Battle of the Ring Read online

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” Lenna assured him absently as she struggled into her uniform.

  “And above all, do not get yourself in more trouble than you can manage.”

  “Sure. All ready.”

  She emerged from the room, abruptly transformed into a stranger. She had put on her makeup in advance, hiding her Trader ancestry with a slightly different appearance to her slightly slanting eyes along with the hollow cheeks and wide, thin-lipped mouth of a native of the Lokuivea worlds, who still reflected their strong Polynesian and Amerindian background. Curiously enough, that might also explain any peculiarities in her speech.

  “Ah, the girl of a thousand races,” Baress said approvingly. “A true artist.”

  “That was my name at the bottom of the painting.” Lenna retrieved her gun and joined the others. “Lead on, wizard.” The first task was to find a main corridor that would lead the Starwolves to the forward portion of the ship, and where Lenna could find a lift to serve as the shortcut that she alone dared to use. There was a basic logic to the construction of this ship. In a sense the Fortress was a large ship inside a larger shell. The outer shell was the hull itself, its quartzite shielding and the vast sockets that held the guns and engines. Three hundred meters inside that was the inner hull that housed the mechanical workings of the ship itself as well as several cubic kilometers of crew quarters, storage bays, and machine shops.

  The only inhabited regions in the outer hull were the rider bays and airlocks such as the one they had just entered. A single wide corridor extended tunnel-like to the interior portion of the ship, where a second airlock sealed it against emergency decompressions. Velmeran cycled this lock as he had the first, stepped boldly through the moment the inner doors opened, and found himself face-to-face with an automated sentry.

  “Hello! Where did you come from?” he asked in mild surprise.

  The sentry said nothing. The pair stood motionless as Velmeran stared into the glass eyes of the machine’s cameras. Moments passed, and the apprehension of the others turned to complete mystification.

  “Well, now, that is better,” Velmeran said with disarming familiarity, as if he had just run across an old friend. “Do you have a name?”

  The sentry appeared surprised. “I am called Ecs23-18.”

  “Oh, that is no name!” Velmeran declared. “What if we give you a real name? Bill, I think. Do you have any friends, Bill?”

  “I have no friends. I am security automaton.”

  “We are your friends now, Bill. Would you like to work with us?”

  “I would like that very much,” Bill replied in his even, mechanical baritone, although it was easy to imagine tears welling up in his glazed lenses.

  Velmeran took Lenna by the arm and pulled her forward. ‘This is Lenna Makayen. She is your very special friend. She has very important work to do. I want you to go with her, to help her and defend her. Will you do that?”

  “I would like that very much,” Bill agreed with a note of eagerness. “Lenna is my very special friend.”

  Velmeran turned to Leena, who was speechless. “Go on, girl. Bill is totally obedient to our will now, and he will not turn on you. He can help you more than I can.”

  “Right, Captain,” Lenna agreed, recovering from her shock. “You concentrate on your own business. I know what I need to do.”

  Velmeran nodded. “You have a very good idea, and I know that you can make it work.”

  She looked at him in surprise, then smiled. “Thank you, Captain. I’ll not let you down.”

  Lenna hung the rifle by its strap and access hook on the towering automaton’s humped back. “Can you take me to the nearest lift?”

  By way of reply, Bill turned himself around and started down the corridor to their right at his even, lumbering gait. As slow and careful as he appeared to move, his long legs carried him at a pace that Lenna had to step quickly to match.

  “There go two that I love, and the smallest not the least,” Baress quoted.

  Velmeran paused in putting on his helmet. “Is Professor Tolkien to be with us the entire mission?”

  Baress shrugged. “I thought that we might have need of entertaining company now that Lenna is gone. What did you do to that machine, anyway?”

  “Just a little judicious tampering with both the hardware and the software.” He paused a moment to secure his helmet and switch on the outside audio pickups. The Starwolves could hear, if not as well, and yet converse freely without fear of being heard. “We have to hurry now.”

  “We should have asked Bill for directions,” Consherra remarked as they started off in the direction the sentry had led Lenna.

  “No need,” he assured her. “All the major sections of the ship are located on a major corridor. Corridor three, level twenty-five ends at the auxiliary bridge. All we have to do is find corridor three on this level and go up five to level twenty-five, then follow that corridor forward all the way.”

  “And what about the sentries?” she asked.

  “We will have no more trouble with sentries. I just needed a little practice at hearing them.”

  “Hearing them?” Baress asked incredulously. “You can sense the tiny generator in a sentry over the roar of this beast’s engines?”

  “Of course.”

  “If you say so,” he said dubiously. “I only wish for half your talent. Still, it is as they say, do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.”

  Velmeran glanced at him without pausing. “My mistake was obvious. I should have given Lenna access to my books, and given you my art supplies. Then neither of you would have understood what you had well enough to annoy me with it. Ah, here we are.”

  They emerged suddenly into a vast chamber, three levels high by nearly twice as wide and extending in either direction as far as even their sensitive eyes could see. Tubes of various sizes, from pencil-thin to large enough to walk inside, ran along the walls, ceiling, and floors, while several of the largest were suspended in frames in the center. Railed catwalks leaned out from the walls on various levels, and a raised platform wove a twisting path through the maze of pipes on the floor.

  “This is your major corridor?” Consherra asked.

  “Of course not,” Velmeran replied. “We follow this forward to the next major transverse corridor, and that will take us directly to the major lateral corridor we need. Then we follow that forward until we find stairs leading up.”

  The Methryn sat in a natural pocket within the interior of the ring, her engines idle as she waited, and pivoted carefully until she was facing back the way she had come. Capture ships continued to arrive, every one both the Kalvyn and the Methryn possessed, and set to work plugging her corridor with boulders pushed aside in her passage. Transports of all sizes were gathering patiently in the main portion of the corridor five kilometers away.

  “A report just came in,” Valthyrra announced. “Tregloran says that the Challenger is moving again.”

  Mayelna nodded slowly without turning from the main view-screen. “What about your mechanical self? That rock you pushed weighed a great deal more than you do.”

  “Oh, I can handle more stress than that,” Valthyrra assured her. “That is part of the reason I have a shock bumper in my nose. However, I am reminded of something from ancient Terra, an animal called a seal that was trained to balance a ball on its nose.”

  “No seal ever had to balance its ball while running a path no wider than itself at four thousand kilometers per hour.”

  “I also doubt very much that seals ever threw rocks at battleships,” she said dryly, then glanced at the viewscreen. “Only for him would I even consider doing such a thing.”

  Mayelna glanced up as well. The capture ships had completed their labor and were joining the transports in the main corridor. Seen from behind, their careful arrangement resembled the outline of a Starwolf carrier.

  “All ready?” she asked.

  “Just about,” Valthyrra r
eplied. “If the Challenger moves back up to her previous speed, she will be passing here in about ten minutes.”

  “Will this arrangement work?”

  “Yes, it will work,” the ship insisted. “But we are still taking a chance. All of those little ships will leave a very different, energy-emission signature. For someone as intelligent as Maeken Kea seems to be, that might be too many hints as to our real tactics. Damn Donalt Trace anyway! The smartest thing he ever did was to admit that he is not smart enough to fight Velmeran. She also has the better ship.”

  “A better defensive weapon,” Mayelna corrected her. “You make up for that in versatility. You also have the advantage of being a great deal smarter.”

  “I should hope so!” Valthyrra declared.

  Mayelna smiled. “I just wish that you could fire as it passes.”

  “So do I,” the ship agreed. Unfortunately, she needed half a minute to charge her conversion cannon, and the concentration of raw energy in her containment chamber would scream her presence throughout the system. “The decoy formation is ready to proceed.”

  “Send them on, then. They need to keep all the distance they can.”

  Five kilometers away, the decoy ships began to accelerate cautiously. The unique configuration of the formation allowed their overlapping shields to form a spearhead shape, gently pushing a passage through the ring that was identical in appearance to the Methryn’s corridor.

  Donalt Trace remained in his cabin, strapped in his bunk by acceleration belts, until he was reasonably certain that the attack was over. That was hardly an act of cowardice, but a practical consideration involving a couple of hard truths. He knew that he had very little to offer Maeken Kea, and there was no doubt that his reconstructed back would not endure being bounced around the corridors of the Challenger. And so it was a quarter of an hour after the last impact that he finally started for the bridge.

  When the lift opened, he found two passengers already in the car. One was a cute if lanky Lokuivian girl in the uniform of a first lieutenant. The other was a sentry that took an abrupt step forward until the girl put out a hand to stop it. Trace naturally assumed that the machine thought it had reached its destination. He never knew how close he came to being killed by one of his own sentries.

  “Bridge, Commander?” the girl asked, and he nodded as he took his place on the opposite side of the door. “The lift is set for there already.”

  “All secure, Lieutenant?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  The lift pulled to a stop only a moment later and Trace was gone the moment the doors snapped open. Lenna Makayen rolled her eyes, sighed heavily, and gave herself an imaginary medal for acting. She would have liked to have let Bill shoot him, except that his disappearance would have thrown the entire ship into such a state of confusion that it would have been nearly impossible for the Starwolves to get away, much less complete the task at hand. With Bill at her side, she followed cautiously.

  Commander Trace found the bridge in a state of organized confusion. Stunned and injured crewmembers sat in their chairs or on the steps leading to the central bridge. Lieutenant Skerri seemed the worst of the lot, and Maeken Kea, curiously enough, was wet and barefoot. Both were bent over the monitors at the Captain’s console.

  “Moving again?” he asked unnecessarily.

  “This round seems to be over,” Maeken replied. “Did you enjoy the ride, Commander?”

  “It was interesting, to say the least. But what did they accomplish?”

  “If nothing else, they bought more time. The final phase of repairing their generators has to be a shutdown of at least several minutes to tie in new power leads. They need to keep us off their tail.”

  “No doubt,” Trace agreed, then paused to stare at her. “If you want to finish dressing, I suppose it might be safe for you to leave the ship in my care for a few minutes.”

  “I would like a dry uniform.”

  “And what about yourself, Mr. Skerri?” Trace asked of the junior officer. “You look like you need to visit the sick bay for a couple of aspirin.”

  “Yes, sir. I would appreciate that.”

  Lieutenant Skerri retreated gratefully from the bridge. His back ached fiercely, and his head hurt even more. All the same, he meant to return to the bridge as quickly as he could. His awe and respect for Commander Trace did not blind him to the fact that the old man was a mediocre battle commander at best. If he hurried, he might get back before Captain Kea left.

  “Could you help me for a moment?”

  Lieutenant Skerri stopped just short of the lift and peered at the small female figure dimly outlined in the darkened side corridor. “Yes, what is it?”

  “Well, there seems to be a bit of trouble at hand, and I really need an officer of some standing to help me.”

  “I’m Lieutenant Captain Denas Skerri,” he explained, trying to identify the crewmember.

  “Sure, you can’t get much higher than that,” she agreed. “Tell me, do you happen to see that sentry standing behind you?”

  He turned quickly and saw a sentry standing motionless in the shadows of the opposite corridor, not two meters from where he stood.

  “Yes, I see him. What of it?”

  “Well, it’s a most peculiar thing. He said that if you don’t do exactly as I tell you, he’ll blow your damned head off.”

  “He does?” Skerri asked in complete mystification. Then the little wheels inside his head gave a convulsive jerk. “Hey, what is this?”

  He turned abruptly back to the girl and found himself staring down the business end of a gun. “Actually, I’ll shoot you myself if you don’t do exactly as I say. Now, you just go ahead and call the lift. The three of us are going for a little ride.”

  The Challenger moved cautiously up the long corridor leading outward from the planet, laid by the Methryn to accelerate the massive rock toward her target. At the top of the run the Methryn’s corridor turned sharply and settled into a path that formed a more or less stable orbit. The Fortress accelerated to her best speed as she returned to the chase. She had only just achieved her maximum velocity when she shot past the Methryn, hidden in the ring a short distance to one side. Even at a relative speed of nearly a kilometer per second, it took her half a minute to pass.

  “There she goes,” Valthyrra announced as she brought up just enough power for her debris shields to deflect the rocks pushed aside by the Challenger.

  Mayelna turned to look at her. “All I saw was a big, black shadow moving extremely fast. Are you ready?”

  “Ready,” the ship agreed. “I will begin powering up as soon as the Challenger is well out of range and follow five minutes behind until the time comes to move in.”

  -14-

  Maeken Kea reviewed the scan data for the third time. Readings inside this highly charged nightmare were suspect to begin with. And it certainly seemed too good to be true, which meant to her that it probably was. She did not believe in luck. But the evidence remained, and she did not believe that static distortion could have altered the scanner reading so completely.

  “It must be so,” she agreed, although her reluctance was plain. “They are towing the Methryn.”

  “If the scan of energy emissions is at all accurate, that is the only explanation,” Trace insisted.

  “What convinces me is this additional evidence. Look at their orbital projections.” She called up the data and a diagram on her monitor. ‘Their orbit is a slow spiral inward toward the planet, taking advantage of gravity to help maintain their speed. They’re doing everything they can to keep that ship moving. The question is, did they break down or shut down?”

  “Care to make an educated guess?”

  Maeken shrugged. “It hardly matters either way. The important thing is that the Methryn is no longer moving under her own power. If we are going to catch her, it is going to be now.”

  The corridor opened onto a chamber of some size, which in turn served only as a balcony for a greater chamber b
eyond. Although it shared the same high ceiling, they could see that it dropped down at least one full level and appeared to be about forty meters wide by at least a hundred long. The three Starwolves could see little of the floor below, although they could make out a similar balcony on the far side and an entrance where the main corridor on this level picked up again.

  “Security region,” Velmeran remarked as they paused at the doorway. “We are on the far edge of the Kalfethki quarters.”

  “How do you know that?” Consherra asked.

  “Airlock,” he explained, pointing to the double doors immediately behind them. “We were supposed to be a level above this.”

  “Then what are we waiting for?”

  “I prefer to meet them here,” he said as he began to ready his weapons. Baress did the same, although Consherra was too surprised to do anything but stare in disbelief. He indicated for her to set the controls on her rifle. “Single shot, full power will be most effective. At least we have two chances to salvage this mission. The Kalfethki will not call up to the bridge until they have defeated us. Also, their weapons are kept under lock, so that all they will have to fight us will be their ceremonial swords.”

  “Why do we have to fight them in the first place?” Consherra demanded.

  “They already have us cut off.”

  Velmeran advanced cautiously to one of the two sets of stairs leading down from each corner of the alcove. Towering Kalfethki warriors. began streaming into the larger room below, stalking along in their awkward saurian gait with surprising speed. A smaller army was loping along the main corridor behind them, cutting off any retreat. All were armed with long, curved swords, with heavy blades two meters or more in length and quite capable of cutting a Starwolf in half, armor and all.

  The three Kelvessan took up a defensive position on the steps, Velmeran at the bottom and Baress guarding the top. The Kalfethki continued to come, first by the dozens and then by the hundreds, until they filled the main chamber and overflowed into the alcoves. Velmeran knew their thoughts, and he could sense their eagerness and complete lack of fear. They had no concern for wars, for defending this ship or serving their temporary masters. They wanted either the honor of the kill or their own death, with a slight preference for the former.