Tactical Error Read online

  The Vardon advertised herself willingly as the new Starwolf supership. Her hull employed a new type of armor, a silver-titanium fusion that could disperse most direct cannon strikes in itself, but which could be infused with a structural shield to become harder even than the heavy quartzite used by the Union on their Fortresses. Because the ship was still under her trials, the black polymer impact layer that gave other Starwolf ships their distinctive appearance had not yet been installed. Her hull was still the bright silver of the original metal, except for a wide border of black impact shielding around the edges where her upper and lower hulls met along her lateral groove. There had been some discussion of leaving her in that form, a clear warning of the special threat she represented. She hardly needed that complete coat of impact polymer.

  Although the Vardon was still the same size and shape as her older sisters, she did possess some other subtle differences. She had six main drives in a slightly larger housing under each of her short, slightly downs wept wings rather than the usual four. Her stardrives were the same size as previous ships, since she depended more upon her jump drive for interstellar distances, and she was the first carrier to have twin conversion cannons, a pair of the large muzzles protruding just slightly from beneath her nose.

  “She is a pretty thing,” Velmeran commented softly. He still regretted the fact that other business had caused him to miss her launch.

  “Everything a ship could ever want to be,” Valthyrra agreed wistfully.

  Velmeran glanced at her. “They have one just like that with your name on it, waiting for you. It should be ready soon now.”

  “It would be nice, just to feel young again,” she replied vaguely.

  Velmeran did not answer, knowing that she was tearing herself apart in the duty he required of her, using the jump drive that was destroying her to keep his schedule. He had wanted for her to transfer into this ship, let Theralda wait for the one that would soon be coming out of her construction dock, but the time for going home had never been convenient, and it had seemed more important to have that twenty-third carrier in operation as soon as possible.

  “Could you find out if Tregloran wants to talk to me?” Velmeran asked.

  “He is standing by already,” Valthyrra reported; she had already been in private communication with the other ship. She moved her camera boom closer. “I will put you through on my own pickup.”

  “Treg?” he asked, addressing the camera pod.

  “Tregloran here. We are ready to go to work, Commander.”

  Velmeran glanced at Consherra. “He still knows his master’s voice. Treg, we will be coming over for a little talk.”

  “Do not trouble yourself, Commander. Theralda and I will come over to the Methryn.”

  “Not on your life!” Valthyrra interceded. “We will be over in a few minutes.”

  “You want to see how a new ship works?” Theralda asked.

  “This from a ship whose claim to fame was her ability to get herself blown out of space?” Valthyrra responded even more sharply. “I can still take you in a fight, sister. I just wanted to see if you were keeping yourself in any sort of order.”

  “You just bet. Come on over, and I’ll show you how it’s done.”

  “Just clear a path,” Valthyrra said, and cut the channel. She turned her camera pod to look at Velmeran. “You know, I think I like her.”

  When Velmeran and Consherra reached the transport bay, they found that Valthyrra was already waiting for them. The small wedge-shaped hull of the probe was hovering near the door of their transport, the shielded camera pod at the end of its long, flexible neck bent around to regard them.

  “You have elected to join us?” Velmeran asked. The probe was perfectly capable of independent space flight, as small as it was. It was essentially just a field drive system and a transceiver for Valthyrra’s use inside an armored shell.

  “I might as well take it easy on myself,” she replied. “All of my remaining probes are getting a little shabby, and we are sitting in a very cold and uncomfortable section of space just now.”

  The probe turned and drifted inside the open hatch of the transport, and the two Starwolves followed, but they paused in mild surprise as soon as they stepped inside. Venn Keflyn stood in the aisle between the transport’s rows of seats. The Aldessan was not as massive a creature as she seemed but exceptionally rangy, a dragon’s body in long, chestnut-colored fur, both sets of long, triple-jointed legs braced wide as she held to the back of the seats with all four arms. Her head was bent low to avoid the rather low ceiling, her large cat’s eyes glittering at them through the fringe of her mane.

  “Glad that you could make it,” Velmeran commented.

  “You people seem to think this business quite important,” Venn Keflyn replied. “There is a reason why I should be there.”

  That was certainly vague enough. Velmeran had met several Venn warriors from her ancient and mysterious race, but she remained his idea of the archetype. The Venn were the members of the elite group of warrior-scholars of the Aldessan – an admittedly strange combination of professions for anyone. They had created his own race, the Kelvessan, some fifty thousand years before, supposedly as the ultimate peacekeeping weapon – a function that they had not fulfilled especially well – but apparently also for the excuse for having the company of another race that was in most ways like themselves. Velmeran was even less certain that that had worked out quite as well as intended.

  They were still taking their seats when the small ship came to life, rising a short distance from the deck. A moment later the deck itself dropped away as the massive doors of the cargo bay opened, the interior atmosphere held in by a containment field. The transport moved down through the containment field and out between the parting halves of the bay doors.

  Velmeran looked into the control cabin, curious about their impatient pilot. He and Consherra were still taking their seats in the front of the main compartment. The pilot glanced at him rather guiltily, and Velmeran was surprised to see his own daughter.

  “Keflyn, what are you doing here?” he exclaimed, then regarded her shrewdly. “You expect an invitation to this meeting.”

  “Oh, sure, since I am already going in that direction, I mean,” she agreed innocently, as if accepting that as an invitation in itself.

  Keflyn had of course been named after that same Aldessan standing behind them in the cabin, at a time when Velmeran had felt far more impressed with the mysterious Venn Keflyn. She was in most ways like her father, although she was always eager and ready for anything while Velmeran had accepted greatness reluctantly. In her younger years, the only way they had found to keep her out of trouble was to constantly move her ahead in her training, until she had gone to the packs at the very early age of fifteen. Now twenty, she had nearly five years of experience with Baressa, the best pack leader in the ship, and was ready for a pack of her own.

  But Keflyn differed from Velmeran in one very important respect; both her interest and her real talent lay in command. She would be a pack leader because it was a necessary step to becoming the commander of her own ship, as well as the best use of her talents until Velmeran could find a ship for her. Perhaps in that respect she was more like her mother, Consherra, who had given up the packs and the possibility of command because she had always felt that her place was on the bridge.

  Velmeran sat back in his seat, folding his arms. “Just why is this so important to you? Is there a purpose at work here, or are you consumed with overwhelming curiosity?”

  “No, I have to go to this meeting,” she said, her voice becoming soft and serious. She did that rarely, and everyone had learned that it meant for them to pay attention. “I have this premonition that I have some important task to perform.”

  “Oh, my!” Consherra muttered, rolling her head back on the top of the seat cushion. “What do you think?”

  “She is about the right age for that to begin,” Velmeran admitted. That was a bit of an exaggeration; he
had actually been twenty-seven at the time when he had begun such tricks in earnest, although he had not enjoyed the benefit of Aldessan training. That brought something else to mind and he glanced over his shoulder at Keflyn’s alien namesake, standing quietly in the back of the cabin. “Is this why you came along?”

  “Perhaps.”

  Twenty years he had had this fox-faced, snake-bodied wiseacre on his ship, and he was still occasionally tempted to slap the mystic pretentiousness right out of her.

  “Can I come?” the younger Keflyn asked, unable to contain her suspense any longer.

  Velmeran thought about it a long moment. “You can come along, then, but you will abide by our decisions.”

  “When did you train to fly a transport?” Consherra had to ask.

  “Oh, well, I really never had,” Keflyn admitted hesitantly. “It just never seemed to me that it should be so difficult.”

  Velmeran looked rather uncertain. “Was it?”

  The transport bay doors on the Vardon closed, and Keflyn brought the little ship down on the deck. This bay was in most ways identical to the one they had just left, except that something about it just looked new. For one thing, the machinery did not seem to rattle and clang so much, and the paint on the bulkheads and beams did not have the blurred, lumpy look of several centuries of coats. Perhaps it had just been the sight of that sleek, silver and black ship that they were now inside that made the difference.

  Like a dutiful son, Tregloran was there as soon as they stepped from the transport. Like both Velmeran and Consherra, he was dressed in the white tunic, pants, and short cape that were the unofficial dress uniform of a Kelvessan bridge officer. Keflyn wore her full armored suit, with a black cape attached at the shoulder clips, in a less subtle effort than she might have wished to emphasize her own rank and experience. Venn Keflyn wore only her belt and harness, with its small arsenal of knives, guns, and small explosive devices.

  “Venn Keflyn, this is an honor,” Tregloran exclaimed, honestly surprised when the Aldessan appeared at the hatch of the transport.

  “Stuff it, Treg,” she told him bluntly. “Did you think that I would not be involved in this?”

  “I hear that you are doing well with this ship,” Velmeran commented. “No problem with the adaptations?”

  “None at all,” Tregloran insisted. “She really had handled perfectly, perhaps even better than the older carriers handled even when they were new. After fifty thousand years of exactly the same design, it was time for a change or two.”

  They stepped to one side as manipulator arms locked onto the transport and lifted it away for storage. It was an old habit on board starships to never leave anything with mass of any consequence setting about unsecured. As soon as the little ship was well clear of the deck, the small group of visitors followed Tregloran to the nearest lift.

  “It is good to see you again, Consherra,” he said. “I never realized just how much you really do as second-in-command until I had one who was new to the task, and who never wanted the job in the first place.”

  “Who do you suppose does all of the real work?” Consherra asked. “I suppose that you knew all there was to know about commanding a ship?”

  “Actually, Velmeran was a very good teacher.”

  Escaping the wrath of a first officer, he dropped back close beside Velmeran. “Have you heard anything from Lenna?”

  “Only that the crew of the freighter that had carried her in released her and Bill on the surface, they think safely and undetected,” Velmeran answered. “I do not expect to hear from her until she is ready for us.”

  Tregloran stood aside as they stopped before the doors of the lift, waiting for the others to proceed him.

  “I worry about her,” he admitted after the lift had started. “Not so much because of what she does, but because she will soon be too old to do it. I was watching her during our trial runs, and I could see that the accelerations are beginning to hurt her quite a lot. I have to wonder how much longer she can take it. As hard as it is to think about it, I suppose that she is starting to get old.”

  “Lenna?” Velmeran was frankly surprised. He remembered the girl Lenna who had followed him home twenty years earlier. She was older than he was. Was that old for a human, even of Trader stock? He frankly had no idea. “Well, when it comes time to put her off the ship, there are just two things that you should remember.”

  “What is that?”

  “First, it is now your responsibility to tell her.”

  “Oh, nice!” Tregloran complained. “What is the second thing?”

  “When you do put her out, be sure to lock all the doors.”

  Consherra turned to afford him a medium-range dirty look. “I think that what troubles him most is that he does not want to have to put her off the ship in the first place.”

  “Oh, I know that,” Velmeran agreed. “I indicated that I am sympathetic with the problem, but that I have no better answer except to say that it is his own fault for getting involved with someone from a different species.”

  Tregloran looked puzzled. “Yes, that is exactly what I thought you were telling me.”

  The discussion was mercifully concluded by the arrival of the lift at the bridge, and they arrived sooner than the visitors from the Methryn would have anticipated. Valthyrra, who had been conspicuous in her remarkable silence, bent her camera pod around to peer at the lift. Her own had not run so smoothly and swiftly even after her last overhaul. A moment later she happened to glance outside the lift into the bridge just beyond, and she was captivated. She drifted along, heedless of her companions, staring in rapt fascination. It was just like her own, but it was so new and bright and... neat. Really neat.

  Tregloran made quick introductions all around. Curiously enough, this was the first meeting between Velmeran and Theralda Vardon. He had rescued her from the museum in the port of Vannkarn more than two decades earlier. She had at the time been dormant, only a single memory cell remaining from the vast network of memory storage units and processors that formed the sentient computer systems of the Starwolf carriers. This was actually the second ship to carry the name and personality of the Vardon, the original having been destroyed over sixteen thousand years before.

  Velmeran was curious to discover just how much of the original Theralda Vardon actually remained, and whether or not she still remembered one very important piece of information. Legend, or rumor, had always insisted that she had been the last ship to know the location of lost Terra. Valthyrra, who was old enough to have known the first Vardon, thought it likely, although not even Theralda was old enough to have been there herself.

  Tregloran completed the introductions with his first officer Denna, a tall, rather dark Kelvessan with a surprisingly shy, even self-effacing smile; commanding a completely new ship had taught both her and her young commander a lot about being humble. Theralda had her camera pod bent completely around, staring at the captivated Valthyrra.

  “She will probably refuse to leave until you show her engineering and the main fighter bays,” Velmeran said softly. “I suppose that we should get on with this little meeting. Perhaps one of the smaller conference rooms...”

  “Yes, or we could just hang curtains from her and use her for a hatstand,” Tregloran added, just to see if she was listening.

  “Oh, certainly,” Valthyrra agreed, returning – with some effort – to the here and now. “We might just as well retire to one of the conference rooms and get started.”

  “An excellent suggestion,” Velmeran agreed, amused.

  Such meetings in the conference rooms located behind the bridge of the Starwolf carriers were a common occupation for most of those present, meetings that would often lead to major defeats for the Union. Keflyn had contrived to sit in on a few of the most recent meetings on the Methryn, following along as the second to her pack leader, Baressa. The group from the Methryn sat on one side of the oval with Tregloran and his first officer on the other. Denna looked rather lost and
intimidated by such exalted company, and frankly fearful of the Aldessa.

  “Well, I know what the question is,” Theralda began. Her presence was through the camera pod at the end of the sort boom hung over the center of the table, currently rotated around to watch her visitors. “I have some good news and some bad news. No, I do not know the location of Terra, at least not accurately. I have a lead. Not a conscious lead, but the location of a world that is very important to finding Earth, in some way a stepping stone on the way.”

  “But you do not recall the specific importance of this world?” Velmeran assumed.

  “No, not specifically, although I do think that it was an important base to the early Starwolves. I remember being given the coordinates of this world from Meykenna Haldayn and she told me that she had been refitted here, but the conversation exists in my current memory only as a fragment. I think that this world may have been Alameda, the original location of Home Base before it was removed to Alkayja in the heart of the Republic, and was abandoned at the same time that Terra was lost.”

  “I hope that there is something there now,” Velmeran prompted. He and Consherra both noted some vagueness to Theralda’s personality, a small lack of spontaneity and a sense almost as if her mind had a tendency to wander. Her personality programming had obviously not survived intact in that one memory cell, and she was still filling in the missing pieces. After a year’s time, she seemed to be doing very well for herself. Once she was speaking, she seemed normal enough. Her tendency toward the melodramatic was a trait she shared with all her sister ships. Velmeran found it refreshing to note that some things had never changed.