Thorarinn Gunnarsson - Tactical Error

Keflyn waited anxiously, knowing that Quendari Valcyr must have cherished that simple thing to have kept it tied to her camera pod, a red ribbon that was nearly as old as the Kelvessan race, indeed nearly as old as human civilization. It was in a way her own fault that it had broken, for she had come here to innocently disturb the sleep of this ancient machine. Quendari’s camera pod just hovered motionless over the broken ribbon, her lenses rotated almost straight down.

“I am very sorry,” she offered apologetically.

“No, it was inevitable, it was so old,” Quendari answered. “I should have done something to preserve it long ago. It was given to me by my Commander.

“Your first Commander?” Keflyn asked.

“I had only the one.” She looked up at the young Starwolf. “Perhaps it is my turn to ask questions and receive explanations. First of all, I must ask what you plan to do now?”

“According to my original plan, I was to do what I could to determine the location of Terra and use my portable achronic transceiver to call in the Methryn to retrieve me.” Keflyn paused a moment, frowning. “It seems that I have found Terra, and that was never expected. I suppose that I might as well go home, although I would like a look at those carrier construction bays on this world’s moon. I wonder if they are still usable.”

“They were perfectly sealed for long-term storage when I returned.”

“That was also some forty thousand years ago,” Keflyn reminded her.

“I cannot help you with that,” Quendari said. “I have no small ships left to me, and I could not get them from my bays even if I had them.”

“Well, Mr. Addesin should be good for something.” Keflyn paused, looking up at the camera pod. “What will you do if people come back to this world? We need to have those construction bays back in operation. We need more ships, if we are ever going to end this war.”

Quendari considered that for a moment. “I do not yet have an answer to that. But it seems that, in any event, my long sleep is ended.”

It was the only piece of old Terra that had survived unharmed by the forces of time and climate that had devastated that entire world, and only because it was not a part of the planet.

They were quick to appreciate Quendari’s maps; the Lunar Industrial Complex was vast, covering well over 500 square kilometers in a series of linked clusters of large buildings. These were the oldest surviving human artifacts in existence, dating from the first permanent off-world settlements from as early as the twenty-first century. The low-gravity environment had been a welcome alternative to the slow and awkward process of building large spacecraft in open space. The Complex itself was easy enough to find, even as they were orbiting down in one of the Thermopylae’s dismal shuttles. Since the primitive machine could not hover, they had to make some very hasty decisions when they were confronted by the confusing maze of buildings. Then Keflyn saw four sets of doors so large that they could have only been meant for one purpose, and she knew that they had come to the right place.

Jon Addesin was rather annoyed with the whole affair by that time. For one thing, Keflyn was at the controls of the shuttle and his ego, male and/or professional, was seething. The trouble with the shuttle was that it had been designed for atmospheric landings, or for docking in freefall. It had no provisions for landing in any gravity on a planet with no atmosphere to provide lift for its short wings. Addesin assumed that there was no way they could land; if he had thought of that earlier, they would have still been back at the colony. Keflyn assumed that she could invent something, and she sounded more confident on the subject than she felt. Once she had manual control of the Thermopylae’s flying cargo canister, she was less certain.

Addesin also lost the next argument; he had assumed that the long doors set in low platforms just above the dusty plains were landing strips. Keflyn was finally obliged to use one as such, rolling the ungainly shuttle to a stop in less than three kilometers under one-sixth standard gravity. It was a controlled crash in nearly the worst sense of the word. Keflyn had landed on the door reluctantly, not wanting to trust the sturdiness of a moveable platform under any circumstances and certainly not one that had been setting about for fifty thousand years.

Keflyn intended to make her investigation brief, not wanting to disturb the base any more than she could help. As the Valcyr had been, the complex was filled with inert gasses at low pressure, all traces of any corrosive atmosphere removed, and just about as cold as the dark places of space. She had brought her own armored suit in her luggage, separated into many pieces for travel, but Addesin was forced to wear one of the Thermopylae’s rather awkward service engineer’s suits. As he explained, a simple freighter never had to put people down in completely hostile environments, so there was little need for suits except those meant for exterior engineering in open space. But it did not improve his humor.

Keflyn kept to the major corridors, finding that the underground portions of this complex were much larger than even the vast bay doors suggested. The first bay was completely empty, except for a curious rack of immense proportions that she supposed was meant to support a carrier under construction. The next bay held a surprise that she had never expected. A nearly complete Starwolf carrier sat in the rack, apparently lacking only her bay doors and large portions of her hull over the engines and generators. All of her drives were in place, and her spaceframe was obviously complete. Perhaps only a few short weeks of work had been needed for this ship to have flown out under her own power, even if it had been under manual control without a working sentient computer complex.

“A new ship, just waiting for Quendari to move in,” Keflyn said to herself in her own language as she observed the ship through the windows of the observation deck.

“What is that?” Addesin asked, still trying to hide his impatience. The minimal lighting operating within the complex was hardly enough for his mortal eyes, and he could make out little in the bay except the edges of a vast, dark shape. It hardly helped that Starwolf ships were black.

“I wonder why they left all of this?” Keflyn asked. “Did they think at the time that they had defeated us, or did it just get overlooked in all of the confusion?”

“Chaos, I should say,” Addesin remarked in a rather staid voice. “The destruction of Terra would have been a very unpopular military action under any circumstances. It was also probably the most heavily defended corner of your Republic at that time, so it was probably like hitting the nest of some nasty stinging insect with a stick. And that also helps to explain why they would have done something so drastic in the first place. They probably just launched their bombs and made a run for cover.”

Keflyn did not feel it necessary to point out to him that she had figured all of that out for herself long ago. But the war had been more evenly matched at that time, and the Union had been on the attack more often than on the defensive. The Republic had nearly been defeated, suffering from the loss of first Terra and then Alameda, retreating to a handful of uninhabited worlds so recentiy discovered that the Union had known nothing of their existence. The Union may have assumed that it had won the war, since the Starwolves had disappeared for centuries to recover from their losses.

“I have seen enough,” Keflyn declared, turning to march away at a pace that Addesin found difficult to match in his bulky suit.

She might have done more investigating if she had been alone, but she thought that Jon Addesin had suddenly seen more than was good for him. He was going to have to start plying his trade in Republic space now. He knew the location of Earth herself, to use the odd name that Quendari had for that world. The Union would have taken him apart for that knowledge, and the Starwolves would have been forced to kill him to keep that secret. Fortunately, she believed that he would not object to that restriction. He probably had a very good idea of exactly what his life was worth.