Battle of the Ring (26 page)

“No. Visual identification is a complex function with a long history
of accidents,” Baress told her. “The uniform and the forged
magnetic ident you carry will identify you as a legitimate crewmember.”

“Just turn on the old Kanian charm,” Velmeran added. “That
should be enough to baffle even an automaton.”

He glanced inside the little room to check on her progress, and found that
she had just come out of her armor. It was his first sight of a naked human,
and he did not care for another. The lack of a second set of arms made her look
pitifully deformed.

“Since you will be on your own, remember to keep track of the
time,” he continued. “And give yourself enough time to get out. You
have to be back inside your armor before you can leave.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Lenna assured him absently as
she struggled into her uniform.

“And above all, do not get yourself in more trouble than you can
manage.”

“Sure. All ready.”

She emerged from the room, abruptly transformed into a stranger. She had put
on her makeup in advance, hiding her Trader ancestry with a slightly different
appearance to her slightly slanting eyes along with the hollow cheeks and wide,
thin-lipped mouth of a native of the Lokuivea worlds, who still reflected their
strong Polynesian and Amerindian background. Curiously enough, that might also
explain any peculiarities in her speech.

“Ah, the girl of a thousand races,” Baress said approvingly.
“A true artist.”

“That was my name at the bottom of the painting.” Lenna retrieved
her gun and joined the others. “Lead on, wizard.” The first task
was to find a main corridor that would lead the Starwolves to the forward
portion of the ship, and where Lenna could find a lift to serve as the shortcut
that she alone dared to use. There was a basic logic to the construction of
this ship. In a sense the Fortress was a large ship inside a larger shell. The
outer shell was the hull itself, its quartzite shielding and the vast sockets
that held the guns and engines. Three hundred meters inside that was the inner
hull that housed the mechanical workings of the ship itself as well as
several cubic kilometers of crew quarters, storage bays, and machine shops.

The only inhabited regions in the outer hull were the rider bays and
airlocks such as the one they had just entered. A single wide corridor extended
tunnel-like to the interior portion of the ship, where a second airlock sealed
it against emergency decompressions. Velmeran cycled this lock as he had
the first, stepped boldly through the moment the inner doors opened, and found
himself face-to-face with an automated sentry.

“Hello! Where did you come from?” he asked in mild surprise.

The sentry said nothing. The pair stood motionless as Velmeran stared
into the glass eyes of the machine’s cameras. Moments passed, and
the apprehension of the others turned to complete mystification.

“Well, now, that is better,” Velmeran said with disarming
familiarity, as if he had just run across an old friend. “Do you have a
name?”

The sentry appeared surprised. “I am called Ecs23-18.”

“Oh, that is no name!” Velmeran declared. “What if we give
you a real name? Bill, I think. Do you have any friends, Bill?”

“I have no friends. I am security automaton.”

“We are your friends now, Bill. Would you like to work with us?”

“I would like that very much,” Bill replied in his even, mechanical
baritone, although it was easy to imagine tears welling up in his glazed
lenses.

Velmeran took Lenna by the arm and pulled her forward. ‘This is Lenna
Makayen. She is your very special friend. She has very important work to do. I
want you to go with her, to help her and defend her. Will you do that?”

“I would like that very much,” Bill agreed with a note of
eagerness. “Lenna is my very special friend.”

Velmeran turned to Leena, who was speechless. “Go on, girl. Bill is
totally obedient to our will now, and he will not turn on you. He can help you
more than I can.”

“Right, Captain,” Lenna agreed, recovering from her shock.
“You concentrate on your own business. I know what I need to do.”

Velmeran nodded. “You have a very good idea, and I know that you can
make it work.”

She looked at him in surprise, then smiled. “Thank you, Captain.
I’ll not let you down.”

Lenna hung the rifle by its strap and access hook on the towering
automaton’s humped back. “Can you take me to the nearest
lift?”

By way of reply, Bill turned himself around and started down the corridor to
their right at his even, lumbering gait. As slow and careful as he appeared to
move, his long legs carried him at a pace that Lenna had to step quickly to
match.

“There go two that I love, and the smallest not the least,”
Baress quoted.

Velmeran paused in putting on his helmet. “Is Professor Tolkien
to be with us the entire mission?”

Baress shrugged. “I thought that we might have need of entertaining
company now that Lenna is gone. What did you do to that machine, anyway?”

“Just a little judicious tampering with both the hardware and the
software.” He paused a moment to secure his helmet and switch on the
outside audio pickups. The Starwolves could hear, if not as well, and yet
converse freely without fear of being heard. “We have to hurry
now.”

“We should have asked Bill for directions,” Consherra remarked
as they started off in the direction the sentry had led Lenna.

“No need,” he assured her. “All the major sections of the
ship are located on a major corridor. Corridor three, level twenty-five ends at
the auxiliary bridge. All we have to do is find corridor three on this level
and go up five to level twenty-five, then follow that corridor forward all the
way.”

“And what about the sentries?” she asked.

“We will have no more trouble with sentries. I just needed a little
practice at hearing them.”

“Hearing them?” Baress asked incredulously. “You can sense
the tiny generator in a sentry over the roar of this beast’s engines?”

“Of course.”

“If you say so,” he said dubiously. “I only wish for half
your talent. Still, it is as they say, do not meddle in the affairs of wizards,
for they are subtle and quick to anger.”

Velmeran glanced at him without pausing. “My mistake was obvious. I
should have given Lenna access to my books, and given you my art supplies. Then
neither of you would have understood what you had well enough to annoy me with
it. Ah, here we are.”

They emerged suddenly into a vast chamber, three levels high by nearly twice
as wide and extending in either direction as far as even their sensitive eyes
could see. Tubes of various sizes, from pencil-thin to large enough to walk
inside, ran along the walls, ceiling, and floors, while several of the largest
were suspended in frames in the center. Railed catwalks leaned out from
the walls on various levels, and a raised platform wove a twisting path
through the maze of pipes on the floor.

“This is your major corridor?” Consherra asked.

“Of course not,” Velmeran replied. “We follow this forward
to the next major transverse corridor, and that will take us directly to
the major lateral corridor we need. Then we follow that forward until we find
stairs leading up.”

The Methryn sat in a natural pocket within the interior of the ring, her
engines idle as she waited, and pivoted carefully until she was facing back the
way she had come. Capture ships continued to arrive, every one both the
Kalvyn and the Methryn possessed, and set to work plugging her corridor with
boulders pushed aside in her passage. Transports of all sizes were gathering
patiently in the main portion of the corridor five kilometers away.

“A report just came in,” Valthyrra announced. “Tregloran
says that the Challenger is moving again.”

Mayelna nodded slowly without turning from the main view-screen. “What
about your mechanical self? That rock you pushed weighed a great deal more than
you do.”

“Oh, I can handle more stress than that,” Valthyrra assured her.
“That is part of the reason I have a shock bumper in my nose. However, I
am reminded of something from ancient Terra, an animal called a seal that was
trained to balance a ball on its nose.”

“No seal ever had to balance its ball while running a path no wider
than itself at four thousand kilometers per hour.”

“I also doubt very much that seals ever threw rocks at battleships,”
she said dryly, then glanced at the viewscreen. “Only for him would I
even consider doing such a thing.”

Mayelna glanced up as well. The capture ships had completed their labor
and were joining the transports in the main corridor. Seen from behind, their
careful arrangement resembled the outline of a Starwolf carrier.

“All ready?” she asked.

“Just about,” Valthyrra replied. “If the Challenger moves
back up to her previous speed, she will be passing here in about ten
minutes.”

“Will this arrangement work?”

“Yes, it will work,” the ship insisted. “But we are still
taking a chance. All of those little ships will leave a very different,
energy-emission signature. For someone as intelligent as Maeken Kea seems
to be, that might be too many hints as to our real tactics. Damn Donalt Trace
anyway! The smartest thing he ever did was to admit that he is not smart enough
to fight Velmeran. She also has the better ship.”

“A better defensive weapon,” Mayelna corrected her. “You
make up for that in versatility. You also have the advantage of being a great
deal smarter.”

“I should hope so!” Valthyrra declared.

Mayelna smiled. “I just wish that you could fire as it passes.”

“So do I,” the ship agreed. Unfortunately, she needed half a
minute to charge her conversion cannon, and the concentration of raw energy in
her containment chamber would scream her presence throughout the system.
“The decoy formation is ready to proceed.”

“Send them on, then. They need to keep all the distance they
can.”

Five kilometers away, the decoy ships began to accelerate cautiously. The
unique configuration of the formation allowed their overlapping shields to form
a spearhead shape, gently pushing a passage through the ring that was identical
in appearance to the Methryn’s corridor.

Donalt Trace remained in his cabin, strapped in his bunk by acceleration
belts, until he was reasonably certain that the attack was over. That was
hardly an act of cowardice, but a practical consideration involving a couple of
hard truths. He knew that he had very little to offer Maeken Kea, and there was
no doubt that his reconstructed back would not endure being bounced around the
corridors of the Challenger. And so it was a quarter of an hour after the last
impact that he finally started for the bridge.

When the lift opened, he found two passengers already in the car. One was a
cute if lanky Lokuivian girl in the uniform of a first lieutenant. The other was
a sentry that took an abrupt step forward until the girl put out a hand to stop
it. Trace naturally assumed that the machine thought it had reached its
destination. He never knew how close he came to being killed by one of his own
sentries.

“Bridge, Commander?” the girl asked, and he nodded as he took
his place on the opposite side of the door. “The lift is set for there
already.”

“All secure, Lieutenant?” he asked.

“Yes, sir.”

The lift pulled to a stop only a moment later and Trace was gone the moment the
doors snapped open. Lenna Makayen rolled her eyes, sighed heavily, and gave
herself an imaginary medal for acting. She would have liked to have let Bill
shoot him, except that his disappearance would have thrown the entire ship into
such a state of confusion that it would have been nearly impossible for the
Starwolves to get away, much less complete the task at hand. With Bill at her
side, she followed cautiously.

Commander Trace found the bridge in a state of organized confusion. Stunned
and injured crewmembers sat in their chairs or on the steps leading to the
central bridge. Lieutenant Skerri seemed the worst of the lot, and Maeken Kea,
curiously enough, was wet and barefoot. Both were bent over the monitors
at the Captain’s console.

“Moving again?” he asked unnecessarily.

“This round seems to be over,” Maeken replied. “Did you
enjoy the ride, Commander?”

“It was interesting, to say the least. But what did they accomplish?”

“If nothing else, they bought more time. The final phase of repairing
their generators has to be a shutdown of at least several minutes to tie
in new power leads. They need to keep us off their tail.”

“No doubt,” Trace agreed, then paused to stare at her. “If
you want to finish dressing, I suppose it might be safe for you to leave the
ship in my care for a few minutes.”

“I would like a dry uniform.”

“And what about yourself, Mr. Skerri?” Trace asked of the junior
officer. “You look like you need to visit the sick bay for a couple of
aspirin.”

“Yes, sir. I would appreciate that.”

Lieutenant Skerri retreated gratefully from the bridge. His back ached
fiercely, and his head hurt even more. All the same, he meant to return to the
bridge as quickly as he could. His awe and respect for Commander Trace did not
blind him to the fact that the old man was a mediocre battle commander at best.
If he hurried, he might get back before Captain Kea left.

“Could you help me for a moment?”

Lieutenant Skerri stopped just short of the lift and peered at the small
female figure dimly outlined in the darkened side corridor. “Yes,
what is it?”

“Well, there seems to be a bit of trouble at hand, and I really need
an officer of some standing to help me.”

“I’m Lieutenant Captain Denas Skerri,” he explained,
trying to identify the crewmember.

“Sure, you can’t get much higher than that,” she agreed.
“Tell me, do you happen to see that sentry standing behind you?”