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