Dreadnought (21 page)

Commander
Gelrayen called a last tactical council on the Methryn’s upper bridge, even
though his group of experts was very limited in both size and experience. Janus
Tarrel was there mostly on the basis that she had seen the Dreadnought more
often than anyone else, human or Starwolf. Kayendel had also fought the
Dreadnought, acting as helm aboard the Vardon. Valthyrra herself completed the
group by rotating her camera boom into the upper bridge.

“What
do you think?” Gelrayen asked her bluntly.

Valthyrra
lowered her camera pod slightly. “Seriously? I believe that my objective should
be to obtain as much information and sustain the least damage that I can, with
information being the priority. I keep thinking that I can only play this as it
comes, but I suspect that I will have to get in close to the Dreadnought and
give it a sustained shot from my three forward cannons before I will see inside
that shield.”

“Is
there any hope of catching it by surprise?” he asked. “Could we hit it with
those cannons from a greater distance if we knew where to expect it, possibly
catch it with its shields at a lower intensity? If we just found out where to
find it using a very low-intensity sweep, without giving away our own presence,
we could hit it with a high-intensity beam before it could react. I am thinking
of our success with the last testing of the impulse scanner.”

“I
haven’t heard that the Dreadnought ever reduces that shield,” Tarrel said.
“Part of its advantage as a weapon is that it’s able to maintain a battle-ready
status at all times.”

“I
fear that Captain Tarrel is correct,” Valthyrra agreed. “All the same, I still
recommend that very tactic as our initial course of action. Certainly I will find
it easiest to scan the Dreadnought before it begins shooting at me. I have
little hope that the sensors for the impulse scanner will survive for very long
once that discharge beam begins hitting my hull.”

“Yes,
there is that,” Gelrayen agreed thoughtfully. “Then what we are facing is an
engagement that will be very short in duration, simply because our own
usefulness will probably deteriorate badly after the first minute or two.”

“I’ve
seen a carrier try to engage the Dreadnought once before,” Tarrel said. “I
would give you no more time than that, once it opens fire.”

“Could
we get it to chase us, now that we can keep a careful track of its location?”
Kayendel asked.

“It
hasn’t seemed prone to giving chase before,” Tarrel remarked. “It moves in
slowly and takes out everything within range.”

“Well,
it has not been given much incentive to chase,” the first officer pointed out.
“That situation might change once it knows that our impulse scanner works. If
we could maintain contact at a certain distance, we could prolong our useful
time for scanning that machine and minimize the effectiveness of its weapons.”

“All
the same, I would not anticipate that we could encourage it to give chase to
this ship,” Tarrel insisted. “Twice already it has allowed damaged carriers to
move out of range, although it could have given chase and destroyed them both
easily. Chasing would mean allowing itself to be distracted from its main goal.
It’s probably programmed against chasing.”

“I
have to agree with that,” Valthyrra added. “Even given that we cannot predict
anything absolutely, the Dreadnought’s past performance gives us some
indication of what we can expect. I do not expect that I could encourage it to
chase me.”

“You
seem to have a great deal of insight into how we can and cannot deal with this
thing,” Kayendel remarked candidly.

Tarrel
smiled. “That’s my advantage as a Union captain. I’m used to having to operate
from a position of disadvantage. Starwolves are not.”

“Then
what do you expect?” Gelrayen asked her.

“Well,
you’re overlooking one important fact,” she began. “We already know that the
Dreadnought makes routine scanner sweeps, just so that Starwolf carriers
running under stealth cannot sneak up on it. The Methryn has the same
stealth-intensity shields as any other carrier, so are our chances of sneaking
up on it any better?”

“No,”
Valthyrra admitted bleakly.

“Then,
if sneaking is out, you can only make a very quick approach under stealth and
try to be on top of it before it has a chance to see you coming,” Tarrel continued.
“If you were the Dreadnought, loitering in system before or after an attack but
not presently in battle, where would you be?”

Valthyrra
brightened, lifting her camera pod. “I would stay in close to where the action
is, or was. The inhabited planet is the focus of all traffic in and out of the
system.”

That
really was the best course of action they had. Very much depended upon whether
or not the Methryn’s scanner actually could penetrate the Dreadnought’s unusual
shield. Although that scanner had a proven ability to receive some impressions
of a Starwolf carrier running under stealth, the shields of the Dreadnought
were of a much higher intensity. They had little reason to expect that this
attempt would be successful. But the Starwolves needed more information on the
physical structure of the Dreadnought before they could fight it, even if they
had to risk an entire carrier to obtain that information.

The
problem was that they were very likely to get no return for the price they were
prepared to pay.

Now
that they were nearly five days behind the Dreadnought, they did not expect to
encounter it in this first system. All the same, the Dreadnought had
demonstrated a talent for doing the unexpected, based partly upon the fact that
it was more clever than they had first thought and partly because most of their
other guesses had been equally limited. After the Vardon’s report, they had no
way of knowing if the Dreadnought might still be loitering somewhere in the
system even after this amount of time. There was even the possibility that it
had intercepted the communications to the Methryn and was preparing an ambush
at that very moment. Theralda Vardon had certainly believed that it might
already know about the Methryn’s modifications, a matter that had been discussed
freely through the achronic channels when they had believed the Dreadnought too
stupid to notice. Valthyrra was inclined to agree.

With
the possibility of battle just ahead, Captain Tarrel wanted to be prepared for
a fight and the sharp accelerations that would involve well in advance. While
they were still a short distance out, she returned to her own cabin to put on
her armor. Valthyrra’s automated equipment had completed it on schedule,
exactly like the armor worn by the Starwolves except for having only one set of
arms and certain structural modifications to allow for her physical
differences. She was somewhat surprised to find that it had been constructed in
command white, although it was the color of a ship’s commander.

She
was also surprised to find that Lt. Commander Pesca was in his own cabin. He
was almost always off somewhere, wandering about the ship and talking with
Kelvessan in the hope of learning their language. He was trying to meet every
member of the crew. The Starwolves had discovered very quickly that he could
not tell any of them apart. He seemed to have a bad memory for people. He would
come up to each of them as if they had never met before, even if it was their
third or fourth encounter, and the Starwolves would pretend to be someone
different each time. If Pesca ever paid attention to such details, he would
have been beginning to think that there must be four or five thousand
Starwolves aboard this ship, when in fact there were hardly a thousand due to
stripped ranks and the lack of any non-active personnel.

In
all the years that Captain Tarrel had been fighting Starwolves, or at least
trying to avoid them, she had never anticipated their possession of such a
mischievous sense of humor.

Commander
Pesca looked miserable. He looked somehow like a kitten that had been left out
in a cold rain, forlorn and weary and badly in need and want of comforting.
Tarrel noticed that especially, not because she was able to feel any sympathy
for him but because of her complete lack of pity. That was what surprised her.
Since she had become a senior officer, she had always been very parental toward
those who served under her, especially her junior officers. She knew that Pesca
was in trouble with his obsession to learn the Kelvessan language, and that he
was having a very xenophobic reaction to being trapped in alien company. He
deserved pity, and yet she could not find it in herself to pity him. She
realized that she had been ignoring him so far, rather than face the question
of just what it was about him that bothered her. Perhaps he was simply too
stupid and self-centered to develop any honest social graces, like a child who
was too dull to be able to stop acting spoiled.

“Put
on your armor and find yourself a safe place to ride,” she told him. “The
Methryn is looking for trouble.”

“The
Starwolves locked me on one of the escape pods,” he told her.

Oh?
How very clever. “The escape pods have good acceleration seats, I’m sure. I can
have you put off, but probably not before this first fight.”

“I’m
not getting my work done,” he said, a vague and rather hopeless complaint. She
took that to mean that he was not ready to be put off.

“Then
what’s bothering you now?” she asked. “You’ve been in battle before. You were
there aboard the Carthaginian, and the battle between the Dreadnought and the
Kerridayen. You’re practically an old hand at this. And the objective of this
mission is to survive. The Methryn will turn away as soon as she learns
everything she can. The ship will survive, whatever else that thing does to
her.”

“Yes,
but something can go wrong,” Pesca reminded her. “I just realized that I’m not
ready for that. There’s so much I haven’t done.”

“What,
made a will?”

“It’s
not funny, Captain,” he complained, then put on the most dejected face he had.
“You might laugh to hear this, Captain, but I’ve never . . . well, you know. I
just thought I had more time, but I don’t like to think that I might have lived
my entire life without doing it.”

Tarrel
did not laugh, simply because she was not surprised. It was the old line about
going into battle and being afraid to die a virgin. Either he really was a
virgin and he meant this, or else he was naive enough to think that he could
try such lines on his Captain. She could believe either case. “I’m sorry,
Wally. There are only Starwolves aboard this ship, and I don’t expect you to
have any luck propositioning them.”

“We’re
not all Starwolves on this ship,” he suggested with an amusing lack of
subtlety. “Since the two of us are alone among aliens, it just seems to me that
we should stick together.” This time she nearly did laugh. “Wally, I have
absolutely no interest in sticking to you that closely. I’ll give you two
warnings. First, its safer to proposition Starwolves. Second, if you don’t
straighten up and act like a good little trooper, I’ll have you put off this
ship at the first opportunity. And if you ever get familiar with me again, I’ll
ask the Starwolves to confine you to quarters until I can have you brought up
for misconduct. Understand?” Pesca looked pale enough to faint. “Yes, Captain.”

“I’m
not picking on you,” she told him. “That’s just the way the rules work for
everyone aboard ship, although maybe it’s less formal when you work behind a
desk.”

“Yes,
Captain.”

She
returned to the bridge, hoping that she was not late. The armor was somewhat
heavy, usually an irrelevant matter since even such weight was of no
consequence to Starwolves compared to the value of added protection and
durability. But it was heavy to her, and she did not want to be caught in the
corridors once the Methryn began two or three extra G’s of braking. She was
appreciative that Commander Gelrayen was willing to surrender his seat to her,
knowing that he welcomed the excuse to remain on the main bridge. He was still
a pilot at heart; he wanted to be in the middle of things, not sitting on high
and giving occasional directions to a ship that flew herself.

“We
are ten minutes out,” Valthyrra told her as she walked carefully onto the
bridge, still getting used to the weight of her armor. “What about your young
friend?”

“He’s
afraid of dying a virgin,” Tarrel commented sourly.

“There
is nothing wrong with virginity,” the ship said. “I am a virgin, and I expect
to stay one for a very long time. Monks die as virgins, and they are called
holy. To be more specific, I was wondering if he is preparing himself for our
transition out of starflight.”

“He
was when I left him. If his sense of normal caution should become overwhelmed
by baser instincts, it might do him good to spend some time on the floor. Or
even the wall.”

“He
seems to be having a hard time of it,” Gelrayen said, joining them at that
moment. “I have told the crew to be gentle with him. His behavior is becoming
rather odd.”

“I
can have him put off the ship, as soon as we find someone to take him,” Tarrel
offered. “I think it would be better for him if he does go. He seems to be a
paranoid xenophobe.”

“Is
he?” Kayendel looked up from her helm station. “Why would he want to become a
linguist if he is afraid of aliens?” “Some morbid fascination to the unbalanced
mind, I suppose. Half of all mental health professionals I’ve ever met were
worse off than most of their patients.”

“I
am bringing the ship up to full battle alert,” Valthyrra announced. “We have to
be ready for anything. If this is the time, then we must move very quickly and
get away.”

Captain
Tarrel obediently hauled her armored self up the steps to the Commander’s
station, allowing the Starwolves to attend to their last-minute duties. She was
just a little annoyed that she was unable to wear her armor with the complete
disregard of the Starwolves; they made it seem easy to look grand and powerful
in their suits. The armor itself was only half the weight, covering the
pressure suit, pressurization equipment, and a self-contained atmosphere
designed to satisfy Starwolf needs for up to ten hours using a carbon dioxide
converter system and solid oxygen supplement canisters. The heating was a
simple wire mesh inside the pressure suit, and cooling—a more important matter
under most circumstances—was a solid state unit assisted by a microcirculation
network. The power, enough to supply auxiliary weapons or to run a companion’s
damaged suit, came from a self-contained total conversion generator.