Battle of the Ring Read online

  “Then we will consider that a fact,” Valthyrra remarked cryptically.

  Before Velmeran could ask for an explanation, the lift doors snapped open.

  “I will see you on the bridge,” she said quickly, and withdrew her presence from the automaton. The machine turned and drifted off, seeking its mounting cradle. Mayelna pulled Velmeran into the lift.

  “Valthyrra is quite beside herself over something,” Mayelna began as soon as the lift was moving. “And it has something to do with you. How did you know? There was nothing to indicate that it was not a company ship.”

  Velmeran shook his head slowly. “I do not know. It is not normal... “

  “Since when have you worried about being a normal, ordinary Starwolf?” she asked. “You can tell me. I am, at this point, prepared to accept anything.”

  “Well, there are times, more and more often lately, when I know things that I could not possibly know,” he explained hesitantly. “It used to be that I was alert to clues that no one else could find. Now there are times when I know answers when even I can see no clues.”

  “You have already proven that.”

  “Also, there are times that I hear the thoughts of others calling out to me,” he continued with even greater reluctance. “That is how I knew this time. It seems that I often hear thoughts of fear and desperation during a run. But this time I heard thoughts of indignation as well, that they were Traders and should be immune.”

  “Telepathy?” Mayelna mused, and shrugged. “Why the hell not? We have always had the ability to sense high-energy emissions. We generally do not think about it, but it must be some form of telepathy. Must be our Aldessan heritage. They are tremendous telepaths.”

  “But why should I be the first Kelvessan telepath?” Velmeran protested.

  “Why indeed?” the Commander laughed. “Meran, it does not surprise me at all. I have always said that fate must have conversations with your subconscious, and now I see that it must be true. Why have you said nothing?”

  “It was not the type of thing that I felt confident to talk about. Not until I gave myself away. When you are the first known telepath in the history of your race, you tend to keep it to yourself.”

  “Velmeran, I am going to arrange more matings for you,” Mayelna said briskly. “It is now more important than ever to reproduce your traits.”

  That suggestion was a logical one, and with considerable merit. The females of their race, at those rare times when they knew that they were likely to conceive, often arranged a mating in the hope that desired traits would be passed on to their offspring. At that time there was no Kelvessan whose genes were in greater demand than Velmeran’s. Nor was there a male more reluctant to mate.

  “Consherra...,” he protested weakly.

  “Consherra would be the first to agree,” Mayelna insisted. He knew that it was the truth, but he had no wish to discuss it.

  “I also want you to work on developing your talents,” Mayelna continued. “Valthyrra might be able to help you with that. It will be interesting to see the extent of your talents.”

  * * * *

  “The object of this first exercise is simple enough,” Consherra explained as she shuffled a deck of large, stiff plastic cards between her four hands. “I will draw a card and you will determine the symbol that is pictured on it.”

  “I take it that I am not shown the symbols on the cards?” Velmeran asked innocently. They were seated together on the floor of Consherra’s cabin. The Methryn’s helm was surrounded by various items that Valthyrra and Dyenlerra had helped her collect. A portable medical scanner was aimed at his back, although Consherra insisted that this was only an exercise, not a test.

  “Concentrate!” Consherra ordered, drawing the first card so that he could not see it. He stared, she noticed, not at the card but at her. After an instant his expression became one of surprise.

  “Where did you get these silly cards?” he asked incredulously.

  She shrugged helplessly. “They are the only cards that I could find. Thrynna uses them with her first-level students – most of them have not yet learned to read. Just tell me what it is.”

  “It looks like a thark bison,” he replied.

  “You are not sure?”

  “I have never seen a real thark bison.”

  She placed that card on the floor and selected another. “And this?”

  “Terrestrial horse.”

  “And...”

  “Quan rat.”

  “Do you have any idea how you know?” Consherra asked suddenly, her hand on the card she did not draw.

  “I am doing it the easy way,” he replied. “You are looking at the card for me. I see the image in your mind. In fact, you are thinking so hard that you are practically shouting at me.”

  “That is what I suspected,” she remarked. “Can you guess the card before I draw it?”

  “Now, that is harder,” Velmeran said, and concentrated. “Tharnlak. Flordan. Sivan. Langie. And a very large dog.”

  Consherra glanced quickly at the next five cards and frowned. “Harder, you say? Because you have to probe the identity of the card itself?”

  “I suppose so,” he agreed. “All I know is that it is harder.”

  Consherra laid out several cards facedown, including a few that she had already used. “Find the Quan rat.”

  Velmeran indicated a card but did not pick it up. Consherra looked at the card, then glanced at him. “Find the langie.”

  When he indicated the stack of discarded cards, she made a disgusted sound. “And the wolf?”

  Velmeran indicated a card without hesitation.

  Consherra stared in surprise. “How can that be? I was making that up!”

  She lifted the card and set it down again. “Damn! Well, so much for that.”

  Velmeran stared at her as she began to collect the cards. “What is wrong? How did I do?”

  “You did perfect,” she told him. “But what about the wolf?”

  She lifted the card for him, revealing it to be a wolf. “I had no idea what cards I put down. Either chance outsmarted me, or I have a touch of your own talent.”

  She set the cards aside and picked up a small cardboard box, which she placed on the floor in front of him. “There are several objects in the box. Name as many as you can.”

  Velmeran stared at the box a moment before glancing over at her. “More children’s games?”

  “No, not at all.”

  “I can see that.” He stared at the box a moment longer. “There are five plastic figures that I identify as large reptilian forms, perhaps Terrestrial dinosaurs. Please do not ask me the type; paleontology was never one of my strong suits, although I do consider these ruling diapsids of the Mesozoic. There are several coins of various types, mostly copper and bronze although one is almost pure silver. There are four machine parts of types that I cannot begin to identify. There is a pan, a rubber ball, and... teeth?”

  “Human dentures... that is Dyenlerra’s contribution,” Consherra explained. “And do not look so horrified. Our teeth might be self-repairing, but humans are not so lucky. Anything else?”

  “There is a photograph,” he said.

  “Of what?”

  “How should I know? It is dark in there.”

  Consherra rolled her eyes to indicate her impatience with him. Velmeran frowned as well. He had little desire to be a part of this from the beginning, and now he was convinced that this was only more trouble for him, much more than it was worth. His new talents held no fascination for him. Instead they had frightened him from the first, not in themselves but because they were one more way in which he differed from his own kind. He was alone, and he would always be alone. Even Consherra, as much as she meant to him, could not fill that strange longing he had for someone just like himself.

  “Velmeran, what is it?” Consherra asked, noticing his distraction. “What is it about this that troubles you?”

  Velmeran glanced up at her, and was about
to tell her that she could not understand. Then he caught himself. She had always made an effort to understand him, and she did know him better than anyone else could.

  “I am not certain,” he said at last. “Velmeran the Magnificent has grown somewhat, coming even closer to immortal status. Perhaps he is becoming a little too complex for me.”

  Consherra nodded. Velmeran the Magnificent was their own term for a living legend, his own alter ego, the great one who had lead the raid on Vannkarn and five more missions just like that. He was the person that Velmeran became when duty required. But the real Velmeran was simple, sensitive, and often insecure. Only she knew him as he really was.

  “I understand,” she said slowly, and glanced up at him. “Velmeran, do you still dream of what our race will become when the war is over and we are free?”

  “Of course,” he replied. “That dream gives me the courage to do what I must. If I lose that dream, then I will be no more than an ordinary pilot.”

  “Well, I believe that you are leading us along the path to what we will become,” she continued. “You have many special talents, not all of them psychic. But being a leader, you are in front of the rest, alone and by yourself. I understand the sadness that is a part of your life, since you must pay for this greater dream with all your own personal dreams. I wish that I could make your sadness and hurt go away and still your longing, but I cannot. You need the understanding of someone like yourself, which I am not. No one is like you, but I think that you are not so different as you believe.”

  “Perhaps you do know me well,” he conceded. “But if I am not Kelvessan, then what am I?”

  “Something more,” Consherra said, pointing to the medical scanner aimed at his back. “Dyenlerra wants to study you very closely. The suggestion has been made that you are a mutation, perhaps the first evolutionary step our race has taken since our creation. In short, you are the real Kelvessan. We are only the prototype.”

  -2-

  The palatial structure in the mountains south of Vannkarn was called Rane Manor after its first owner, although the dynasty he had founded now bore the name Lake. This was not the original mansion; few things built by man could survive chance accident and natural disaster that long. In all those years, fifty thousand in all, only one thing had remained unchanged: the same family had ruled there in a line of descent that had remained unbroken. The family name had changed often and clan leaders had frequently turned to the offspring of near or distant cousins to adopt an heir.

  Richart Lake had come to that high position with the sudden if not unexpected death of his grandfather hardly a year before. Richart was not the same sort of man Jon Lake had been, and the sector already reflected his changes. Jon Lake had been philosophical and reflective, while Richart was calculating and coldly efficient. He ran the sector as he had run Farstell Trade, as a business, a tool to control the population, with definite goals to be met and a profit to be made. And he was in his own way even stronger.

  Donalt Trace, the Sector Commander, was like neither of those two. He disdained both government and business; according to his own philosophy, a society existed primarily to serve the needs of its military. His whole life had been shaped around the single, all-important task of defeating Starwolves. Richart, on the other hand, had been taught that the Starwolves were a threat that could not be effectively countered, a problem that could be quietly worked around but never eliminated. That was perhaps their main difference. Donalt would have them always fighting, while Richart knew that they could not win. Neither of them had an effective solution. Until now.

  Jon Lake had divided the two great tasks of his life between his two successors. Donalt had inherited the problem that the Starwolves represented, but Richart had received the greater responsibility of ensuring the survival of their race. The human species was in rapid decline, too long apart from the rules of natural selection that had shaped their very being. Weak and defective traits had polluted the genetic resources of the entire species. A large portion of their race was impaired physically or mentally beyond the ability to function normally. This escalating problem was a drain of resources that the Union would be unable to afford before long.

  Richart Lake was the key supporter of a daring, even dangerous plan to correct this problem. His grandfather had first proposed to trim back the population of the Union by at least half. Forced sterilization would be employed on a large-scale basis, having already begun on those with severe mental or physical impairments. But those standards would slowly be increased to include everyone below a certain intelligence level or a victim of any physical defect, a subsidized return of natural selection, while genetic enhancement would be used to predispose groups of people to certain tasks.

  The problem of enforcing that plan was obvious. The implement of the first phase, four months earlier, had led to unrest on every Union world, rioting on twenty and the complete overthrow of Union authority on one. Before the next phase could be put into effect, the full force of the military would be needed to intimidate or punish the general population into compliance. And for that, the problem of the Starwolves must somehow be eliminated. That last point was vital, for the Starwolves would quickly use the Union’s troubles to defeat it.

  And that was Donalt Trace’s specialty.

  Trace had been nervously pacing the hall outside Richart Lake’s office in Rane Manor for the past half hour. Now he straightened his back cautiously and eased himself into a chair. Circumstance had not been kind to him these past two years. He had just finished with a series of operations to reconstruct his ruined back, blasted by a bolt from a Starwolf’s gun. Nor had his reputation survived the raid on Vannkarn unaffected, in spite of his uncle’s best efforts to protect him. Then the old Councilor had died suddenly, leaving him to fend for himself while still immobilized by his injuries and his new weapon only half built. As the new Councilor, Richart had shown him little support and had gone so far as to consider his replacement.

  But now that they needed him for their purposes, they could not be nicer. The door to the inner office opened and Richart Lake stepped out. Trace rose as quickly as he dared, hoping that he was not betrayed by the pain in his back. His real condition was such that, had it been an officer in his command, he would have restricted the man from space travel and certainly combat duty.

  “Hello, Don. I’m glad that you could make it,” Lake greeted him cordially enough, almost enthusiastically.

  “No problem,” Trace assured him, stepping into the office as the other held the door for him.

  “Please excuse the mess,” Lake said as he pulled the door shut, indicating the boxes, files, and temporary access terminals that littered the room. He showed Trace a chair in front of the desk and hurried around to take his own seat behind. “I’m afraid that we are only now getting matters straightened up and back into working order. Next week we move into the new government building, but it will be at least a year before we return to the same level of efficiency we had before the Starwolves brought the roof down on top of us. Farstell was a lot easier to put back together.”

  “Farstell had the advantage of duplicate records as shipping and receiving ports and factories,” Trace pointed out. “There was a lot gone from the government and military offices that can never be replaced.”

  “True enough,” Lake agreed, and leaned back in his seat. “I have received a full report on the space trials of your new ship.”

  “So? What do you think?”

  “It is slow... “

  “It was never meant for speed,” Trace replied. “Just as long as it can get itself where it needs to be.”

  “Then you are satisfied with the machine?” Lake asked.

  “Yes, I am,” the Sector Commander replied without hesitation. “It is everything that I had hoped it would be. It accelerates and handles perfectly. The computer network and channeled power grid work as well in real life as they did on paper.”

  “And the sentient command computer?”
/>   Trace shrugged. “Again, it was perfect in its operation. It is no more or less than it needs to be. As you know, it has intelligence, independent reasoning capabilities, and self-awareness, it can take care of itself, but it will also follow orders without question. It is not a living, thinking, feeling being like the Star-wolf carriers, but we did not want that in the first place.”

  “No, we did not,” Lake agreed thoughtfully.

  “And it can fight,” Trace continued. “We ran it through twenty-eight simulated attacks by Starwolves. Everything we know they have, we threw at it. It survived every attack, and won more than half of the engagements that we played through.”

  Lake glanced up at him. “No problem for you, I trust? I mean, you are still fairly fresh from your last surgery.”

  “No, no problem,” Trace assured him. “As you pointed out, the machine is no light cruiser. We took at most a momentary five G’s, otherwise no more than sustained three.”

  “Then you will be along for its first mission?”

  “Yes, I must. I expect that we will have no problem the first time that we meet Starwolves, since they will not be prepared for what my beauty can do. Assuming they survive, they are likely to run crying for Velmeran to slay this dragon for them. And Velmeran is the one unpredictable element. If he shows up, then I want to be there.”

  “Well, that is just the problem,” Lake said, leaning back heavily in his chair. “The Fortress is a strong defensive weapon. Put one of these in a system and you are drawing an imaginary line that you dare any Starwolf to cross. I do not like having to use our only Fortress as a combat lesson. But we need that ship at Tryalna if we are going to retake and hold that system. The Starwolves know what the revolt and secession of a major system will mean for the Union, and they are going to fight to keep it free.

  “We have to do something about the Starwolves if we are going to be respected. They have been having their way with us ever since they broke into Vannkarn. And you can bet that Tryalna would not have been so quick to revolt if they had not been certain that the Starwolves would protect them.”