and allow us to destroy it. Coming up on the first round of detonations,”
They engaged the primary generators of their fighters and brought forward engines to hold the ships stationary. As long as the drives were at least idling and warm, they would respond much more quickly to a sudden demand for full power. If the Dreadnought did happen to explode in a massive overload, a blast that would likely be measured in billions of megatons, then the Starwolves would have to race a double shock wave. The first would be a mass of radiation across a wide spectrum, the greatest and most deadly amount being a seemingly solid wall of intense light and heat, and an electromagnetic flare that would wreck a ship’s electronics. This shock wave would be moving at or very near the speed of light, meaning that the fighters would have to get into starflight to outrun it. Pushed to its limits, under an acceleration that even Kelvessan would find hard to endure, a fighter could kick itself over threshold prematurely after a thirty second run. The second wave, superheated plasma — the vaporized remains of the Dreadnought itself — would be much slower and would dissipate fairly rapidly, and so was of no consequence.
“On the mark. . now!” Gelrayen warned.
There followed a distant flare of light and a deep shudder passed along the frame of the Dreadnought, imperceptible to the fighters isolated in the vacuum of space within the shield. Because that first set of detonations was some ten kilometers up the length of the ship and contained deep within its machinery, the effects were outwardly deceptively restrained. The only drastic result was the abrupt failure of the shield, which collapsed without even an instant of hesitation. As soon as the two pilots could see the stars, they engaged their main drives and accelerated away. They were already well beyond visual range before the next set of explosions wrecked the second jump drive assembly.
“Commander, were you successful?” Valthyrra asked as soon as she was able to identify the two fighters and establish contact.
“Valthyrra, are you anywhere near?” Gelrayen asked in turn. “That machine has an array of generators that could feed an entire Union sector with power, and I cannot say whether or not they will explode.”
“I will maintain a safe distance,” she agreed. “I am detecting a series of major explosions within the Dreadnought.”
“There will be four in all,” he told her. “We set our conversion charges to explode in pairs every five seconds, with the objective of destroying the Dreadnought’s four major reactionless drive units as well as the power core and shield coils. That should be the end of it.”
“I am happy to hear that,” Valthyrra commented. “The. Dreadnought is beginning to move, using the drives it still has in operation.”
“Where is it going?” he asked.
“Toward this system’s sun. This might be a self-destruct gesture.”
Perhaps anticipating the loss of self-control, the Dreadnought had set itself on a course that would carry it to certain destruction. Even if it now shut down entirely, leaving it a half-wrecked and drifting hulk, Gelrayen wondered if they would be able to deflect its path in time to avoid that act of self-immolation. Perhaps it would be best to simply let it go. Aside from the mystery of its origin and purpose, there was nothing of the Dreadnought’s technology they wanted except the secret of its reactionless drives. And he had already wrecked those.
“Commander, I have detected your final explosion,” Valthyrra announced. “The Dreadnought is completely disabled unless it still possesses field drive, and it has accelerated itself to nearly the speed of light. At this speed, it will destroy itself in less than three minutes.”
“I forgot how fast we expected it might be,” Gelrayen said. “It might have been able to match your best speed using only one of those four drive assemblies. It appeared to have been designed to have a reserve capacity for power and speed several times what it could actually use. Do we have time to attempt to capture that ship and turn it away?”
“It might not be able to move, but it can still fight,” Valthyrra reminded him.
“There seem to be very few actual cannons. The fighters will be able to go in and destroy those in reasonable safety, and then we could shut down that weapon while it is still reasonably intact.”
“I cannot believe that we have the time,” Valthyrra answered. “You know how hard it would be to target those weapons on a ship moving that fast, and then I would still have to come in and attempt to turn it aside. That is not something I care to try at that speed.”
“No, there is not enough time,” Gelrayen agreed. “I was able to collect detailed interior scans. Perhaps that will tell us all that we need to know.”
“Just what are you interested in?” the ship asked. “Are you lusting after reactionless drives?”
“Why not? You are not too new to refuse a refitting.” “Commander, the Dreadnought has begun building power,” she interrupted him. “Entirely too much power for a ship that has no drives.”
“I should have gone after the generators after all,” Gelrayen commented to himself. “Does it seem to be doing anything with that power?”
“No, just holding it.” She paused, and when she spoke again she seemed honestly frightened. “Commander, can you anticipate the power involved if every generator in that machine was forced to overload?”
“Yes, I warned you about that already.”
“Then can you imagine what would happen if the Dreadnought brought every generator it has to a level just below overload and then hurtled itself into that star at nearly the speed of light? It would be bad enough just to throw a hundred million tons of machinery into a star at that speed, but I had calculated that the star would have survived that. The power of those generators alone would explode that star, but the combined energy will create a shock wave that will destroy the closer planets in this system. I am moving to intercept.”
“Val, what can you do?” he demanded. “Can you get yourself in range in time?”
“I doubt that very much,” she admitted. “But I still have to try. There are two hundred million colonists in this system who are not out of range of that blast.”
“If you cannot stop it, then you will never get yourself out of range in time,” Gelrayen told her as he brought his fighter around. “Take yourself and your crew to safety. I will ram that monster.”
“Commander?”
“The sacrifice of one is preferable to that of an entire carrier, and I have a better chance of getting there in time. Teraln?” The other fighter had already pulled ahead of his own, moving quickly to overtake the Dreadnought from behind.
“You save yourself, Commander,” Teraln answered. “Valthyrra Methryn needs you. This is work for peons.”
Valthyrra interrupted the discussion. “If you gentlemen are finished being noble and self-sacrificing, you might be interested in knowing that the Dreadnought is changing course.”
Now that the Dreadnought no longer had its concealing shield, it was open to even common scanners. Before any of them could respond, or even begin to wonder why the Dreadnought was turning away, the massive machine had used its own limited resources and the pull of the star’s gravity to take itself close enough to speed of light to kick itself through threshold and into actual starflight, if at extremely low speed. Once it was into starflight, however, the greatly reduced drag of acceleration permitted it to build its speed more rapidly. After everything that had happened, the Dreadnought was still about to escape. And it almost certainly had the ability to repair itself, even after so much damage. Although it had lost several vital systems, it had only suffered destruction of well under a quarter of its total machinery.
Valthyrra responded out of desperation, locking het scanners on the fleeing ship and forcing herself over threshold prematurely. She knew that she could keep pace with the Dreadnought if she could only catch it before it was able to disappear from her own scanner range. She could hardly imagine how that machine could have gotten itself into starflight without the use of any of its primary drives, until she locked in her spanners for a detailed analysis. The Dreadnought, as Commander Gelrayen had observed, had been built with multiple redundancies and capacities that far exceeded the needs of normal use. Its secondary drive system, a very refined and powerful version of her own field drive that would have normally been reserved for close maneuvering, was in fact powerful enough to carry it past threshold. After it had used its primary drives to take it nearly to light speed before they had been destroyed, it had used the gravity of the star as an added boost to get it clear of the Starwolves as soon as possible.
Under the circumstances, the Dreadnought certainly no longer possessed the power to outrun a Starwolf carrier; its only hope had been to get itself into starflight before it could be tracked. Valthyrra had not forgotten that
