Battle of the Ring Read online

  Frenzy was a very good description of the state of affairs on the bridge. Marenna Challenger began to report damage to her innermost drive units. Maeken Kea pondered only long enough to establish exactly what was going on, then began shouting orders as she ran to her own console on the central bridge.

  “Tie me in with Commander Trace’s personal communicator!” she ordered as she ran up the steps.

  “Maeken?” Trace inquired even as she arrived at her station. “Captain Kea, what is it? My sentries just took off at a run.”

  “Follow them!” she shouted into the com. “Starwolves are in the power core. I’ve relayed specific directions to your sentries, so they will take you straight there.”

  “Right!” Trace agreed simply. The destruction of a section of the core might not affect the ship, since that power could be recircuited through the outer power network. But it was better to take no chances. If the Challenger was unable to shield herself, even the damaged Methryn could rip her apart.

  Then all the pieces of the puzzle fell into place with shocking suddenness, instantly and unbidden. Momentarily stunned by that revelation, Maeken sat down heavily in her seat to review the facts she knew. Nothing was certain, and she still did not know the full truth. But she was so sure that she was willing to gamble the success of the entire battle on it.

  “Marenna Challenger!” she ordered sharply, leaping from her chair. “Reduce speed gradually to a full stop. Do you understand me? Ready all guns and stand by to shield engines.”

  “I understand,” the ship responded. “Beginning deceleration now. All offensive and defensive systems standing by.”

  Not even Velmeran was aware for some time that the Fortress was slowing. The sudden shift of power from the rear engines to an equal number of forward engines running at the same level went unnoticed. His first hint came when he suddenly realized that the Methryn’s own sustained, high-pitched pulse was almost on top of them. In the next instant the Challenger braked hard before executing a quick end-over pivot to face back the way she had come.

  Tregloran, do you hear me? he called out with all his telepathic skills.

  Yes, Captain. Tregloran’s reply was distant but clear.

  Warn Valthyrra! I cannot yet reach her.

  I am already on my way! the younger pilot replied, for he had already figured out what was happening for himself. Unfortunately, he needed the more powerful com inside the fighter to call above the static inside the ring.

  But it was already too late. Valthyrra Methryn had been skirting one of the larger moonlets, five kilometers across and large enough to have been rounded under its own gravity. When Tregloran’s warning came, she began braking hard to stop. Suddenly the Challenger was there before her, emerging black and threatening behind the satellite. She opened fire on the smaller ship with every gun she could bring to bear. From a hundred kilometers, only four times her own length, she could not miss.

  And from that distance the Methryn’s shields had little effect against those powerful bolts. A hail of brilliant shafts of energy slammed against her shields, and she could not turn them all. One and sometimes two scored every second, cutting deep into her hull and discharging with tremendous explosions. The entire ship rocked violently under the unrelenting impacts.

  “They are trying for the bridge!” Valthyrra shouted above the confusion as she readied herself for the flight. With her own pack members clinging to the hull of the Fortress, she could not fight back. It would have been foolish, futile effort anyway.

  Mayelna glanced at her impatiently. “They seem to have a damned good idea where it is.”

  A single bolt tore screaming with raw energy through the ceiling above the bridge, cutting through the heavy plating barely a meter behind the main viewscreen and striking at the front of the upper bridge, slicing through the front of the Commander’s console and into the deck below. It discharged into the structural supports on the next level, and the force of the blast traveled upward, ripping out most of the upper bridge. Cargin, at the weapons station, was pitched from his seat and landed unharmed on the forward console to the right of the navigator’s station. Mayelna was thrown against the ceiling with such force that her armor snapped as easily as the bones within. She fell amid the wreckage of plating and her own console in the center of the bridge.

  Valthyrra’s camera pod was nearly ripped free by the blast, and it turned reluctantly when she tried to bring it back around. Reacting to falling pressure, doors were slamming shut throughout the area to contain the break in the hull. Cargin, recovering quickly, hurried to the dented helmet he spied amid the wreckage. With this in hand, he rushed to Mayelna’s inert form and gently lifted her up so that he could set the helmet over her head and clip it in place even as the last trace of air and smoke fled through the gaping hole overhead. Another crewmember arrived with pressure tape to seal the breaks in the Commander’s armor, in case the suit underneath had not sealed itself.

  Oblivious to the continued assault she was taking, Valthyrra forced her damaged camera pod around until she was looking down at Mayelna’s silent, battered form. Cargin opened her chestplate for a reading. In spite of all their fears, it showed a feeble pulse of life.

  “Dyenlerra to the bridge, now!” Valthyrra all but screamed over the ship’s com. Then, almost as an afterthought, she opened a line through every speaker and suit com. “Stand by to abandon ship.”

  Mayelna stirred weakly. Surely she had heard! Valthyrra bent even closer, hoping that her suit com remained intact. “Commander?”

  “Save yourself, you old fool!” Mayelna admonished in a thin, harsh whisper.

  Valthyrra glanced up abruptly at the main viewscreen, a cold, determined gesture. The Challenger lay to her right and slightly above barely twice her length ahead, pounding the smaller ship with unrelenting fury. Swinging her nose around to face her enemy head-on, the Methryn opened fire with deadly accuracy as she accelerated straight toward the larger ship. Valthyrra concentrated her fire on the cannons of her very nose, kilometers forward of where Tregloran and the others watched in stunned terror.

  The results were as she had anticipated. Neither the Challenger nor her captain knew whether the Methryn meant to ram or to fire her conversion cannon so close that nothing could deflect the flood of raw energy, even if it meant the destruction of both ships. Maeken Kea had to decide in a hurry. She diverted one quarter of the ship’s power to the hull shields, enough to minimize the damage of a direct impact, sending the rest into the outer shield. The Challenger disappeared within its protective white shell of static force.

  The Methryn struck that barrier nose-on and it parted around her in a fantastic display of blue and white lightning that rippled harmlessly over her hull and a fourth of the distance around the shell. At the same time she dropped her tapered nose enough to pass just beneath the blunt bow of the Fortress. Although she cleared the lower hull with fifty meters to spare, their great forms appeared to skim past with only the narrowest gap. The Challenger had dropped her outer shield and held her fire, her full power to her hull shields for nearly half a minute that the Methryn was beneath her. Then she was past, accelerating at her best speed along the decoy corridor laid by her own transports.

  Now Valthyrra was safe and could flee out of range before the Challenger could pivot back around to bring her main battery to bear. She turned her attention back to her stricken Commander. Dyenlerra had arrived moments earlier and was bent over the diagnostic unit attached to her suit. She looked up as Valthyrra brought her camera pod around.

  “I am sorry,” the medic said softly. “It is too late.”

  For a long moment out of time, Valthyrra was too stunned to react. Then she did something that she should not have been able to do, something contrary to the programming that had brought her to life thousands of years before. Her capacity for both love and grief had grown far beyond what her initial design had allowed. In a blind fury, mindless of her own safety and forgetting her own crew members on the
Challenger, she swung herself back around and began charging her conversion cannon. But the Challenger immediately sensed that rapid increase in power, and she knew what it meant. Without even waiting for orders, she threw up her shield.

  No, Valthyrra! Velmeran called to her silently across space. Run for now. I will call you when the time comes.

  That brought her fully back to her senses. She began to power down her cannon as she turned herself back around and disappeared into the ring.

  Velmeran sat alone in the chamber just off the power core, beside a control console for a field generator that still smoked from the effects of a heat charge. One life had been required in payment for the successful completion of this task. He had known that from the first. But he had thought that it would have been his own, terms that he would have been willing to pay. In the end the payment had come suddenly and unexpectedly, the one life nearest to him that he had considered safe. If he had only known. He sat alone in the middle of the vast ship that he had come to destroy and grieved silently for what might have been.

  So it was that he grieved too long, lost amid regret and self-recrimination, when Donalt Trace found him there minutes later.

  -15-

  When Donalt Trace first saw the single figure completely encased in Starwolf armor sitting on the steps of the inclined ladder leading up into the machinery of the field generator, he did not know what to make of it. Because the Kelvessa was helmeted, he could not tell who it was or why he just sat there in a decidely dejected altitude. He was aware that the Challenger had been in battle, having ambushed the Methryn and apparently won. And so he thought he knew from that who this must be.

  Commander Trace checked his rifle a final time before moving in. Two other crewmembers moved in along converging paths, their own rifles ready. The sentries held back, too big and clunky to sneak up on anything short of a deaf thark bison facing in the wrong direction. As versatile as the automatons were, they were never subtle.

  Three against one. Trace considered the odds slightly on his side because he had the element of surprise. He would have felt safer if he could have gone in shooting, but he desperately needed a live Starwolf.

  “We have you surrounded!” he called out, a slight exaggeration. “Put down your weapons and move in this direction.”

  The Starwolf looked up, startled. Seeing the three rifles trained on him, he decided quickly. Moving carefully, he released his belt with its two pistols and remaining heat charges and laid it on the floor. Then he rose slowly and walked half the distance to where Trace stood.

  The Sector Commander called in the waiting sentries, ordering them to surround the captive at a distance of only two meters and shoot if he made any sudden moves. Only then did he receive the abandoned weapons. The rifle was a greater burden than he cared to admit, and he hung it by its strap from the access hook on the side of a sentry and slipped the latch of the belt on the opposite side. He gave the Starwolf’s armor a quick inspection but saw nothing he considered to be a weapon.

  “Now, my busy little friend,” he said, facing his tiny captive. “Why don’t you remove that helmet so that we can see who you are.”

  The Starwolf released the throat clips and pulled off his helmet. As much as his kind looked alike to most humans, Donalt Trace recognized him immediately. What surprised him was to find that Velmeran had been crying. His triumphant look faded to one of sadness.

  “Your ship?” he asked gently.

  “You hit the bridge,” Velmeran explained simply.

  “I am sorry,” Trace said, and his regret seemed very sincere. “I never really meant to hurt you, not like I have. This is simply business. I do what I have to do.”

  “I am glad that you can appreciate that,” Velmeran remarked.

  Trace looked at him sharply. “What do you mean by that?”

  Velmeran only shrugged indifferently, as if he had a secret and considered it very secure.

  “You’ve put a bomb in the power core, haven’t you?” Trace insisted. “All this minor sabotage... you could work at this for hours and never get anywhere. Well, I know where you entered, about three-quarters of a kilometer back. Your bomb has to be somewhere between that point and here.”

  Velmeran shrugged again. “And how many tens of thousands of access plates will you have to check under in the next hour before it goes off before you find it? It is not a very big bomb, but it is more than enough to snap this power core in two.”

  “We can reroute the network around the power core. Besides, the Methryn is not going to fire on you – assuming she is still able – while I have you.”

  “The Methryn will do what she must,” the Starwolf assured him.”And I will be gone by then, anyway.”

  Trace grinned in wry amusement. “You know, I more than half believe you will. That’s why I’m hoping to make it very, very hard for you. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll leave you to my associates for a few minutes while I call up to the bridge.”

  Commander Trace sent him back to the steps where he had been sitting and put the three watchful sentries to stand guard over him, their guns charged and ready to fire. Then he withdrew around the corner, far enough to avoid being overheard by the sharp ears of a Kelvessa.

  Velmeran, distracted from his grief by matters at hand, gave some quick thought to the immediate future. His claim that he could escape at any time was not an idle threat. At least he hoped not. For now he had to buy time for Consherra to reach the auxiliary bridge and complete her own task. As long as Trace was preoccupied with him and the crew of the Challenger was distracted by looking for a nonexistent bomb, Consherra was likely to remain forgotten.

  Velmeran?

  Yes, Sherry? he responded silently. Are you ready?

  I am, she said. Give me access.

  Velmeran concentrated his talent on forcing the Challenger to open her basic programming. He found it easier to control this ship than to force Valthyrra to recite Lenna’s rank poetry, but he also had to be far more subtle.

  Your access is open, he reported. Take your time. I have found a way to keep this entire ship preoccupied for at least the next hour.

  Take care of yourself. Consherra admonished before quickly breaking contact. Velmeran was momentarily amused. He could guess what her reaction would be if she knew how he was keeping this ship preoccupied.

  Commander Trace returned presently, looking very pleased. Velmeran could well imagine that everything must be going very well in his world.

  “I thought that we might take a little trip up to sick bay,” he announced.

  “Sick bay?” Velmeran asked innocently. “Am I going to be sick?”

  Trace laughed as he indicated with his rifle for the Kelvessa to precede his three mechanical guards out of the chamber. “No, but it seems about the best place to try to keep you. Even our security cells are made of ordinary floor and panel plating, which would not hold out very long against your strength. No, the surest way to keep you is set you down somewhere and surround you with more sentries than you can handle.”

  Commander Trace led the odd procession out of the power core and back into the main corridors of the ship, the unfortunate Starwolf packed between two sentries ahead and three behind. They soon came to the lift and Trace went on ahead with two of the sentries, sending the car back for Velmeran and the other three. The ride was not long, the lift going up four levels and ahead only a short distance. Velmeran thought that they could not be more than three hundred meters from the auxiliary bridge, a little more than twice that far from the main bridge.

  The sick bay was clearly meant to serve a much larger crew; for the present needs of the Challenger, one physician and three automated assistants were more than enough for the single patient who waited for a plastifiber cast to cure out. Velmeran was led into a very large general diagnostic ward just off the main lobby. There he was set on a stool-like chair near the back wall, surrounded at a discreet distance by two of his dutiful guards.

  The other two remained
to either side of the door that was the only exit.

  There he sat, looking dejected but not particularly frightened. Trace watched him with an expression of puzzlement as he conferred for a minute with the physician. Dr. Wriestler seemed to Velmeran to be a fairly typical military doctor, radiating an air of faint ineptitude. They spoke quietly for some time before the physician hurried off on some errand. Trace, looking as if he had just settled some major problem, walked slowly over to where the Starwolf waited.

  “I am about to take a terrible liberty, so I want to explain,” he began, pulling up a chair of his own. “As you might have guessed, I have gone into the ultimate weapon business. I already have a ship that has proven its ability against Starwolves. I intend to build more like it, certainly. But I also hope to build a smaller carrier version, a great deal faster but just as invulnerable. Naturally, I want my own Starwolves to go with it.”

  Velmeran looked startled. “Me?”

  Trace nodded slowly. “As much as I would prefer, we cannot begin to design and create our own. But as long as we start with living genetic material, we can clone our own. By fishing out your recessive traits, and introducing genetic variables of our own, we can create an entire race out of you alone.”

  Wriestler returned at that moment, pushing a small cart that bore a collection of medical supplies. Two Velmeran recognized instantly. One, a curious boxlike device, was a suspension chamber, designed to keep organs alive in stasis indefinitely until needed for transplant. The other was a large laser cutting tool.

  “You see, I do take you at your word,” Trace explained. “I do consider it very likely that you will either escape or die in the attempt. This way, if you do part from our company, you will leave what I need behind. What do you think, Doc? A hand?”

  “Yes, that is one item he has in redundant quantities,” Wriestler agreed, regarding his subject appraisingly. Although far shorter than Donalt Trace, his thin, lanky frame made him appear taller than he actually was. “Yes, a hand would be quite sufficient. Which one do you favor?”