Dreadnought (8 page)

Trendaessa
lifted her camera pod and looked about, her gesture one of confusion and
possibly some embarrassment. “I must have fallen asleep. Did I miss anything
important?”

“Possibly
your own destruction,” Daerran told her drily as he lifted himself from his
station. “Engineering, get repair crews onto our power systems and put
everything back into the grid. I want a list of every damaged system divided
into those things we can fix and those we cannot. Trendaessa?”

“Our
worst damage is to our power systems,” the ship answered. “We have no shields.
The main drives are down to sixty percent, and I can get enough power to the
star drives for only forty percent. We will not be going anywhere very fast
unless we can replace quite a few power couplings. At least the generators are
strong.”

Daerran
nodded. “Set a course for Home Base.”

Trendaessa
turned her camera pod to look at Captain Tarrel. “What about our passengers?”

“Just
do it.”

He
walked over to join Tarrel, who was stretching in an attempt to relieve cramped
joints. “How do you feel?”

“I
should live,” she said. “I just won’t like it for a while.” “Captain, we have a
problem,” Daerran said, helping her to stand. “I need to take my ship and her
information to our main base as quickly as we can get there. I would like to
have you along, both as an advisor and a representative of the Union. But you
will see and hear many things that you probably should not, and they might not
allow me to take you home again. Are you willing to accept that risk? I can
still have you put off.”

Tarrel
considered that briefly. “If I can do anything to help, then it would be worth
the risk. Did we learn anything?”

“We
learned that there are a few things that we should never try to do again. I
hope that it was worth it.”

Trendaessa
Kerridayen took fourteen days to make her long, slow way home. Captain Tarrel
had no idea of their course, nor did she ask. The location of the Starwolf main
base was unknown in the Union, and she believed that it would have to remain
unknown if she expected to ever be allowed to go home again. She was not even
certain of the carrier’s speed, although she suspected that they were limping
along at a pace her own battleship would have found hard to match. The Rane
Sector bordered the frontier with the old Republic, an area that was now
believed to be Starwolf territory. Fourteen days of travel at the speed and
direction she suspected would have taken them well outside of Union space.

The
Kerridayen had been in a constant state of repair since her battle with the
Dreadnought. Starwolves, as Tarrel discovered to her great surprise, did not
sleep, and they were willing to put in some very long hours. Even so, there
were fewer than three thousand of them aboard the ship, only two-thirds of that
number active crewmembers, and they had a very large ship to maintain. For all
their efforts, they made very little progress toward repairing their ship
during that long journey home. The greatest part of the damage was not
structural but to the ship’s power grid and complex electronics; some of the
damaged systems could not be replaced in flight, but would have to wait for a
refitting in dock. Superficially the Kerridayen had been badly scorched—* hard
to see on her black hull—but she had been far more badly damaged than it
seemed.

Kerridayen
dropped out of starflight well inside the Alkayja system and began braking
smoothly for her approach. There sas none of the usual bravado and intimidation
in her manner, such as she would have employed in Union space to remind people
like Captain Tarrel that she was too dangerous for them to touch. This was her
home, and here she was just a part of the regular local traffic. A small
tender, painted bright orange and sporting powerful running lights, fell in
just ahead of the carrier to escort her home, while Kerridayen herself ran with
both her recognition lamps and the retractable main lights in her shock bumper
burning. A Starwolf carrier was a very difficult ship to see, even considering
her size, and she had to make her presence well known. It would have been
better, of course, if so many of her lights had not burned out in the attack.

Alkayja
station was rather more compact than the stations that Tarrel was used to
seeing, particularly when compared to the kilometers of sprawling tubes and
modules that formed the Vinthra Military complex. The main portion of the
station consisted of two wide disks, each about twenty-five kilometers across.
The thicker disk was lined along the outside with a continuous row of vast bays
that allowed the carriers to dock facing in. The smaller disk above that was
studded with bays for ships of a more conventional size. And the station was
capped above and below with a flattened dome. Although it was a very visible
white, Tarrel realized suddenly that the actual station shared certain
similarities with the carriers. The flat, rounded domes on top and bottom
offered armored protection against attack—just like the large, flat surfaces of
the hulls of the carriers—with no sharp angles to catch a bolt that might have
otherwise skipped harmlessly off that featureless surface. All machinery, pipes
and ducting were within the shell, less vulnerable while keeping the exterior
uncluttered. The station probably even had independent interplanetary drive
capabilities.

Kerridayen’s
maneuverability was compromised from having too many of her field drive
projectors burnt out, and so the immense ship had to be moved into a refitting
bay by a team of tenders. Since the carrier weighed some fifteen million tons
that had to be stopped once it was set into motion, that was a long and
difficult process indeed. Half an hour passed just drawing her slowly up the
full length of the bay, three kilometers deep, before she nosed into the
bracket designed to receive her forward shock bumper. After that, bringing in
the braces that steadied the ship’s short wings and finally the two forward
docking tubes was fairly easy.

“I
hate that,” Trendaessa said when it was done, lowering her camera pod to the
floor. “I hate being towed. I hate being pulled and pushed. I hate being shot
at. Why could I have not been built a freighter?”

“Freighters
are stupid,” Daerran told her. “Freighters are the cattle of the lanes. Do you
want to be a cow?”

She
lifted her camera pod. “No, not really.”

“Send
your data over to the station, and shut yourself down for a few weeks of
convalescence,” he told her, then turned to Captain Tarrel. “I would suppose
that your stay with us is just about at an end. When you go out from this
station again, it will probably be aboard another carrier. For now, we should
go into the station and see what they have planned.”

They
took a lift down to the main starboard docking tube, which led them, after a
walk of nearly a hundred meters along the nose of the carrier and into the
station itself, to one side of the bay control station and the observation
rooms to either side. It seemed that the station air, which also filled the
tube, was something of a compromise. It was warmer than that within the ship,
but still slightly cool by human standards.

Whether
Commander Daerran had expected it or not, something of a reception committee
was waiting for them outside the docking tube. Hasty introductions were made,
but these were mostly between some three dozen people who already knew each
other at least by name and reputation and Captain Tarrel was able to remember
only the most important ones present. There were three other carriers already
at the station, including one that was still in the late stages of
construction. For reasons that she did not expect, she surprised herself by
taking exception to the fact that the Starwolves were actually under the
control of a human senior officer, a certain Fleet Commander Dave Asandi. He
was a tall man and rather dark, reflecting like all other humans at the station
a more direct Terran ancestry than herself, reminding her oddly of the Union’s
ruling Sector Families. The Fleet Commander’s entourage of scientific and
military advisors was a mixed group, with slightly more Starwolves than humans.

Kelvessan,
she reminded herself, that being their name for their race in their mysterious
language. A language that, for all the long-suffering Lt. Commander Walter
Pesca had been able to determine, did not even exist. He was, for that matter,
still in his own cabin aboard the Kerridayen, forgotten and not necessary for
the business at hand. Now that she had discovered humans in the station, Tarrel
wondered if he might be encouraged to defect.

It
seemed that this group had been waiting for the Kerridayen to arrive with her
important data on the Dreadnought and the observations of witnesses who had
fought the machine. Their first serious strategy meeting was planned to begin
immediately. Tarrel found herself walking beside Fleet Commander Asandi, who
was openly curious about her. She had found the Starwolves to be very open, uncomplicated
people, direct, honest and incapable of duplicity. The humans among them shared
many of those same qualities, although it came across almost as a rigidly
honest gallantry in them.

“I
find you a very uncommon person, Captain,” he said. From anyone else, such
flattering comments would have put her on her guard against lechery and
requests to borrow money. “You have repeatedly faced two of your most deadly
enemies.” “You did not expect that of a Union captain?” she asked, speaking
more directly than she would have among her own.

“Frankly,
I did not,” he admitted. “That is not to say that I question the courage of
your officers. But the limits of your technology would not seem designed to
inspire courage, but prudence.”

Tarrel
smiled. “To tell you the truth, I believe that the only reason I am alive now
is because I have a very accurate sense of knowing when it is time to run.”

“Your
own people seem to value you highly,” Asandi told her. “So that you may know
how matters stand at this point, we now have a formal truce with the Union. You
have been appointed special diplomatic and military advisor. And we are happy
to have you. We will be carrying our fight with this Dreadnought into your own
space, and we need you to smooth the way with local officials when our ships
descend in force upon their systems. I have received a special communication
detailing your new duties and special powers. I will add that you can expect
any reasonable cooperation from us, including the right to see and to know
certain things that we would otherwise have kept to ourselves.”

She
hesitated. “If you will excuse me for bringing this up, but it does seem like
the proper moment. Commander Daerran indicated that those very matters that you
just mentioned might interfere with your ability to allow me to return home
again when this matter is settled.”

“He
was right to broach that subject with you,” Asandi explained carefully, after a
moment’s pause. “It involves certain assurances that he did not have the power
to give you himself. He could not promise you something that the Council might
then feel compelled to take away.”

“I
do understand,” she insisted. “On less immediate matters, there are a few
things I have been wondering about.”

“Please
speak freely.”

“For
one thing, I find it odd that a human would be the supreme commander of the
Starwolf fleet. The Kelvessan seem to feel that they are people, not property,
and certainly not machines of war.”

“That
might require a rather complex explanation,” Asandi said as they filed aboard a
tram to take them deeper into the station. Other members of the group continued
their own conversation, allowing Asandi and Tarrel the privacy to speak freely.
“In theory, the Kelvessan are in fact property and not people, and I am
supposed to make their decisions for them. In practice, they make their own
decisions among themselves. I serve as a liaison between the Kelvessan and the
human worlds of the Republic, which supplies many of their needs. That is why
my post has traditionary been led by a human. I am indeed not qualified to act
as their military commander. I have never been in Union space and I do not
fully understand the situation they face. They tell me what they need and what
they would like to have, and I do my best to get it for them.”

“But
the Republic no longer exists,” Tarrel insisted. “At least, that’s what I have
always been told. The Starwolves are fighting to restore the old Republic,
which created them as a long-term weapon of last resort.”

“That
is partly true in itself,” he agreed. “But the Republic has never ceased to
exist. We are the Republic, admittedly only a handful of colonies smaller than
a single sector of your Union. For that matter, those that you call the
Starwolves are formally the First and Second Special Carrier Fleets.”

“First
and Second?”

He
smiled wryly. “The First Fleet patrols your space. The Second Fleet,
considerably smaller, guards our own space from attack. They have not been
needed since the early years of the war, but we keep a few carriers at hand
just the same.”

The
tram took them well into the interior of the station, and the entire delegation
filed quickly into a large conference chamber, taking their seats to suddenly
become a committee. Captain Tarrel herself began the discussion by relating the
events of her first and second unexpected encounter with the Dreadnought, and
her attempt to make contact with it afterward. Then she and Commander Daerran
spoke of their observations of the Kerridayen’s attack on the Dreadnought in an
attempt to gain information. The scientists of the group took control of the
discussion after that, analyzing and debating the data that the Carthaginian
and the Kerridayen had collected. Tarrel did her best to keep up with the
conversation from that point but matters became a bit thick for her education,
especially when they began to explore regions of advanced physics that her own
understanding of science told her did not exist. Secondary subspace refractions
and achronic resonance seemed to be the topics of the moment , and she had only
a vague idea of what those things even meant. She sat back in her chair,
listening much but saying nothing as she waited for matters to return to
subjects in which she could be useful.