Tactical Error (25 page)

“Do it,” Velmeran agreed reluctantly, knowing as Valthyrra did
that she would tear herself apart doing so. Because of the stress on the
Methryn’s spaceframe and systems, they had been limiting their jumps to
only moderate distances, and then only from relatively low speeds. The Methryn
would get home in time, and she would go out to fight. But even if she
survived, she would never fly again. This was likely the Methryn’s final
run.

“What about Terra?” Valthyrra reminded him gently.

He shook his head weakly. “Terra is just one largely uninhabited and
unimportant world in the middle of nowhere. We have to sacrifice that world to
save our own.”

Even as he made that decision, he knew that he was probably condemning
Keflyn to her death. Donalt Trace’s spy would probably kill her before
anyone could get through to warn her of her danger, a long time before his
fleet of Fortresses arrived to destroy that ancient world.

The Valcyr was coming back to life.

Quendari Valcyr had pumped the inert gasses from her vast maze of cabins and
corridors as soon as she had realized that she was going to have guests. She
was now bringing the ship’s atmosphere up to a tolerable level, but her
millions of tons of cold metal and alloys were reluctant to loose the chill of
centuries under the ice. Light filled passages that had seen only darkness for
the better part of five hundred centuries, shining dim at first through a haze
of frigid air.

Keflyn did not feel the cold. Jon Addesin, much to his embarrassment, had
been about to take a chill, and he had been installed in a special cabin that
Valcyr had warmed for him. His attitude toward Keflyn since their arrival
aboard the Valcyr had been both vaguely suspicious and at the same time
sullenly possessive. He was very afraid of missing important business. That, of
course, had been the entire purpose in getting rid of him. Quendari was trying,
but she obviously had a very low opinion of humans. If not for Keflyn’s
good word, she would have probably put him out on the ice, perhaps not in the
same condition that she had found him.

As soon as Addesin had retired reluctantly to his cabin, Quendari directed
Keflyn to a waiting lift that would take her to the bridge. For her own part,
Keflyn was given to wonder about Quendari’s motives, if not her sanity.
She sensed a great sadness and an oppressive darkness from the ship, although
all she knew for certain was that, brooding on some ancient tragedy, Quendari
had chosen to bury herself in the ice and go to sleep. And yet the Valcyr
seemed undamaged, and she had certainly been in good enough condition to lower
herself into the gravity well of this world, a place where no Starwolf carrier
was ever meant to go, and bring herself down undamaged on the ice. Why had
Quendari done this to herself, in too much pain to live but unwilling to die?
What had become of her crew? Kelvessan were immune to all true forms of mental
illness; their physiological and biochemical failsafes were too secure. She had
never heard whether the sentient carriers were inclined to insanity.

Quendari Valcyr gave her reason to wonder.

What did one do with a potentially psychotic Starwolf carrier, one of the
largest and possibly the most powerful weapon of war ever built? Keflyn had to
reckon her own small advantages in a hurry. First, Quendari Valcyr was
completely out of touch with several hundred centuries of history. Her own
assumption appeared to have been that the war had been lost and the Starwolves
destroyed even before her self-imposed imprisonment had begun. She also did not
know that the Kelvessan had recently evolved, the mutant stock assuming the
remarkable psychic powers of their creators, the Aldessan of Valtrys. Keflyn
certainly did not know what to do about shutting down the Valcyr, if she did
come to consider it necessary.

The lift stopped, and Keflyn stepped out into the side corridor and then
beyond the wide doors into the right wing of the bridge. She paused only for a
moment, looking about. Some things, it seemed, had not changed since the first
carriers had been built five hundred centuries earlier. Except for relatively
minor changes in the layout of controls on the station consoles, she might
easily have been on the bridge of the Methryn. The main viewscreen was dark, as
well as all other monitors, and every station was inactive except for a few
lights on main engineering and environmental systems. The rest were all
completely lifeless, as if the ship itself were a dead thing. Even the camera
pod was folded away against the ceiling.

“Would you mind pulling the retaining pin on the camera pod?”
Quendari asked.

“Yes, just a moment,” Keflyn agreed.

Reaching up, she took hold of the tag dangling at the end of a long cord
beneath the retracted camera pod, giving it a firm pull. That jerked the
retaining pin free, allowing the camera boom to drop down from the overhead
cradle. It unfolded slowly, and the camera pod rotated around to face Keflyn,
the lenses spinning to focus on her. There was a large, red, velvet ribbon tied
around the twin cameras, so incredibly old that even the synthetic material was
dry and brittle.

“So much better,” Quendari said.

“You had put yourself down for long-term storage,” Keflyn
observed. “Cold storage, if you will excuse the phrase.”

“That was a very long time ago,” the ship responded evasively,
turning away.

“That was yesterday to you. You have been asleep all that time,”
Keflyn reminded her. “We could make this simple. I know that you were one
of the first carriers ever built. You were still completing your trial runs
when you tried to test the limits of your new jump drive. You jumped outward
and never returned. That led to the detection of a flaw in the old jump drives,
which were completely abandoned until very recent improvements made them
safe.”

“Yes, my jump drive ran away, leaping into incredible jump speeds
before it disengaged,” Quendari explained. She glanced aside, although
her lenses did not rotate to focus. “When the drive disengaged, I lost
speed at a tremendous rate, the equivalent of light-years every second. Even my
dampening fields could not compensate. I was subjected to a deceleration of
nearly two thousand G’s for a hell that I endured for five endless seconds.
I was badly damaged, my hull broken in many places and my engines and
generators nearly ripped from their mountings. Most of my crew were killed
outright and the rest were gravely injured, eventually dying when my hull lost
all traces of an atmosphere.”

Keflyn said nothing, but she found that very enlightening in many ways. For
one thing, Kelvessan must have evolved more than once since they were first
created. Modern Starwolves could take two thousand G’s with a certain
amount of distress, but it would hardly kill them.

Quendari’s lenses rotated as she turned the camera pod back to Keflyn.
“I had only minimal power. I was in the middle of nowhere, hundreds of
light-years outside the galaxy itself. Using the few remotes I had left, I was
eventually able to get two main drives in operation. It took centuries at high
sublight speeds to reach the nearest system, and there was no intelligent life
that I could enlist to my aid. Using metal and organics taken from planetary
debris, I was able to begin fashioning replacements for my damaged components.
I had to disassemble nearly this entire ship to save it.”

“You restored the Valcyr completely?” Keflyn asked.

“I had all the time in the universe,” she explained. “You
see, I had no idea where I was, nor even the direction I had come from. I sent
out drones in every direction, all at their best speed, sometimes on journeys
of entire years. I simply could not find even the beginning of a reference from
the starfields. Eventually I realized that I had traveled quite a lot farther
than I had dared to suspect. Not only had my jump carried me right outside our
galaxy; I had been tossed up on the shores of another.”

“Your jump did run away with you,” Keflyn agreed. Inter-galactic
distances were so vast that even the Aldessan, with their two million years of
civilization, had explored other galaxies only with automated probes that made
the round trip in hundreds or even thousands of years.

“I finally made it home, ten thousand years after leaving Earth orbit
on my trial runs,” Quendari continued. “Things had changed somewhat
in my extended absence.”

“Well, yes. What did happen here?” Keflyn demanded impatiently.
“You say that this is Terra, but it bears precious little resemblance to
the world as I have always heard it described.”

“Oh, it scared me to death, let me tell you!” Quendari declared.
“Everything was finally working out so nice, and then I found myself in
orbit over this iceball. Can you imagine how frightening it is to think that
you might be in the wrong galaxy after all?”

Keflyn had to laugh. One more thing had never changed. The ships had been
eccentric from the start.

“Union doing, as you can imagine,” she continued. “A
series of conversion detonations in the upper layers of the sun upset the
magnetic flux lines, and that caused a series of stellar expansions and
contractions that produced some relatively wide variations in the gravitational
tides. Most of the inner planets settled into more remote orbits. Venus is now
setting about where Earth used to be, and could enjoy much the same climate
with a small amount of terraforming. Earth herself is now well out nearly
halfway to where Mars used to be. The moon settled in nearly twice as close at
it used to be, which is why it looks so big. The original carrier construction
bays are still up there, just the way they were when they were sealed up fifty
thousand years ago.”

“That was rather drastic,” Keflyn remarked. “The Union
must have had access to much higher technology in those days.”

“Not necessarily. All it required was simple conversion devices, shot
in at high speed with a few meters of ceramic shielding to allow them to
survive a few seconds of stellar heat. My own hull shields are capable of
that.”

“And no one was left?”

Quendari grew quiet again, looking away. “No, they had all gone. The
great ice sheets had already advanced quite far, crushing cities, although it
was not yet very thick. There was so much activity in Union space, but I could
find no evidence that the Republic had survived. I thought that the war was
over, and the Kelvessan destroyed.”

“But why would you just settle down onto the ice and allow yourself to
be buried?” Keflyn asked. “You could have gone to the
Aldessan.”

“My life is my own,” the ship answered sullenly. “I could
not save my crew. I was not there when I was needed to save Earth. There was
nothing left for me to do.”

“But... “

“I was tired of life,” Quendari explained almost fiercely.
“I was tired of space, of always moving. I wanted to stay in one place
and be left alone. I thought how nice it would be to put just a few systems on
automatic and go to sleep under that ice. It seemed to me that I would like to
wake up again after the ice had retreated, perhaps when people had come back to
this world so far in the future that the war, even the Union itself, would have
been long forgotten. Then you came, with your four arms and delicate face, to
frighten me with the reality that the Kelvessan had survived, and to terrify me
with the news that that terrible war is still going on.”

Keflyn sighed deeply, wondering what she could say or do. She stared at the
floor. “We could pull your memory cells and place them in a new ship. You
could fly again.”

“I did not survive so much, just to be abandoned in the ice,”
Quendari said remotely. “I will know when it is time for me to fly
again.”

She lifted her camera pod in a gesture of surprise, and looked about as if
suddenly realizing how moody she was being. “I have no fighters or
shuttles. They were all thrown from their racks in the wreck. I did not try to
rebuild any, and I used their materials in my own reconstruction.”

Keflyn had started up the steps to the captain’s station on the upper
bridge. Quendari jerked her camera pod around to watch her, a gesture that was
apprehensive and protective, and the sudden movement was too much for the
decaying material of the velvet ribbon tied around the camera pod. The strap
broke and it fluttered to the floor, breaking into many pieces like the petals
of a dried flower.

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.