Dreadnought (12 page)

The
Vardon had cut her speed considerably and was now making her final approach to
the planet. At this range, she was finally able to make a detailed scan of the
planet itself and the general area of attack. Now that she was able to get
better information on some of the more subtle details, she began to realize
that matters here were rather more complex than she had first anticipated. That
also taught her a lesson on being more cautious, and she began to devote more
of her attention to space about her, especially behind. That was no
reassurance. If the Dreadnought was still lurking, she would not know until she
was attacked.

Wondering
what she could do to guard herself better, she recalled what she had seen in
the reports on the attacks on the Carthaginian and the Kerridayen. She checked
her files for the recognition code that the Kerridayen had used to hail the
Dreadnought, modified that slightly and broadcast it in the achronic bands.
When she received no response, she felt somewhat better about the situation.
But not entirely.

“Commander,
I have recognized a second change in the attack patterns of the Dreadnought,”
she said. “Emissions and dispersal patterns indicate two separate attacks, over
a full day apart. The main attack, the destruction of the station and most of
the ships, occurred first. A second, smaller group of ships was destroyed some
time later. I cannot say when the attacks on the surface took place, since
dispersion patterns in atmospheric conditions are too irregular to predict.
Because very few fires are still burning in the debris, I would predict that
most if not all of the surface strikes took place during the initial attack.”

“What
would you make of that?” Schyrran asked.

She
brought her camera pod back around. “Subtlety. I would say that the Dreadnought
withdrew after the first attack, hid itself, and waited for more ships to come
blundering into the system. It might still be lurking about, for that matter.
The last attack was only a few hours ago. Because those emissions are fresh, I
mistook them at first as the time frame for one single attack.”

He
looked up at her camera pod. “What is it thinking? If you were the Dreadnought,
what would be your priorities?” Theralda considered that briefly. “I have seen
and fought a Starwolf carrier. I would consider the Starwolves to be the only
real threat facing me in the performance of my mission, as far as they have
been a threat. I might or might not be aware of how many carriers there
actually are, but one of my greatest priorities would be the destruction of
those ships. And I have only just realized where we might have been making a
very serious mistake.”

“What
is that?”

“We
have been treating the achronic channels as being entirely our own property,
simply because it has been so for so long,” she explained. “And we have been
exchanging large amounts of information by achronic means, quite literally
everything we know and plan to do. If the Dreadnought has been receiving and
translating those messages, then it knows more about us than we would like. It
will know our exact number, our general locations at any time, and all of our
various facts and speculations about it, our enemy. It will even know that the
Methryn is being fitted with a new scanner. And when she comes out to find it,
then it will know that as well.”

Schyrran
crossed both sets of his arms on his chest, looking displeased about the
situation. “Continue your reports as usual, but compose a message about your
suspicions and send it on a very tight beam to Alkayja station. If that thing
is listening to us, then we might be able to mislead it with false
information.”

During
that time, the Vardon had braked to an orbital speed some distance out from the
planet. She began broadcasting in the common Union commercial and military
bands in the hope that someone on the planet could supply her with a more
accurate timetable on the attacks. She was soon given to wonder if the
Dreadnought’s double attack had spooked the locals into being too terrified of
their communicators to respond, for fear that the transmissions might draw the
monster back. She might have spooked them herself; she had already met some
resistance to accepting the idea that Starwolves were no longer enemies but
allies. But she had not recorded a single scanner beam on her way into the
system. As long as she used the Terran language and did not identify herself, they
had no way of knowing who she was.

“Military
shuttle AK-2110 D reporting,” a reply came at last.

“Report
your position, shuttle,” she ordered sharply, encouraging them to believe that
she was herself a Union military ship.

“We
were evacuating from the station, and we were coming down to Forestan Base.
When we saw that the base was under attack, then we decided to settle down into
the mountains and wait.”

“Then
there was time to evacuate the station?” she asked.

“Hardly.
I know of only two more shuttles that got away. There were pods all over the
place. But there was a large munitions store at the station, and that went
early on. I think the explosion took out most of the pods before they could get
clear.”

“But
there was a second attack?” Theralda asked. She was certain of that, but she
wondered if they knew.

“Yes,
a small military convoy came in about five hours ago. They called down, just
like you did, and the Dreadnought attacked while we were talking to them. Are
your sure it’s gone now?”

“It
seems to be, and I have even hailed it,” she responded. “You say that the last
attack was about five hours ago?”

“Yes.”

“Then
listen to me. You can begin spreading the word that the Dreadnought seems to be
gone, and it is unlikely to attack the planet itself again anyway. Try to get
things up and running again as soon as possible. I would like to stay and help
you, bill I must try to race the Dreadnought to the next system likely to come
under attack and order an evacuation.”

“You
can’t out-run that thing.”

“I
am the Starwolf Carrier Vardon,” she said.

“Oh.”
That was followed by a very long pause that Theralda found vaguely amusing.
“Then they will probably accept your word that everything is safe enough now.”

“If
you cannot trust a Starwolf, who can you trust?” she asked, knowing that it was
unkind of her to tease humans in distress. “I am leaving orbit presently. Your
own fleet should be here within a couple of days.”

Theralda
shifted her attention back to her own bridge. Commander Schyrran had stepped
down from his station and was comparing notes with the navigator and the first
officer at the navigational station. They all looked up at her camera pod as
the Vardon engaged her main drives and began to move swiftly out of orbit. She
brought her pod closer.

“It
has been about five hours since the last attack,” she announced. “My own
suspicion is that the Dreadnought left this system to proceed to its next
target immediately after that. It had been waiting for Starwolves, and they did
not come.”

“You
said that you know where it is going,” Schyrran reminded her.

“I
believe that I do,” she said. “And if it continues on for a third attack in
this group, then it will hit Norden within a week at most.”

That
was very bad news. While Norden was not a Sector Capital, it was still one of
the most important and populous worlds in this Sector, a crossroad of trade as
well as a center of high-tech industry. If the Dreadnought did hit there, this
Sector would lose two major commercial spaceports, and orbital manufacturing
complexes in addition to a large military station. And if the attack was not
anticipated, the losses would likely include not only the system fleet but a
very large portion of the Sector Fleet as well, as many as twelve hundred
heavier ships, and perhaps another two thousand commercial vessels caught at
the stations. A major shipyard would be gone as well, and that loss would
effect this Sector’s ability to recover quickly from its damages.

“Will
you call ahead for support?” Schyrran asked.

“I
will, but I doubt that any other carrier will get there sooner than myself,”
she said. “Perhaps the damage might be less if I did not, but I still must
proceed to the second system in this sequence and warn them that the
Dreadnought is probably on its way. There is nothing I can help them to do
otherwise.”

He
nodded his agreement. “But what about Norden? Are you thinking about trying to
fight?”

“No,
I cannot fight the Dreadnought,” she admitted reluctantly. “Just the same, it
very much goes against my nature to run away and allow that machine to have its
way in a major system. That used to be my job.”

Several
hours later, and with her star drives coming dangerously close to overheating,
the Vardon arrived at her next destination. She was unable to know the speed of
the Dreadnought, but with every previous indication being that it moved fairly
slowly, she should have expected to arrive well in advance of the mysterious
ship. But since she now had some reason to believe that the Dreadnought spent
some time after its initial attack loitering about, waiting for more prey to
appear, that implied that the Dreadnought might be capable of moving very
quickly between systems. Knowing the time of its last attack, she wanted very
much to learn when it had actually arrived in the next system.

She
would not, however, be able to wait around to find out. This next system was a
relatively unimportant one, the local station and traffic load smaller even
than what it had been in the system she had just left. She felt obliged to
deliver her warning and press on to Norden, where the danger was far greater,
and every hour that she saved in getting there would allow the locals to
salvage that much more. They should at least be able to get their ships to
safety. Given enough time, they might even be able to dismember and tow away
the stations, which lacked the ability to move under their own power and were
too sprawling to tow intact. The problem, of course, was that in a system of
that size, traffic that could not be warned away in advance was going to be
coming in constantly, and the Dreadnought was going to snap those up even if it
could not find anything else. And whether or not it would again attack surface
installations, and how much damage it might do, might depend upon getting the
major power sources shut down in time.

And
of course, it might also depend on whether the locals were willing to listen to
the advice of Starwolves. Commander Schyrran persisted in pointing out that
pessimistic view, and Theralda could not deny that he might be correct. As far
as either the Starwolves or their ships could determine, humans were largely
motivated by greed, and could take some enormously ill-founded risks by
weighing profit against danger as if the comparison was valid. The promise of
profit did not reduce a risk, but humans could not always be convinced of that.
If the local officials were unwilling to close to commercial traffic, much less
haul away their stations, because of the threat of lost revenue, then they
would find endless, and to them very valid reasons to question Theralda’s
judgement that the Dreadnought was coming their way.

Frankly,
the Starwolves themselves could not care less. They would fight to the death to
protect the innocent, but they were not in the business of protecting people
from their own stupidity. They were, of course, such clever people by genetic
design that they did not really understand stupidity. The Kelvessan were
generally great magnets for information, with a thought process that was
largely comparative. They had their own form of stupidity, usually reserved for
when they missed some important detail, and then their mistakes tended to be
both monumental and memorable.

Theralda
Vardon went into that first system aware that she could find trouble but not
really expecting it, and trouble was exactly what she found. She could not see
the Dreadnought directly, but the fact that the planet itself was under attack
and the station was already gone argued that it was there. She cut the very
low-intensity scans that she had been using and was grateful for having been
warned to maintain her shields at stealth intensity. There was nothing she
could do here, so she kept her engines idle and settled into a long, gentle
loop that would take her back out of the system fairly quickly, setting her
course for her next destination. She did not dare to engage her star drives
until she was well out of the area.

“Trouble
again,” she warned the bridge crew. “Our belligerent friend is already here.”

Commander
Schyrran looked up from his monitors. “Running the ship in a permanent class
two battle alert certainly is convenient. It saves having to wait for the crew
to prepare itself. I suppose that there is nothing we can do here. At least now
that we know we are ahead of the Dreadnought, I suppose that we should just
keep going.”

“Yes,
that was my thought,” the ship agreed. “I am already bringing us around on the
best course for Norden. And I do not even want to know what the Dreadnought is
doing to that poor planet. This can all be very hard on a ship like myself, you
know. I am used to being able to stomp anything I wish.”

Theralda
had no reason to expect that anything should be that easy, and she was right.
The Dreadnought betrayed itself directly by suddenly sweeping all space around
it with a powerful scan. Theralda had already wondered if its reason for
loitering in that first system was to catch any Starwolves that might come
along on a regular patrol, and it knew also from its fight with the Kerridayen
that the carriers could cloak themselves with stealth-intensity shields. When
that impulse sweep came around and registered on her passive scanners, she knew
that it was looking for her. And if the Dreadnought was looking for Starwolves,
there was certainly no difficulty in guessing why it wanted them.