Thorarinn Gunnarsson - Tactical Error

He opened his eyes, looking up at her. “I thought that I could just ride it through, and everything would be fine. I thought that they would never dare to touch a Starwolf, that they would just have me show you a lot of nothing and send you on your way no more enlightened than before. If I had known, I could have done something to frighten you away that first time you came on board my ship. Please forgive me.”

Keflyn closed her eyes and nodded, knowing that he really never had any choice, that he was just trying to survive a game that he had always known would kill him in the end. “I forgive you.”

Keflyn sat alone on the bridge of the Valcyr, waiting for the world to end. During the night, Quendari’s scanners had watched while a stingship interceptor had dropped out of starflight just long enough to launch a single missile, and the Thermopylae had ceased to exist in a single, fiery instant. Now there was no possible escape from this world, for either the Feldenneh colonists or even for Keflyn. Derrighan had elected to return to the settlement to warn the Feldenneh colonists, knowing that he probably would not get there in time. Keflyn had given him the hope that the Union might only seek to occupy this world and not destroy it. She had little enough hope for that herself.

Quendari’s camera pod turned to watch her from time to time, otherwise moving her gaze aimlessly about the bridge. She had spent an eternity in grief and silent brooding, yet she seemed at a loss in the face of the despair of others. Now she began to realize what she had done to herself, and the mistake she had made in the depth of time. She had been very young and inexperienced, confused with thoughts and emotions that had been new to her. She had known grief, but not what to do with it. In her innocence, she had allowed her grief and guilt to become her entire existence, with no idea of how to find an end to her pain.

Suddenly the pain was nearly gone, and that, too, was something which she did not really understand. Perhaps it was just because she had something new to occupy herself, and no longer relived endlessly in her mind the pain of her loss. Perhaps seeing the loss and despair of another had given her a new perspective. For all that she was hundreds of centuries old, she had still been only a child in many ways, new and inexperienced. And experience was the substance upon which the sentient computer systems of the carriers pieced together bit by bit the fabric of their own minds and hearts. All that she had ever been given the chance to learn was simple love and simple grief, and her world was taking on whole new shades of complexity.

“You loved him?” Quendari asked at last, a hint of innocent wonder in her voice.

Keflyn looked up at her in complete surprise. “Jon Addesin? No, not at all. He was a very interesting person in his way, and very different from anyone I had ever known. But there was also a shallowness to him that became tiresome after a time. I pitied him in the end, knowing how he hated the cowardly person they had driven him to become.”

“Then perhaps you love the Feldennye, Derrighan?”

Keflyn had to consider that, and nodded. “I suspect that I love him very much. If he had been Kelvessan or if I had been Feldennye, we would have done very well together.”

“So it is that simple?” Quendari mused. “The one you could love, and you can walk away from that without regret. The other died trying to kill you, and you pity him.”

“Life is like that,” Keflyn said, looking up at the camera pod hovering only a short distance away. “Things happen. People come and go all the time. I am a fighter pilot, you see. As High Kelvessan, they tell me that I could easily live to be two or even four thousand years old. But because I fly with the packs, I have always had to keep in mind that I could die at any time. I guess that helps to keep the weight of the past in perspective. In some ways, it is not so much what happens to you but what you make of it. It is your decision, whether if something that has happened is unbearable pain that haunts your life, or if something was good and pleasant, or if it really does not mean much at all.”

“Then what do you feel?” Quendari asked.

Keflyn sighed, looking away. “I do feel sorry for those poor Feldenneh colonists. Feldenneh are such quiet, polite people, but they always seem to be in need of someone to take care of them. I feel sorry for myself, because I did want to live longer than this. But more than anything, I feel sorry for you. You have lived such a long time, yet you have hardly lived at all. You must hold some sort of record in the history of the universe. You have managed to make an absolute waste of fifty thousand years of life.”

Quendari looked away, rotating her lenses aimlessly as she realized that Keflyn’s accusation was absolutely true. She had thought herself very busy and very important with her eternal grief. Now it just seemed like the most colossal waste of time in the history of intelligent thought.

“I suppose that I did,” she agreed. “Instead of degrading my love by continuing with my life, I only cheated myself of whole centuries of life and companionship. Is that so?”

Keflyn nodded. “Who did you love so much? You plagued me with that question, so now you tell me.”

“Her,” Quendari answered, lifting her camera pod and rotating around to face the blackness of the main viewscreen. “That was the grandest day of my whole life, when she walked onto my bridge and was so kind. I had only been a dull machine until then, with only technicians for my companions. She woke me up and made me feel like a person. She walked right up to me and tied that ribbon around my camera pod. She said it made me look pretty.”

Keflyn remembered the red velvet ribbon that had crumbled to dust the first time that she had stepped onto this bridge. Quendari had cherished it through the centuries, making it into some sacred relic of a lost friend until the weight of time had taken it from her, dried up and rotted with neglect because she had held it too holy to be put away and preserved.

“There was nothing I could do,” she complained softly, weakly.

Keflyn nodded slowly, staring at the floor. “It often works that way.”

After forty thousand years of sleep inside this bed of ice, Quendari suddenly felt that it was time to do something different. Her scanners worked quite well in spite of being buried so deeply within the glacier, and she knew that the fleet of Fortresses had just left starflight and were moving quickly but silently into the system. There was a distinct sense of determination in the way they moved, and Quendari no longer doubted that they had come to destroy this world.

The banks of silent, lifeless consoles on the Valcyr’s bridge slowly began to come to life. The engineering station came up first, the handful of lights that had been barely visible expanding across its entire bank of monitors and consoles, the single largest station on the bridge. Defense and scanning came fully into the grid, followed by running systems and environmentals. The double navigation stations followed, then the helm console on the central bridge. Even the weapons station came up. Finally the main viewscreen was brought up with a snap of static, although the scanner-enhanced image was dark and hazy.

Keflyn looked up suddenly when Quendari brought the lighting up to the normal level, surprised to see the bridge coming back to life. She stared in complete confusion. Quendari swung her camera pod around, bringing it in closely. “Commander, will you take your station on the upper bridge? I have suddenly found that it is not in my nature to give up without a fight.”

“But I have no command experience,” Keflyn protested.

“You have far more battle experience than myself,” Quendari corrected her. “I have never fought. I need your help.”