Tactical Error

once fooled all of Port Kallenes for a couple of days, including the redoubtable Lenna Makayen.

The junior officer came to collect her several hours later, helping her to place her bags into a shipping container that would be transferred over to the Thermopylae. One of her bags contained an achronic transceiver that weighed half as much as herself. It seemed that the negotiations with the captain of the Thermopylae had gone extremely well, and that he was completely willing to accept the risk of transporting her to the colony on Alameda, which the Union called Charadal. But they would have to hurry, since the Thermopylae was on the Port Schedule to depart in only a few hours.

The shipping crate was put on a cart which the officer from the Karabyn proceeded to navigate through the crowd. Keflyn was obliged to follow him at a discreet distance, with just one of her bags over her shoulder, playing the part of a passenger looking for her ship. She had to wear the cape to hide her lower set of arms, and that prevented her from wearing a uniform that would have allowed her to pretend to be the member of a ship’s crew.

Having lived all her life in the monotonous uniformity of the same ship, she was in fact too busy enjoying herself during her walk through the station to be frightened. The corridors of the station were nearly overflowing with the press of aliens of every type, mostly human. She was so busy looking about, in fact, that she had a hard time keeping within sight of her guide. They arrived in time at an airlock essentially identical to the one they had just left. Following the instructions she had been given, she loitered at the observation port while her crate was loaded onto the ship.

That gave her a chance for her first look at the ship that would take her to her destination. The Thermopylae was a moderately large ship by Free Trader standards, some 300 meters or more in length, but old and generally decrepit. On the whole — and largely because of Starwolf intervention — the Free Traders led a fairly profitable existence. For one to be in this state meant that they had been down on their luck for some time, perhaps impoverished from the debt of unexpected repairs. She had heard tales of Traders reduced to smuggling or other illicit schemes in their desperation to pay their port fees and keep their ships in space. This lot had apparently swallowed their pride and accepted a long-term contract for a run that would not have paid for the larger ships of the Companies.

“We should get you on board.”

She turned quickly to the man who had suddenly stepped up beside her. She had never met a Free Trader before. But remembering Lenna and how she could pass for Kelvessan, Keflyn was not entirely surprised at how much he looked like one of her own kind. He was too tall for a Starwolf, but he did have the same tan skin, dark brown hair and dark eyes, and the same smooth, almost child-like features, perhaps more so because he was obviously still quite young. The Free Traders were nature’s answer to the Kelvessan, the very best that natural selection could do to adapt a living creature to the same high-stress environment of space flight that the Starwolves had been designed to conquer. The outward resemblances between the two races were, as far as anyone knew, entirely a matter of coincidence.

He did not, of course, possess a second set of arms, nor could he take more than just a fraction of the crushing accelerations that Starwolves could endure. He could not endure even an instant of the vacuum or the super-cold temperatures of open space. He could not lift thirty times his weight, nor did he face a life expectancy of centuries.

He was sort of cute, all the same.

“We will be leaving in less than three hours,” he said as he escorted her to the airlock. “The sooner we get out of here, the better I’ll feel about it, I do admit.”

They were both happier once they stepped through the airlock and entered the ship itself, moving quickly through the wide tube of the docking probe and into the cargo hold. The Thermopylae was essentially just a single, long storage bay, with her engineering section in back and the crew quarters in a single deck above.

Her companion indicated a set of stairs leading up with a gallant wave of his hand. “She’s not much, but she always gets there on time. So far, at least. I’m Jon Addesin, Captain of the Thermopylae.”

“Keflyn, no last name, lately of the Methryn, Starwolf extraordinaire.”

“I’ve never met a Starwolf before,” Addesin said as he boldly lifted her cape to look at her second set of arms. Most humans would not dare to touch a Starwolf, which they considered a quick way to certain death. Perhaps she just looked small and defenseless without her armor; humans were also not used to seeing Starwolves in such an advanced state of undress.

“You might find something in there you do not expect,” she said, trying to sound stern and threatening, although she was more amused than anything.

“I doubt that,” Addesin remarked. He stepped off the stairs and paused almost immediately before the door of a cabin. “I thought that we might put you here on the nearest end of the passenger section, right up against the crew quarters. Being a colony supply ship, the Thermopylae has to carry a fair amount of passenger space, although we have nobody but yourself on this trip. Since most of our passengers are Feldenneh, the environmental system has been converted over to their tastes. Tell me if it runs a little cold.”

“I am not likely to complain,” she said. “Starwolves were meant for cold climates, like the Feldenneh.”

“Is that so?” He stared at her closely. “Where’s your fur?”

“You seem to be very interested in what I have inside my clothes,” she said, deciding to tease him hard in return. She was young enough to be quite flattered by the attention, but old enough to know better. “Do you have a thing about Starwolves? That is about as weird as it is dangerous.”

“Just polite interest in something new and different.”

“Different? I should introduce you to one of my Valtrytian friends, if extra limbs excite you.”

Addesin seemed to be at a loss for an answer to that one; Keflyn wondered if he was not used to young, innocent prey that knew how to fight back. She had learned to bluff from the best, having watched her father for years. And Lenna Makayen had told her a few things that Starwolves hardly ever knew.

“Why don’t you stay under cover until we leave the station,” he said as he turned to leave. “The port authorities sometimes come on board to inspect the cargo before we go, but they never come into the passenger area.”

A few short hours later, the Thermopylae backed away from her place at the Vinthra Commercial Complex and accelerated in a slow loop that carried her out of system. Eventually, as she pushed laboriously toward the speed of light, she engaged her stardrive and slipped away into the endless night between the stars. Unseen, a small, dark ship followed closely.

Almost immediately, eight vast ships left their place of hiding in close orbit over a remote planet of that system. Seven of those ships, moving in a wide arrowhead formation, were standard Union Fortresses. The last was a ship the Starwolves had heard about in rumor but never seen. The SuperFortress, vast almost beyond belief, was nearly fifty kilometers in length, twice the size of any other Fortress. Larger even than any mobile station ever built in Union space, an armored monster vast, dark, and threatening. Slow and awkward, the strike force took the better part of a full day to accelerate to light speed, and even then they lumbered through the stars like a pack of large predators on the hunt. Indeed they were already on the scent, following the Thermopylae’s trail at a discreet distance.

Thermopylae was a fitful, temperamental little ship. Her stardrive phased in an endless repetition of surges and stalls. The relentless pulsing was enough to drive Keflyn to distraction, for Kelvessan had been bred with the ability to sense stardrives as an alternative to having to rely upon scanner images when pursuing their prey. She went at last to the main engineering compartment in the back of the ship and began the subtle task of recalibrating the drive to phase smoothly.

No race in all of space understood drives better than Kelvessan, and she soon had the aging freighter purring contently. That brought about certain very noticeable changes on the displays on the bridge, most importantly an increase in speed of almost one-fifth. That, along with the nervous complaints of the chief engineer who had been chased out of his domain by a determined Starwolf, brought Captain Addesin to investigate.

He found Keflyn well in the back of the engineering compartment, closing access panels on the main power coupling feeding into the stardrive. That frightened him just a little; with the drive powered up, a mistake here could