pieces by discharge beams, large areas breaking up or burning fiercely, and too much stray power was getting into her own systems. But it was keeping those beams away from her vulnerable drives. She thought that she might still make it, although she would be in no condition to fight without some repairs.
“Khallenda, you collect our capture ships as soon as you can and meet me at Boulder,” she said. “I am going to need help.” “What are you going to do?”
“Something drastic.”
She engaged her star drives as gently as she could, kicking herself into premature transition at the cost of nearly sixty G’s of acceleration past what her dampers were able to contain. The straps held and she carried the station components with her into starflight, the damaged sections shedding a cloud of debris.
5
Captain Tarrel decided that she wanted to go out on the first flight of the Methryn, and she was prepared to do all the begging and convincing she needed to be certain that she did. As it happened, the Starwolves had every intention of sending her. They had agreed to a truce with the Union which specified that they would do everything they could to destroy the Dreadnought, and they were apparently very sensitive to the accusation that they were not doing enough. And that accusation had indeed been made by certain elements within the Union, particularly those who had the most to lose, and who wanted the Starwolves to take a brute force approach with the Dreadnought by confronting it immediately. Some believed in the old myth, or perhaps more a fear in the Union, that the Starwolves were invincible. Others did not care what that battle cost the Starwolves, or else preferred to see both enemies of the Union fight to mutual destruction.
Janus Tarrel had known, even when Sector Commander Lake had first proposed a truce with the Starwolves, that it would come to this. Union attitudes both to others and to one’s self were two-fold. The individual, such as herself, was supposed to be devoted, noble and willing to make any sacrifice toward the greater good; but greedy, cruel and suspicious when representing the interests of the Union to outsiders. Tarrel was wise enough to have figured out long ago that those attitudes were largely designed only to protect the status quo, and that she was not, herself, a part of that status quo and never would be. She was a willing servant, even protector of that system, for the simple reason that she was cynical enough to believe that it probably was the best of all realistically possible systems for human society. She did subscribe without reservation to the popular Union belief that all human society was best served by sticking together. She looked upon the independent colonies, and all would-be independents, as traitors. And, as the captain of a Union battle ship, she was willing to treat them as traitors.
At this particular time, she could not yet decide how those philosophies affected her own relationship with the Starwolves. They had agreed to do a very dirty job that was not necessarily their problem, and it was probably going to cost them dearly before it was done. She believed that they deserved some consideration for that. She also believed in the practical wisdom of allowing the Starwolves to wait until they were ready to fight with some assurance of winning. The Starwolves were the lesser of evils by far; they were only an annoyance, while the Dreadnought would apparently be satisfied with nothing less than the destruction of Terran civilization. It was better to keep the Starwolves than risk losing them by forcing them to attack too soon.
Responding to her own instincts, Tarrel decided that there were separate levels to her loyalty. As long as the Starwolves were fighting the Dreadnought, she would do anything to help them. But if she learned any secrets that would help her to fight them, even to destroy them, when this was over, that was quite another matter. She suspected, however, that her greater loyalty to the Starwolves would never be an issue. They guarded their true secrets very well, for they actually had very few weaknesses that she could ever hope to exploit. Their strengths were in things that she could never have and could not take away from them.
Her interests in being aboard the Methryn were therefore honest ones. The Methryn would be going out to hunt the Dreadnought in Union space, and she believed that the Starwolves would benefit by having her along. She could invoke the highest level of diplomatic passes, for the Combined Council itself had granted her extreme emergency powers in giving her the authority to override any Fleet or System Commander in any Sector. She could get the Starwolves any support and cooperation they needed. She had also been instructed to give them any Union secrets she felt would benefit the Starwolves in their attempt to destroy the Dreadnought. Of course, she was also given to wonder if the Union actually kept as many secrets from the Starwolves as it preferred to believe.
She certainly did not expect to be taken aboard the Methryn until the carrier was ready to go out, and so she was surprised when Commander Gelrayen himself came to collect her a week before their scheduled launch. She had seen little of this young Starwolf since the meeting in which it had been decided to fit his new ship with the scanner, and she had been curious about him ever since. Because Starwolf Commanders were chosen from among the pack leaders, he had very little previous command experience on the bridge of a full ship. In their last meeting, Tarrel had noticed that he did not yet seem entirely comfortable in his new role, but she had quietly predicted that he would learn quickly. She was curious to find out if she was right.
“Are you sure that I won’t be in your way?” she asked. He seemed to have more trouble than usual with her use of contractions, something that seemed to be lacking from Kelvessan syntax logic. No Kelvessan would normally use a contraction, but they usually seemed to understand the use. He seemed to lack that much familiarity with the Terran language.
“No, not at all,” Gelrayen insisted. “In fact, I would rather have you become a familiar element on the ship before we go out. With our collective inexperience, I want to eliminate as many uncomfortable elements as possible now. Would you like a quick tour of the ship? You can come back for your things later.”
Captain Tarrel was not about to turn down that invitation, knowing that he might be too busy to make that offer except in his own good time. They descended to the observation deck level for the carrier bays, where Gelrayen was able to show her the work being done on the Methryn. A surprising amount of the hull about her tapered nose was still open, considering the fact that she was due to leave her bay in only a week. Tarrel could make little enough sense of the equipment she saw exposed within the hull, although she was impressed with the scale of that machinery. Components that she would have probably been able to hold comfortably in her hands from the ships she knew were larger than herself within the carrier.
“Those are the impulse transmitters, there in the shock bumper, one to either side of the main lights, and the primary cannon dead center,” Gelrayen pointed out. “We call them cannons for good reason. At extreme range, that achronic pulse would probably knock a small ship right out of space. There are also side-directed cannons in the ventral grooves of the wing tips, that groove which runs the entire length of the ship where the upper and lower hulls meet.”
“Why does a carrier have a ventral groove?” Tarrel asked. “Mostly because of the size of the ship. The upper and lower hull are actually large pieces of armor built over the actual ship, and a ventral groove gives them room to flex. Also, the heating and cooling exchanges, the scanner receivers and the smaller remote cannons are protected from attack by being set back within the groove.”
“And what about the shock bumper?” she asked. “It seems designed to be a separate component from the ship.”
“Oh, that serves several purposes. The shock bumper is somewhat isolated from the rest of the ship, which cuts down on nuisance vibrations when aiming the cannons. The navigational shields are in the bumper, and that acts to reduce the shock of sudden large impacts against that shield. The entire assembly with the complete forward battery can be replaced as a single unit in a very short time. And it also gives the ship a bumper to push with. That comes in more useful than you might imagine.” “You are not worried about your secrets?” Tarrel asked. “This scanner is new technology for you.”
“And absolutely worthless as a technical advantage in our affairs with the Union,” he pointed out. “Our old scanners could locate your ships effectively enough, and you are unlikely to develop stealth-intensity any time in the foreseeable future. Besides, the objective is to avoid going back to war when this is over.”
Tarrel was obviously amused. “If you expect a lasting peace between us, it means that one of us is going to be whipped so badly that we will no longer be able to fight.”
“That is my expectation,” Gelrayen admitted. “You first encountered the Dreadnought more than six weeks ago. I fully expect another two to five months before we finally destroy it, if we are lucky and very efficient. What is
