Tactical Error (35 page)

“Yes, sir.”

“Have missile bearing stingships ready to go down into the atmosphere
if we get the chance, but launch no ships until I give the orders,” Trace
added. “I want no energy emissions or other types of clutter in space to
distract those scan images. Settle the ships in close orbit and close down the
engines, but have shields standing by.”

“At once, sir.” Avaires hurried to the com station to relay
those orders.

Trace stood alone on the bridge, watching as the Starwolf carrier disappeared
into the deeper reaches of the planet’s hydrogen shell.

The Valcyr slowed quickly as she penetrated through Jupiter’s dense
atmosphere and into the depthless ocean of liquid hydrogen. She elongated her
shields even more, bringing them up to even greater strength as the pressures
continued to mount, trapping a pool of low-pressure liquid hydrogen within her
shields to act as insulation against the increasing temperature. Pouring all
the power she dared through her main drives, she was barely able to maintain an
initial speed of about seventeen thousand kilometers. That speed would continue
to fall as she pushed steadily deeper and tremendous pressures turned the
hydrogen from liquid to a thick plastic.

The heat was a strong consideration. Her shields were opaque to the
radiation of heat, but temperatures inside that shell continued to climb. She
had actually planned that reaction, since the volume of low-pressure hydrogen
within the shell would try to expand as it warmed, providing outward pressure to
reinforce the shields. Even so, the ship itself would eventually begin to heat
dangerously as the trapped hydrogen against its hull warmed. Quendari estimated
that she faced a journey of at least two-and-a-half hours, a long time to
survive temperatures that might eventually reach twelve to fifteen thousand
degrees in the surrounding hydrogen.

She was running blind, even her space-distorting achronic sensors hopelessly
scrambled by the fierce electric and magnetic currents running through the
liquid hydrogen. Visual was even more useless, and she kept her main viewscreen
blanked out. She was orienting herself by the pull of gravity as she aimed
straight down toward the heart of the planet, estimating her progress as best
she could from her speed and the external pressure against her shields. At
almost exactly two-and-a-half hours, her speed began to slow to a relative
crawl. She had penetrated more than halfway to the core of the planet to the
depth of liquid, metallic hydrogen, turned into a dense, molten, metallic
substance by the tremendous temperatures and pressures.

“This is as far as we go,” Quendari announced. “My speed
has been cut so low that I could spend hours trying to push forward enough to
make any difference in our distance from the core.”

“Are they still out there?” Keflyn asked.

“Yes, I suppose,” she answered, not very certain. The drone that
she had left had only one command, to transmit a tight, achronic beam into the
core of the planet if the fleet moved out of close orbit. Otherwise it was to
keep communication silence, reducing the possibility if giving itself away.

“We might as well do it,” Keflyn agreed. “At your
discretion.”

“Warming the conversion cannon for firing, building the power reserve
to one hundred percent,” Quendari reported. “The jump drive is
powered up and standing by.”

Keflyn nodded. “When you are ready.”

She would have been amused, if the circumstances had not been so incredible.
Quendari persisted in granting her every courtesy as Commander, although she
felt that she was just along for the ride. She had been able to make a few
suggestions in recalibrating the jump drive so that it was far less likely to
run away with itself, until permanent alterations could be made.

“All ready,” Quendari reported a few moments later. “At my
count. Three. Two. One.”

The tubular shield of the conversion cannon shot out from the nose of the
Valcyr, striking deep into the heart of the planet to its rocky core, and
Quendari poured all the power she had to give through that passage. Jupiter was
just large enough to be a failed star, lacking the mass to generate the
pressures and temperatures in the liquid, metallic hydrogen to allow fusion
reactions to begin. Quendari bridged that gap, pouring billions of megatons of
explosive force into the heart of the planet. Fusion began as a sudden spark,
adding more and more power into the system with each small reaction, the
process expanding so rapidly that the heart of the planet went up in a flash of
stellar flame.

Driven by that fierce, internal heat, the outer hydrogen shell of the planet
expanded rapidly outward as it was warmed from within. The Fortresses came
quickly to life in a desperate attempt to engage their engines and escape as
the bands of color melted away in a stellar flare of brilliant light and
searing heat, and the surface of the newborn star reached out to trap them.
Some ran a short distance before they were caught, while others hid within
their shields before the defensive shells were overloaded and collapsed.

Barely twenty million kilometers away, space itself erupted in a sudden
flare of white-hot gas. The Valcyr hurtled out of the core of that brief,
brilliant explosion, the substance of stellar material suddenly released from
under vast pressures as it was carried through with the carrier’s short
jump. She looped around wide, coasting on the thrust of her jump, turning back
for a clear view of the new star.

“We got them?” Keflyn asked, daring to look up and see that they
had indeed survived.

“Nothing escaped that I have detected,” Quendari reported.
“I am still scanning the area carefully for even small ships, although I
doubt that they had time to even think about getting to their escape pods. In
fact, escape pods would not have had the speed to escape the shock wave.”

“And yourself?” Keflyn asked as she lifted herself from her seat
at the commander’s station.

“My condition appears to be perfect. Even my conversion cannon seems
to have survived the firing.”

Keflyn nodded. “Set course for Alkayja, then. Best possible speed,
with the largest jumps you dare take. We might not yet be too late.” She
paused at the bottom of the steps. “I do not like to leave Terra itself
unprotected, with the possibility of more Union warships coming along behind
the main fleet at any time.”

“If they do not arrive within the next few hours, they will find
nothing but some odd energy readings from the area of the fifth planet,”
Quendari explained. “There is no battle debris to be found, except for
the wreckage of the
Thermopylae
. The explosion swallowed it all. Is
anyone likely to leap to the true conclusion, as unlikely as it was what we
did, or will they simply assume that the party has gone on somewhere
else?”

Keflyn watched the newborn star for the moment that it was still on the
forward viewscreen, before the Valcyr began to accelerate to starflight.
“Then you are saying that it will not stay like that for long?”

“Probably no more than a few hours,” Quendari explained.
“There is not enough mass to maintain the temperatures necessary to
continue natural fusion reactions. Given enough time, it will eventually cool
off, stratify itself back out, and look much the same as always.”

“How much time?” Keflyn asked.

“Perhaps only a few thousand years.”

“Oh.”

Velmeran stood for a moment longer, watching the black forms of the Mock
Starwolf cruisers surrounding the three remaining carriers. Then he turned and
hurried up the steps to the Commander’s station on the upper bridge.

“Get me a direct visual channel to the main monitor at my
console,” he ordered, obviously very pleased with himself. “This is
perfect. I have them right where I want them.”

Consherra turned in her seat to stare at him. “I beg your pardon? You
were telling us a minute ago that Mock Starwolves do not even exist. Now we are
up to our apertures in Mock Starwolves telling us to surrender.”

“They are talking to us and not shooting,” he explained as he
lifted himself into the seat and rolled it forward. He leaned closer to the
monitor, which remained obstinately blank. He waited a moment more, then looked
up impatiently. “What is he waiting for?”

“He seems hesitant to open a visual line,” Korlaran answered.

“Then give me an audio line,” Velmeran declared impatiently,
although he had no intention of surrendering the point. He wanted this errant
Starwolf to see him clearly, and to see a few truths.

“This is Jaeryn of the Avenger,” the Mock Starwolf commander
responded immediately, speaking Terran like a human would. Velmeran realized
that he did not even speak the language of his own kind. “What is your
answer?”

“This is Commander Velmeran of the Starwolf Fleet,” he
responded, sounding very stern and impatient on his own part. “If you
want to talk to me, you are going to give me that visual channel I asked for
and then speak to me in a more reasonable manner.”

That was calculated to surprise, and it did. Velmeran knew that he was
speaking to a very young and inexperienced Kelvessan, and someone who was not
entirely sure of the things that he had been told were true. The monitor lit up
a moment later. They were both surprised to see each other’s face, but
Velmeran was the first to comprehend the full meaning. He sat back, smiling.
“Yes, I think that you do understand. Where did they tell you they got
you? That they had bred you themselves from original genetic material?”

“Well, yes,” Jaeryn admitted, obviously disconcerted.
“They did warn us that you would look quite a lot like us.”

“But you look almost exactly like me, is that it?” Velmeran
asked. “The Kelvessan were created by the Aldessan of Valtrys fifty
thousand years ago. You and all of your companions were cloned from genetic
material taken from me personally during a little accident I had about a year
before you were born. You were not created by them, and your genetic material
was not altered in any way. They do not have that ability. And I suppose that I
might warn you now that Commander Trace would never trust you. I suspect that
there are very likely to be self-destruct devices built into your ships that
can be detonated by external remote control.”

“Yes, we found those long ago,” Jaeryn admitted thoughtfully.
“Those things are no longer in our ships. How did you know?”

“A simple, logical deduction, based upon a long history of associating
with Commander Donalt Trace,” he explained. “So there you are, I
suppose. You can no longer trust the Union, and you have reason to doubt just
about everything they ever told you. Now you are wondering if you belong
anywhere. That is why you held back from the battle.”

“Exactly,” Jaeryn agreed, regaining some authority of his own.
“Of course, the fact that they betrayed us does not automatically make
you our friends. They raised us to believe in a great many high ideals that
they apparently do not believe in themselves, and they told us many things about
you that appearances argue could be true. It seemed to me that the best way to
prove matters was to arrange a confrontation under circumstances that we could
control.”

Consherra, seated at the helm station, rolled her eyes. “You would
almost think that he is talking to himself.”

“Listening to your communications has also been very
informative,” he continued. “Actually, we arrived before you did,
so we have overheard quite a lot. It seems that we are both orphans in this
universe. Are we people or are we property, Commander Velmeran?”

“I was just about to stress that very point,” Velmeran answered.
“I would like for you to declare your intentions and be done with it. I
have some very important business to attend right now. For one thing, I am
going to make certain that Kelvessan are not treated like property again. Are
you going to help me?”

Jaeryn considered that briefly. “Are you asking me to surrender to
you?”

“I am asking you to join your ships to the Starwolf Fleet and help
your own people in a time when we need you most,” he answered. “If
you are not yet certain that you can trust us, then remove your ships until you
have enough evidence to decide.”

“I think that we will take the chance, Commander,” Jaeryn said.
“What can we do?”

“Move your cruisers in to guard those captured Union ships and give my
poor carriers a rest. Have this channel stand by.” He sighed heavily,
leaning back in his seat and permitting himself a moment of looking incredibly
relieved. There was a limit to how many miracles even a Starwolf could pull off
in one day. Then he looked up. “Get President Delike back on the channel.
We were discussing a surrender.”

Velmeran had the Maeridyen and the Karvand returned to their bays, to act as
an occupation force within the station itself. The military, under Admiral
Laroose, was loyal to the Starwolves and following Velmeran’s orders. The
civilian Kelvessan were otherwise in command of the station, and they had kept
the situation there from falling into confusion and panic during the battle.

The president and leaders of the Senate, or at least those who had not
already been arrested, had retreated to the government compound within the
station, not daring to leave for fear of the crowds, mostly human, who wanted
nothing more than to administer their own justice to the traitors. President
Delike and his friends feared the Kelvessan, and with good reason. But it was
their own kind, people who now felt that they had been deceived into embracing
philosophies they now detested for the promise of simple greed and hate, who
would have gone into the compound after the traitors except for Starwolf
intervention.

Fearing unexpected trouble to come, Velmeran ordered work to begin on the
Maeridyen immediately. At least none of the three remaining ships had taken any
damage during the battle, even though both of the two new ships had taken
missiles directly against their shielded hulls. Velmeran’s first task was
to formalize the surrender of the Republic to Starwolf authority. That was a
rather desperate act on his part, and one that was not strictly necessary. But
he considered the act itself most important, the ability to begin fresh with a
new Republic, bound by the laws of a new constitution that would guarantee the
irrevocable rights and freedom of the Kelvessan.