Trendaessa turned her camera pod to look at Captain Tarrel. “What about our passengers?”
“Just do it.”
He walked over to join Tarrel, who was stretching in an attempt to relieve cramped joints. “How do you feel?”
“I should live,” she said. “I just won’t like it for a while.” “Captain, we have a problem,” Daerran said, helping her to stand. “I need to take my ship and her information to our main base as quickly as we can get there. I would like to have you along, both as an advisor and a representative of the Union. But you will see and hear many things that you probably should not, and they might not allow me to take you home again. Are you willing to accept that risk? I can still have you put off.”
Tarrel considered that briefly. “If I can do anything to help, then it would be worth the risk. Did we learn anything?”
“We learned that there are a few things that we should never try to do again. I hope that it was worth it.”
3
Trendaessa Kerridayen took fourteen days to make her long, slow way home. Captain Tarrel had no idea of their course, nor did she ask. The location of the Starwolf main base was unknown in the Union, and she believed that it would have to remain unknown if she expected to ever be allowed to go home again. She was not even certain of the carrier’s speed, although she suspected that they were limping along at a pace her own battleship would have found hard to match. The Rane Sector bordered the frontier with the old Republic, an area that was now believed to be Starwolf territory. Fourteen days of travel at the speed and direction she suspected would have taken them well outside of Union space.
The Kerridayen had been in a constant state of repair since her battle with the Dreadnought. Starwolves, as Tarrel discovered to her great surprise, did not sleep, and they were willing to put in some very long hours. Even so, there were fewer than three thousand of them aboard the ship, only two-thirds of that number active crewmembers, and they had a very large ship to maintain. For all their efforts, they made very little progress toward repairing their ship during that long journey home. The greatest part of the damage was not structural but to the ship’s power grid and complex electronics; some of the damaged systems could not be replaced in flight, but would have to wait for a refitting in dock. Superficially the Kerridayen had been badly scorched—* hard to see on her black hull — but she had been far more badly damaged than it seemed.
Kerridayen dropped out of starflight well inside the Alkayja system and began braking smoothly for her approach. There sas none of the usual bravado and intimidation in her manner, such as she would have employed in Union space to remind people like Captain Tarrel that she was too dangerous for them to touch. This was her home, and here she was just a part of the regular local traffic. A small tender, painted bright orange and sporting powerful running lights, fell in just ahead of the carrier to escort her home, while Kerridayen herself ran with both her recognition lamps and the retractable main lights in her shock bumper burning. A Starwolf carrier was a very difficult ship to see, even considering her size, and she had to make her presence well known. It would have been better, of course, if so many of her lights had not burned out in the attack.
Alkayja station was rather more compact than the stations that Tarrel was used to seeing, particularly when compared to the kilometers of sprawling tubes and modules that formed the Vinthra Military complex. The main portion of the station consisted of two wide disks, each about twenty-five kilometers across. The thicker disk was lined along the outside with a continuous row of vast bays that allowed the carriers to dock facing in. The smaller disk above that was studded with bays for ships of a more conventional size. And the station was capped above and below with a flattened dome. Although it was a very visible white, Tarrel realized suddenly that the actual station shared certain similarities with the carriers. The flat, rounded domes on top and bottom offered armored protection against attack — just like the large, flat surfaces of the hulls of the carriers — with no sharp angles to catch a bolt that might have otherwise skipped harmlessly off that featureless surface. All machinery, pipes and ducting were within the shell, less vulnerable while keeping the exterior uncluttered. The station probably even had independent interplanetary drive capabilities.
Kerridayen’s maneuverability was compromised from having too many of her field drive projectors burnt out, and so the immense ship had to be moved into a refitting bay by a team of tenders. Since the carrier weighed some fifteen million tons that had to be stopped once it was set into motion, that was a long and difficult process indeed. Half an hour passed just drawing her slowly up the full length of the bay, three kilometers deep, before she nosed into the bracket designed to receive her forward shock bumper. After that, bringing in the braces that steadied the ship’s short wings and finally the two forward docking tubes was fairly easy.
“I hate that,” Trendaessa said when it was done, lowering her camera pod to the floor. “I hate being towed. I hate being pulled and pushed. I hate being shot at. Why could I have not been built a freighter?”
“Freighters are stupid,” Daerran told her. “Freighters are the cattle of the lanes. Do you want to be a cow?”
She lifted her camera pod. “No, not really.”
“Send your data over to the station, and shut yourself down for a few weeks of convalescence,” he told her, then turned to Captain Tarrel. “I would suppose that your stay with us is just about at an end. When you go out from this station again, it will probably be aboard another carrier. For now, we should go into the station and see what they have planned.”
They took a lift down to the main starboard docking tube, which led them, after a walk of nearly a hundred meters along the nose of the carrier and into the station itself, to one side of the bay control station and the observation rooms to either side. It seemed that the station air, which also filled the tube, was something of a compromise. It was warmer than that within the ship, but still slightly cool by human standards.
Whether Commander Daerran had expected it or not, something of a reception committee was waiting for them outside the docking tube. Hasty introductions were made, but these were mostly between some three dozen people who already knew each other at least by name and reputation and Captain Tarrel was able to remember only the most important ones present. There were three other carriers already at the station, including one that was still in the late stages of construction. For reasons that she did not expect, she surprised herself by taking exception to the fact that the Starwolves were actually under the control of a human senior officer, a certain Fleet Commander Dave Asandi. He was a tall man and rather dark, reflecting like all other humans at the station a more direct Terran ancestry than herself, reminding her oddly of the Union’s ruling Sector Families. The Fleet Commander’s entourage of scientific and military advisors was a mixed group, with slightly more Starwolves than humans.
Kelvessan, she reminded herself, that being their name for their race in their mysterious language. A language that, for all the long-suffering Lt. Commander Walter Pesca had been able to determine, did not even exist. He was, for that matter, still in his own cabin aboard the Kerridayen, forgotten and not necessary for the business at hand. Now that she had discovered humans in the station, Tarrel wondered if he might be encouraged to defect.
It seemed that this group had been waiting for the Kerridayen to arrive with her important data on the Dreadnought and the observations of witnesses who had fought the machine. Their first serious strategy meeting was planned to begin immediately. Tarrel found herself walking beside Fleet Commander Asandi, who was openly curious about her. She had found the Starwolves to be very open, uncomplicated people, direct, honest and incapable of duplicity. The humans among them shared many of those same qualities, although it came across almost as a rigidly honest gallantry in them.
“I find you a very uncommon person, Captain,” he said. From anyone else, such flattering comments would have put her on her guard against lechery and requests to borrow money. “You have repeatedly faced two of your most deadly enemies.” “You did not expect that of a Union captain?” she asked, speaking more directly than she would have among her own.
“Frankly, I did not,” he admitted. “That is not to say that I question the courage of your officers. But the limits of your technology would not seem designed to inspire courage, but prudence.”
