threw her well out of the Challenger’s reach. The Fortress adjusted her course on her own initiative; she was not yet ready to give up the chase.
“Damn them!” Maeken declared. “I should have guessed.”
“What is it?” Trace demanded, mystified.
“They found their escape,” she explained. “Apparently their damage is such that they can never outrun us. But they do mean to duck into the ring of the fifth planet for repairs.”
“Can we stop them?”
Maeken bent over her terminal to do some hasty calculations. Donalt Trace was impressed; very few people had the mechanical ability to perform their own trajectory mechanics. After a moment she sat back and frowned.
“Well, this is certainly going to be close,” she remarked at last. “Assuming that the Methryn has to shed all her speed before she can enter the ring, she should be coming into our range at almost the same instant she loses herself in the debris. We have just over twenty-one minutes to try to catch her.”
The race continued. After a few minutes the Challenger matched the Methryn’s speed, and the task of closing on her prey began again. After eighteen minutes more of running, the Fortress was now nearing seven- eighths the speed of light. One of the brighter stars ahead suddenly began to expand rapidly, quickly becoming a large world banded by yellow and reddish-orange clouds and framed by an immense ring. Rings were common enough, but this one was unique in that it was not banded and segmented but consisted of a single disk that was a noticeable brown in color, with a grainy texture that betrayed the large size of its components. Moments later the Methryn herself became visible at the limit of the highly magnified image.
The Methryn was braking sharply now as she prepared to match speed with the mass of the ring, rising quickly below the ship. The Challenger cut her own acceleration but continued to drift at near light speed. But the race was lost already, if by mere seconds. The Methryn braked hard a final time before disappearing both visually and from scan. A moment later the Challenger fired a quick volley at the region where she thought the carrier to be for the few seconds that she remained within range, already braking with her forward engines as she shot past the large planet. She began a slow circle that would bring her back to the same area of the ring by the time she could cut her speed to orbital velocity.
“Now what?” Trace demanded, gasping for breath as he was held against the straps of his seat by a five-G deceleration.
Maeken spent a long moment studying her monitors before reporting. “The Kalvyn is holding her distance, apparently too damaged herself to fight us alone. On the other hand, the packs have destroyed our stingships and are coming in a hurry.”
“And your recommendation?”
Maeken frowned, but made her decision quickly. “Finding the Methryn in that place will be a real chore. Both ships can navigate the ring, but it will keep our speed limited to little more than orbital velocity of the ring itself And cut the range of our cannons. Neither ship will have effective scan. The Starwolves can keep us preoccupied with their fighters, but we have the undamaged ship. But she is leaving a trail for us to follow, And if she loses power again we’ll have her. And if we do not go after her now, before help arrives, she will get away. I say that we should go in after her now.”
“So do I,” Commander Trace agreed.
Maeken Kea gave the order for the Challenger to follow the Methryn into the ring. It was as Velmeran had foreseen. Donalt Trace could not resist the prize under any circumstance. But Maeken Kea was also tempted, beyond her better judgment.
Maeken Kea was unaware that she was chasing an intact, undamaged Starwolf carrier into a trap.
11
A large part of Velmeran’s success lay in his talent for conceiving and executing plans that his human opponents did not expect. Lenna Makayen, expressing it from the human point of view, declared it was the sort of thing that no one in their right mind would consider the first time she heard it. Velmeran thereby reasoned that it was also the sort of thing no one would expect and somehow saw a compliment in that remark, Either he knew a few things about humans that they did not themselves suspect or else he was, as Lenna implied, not entirely in his right mind. Whatever the case, it had certainly worked.
The execution of the plan had been simple enough. Valthyrra had made her run at a speed and heading that had put her in the general direction of the fifth planet, requiring only one course correction. The large explosion in her engine rooms had been in reality a quarter-megaton conversion device rigged from the salvaged generator of a fighter, and placed atop the tripod erected a hundred meters above her hull. The Fortress’s scanners were not accurate enough to detect the light structure or determine the fact that the explosion had actually been safely outside the Methryn’s shields. Marenna Challenger had assumed from misleading evidence that her main generators had been hit, and Maeken Kea had seen no reason to question that.
The rest had proceeded simply enough, although it had required careful timing. Valthyrra had simply shut down her engines to set herself adrift, idling her main generators, then gave herself a very slow nose-over roll. Everything, from her high initial attack speed to her one course correction and short bursts of power, had been carefully calculated to keep her just outside the Challenger’s reach.
If Maeken Kea had been at all suspicious, she would have easily seen that there were entirely too many convenient coincidences. But those suspicious coincidences had instead become enticing lures. After one piece of incredibly good luck followed by a string of near misses, neither Maeken Kea nor Donalt Trace could resist the urge to continue the chase. As prey, the disabled Methryn was simply too tempting to refuse.
Velmeran knew that the Challenger would attempt to follow the Methryn’s trail through the ring. The powerful static charge of the ring caused its relatively large fragments to repel each other enough for Starwolf fighters to slip through with ease; the larger ships would simply force a path with their debris shields, a path that could be easily followed for several hours before gravitational and static forces caused them to close again. Velmeran actually pointed out the Methryn’s corridor to the Challenger by having the returning fighters duck almost beneath the larger ship’s nose to fly down the open path.
“How long until the fighters come in?” Velmeran asked, removing himself at last from the Commander’s station.
“The first packs should be in about two minutes from now,” Valthyrra replied. “Baress and Baressa will be leading their packs in first. Do you want me to send them here as soon as possible?”
“Send me those two, and the rest of my special tactics team,” he decided. “What is the Challenger doing?”
“Casting about for the opening I left in the ring,” the ship replied. “She obviously means to follow.”
Velmeran spent the next few minutes reviewing the careful scan of that area of the ring that Valthyrra had made during her approach. She calculated that the giant Fortress would not be able to make better than two thousand kilometers per hour — relative, of course, to the speed of the ring itself. Within the ring, its floating mass of boulders and moonlets appeared as a motionless landscape to any ship sharing the same orbit… that is, traveling in the same general speed and direction. Actually, the Methryn could go little faster herself, since speed was determined by how fast rocks could be shoved away from an oncoming ship.
They had entered the ring near its outer edge, and had been working their way steadily inward ever since. Because of the low speed, they could expect to confine their chase to a relatively small area. At this rate, it would take nearly two full days just to pass completely through the ring and reach the outer atmosphere of the planet below. They were in fact spiraling slowly inward, moving ‘downstream’ with its motion.
The crewmembers he had requested, and some he had not, arrived on the bridge within minutes. Baress and Baressa arrived with Trel and Marlena, the other two official members of the special tactics team, and Tregloran, who had been an unofficial member for over a year. Lenna Makayen, none the worse for her first turn as a combat pilot, quietly brought up the rear.
