Tactical Error Read online

  He nodded. “This is the main complex, of course. Hangars for the supply ships and the mock wolves are on the far side of the western ridge.”

  Lenna was so surprised by that unexpected lead that she almost forgot to tender the appropriate thanks and farewells as she followed Bill out the hatch. The tank rose and moved away, accelerating up the long ramp back to the surface. Lenna hardly even noticed as she walked absently across the garage toward the tram station, while Bill followed loyally behind.

  Things seemed to be going about as well as she had any right to expect. First she was delivered right inside the base itself, without the need to bluff her way through security, and then she was given the lead she needed to begin her search. Apparently the vague hints were perfectly true. The Union was developing a new form of missile or automated fighter that employed highspeed artificial intelligence to outfly the Starwolves, a highly advanced variant of the old Wolfhound missiles that had been used to limited effect in the past.

  “Get a move on,” Bill told her softly. “You might attract attention to yourself, shuffling about like that.”

  “All right. You just keep your shell on,” Lenna answered softly. “What’s your problem? You have a short in your patience chip?”

  “What do we do now?” he asked, his usual practical and unperturbed self.

  “Now we establish our cover,” she said, directing Bill into the first of the two compartments of the tram. “First we turn up the personnel sections and requisition ourselves an apartment where I can leave this arctic gear, and then we begin having a look about. If things continue to... Hello!”

  “Hello,” Bill answered pleasantly.

  “Oh, debug yourself!” Lenna snapped, waving him away impatiently. She had been bent over the control panel in the front of the compartment, where the operator could select from between some three dozen tram routes. There was a very extensive map of both the passenger and heavier cargo tram routes. “Why, just look at this map. This place must be as large as a city. And a fairly large city, at that.”

  “Many places to look,” Bill remarked innocently.

  Maeken Kea stood at the window of the observation deck, watching the loading of the cutter that would take her back to Vannkarn. The ship looked small and lonely in the immense, underground bay now that the fleet was under way, just as this entire complex seemed silent and empty now that its primary function was done. She wanted out of here, but she did not want to go home. She wanted to be out with her fleet, at the command of a swift, powerful ship. Even a Fortress would do, for all that she seemed to have bad luck with the monsters.

  Donalt Trace stood a short distance behind her, leaning back with crossed arms against the table that rested against the inner wall. He was a towering man, as big as she was small, a stately, ruggedly handsome man with streaks of white in his hair and a regal face lined by years of care and reconstructive surgery. They were both growing old in the pursuit of his schemes.

  “It’s just not fair,” she insisted, turning to face him. “We’ve worked on this for years. Twenty years of planning all coming together at the same time, hitting the Starwolves in more ways than they can possibly handle. Next to you, I’ve done more than anyone else to make this happen. I want to be a part of it.”

  Trace shook his head slowly, perhaps even sadly. Maeken expected no concessions from this man, not even for her. Obsessed men were supposed to be cold and uncaring, to use others as they used themselves. Most people assumed that Donalt Trace was a man obsessed with the destruction of the Starwolves, a certain Starwolf named Velmeran in particular. But Maeken thought that she knew him better. Fighting Starwolves was simply his job, and he took it very seriously.

  Trace’s task was simple in definition, but seemingly impossible in actual implementation. He had to find a way to destroy the Starwolves so that the Union would be free to turn its military might inward to enforce the sterilization of complete segments of its own population. Genetic drift was slowly degenerating the human species; the essential rule of nature that only the strong should survive had not been in effect in hundreds of centuries, and the Union wished to impose its own standards of just who should survive and reproduce. The Starwolves were enough of a distraction that the Union’s ability to police and control its own was beginning to slip, with elements of internal rebellion growing rapidly for the first time in thousands of years.

  Fighting the Starwolves meant fighting Velmeran, their tactical leader, a Starwolf of tremendous cunning and initiative. Twenty years and more had passed since Donalt Trace’s last meeting with Velmeran, and he had, in a strange way, benefited from that meeting. He had been matured by what had happened to him that last time. He had shed his blind loyalties, beliefs, and prejudices, his foolish self-limitations that had made him the simple, shallow man he had been. He had learned wisdom the hard way, through defeat and the cynicism born of his failures. He had become a serene, calculating man of tremendous depth, a man qualified at last for defeating the ultimate weapon of war, the sentient fighting machine of artificial design known as the Starwolf.

  He had learned to defeat them in the only way he could. He knew now that he could never build better ships or weapons than they possessed. He had come to realize that he could never build better pilots, living or mechanical. The only way to defeat Starwolves was to be more creative than they were. The only weapon that would work against the Starwolves was themselves. Twenty years of careful planning had gone into a relentless series of attacks designed to make the Starwolves outsmart themselves.

  He pushed himself away from the table, his biomechanical arms moving with their typical hesitation. “Every part of my plan is ready except for the contingency clause. That’s the part that only you can do for me. If we win, we win everything, perhaps even an immediate end to this ancient war. We certainly make our victory inevitable. If we lose, we lose everything. That means that someone I can trust has to be there to pick up the pieces.”

  “No, don’t say that,” Maeken protested. “There’s no way that we can fail now.”

  He stepped up close behind her, placing his hands on her shoulders. She almost could not stop herself from flinching under that touch, knowing the incredible strength contained in those hands. Stronger even than the hands of Starwolves, although he had only the two. “Just keep in mind who it is we’re fighting, and never underestimate them. They are very, very good. Their only weakness is that the only way they know how to think is like themselves. My only remaining concern is how much Velmeran might have learned from fighting us.”

  Maeken glanced out the window, seeing that the cutter was being sealed for flight. She bent to collect her bags. “Well, I suppose that I should be on my way. They seem to be ready.”

  “They have to wait for you,” Trace pointed out as he took one of her bags for her. “It’s your ship.”

  Maeken laughed, giving him the benefit of the doubt. He joked so seldom, but he was often funny without intending to be. “So, what will you do when it’s all over? Retire?”

  “If I can,” he said as they walked over to take the lift down to the main level of the bay. “It’s hardly going to be that simple, as if the war will just end. I don’t know how many of their carriers we can catch all at once. We might be hunting down Starwolves for some time yet to come. But it is good to know that we can finally defeat them.”

  “If you are so sure of that, then why do I have to stay behind to pick up the pieces if something goes wrong?” Maeken said softly, mostly to herself. Trace did not seem to hear as he pressed the call button for the lift. Maeken frowned. “What will happen, when the war is over? I mean, everything about our military, our government, even our economy, is designed to run on this war. We build a massive amount of ships, weapons and equipment each year, and the Starwolves oblige us by destroying a large part of it all so that we can build some more. I had always assumed that we would have done something to end this war one way or another a long time ago, if we really wanted.”

>   “That might have been true, in the past,” Trace answered. “The war was a ready-made justification for limitless spending on construction and research, for tight control on trade and interplanetary travel. But then this business of genetic deterioration became an inescapable fact, and the war has turned from an asset to a liability.”

  “But what do we do now?” Maeken insisted. “If the basic economic structure of our civilization is about to come to an end, what do we put in its place? What can we do?”

  “What can’t we do?” Trace asked in return, then stepped out of the lift when the doors snapped open. “Don’t you understand? The Union wants to take itself apart. A war economy is a system that belongs to a forgotten age. I like to think that we have outgrown that, that perhaps we outgrew such things a long time ago and just never realized it. I would like to see my fleet become something very different than it is now, perhaps a body of explorers and peacetime troubleshooters, and I don’t mean anything military or clandestine by that, but an organization of scientists and diplomats and teachers.”

  “In all the years that I’ve known you, I never suspected that you were secretly a starry-eyed optimist,” Maeken remarked as she hurried to keep pace with him. “So with everything else in the known universe about to change, what is to become of you? Time at last to be yourself? Maybe settle down and have children?”

  Trace considered that, his face making no less than two almost comical contortions. “If I had children now, I would be just old enough to settle down and have grandchildren.”

  Maeken frowned to herself. She could see that she would get nowhere along that line, at least not until the war was over. “Well, if those are your objectives, why not just make peace with the Starwolves? I’ve always found them a very reasonable and honorable people.”

  “That is the contingency plan,” Trace said in a cold, tight voice. “But not now, not when we finally have them trapped. If we make peace with them, we’re stuck with them, and there is no place for Starwolves in our future. It’s their fault that this damned, ridiculous war has gone on so long. They would never leave us alone and give us a chance to go our own way, and I should hope that we have too much human pride to let a pack of glorified laboratory animals dictate our future to us. Right now, we’re fighting to stay alive as a race. If we have to turn ourselves over to the Starwolves to guard our collective conscience and police our every move, then we might just as well die.”

  Trace walked in a rather angry silence, leaving Maeken Kea almost running to keep up with him. They crossed the twenty or so meters of the bay floor to the boarding ramp of the cutter. Trace passed her bags into the hands of a junior crewmember who was making final preparations for getting the little ship under way, indicating for another to take the bags she carried. They hurried into the ship with their burdens, and Trace turned to leave just as abruptly.

  “Good luck, Commander,” Maeken called after him, determined that he would not simply disappear without a word. Once he developed a case of Starwolves on the mind, he forgot all else.

  He paused only long enough to nod once, looking over his shoulder.

  “Commander Trace!” she insisted, running after him a few paces. “You can surely spare me a moment more of your time. You’re on your way to your carefully contrived meeting with Velmeran, and if that goes the way it has in the past, then I may never see you again. There are a lot of things that I’ve never said, out of respect for military necessity, but you can damned well do better than that.”

  Donalt Trace just stood where he was for a long moment, looking startled and slightly confused, before he turned and walked slowly back to stand before her. He towered over her, remote and silent, and Maeken wondered almost fearfully if her quiet hopes had only earned her his wrath. Then, to her great surprise, he bent to take her hand, and kissed it gently. From anyone else, that would have seemed a contrived and ridiculous gesture. Donalt Trace was, if nothing else, a man of quiet majesty and gallantry, and he had meant that gesture in perfect sincerity.

  “To a future of many hopes, my little lady,” he said, then turned to walk away.

  Maeken Kea wept silently, knowing that she had forced the question and wondering if she would have been better for never having known the truth in matters that she could never have the way she wanted.

  - 2 -

  Vast and dark, the Starwolf carrier moved quietly through the shadow of the ring, the black arrowhead shape of her armored hull almost invisible against the bands of bright colors of the immense gas giant. She stayed close to the underside of the ring, hiding in its pale shadow and the sensor distortion from the haze of fine particles of ice surrounding the ring, ready to run into the planet’s own deep shadow if unwanted visitors were to arrive in the system. No small, black fighters moved through her closed bays. Her few windows were sealed, and her running lights were dark.

  On the Methryn’s bridge, Velmeran paced with pentup energy before the central bridge. Seated at the helm station, Consherra watched him quietly. She was reminded of Mayelna, his mother and predecessor, gone now these past twenty years. She had always been content to remain inconspicuously in the quiet recesses of the commander’s station of the upper bridge, while Velmeran would more often descend to the main bridge where he could move about, watching the various stations. He was a very capable commander, but he would never be completely at home on the bridge. He missed being a pilot more than he would ever admit, and Consherra would always regret the necessity that had taken him away from the one real delight in his life. He had been a legendary pilot, but he was needed too much on the bridge of this ship.

  At least they would be meeting old friends this day. Tregloran had left the Methryn over a year before to prepare his own ship, the Vardon, for her launch and initial tour of duty. With him had gone Lenna, perhaps the most unusual crewmember ever to walk the corridors of a Starwolf carrier, as well as most of the rest of Velmeran’s old pack. Only the core of Velmeran’s special tactics team remained; Baress and the two transport pilots, Trel and Marlena. Baressa’s pack now served Velmeran for the remainder of his special tactics team.

  Of course, Velmeran was anxious to see the newest ship in the Starwolf fleet. Valthyrra was a little anxious about that herself. Consherra had been quietly amused by watching the ship’s camera pod, which had been engaged in its own form of nervous pacing, looking over the shoulder of every bridge officer in an erratic cycle. Occasionally Commander and camera would fall in beside each other as they conversed privately. That was occasionally a bit of a trick for Valthyrra, who had to choreograph the movements of her camera boom.

  “Have you heard any gossip?” Velmeran asked the ship as they both stopped just before Consherra at the helm station. “Has there been any hint that Theralda remembers anything important?”

  “There has been precious little gossip on the subject of Theralda Vardon, beyond the fact that she is up and running,” Valthyrra explained. “It has been a closed subject, considering the importance of the information she may be carrying. Why did you never take me to look for Terra while you were still in the business of predicting the future?”

  Velmeran did not answer, knowing when he was being teased and not necessarily too kindly. As it had turned out, the almost god-like psychic abilities of the High Kelvessan were limited to only a few months of hyper-sensitivity at the time when those talents were coming to their full maturity. Velmeran and several other of the Kelvessan aboard the Methryn were still remarkable telepaths, even by the standards of his own kind, but his apparent ability to predict the future had long since been severely diminished.

  The Aldessan had been so disappointed, they had refused to have anything to do with him for a year.

  Velmeran was still young for a Kelvessan – very young to command a ship of his own, young even for a pack leader. He was tall for one of his kind, although the Kelvessan did not vary greatly in most physical characteristics, and he was still smaller than most humans, even at the height of their genet
ic decline. Like all Kelvessan, he had large, dark eyes and long, thick hair of chestnut brown, but he was of mutant stock, the reason for his unusual height as well as the fact that he was somewhat less human in appearance than most of his kind, his long skull and hint of a short muzzle making him almost feral in appearance. Consherra, who shared his mutant features, had finally figured out that the High Kelvessan were beginning to resemble the Aldessan of Valthrys, their creators.

  “Here they come,” Valthyrra announced, with an almost predatory eagerness that made Consherra look up. The ship dropped her voice in a conspiratorial manner. “They came out of jump exactly five light-minutes from the planet. I never had that kind of control from my jump drive.”

  “Your frame could never take it,” Velmeran reminded her. That was a very sore point with Valthyrra. She damaged herself just a little more every time she jumped, so she was obliged to save it for emergencies. “I would like to take a short ride in that ship, all the same, if you would not consider it too disloyal.”

  “Just a moment, you two,” Consherra interrupted, sitting back in her seat with both pairs of her arms folded. “That is the Vardon, and Tregloran is the commander of that ship. She is not the property of either one of you.”

  Both Velmeran and Valthyrra stared at her, looking too surprised to be hurt.

  “I know you both,” she continued sternly, glaring at Velmeran. “You get so caught up in your schemes that you begin to give orders as if you were in command of the entire Wolf fleet. While that ship of yours always has been willing to try anything she can get away with, she has also acquired some of your bad habits.”

  Velmeran shrugged helplessly with both sets of arms. “I am in command of the entire Wolf Fleet.”

  “You can still be polite.”

  Valthyrra had tracked the main viewscreen around to observe the approach of the other ship, and they looked up in time to see the almost breathless approach of the Vardon, appearing suddenly under the ring and braking sharply with her forward engines to pull to a sudden halt barely twice her own length away. There was a certain amount of blatant showing off in such a maneuver, although Valthyrra had to think that fifteen million tons of ship was a lot of weight to throw around so casually for a machine that was still making her trial flight.