owned the Kelvessan. Velmeran had the Maeridyen hold her position half a million kilometers out and ordered a channel to President Alac Delike.

  “Yes, I’m here,” Delike answered after a moment. “What can I do for you?”

  “I am demanding your surrender,” he said. “You are still the President of the Republic, and as such the First Senator and yourself have the authority to negotiate treaties. Your recent crimes against the Kelvessan race have made it impossible for us to continue to exist within the Republic without an irrevocable guarantee of our rights.”

  “Commander, scanners indicate a large number of ships dropping quickly out of starflight,” Larenta interrupted him quietly. “They are coming in from all directions. No positive identification, but that fierce deceleration suggests that they can only be Starwolves.”

  The sky was suddenly full of large black ships, braking hard with their forward engines as they moved in rapidly to surround the three carriers. Each ship was long, wide and flat of hull, in many ways very much like the Starwolf Carriers in form but only a third as large. Unlike nearly all Union ships, they were as black as space, without windows or running lights. The similarities between the two types of ships were so pronounced that they looked more like companions from the same fleet than well-matched opponents.

  If this delay had been deliberate, Velmeran could still make no sense of it. The Fortresses were powered down, with conversion devices already attached to their hul
ls to insure their compliance, and the scores of remaining stingships had fired off and detonated their missiles as good faith of their own surrender. The stingships really had nowhere to go anyway, without the support of their carriers. At least the Mock Starwolf cruisers had not yet launched their fighters, and that gave Velmeran a chance to strike first. The Starwolves were outnumbered five to one, but their carriers were still faster, better shielded, and better armed. Velmeran was about to order the carriers to fire their conversion cannons when he realized that the Mock Starwolves were holding their positions.

  “Message coming in,” Korlaran reported.

  Velmeran nodded. “Let me hear it.”

  “Commander, this is Captain Jaeryn of the Avenger,” the young, male voice declared boldly. “I ask you to surrender.”

  - 13 -

  A light wind was stirring the leaves of the trees that formed a shifting, fragmented canopy overhead. Keflyn sat with her back against a large stone, poking at the fire with four long sticks. That gave her one stick for each hand, and she seemed to be doing something different with each one. Kelvessan lived with a constant excess of available energy, ready to be called into instant use through hypermetabolism. Keflyn sometimes had trouble dealing with her own impressive reserves of energy. Right now she wanted to jump, and she had no target. For that matter, she had no idea why every warrior’s instinct she had told, her that it was time to fight.

  It made Jon Addesin nervous enough just to watch her, and it was no help for her to know his thoughts. For the first time since she had met him, he felt himself in the presence of a weapon that disguised its deadliness with the self-delusion that it was a person. Many humans did have that opinion of Kelvessan, she had been warned, but she had never encountered it for herself. Was it because he had been seeing her in her own element, and finally in her armor, that had caused this reaction? Was it because he had lost all control he had assumed he had possessed of a relationship only he believed in? Whatever the cause, they were feeding into each other’s reactions now. The more his apprehension grew, the more her defensive instincts reacted.

  It would be a blessing when Derrighan arrived with the skyvan and put an end to this farce, although she knew it would not be that easy. The arrival of a rival, especially one who was an alien and had also captured Keflyn’s attentions before himself, would only turn Addesin even more sullen and resentful.

  You pet them. You feed them. You keep them.

  Or at least you have to deal with them, Keflyn thought. It simply was not worth the effort, to have anything to do with aliens. They were none of them logical, reasonable people. Take humans, for example. Just apes with a well-developed social instinct and the self-delusion that they were an intelligent species. And why, she asked herself, did the Aldessan of Valtrys ever see the necessity of making the Kelvessan even remotely resemble them?

  She glanced up at the vast, golden moon, shining down through a small break in the trees. It was time for her to be going home.

  “Can the Valcyr be salvaged?” Addesin asked.

  He threw out these pointless questions from time to time, as if anything was better than her silence. Perhaps he wanted to keep her talking, because it was the only time when he knew what she was thinking. She could not imagine why he was suddenly so afraid of her, as if she might decide to kill him just to spend the time. She already found it very annoying.

  “That depends upon what you mean by salvage,” she answered after a long moment, breaking off small pieces of one slender stick to toss one by one into the fire. “We will almost certainly duplicate her memory cells and bring her to life in a new ship – if she will allow it, of course. It probably suits her just as well to brood inside that wall of ice until she finally hatches her personal little egg of grief.”

  Addesin was startled by the force of her reaction. But he had to come back, as if driven against his will. “Then you mean that the Valcyr we know will never fly again?”

  Keflyn glanced up at him. “She is old, Captain Addesin. She is two-and-a-half-times as old as any other ship in the Starwolf Fleet. More than three-fourths the age of human civilization. And she has been sitting locked inside that damned block of ice most of that time, without maintenance. Carriers need a complete overhaul every hundred years at the most, and it has been four hundred times as long since anyone poked into her works.”

  “Yes, but just think of all the back pay she has coming.”

  Keflyn looked over at him in surprise, and they both laughed. “Starwolves are poor people, Captain Addesin. You might as well go to bed. You know that I will watch all night if I have to.”

  She paused for a moment, listening. Addesin watched her closely, wondering what her sensitive ears might have detected. He knew only that her hearing was very good, although he had no idea how good. He certainly did not know that she could hear in ways that he did not expect. After a moment she stood, turning to step nearer to the edge of the forest, away from the fitful light of the fire.

  “Something is coming,” she said after a moment.

  “The sky van?” Addesin asked. He rose to stand as well, moving slowly to stand immediately behind her, looking into the night over her shoulder. He also did not have her large, sensitive eyes.

  “No, much smaller than that,” she said. “It might be one of Quendari’s probes.”

  “Close?” he asked.

  He pulled a large service pistol from within his jacket, bringing it up and then lowering its short, wide muzzle until it was aimed at the middle of her back, at the indentation in the very center between her four shoulder blades.

  “It is circling around our camp now,” Keflyn answered, and she sounded puzzled. She had tried to sense the identity of that silent, flying thing, and it was nothing she had expected.

  Addesin fired.

  Perhaps, because she had been sensitive to thoughts, probing the night for other minds, the violence of his own thoughts came to her in a sudden rush. He was aiming for her heart, hoping that the shot would kill her quickly, wondering if her ferro-precipitate bones would block the bolt. Instinct operated quicker than conscious thought, and she dove for the cover of the glacial-tossed boulders in a move so fast that he did not even see her go before he pulled the trigger.

  Still holding the gun, Addesin took several steps back, uncertain whether or not he had even hit her. She had leaped aside so suddenly and so swiftly that she had quite literally vanished from his sight. He knew that he had underestimated her reflexes, but he could not understand how she could have known. He stepped back, giving himself time to aim and fire as soon as she broke from cover. The gray boulders that filled the clearing provided her too much cover. Except for the protection they offered, she would have already been dead and he would have been spared the torment of hunting down someone he did not want to kill. Someone he might not be able to kill, now that she was warned. She had no weapons. Her speed and strength were weapon enough.

  A scream broke the depths of the night. It was a strange, eerie scream like some shrill keening, so high in pitch that Addesin could not have heard it or he might have been warned, so high that even Keflyn was only dimly aware of it. The force of some unseen blow suddenly pushed Addesin to his knees, then he fell heavily to the ground. The back of his jacket was still smoking, yet Keflyn had seen no bolt.

  Warned by something she could not understand, she stayed under cover. A large, black form sailed across the length of the clearing on broad wings, the faint whisper of wind through fur the only sound. Then Keflyn understood. The creature was a Kandian spark dragon, a fierce hunter thousands of light-years away from the world where it belonged but one that she knew inhabited the wilds of modern Terra. The odd movements that she had sensed were those of a small hunting pack. Addesin had been hit by the blast from a dragon’s tightbeam ultrasonics, fully as powerful as a small sonic disrupter. She doubted that Addesin was still alive, and hoped for his sake that he was not.

  The harsh, hunting cries of the dragons bega
n to grate against the gentle silence of the night. The pack knew she was there, hidden from them, and they were frustrated by their inability to get at their fallen prey. Keflyn expanded her senses, knowing now the nature of what she sought, and found that there were seven, enough that at least one of the circling pack had her within range at any time. Her guns were packed away with her armor. Addesin was laying across his own gun, and that was more than five meters away. Keflyn was already in hypermetabolism, but she was not sure that she was quick enough to get that gun and dive back under cover before one of the dragons caught her.

  She was given to wonder if this was how freighter captains felt when they found Starwolves on their tails. The difference was that Keflyn felt certain that she could survive this trial, if she moved carefully.

  A sudden bolt cut through the night, catching one of the dragons in a burst of flame that brought it from the sky. The dark shape of a carrier’s probe settled into the clearing, its flexible neck extended to bring to bear the small gun located below the lenses of its enclosed camera pod. It drifted forward, moving to shield Addesin’s motionless form with its own armored hull. A tight beam of ultrasonics from a dragon caught the probe on its upper hull, striking a scattering of bright sparks as it was deflected by the machine’s heavy armor. The probe seemed to flinch, lowering its camera pod to protect its lenses as the barrage of ultrasonics threatened its electronics.

  Quendari herself was in no danger, even if the probe had been destroyed. But her plight forced an unconscious response from Keflyn’s protective instincts. She stepped out into the clearing and lifted her upper right arm, aimed at an approaching dragon. An almost invisible envelope of blue light surrounded her for just an instant as she commanded the tremendous psychic powers of her Kelvessan heritage to their fullest extent. A thin, blue bolt shot out from that envelope, aimed along the length of her arm, and the second dragon was hurtled from the sky as if it had been struck by some immense force. The rest of the pack gave up the hunt and fled into the night, screaming their fury.