Thorarinn Gunnarsson - Tactical Error

“What do you intend to do?” Keflyn asked as she rose and began to climb the steps to the commander’s station uncertainly. “I mean, you can hardly bring your own weapons to bear on the ice to free yourself.”

“I am better prepared than you might think.”

As soon as Keflyn had lifted herself into the commander’s station by the overhead supports, Quendari rotated her camera pod around as if to face a bridge crew that was not there. Carefully at first, she began to bring her main generators on line. The large units responded willingly enough, one by one adding their power to the line of indicators at the engineering station. A distant vibration began to stir through the Valcyr’s space frame; that feeling of life that Keflyn had missed in this ship was returning quickly.

“This could be the end of you,” Keflyn warned when Quendari brought her camera pod into the upper bridge. She still remembered the ribbon that had fallen away in dust.

“It will be the end of me if I do nothing,” Quendari answered. “This way, at least I tried.”

She brought up her shields gradually. They strained against the weight of ice, collapsed completely against the hull of the ship, but she continued to add power until the ice began to snap. The surface of the glacier above the Valcyr suddenly lifted in a long, law dome. Quendari relaxed the shields, allowing the ice to settle, and suddenly brought them to battle intensity. The ice was thrown aside, splitting into large fissures, massive blocks of it along the forward edge collapsing to slide off the curve of her exposed hull into the cold lake far below.

Quendari engaged her field drives, and those systems responded with the same flawless ease. Pushing against the weight of ice still riding on her upper hull, she began to lift herself slowly straight out of her ancient bed. Massive blocks of ice, some dozens of meters across and weighing hundreds of tons, began to fall away in the white fog of crushed powder that cascaded from the wreckage in sheets and streams like waterfalls. Deep black against the white, the Valcyr rose proudly from the clouds of powder, the last small boulders of ice rolling from her hull as she rotated around to the east, the doors in her shock bumper that covered her immense forward lights and high-intensity scanners folding back as she faced into the planetary angle of rotation. Engaging all four of her main drives in a sudden flare of power, the Valcyr began to climb toward the stars.

“We are free and clear,” Quendari reported. “All systems are operating perfectly. Power at less than five percent, all generators on line. Weapons systems standing by. Present altitude is twenty kilometers at an ambient speed of two thousand.”

Keflyn stared at her questioningly. “How did you manage?… “

“I am not in so bad a shape as you seemed to think,” the ship explained. “Although my conscious systems were shut down, my automatic computer systems continued to care for this ship, providing constant maintenance and even fabricating new parts. Constant internal shields have protected my hull and space frame against deterioration and fatigue. My present condition is as good as if I had just completed a major overhull.”

Keflyn nodded to herself. “How are you doing?”

“The Valcyr is clear of planetary orbit,” the ship responded. “What recommendation would you make on our present situation?”

“My inclination is that we should run like hell,” Keflyn said candidly. “I did tell you about Fortresses. You have no shield detonation missiles to strip them of their quartzite shielding. That means that they will have both their hull shielding and their shell, both of which can easily turn a single shot from a conversion cannon. And you will have possibly only one shot from your own cannon, with whatever conversion missiles you might possess. You have no hope.”

“I see,” Quendari remarked thoughtfully. “My scanners report seven of these Fortresses, in addition to one ship that is even larger. It looks like this.”

She cleared her main viewscreen, replacing the image with the schematic of a very large ship. Seen in side view, it was obviously a ship of vast proportions, in most ways like the complex matrix of sharp edges and flat hull plates joined by shallow angles of the Fortresses. It appeared at first to be much lower in height than a Fortress, giving it the very long, slender appearance of a stingship. Then she realized that the height of the two ships was about the same, but this ship was nearly twice as long.

“Typical Union military thought,” she remarked. “When you find a weapon that works, make one twice as big, although I cannot imagine why Trace would bother. It does him no more good to have a larger one, certainly not as much good as two of the regular type would have.”

“Donalt Trace? He is the one who has been after your father these past few years?” Quendari asked. “What do your carriers do about these ships?”

“Sequential firing,” Keflyn explained. “Two carriers working together, or one of the new carriers that has two conversion cannons. The battle shells of the Fortresses can take anything you throw at them, but not for long. Operating under a load, they can only endure a matter of seconds before they have to come down. The sustained blast of a sequential firing overloads the shell and allows you to get at the meat. But that only works if you have already stripped them of their quartzite shielding.”

Quendari considered that for a moment. “So, I have to destroy eight invincible ships with only one shot, when one shot is not enough to destroy even one.”

“You do not have the power,” Keflyn reminded her. “But is there somewhere you can get it? Or is there some way that we could just render them harmless to the planet?”

“I think that I just might have a plan,” Quendari said. “But I need for them to follow me. Can we manage that?”

“We can try,” Keflyn agreed. “Put on your best aggressive stance and move out to meet them. Do something to make yourself inviting. They cannot afford to miss the chance to destroy a carrier.”

The Valcyr was already clear of the atmosphere by that time, free to pile on speed with complete impunity. She engaged her main drives at full power, fairly leaping out of the gravity well and hurtling into open space. It felt good to be able to stretch herself in this way, a pleasure that she had not enjoyed in a long time. A curious and entirely extravagant portion of her personality programming had been designed to interpret an array of sensory feedbacks, from the stress of acceleration on her space frame to the sudden thrust of power to her engines, as a pleasurable response. Such subtle things were the substance of life, the portion of her own self that she had once forgotten she possessed.

She circled wide, then hurled herself directly toward the group of Fortresses, accelerating rapidly to near light speed. The Fortresses were moving in a fairly tight formation, so vast in size that the kilometers which separated them seemed tight and confining. They had none of their riders out, not even stingships to scout their path or cruisers running vanguard. Their stance was a singularly aggressive one, suggesting that they were going into battle and would allow nothing to stop them.

“That Donalt Trace you mentioned,” Quendari said. “He is calling on a visual channel. He says he wants to talk.”

“Oh?” Keflyn was honestly surprised to hear that name. She suspected there was more about this business than there seemed, to bring him out, even considering how important the battle for the possession or destruction of Terra would be. He had learned to let better warriors do his actual fighting, freeing him to be the strategist. According to her father, he had always been a poor tactician once battle was engaged. “Have you declared your identity to him?”