Thorarinn Gunnarsson - Tactical Error

“You can get there from here through the freight tram tunnels,” she explained simply. “I suppose that I can guide you from the transport.”

He nodded. “The word, I am told, is haste. Get to it.”

“Come along, Bill,” Lenna called to the sentry as she followed Trel and Marlena to the transport. The other pilots hurried to their own fighters, but Venn Keflyn hesitated a moment.

“I sense something familiar in this place,” she said. “Something that has since gone away, leaving only a shadow of its presence.”

Velmeran glanced at herjn surprise. “Strange. Somehow, I sense that I have been here before. How do you sense yourself, as you would seem to another Kelvessan?”

Since the others were already in their ships, they did not have the time to discuss it further. Velmeran thought his answers lay ahead, wherever Lenna meant to take them. Venn Keflyn thrust her vulpine head back inside her helmet as she pulled herself into the main hatch on the underside of her ship. Velmeran hurried to his own fighter, knowing that the transport would be ready to leave as soon as Lenna had her mechanical companion strapped down in the cargo compartment.

All the same, Velmeran knew that he was in trouble. One major key to his two decades of consistent success was that he had never allowed himself to be distracted by thoughts of failure. He made his plans thoroughly, and he took all surprises as they came. Fear, anticipation of failure, and compulsive haste were the greatest enemies of anyone operating under pressure, but he never allowed himself to respond to such impulses. This time he was working almost completely blind, with no more plans to guide him and no idea of what he had yet to face. He was at Lenna’s mercy, and she was determined to keep her secrets until she could show him what she had discovered.

More than that, he was afraid. That odd, shadowy presence he sensed, that seemed in some unexplainable way to be himself, had disturbed him more than he wanted to admit. He was afraid, and that fear had awakened apprehensions of his ability to deal with any surprises. He tried to put such thoughts and fears from his mind, knowing that they only distracted him from his true business, and yet they remained, demanding attention that he could not spare.

The transport rose and began moving slowly across the width of the bay, its speed hardly more than a hover. Velmeran lifted his own fighter from the floor of the bay, leaving his landing gear down as a caution against bumping the down-swept portions of his wings against the ground. The Starwolf ships were maneuverable, but these tunnels would still demand all the skills of the Methryn’s best pilots. He was most worried about Venn Keflyn. Her interceptor was twice as large as a transport, and wider by half again than the short-winged fighters.

He reminded himself that she had well over five hundred years of flying experience. It was like having a fox-faced Methuselah for a pilot. He hoped that she was bringing up the rear. Her big ship could settle down and shield itself like a turtle, or rotate to bring the firepower of a cruiser to bear on anything coming up behind.

Lenna led the transport into the larger tunnels of the freight trams, working their way around the burning areas of the installation. Velmeran did not like having to take the tram passages, and he would have trusted them even less if he had known what Lenna had done with a runaway security tram. Under the circumstances, he simply had no choice. At least they were able to make fairly good speed through the wider tunnels, and Lenna led them to their destination within a matter of minutes.

The transport slowed, then turned off down a side passage that led within a hundred meters to a landing bay, one that was vast in size. When Velmeran settled his fighter in the center of the bay, he guessed that it must be some 250 meters deep, 800 wide and more than 1,200 long. The bay was several times the size of the Union’s largest ships of war, except of course for the immense Fortresses. Four or possibly five of their largest carriers could be brought down side by side in this bay, with room left over for a small fleet of cruisers.

The most startling aspect was that no large warship in the Union fleet had the capabilities of landing itself planetside.

He unstrapped from his seat as quickly as he could and dropped down from the cockpit of his fighter. Lenna was already waiting for him, staring up at the tremendous double doors that closed the ceiling of the bay. She seemed to be very pleased with herself, in a grim manner.

“Commander, this bay was meant to service a single ship,” she told him. “There are sixteen bays exactly like this one located in a sub-complex in this section of the installation, which is separated from the main base by several kilometers. When this area was active — until about two months ago — no one except military personnel with special clearances were allowed through the very limited numbers of tunnels into this section. There are certain things that I do not have to tell you about a ship this size being able to land itself, but the ship that once filled this bay is by no means the Union’s secret weapon. It is only a tool for transporting and servicing that weapon.”

With that flourish of melodramatics out of the way, Lenna turned to lead him across the bay. Only Venn Keflyn followed, leaving the others to watch the ships.

“I went ahead and assembled some important pieces of evidence here, so that we would not have to spare the time for me to drag you over a wide area of this place,” she explained.

“Good,” Velmeran said quietly. Lenna might be used to it, but he did not care for walking about a major Union installation as if all the time in the world was his own.

They left the bay through a pair of wide doors in the very center of one long side, beneath entire banks of observation decks. Lenna seemed to know her way very well as she led them some distance along the wide corridor, turning off abruptly into an area which looked to be a large complex of apartments and personal support facilities. Suddenly the shapes of corridors, rooms and equipment reminded him less of the older portions of the installation and more of the interior of a ship, as if some effort had been made to surround those who had once lived here with an environment that was always familiar and comfortable to those who lived their entire lives in space. It was not standard Union practice to house any personnel so near to a landing area, except for small interceptors employed in defense that might need to launch on a moment’s notice. No ship made to fit that bay could have fallen into that category.

They entered yet another area of the complex, this part clearly a pilot’s training area. One large room contained a row of simulators along one wall, all complete with large, vision domes over their cockpits and multidirectional artificial gravity units to mimic the inertia of turns. Unfortunately, the simulators were entirely utilitarian on the outside and gave no hint of the size or form of the ship they imitated.

“As you can see, this is the larger training room where both pilots and service personnel were made familiar with their ships,”

Lenna explained. She indicated for them to wait as she walked toward one long door along the back wall. “They did have actual examples of their new fighters, presumably for their technicians to have to tear down and put back together again.”

Lenna pressed a button on the wall, and the wide, high door began to lift slowly into the ceiling. The keen eyes of both the Starwolf and, to a lesser extent the Kelvessan, could pierce the shadows somewhat, revealing to them a dim, massive form of sleek lines and sharp angles, clearly some manner of fighter possessing atmospheric control surfaces. Once the door was completely raised, Lenna pressed a second button and the lights inside the chamber came on.