Tactical Error (32 page)

That final contest of the battle lasted a shorter time than Velmeran had
anticipated. Once it became obvious that the two carriers were in pursuit, the
Union commanders faced their final options. The Fortresses began to decelerate
slowly and steadily, never once altering their course as they came to a
complete stop to drift in space. Velmeran wanted no more surprises, and he
ordered the Starwolves to keep their distance.

“What could they be doing?” Consherra asked as she brought the
Maeridyen around to face one of the two Fortresses from the side.

“Staying alive, it would seem,” Velmeran said, walking over to
stand behind Larenta. “What does intensity scanning tell us about those
ships?”

“Powering down, Commander,” she answered. “All the engine
and cannon modules are inactive. They are idling on internal power only.”

“A gesture of submission, then,” he concluded. “Tell
Tregloran that he is to handle the surrender of the Union ships. Order the
Karvand in to support the Vardon. Order the packs to standby status, although I
do need them to stay outside for just a while yet and keep an eye on things.
Consherra, take us back to Alkayja Station.”

“Coming around now, Commander,” Consherra said. “But I do
not understand one thing. What happened to the Mock Starwolves?”

“I am beginning to believe that there never were any Mock Starwolves,”
Velmeran explained as he walked over to stand leaning on the front edge of the
console of the central bridge. “Everything that Lenna showed us was very
neatly contrived to convince us to believe in something we never actually saw.
It was a part of Donalt Trace’s tactics, I suspect, to try to confuse us
by making us fear a secret weapon that they did not actually have.”

“But how would that help?”

“If I had held back forces in this battle, waiting for a threat that
never arrived, then his own attack force would have been able to face us and
take us apart in pieces. We were lucky that I elected to solve our problems as
they came.”

Alkayja Station had already made the jump back from wherever it had gone and
was using its feeble main drives to settle into its former orbit. One battle
had ended, but another was yet to begin. One thing that Velmeran had learned
from this whole affair was that the Kelvessan could never afford to trust in
the unending good will of others. It was time for the Kelvessan to end their
servitude to the war they had been created to fight, and to the Republic, which
could never completely ignore the belief that it owned the Kelvessan. Velmeran
had the Maeridyen hold her position half a million kilometers out and ordered a
channel to President Alac Delike.

“Yes, I’m here,” Delike answered after a moment.
“What can I do for you?”

“I am demanding your surrender,” he said. “You are still
the President of the Republic, and as such the First Senator and yourself have
the authority to negotiate treaties. Your recent crimes against the Kelvessan
race have made it impossible for us to continue to exist within the Republic
without an irrevocable guarantee of our rights.”

“Commander, scanners indicate a large number of ships dropping quickly
out of starflight,” Larenta interrupted him quietly. “They are
coming in from all directions. No positive identification, but that fierce
deceleration suggests that they can only be Starwolves.”

The sky was suddenly full of large black ships, braking hard with their
forward engines as they moved in rapidly to surround the three carriers. Each
ship was long, wide and flat of hull, in many ways very much like the Starwolf
Carriers in form but only a third as large. Unlike nearly all Union ships, they
were as black as space, without windows or running lights. The similarities
between the two types of ships were so pronounced that they looked more like
companions from the same fleet than well-matched opponents.

If this delay had been deliberate, Velmeran could still make no sense of it.
The Fortresses were powered down, with conversion devices already attached to
their hulls to insure their compliance, and the scores of remaining stingships
had fired off and detonated their missiles as good faith of their own surrender.
The stingships really had nowhere to go anyway, without the support of their
carriers. At least the Mock Starwolf cruisers had not yet launched their
fighters, and that gave Velmeran a chance to strike first. The Starwolves were
outnumbered five to one, but their carriers were still faster, better shielded,
and better armed. Velmeran was about to order the carriers to fire their
conversion cannons when he realized that the Mock Starwolves were holding their
positions.

“Message coming in,” Korlaran reported.

Velmeran nodded. “Let me hear it.”

“Commander, this is Captain Jaeryn of the Avenger,” the young,
male voice declared boldly. “I ask you to surrender.”

A light wind was stirring the leaves of the trees that formed a shifting,
fragmented canopy overhead. Keflyn sat with her back against a large stone,
poking at the fire with four long sticks. That gave her one stick for each
hand, and she seemed to be doing something different with each one. Kelvessan
lived with a constant excess of available energy, ready to be called into
instant use through hypermetabolism. Keflyn sometimes had trouble dealing with
her own impressive reserves of energy. Right now she wanted to jump, and she
had no target. For that matter, she had no idea why every warrior’s
instinct she had told, her that it was time to fight.

It made Jon Addesin nervous enough just to watch her, and it was no help for
her to know his thoughts. For the first time since she had met him, he felt
himself in the presence of a weapon that disguised its deadliness with the
self-delusion that it was a person. Many humans did have that opinion of
Kelvessan, she had been warned, but she had never encountered it for herself.
Was it because he had been seeing her in her own element, and finally in her armor,
that had caused this reaction? Was it because he had lost all control he had
assumed he had possessed of a relationship only he believed in? Whatever the
cause, they were feeding into each other’s reactions now. The more his
apprehension grew, the more her defensive instincts reacted.

It would be a blessing when Derrighan arrived with the skyvan and put an end
to this farce, although she knew it would not be that easy. The arrival of a
rival, especially one who was an alien and had also captured Keflyn’s
attentions before himself, would only turn Addesin even more sullen and
resentful.

You pet them. You feed them. You keep them.

Or at least you have to deal with them,
Keflyn thought. It simply was
not worth the effort, to have anything to do with aliens. They were none of
them logical, reasonable people. Take humans, for example. Just apes with a
well-developed social instinct and the self-delusion that they were an
intelligent species. And why, she asked herself, did the Aldessan of Valtrys
ever see the necessity of making the Kelvessan even remotely resemble them?

She glanced up at the vast, golden moon, shining down through a small break
in the trees. It was time for her to be going home.

“Can the Valcyr be salvaged?” Addesin asked.

He threw out these pointless questions from time to time, as if anything was
better than her silence. Perhaps he wanted to keep her talking, because it was
the only time when he knew what she was thinking. She could not imagine why he
was suddenly so afraid of her, as if she might decide to kill him just to spend
the time. She already found it very annoying.

“That depends upon what you mean by salvage,” she answered after
a long moment, breaking off small pieces of one slender stick to toss one by
one into the fire. “We will almost certainly duplicate her memory cells
and bring her to life in a new ship – if she will allow it, of course. It
probably suits her just as well to brood inside that wall of ice until she
finally hatches her personal little egg of grief.”

Addesin was startled by the force of her reaction. But he had to come back,
as if driven against his will. “Then you mean that the Valcyr we know
will never fly again?”

Keflyn glanced up at him. “She is old, Captain Addesin. She is
two-and-a-half-times as old as any other ship in the Starwolf Fleet. More than
three-fourths the age of human civilization. And she has been sitting locked
inside that damned block of ice most of that time, without maintenance.
Carriers need a complete overhaul every hundred years at the most, and it has
been four hundred times as long since anyone poked into her works.”

“Yes, but just think of all the back pay she has coming.”

Keflyn looked over at him in surprise, and they both laughed.
“Starwolves are poor people, Captain Addesin. You might as well go to
bed. You know that I will watch all night if I have to.”

She paused for a moment, listening. Addesin watched her closely, wondering
what her sensitive ears might have detected. He knew only that her hearing was
very good, although he had no idea how good. He certainly did not know that she
could hear in ways that he did not expect. After a moment she stood, turning to
step nearer to the edge of the forest, away from the fitful light of the fire.

“Something is coming,” she said after a moment.

“The sky van?” Addesin asked. He rose to stand as well, moving
slowly to stand immediately behind her, looking into the night over her
shoulder. He also did not have her large, sensitive eyes.

“No, much smaller than that,” she said. “It might be one
of Quendari’s probes.”

“Close?” he asked.

He pulled a large service pistol from within his jacket, bringing it up and
then lowering its short, wide muzzle until it was aimed at the middle of her
back, at the indentation in the very center between her four shoulder blades.

“It is circling around our camp now,” Keflyn answered, and she
sounded puzzled. She had tried to sense the identity of that silent, flying
thing, and it was nothing she had expected.

Addesin fired.

Perhaps, because she had been sensitive to thoughts, probing the night for
other minds, the violence of his own thoughts came to her in a sudden rush. He
was aiming for her heart, hoping that the shot would kill her quickly,
wondering if her ferro-precipitate bones would block the bolt. Instinct
operated quicker than conscious thought, and she dove for the cover of the
glacial-tossed boulders in a move so fast that he did not even see her go
before he pulled the trigger.

Still holding the gun, Addesin took several steps back, uncertain whether or
not he had even hit her. She had leaped aside so suddenly and so swiftly that
she had quite literally vanished from his sight. He knew that he had
underestimated her reflexes, but he could not understand how she could have
known. He stepped back, giving himself time to aim and fire as soon as she
broke from cover. The gray boulders that filled the clearing provided her too
much cover. Except for the protection they offered, she would have already been
dead and he would have been spared the torment of hunting down someone he did
not want to kill. Someone he might not be able to kill, now that she was
warned. She had no weapons. Her speed and strength were weapon enough.

A scream broke the depths of the night. It was a strange, eerie scream like
some shrill keening, so high in pitch that Addesin could not have heard it or
he might have been warned, so high that even Keflyn was only dimly aware of it.
The force of some unseen blow suddenly pushed Addesin to his knees, then he
fell heavily to the ground. The back of his jacket was still smoking, yet
Keflyn had seen no bolt.

Warned by something she could not understand, she stayed under cover. A
large, black form sailed across the length of the clearing on broad wings, the
faint whisper of wind through fur the only sound. Then Keflyn understood. The
creature was a Kandian spark dragon, a fierce hunter thousands of
light-years away from the world where it belonged but one that she knew
inhabited the wilds of modern Terra. The odd movements that she had sensed were
those of a small hunting pack. Addesin had been hit by the blast from a
dragon’s tightbeam ultrasonics, fully as powerful as a small sonic
disrupter. She doubted that Addesin was still alive, and hoped for his sake
that he was not.

The harsh, hunting cries of the dragons began to grate against the gentle
silence of the night. The pack knew she was there, hidden from them, and they
were frustrated by their inability to get at their fallen prey. Keflyn expanded
her senses, knowing now the nature of what she sought, and found that there
were seven, enough that at least one of the circling pack had her within range
at any time. Her guns were packed away with her armor. Addesin was laying
across his own gun, and that was more than five meters away. Keflyn was already
in hypermetabolism, but she was not sure that she was quick enough to get that
gun and dive back under cover before one of the dragons caught her.

She was given to wonder if this was how freighter captains felt when they
found Starwolves on their tails. The difference was that Keflyn felt certain
that she could survive this trial, if she moved carefully.

A sudden bolt cut through the night, catching one of the dragons in a burst
of flame that brought it from the sky. The dark shape of a carrier’s probe
settled into the clearing, its flexible neck extended to bring to bear the
small gun located below the lenses of its enclosed camera pod. It drifted
forward, moving to shield Addesin’s motionless form with its own armored
hull. A tight beam of ultrasonics from a dragon caught the probe on its upper
hull, striking a scattering of bright sparks as it was deflected by the
machine’s heavy armor. The probe seemed to flinch, lowering its camera
pod to protect its lenses as the barrage of ultrasonics threatened its
electronics.