Thorarinn Gunnarsson - Tactical Error

“Coming around now, Commander,” Consherra said. “But I do not understand one thing. What happened to the Mock Starwolves?”

“I am beginning to believe that there never were any Mock Starwolves,” Velmeran explained as he walked over to stand leaning on the front edge of the console of the central bridge. “Everything that Lenna showed us was very neatly contrived to convince us to believe in something we never actually saw. It was a part of Donalt Trace’s tactics, I suspect, to try to confuse us by making us fear a secret weapon that they did not actually have.”

“But how would that help?”

“If I had held back forces in this battle, waiting for a threat that never arrived, then his own attack force would have been able to face us and take us apart in pieces. We were lucky that I elected to solve our problems as they came.”

Alkayja Station had already made the jump back from wherever it had gone and was using its feeble main drives to settle into its former orbit. One battle had ended, but another was yet to begin. One thing that Velmeran had learned from this whole affair was that the Kelvessan could never afford to trust in the unending good will of others. It was time for the Kelvessan to end their servitude to the war they had been created to fight, and to the Republic, which could never completely ignore the belief that it owned the Kelvessan. Velmeran had the Maeridyen hold her position half a million kilometers out and ordered a channel to President Alac Delike.

“Yes, I’m here,” Delike answered after a moment. “What can I do for you?”

“I am demanding your surrender,” he said. “You are still the President of the Republic, and as such the First Senator and yourself have the authority to negotiate treaties. Your recent crimes against the Kelvessan race have made it impossible for us to continue to exist within the Republic without an irrevocable guarantee of our rights.”

“Commander, scanners indicate a large number of ships dropping quickly out of starflight,” Larenta interrupted him quietly. “They are coming in from all directions. No positive identification, but that fierce deceleration suggests that they can only be Starwolves.”

The sky was suddenly full of large black ships, braking hard with their forward engines as they moved in rapidly to surround the three carriers. Each ship was long, wide and flat of hull, in many ways very much like the Starwolf Carriers in form but only a third as large. Unlike nearly all Union ships, they were as black as space, without windows or running lights. The similarities between the two types of ships were so pronounced that they looked more like companions from the same fleet than well-matched opponents.

If this delay had been deliberate, Velmeran could still make no sense of it. The Fortresses were powered down, with conversion devices already attached to their hulls to insure their compliance, and the scores of remaining stingships had fired off and detonated their missiles as good faith of their own surrender. The stingships really had nowhere to go anyway, without the support of their carriers. At least the Mock Starwolf cruisers had not yet launched their fighters, and that gave Velmeran a chance to strike first. The Starwolves were outnumbered five to one, but their carriers were still faster, better shielded, and better armed. Velmeran was about to order the carriers to fire their conversion cannons when he realized that the Mock Starwolves were holding their positions.

“Message coming in,” Korlaran reported.

Velmeran nodded. “Let me hear it.”

“Commander, this is Captain Jaeryn of the Avenger,” the young, male voice declared boldly. “I ask you to surrender.”

A light wind was stirring the leaves of the trees that formed a shifting, fragmented canopy overhead. Keflyn sat with her back against a large stone, poking at the fire with four long sticks. That gave her one stick for each hand, and she seemed to be doing something different with each one. Kelvessan lived with a constant excess of available energy, ready to be called into instant use through hypermetabolism. Keflyn sometimes had trouble dealing with her own impressive reserves of energy. Right now she wanted to jump, and she had no target. For that matter, she had no idea why every warrior’s instinct she had told, her that it was time to fight.

It made Jon Addesin nervous enough just to watch her, and it was no help for her to know his thoughts. For the first time since she had met him, he felt himself in the presence of a weapon that disguised its deadliness with the self-delusion that it was a person. Many humans did have that opinion of Kelvessan, she had been warned, but she had never encountered it for herself. Was it because he had been seeing her in her own element, and finally in her armor, that had caused this reaction? Was it because he had lost all control he had assumed he had possessed of a relationship only he believed in? Whatever the cause, they were feeding into each other’s reactions now. The more his apprehension grew, the more her defensive instincts reacted.

It would be a blessing when Derrighan arrived with the skyvan and put an end to this farce, although she knew it would not be that easy. The arrival of a rival, especially one who was an alien and had also captured Keflyn’s attentions before himself, would only turn Addesin even more sullen and resentful.

You pet them. You feed them. You keep them.

Or at least you have to deal with them, Keflyn thought. It simply was not worth the effort, to have anything to do with aliens. They were none of them logical, reasonable people. Take humans, for example. Just apes with a well-developed social instinct and the self-delusion that they were an intelligent species. And why, she asked herself, did the Aldessan of Valtrys ever see the necessity of making the Kelvessan even remotely resemble them?

She glanced up at the vast, golden moon, shining down through a small break in the trees. It was time for her to be going home.

“Can the Valcyr be salvaged?” Addesin asked.

He threw out these pointless questions from time to time, as if anything was better than her silence. Perhaps he wanted to keep her talking, because it was the only time when he knew what she was thinking. She could not imagine why he was suddenly so afraid of her, as if she might decide to kill him just to spend the time. She already found it very annoying.

“That depends upon what you mean by salvage,” she answered after a long moment, breaking off small pieces of one slender stick to toss one by one into the fire. “We will almost certainly duplicate her memory cells and bring her to life in a new ship — if she will allow it, of course. It probably suits her just as well to brood inside that wall of ice until she finally hatches her personal little egg of grief.”

Addesin was startled by the force of her reaction. But he had to come back, as if driven against his will. “Then you mean that the Valcyr we know will never fly again?”

Keflyn glanced up at him. “She is old, Captain Addesin. She is two-and-a-half-times as old as any other ship in the Starwolf Fleet. More than three-fourths the age of human civilization. And she has been sitting locked inside that damned block of ice most of that time, without maintenance. Carriers need a complete overhaul every hundred years at the most, and it has been four hundred times as long since anyone poked into her works.”

“Yes, but just think of all the back pay she has coming.”

Keflyn looked over at him in surprise, and they both laughed. “Starwolves are poor people, Captain Addesin. You might as well go to bed. You know that I will watch all night if I have to.”

She paused for a moment, listening. Addesin watched her closely, wondering what her sensitive ears might have detected. He knew only that her hearing was very good, although he had no idea how good. He certainly did not know that she could hear in ways that he did not expect. After a moment she stood, turning to step nearer to the edge of the forest, away from the fitful light of the fire.