Tactical Error

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.