“We are your friends now, Bill. Would you like to work with us?”
“I would like that very much,” Bill replied in his even, mechanical baritone, although it was easy to imagine tears welling up in his glazed lenses.
Velmeran took Lenna by the arm and pulled her forward. ‘This is Lenna Makayen. She is your very special friend. She has very important work to do. I want you to go with her, to help her and defend her. Will you do that?”
“I would like that very much,” Bill agreed with a note of eagerness. “Lenna is my very special friend.”
Velmeran turned to Leena, who was speechless. “Go on, girl. Bill is totally obedient to our will now, and he will not turn on you. He can help you more than I can.”
“Right, Captain,” Lenna agreed, recovering from her shock. “You concentrate on your own business. I know what I need to do.”
Velmeran nodded. “You have a very good idea, and I know that you can make it work.”
She looked at him in surprise, then smiled. “Thank you, Captain. I’ll not let you down.”
Lenna hung the rifle by its strap and access hook on the towering automaton’s humped back. “Can you take me to the nearest lift?”
By way of reply, Bill turned himself around and started down the corridor to their right at his even, lumbering gait. As slow and careful as he appeared to move, his long legs carried him at a pace that Lenna had to step quickly to match.
“There go two that I love, and the smallest not the least,” Baress quoted.
Velmeran paused in putting on his helmet. “Is Professor Tolkien to be with us the entire mission?”
Baress shrugged. “I thought that we might have need of entertaining company now that Lenna is gone. What did you do to that machine, anyway?”
“Just a little judicious tampering with both the hardware and the software.” He paused a moment to secure his helmet and switch on the outside audio pickups. The Starwolves could hear, if not as well, and yet converse freely without fear of being heard. “We have to hurry now.”
“We should have asked Bill for directions,” Consherra remarked as they started off in the direction the sentry had led Lenna.
“No need,” he assured her. “All the major sections of the ship are located on a major corridor. Corridor three, level twenty-five ends at the auxiliary bridge. All we have to do is find corridor three on this level and go up five to level twenty-five, then follow that corridor forward all the way.”
“And what about the sentries?” she asked.
“We will have no more trouble with sentries. I just needed a little practice at hearing them.”
“Hearing them?” Baress asked incredulously. “You can sense the tiny generator in a sentry over the roar of this beast’s engines?”
“Of course.”
“If you say so,” he said dubiously. “I only wish for half your talent. Still, it is as they say, do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.”
Velmeran glanced at him without pausing. “My mistake was obvious. I should have given Lenna access to my books, and given you my art supplies. Then neither of you would have understood what you had well enough to annoy me with it. Ah, here we are.”
They emerged suddenly into a vast chamber, three levels high by nearly twice as wide and extending in either direction as far as even their sensitive eyes could see. Tubes of various sizes, from pencil-thin to large enough to walk inside, ran along the walls, ceiling, and floors, while several of the largest were suspended in frames in the center. Railed catwalks leaned out from the walls on various levels, and a raised platform wove a twisting path through the maze of pipes on the floor.
“This is your major corridor?” Consherra asked.
“Of course not,” Velmeran replied. “We follow this forward to the next major transverse corridor, and that will take us directly to the major lateral corridor we need. Then we follow that forward until we find stairs leading up.”
The Methryn sat in a natural pocket within the interior of the ring, her engines idle as she waited, and pivoted carefully until she was facing back the way she had come. Capture ships continued to arrive, every one both the Kalvyn and the Methryn possessed, and set to work plugging her corridor with boulders pushed aside in her passage. Transports of all sizes were gathering patiently in the main portion of the corridor five kilometers away.
“A report just came in,” Valthyrra announced. “Tregloran says that the Challenger is moving again.”
Mayelna nodded slowly without turning from the main viewscreen. “What about your mechanical self? That rock you pushed weighed a great deal more than you do.”
“Oh, I can handle more stress than that,” Valthyrra assured her. “That is part of the reason I have a shock bumper in my nose. However, I am reminded of something from ancient Terra, an animal called a seal that was trained to balance a ball on its nose.”
“No seal ever had to balance its ball while running a path no wider than itself at four thousand kilometers per hour.”
“I also doubt very much that seals ever threw rocks at battleships,” she said dryly, then glanced at the viewscreen. “Only for him would I even consider doing such a thing.”
Mayelna glanced up as well. The capture ships had completed their labor and were joining the transports in the main corridor. Seen from behind, their careful arrangement resembled the outline of a Starwolf carrier.
“All ready?” she asked.
“Just about,” Valthyrra replied. “If the Challenger moves back up to her previous speed, she will be passing here in about ten minutes.”
“Will this arrangement work?”
“Yes, it will work,” the ship insisted. “But we are still taking a chance. All of those little ships will leave a very different, energy-emission signature. For someone as intelligent as Maeken Kea seems to be, that might be too many hints as to our real tactics. Damn Donalt Trace anyway! The smartest thing he ever did was to admit that he is not smart enough to fight Velmeran. She also has the better ship.”
“A better defensive weapon,” Mayelna corrected her. “You make up for that in versatility. You also have the advantage of being a great deal smarter.”
“I should hope so!” Valthyrra declared.
Mayelna smiled. “I just wish that you could fire as it passes.”
“So do I,” the ship agreed. Unfortunately, she needed half a minute to charge her conversion cannon, and the concentration of raw energy in her containment chamber would scream her presence throughout the system. “The decoy formation is ready to proceed.”
“Send them on, then. They need to keep all the distance they can.”
Five kilometers away, the decoy ships began to accelerate cautiously. The unique configuration of the formation allowed their overlapping shields to form a spearhead shape, gently pushing a passage through the ring that was identical in appearance to the Methryn’s corridor.
Donalt Trace remained in his cabin, strapped in his bunk by acceleration belts, until he was reasonably certain that the attack was over. That was hardly an act of cowardice, but a practical consideration involving a couple of hard truths. He knew that he had very little to offer Maeken Kea, and there was no doubt that his reconstructed back would not endure being bounced around the corridors of the Challenger. And so it was a quarter of an hour after the last impact that he finally started for the bridge.
When the lift opened, he found two passengers already in the car. One was a cute if lanky Lokuivian girl in the uniform of a first lieutenant. The other was a sentry that took an abrupt step forward until the girl put out a hand to stop it. Trace naturally assumed that the machine thought it had reached its destination. He never knew how close he came to being killed by one of his own sentries.
“Bridge, Commander?” the girl asked, and he nodded as he took his place on the opposite side of the door. “The lift is set for there already.”
“All secure, Lieutenant?” he asked.
