“How did it go?” Velmeran asked as they approached.
“Quite well,” Baress replied. “We did not get a scratch. And at this point, the only stingships they have left are any the Challenger herself might be carrying.”
“I got three!” Lenna proclaimed proudly. Since she had not had time to remove her makeup, Velmeran had recognized her by the fact that the black armor she wore had only one set of arms.
“Three what?” he asked. “Ours, or theirs?”
“Stingships, of course,” she said indignantly. “Like shooting fish in a barrel.”
Velmeran glanced at Baress, who shrugged helplessly. “I got only three myself. Valthyrra cut down the phasing of her engines so that we would always know where she was. And, to tell the truth, we were flying in such close quarters that you could not tell her from the regular pilots.”
Velmeran regarded the girl for a moment and shrugged. “That should not be surprising, I suppose. Just tell me when your ears begin to point. How did the attack transports work out?”
“It was a simple matter of overkill, shooting at stingships,” Trel replied. “They were designed for bigger game.”
Valthyrra steered her camera pod in behind Velmeran. “I thought you would like to know that the Challenger has indeed entered the ring and is following my corridor at such an alarming pace that I have had to increase my own speed. I have a probe following her at a discreet distance.”
“Then we really are in business,” Velmeran muttered to himself, and turned back to Valthyrra. “How soon can the packs go out again?”
“Back out?” the ship asked in desperation. “I only just finished getting them all in. But you can head out immediately, if you must.”
“That might seem a little extreme. We need to make it look like we had to take stock of what we have and hold an emergency conference on the subject first. We will start putting fighters back into space in exactly one hour. Right, Lenna?”
“Right, Captain.”
“I will lead twelve packs after the warships,” Velmeran continued. “Baressa, you will take twelve packs after the supply convoy.”
“What about me?” Lenna demanded.
“You will…,” Velmeran began sternly, but paused when he saw her look of determination, “…need all the practice you can get. I do not have a pack for you to fly with this time.”
“She can go with us,” Trel offered. “We should be easy to keep track of, since she has to depend upon scan entirely to know who she is with.”
“Good enough,” Velmeran agreed. “Lenna, if you can hold your own against stingships, you can certainly handle the warships.”
“And if you do not come back, I am only out a fighter,” Valthyrra teased.
Donalt Trace arrived on the bridge at a run, only to find that no one was at the Captain’s station. He paused just long enough for a quick look around, and found Maeken Kea bending over the shoulder of the officer at the main communication console. She turned to meet him just as he arrived.
“The support fleet and the convoy are both under attack,” she explained quickly.
“Is there anything we can do?” Commander Trace asked.
“It is already over, as far as I can tell,” Maeken answered. “That fool of a fleet commander thought that he could handle the problem himself; he didn’t call for help until he realized that he had lost. The last ship went silent only a moment ago. We cannot scan accurately from inside the ring, but the answer is plain enough. We have no support fleet, and we can no longer repair this ship.”
“We have no damage now, do we?”
“No, nor could the support fleet do us much good inside the ring,” she answered. “Stingships could not begin to navigate this mess, although it seems that Starwolves can.”
“Do you consider this a major setback?” Trace asked as they turned toward the Captain’s station.
“No, a relatively minor one, under the circumstances.” Maeken had to run every few steps to match his long- legged stride. She wondered if he had really come to value her judgment so much that he would agree to retreat on her recommendation. She decided to test that. “As I see it, we can risk another twenty-four hours to try to fish the Methryn out of the ring. I am only guessing that we will be fairly safe until then, but any time after that we’re likely to be up to our necks in carriers. We can only hope that the Methryn will either have to shut down for repairs or else simply break down again, and we have to overtake her during that time.”
“And we have no idea how fast she’s moving. She might be gaining on us, or we might be gaining on her.” Trace started to seat himself in the Captain’s chair, but remembered and quickly stepped aside. “You are right, I suppose. But what good does it do him to go after those targets?”
“It’s just what I would have done,” Maeken said. “At least he now has his problems limited to just one big one. And now we have to ask what he intends to do about that problem.”
Velmeran was contemplating that very question during his return to the Methryn. As far as he could tell, he had only three options. He could either lead his packs against the Challenger and see what their cannons could do against her guns, take the Methryn in for a real battle, or else go immediately to his reserve plan. He did not doubt that he would have to resort to that third plan, but he preferred to try something simpler and more direct first.
The truth was that Velmeran had no idea just how effective a fighter would be, but he had little hope that this was the answer to his problem. That depended more than anything on how fast and accurate the Challenger was at tracking a target as small as a twenty-meter fighter. To destroy a cannon, the pilots were required to put a bolt through the small opening in the turret for its tracking lenses, a task complicated by the fact that they had to align their entire ship to fire their own cannons. That might prove impossible even for Starwolves, between dodging rocks and enemy fire. Still, he thought it was worth a try.
Velmeran allowed another hour’s rest before the next attack. Kelvessan, because of the tremendous demands of hypermetabolism, had surprisingly little endurance, but they also recovered very quickly. That was Lenna Makayen’s peculiar advantage over her fellow pilots. But when she did tire, she was much slower to recover. That was part of the reason why she did not protest when Velmeran told her that she would not take part in this attack. She really did know what she could and could not do; she could easily navigate the ring, something no true human would attempt, but not fight there.
The problem of endurance was also very much on Velmeran’s mind. He knew that his pilots were only good for about ten or twenty minutes of this kind of work. If this attack did show reasonable promise, it would take hours of picking away at the Challenger’s guns and engines to leave the ship vulnerable to the Methryn’s conversion cannon. He would have to divide his twenty packs into four groups of five each, each group attacking for fifteen minutes and then resting at a safe distance for forty-five.
“There simply are no easy answers,” Valthyrra had concluded when he had discussed his ideas with her. “The question, of course, is do we really have to defeat this thing as long as we can keep it here?”
“I have not forgotten that,” Velmeran said. “But this Maeken Kea is smarter than anyone I have fought before, and she is going to be hard to fool. I am sure that she expects me to put up a stiff fight, even if she also expects to win. It seems to me that there is little difference between doing my best and doing enough to keep her satisfied, so I might as well try to win.”
“And what if you do too good, and she decides that it is time to leave?” Valthyrra asked.
Velmeran smiled. “The Challenger is as penned inside this ring as they believe we are. She cannot open the shields on her engines to run without leaving them vulnerable to our attack. But I actually want them to run at the end. We certainly cannot use the conversion cannon here. We would blast away half the ring and ourselves with it.”
Valthyrra’s cameras had a decidedly shocked expression. “Funny I had not thought of that.”
“Then I suppose that I might as well get on with what I can do,” Velmeran said, already on his way down the steps from the upper bridge. “Call the pilots to their ships and have the capture ships stand by.”
Velmeran collected the packs just above the ring and backtracked along the Methryn’s path until he was sure that he was behind the Challenger. Returning to the ring, they quickly found the five-kilometer-wide corridor left by the Fortress’s passage. Velmeran sent two groups of six packs each into the ring to either side, then waited with