Tactical Error (7 page)

It seemed like a good place for Keflyn to find a Free Trader that would take
her to Vannkarn for her meeting with the
Thermopylae
. It seemed unlikely
that Union spies would observe her transfer from the Methryn, at least as long
as they were discreet. Kanis was by no means immune to Union spies. Velmeran
had once faced both a Union operative and an assassin in the port of Kalennes,
on the same day.

In order to maintain the necessary discretion, the Methryn had settled
quietly into orbit and immediately began putting packs and transports down to
the surface as she would during any other port leave. Keflyn followed several
hours later, after nearly half of the Methryn’s crew had already been
down and spread out through the town for some time.

Keflyn had to wonder if she was doing the right thing. A large part of the
strength of the Starwolves lay in their numbers and organization. A Starwolf
was never alone, yet she would be completely alone for several weeks. If she
got into trouble, she would be on her own. She would be without the defense of
her armor, or the very important cooling it provided to protect her from the
oppressive heat of human environments. Above all else, her safety would be
completely dependent upon the trust she had to give to a great many people who
would help her along the way, aliens all.

“Your contact on the surface will be Iyan Makayen, Lenna’s older
half-brother,” Velmeran told her as he helped to carry her bags to the
transport that would take her down. She was dressed in human manner, in clothes
of dark, heavy cloth, and a cape to hide her Kelvessan form and lower set of
arms; her hair was worn in two loose braids to hide her pointed ears.

“Is he anything like Lenna?” Keflyn asked as she began tossing
her bags into the open hatch of the transport.

“I have not seen him in over twenty years,” Velmeran said.
“He is not of Trader stock, as Lenna’s mother was. I remember that
he was a quiet, practical man, more cautious than Lenna, but one to be trusted.
He has made arrangements for you to travel on the Free Trader
Karabyn
,
which will take you through two scheduled stops before she leaves you in
Vannkarn. The
Karabyn’s
captain will put you in touch with the
underground in Vannkarn, and they should be able to get you on the
Thermopylae
.”

On the way down, Keflyn had a few minutes to think hard about her own
future. She looked upon the role of a pilot, even a pack leader, as dull and
repetitive. She certainly did not want to give up her command status as a pilot
to become an officer like her mother, but centuries could pass before she might
have a ship of her own. The only answer for her seemed to be special tactics,
and she was contemplating stepping into the role that Lenna Makayen would
be forced to vacate in only a few years. Although Keflyn did not know it, she
was cursed with her father’s leadership abilities. She possessed a quick
wit and insatiable curiosity that could never be satisfied in any role short of
the one making the rules, and if she could not be the leader then she was much
better off working on her own. She did not know that Velmeran had himself
nearly left the Methryn for special tactics, only that he had acquired such a
team in addition to his own pack in some manner that she had never considered.

She knew only that things had apparently been handed to Velmeran to
comfortably fill up the limits of his considerable abilities, not that he had
sometimes paid a bitter price for his accomplishments.

The transport landed in the small port field outside the town of Kalennes.
It was night, and they planned to use the darkness combined with the dark
clothes that Keflyn wore to cover her departure from the transport. As soon as
the hatch opened, she grabbed her things and made a rush for the concealment of
the shadows at the edge of the port buildings.

“Miss Keflyn?”

The voice had come out of the shadows of one dark corner, a rich, warm
baritone that was deeper than any male Kelvessan voice could ever be, and
holding a curious accent that she recognized instantly as being the same
as Lenna’s. She ducked into that same dark corner, her large, sensitive
eyes able to pierce the shadows and see the tall, broad-shouldered man who
waited for her.

“You are?” she asked cautiously.

“Iyan Makayen,” he answered briskly. He was wearing the uniform
of the local police; Keflyn remembered Lenna saying that he was a port
constable.

“You look like Velmeran, for all that you’re a girl,” he
observed, peering at her closely.

She nodded. “He is my father.”

That seemed to startle this tall man, but he made no comment of it. He
reached to take a couple of her bags. “I should think that we would be
well advised to get you under cover as soon as possible. It’s a slow time
in the season here in town, with the rangers still in the wild and only the one
ship in port.”

He turned and backed his way through a wide, double door into the hallway
beyond, gallantly holding the door for her. He had by chance taken the heaviest
of the bags, and he was having some trouble with their weight. She could have
carried all of the bags easier than he carried the two, but they had to
maintain appearances. He was a head taller than her and weighed more than half
again as much.

The main, commercial district of Kalennes was enclosed into a single
structure known as the Mall, although the heavy, timber-supported roof was
meant more to keep out wind and weather than the cold itself. As her companion
had said, there were few people about even though the hour was still early.
These people were of a purer Terran stock than most humans, tall, light of skin
and hair, and heavy of build. Small and dark, Lenna was plainly of a very
different racial stock from these people. She was obviously an outworlder, in
spite of her disguise.

“Is Lenna still on the Methryn?” Iyan asked quietly as they
walked quickly through the nearly deserted corridor, most of the shops already
closed.

“No, she went over to the Vardon a year ago,” Keflyn replied,
wondering how much she should say. No one had told her anything about this.
“She is on an important mission of her own just now, or she would be here
instead of me.”

“I always thought that she would come to a bad end, running off with
Starwolves like she did,” he remarked, mostly to himself. “It seems
that she had been much better at delaying that bad end than I would have
thought.”

Out on the port field, a small, dark form skittered on spider’s legs
through the night. It was no living creature but an automaton, a small
mechanical device with a simple, box-like body and a single optical sensor for
an eye, carried on six long, multi-jointed legs. It scurried rapidly from one
patch of darkness to the next until it eventually disappeared into the
blackness beneath the transport that had just brought Keflyn to the surface. It
was still there when the transport lifted from the field a short time later.

The transport moved back into its bay, hovering in place while the manipulator
arms moved in to capture it, lifting the small ship directly to its berth in
the racks so that the bay doors could remain open. Velmeran waited outside
while the transport was locked down and secured for flight. After a long
moment, the main hatch opened and Trel stepped out.

“All set?” Velmeran asked.

“I think so,” the special tactics pilot answered.
“Everything went according to plan, and I could not see that we were
observed.”

“Well, we’ve done the best we can,” Velmeran remarked.
“That freighter is due to leave port early tomorrow morning. We will have
to wait a few more hours after that for the sake of discretion, and then we
will be on our own way.”

“Commander Velmeran, please come to the bridge,” Valthyrra’s
voice echoed through the bay.

“She said please,” Velmeran remarked. “It must be
serious.”

It apparently
was
serious, since Consherra hurried to meet him as
soon as he stepped out of the lift onto the bridge. “We have just
received an achronic message from Home Base. They have called us in, as soon as
we can get there.”

“What?” Velmeran could not have been more surprised, or
confused. “Did they give any reason why? Is there some emergency, or
have they just missed our charming presence?”

“No explanation,” Valthyrra reported as they came to the center
of the bridge. “We have simply been ordered to return. Ordered, I might
add, in a very abrupt, even curt manner, that I for one found quite
insulting.”

Velmeran leaned back against the console of the central bridge, his arms
crossed, obviously deep in thought. “We can hardly leave Union space at
this time. Lenna will be signaling for us to come for her as soon as she finds
what she is looking for, and now we have Keflyn off the ship as well. Two of
the most critical missions that we have ever had running at the same time, and
they expect us to drop everything and run home.”

“Do we ignore the order?” Consherra asked. “You are the
Fleet Commander. In theory, only you can give such orders.”

“There is one higher authority,” Valthyrra reminded them.
“This order has come directly from the Republican Senate.”

“Oh, my!” Velmeran muttered thoughtfully. “Well, I have to
assume that such an august body has a very good reason for doing this, although
I would never bet money on it. Valthyrra, call up the Vardon and have her
assume our patrol. Treg and Theralda are going to have to watch things here. If
Lenna’s call comes in, we will just have to drop whatever we are doing.
We will get under way as soon as the
Karabyn
leaves port tomorrow
morning.”

“Oh, mercy!” Valthyrra exclaimed. “The powers that be will
have to wait a few hours more.”

“They will have to wait a few days,” he told her. “I
refuse to wreck this ship rushing home for some unexplained summons. No jumps,
and no excessively high speeds. We will hurry, but we refuse to hustle.”

Hours later, after the transport bay had been secured for flight, a small,
dark shape dropped down from beneath one of the little ships. It crouched low
to the deck for a long moment, using its single optical sensor to probe the
immediate environment. It was not a particularly intelligent machine, less so
even than a sentry. It had only one purpose, to make its way into the heart of
a Starwolf carrier. It had no clear idea of its goal or how to get there, nor
even what it was looking for. Its primary logic function was to compare what it
saw with its internal records of starship design, and to keep moving until it
found what it sought. It was also programmed to keep itself under cover and
avoid discovery.

The spider drone’s first task was to scurry down to the bare deck
formed by the sealed bay doors. It sat down tight against the deck, and a small
cutting beam within its body began to bore a tiny, almost microscopic hole all
the way through the door into the cold space beyond. Into this it inserted the
lead of a tiny antenna, sealing the hole against air loss, then the drone spun
a minute spider’s web of an antenna across the bay to the tiny receiver
it hid in the shadows along one wall. Now that it could receive orders, it
hurried to complete its task.

A combination of data – or rather the lack of it – from both its
optic and sonic sensors led it to infer that it was relative night on board the
Methryn, the corridor lights turned down combined with a general lack of
activity. The deck below was down, analogous to the ship, and it knew how far
forward it was in the carrier measured from the nose, since it had to have been
brought on board through one of the transport bays. Those were simple bits of
logical deduction, but by constructing a memory map of its turns and straight
runs as it moved through the ship, the drone was able to always have a fair
idea of where it was. Sonic data allowed it to guess when it was entering
inhabited regions, and visual references permitted it to guess whether it was
in a major corridor or a small, unimportant passage.

By keeping to the shadows and jumping into any available cover at the
slightest sound, the spider drone was finally able to work its way to the core
of the ship between her broad, thick wings, and into the maze of main engineering.
Once there, its most difficult task began. The machinery it observed was beyond
its experience, both because of the complexity of Starwolf technology and the
tremendous size of these generators and power grids. But by a careful
comparison of what it saw with what it knew, it was finally able to trace the
main power linkages to the main switching core on the outside, a single piece
of metal pipe two meters wide by twelve meters long.

The spider drone scrambled up the machinery and scurried along the main
switching core to its very center, then settled itself tight against the pipe
and held on firmly with all six legs. There it awaited its orders.

Although Velmeran made a joke of pretending impatience and suspicion for his
summons back to Alkayja Base, he still believed that it must be important.
Starwolf carriers traditionally returned to Home Base only at need, perhaps
once every hundred years for overhaul. A direct summons was almost unknown,
although far less unusual than it had once been. As soon as the Free Trader
Karabyn
was safely away, he ordered the Methryn out of orbit as well.

“I may have missed something,” Valthyrra remarked, her camera
pod watching the main viewscreen over Velmeran’s shoulder. “How are
we supposed to get Keflyn back?”

Velmeran glanced at her. “Back? Who said anything about getting her
back? I was just hoping to get her off this ship before she realized the flaw
in her little plan.”

The camera pod afforded him an impatient stare.

“She has a small achronic transmitter in one of her bags,” he
explained.