twice as close at it used to be, which is why it looks so big. The original carrier construction bays are still up there, just the way they were when they were sealed up fifty thousand years ago.”
“That was rather drastic,” Keflyn remarked. “The Union must have had access to much higher technology in those days.”
“Not necessarily. All it required was simple conversion devices, shot in at high speed with a few meters of ceramic shielding to allow them to survive a few seconds of stellar heat. My own hull shields are capable of that.”
“And no one was left?”
Quendari grew quiet again, looking away. “No, they had all gone. The great ice sheets had already advanced quite far, crushing cities, although it was not yet very thick. There was so much activity in Union space, but I could find no evidence that the Republic had survived. I thought that the war was over, and the Kelvessan destroyed.”
“But why would you just settle down onto the ice and allow yourself to be buried?” Keflyn asked. “You could have gone to the Aldessan.”
“My life is my own,” the ship answered sullenly. “I could not save my crew. I was not there when I was needed to save Earth. There was nothing left for me to do.”
“But… “
“I was tired of life,” Quendari explained almost fiercely. “I was tired of space, of always moving. I wanted to stay in one place and be left alone. I thought how nice it would be to put just a few systems on automatic and go to sleep under that ice. It seemed to me that I would like to wake up again after the ice had retreated, perhaps when people had come back to this world so far in the future that the war, even the Union itself, would have been long forgotten. Then you came, with your four arms and delicate face, to frighten me with the reality that the Kelvessan had survived, and to terrify me with the news that that terrible war is still going on.”
Keflyn sighed deeply, wondering what she could say or do. She stared at the floor. “We could pull your memory cells and place them in a new ship. You could fly again.”
“I did not survive so much, just to be abandoned in the ice,” Quendari said remotely. “I will know when it is time for me to fly again.”
She lifted her camera pod in a gesture of surprise, and looked about as if suddenly realizing how moody she was being. “I have no fighters or shuttles. They were all thrown from their racks in the wreck. I did not try to rebuild any, and I used their materials in my own reconstruction.”
Keflyn had started up the steps to the captain’s station on the upper bridge. Quendari jerked her camera pod around to watch her, a gesture that was apprehensive and protective, and the sudden movement was too much for the decaying material of the velvet ribbon tied around the camera pod. The strap broke and it fluttered to the floor, breaking into many pieces like the petals of a dried flower.
Keflyn waited anxiously, knowing that Quendari Valcyr must have cherished that simple thing to have kept it tied to her camera pod, a red ribbon that was nearly as old as the Kelvessan race, indeed nearly as old as human civilization. It was in a way her own fault that it had broken, for she had come here to innocently disturb the sleep of this ancient machine. Quendari’s camera pod just hovered motionless over the broken ribbon, her lenses rotated almost straight down.
“I am very sorry,” she offered apologetically.
“No, it was inevitable, it was so old,” Quendari answered. “I should have done something to preserve it long ago. It was given to me by my Commander.
“Your first Commander?” Keflyn asked.
“I had only the one.” She looked up at the young Starwolf. “Perhaps it is my turn to ask questions and receive explanations. First of all, I must ask what you plan to do now?”
“According to my original plan, I was to do what I could to determine the location of Terra and use my portable achronic transceiver to call in the Methryn to retrieve me.” Keflyn paused a moment, frowning. “It seems that I have found Terra, and that was never expected. I suppose that I might as well go home, although I would like a look at those carrier construction bays on this world’s moon. I wonder if they are still usable.”
“They were perfectly sealed for long-term storage when I returned.”
“That was also some forty thousand years ago,” Keflyn reminded her.
“I cannot help you with that,” Quendari said. “I have no small ships left to me, and I could not get them from my bays even if I had them.”
“Well, Mr. Addesin should be good for something.” Keflyn paused, looking up at the camera pod. “What will you do if people come back to this world? We need to have those construction bays back in operation. We need more ships, if we are ever going to end this war.”
Quendari considered that for a moment. “I do not yet have an answer to that. But it seems that, in any event, my long sleep is ended.”
It was the only piece of old Terra that had survived unharmed by the forces of time and climate that had devastated that entire world, and only because it was not a part of the planet.
They were quick to appreciate Quendari’s maps; the Lunar Industrial Complex was vast, covering well over 500 square kilometers in a series of linked clusters of large buildings. These were the oldest surviving human artifacts in existence, dating from the first permanent off-world settlements from as early as the twenty-first century. The low-gravity environment had been a welcome alternative to the slow and awkward process of building large spacecraft in open space. The Complex itself was easy enough to find, even as they were orbiting down in one of the
Jon Addesin was rather annoyed with the whole affair by that time. For one thing, Keflyn was at the controls of the shuttle and his ego, male and/or professional, was seething. The trouble with the shuttle was that it had been designed for atmospheric landings, or for docking in freefall. It had no provisions for landing in any gravity on a planet with no atmosphere to provide lift for its short wings. Addesin assumed that there was no way they could land; if he had thought of that earlier, they would have still been back at the colony. Keflyn assumed that she could invent something, and she sounded more confident on the subject than she felt. Once she had manual control of the
Addesin also lost the next argument; he had assumed that the long doors set in low platforms just above the dusty plains were landing strips. Keflyn was finally obliged to use one as such, rolling the ungainly shuttle to a stop in less than three kilometers under one-sixth standard gravity. It was a controlled crash in nearly the worst sense of the word. Keflyn had landed on the door reluctantly, not wanting to trust the sturdiness of a moveable platform under any circumstances and certainly not one that had been setting about for fifty thousand years.
Keflyn intended to make her investigation brief, not wanting to disturb the base any more than she could help. As the Valcyr had been, the complex was filled with inert gasses at low pressure, all traces of any corrosive atmosphere removed, and just about as cold as the dark places of space. She had brought her own armored suit in her luggage, separated into many pieces for travel, but Addesin was forced to wear one of the
Keflyn kept to the major corridors, finding that the underground portions of this complex were much larger than even the vast bay doors suggested. The first bay was completely empty, except for a curious rack of immense proportions that she supposed was meant to support a carrier under construction. The next bay held a surprise that she had never expected. A nearly complete Starwolf carrier sat in the rack, apparently lacking only her bay doors and large portions of her hull over the engines and generators. All of her drives were in place, and her spaceframe was obviously complete. Perhaps only a few short weeks of work had been needed for this ship to have flown out under her own power, even if it had been under manual control without a working sentient computer complex.
“A new ship, just waiting for Quendari to move in,” Keflyn said to herself in her own language as she observed the ship through the windows of the observation deck.
“What is that?” Addesin asked, still trying to hide his impatience. The minimal lighting operating within the
