Tactical Error Read online

  “The repairs should be done any time now, certainly no more than another two minutes,” the ship answered.

  Velmeran frowned. What did he do now? This attack had obviously been aimed at capturing the Methryn, taking advantage of the admittedly ingenious abilities of the little automaton that had been used to rob the carrier of her main power. He doubted that the Methryn was in any shape to fight these three Fortresses even when she did break free, yet he could not leave Kanis at the mercy of this attack force.

  “Do not bring main power up until we need it,” he directed at last. “When we break free, we will accelerate straight ahead at high speed. Have two quartzite detonator missiles ready for launch.”

  “Understood,” Valthyrra agreed. “Main power will be ready when you need it. Our people are now all inside and accounted for.”

  Velmeran nodded. “Secure the airlocks as soon as the packs can have them clear, even if you can close only one set of doors.”

  He turned to Consherra, who had stepped up behind him. “Well, this has been a close one. They catch us by surprise every now and then, but it only works once.”

  “From now on, we have to scan all boarding ships for hitchhikers,” she agreed. “I hope that we do not have to fight. I have a very good idea what they must be doing to replace that main switching core, and it might not hold under any real stress.”

  “The airlocks are all secure,” Valthyrra announced. “We can get out of here any time you want. Main power is definitely available.”

  “No matter what, do not stress yourself beyond three-quarters of your normal full capacity,” Velmeran told her. “Go ahead and power up for flight. Turn over the main generators.”

  The entire ship shifted back from emergency support to main power, her environmental systems returning to normal levels and her full interior lighting coming back up. On the bridge, banks of consoles that had been sitting idle returned to life. The main viewscreen came up last of all, showing an unmagnified forward view. The bulk of the Fortress loomed vast and threatening overhead.

  “Blow the grapples,” he ordered.

  Valthyrra triggered the explosive devices that had been planted on the joints of the grappling probes. A series of powerful blasts shook both ships as the Methryn all but disappeared within a cloud of flames and debris. Only three of the grapples were ripped away by the explosions themselves, but the rest were all so weakened that they failed immediately when the carrier began to pull away, dropping down away from the Fortress to clear the depression in the underside of her hull.

  The Methryn engaged her main drives an instant later. Riding the double glare of her flaring engines, she shot out from beneath the vast nose of the Fortress and away into open space. She accelerated rapidly, putting distance between herself and the three Union ships before they could recover from this unexpected move and open fire. Then, even as she ran, the Methryn fired both of her missiles simultaneously, emerging from the small, hidden bays under her nose.

  Propelled by powerful drives, the missiles were visible only by the fierce glare of their engines. They hurtled ahead of the Methryn until they were well clear of the carrier, then looped around tightly, each one turning across the path of the Methryn, reversing their course completely to pass just to either side of the ship. As massive as they were, the Fortresses could not begin to evade impact in time. They were committed to a collision course at more than half the speed of light.

  Unshielded, that impact alone would have probably vaporized a sizeable portion of one of the Fortresses. Even so, quartzite shielding at full power could have survived even that with only minor damage. The missiles struck the middle Fortress with the force of small nuclear explosions, shattering the quartzite shielding over an area of little more than a square meter. But that was all that was needed for the wave of plasma energy created by the detonation of the missile to penetrate those cracks and begin spreading like a circular wave over the hull of the ship just under the surface of the shielding, shattering the quartzite and lifting it away from the skin of the ship like the shell of an egg.

  By that time, the Methryn was already circling back well out of range of the thousands of powerful cannons of the three Fortresses, the middle one was still losing it’s quartzite shielding. The Starwolves had never had a chance to use this weapon before, or even to test it on a large subject. They had no idea just how much of the ship would be stripped by the plasma wave, and they were interested in finding out. The Fortress was not being damaged in any other way, but she was suddenly very vulnerable to attack. The other two Fortresses were already moving to position themselves between their stricken sister ship and the carrier, but they had not changed course or opened fire. The Methryn’s rather aggressive response, circling around as if ready to attack again, no doubt left their captains wondering if there were missiles ready for launch at their own vessels.

  The answer was a definite yes, although Velmeran did not care to continue this battle except in defense of Kanis. He had to chase these three ships out of system before the Methryn could respond to her own summons home. He was saving that second set of missiles to accomplish that goal. He certainly did not expect this group to try to take the planet now, and he doubted very much that that had ever been their intent. Considering the planning that must have gone into getting that automaton on board, the capture or destruction of the Methryn had been their primary ambition. Hard work, fast action, and a certain amount of quick thinking had saved his ship this time.

  “What did this cost us?” he asked, turning to Valthyrra’s camera pod.

  “No losses or severe injuries,” she reported. Her continual contact with the suits of her pilots allowed her to keep easy track of such things. “Very little damage to the ship itself, except for the main switching core. Should I begin to synthesize a new unit, or do we wait until we get home?”

  “Get to work on it right away. We have a long journey home ahead of us, and that patch could fail at any time.” He turned to lean on the console of the central bridge, where Consherra remained at the helm station. “What are they doing?”

  “They seem to be waiting, no change in course or speed,” she answered. “They probably want to see what our little weapons are doing to their ship. If the process continues to completion, it could take half an hour to strip that ship.”

  He nodded. “We will continue to circle like a scavenger until they decide what to do. I do expect that they have had quite enough and are entirely on the defensive just now, but we have to watch them until we know that they have had enough.”

  - 4 -

  The Vinthra Commercial Complex was surely the largest, most sprawling orbital station Keflyn had ever seen. Since she had visited here on several occasions in the past, she was not particularly impressed. Under the present circumstances, she was far from thrilled to be here. This place represented the lion’s mouth, and she was about to stick her head in all the way up to her shapely Starwolf derriere.

  Following the orders of station control, the Karabyn had spent the better part of an hour working her way into system as a part of the small fleet of incoming and departing ships with the precision of a stately dance. After having done it the hard way, she was beginning to have some understanding of the havoc that the sudden, menacing arrival of a Starwolf carrier must have upon a station like this. Keflyn had been taking advantage of her esteemed reputation with the crew of this ship to observe the docking from the small and rather crowded bridge, hiding her alarm at watching two-handed humans trying to dock a ship that was not smart enough to begin to dock itself.

  Since the Karabyn was a regular courier for the Union rebels, she had been scrupulous in following the protocol of asking no one their names and they did not ask for hers. She knew the name of the ship itself only because it was listed, along with her recognition code, on either side of the hull. She had been told that the crew was changed every few weeks, and that the ship herself was given a new name, code, and registration papers twice a year.


  An aging independent freighter of less than 140 meters, the Karabyn obviously did not rate very highly with the port authorities. She was nuzzling into a simple docking sleeve in one very remote corner of the station, hardly more than a large cargo airlock for her nose and a pair of braces that was ready to catch her. Even if it had been allowed for such a humble ship, they had no interest in bringing the Karabyn down to the surface as she had at Kanis. Although she had no atmospheric control or lift surfaces at all, the Karabyn was perfectly capable of landing.

  The ship shuddered slightly as she slipped her docking probe into the main airlock. The braces closed against the hull a moment later, locking her in. The bridge crew hurried to secure the ship, powering down all systems except environmental and maintenance.

  “Well, here we are,” the captain said, turning to her. “I’ll go find out if the Thermopylae is in port and where she is located. You won’t have to leave the ship until everything is ready.”

  “Will she be on schedule?” Keflyn asked, knowing that their arrival had been timed perfectly.

  “She’s a ship hired out for a regular run,” he explained. “They have to keep their schedule within a reasonable tolerance or they risk losing their contract. Barring accident or major emergency, they’ll be here.”

  The captain left in the company of a junior officer, leaving the ship’s regular business in the hands of the first officer and cargo master. Keflyn spent the time as best she could, getting herself into costume and preparing her bags for travel. As far as she was concerned, this was the most dangerous part of the operation. The captain of the Thermopylae could turn them all in for a very sizeable reward, if it included her as the main prize, and she would never know until they came to take her away. And even if that part went well, she still had to reach the other ship, which could be kilometers away through a very crowded station. Although she knew to look for the tell-tale signs that gave her away, she still thought that she looked very much like a Starwolf pretending to be human. She was never entirely sure if she had been teased when she recalled her father’s story of how he had once fooled all of Port Kallenes for a couple of days, including the redoubtable Lenna Makayen.

  The junior officer came to collect her several hours later, helping her to place her bags into a shipping container that would be transferred over to the Thermopylae. One of her bags contained an achronic transceiver that weighed half as much as herself. It seemed that the negotiations with the captain of the Thermopylae had gone extremely well, and that he was completely willing to accept the risk of transporting her to the colony on Alameda, which the Union called Charadal. But they would have to hurry, since the Thermopylae was on the Port Schedule to depart in only a few hours.

  The shipping crate was put on a cart which the officer from the Karabyn proceeded to navigate through the crowd. Keflyn was obliged to follow him at a discreet distance, with just one of her bags over her shoulder, playing the part of a passenger looking for her ship. She had to wear the cape to hide her lower set of arms, and that prevented her from wearing a uniform that would have allowed her to pretend to be the member of a ship’s crew.

  Having lived all her life in the monotonous uniformity of the same ship, she was in fact too busy enjoying herself during her walk through the station to be frightened. The corridors of the station were nearly overflowing with the press of aliens of every type, mostly human. She was so busy looking about, in fact, that she had a hard time keeping within sight of her guide. They arrived in time at an airlock essentially identical to the one they had just left. Following the instructions she had been given, she loitered at the observation port while her crate was loaded onto the ship.

  That gave her a chance for her first look at the ship that would take her to her destination. The Thermopylae was a moderately large ship by Free Trader standards, some 300 meters or more in length, but old and generally decrepit. On the whole – and largely because of Starwolf intervention – the Free Traders led a fairly profitable existence. For one to be in this state meant that they had been down on their luck for some time, perhaps impoverished from the debt of unexpected repairs. She had heard tales of Traders reduced to smuggling or other illicit schemes in their desperation to pay their port fees and keep their ships in space. This lot had apparently swallowed their pride and accepted a long-term contract for a run that would not have paid for the larger ships of the Companies.

  “We should get you on board.”

  She turned quickly to the man who had suddenly stepped up beside her. She had never met a Free Trader before. But remembering Lenna and how she could pass for Kelvessan, Keflyn was not entirely surprised at how much he looked like one of her own kind. He was too tall for a Starwolf, but he did have the same tan skin, dark brown hair and dark eyes, and the same smooth, almost child-like features, perhaps more so because he was obviously still quite young. The Free Traders were nature’s answer to the Kelvessan, the very best that natural selection could do to adapt a living creature to the same high-stress environment of space flight that the Starwolves had been designed to conquer. The outward resemblances between the two races were, as far as anyone knew, entirely a matter of coincidence.

  He did not, of course, possess a second set of arms, nor could he take more than just a fraction of the crushing accelerations that Starwolves could endure. He could not endure even an instant of the vacuum or the super-cold temperatures of open space. He could not lift thirty times his weight, nor did he face a life expectancy of centuries.

  He was sort of cute, all the same.

  “We will be leaving in less than three hours,” he said as he escorted her to the airlock. “The sooner we get out of here, the better I’ll feel about it, I do admit.”

  They were both happier once they stepped through the airlock and entered the ship itself, moving quickly through the wide tube of the docking probe and into the cargo hold. The Thermopylae was essentially just a single, long storage bay, with her engineering section in back and the crew quarters in a single deck above.

  Her companion indicated a set of stairs leading up with a gallant wave of his hand. “She’s not much, but she always gets there on time. So far, at least. I’m Jon Addesin, Captain of the Thermopylae.”

  “Keflyn, no last name, lately of the Methryn, Starwolf extraordinaire.”

  “I’ve never met a Starwolf before,” Addesin said as he boldly lifted her cape to look at her second set of arms. Most humans would not dare to touch a Starwolf, which they considered a quick way to certain death. Perhaps she just looked small and defenseless without her armor; humans were also not used to seeing Starwolves in such an advanced state of undress.

  “You might find something in there you do not expect,” she said, trying to sound stern and threatening, although she was more amused than anything.

  “I doubt that,” Addesin remarked. He stepped off the stairs and paused almost immediately before the door of a cabin. “I thought that we might put you here on the nearest end of the passenger section, right up against the crew quarters. Being a colony supply ship, the Thermopylae has to carry a fair amount of passenger space, although we have nobody but yourself on this trip. Since most of our passengers are Feldenneh, the environmental system has been converted over to their tastes. Tell me if it runs a little cold.”

  “I am not likely to complain,” she said. “Starwolves were meant for cold climates, like the Feldenneh.”

  “Is that so?” He stared at her closely. “Where’s your fur?”

  “You seem to be very interested in what I have inside my clothes,” she said, deciding to tease him hard in return. She was young enough to be quite flattered by the attention, but old enough to know better. “Do you have a thing about Starwolves? That is about as weird as it is dangerous.”

  “Just polite interest in something new and different.”

  “Different? I should introduce you to one of my Valtrytian friends, if extra limbs excite you.”

  Addesin seemed to be at a los
s for an answer to that one; Keflyn wondered if he was not used to young, innocent prey that knew how to fight back. She had learned to bluff from the best, having watched her father for years. And Lenna Makayen had told her a few things that Starwolves hardly ever knew.

  “Why don’t you stay under cover until we leave the station,” he said as he turned to leave. “The port authorities sometimes come on board to inspect the cargo before we go, but they never come into the passenger area.”

  A few short hours later, the Thermopylae backed away from her place at the Vinthra Commercial Complex and accelerated in a slow loop that carried her out of system. Eventually, as she pushed laboriously toward the speed of light, she engaged her stardrive and slipped away into the endless night between the stars. Unseen, a small, dark ship followed closely.

  Almost immediately, eight vast ships left their place of hiding in close orbit over a remote planet of that system. Seven of those ships, moving in a wide arrowhead formation, were standard Union Fortresses. The last was a ship the Starwolves had heard about in rumor but never seen. The SuperFortress, vast almost beyond belief, was nearly fifty kilometers in length, twice the size of any other Fortress. Larger even than any mobile station ever built in Union space, an armored monster vast, dark, and threatening. Slow and awkward, the strike force took the better part of a full day to accelerate to light speed, and even then they lumbered through the stars like a pack of large predators on the hunt. Indeed they were already on the scent, following the Thermopylae’s trail at a discreet distance.

  Thermopylae was a fitful, temperamental little ship. Her star-drive phased in an endless repetition of surges and stalls. The relentless pulsing was enough to drive Keflyn to distraction, for Kelvessan had been bred with the ability to sense stardrives as an alternative to having to rely upon scanner images when pursuing their prey. She went at last to the main engineering compartment in the back of the ship and began the subtle task of recalibrating the drive to phase smoothly.