“That makes your poor nose look like a garden plot in comparison,” he commented. “What happened to her?”
“Theralda is reluctant to speak of the matter,” Valthyrra said. “She does relay important information regarding the Dreadnought, although it is all more in the area of bad news for us than good news, although still better for us to know. She says that the Dreadnought is now attacking planets, and that it is faster and more clever than we had first anticipated. She also warns us to use only tight-beam achronic transitions, since she believes now that the Dreadnought has been monitoring our wide-beam communications.”
Gelrayen crossed both sets of his arms. “Wonderful! That monster knows everything we plan, then. It will be waiting for us when we go out now, you realize.”
“We can hope that it has not overheard everything,” Valthyrra suggested. “It is easy enough to miss a sweep transition if you are in the wrong place. Thirty-two percent of all such transitions are missed, especially at longer ranges. I am hot speaking from personal experience, of course.”
“Wait a moment,” Tarrel interrupted. “Are your transitions usually in your own language?”
“Yes, of course,” the ship answered.
“Then the Dreadnought understands your language?”
“I suppose that must follow, certainly. It is not difficult to figure out another language, if you can find someone foolish enough to speak it to you. You might try explaining that to your young companion. ”
Captain Tarrel laughed softly. “He can go talk to the Dreadnought, if he wants. But if he stays here, then we’re all better off for letting him have something harmless to keep him busy.” “The Vardon will be here in perhaps eighteen hours,” Valthyrra continued. “We will learn more about the matter then. She is very reluctant to use the achronic to any extent, and she seems honestly frightened. The scanner is fully integrated and nominally functional in as far as I have been able to test it so far.”
“Very well, then,” Gelrayen agreed. “Prepare the scanner for the second level of testing. Are you going to try rapid sequencing?”
“I thought I might. That is a key element in the grid.”
“Take it easy, then,” he warned, stepping back toward the middle bridge to allow members of the crew to take their stations for testing. Captain Tarrel joined him, and he leaned back against the wall with his arms crossed. “The problem is that all of these tests only tell us if we have installed it in the ship properly. We will not know if it actually works until we can take the Methryn out where she can maneuver.”
“Can you take it out to test it now, before they’re ready to put the hull shields back on?” Tarrel asked.
“I wish we could. Unfortunately, we will not know how well we are actually receiving because the receivers are calibrated to work surrounded by that great mass of metal. Besides, Valthyrra is running the ship off of station power. It would take hours to manually reconnect the power couplings and get her running.” “Oh?” Tarrel was surprised to hear that. “Is there some reason to keep the ship isolated from her own power? You certainly would not go to that much trouble for an ordinary docking.”
“There is no need for her to generate her own power, as little as she can use. I suppose that keeping her in this state saves the time needed to change the couplings to station power if the technicians want to modify her power grid.” He shrugged both sets of arms, a serious expression of his own helplessness to know the true reason. “As far as I know, she never has powered up her own generators.”
“Then how do you know that the power grid works properly. “Gelrayen glanced at her impatiently. “Please, do not complicate my life any more than it already is.”
A noise like distant thunder rolled through the frame of the carrier, a sound that made Tarrel think immediately that the Methryn had just taken a hit or some minor impact. Gelrayen seemed to think the same thing, and they both paused to listen intently. Tarrel realized that such a sound was more ominous here than it would have been on her own battleship, since any impact that would have carried through the bulk of this ship probably indicated a much larger blow than she first estimated. Her first thought was that there had been some accident with the tenders removing those massive hull plates, or even that the Dreadnought was attacking the station. She noticed first that all of the images on the main viewscreen looking forward from the nose of the carrier had gone suddenly black, and that sections of the main consoles were beginning to light up in a way that suggested an emergency.
“What do you have, Val?” Gelrayen asked cautiously.
She brought her camera pod around slowly. “The primary and two secondary impulse cannons in the shock bumper fired. There was no reason; they were not powered up nearly far enough to pulse.”
“Something slipped?”
“Nothing on my end,” she insisted. “The power levels should have held the impulse cannons in standby condition. I cannot see yet how the fault could have been at my end. The cannons discharged prematurely.”
“No one is blaming you,” Gelrayen told her, since she sounded almost as if she was on the edge of panic. “Forget the cannons for now; we should just consider ourselves lucky that it was only the three forward cannons. Tell me about the condition of the bay.”
“I was not greatly damaged by the concussion itself, and my hull is open closest to the blast,” she reported, calmer. “That suggests to me that the damage is not great. I was hit by a hull plate that got away from a tender during the concussion, but the plate defected off with minimal damage and has drifted away. I cannot say what has happened to the construction crew because I am blind to the front. Station control has called me, but I have not yet been contacted by bay control or the observation deck. Would you like to go outside and check conditions for me? I would appreciate it.”
“Yes, I suppose that I should,” he agreed pensively. “I would not expect any response from the observation deck, since those windows were only twenty meters or so away from the primary impulse cannon. Do what you can.”
Although she had not been specifically invited, Captain Tarrel followed quickly as the Starwolf Commander stalked off toward the lift. Once the doors were closed, Gelrayen looked far more annoyed and concerned that he could have afforded to while his ship could see him. He was being protective of Valthyrra, trying to be attentive and commanding enough to make up for her own deficiencies. That made Tarrel even more concerned about what she had just seen.
“Commander, your ship was rattled,” she told him. “Valthyrra was scared to death, and she nearly froze up.”
Gelrayen frowned fiercely. “She was just concerned that she might have been responsible for damage and injury, all the more so because she knows how important time is right now.”
“I certainly hope so,” Tarrel said guardedly. “If that really is her reaction to danger, then you cannot take this ship into battle. She has a lot of growing up to do.”
The first thing they discovered was that the docking tubes had been ripped away by the concussion. Gelrayen stepped through the airlock and out to the broken end of the tube, then gently propelled himself over the side. Tarrel followed his example with only marginal hesitation; there was no gravity in the bay except for the final two meters or so above the floor, and that final drop was small enough that even she made it easily. At least that gentle descent of over a hundred meters had given them both time for a good look about the bay.
As Gelrayen had predicted, the concussion from the primary impulse cannon had taken out the observation deck and the bay control room, although the nose docking bracket was built heavily enough that it had survived unharmed. The two secondary cannons had added their own power to the blast, and the concussion had swept along the length of the bay and out the main doors. At least the doors had been open at the time; the shock wave had been intense enough to blow out the containment field for a brief moment. There had been two tenders in the bay at the time. One, just coming in, had been kicked back out again. The second tender had already collected one of the immense hull plates, but that had been ripped from its hold by the concussion and had slid along the Methryn’s upper hull until it too passed out the containment field. It had already been collected by the first tender.
Most of the bay crew had already gone to the construction facilities to help prepare the Methryn’s armor. The dozen or so left had all been Kelvessan and hearty enough to survive more than this. Some had very minor injuries due to being tossed about by the concussion or else being hit by debris. There had fortunately been no one in the bay control room or the observation deck at the time; even Starwolves would not have easily survived that. All in all, things could have been worse. If the bay doors had been closed, the entire concussion would have been forced into the station corridors.
