Several hours later, and with her star drives coming dangerously close to overheating, the Vardon arrived at her next destination. She was unable to know the speed of the Dreadnought, but with every previous indication being that it moved fairly slowly, she should have expected to arrive well in advance of the mysterious ship. But since she now had some reason to believe that the Dreadnought spent some time after its initial attack loitering about, waiting for more prey to appear, that implied that the Dreadnought might be capable of moving very quickly between systems. Knowing the time of its last attack, she wanted very much to learn when it had actually arrived in the next system.
She would not, however, be able to wait around to find out. This next system was a relatively unimportant one, the local station and traffic load smaller even than what it had been in the system she had just left. She felt obliged to deliver her warning and press on to Norden, where the danger was far greater, and every hour that she saved in getting there would allow the locals to salvage that much more. They should at least be able to get their ships to safety. Given enough time, they might even be able to dismember and tow away the stations, which lacked the ability to move under their own power and were too sprawling to tow intact. The problem, of course, was that in a system of that size, traffic that could not be warned away in advance was going to be coming in constantly, and the Dreadnought was going to snap those up even if it could not find anything else. And whether or not it would again attack surface installations, and how much damage it might do, might depend upon getting the major power sources shut down in time.
And of course, it might also depend on whether the locals were willing to listen to the advice of Starwolves. Commander Schyrran persisted in pointing out that pessimistic view, and Theralda could not deny that he might be correct. As far as either the Starwolves or their ships could determine, humans were largely motivated by greed, and could take some enormously ill-founded risks by weighing profit against danger as if the comparison was valid. The promise of profit did not reduce a risk, but humans could not always be convinced of that. If the local officials were unwilling to close to commercial traffic, much less haul away their stations, because of the threat of lost revenue, then they would find endless, and to them very valid reasons to question Theralda’s judgement that the Dreadnought was coming their way.
Frankly, the Starwolves themselves could not care less. They would fight to the death to protect the innocent, but they were not in the business of protecting people from their own stupidity. They were, of course, such clever people by genetic design that they did not really understand stupidity. The Kelvessan were generally great magnets for information, with a thought process that was largely comparative. They had their own form of stupidity, usually reserved for when they missed some important detail, and then their mistakes tended to be both monumental and memorable.
Theralda Vardon went into that first system aware that she could find trouble but not really expecting it, and trouble was exactly what she found. She could not see the Dreadnought directly, but the fact that the planet itself was under attack and the station was already gone argued that it was there. She cut the very low-intensity scans that she had been using and was grateful for having been warned to maintain her shields at stealth intensity. There was nothing she could do here, so she kept her engines idle and settled into a long, gentle loop that would take her back out of the system fairly quickly, setting her course for her next destination. She did not dare to engage her star drives until she was well out of the area.
“Trouble again,” she warned the bridge crew. “Our belligerent friend is already here.”
Commander Schyrran looked up from his monitors. “Running the ship in a permanent class two battle alert certainly is convenient. It saves having to wait for the crew to prepare itself. I suppose that there is nothing we can do here. At least now that we know we are ahead of the Dreadnought, I suppose that we should just keep going.”
“Yes, that was my thought,” the ship agreed. “I am already bringing us around on the best course for Norden. And I do not even want to know what the Dreadnought is doing to that poor planet. This can all be very hard on a ship like myself, you know. I am used to being able to stomp anything I wish.”
Theralda had no reason to expect that anything should be that easy, and she was right. The Dreadnought betrayed itself directly by suddenly sweeping all space around it with a powerful scan. Theralda had already wondered if its reason for loitering in that first system was to catch any Starwolves that might come along on a regular patrol, and it knew also from its fight with the Kerridayen that the carriers could cloak themselves with stealth-intensity shields. When that impulse sweep came around and registered on her passive scanners, she knew that it was looking for her. And if the Dreadnought was looking for Starwolves, there was certainly no difficulty in guessing why it wanted them.
The Vardon responded in about the only way she could, engaging her main drives to take her speed back up to a point where she could make a smooth, quiet transition into starflight. Her actual distance from the Dreadnought was over two light hours, since she had not penetrated very deeply into the system and was now looping around to head back out. Theralda assumed, or at least hoped, that she was out of the Dreadnought’s effective range. Achronic-based weaponry could be fired across light-years without serious loss of power or definition; the problem was finding the target precisely after the first few hundred thousand kilometers. Given enough distance, a variation of even a millionth of a degree became a significant miss.
“Impulse scan contact,” Theralda warned, although the members of the bridge crew had already noted her acceleration. “A second contact followed the first by several seconds, so I have to assume that I have been seen. The attack on the planet ceased at that same moment.”
“Is it following us?” Commander Schyrran asked as he returned to the Commander’s station on the upper bridge.
“I have no way of knowing,” she admitted. “If it is, the best evidence will come when it begins shooting at us.”
“You have us accelerating back to starflight?”. Schyrran assumed. “Take us through quickly, but try to be discreet about our course. Head somewhat away and then change course fiVe minutes into starflight.”
“Moving into starflight now.”
The Vardon made a very smooth transition back into starflight. A carrier could make an extremely abrupt transition, due partly to its superior drives and acceleration dampers, but mostly because the Starwolves themselves were able to handle harsh accelerations that would have killed anyone else. But a forced transition, engaging the star drives while the ship was still well below light speed, caused a very turbulent dispersion of emissions from the drives that was easy enough to follow. The Vardon did not want to draw a line leading straight to her destination, especially if the Dreadnought would not have been going on to Norden otherwise.
Theralda brought her camera pod into the upper bridge. “I will not say that I like that. The Dreadnought was ahead of us with no more than a five hour lead, possibly less. That means that it is at least as fast as my own best speed, and I was running my drives to within two percent of risking permanent heat damage to the crystals. How can anything that size be able to move so fast? I wonder what manner of drive it uses?”
“Are we away clear?” Schyrran asked.
“I certainly hope so, but it seems a little early to promise anything.” She lowered her camera pod slightly, a gesture of resignation or defeat. “I no longer know what to make of that machine or just what it might be capable of doing. We had assumed that it was slow because of the interval between attacks, but we now have every reason to believe that it loiters in-system after an attack to see what shows up, and that it actually travels at speeds a carrier would find hard to match. And that is probably only its cruising speed. I hesitate to think what it might be capable of doing in a pinch.”
Schyrran nodded. “Do you know of any reason why we cannot relay that information on a tight beam back to Alkayja station immediately?”
“A tight beam should be safe enough.”
“Then Norden is the next step. Get us there as fast as you can, and we should have two or three days from this point to get things ready before the Dreadnought shows itself.”
“I will need sixteen hours at least to reach Norden,” Theralda warned him. ‘‘My drives are hot. I knew that they would be, but I was anticipating a few hours at least in this last system to let them cool. I will have to reduce power by at least thirty percent to keep drive temperatures from going up any more.”
He nodded. “Do the best you can, but do not damage yourself. If you have a drive go down now, you could be out for months. It might seem like a harsh judgement, but a single carrier in good fighting condition is worth more right now than even a major system.”
