The Starwolves (28 page)

Leaving Vinthra, the Methryn followed the freight lane directly to the
Kalleth system. There she paused outside the system itself and far enough to
one side of the freight lane to remain undetected. The Kalleth system was near
to Vinthra, still very much in the inner systems even if it was not one of the
rich inner worlds. Indeed it lacked a single world that could have been made
even remotely inhabitable. It was just a system consisting of four gas giants
and a wealth of ore-rich moons and debris, with a total population of nearly a
billion divided between several large mining colonies and stations. Bulk freighters
brought in all the necessary supplies and equipment, and left shifting all the
mass they could manage in raw ores.

Velmeran approached this run with as much apprehension as he had the last
time. Instead of demoralized students and an older pilot who should not have
been flying, he now had seven eager and possibly overconfident students and a
girl he could not quite consider his subordinate. In truth he had little to
fear for the younger members. After their last battle, they were out to prove
themselves experienced pilots and the only danger was that they might try too
hard. But Dveyella was another matter altogether, and one that he did not know
how to approach.

"Dveyella, we must be pack leader and pilot now," he reminded her
gently, almost questioningly, as they rode the lift down to the bay.

"Meran, for as long as I fly with you, we must always be pack leader
and pilot to a certain extent," she answered. "For now, we must
forget that we are anything else. I will follow your orders without question or
condition. You must not be afraid to give me those orders."

Velmeran smiled uncertainly. "Yes, I know. The problem is more likely
to be with me, not you."

"Why? Because there is love between us, or because I have been a pack
leader myself."

"Both, perhaps," he admitted.

"If that is the case, then I will leave the pack," she told him.
"There are other things that I can do aboard this ship. But there is no
one else I love. I will never allow anything to come between us."

The lift deposited them on the lower flight deck and they went directly to
their ships. Time was running short, for their target ship would already be on
the edge of the system before they could overtake it. Steena and Delvon would
have as many chances at the freighter as time allowed before he let Dveyella
pull it down – if necessary.

The nine fighters thundered out of the bay, holding formation so tightly
that even Velmeran was impressed. He did not know whether they were inspired by
their past performance or if they operated under a collective urge to impress
their new member, but he was grateful for the change. The last time he had
taken this pack out for battle, he had been concerned that Vayelryn might bump
wings in her nervousness. Now she snapped her fighter up into its running
position above the pack with casual precision.

Shayrn brought her own pack in close behind his own and the two formations
moved as one into starflight. They were upon their prey almost immediately.
Valthyrra Methryn had been flanking it as closely as she dared, every scanning
device she had turned on it, remembering the misfired trap that had awaited
them last time. She reported a crew of seven and a half-filled hold, mostly
inexpensive bulk items and what appeared to be an uncertain number of very small
ships, smaller even than fighters, but nothing that she could identify as
dangerous.

Velmeran intended to verify that at even closer range, bringing his own ship
to within a thousand meters of the freighter to allow his own scanners to pick
it over as best they could. There was something about this that seemed wrong,
but he had no idea what. His own readings confirmed Valthyrra's. He lifted
slightly above the freighter and dropped back a short distance.

"Have at her!" he announced to the waiting pilots.

Delvon came in first, quick but careful in his approach, and fired. His
target was an easy one; he missed, but not by much. He dropped back to await
his second pass as Steena took his place. She was just moving in when Velmeran
realized what he did not like.

"Scatter!"

His cry sent every fighter of both packs heading as fast as they could
directly away from the freighter. Hardly an instant later nine small shapes
shot out of openings in the freighter's hull, curious little ships that seemed
to consist only of a generator, a large star drive in rear and a slightly
smaller one forward for braking, and a single turret that might have belonged
on a destroyer. Their targets had been selected before their launch. Each shot
unerringly after one of the nine fighters of Velmeran's pack. And their speed
was terrifying.

For the Starwolves, this was a new and frightening experience, for they had
never met anything in actual battle that could match the speed of their wolf
ships and their own reflexes. These machines could not only pace them, but at
first threatened to overtake their prey. The fighters dodged and twisted as
best they could, but their deadly pursuers reacted with the barest instant of
hesitation. These were obviously robots, the best automated missiles the Union
could build. Nothing but a Starwoff could have survived aboard them.

The Starwolves engaged their star drives at full thrust in an attempt to
flee. Now the drives of the pursuing missiles flared like sustained explosions
of raw energy, the roaring of those crystal engines filling the heads of the
pilots and confusing them to an extent, their special senses blinded by that
violence. The machines were tearing themselves apart, their drives unable to
sustain more than perhaps a minute of that terrible abuse. But that minute was
all they would need.

Then, as the first few seconds passed, their responses began to deteriorate
as their engines overheated both themselves and their on-board systems.
Velmeran destroyed his with a shot from his tail cannon after luring it in.
Dveyella took out her own, and the free ships then went after the remaining
missiles. The one weakness of the machines, they soon discovered, was that once
locked on target they appeared to be blind to all else.

Steena was in the worst trouble. She had been in her run at the moment of
Velmeran's warning. Three shots had glanced off the hull of her fighter before
she was able to evade; the damage was not obvious, but the ship remained slow
to respond.

Dveyella went to her aid, moving in on the missile with careful
deliberation. Perhaps her attack was too slow. The machine proved to be more
alert than she had anticipated, and sensing this new danger, rotated its turret
completely around. Dveyella was not even aware of her own danger until it fired
directly into her ship's forward hull. The stricken fighter tumbled off to one
side, engines flaring but out of control, as the missile circled around for the
kill. An instant later it was ripped apart as Velmeran dived to her aid, too
late.

"Dveyella?" he called out questioningly as he fell in beside the
damaged ship, but he could not wait for a reply. "Report!"

"All clear!" Tregloran answered for the rest. "We have them
all."

"Valthyrra?"

"Coming!"

"Make certain of that freighter," he insisted.

"I am already on it," she replied. A pair of powerful bolts lanced
out of the darkness of space, locking with deadly accuracy on the bulk
freighter that cruised seemingly unconcerned into system. The vast ship was
vaporized by the explosion of its own generator.

"Dveyella?" Velmeran asked again as he brought his fighter in
close to her own. The damage was not extensive, but it was all concentrated on
the right side of the cockpit. A gaping tear in the tough material of the hull
ran from where the seat would have been to a point two meters back. The forward
window as well as the one on that side were shattered but had not popped out.

Had Dveyella survived that? Was she dead, stunned or simply too busy at the
moment to respond? Even as he watched, the fighter righted itself and swung
around on a new course, back to the Methryn. The remainder of Velmeran's pack
gathered protectively about the two fighters, and Shayrn brought her own pack
in close behind.

"I have control of her ship," Valthyrra informed him. "I will
bring her straight into the bay. Help will be waiting."

At that moment Valthyrra was putting packs into space with clockwork
efficiency. In contrast with that, her bridge was a scene of confusion. She was
silently giving special orders throughout the ship, but her conversation with
the packs was open and the bridge crew was beginning to understand that
something was very wrong. Mayelna stood tensely beside her seat, watching the
main screen attentively. Valthyrra condensed her map of long-range scan to
project a set of graphs beside it. They represented Dveyella's failing life,
the vital readings from her suit.

"Do you have that?" she asked of someone not on the bridge.

"I do now," Dyenlerra, the medic, replied over inter-ship com.
"Great Spirit of Space, what hit her? Valthyrra, I want total life support
equipment moved to the bay immediately."

Mayelna stirred for the first time, pouncing on the com controls in the arm
of her chair. "Dyenlerra, answer me. Can you save her?"

"I can save her, yes," the medic responded, then hesitated.
"Commander, you know what tough little machines we are. To put it simply,
that girl is dead right now. But I can save her yet, if we can get her in
before she realizes that."

"Velmeran?" That weak voice, as though echoing from the dead,
brought instant silence.

"I am here beside you," he answered. "Valthyrra is taking you
home."

"Where are you?" Dveyella asked weakly, uncertainly. "My
windows are glazed."

"I am just off your right side," he was quick to assure her.

"Dveyella, do you hear me?" Valthyrra cut in gently.

"Yes, of course."

"Can you tell me how you are hurt? We need to know what to do for
you."

"There is a pipe... or a rod... that has come through the hull,"
she answered slowly. "It has penetrated the armor on my right side, just
below my lower arms."

"Is it in very deep?" the ship asked.

"I suppose," she said uncertainly. "It... it comes back out
the other side in about the same place."

Mayelna closed her eyes and sat down wearily. Dveyella's hope was almost
gone. Her body had tightened hard against the rod that had transfixed her, even
torn veins and arteries, so that her blood loss was minimal. Ordinarily she
would have survived an amazingly long time with such damage, but with ship and
suit penetrated her wounds were exposed to the harsh emptiness of space. The
terrible cold stabbed at her through the breaks in her suit and the rod, at
first red hot, was now a spear of burning ice. She was quickly freezing, and
she knew it.

"It would seem that I was wrong, Meran, when I said that nothing could
come between us," she said, seeming to gain both strength and awareness.
"Nothing in our lives can be that certain."

"Please, I wish that you would not say such things," Velmeran
pleaded helplessly. "We will be back on board in a moment."

"Oh, I have not given up all hope," she assured him. "I have
a fairly good idea of what my chances are. Because they are not good, there are
certain things that I would not have unsaid. Soon I may be only a memory to
you. I want it to be a happy memory and not a bitter one. We did not have time
for many happy memories, but I would prefer that you remember only those."

Velmeran did not know what to say, if indeed there was anything that he
could say. On the Methryn's bridge there was silence, a tense, fragile silence
as they waited for fate to decide this desperate race. Consherra wept silently
but stayed at her post. Valthyrra was running at her best sublight speed and
wishing that she dared a short jump into starflight. But she could not bring
Dveyella in any faster, not without killing the girl with stresses that she
could no longer endure. All of her packs were out now, for all the good they
could do, and she was closing quickly.

"Commander Trace is to be complimented on his new weapon,"
Dveyella said after a long, uneasy moment. "He was so angry at you when he
could not beat you at chess. And the balladeer's song was so beautiful. That
night was worth a lifetime. I remember that you were so afraid... "

"You were quite enough to frighten anyone," he said when she
seemed to falter. "You asked me that night if I loved you, and I was too
confused to know. That is something I do not believe I ever told you. I hope
that I did not have to."

Mayelna struck her armrest so hard that portions of it shattered. "Damn
it, Valthyrra, you have to get that ship on board now!"

"Do you think that I am not doing my best?" Valthyrra demanded,
swinging her camera pod around. Then she paused. Mayelna had to wipe her eyes
to glare fiercely at the staring lenses. An instant later the Methryn began
braking hard to match speeds.

"Meran, are you there?" Dveyella asked suddenly, urgently.
"Meran? I have no control over my ship."

"Valthyrra is bringing you in," he reminded her gently, although
there was no mistaking the raw fear in his voice. "She is turning in front
of us now."

Valthyrra said nothing, but too many of the life signs that she had been
monitoring were beginning to fail.

"Meran, where are we?" Dveyella asked, only partly reassured.

"We are coming up behind the Methryn fast now," he promised her.
"She is perhaps fifty kilometers ahead now. If your windshield was clear
you would be able to see her lights."

But Dveyella did not hear him. Too many of her vital signs had abruptly
ceased and others were failing quickly; whatever reserve of strength or fierce
determination that had kept her alive was gone. Mayelna buried her face in her
hands for the moment's indulgence in grief that she could spare, wondering at
the same time how she could tell Velmeran. Valthyrra watched her for a moment
of silent pity before turning away.