— and she easily could have done without him. For one thing, he was not very likely to accomplish his mission of learning their secret language, all the more so because they probably knew exactly what he was trying to do. But Tarrel had no good excuse for leaving him at the station, and she thought it best to keep him close, where she could watch him.
“Pack your bags, Wally,” she declared, finding him in the common lounge of their suite of apartments when she returned. “We’re moving aboard the Methryn right away.”
“Is the Methryn ready to go out?” he asked, looking surprised and curiously worried about her announcement.
“No, not for another week. But I’ve been invited aboard, and I’m not going to leave you wandering about here on your own.” “But is that a good idea?” he asked, still obviously concerned. “I mean, can’t you do your work better here at the main base?” “No, I can do my work better aboard the Methryn when she goes into Union space,” she said, wondering what was bothering him. “If you don’t want to go back into battle, I can probably make arrangements to have you sent home. But I’m not going to leave you here.”
“No, I should go,” he agreed grudgingly. “You might need me. Besides, I seem to be getting nowhere with their language.” “No, you never will,” she told him. “They keep their secrets better than stones.”
The first crisis had occurred by the time Captain Tarrel returned to the Methryn. Kelvessan were running up and down the docking tube, to the point that she spent half the walk through stepping to one side with her bags. A whole crowd of people was outside in the bay itself in what looked like furious inactivity, as if they very much wanted to do something but had no idea just what. None of that was very promising for the Methryn. Captain Tarrel did not know what the problem could be, but her first guess was that the scanner was somehow involved. She doubted that there was anything that she could do to help, except perhaps by staying out of the way. Her compromise to her own curiosity was to stay in her cabin and make herself at home for a couple of hours, time enough for the Starwolves to get over their initial panic and make some sense of the situation.
When Tarrel did finally present herself on the bridge, the crisis had settled itself to a state of desperate industry, which was probably to say that things were very much back to normal.
The work on the new surveillance console was continuing at an unhurried pace, as if nothing had happened, and that seemed to suggest that the trouble had not occurred here. Commander Gelrayen had left a message for her with Valthyrra, instructing her to join him on the floor of the construction bay.
As soon as she could see the interior of the bay, Tarrel had a much better idea of what was happening. Handling arms mounted on tracks on ceiling and floor had been brought in both above and below the ship to begin the work of fitting the remaining hull plates, suspended by the — deceptively slender arms out of range of the artificial gravity that existed only at floor level. More plates were being held in groups by other handling arms, but the work itself appeared to have been suspended. Commander Gelrayen hurried over to join her before she saw him. He was not in Starwolf Commander’s white, and she could not easily tell him from many of the dozens of other Kelvessans on the bay floor.
“We have a problem,” he told her simply. “We have to send these plates back to the construction facilities. These plates were cast and shaped years ago, but this is the first time that they have ever been brought out into the bay.”
“What is the problem?” Tarrel asked. “Don’t they fit?” “They probably fit perfectly,” he told her. “Unfortunately, they have not yet been prepared for final fitting. Do you not see the difference?”
Tarrel looked closely, but the only thing that she could see was that all of the plates were shiny silver on both sides. “I suppose that the new plates haven’t been painted yet. Can’t you do that after they go on?”
“That is not paint,” Gelrayen said. “The plates are bonded to a thick polymer coating that resists impacts and helps to insulate the hull against power discharge. And considering what we have to fight, we will need that coating. We fuse the sheets into a solid piece once it is on, and we can easily repair ripped and burned sections. But this much work has to be sent back to be done properly, and quickly enough to keep us on schedule.” “Can you still keep your schedule?” Tarrel asked.
He nodded. “Yes, we believe so. We began fitting the plates two days ahead of schedule, and that gives us two extra days to make up for our little mistake.”
The main bay doors began to open, the internal atmosphere held by containment fields, while smaller tenders waited just outside to carry away the hull plates. Considering the size of those plates, most of them almost sixty meters'along each edge, this was the only door through which they would fit. Tarrel looked up to see one of the massive plates pass directly over her head, supported at one corner by a handling arm barely half a meter thick. For all the years that she had lived in space, she still had some problems with artificial-gravity environments.
“We might just as well go back aboard,” Gelrayen commented. “There is nothing we can do to help here, except to get out of the way. Valthyrra will be powering up the scanners as soon as the bridge console is finished, and she told me to expect that within the hour.”
Tarrel was interested to watch the tenders move along the length of the Methryn to collect the unfinished hull plates, but she did not necessarily want to be beneath while the plates were being taken away. They took the lift back up several levels to the observation deck, then crossed the docking tube back into the carrier. Tarrel was compensated for not staying below to watch, since the windows along the length of the tube gave her an excellent view of the tenders operating on their own level. Commander Gelrayen indulged her curiosity a moment, stopping to watch. The only problem with moving the weightless plates was maneuvering their awkward size through the tight areas between the Methryn and the walls of the bay.
“Will Valthyrra be able to fly this ship?” Tarrel asked. “I would think that she would need some practice to get the feel for anything this large and powerful.”
“She has been practicing,” Gelrayen told her. “She has spent the last week moving the Sharvaen in and out through the entire system by remote. She can establish a multi-channel achronic link with any of the other ships that gives her complete input of data and sensory devices and direct control over the other ship’s major systems. So you might say that she really is getting the feel along with the practical experience.”
“Can these ships actually feel?” Tarrel asked, surprised. “I did not use the word in that sense.”
“Oh yes, they can feel,” he insisted. “They have various motion detectors that allow them to judge degrees of accelerations and changes in direction, and they have stress, compression and torsional sensors throughout their frame and hull. They do not feel actual pain, but they know how different areas of the ship are responding to stress. They have a better feel for flying than any other pilot ever could.”
“So all of the concern was only about her actual battle experience?”
“Unfortunately, she cannot learn that from the other ships. Several of them have down-loaded their own experiences to her, but I am told that it is not quite the same. There are some things you can only learn by doing them yourself, and she can hardly take one of the other carriers into battle.”
The first of the tenders retreated from the construction bay, a plate of armor held in each of its short forward handling arms. Each of those plates was probably four or five times as massive as the little ship that was moving two of them out of the bay, lifting to pass over the top of the carrier’s down-swept wing. A second tender started out from the other side of the ship, something that Tarrel had missed seeing so far.
“Will the Starwolves fight to the death against the Dreadnought?” Tarrel asked abruptly.
“No, we have already decided that,” he admitted. “If we realize that we absolutely cannot destroy it, then we will retreat. Our concern then will be the evacuation of enough of Terran civilization, and our own ships along with this station, to start again. You might think that we are cold, but we must be practical. It is better to save something than lose everything.”
The technicians had just finished closing up the panels on the new surveillance console as they returned to the bridge. Valthyrra rotated her camera pod around to look at them, obviously very pleased with the work. “The impulse scanner is installed and ready for the first level of testing. I want to begin bringing it into the main computer grid.”
Gelrayen nodded. “Start getting comfortable with it, then. Anything else to worry about?”
The camera pod somehow managed to look uncomfortable. “Is there a very good estimate on how long the closing of my hull will take?”
Gelrayen regarded her suspiciously. “Probably a week. Why?”
“The Vardon is coming in a few hours from now, and she needs more that a square kilometer of new upper hull.”
