Tactical Error Read online

  No race in all of space understood drives better than Kelvessan, and she soon had the aging freighter purring contently. That brought about certain very noticeable changes on the displays on the bridge, most importantly an increase in speed of almost one-fifth. That, along with the nervous complaints of the chief engineer who had been chased out of his domain by a determined Starwolf, brought Captain Addesin to investigate.

  He found Keflyn well in the back of the engineering compartment, closing access panels on the main power coupling feeding into the stardrive. That frightened him just a little; with the drive powered up, a mistake here could have vaporized the ship. He stood where he was, leaning against a post as he watched her.

  “I know you are there,” Keflyn said at last.

  Addesin shrugged and sauntered over to join her. “The position of chief engineer was not open, but you can have it if you want it. Do people come on board the Methryn and start taking her apart?”

  “The Methryn has never been in such bad shape,” Keflyn said, tightening the final bolts on the panel. “That rough phasing was giving me fits.”

  “You’re some kind of strange perfectionist?”

  “Starwolves can hear drives phasing,” she said, tapping her head. “That is no secret to the Union, although it is not common knowledge. That is why we are such good fighter pilots. We can track drives more accurately than any scanner.”

  “That’s a neat trick,” he commented, surprised and obviously skeptical. “I’ve never believed in magic.”

  “Starwolves have nothing to do with the supernatural.” Keflyn teleported the wrench that she had left beside the access panel into her hand; she had inherited her father’s remarkable abilities, although simple teleportation was actually the limit of her powers. “What we can do with the natural is something altogether different.”

  You are showing off, she told herself. Starwolves were not supposed to do things like that in front of humans, not even their friends. Of course, most Starwolves could not begin to do that. Then again, who was he going to tell? No one would believe him.

  Addesin thought about it for a moment, and decided to change the subject. “Ah, if you are quite finished tinkering with my ship, would you like to see the rest of it? Or would that just tempt you?”

  “I might as well,” Keflyn agreed as they walked slowly back to the main corridor. “I mean, we really need to get down to business.”

  Addesin looked startled. “I thought so, too, but I never expected it so soon.”

  Keflyn looked profoundly embarrassed. “I... really need to know about the Feldenneh colony. I mean, how long have they been there, how large is the colony now, and how much have they explored?”

  “In other words, do they possibly know anything so important that it would attract the attention of Starwolves?” Addesin elected to attack the matter boldly. “Say, why don’t we get just one matter of business over with early and be done with it. I know that colony fairly well; I helped to set it up. If I knew what you were looking for, I could possibly help to steer you in that direction. If I can’t know, then I’ll keep quiet on the subject from now on.”

  “Well, I wish you had not asked that,” Keflyn declared with exaggerated regret. “Now I have to throw you out the airlock and commandeer your ship.”

  “What?”

  “Why are you not afraid of Starwolves?” she asked with equal bluntness. “Humans are all supposed to be afraid of Starwolves, as if maybe we all run around poking people’s eyes out, or something.”

  “Kill you as soon as look at you is the proper expression,” he told her. “I don’t know. You see, I’ve lived my entire life without ever seeing a real, live Starwolf in person, and then you walked onto my ship.”

  “You went outside and got me.”

  “You know what I mean,” Addesin exclaimed. “That was a line, a come-on – flattery. You speak the language reasonably well, well enough to change the subject.”

  “You changed the subject. I asked why you were not afraid of me.”

  Addesin paused a moment, then indicated for her to proceed him up the ladder to the crew deck. “I don’t have an answer. You simply do not frighten me. I’ve seen things in my life that have frightened me a whole lot more than you. Now, do I get an answer to my question, or do you even remember what it was?”

  Keflyn frowned as she considered how much to tell him. “We think that your colony used to be a major world of the Terran Republic nearly fifty thousand years ago.”

  “A major world?” Addesin asked. He looked both directions along the wide corridor that ran most of the length of the ship, choosing to go toward the back. “We’ve found some ruins, but nothing to suggest a major world.”

  “You have found a few glaciers as well, I imagine,” she said, and he nodded. “Those glaciers have been at work for five hundred centuries.”

  He nodded thoughtfully. “I can tell you now that there are some buried ruins, but quite extensive and well-preserved ruins all the same.”

  “Does the Union know about these ruins?”

  “No, I don’t think so. The Feldenneh consider this world to be their own, and they can be very secretive about anything that they consider to be their business. I’ve always respected their privacy, since I work for them. At the same time, they seem to trust me.”

  They entered the large galley and lounge at the end of the corridor, with its wide bank of windows overlooking the ship’s rear drive section. Keflyn flipped the switch that opened the metal shields of the windows, looking out into the blaze of colors of the Thermopylae’s passage. Jon Addesin stepped back from the window. Few humans, even Free Traders, could endure the vertigo of looking directly into the glaring visual distortion of starflight. It was a Starwolf’s native element.

  “How long?” she asked.

  “It’s a long way,” Addesin explained. “It’s way on the outside, even from the Rane Sector. New territory for the Union. The schedule calls for three and a half weeks.”

  “And how long before you have to go on?” she asked.

  “Only a week. I hope that gives you all the time you need to do whatever you have to do.”

  “I will not be leaving with you,” Keflyn explained.

  “Oh, I see.” Addesin was obviously surprised and dismayed to hear that.

  “Could we get there ahead of schedule?” she asked, turning to look at him with a Kelvessan’s big, innocent eyes. She was no fool; he would know that every day they arrived early was another day he had with her. “I mean, surely you can get just a little more speed out of this ship.”

  It was rather bad acting. Keflyn was new at this; she knew the theory, but she had never practiced the technique. All the same, young Captain Jon Addesin swallowed it whole.

  “Well, I suppose that we could step it up just a little,” he agreed reluctantly; something about this made him very nervous. “Especially after what you’ve done to our stardrive, we could probably step up the speed as much as one-third without stressing the engines much more than we were. There’s just one thing that I have to ask.”

  “And what is that?”

  “Can you work on my generator also?”

  The Thermopylae arrived in orbit above the world that the Feldenneh natives called Charadal a full week ahead of schedule. It was a cool, green world of two wide seas between two large, continental regions, mountainous and forested between massive poles and vast plains of glacial ice. It was the type of world only a Feldhennye could love, and a world that the Kelvessan could learn to love.

  As soon as the Thermopylae had settled comfortably into orbit, the crew began the process of unloading their cargo into shuttles. The two atmospheric shuttles were kept in their bays in the underside of the freighter, where they could be loaded directly from the main cargo bay. The Feldenneh colony was receiving so little cargo on that particular journey that the whole shipment was easily loaded onto the two shuttles in only one trip. Depending upon the type of shipment the colony had for exp
ort, loading their cargo could be as easy or it could take the better part of a week. Jon Addesin never knew what he would be carrying out until he got there, but he was expecting a fairly large shipment of cured wood.

  When Keflyn followed Captain Addesin into the shuttle bay for the ride down, she had immediate reservations – the two aging transports were even more decrepit than the freighter herself, worn out from uncounted circuits into and back out of planetary atmospheres. The shuttles were an ancient and simple design, intended for slow, rough, atmospheric entries with low-powered shields that allowed a great deal of heat to leak through, deflected by the shuttle’s own ceramic composite hull. The low-powered design was slow and awkward, but it allowed for more of the shuttle’s interior room to be given over to cargo and less to massive generators.

  Keflyn was even more alarmed when she entered the forward cabin of the first shuttle to find Jon Addesin at the controls. She was not particularly surprised; the Thermopylae was flying under a minimal crew, with just about everyone taking multiple duties. Jon Addesin was not only captain but helm and navigator, and it seemed that he fancied himself a pilot as well.

  “Away we go!” Addesin declared as the shuttle fell away from its cradle out the bottom of the bay. “Have you ever ridden in one of these before?”

  Keflyn shook her head. “I usually have more sense.”

  The shuttles had no reverse-thrust engines, another weight-saving peculiarity of these machines. Addesin simply rotated the ship over on its back and engaged the main engines enough to brake their speed before rotating back to a nose-first position, letting gravity draw the shuttle down toward the planet. After a while the shields began to burn against the outer edges of the atmosphere, and from that point they were going down in a hurry.

  Keflyn had never before ridden a ship down from orbit to landing entirely by gliding unpowered. The main thing that impressed her was how long it took, nearly an hour-and-a-half after leaving the Thermopylae’s bay, a leisurely trip of about fifteen minutes in her own fighter. Unlike most transports, which would stay at speeds of two thousand kilometers or more except at landing and take-offs, this lazy shuttle spent nearly half of its glide down drifting at subsonic speeds.

  It did give her time for a good, long look at the Feldenneh colony. It was located well inland in the north of the smaller continental area, at the eastern base of the mid-continental range of mountains. Like Kanis, this was a heavily forested world, the inherent imbalance of the cold continental and polar areas and the warm equatorial seas driving a weather system that distributed a fairly even amount of precipitation year-round over almost the entire land areas. Keflyn had her closest look at the continental glaciers while they were still very far up, several hundred kilometers away.

  The colony itself was not that large, it’s single impressive feature being the three-kilometer runway for the shuttles. Some distance away, tucked back under the edges of the forest, was the colony itself, some five dozen simple wooden houses and a few larger buildings. The Feldenneh were not farmers, their diet limited to nuts, bread, and meat, and they certainly had not come to this world to farm.

  It occurred to Keflyn then that Jon Addesin was looping the shuttle around to align it with the runway, and that he intended to bring the little ship down in a rolling stop. She realized for the first time that this aging shuttle had not even been designed for field drive vertical landings. She had never made a rolling landing before. For that matter, she had never even been in a ship that had wheels, much less used them.

  Fortunately the shuttle had been designed with large wheels and rugged landing gear for high-speed landings on unimproved runways. Addesin rotated the wings forward and dropped the flaps, and the ship shook and rattled as it protested the slower speeds. Moments later it bumped hard against the runway, and Keflyn was certain that the landing gear must have collapsed to leave the shuttle sliding in on its belly, the ship shook and vibrated so violently. She was contemplating abandoning ship when the machine suddenly lurched almost to a complete stop and rolled off the runway onto the cramped parking apron.

  “There, that was something of an adventure even for a Starwolf, I’ll bet,” Addesin remarked happily as he began shutting down the little ship.

  “Flying a Starwolf fighter is an adventure,” Keflyn remarked as she removed her belts, intent upon finding an open outer door. “That was a very inefficient attempt at self-destruction.”

  “Inefficient?” Addesin was too surprised to be annoyed.

  “We are still alive.” She stared at him. “I cannot imagine that space flight was ever that primitive.”

  The nose of the shuttle split vertically just under the cockpit and opened to either side, and a ramp rolled down. By the time Keflyn reached the cargo deck, a cool, fresh breeze was stirring through the wide hatch. She stepped out onto the ramp, looking across a long, narrow meadow of deep, dense grass surrounded by forests and low mountains. It was a perfect day. The sun was bright but not hot or intense, and a gentle wind stirred through the grass in green waves.

  A flatbed land transport, loaded with crates ready for shipment, rolled along the road from the settlement to the base of the ramp, and a pair of male Feldenneh stepped out of its front cabin. Vaguely wolf-like in appearance, with slender, thickly-furred bodies and long, narrow heads, they were both nearly a head taller than Keflyn, no doubt chosen for their tasks as loaders because of their considerable size for their kind. They were about to board the ramp when they saw her standing at the top and stopped short, staring. Nothing betrayed the Starwolves more for what they were than their second set of arms. Keflyn was dressed in a conventional manner for a Kelvessan civilian, in burgundy pants and tunic with a black vest, all of heavy material, but with no cape to hide her lower arms.

  The smaller of the two relatively husky Feldenneh seemed to consider the meaning of this unexpected appearance of a Starwolf for a moment, then stepped quickly up the ramp to meet her. It had never occurred to Keflyn to wonder if Jon Addesin would have warned the Feldenneh what he was bringing them. It seemed that he had not.

  “I am Derrighan, shipping master,” he introduced himself simply, his voice the soft, rich purr of his kind. “How may the people of Denneshyann serve you, warrior?”

  “I am Keflyn of the Methryn,” she answered, a little disconcerted by his intent and slightly bewildered stare. “I have been sent to seek the answers to a very ancient riddle. We believe that this may have once been a major world of the Republic.”

  “You will have to ask our Speaker, Kalmedhae, for any answers to your questions that we may have,” Derrighan said guardedly, “but I think that you will not be disappointed.”

  Keflyn helped to unload the shuttles, since she could lift so much more than anyone else, before she rode the last transport into the settlement. She thought that she should do these people a favor or two before she came asking for handouts and hospitality... not that the congenial Feldenneh where likely to refuse her. More than anything, she was busy reviewing her strategy, because nothing in the greater universe outside the Methryn’s hull had gone at all the way she had expected.

  She had been watching her father’s techniques for years, and that had let her down from the start. Velmeran’s method of operation had always been quite simple; everyone he had ever met had been frightened to death of him. His reputation alone made his enemies afraid to cross him, while he would approach a would-be friend with that spontaneous innocence and understanding of his and win loyal supporters. That system adamantly refused to work for Keflyn. The Feldenneh found her cute and charming, and perhaps even a little lost. Jon Addesin fancied himself in love. The Feldennye shipping master Derrighan was in love, and too polite to let on. But no one was in the least bit frightened except Keflyn herself, who needed a bit more cooperation and a few less alien admirers.

  Her meeting with Kalmedhae was to take place that night over dinner in the Speaker’s own house. Kalmedhae was an older Feldenneh who served the colony as Speaker
, as far as Keflyn understood a combination of mayor, judge, and social councilor. Aside from Kalmedhae’s own household, the other guests at dinner were Jon Addesin and the shipping master Derrighan. She could imagine why Derrighan had wrangled himself an invitation to dinner; he stayed close to Keflyn’s side to insure his place beside her at the table. Addesin was, at least at first, too annoyed to notice that he had competition. He was forever trying to raise extra money for his ship by selling goods on speculation to the colonists he supplied. Because of a mistake in labeling the shipping crates, something he had bought to sell to the fur-bearing Feldenneh had turned out to be five thousand bottles of suntan lotion.

  So there Keflyn sat, trapped at the table between her pair of strange suitors, knowing that there might be trouble as soon as Jon Addesin recovered from his mood of annoyance enough to notice. Keflyn entertained some hope that Addesin might never know. Despite his occasional obvious and very self-conscious attempts at acting the part of the daring young pirate captain, he was too absorbed in nursing his shaky business and ailing ship to be aware of anything that did not present itself as a profitable venture. The possible romance of a Starwolf and a Feldenneh would not interest him beyond its threat to his own plans... unless he could figure out some way to sell tickets.

  Leave them both alone, Keflyn told herself. You will soon be going back to your own ship and your own kind. One is furry, and the other is descended of baboons. Why would you want to become involved with either one?

  It would be different?

  She told Kalmedhae everything about her mission that she had been willing to tell Addesin, not daring to allow even the Feldenneh to know the greater scope of her search. The Feldenneh gave their wholehearted support to the Starwolves, who protected them from slavery under Union control. At the same time, they were a part of the Union and often found themselves forced to fill the roles of non-combat technicians in the Union military, and they seemed to feel that that did not compromise their loyalty. Unlike Addesin, however, Kalmedhae was honestly interested in her quest, and shrewd enough to realize its implications.