Tactical Error (17 page)

She placed both sets of her arms gently about him and drew him close, a
gesture that surprised him with its subtle boldness, and they kissed. Unseen
for the moment, the single large moon of that world rose slowly over the
eastern edge of the dale. Standing nearly full, it cast a cold, bright light
that turned the waterfall golden. Arm in arm, Jon and Keflyn turned away from
the secluded pool and sought the simple path leading back to camp.

Unnoticed in the night, a small, dark shape left the shadows of the woods.
As it moved noiselessly into the moonlight, it was revealed as a machine, the
rounded, featureless hull of a small automaton with a pair of cameras in a
protective housing at the end of a flexible armored neck. It drifted slowly
forward, suspended on silent field drives, its snake-like neck bent as it
watched the retreating pair. Although it was no part of this world, Keflyn
would have found it a familiar sight. It was a probe, the durable all-purpose
remote employed by Starwolf carriers as their eyes and ears outside their own
hulls. If she had seen it, Keflyn would have wondered why it was there. As far
as she knew, there were no Starwolf carriers anywhere in the area, nor would
any have cause to hide from her.

The probe paused at the edge of the pool where the two had sat. A pair of
long, narrow bays opened in its lower hull, and a set of mechanical arms
unfolded slowly. One small, slender mechanical hand reached down to take up the
length of flowered vine that Keflyn had forgotten, the machine’s camera
pod bent low, a gesture that was gentle, yet somehow sad. For ages she had slept,
desiring never to awaken. The coming of first the Union and then the Feldenneh
had caused her to stir, but she had slept again unconcerned. But the coming of
a Kelvessan was something that she could not ignore, stirring memories as old
and deep as the stars. She lifted her pod and quickly looked around a second
time, watching the pair as they retreated over the edge of the dale and
disappeared into the forest and the night. Slowly her gaze drifted back to the
vine, which she laid gently back into the bed of grass and leaves, withdrawing
the probe’s hands into itself. So she stood, hovering motionless in the
night.

“This is it,” Jon Addesin said, stopping in the middle of the
trail halfway up the ridge to block her path. “Are you prepared to be
astounded?”

“Just go ahead,” Keflyn answered impatiently. She still had no
idea of just what waited on the other side of that low hill, but she knew that
Addesin was excited and extremely pleased with himself. At least he did not
presume upon their one, rather brief intimacy. It had satisfied her curiosity,
and his was the attitude of a man who had gotten rather more than he had
bargained for. She followed him to the top of the ridge, and stopped.

She was every bit as surprised as Addesin could have hoped.

Previously hidden by the dense forest, the towering face of the glacier
suddenly soared before her, a crumbling cliff of ice well over a kilometer in
height and stretching away to either side in a broken line that eventually
disappeared into the distance. The glacier was bordered closely by a string of
long, narrow lakes, sometimes extending several kilometers away from the base.
A thin layer of soil that had collected over the centuries had covered large
areas of the top, bearing carpets of grass and occasional trees. The very sheer
face of the glacier was characteristic of its present state of retreat, a
condition also born out by the thin ribbons of waterfalls that spilled over the
top.

The surprising thing was what she saw embedded in the dark ice. Protruding
from the very center of the glacier was the black nose of a Starwolf carrier.
Although only a small fraction of the ship was visible, over a hundred meters
of the forward hull hung out like a dark ledge.

“Varth! Val traron de altrys calderron!”
Keflyn exclaimed.

“Yes, I had thought so,” Addesin remarked, grinning hugely.
“Now you know why the Feldenneh are so nervous about having something
like that lying about. Even wrecked, a ship like that is something that the
Union would give a lot to get in their possession, but they would have to be
extremely secretive about it. They would probably eliminate all the colonists
on this planet to maintain security.”

“But that is not a wrecked ship,” Keflyn insisted as she started
down the hill toward the glacier.

“What?” he demanded as he hurried after her. “But that
thing has to have been trapped in the ice for tens of thousands of years.

“There are carriers in space right now that are tens of thousands of
years old,” she told him. “Even so, although we might build those ships
to last, that one has been under half a kilometer or more of ice for a very
long time, and even continental glaciers will slide and flow for vast
distances. She would have been ripped to much smaller pieces than that a long
time ago. She must be powered up, with structural shields in her hull and space
frame.”

“Where are you going?” Addesin demanded, almost having to run to
keep up with her.

“Since she is still alive, there might be a way in.”

He expected that she would have to stop when she reached the edge of the
lake that stretched along the base of the glaciers for some distance to either
side of the carrier’s nose. After all, it was at least half a kilometer
across and the water was just barely above freezing... with nothing but ice
waiting on the other side. Starwolves, however, could take worse than that in
stride. Keflyn immediately began removing her clothes.

“Oh, be practical!” Addesin exclaimed irritably.
“I’ll go get the skyvan. It can hover well enough, and it certainly
floats.”

“I will get the skyvan,” she said. Although she did not explain
herself, he had to agree with her reasoning. She seemed determined to run all
the way back to camp some three times faster than he could, assuming that he
could have even run the entire distance.

The skyvan hovered well enough for their purposes, and there was also a
narrow beach of rounded stones and boulders of broken ice where they could
land. They did not have to look for very long. There was evidence of old,
collapsed caverns in the ice in the glacier to either side of the stranded
carrier, and they soon found one that was very recent. It was obvious that new
access caverns were constantly being cut as soon as the old ones were crushed
by the shifting ice.

Unfortunately, the cavern – like all of the others – was four
hundred meters up the side of the glacier. Addesin held the skyvan in a hover
while Keflyn leaped overboard, then he landed the machine on a ledge some
distance below and let the Starwolf haul him up with the length of rope she carried.
He was even less enthusiastic when he found that the tunnel was fairly small,
so that he had to walk slightly bent over.

“Is this entirely safe?” he asked as he followed her into the
depths of the tunnel. The ice cavern seemed much colder on the inside than outside.
“I mean, how do we really know who is living at the far end of this
passage?”

“Starwolves, I imagine,” she answered. Then she realized what he
was thinking and paused to turn to him. “In truth, I expect only to find
the ship itself. You see, our carriers have sentient computer systems. They can
take care of themselves.”

The most important question in Keflyn’s mind was not so much what she
was going to find but how it even got there in the first place. A Starwolf
carrier was a versatile ship. Although it had never been meant for atmospheric
flight, its armored hull was certainly streamlined enough even without
atmospheric shields and its field drive was powerful enough to bring it down
slowly, even hover. The problem then, of course, was that a carrier had no
landing gear. On level ground, the main body would be supported by the tips of
the down-swept wings and the forward edge of the nose. She did think that the
ship was leaning slightly nose-down, but it was hard to tell with so little of
the hull exposed.

She still could not imagine why anyone would want to land a Starwolf carrier
in the middle of a glacier. The best place to park a ship of any great size was
in space. And while the inside of a glacier was perhaps the last place where
anyone would look for three kilometers of starship, it would take hundreds if
not thousands of years to bury anything that size.

The tunnel had so far been following a long, gentle curve inward toward the
buried ship, although they could see only a very short distance ahead in the
absolute darkness. Glacier ice was not very translucent, and a kilometer
thickness of the stuff might as well have been a kilometer of rock.
Keflyn’s small torch suddenly illuminated a blackness at the end of the
tunnel that was the hull of the ship itself, centering on a sealed airlock.

“So now what?” Addesin asked. “We knock?”

“There is hardly any need,” a precise female voice declared from
behind them.

They turned quickly to see a carrier’s probe hovering in the tunnel
some ten meters behind them, at the very limit of Keflyn’s weak light.
Jon Addesin had never seen anything like it in his life, and he drew back
fearfully as the strange machine drifted noiselessly closer, its snake-like
head with two large, bright eyes bent to watch him. It was a very disconcerting
thing to find blocking the only way out at the end of a long tunnel inside a
glacier, especially when it was watching him in such a baleful manner.

“You knew that we were coming?” Keflyn asked.

“I have been watching,” the machine answered vaguely.

Well, this was certainly a Starwolf carrier. Keflyn recognized that very
typical manner well enough. Certainly well enough to know that she was facing a
very perturbed and anti-social example of the species.

‘I am Keflyn, daughter of Velmeran, Commander of the Carrier Methryn
and of the combined Starwolf fleet,” she offered, realizing that she was
expected to make the first overtures. “This is Jon Addesin, Captain of
the Free Trader
Thermopylae
.”

“What is a Starwolf?” the ship asked.

“Oh, my,” Keflyn muttered to herself, suddenly aware of the
incredible antiquity of this ship. “Starwolves are those Kelvessan who
still live on board the ships. There are still twenty-three carriers. We
believe that we are in the final days of the war, although we have no idea how
much longer the Union can hold out. From your point of view, it has to be just
about over.”

“The Republic survives, and the Kelvessan are still fighting the
war?” she asked, her camera pod dipping reflectively. “I had never
expected that.”

The airlock door suddenly snapped open, the warm, bright light of the
corridor beyond flooding out in welcome. Whatever this ship thought of her
unexpected visitors, she had apparently decided to trust them enough to ask
them in. Keflyn realized that the poor ship probably had no idea what to think,
as long as she had been in isolation.

“I am Quendari Valcyr,” she introduced herself simply.

Keflyn stopped short, and turned abruptly to stare. “But the Valcyr
was lost a very long time ago, in the earliest days of the Starwolves. You were
the first jump ship.”

“That is a very long story,” the ship said, drifting slowly
forward to encourage them to enter the airlock. Keflyn suspected that she was
unwilling to speak before Jon Addesin.

The airlock closed behind them. Addesin was enormously relieved to be out of
the intense cold of the cavern, although his joy was short-lived when he
discovered the pronounced chill inside the ship. Starwolves required a cool
environment for comfort, and Quendari had dropped her internal temperature even
more to save power and preserve her electronics against heat decay. Then, as
the inner airlock door closed, he seemed to realize where he was. For the first
time since Keflyn had met him, he appeared impressed and even just a bit frightened
by Starwolves.

Keflyn found the corridors familiar so far, and headed toward the nearest
lift. She assumed that Quendari would then direct the lift to whatever part of
the ship she meant to keep her uninvited guests, probably to put Jon Addesin into
safekeeping so that they could speak privately.

“Why have you come?” Quendari asked as she hovered behind them.
“If you did not know that it was me, then what were you seeking?”

“Another ship that had been destroyed centuries ago was recently
restored to life through her remaining memory cell,” Keflyn explained
briefly, speaking in Tresdyland to protect her secrets. “She possessed
vague memories that brought us here, to the lost colony of Alameda, where we
had hoped to find additional clues that would lead us to Terra. You see, we
lost the location of both worlds a long time ago, after they were abandoned. I
know that Terra is supposed to be unlivable... “

“Then none of the older ships survived?” Quendari interrupted.

“No. All that survived the time before was the former Alameda station,
which is now at Alkayja.”

“Well, you people did get rather lost,” the ship remarked as
they moved into the lift that stood open, waiting for them. “This is
Terra.”

Invisible to sight and scan, the Methryn slipped silently into the small,
remote system. She launched drones immediately, and they reported back within
two hours with a detailed survey of the system, giving Valthyrra the location
of the main surveillance network on the planet and every hidden detector within
the system. That provided a surveillance map of the complete area, allowing the
Starwolves to know the strengths and weaknesses of the Union’s position
and indicating their best avenues of approach.

The most difficult part of landing unseen on any planet was the last two
hundred kilometers. Then an approaching ship was within the effective range of
radar and almost on top of scanners, its own speed cut to a relative crawl and
leaving a fiery trail through the upper atmosphere with its shields. Over their
long history, the Starwolves had explored a variety of methods for getting
their fighters undetected to within striking range of a ground-based target.
The most effective method was a sudden burst of speed on the final run, hitting
hard before defenses could be brought into order. That was not, of course, at
all possible when the objective was a secret landing.