series of attacks designed to make the Starwolves outsmart themselves.
He pushed himself away from the table, his biomechanical arms moving with their typical hesitation. “Every part of my plan is ready except for the contingency clause. That’s the part that only you can do for me. If we win, we win everything, perhaps even an immediate end to this ancient war. We certainly make our victory inevitable. If we lose, we lose everything. That means that someone I can trust has to be there to pick up the pieces.”
“No, don’t say that,” Maeken protested. “There’s no way that we can fail now.”
He stepped up close behind her, placing his hands on her shoulders. She almost could not stop herself from flinching under that touch, knowing the incredible strength contained in those hands. Stronger even than the hands of Starwolves, although he had only the two. “Just keep in mind who it is we’re fighting, and never underestimate them. They are very, very good. Their only weakness is that the only way they know how to think is like themselves. My only remaining concern is how much Velmeran might have learned from fighting us.”
Maeken glanced out the window, seeing that the cutter was being sealed for flight. She bent to collect her bags. “Well, I suppose that I should be on my way. They seem to be ready.”
“They have to wait for you,” Trace pointed out as he took one of her bags for her. “It’s your ship.”
Maeken laughed, giving him the benefit of the doubt. He joked so seldom, but he was often funny without intending to be. “So, what will you do when it’s all over? Retire?”
“If I can,” he said as they walked over to take the lift down to the main level of the bay. “It’s hardly going to be that simple, as if the war will just end. I don’t know how many of their carriers we can catch all at once. We might be hunting down Starwolves for some time yet to come. But it
“If you are so sure of that, then why do I have to stay behind to pick up the pieces if something goes wrong?” Maeken said softly, mostly to herself. Trace did not seem to hear as he pressed the call button for the lift. Maeken frowned. “What will happen, when the war is over? I mean, everything about our military, our government, even our economy, is designed to run on this war. We build a massive amount of ships, weapons and equipment each year, and the Starwolves oblige us by destroying a large part of it all so that we can build some more. I had always assumed that we would have done something to end this war one way or another a long time ago, if we really wanted.”
“That might have been true, in the past,” Trace answered. “The war was a ready-made justification for limitless spending on construction and research, for tight control on trade and interplanetary travel. But then this business of genetic deterioration became an inescapable fact, and the war has turned from an asset to a liability.”
“But what do we do now?” Maeken insisted. “If the basic economic structure of our civilization is about to come to an end, what do we put in its place? What can we do?”
“What can’t we do?” Trace asked in return, then stepped out of the lift when the doors snapped open. “Don’t you understand? The Union wants to take itself apart. A war economy is a system that belongs to a forgotten age. I like to think that we have outgrown that, that perhaps we outgrew such things a long time ago and just never realized it. I would like to see my fleet become something very different than it is now, perhaps a body of explorers and peacetime troubleshooters, and I don’t mean anything military or clandestine by that, but an organization of scientists and diplomats and teachers.”
“In all the years that I’ve known you, I never suspected that you were secretly a starry-eyed optimist,” Maeken remarked as she hurried to keep pace with him. “So with everything else in the known universe about to change, what is to become of you? Time at last to be yourself? Maybe settle down and have children?”
Trace considered that, his face making no less than two almost comical contortions. “If I had children now, I would be just old enough to settle down and have grandchildren.”
Maeken frowned to herself. She could see that she would get nowhere along that line, at least not until the war was over. “Well, if those are your objectives, why not just make peace with the Starwolves? I’ve always found them a very reasonable and honorable people.”
“That is the contingency plan,” Trace said in a cold, tight voice. “But not now, not when we finally have them trapped. If we make peace with them, we’re stuck with them, and there is no place for Starwolves in our future. It’s their fault that this damned, ridiculous war has gone on so long. They would never leave us alone and give us a chance to go our own way, and I should hope that we have too much human pride to let a pack of glorified laboratory animals dictate our future to us. Right now, we’re fighting to stay alive as a race. If we have to turn ourselves over to the Starwolves to guard our collective conscience and police our every move, then we might just as well die.”
Trace walked in a rather angry silence, leaving Maeken Kea almost running to keep up with him. They crossed the twenty or so meters of the bay floor to the boarding ramp of the cutter. Trace passed her bags into the hands of a junior crewmember who was making final preparations for getting the little ship under way, indicating for another to take the bags she carried. They hurried into the ship with their burdens, and Trace turned to leave just as abruptly.
“Good luck, Commander,” Maeken called after him, determined that he would not simply disappear without a word. Once he developed a case of Starwolves on the mind, he forgot all else.
He paused only long enough to nod once, looking over his shoulder.
“Commander Trace!” she insisted, running after him a few paces. “You can surely spare me a moment more of your time. You’re on your way to your carefully contrived meeting with Velmeran, and if that goes the way it has in the past, then I may never see you again. There are a lot of things that I’ve never said, out of respect for military necessity, but you can damned well do better than that.”
Donalt Trace just stood where he was for a long moment, looking startled and slightly confused, before he turned and walked slowly back to stand before her. He towered over her, remote and silent, and Maeken wondered almost fearfully if her quiet hopes had only earned her his wrath. Then, to her great surprise, he bent to take her hand, and kissed it gently. From anyone else, that would have seemed a contrived and ridiculous gesture. Donalt Trace was, if nothing else, a man of quiet majesty and gallantry, and he had meant that gesture in perfect sincerity.
“To a future of many hopes, my little lady,” he said, then turned to walk away.
Maeken Kea wept silently, knowing that she had forced the question and wondering if she would have been better for never having known the truth in matters that she could never have the way she wanted.
2
Vast and dark, the Starwolf carrier moved quietly through the shadow of the ring, the black arrowhead shape of her armored hull almost invisible against the bands of bright colors of the immense gas giant. She stayed close to the underside of the ring, hiding in its pale shadow and the sensor distortion from the haze of fine particles of ice surrounding the ring, ready to run into the planet’s own deep shadow if unwanted visitors were to arrive in the system. No small, black fighters moved through her closed bays. Her few windows were sealed, and her running lights were dark.
On the Methryn’s bridge, Velmeran paced with pentup energy before the central bridge. Seated at the helm station, Consherra watched him quietly. She was reminded of Mayelna, his mother and predecessor, gone now these past twenty years. She had always been content to remain inconspicuously in the quiet recesses of the commander’s station of the upper bridge, while Velmeran would more often descend to the main bridge where he could move about, watching the various stations. He was a very capable commander, but he would never be completely at home on the bridge. He missed being a pilot more than he would ever admit, and Consherra would always regret the necessity that had taken him away from the one real delight in his life. He had been a legendary pilot, but he was needed too much on the bridge of this ship.
At least they would be meeting old friends this day. Tregloran had left the Methryn over a year before to prepare his own ship, the Vardon, for her launch and initial tour of duty. With him had gone Lenna, perhaps the most unusual crewmember ever to walk the corridors of a Starwolf carrier, as well as most of the rest of Velmeran’s
