Thorarinn Gunnarsson - Tactical Error

“I will get the skyvan,” she said. Although she did not explain herself, he had to agree with her reasoning. She seemed determined to run all the way back to camp some three times faster than he could, assuming that he could have even run the entire distance.

The skyvan hovered well enough for their purposes, and there was also a narrow beach of rounded stones and boulders of broken ice where they could land. They did not have to look for very long. There was evidence of old, collapsed caverns in the ice in the glacier to either side of the stranded carrier, and they soon found one that was very recent. It was obvious that new access caverns were constantly being cut as soon as the old ones were crushed by the shifting ice.

Unfortunately, the cavern — like all of the others — was four hundred meters up the side of the glacier. Addesin held the skyvan in a hover while Keflyn leaped overboard, then he landed the machine on a ledge some distance below and let the Starwolf haul him up with the length of rope she carried. He was even less enthusiastic when he found that the tunnel was fairly small, so that he had to walk slightly bent over.

“Is this entirely safe?” he asked as he followed her into the depths of the tunnel. The ice cavern seemed much colder on the inside than outside. “I mean, how do we really know who is living at the far end of this passage?”

“Starwolves, I imagine,” she answered. Then she realized what he was thinking and paused to turn to him. “In truth, I expect only to find the ship itself. You see, our carriers have sentient computer systems. They can take care of themselves.”

The most important question in Keflyn’s mind was not so much what she was going to find but how it even got there in the first place. A Starwolf carrier was a versatile ship. Although it had never been meant for atmospheric flight, its armored hull was certainly streamlined enough even without atmospheric shields and its field drive was powerful enough to bring it down slowly, even hover. The problem then, of course, was that a carrier had no landing gear. On level ground, the main body would be supported by the tips of the down-swept wings and the forward edge of the nose. She did think that the ship was leaning slightly nose-down, but it was hard to tell with so little of the hull exposed.

She still could not imagine why anyone would want to land a Starwolf carrier in the middle of a glacier. The best place to park a ship of any great size was in space. And while the inside of a glacier was perhaps the last place where anyone would look for three kilometers of starship, it would take hundreds if not thousands of years to bury anything that size.

The tunnel had so far been following a long, gentle curve inward toward the buried ship, although they could see only a very short distance ahead in the absolute darkness. Glacier ice was not very translucent, and a kilometer thickness of the stuff might as well have been a kilometer of rock. Keflyn’s small torch suddenly illuminated a blackness at the end of the tunnel that was the hull of the ship itself, centering on a sealed airlock.

“So now what?” Addesin asked. “We knock?”

“There is hardly any need,” a precise female voice declared from behind them.

They turned quickly to see a carrier’s probe hovering in the tunnel some ten meters behind them, at the very limit of Keflyn’s weak light. Jon Addesin had never seen anything like it in his life, and he drew back fearfully as the strange machine drifted noiselessly closer, its snake-like head with two large, bright eyes bent to watch him. It was a very disconcerting thing to find blocking the only way out at the end of a long tunnel inside a glacier, especially when it was watching him in such a baleful manner.

“You knew that we were coming?” Keflyn asked.

“I have been watching,” the machine answered vaguely.

Well, this was certainly a Starwolf carrier. Keflyn recognized that very typical manner well enough. Certainly well enough to know that she was facing a very perturbed and anti-social example of the species.

‘I am Keflyn, daughter of Velmeran, Commander of the Carrier Methryn and of the combined Starwolf fleet,” she offered, realizing that she was expected to make the first overtures. “This is Jon Addesin, Captain of the Free Trader Thermopylae .”

“What is a Starwolf?” the ship asked.

“Oh, my,” Keflyn muttered to herself, suddenly aware of the incredible antiquity of this ship. “Starwolves are those Kelvessan who still live on board the ships. There are still twenty-three carriers. We believe that we are in the final days of the war, although we have no idea how much longer the Union can hold out. From your point of view, it has to be just about over.”

“The Republic survives, and the Kelvessan are still fighting the war?” she asked, her camera pod dipping reflectively. “I had never expected that.”

The airlock door suddenly snapped open, the warm, bright light of the corridor beyond flooding out in welcome. Whatever this ship thought of her unexpected visitors, she had apparently decided to trust them enough to ask them in. Keflyn realized that the poor ship probably had no idea what to think, as long as she had been in isolation.

“I am Quendari Valcyr,” she introduced herself simply.

Keflyn stopped short, and turned abruptly to stare. “But the Valcyr was lost a very long time ago, in the earliest days of the Starwolves. You were the first jump ship.”

“That is a very long story,” the ship said, drifting slowly forward to encourage them to enter the airlock. Keflyn suspected that she was unwilling to speak before Jon Addesin.

The airlock closed behind them. Addesin was enormously relieved to be out of the intense cold of the cavern, although his joy was short-lived when he discovered the pronounced chill inside the ship. Starwolves required a cool environment for comfort, and Quendari had dropped her internal temperature even more to save power and preserve her electronics against heat decay. Then, as the inner airlock door closed, he seemed to realize where he was. For the first time since Keflyn had met him, he appeared impressed and even just a bit frightened by Starwolves.

Keflyn found the corridors familiar so far, and headed toward the nearest lift. She assumed that Quendari would then direct the lift to whatever part of the ship she meant to keep her uninvited guests, probably to put Jon Addesin into safekeeping so that they could speak privately.

“Why have you come?” Quendari asked as she hovered behind them. “If you did not know that it was me, then what were you seeking?”

“Another ship that had been destroyed centuries ago was recently restored to life through her remaining memory cell,” Keflyn explained briefly, speaking in Tresdyland to protect her secrets. “She possessed vague memories that brought us here, to the lost colony of Alameda, where we had hoped to find additional clues that would lead us to Terra. You see, we lost the location of both worlds a long time ago, after they were abandoned. I know that Terra is supposed to be unlivable… “

“Then none of the older ships survived?” Quendari interrupted.

“No. All that survived the time before was the former Alameda station, which is now at Alkayja.”

“Well, you people did get rather lost,” the ship remarked as they moved into the lift that stood open, waiting for them. “This is Terra.”

Invisible to sight and scan, the Methryn slipped silently into the small, remote system. She launched drones immediately, and they reported back within two hours with a detailed survey of the system, giving Valthyrra the location of the main surveillance network on the planet and every hidden detector within the system. That provided a surveillance map of the complete area, allowing the Starwolves to know the strengths and weaknesses of the Union’s position and indicating their best avenues of approach.