“Nothing beyond the obvious,” she said. “For all the good that we can do, they might just as well not include a military escort. I suppose that it gives the freighters some time to scatter while the Starwolves take us apart.”
A flash of light flickered across the viewscreen, and several seconds later a concussion like distant thunder rolled along the length of the ship like a wave. The members of the bridge crew paused for a moment at their stations, waiting until they were certain that it was not themselves that had been hit. Captain Tarrel just waited, knowing that the surveillance officer was already consulting his scanners, although one thing was immediately clear. One of the freighters, and her cargo of perhaps a million tons of deadly ordnance, had exploded.
“That was Velvet Queen by process of elimination,” surveillance reported after a moment. “She had been running six kilometers left and slightly down from our position. Scanners record very little debris of any size, so she must have been largely vaporized by the blast.”
“What contacts?” Tarrel demanded.
“No contacts before, after or during the explosion. No drive emissions. No weapons paths. I see no indication yet that Velvet Queen was destroyed by external forces.”
“Then you rule out the possibility of attack?”
“By no means. I simply have no evidence of attack at this time.”
Tarrel nodded. “Try to obtain confirmation of that from the other ships in the fleet. And get visual identification of as many ships as possible on the various viewscreens.”
These were tense moments, hardly less frightening than being under open attack. Tarrel had to make some very quick decisions about the safety of her convoy, and she did not yet know for certain that they had indeed come under fire. Accidents did happen. Velvet Queen had been carrying nearly two hundred thousand orbit-to-surface guided bombs of five tons each, all in unpressurized cargo bays open to various forms of radiation and extremes of temperature. At the same time, that was hardly a fragile cargo. Those bombs had been designed to penetrate planetary atmospheres without projected shielding, just their own tough ceramic shells. With no other supporting information, the only way that Captain Tarrel had of judging whether or not they were under attack was to wait and see. She stood in the center of the bridge, glancing about at the viewscreens of various sizes that now showed different sections of the fleet.
This time, she happened to be looking right at one of the bulk freighters as electrical discharges rippled over its hull hardly a second before the vast ship disappeared in a brilliant flash.
“Disperse the convoy!” she ordered without hesitation. Starwolves could chase down only so many targets at a time. “Group the military vessels with carriers in the center. Stand by at red alert.”
“Same as before,” the surveillance officer reported. “No contacts. No evidence of physical or energy-based weapons being fired. No drive emissions. This time I did record a sudden flare of energy from the ship itself, as if it was being destroyed from within.”
“Do the Starwolves have any weapons like that?” Tarrel asked.
“Not that I know of.”
“Is there any way you know of that Starwolves could attack a ship without showing themselves?”
“They would have to be firing from very low starflight speeds, but still fast enough to evade our scanners. Even at that, they would have to deliver one shot from extremely close range, less than two hundred meters. Not even Starwolves are that precise. ”
Tarrel had to agree. The situation seemed completely hopeless. They could not fight an enemy they could not even see, and grouping the fighting ships had not diverted the attack to themselves. She weighed her options very quickly and decided upon the only scheme that might save at least a portion of the convoy. Bulk freighters continued to explode all about them, at widely separate locations about the dispersing fleet as if the enemy was all about them. . or perhaps standing off at a great distance and taking shots. Perhaps the Starwolves had invented a weapon which was undetectable in its deployment, and useful from such a distance that the attacking ship was not required to reveal itself.
“Order the convoy into starflight as quickly as they can get there,” she directed. “Any destination that lies in their path. Signal our sister ships to stand by to run at any moment. We’ll be going as soon as the convoy looks safe.”
“What are we doing?” her first officer asked. “Can’t we fight?”
“If you have any constructive ideas on how to fight this, you tell me,” she said. “About all we can do for those freighters is to sit close and try to draw the fire.”
Fortunately they had kept their speed to eighty percent that of light to decrease the time needed for their final run to their destination. They needed only a final sharp acceleration to carry themselves up to starflight threshold, a matter of only a couple of minutes even for bulk freighters. As soon as those ships began disappearing without exploding, Captain Tarrel knew that the survivors were safe. By that time, only four seemed likely to make it clear. But the unseen enemy had left the military ships completely alone, either saving them for sport or simply picking off, the freighters before they could escape. She found that a disquieting observation in itself.
“Order the other ships to break and flee into starflight,” she ordered. “Let’s get the hell out of here as fast as we can. Relay to the battleships to circle around once they are clear. We have to make some determination about the status of the station and remaining system traffic.
“All ships acknowledging.”
“Then let’s scatter.”
Tarrel had already predicted two events. The escape of the fighting ships would be noted, especially now that the freighters were gone, and the larger, slower carriers would lag behind and find themselves selected as the most inviting targets. The five military ships suddenly darted away, each one in a different direction, and it turned out that she was wrong in her second estimate. The intelligence of their enemy was cold, calculating and merciless. The battleships were most likely to escape, generators normally reserved for heavy cannons and shields pouring vast amounts of power into their over-sized engines, and so they were targeted first. The first went in a matter of seconds, overloaded generators exploding with enough force to put a sizeable dent in a planet. The second battleship lost power and was left adrift for a long moment while lightning rippled over its hull. Observing this final attack visually, Captain Tarrel wondered if she could protect her ship.
“Standing to threshold?” she asked.
“Ninety-seven percent at this moment, Captain.”
“Full power to the hull shields, even if the diversion of power slows our transfer into starflight.”
“Captain?” Chagin asked, surprised. *
“Do it now,’’ she snapped.
That order was obeyed only just in time. In the next moment, a tremendous rush of energy washed over Carthaginian’s hull. The shields took the initial assault, and forces that would have ripped the giant ship apart erupted over her hull. The shields held only a matter of seconds before they failed, power couplings burned out from the overload. But the ship escaped in that same instant into starflight, her transitional shock wave shaking off the devastating effects of the weapon discharge.
Carthaginian had barely survived. Devastated by the attack, she was still spaceworthy but in no condition to fight. Too many of her high-power systems had been destroyed trying to shed an overload of energy, even though she had caught only the edge of that devastating weapon’s force. After circling in starflight for a full hour, Captain Tarrel had her brought back into system as close to the inhabited planet and its meager station as safely possible. A parabolic loop around the system’s star and then around the planet itself helped to cut the immense ship’s speed with a minimum use of the drives and their betraying energy signatures.
Tarrel had already relayed her warning ahead to the station, sending the local traffic to cover and dampening all major energy emissions. But closing the system to traffic did not solve the problem of ships already in flight, not when most commercial vessels needed a couple of hours either to get themselves to transition velocity or make they way back to the station. The matter was largely irrelevant under any circumstances. There was no indication that making a ship emission-silent decreased its visibility even to known Starwolf technology, only that unobtrusiveness made it a less inviting target when more tempting ones were at hand. Captain Tarrel had always felt helpless enough in dealing with Starwolves, but that was nothing compared with the helplessness of this situation.
Ignoring normal approach protocol, Carthaginian made a rapid advance to the station, matching velocities during a final, crushing loop about the planet, and nosed in to a docking sleeve. Captain Tarrel had been required to
