'Baressa?'
'She is under strict orders not to offer so much as a word of advice.'
Velmeran, with a final gesture of hopelessness, turned away a last time.
Mayelna turned back to her monitors, but Valthyrra made no secret of watching him go. Several of the others, Consherra in particular, watched him just as closely. Valthyrra swung her boom back around to the Commander's console.
'Is he still your choice?' Mayelna asked without looking up.
The pod itself nodded in agreement. 'More than ever.'
Mayelna looked up sharply. 'He is a good pilot, I will grant you that. But that does not make him a good leader.'
'No, the two are not related,' she agreed. 'But I still believe that when he learns to lose his fear of being a leader, then he will make a very good one.'
Mayelna leaned back in her chair, crossing her arms defiantly. 'How can you know that better than me? I am his mother…'
'And I have been a carrier for nearly twenty thousand years,' Valthyrra replied firmly. 'I should know who I want to command on my bridge. He will prove himself soon enough.'
The landing bay was dark and silent, empty except for the nine fighters seated in their racks just inside the forward bay door. They were starships in their own right, large for single-seat fighters, with main drives tucked under down-swept wings and a large star drive in their tail. In color they were a dull, nonreflective black — even their cockpit windows deeply tinted — like swift shadows against the darkness of space. They were sleek and powerful, built for speed and maneuverability, and there was nothing, neither piloted nor computer-driven, that could outfly them.
For now they sat poised for flight, landing gear retracted, ready to leap from their racks into battle. They lacked only their pilots, who were as finely crafted by genetic engineering for their specific task as the ships themselves. The wolf-pack pilots had been made with the accelerated reflexes needed to fly their ships at tremendous speed, the strength and endurance for harsh accelerations and heightened senses to feel the locations of the ships about them. Together, a Starwolf pilot and ship made the most deadly and efficient war machine known.
Velmeran completed his inspection of his ship and climbed to the rack's boarding platform, using the overhead supports to lift himself into the outthrust cockpit. He often came alone to the bay to be with his ship when his thoughts troubled him. The ship was the other half of his life; being with it reminded him why he flew with the packs, catching company freighters for the carrier he served. Too often he found the same answer. This had been decided for him a very long time ago. He could have no plans of his own because, like this ship, he was too specialized for his task to do anything else.
He thought then, as he often did, of the first time he had sat in the cockpit of a wolf-pack fighter. It had been his mother's ship, sitting on its stiltlike landing gear centermost of its pack of nine, just in from a hunt. The pilots were always exhausted then, barely able to walk for fatigue and the dreamlike concentration of flight. But she had been alive and alert, eager to say to him the things she had to tell. She had stood for a long time, watching him without expression, and the intensity of that stare had demanded his full attention.
'Listen well, Meran,' she had said suddenly. 'The Commander is old and very sick, and I will likely be called to take over his duties at any time. After that I will never fly with the packs again, and so I wanted to say this to you now.
'Fifty thousand years ago we owned these stars we now haunt. But then the Union came like a sickness from within, a group of fringe worlds who thought that they would be happier and wealthier if they could run everything for themselves. And we fought them, back in the days when we were the old Terran fleet. But all of our bases were swallowed up, and our little ships were destroyed. We withdrew for a time to the one base that the Union never found, and tried to think of how so very few could fight something so large.
'Our friends, the Aldessan of Valtrys, did what they could. They gave us these big carriers, self-contained worlds, and these fast little ships that can run down anything. And they made us better, so that we can fly these ships. The Union learned very quickly to leave us alone. They always think in terms of cost and profit, and it costs too much to fight us. They prefer to pay us ransom in the company freighters we take.
'But it was a trap of our own making. They cannot defeat us without destroying themselves, and we cannot defeat them with the few carriers we have. We survive the only way we can, preying upon their freighters and protecting the fringe worlds. Four-fifths of the colonies are fringe worlds, not a part of the Union but dominated by it, and the companies steal away their lives and sell them back with transport charges attached. If we do any real good, it is in the fact that we keep the Union humble and the companies from making slaves of the minor worlds.'
She had paused a moment to run a hand lovingly over the sleek hull of the fighter. Watching her, he had realized that these little ships were more than just toys or machines to the pilots, but a part of themselves. And Mayelna had been there to say farewell to her own, knowing that she would be going up to the bridge to stay in a matter of hours.
'Someday you will most likely fly one of these ships,' she had continued. 'I almost wish that you will not. It is a terrible life, and often a short one. But you are a Starwolf and made to fly, and you will have only half a life if you do not. You will know what it is like to become one with this machine. To outthink and outreact your on-board computer and never need to look at scan because you can feel in the back of your mind the singing of the crystal engines of all the ships about you. The fear for your own life, the remorse and guilt for what you must do as a warrior, the sorrow for those you will lose along the way. All the heavy prices you must pay, and still it is worth it all. Because this is what you exist for. One day you will understand.'
He had listened, and he remembered every word. But he had not understood. He had known only a growing, impatient desire to have one of those sleek little ships for his own.
* * * *
Now Velmeran understood only too well. He had been content as a mere pilot. Now he was pack leader. With that came the responsibility for eight lives beyond his own, the greater responsibility to defend his ship, and the fear of failure in those duties. He dared not fail. With that also came the relentless need to know that he was doing the right thing whenever he led his pack into battle, that there really was some justification for the death and destruction, the lives that were risked and sometimes lost; and above all else he needed to know, for his own satisfaction, that he was not just a machine made for war, with no life or will of his own.
He had no answers to any of those questions, but still he took his pack out and fought. Perhaps that in itself was answer enough, but he did not yet have the experience to understand what it meant.
Velmeran paused when he saw his reflection in the black monitor screen that dominated the upper part of the fighter's console. The Starwolves, the Kelvessan, were a race apart, vaguely human in appearance but not derived from human stock. They were small in size, disproportionately long of limb with powerful arms and legs that looked to have been matched to a body several sizes too small. Far more than just an extra set of arms and unnatural strength separated Kelvessan from men.
Indeed, as he peered at his reflection, he thought that he could never pass as human. His eyes, outsized for good light sensitivity, were more than twice as large as they should have been. His ears, equally outsized and set farther back on his head, had been tapered to a delicate point for purely aesthetic reasons. He also thought that his nose was about half the size it should have been, and his mouth was too wide. And he had always been told that a Starwolf's shaggy mop of brown hair, remarkably thick and soft, was natural padding against helmet and collar.
Other, more extensive refinements were not visible. His bones were not calcium but precipitates of iron, and quite as hard as iron bars of equal thickness. His cartilage and tendons could withstand tons of stress and his nervoussystem was electrical rather than electrochemical, allowing reflexes that were thousands of times faster than those of humans. His strength was tremendous, to allow him to not just withstand but function under forces that would kill an ordinary man. He was a machine, the living control center for an equally remarkable starship.
But was there also a person within that carefully engineered machine? He certainly was not human. He accepted that. But if not human, then what was he? He was a Kelvessa, a Starwolf. His only hope was that those simple words described something more than just a fighting machine.
