Dreadnought (6 page)

“We’re
safer there, even if things do turn out badly,” she told him. “As long as we
remain outside, their safest and quickest way of dealing with us is to shoot.
Once aboard, we’re completely at their mercy, and I do trust their mercy. They
might keep the ship, but they will keep us safe and return us soon enough. But
I don’t see any reason why things should fall out at this point. You have
command. No heroics, and no suicide attacks. You might be able to destroy this
carrier from the inside by exploding the generators—and don’t think they don’t
know that—but we might need every one of these ships to defend our worlds. What
if more Dreadnoughts turn up?”

“I
understand, Captain,” Chagin assured her. “As you say, they won’t want to do
anything to scare us once they do have us in that bay.”

“I’m
supposed to go along this time,” Pesca suggested brightly. “That is my primary
mission objective now, you know. If we meet with Starwolves, I’m to listen to
them and try to learn their language.”

Tarrel
turned to glare at him. “Wally, if the Starwolves use their own language around
us so seldom that linguists haven’t figured it out before now, then what the
hell is the use of knowing it?”

Pesca
looked shocked. “I never thought of that.”

“Did
you ever do anything to Sector Commander Lake that he sent you along on this
mission just to be rid of you?”

“No,
I really don’t think so. I try to remember all the people that I’ve annoyed.”

“Then
you must be my punishment,” Tarrel decided. “Very well, you can go with me. If
the Starwolves think that most of us are just like you, they might just take
pity on us and chase away the Dreadnought for us.”

“That’s
not very nice,” he complained.

“I
am not a nice person,” Tarrel insisted. “Chagin, have you ever known me to be a
nice person?”

Chagin
shook his head emphatically. “Never, ever.”

The
actual docking took place more quickly than the crew of the Carthaginian had
expected. Kerridayen rotated herself and then dropped back until her starboard
holding bay was directly above the battleship, leaving some members of her crew
to reflect upon the size of a vessel capable of holding a Union battleship in
either of two bays. The bay itself opened outward in the belly of the carrier,
between and slightly ahead of her two sets of forward main drives, a great well
of brilliant light in the dull black hull of the massive ship. Unfortunately,
the view that could be had from any of the bridge monitors was not good. After
a brief moment, a distant mechanical boom echoed through Carthaginian’s hull as
the Kerridayen’s handling arms made contact with the battleship and drew her
into the hold.

“Commander
Tarrel?” Daerran called, only moments later. She took the message at her
station. “Captain Tarrel.”

“Excuse
me. For us, Captain is the leader of a pack of fighters, while the Commander
has the entire ship.”

“For
us, Commander is any person of command grade,” she explained. “We use Captain
for the commander of a ship out of tradition.”

“I
will remember that. I was going to say that we have set a docking tube at what
appears to us to be your main airlock. But you do not have to worry about
accidents, whatever door you might open. We have provided atmosphere within the
bay.” “When do you want me to come over?”

“Any
time you desire. Someone will be at the docking tube to escort you to the
bridge.”

Captain
Tarrel put on her best dress uniform, told Pesca that she would have him
court-martialed if he said so much as a single word, and took him to the main
port airlock, with its wide double doors generally employed as a primary access
at station dock. A quick glance out the window to one side of the lock had
shown her that the docking tube was indeed waiting. She found, somewhat to her
surprise, that the interior of the carrier was rather cool. This was enemy
territory, the place that was death for humans to go; to her knowledge, she was
the first Union officer ever to be invited aboard one of their carriers.
Although the Starwolves rescued many from disabled ships each year, prisoners
were usually kept very close to the bays and never saw the deep portions of the
great ships. There was so much mystique woven about the Starwolves that she
found herself honestly afraid to proceed, though she had thought herself too
clever and jaded for such instinctive fears.

She
was by no means prepared for her first sight of living Starwolves in their own
element. Nine of them, wearing their black armored suits—which she recognized
from their number and color as indicating that they formed a pack of fighter
pilots— waited in the small lounge at the inner end of the tube. They were
small people, all of them noticeably shorter than herself. Their appearance was
vaguely human, although their vast, dark eyes and large pointed ears made them
look more elfin. Their greatest obvious difference was the fact that they
possessed two sets of arms, a second pair just below the normal arms and
shoulders of her own race. She had heard stories of their lightning reflexes
and their crushing strength. In spite of their small stature and delicate
features, she could believe everything she had ever heard, although a more
rational part of her mind argued that the black armor-plated suits made them
appear more massive and menacing than they actually were.

At
least they were courteous as they escorted her and Pesca to the lift—the
fastest that she had ever ridden—and took them up to the Kerridayen’s bridge.
Commander Daerran was waiting to greet her personally. He was the first
Starwolf that she had ever seen not in armor, dressed as he was in what might
have been a uniform of white tunic and pants. He seemed at the same time to be
smaller than the pilots who had greeted her outside the docking tube, as she
had expected, but she could also see how heavily muscled his small frame
actually was. Of course, it was not bulk alone that gave the Starwolves their
tremendous strength and speed. Theirs was an artificial race, created
completely by genetic engineering, and even their most basic biochemistry was
entirely their own. The fact that they looked vaguely human was an arbitrary
factor, for there was no actual genetic relationship between the two races.

“Captain
Tarrel, welcome aboard,” Daerran greeted her, his voice lighter and more
musical than it had been over the com.

“Commander
Daerran,” she responded. “This is my special advisor, Lieutenant Commander
Walter Pesca.”

“A
diplomatic liaison?”

“No,”
she replied vaguely.

“Allow
me to introduce relevant members of my own crew,” he said, leading them from
the side corridor onto the bridge. “My first officer Kayell. And, of course,
the present manifestation of Trendaessa Kerridayen.”

Tarrel
was rather surprised when the long, double-armed boom fixed to the ceiling of
the center of the bridge pivoted around, a pair of camera lenses rotating in
unison to focus on her. After that startling introduction, she almost failed to
notice the first officer, a young male Starwolf. As a bridge officer, his white
tunic had black bands about the cuffs. She was glad for the distinction, about
the only way she had to tell one Starwolf from the other.

The
bridge of the carrier was not as large as she had anticipated for a ship of
such tremendous proportions. A single vast view-screen dominated the front of
the wedge-shaped bridge, with a line of various stations along the front. The
middle bridge, with its large consoles for the helm and weapons station, was
elevated above the main level by a series of steps to either side. And above
that was the upper bridge, the Commander’s station, where he could look down
into every console on the bridge. Considering the telescopic vision of the
Starwolves, he could probably read the data on the monitors at each station.
Daerran immediately led them up to his own station. Trendaessa rotated her
camera pod around to join them.

“Do
you have your data on the thing?” Daerran asked as he lifted himself into his
seat at the console, using the overhead bars.

Tarrel
gave him a small optical disk, which he fed into a drive on one of the side
consoles. The machine tried for a long moment to digest the disk, then abruptly
spit it out again.

“Yo,
incompatible format,” Trendaessa remarked. “Kayell, will you run that disk down
to the number three optical reader at the engineering station. Now, Captain
Tarrel, why don’t you tell us your impressions of what you saw.”

At
the same time that she listened to Tarrel’s account of her three separate
encounters with the Dreadnought, Trendaessa sifted through the various records
that had been made aboard the Carthaginian at those times. She employed the
three main monitors at the Commander’s station to project visually some of the
images she was compiling, almost as if she was thinking aloud through those
monitors. She never looked at the monitors themselves, so she must have had
some way of viewing those images directly.

“I
suspect that your assumptions are basically correct,” the ship said when Tarrel
had concluded her account. “The Dreadnought, as you call it, is almost
certainly only a machine, and not an especially clever one at that. Those times
when it seemed only to be playing with convoy, destroying ships in an almost
lazy manner, it was probably responding at a low-priority attack status. There
was no need for it to be in any hurry.”

“What
manner of machine?” Daerran asked.

“A
ship-killing machine, of course,” Trendaessa explained. “It apparently scans
large areas of space for the presence of artificial power sources and any
machine that is intact and potentially functional. The attack on the station
did show it destroying one larger ship that was not powered up, while shuttles
escaped unharmed, so there must be some targeting priority other than just the
sources of active power. My belief is that this is an automated weapon of
unknown alien origin, designed to destroy a civilization’s ability to make war
by decimating the ships and supporting devices that make interplanetary flight
possible.”

“Did
someone aim this damned thing at us?” Tarrel asked. “That is possible, but I
doubt it,” Trendaessa said. “Most likely, this one was set loose and just never
got turned off when the war was over, if there was anyone left to turn it off.
The fact that it responded to your attempt to communicate is interesting. It
was probably asking you if you were friend or foe. Needless to say, you did not
know how to answer. Given much more information, which I doubt that I will be
able to obtain, I might be able to learn the codes that identify a ship as a
friend, or perhaps even tell it to shut itself down. It would probably take far
less time to simply find a way to destroy it.”

“Then
you have not yet seen a way to destroy it?” Daerran asked.

“No,
I am afraid not. That monster is protected by the most powerful shield that I
have ever seen. My own shield can of course be set at the proper frequency and
level of power that will make me invisible to scanners by simply absorbing the
active scanner signals, and by containing all emissions from the ship itself.
The Dreadnought has a shield powerful enough that it contains light, like a
black hole, although gravity is not the agent of this process. It is not
actually invisible; if it was between you and a planet of a very close star,
then you would see that area blacked out by its shields. But it does not
reflect or allow light to escape, and that gives it functional invisibility in
open space. Scanner invisibility is much more useful. From a defensive
standpoint, we are about even.”

“And
the offensive standpoint?” Daerran asked. “Can you see it, and can it see you?”

“I
do not know. One carrier cannot see another that has its shields at stealth
intensity, and I doubt that I could see this Dreadnought. I cannot know whether
or not it could see me. Its shields are more powerful, and it might also have
the technology to penetrate mine.”

“And
what about weapons? This energy-transfer weapon it uses does not seem
especially dangerous to me.”

“That
is because we have never seen it used at anything more than its most basic
level. We use a destructive achronic beam which cuts into the target before the
power charge is released in a quick, strong jolt to destroy the object. The
Dreadnought uses a benign carrier, and releases its charge in a relatively
slow, steady stream. This benign carrier beam does not betray itself on scan,
or visually, the way our own bolts do, so the weapon beams cannot betray the
location of the ship itself. But I am very certain that the weapon can be
stepped up quite a bit in intensity, once firepower is more important than
absolute stealth.”

“Then
I doubt that our cannons would penetrate that shield,” Daerran said.

“I
doubt that even my conversion cannon would be able to penetrate that shield,”
the ship added. “I am not certain that I can fight this thing. For that matter,
I am not certain that all the carriers together could fight it. It might be
easy, and it might be impossible. We need more information.”

“Do
you have any recommendations?”

“Only
to find it and see what we can see.” She hesitated. “We need a decoy for it to
attack, just as Captain Tarrel has so cleverly used decoys against it.
Unfortunately, the only decoy that will serve our present need is myself. I
must fight it, even knowing that I cannot win and that I will sustain some
damage, for the sake of learning what we can.”

“Is
it worth damaging one of our few ships for the sake of information?” Daerran
asked.

“Is
it worth the destruction of a carrier, or worse, trying to fight this thing
unprepared?” Trendaessa asked in return. “I am not concerned. I will withdraw
before I am severely damaged.” Daerran leaned back in his seat, both sets of
his arms crossed on his chest. “Get in touch with Home Base for advisement and
tell them what you propose. If they agree, then we will attempt it. Tell them
also that we will be moving to intercept the Dreadnought now, and to send their
reply there. Do you have any clear idea where to look?”