Battle of the Ring (29 page)

Valthyrra’s camera pod was nearly ripped free by the blast, and it
turned reluctantly when she tried to bring it back around. Reacting to falling
pressure, doors were slamming shut throughout the area to contain the break in
the hull. Cargin, recovering quickly, hurried to the dented helmet he spied
amid the wreckage. With this in hand, he rushed to Mayelna’s inert form
and gently lifted her up so that he could set the helmet over her head and clip
it in place even as the last trace of air and smoke fled through the gaping
hole overhead. Another crewmember arrived with pressure tape to seal the
breaks in the Commander’s armor, in case the suit underneath had not
sealed itself.

Oblivious to the continued assault she was taking, Valthyrra forced her
damaged camera pod around until she was looking down at Mayelna’s silent,
battered form. Cargin opened her chestplate for a reading. In spite of all
their fears, it showed a feeble pulse of life.

“Dyenlerra to the bridge, now!” Valthyrra all but screamed over
the ship’s com. Then, almost as an afterthought, she opened a line
through every speaker and suit com. “Stand by to abandon ship.”

Mayelna stirred weakly. Surely she had heard! Valthyrra bent even closer,
hoping that her suit com remained intact. “Commander?”

“Save yourself, you old fool!” Mayelna admonished in a thin,
harsh whisper.

Valthyrra glanced up abruptly at the main viewscreen, a cold, determined
gesture. The Challenger lay to her right and slightly above barely twice her
length ahead, pounding the smaller ship with unrelenting fury. Swinging her
nose around to face her enemy head-on, the Methryn opened fire with deadly
accuracy as she accelerated straight toward the larger ship. Valthyrra
concentrated her fire on the cannons of her very nose, kilometers forward of
where Tregloran and the others watched in stunned terror.

The results were as she had anticipated. Neither the Challenger nor her
captain knew whether the Methryn meant to ram or to fire her conversion cannon
so close that nothing could deflect the flood of raw energy, even if it meant
the destruction of both ships. Maeken Kea had to decide in a hurry. She
diverted one quarter of the ship’s power to the hull shields, enough to
minimize the damage of a direct impact, sending the rest into the outer shield.
The Challenger disappeared within its protective white shell of static force.

The Methryn struck that barrier nose-on and it parted around her in a
fantastic display of blue and white lightning that rippled harmlessly over her
hull and a fourth of the distance around the shell. At the same time she
dropped her tapered nose enough to pass just beneath the blunt bow of the Fortress.
Although she cleared the lower hull with fifty meters to spare, their great
forms appeared to skim past with only the narrowest gap. The Challenger had
dropped her outer shield and held her fire, her full power to her hull shields
for nearly half a minute that the Methryn was beneath her. Then she was past,
accelerating at her best speed along the decoy corridor laid by her own
transports.

Now Valthyrra was safe and could flee out of range before the Challenger
could pivot back around to bring her main battery to bear. She turned her
attention back to her stricken Commander. Dyenlerra had arrived moments earlier
and was bent over the diagnostic unit attached to her suit. She looked up as
Valthyrra brought her camera pod around.

“I am sorry,” the medic said softly. “It is too
late.”

For a long moment out of time, Valthyrra was too stunned to react. Then she
did something that she should not have been able to do, something contrary to
the programming that had brought her to life thousands of years before. Her
capacity for both love and grief had grown far beyond what her initial design
had allowed. In a blind fury, mindless of her own safety and forgetting her own
crew members on the Challenger, she swung herself back around and began
charging her conversion cannon. But the Challenger immediately sensed that
rapid increase in power, and she knew what it meant. Without even waiting for
orders, she threw up her shield.

No, Valthyrra!
Velmeran called to her silently across space.
Run
for now. I will call you when the time comes.

That brought her fully back to her senses. She began to power down her
cannon as she turned herself back around and disappeared into the ring.

Velmeran sat alone in the chamber just off the power core, beside a control
console for a field generator that still smoked from the effects of a heat
charge. One life had been required in payment for the successful completion of
this task. He had known that from the first. But he had thought that it would
have been his own, terms that he would have been willing to pay. In the end the
payment had come suddenly and unexpectedly, the one life nearest to him that he
had considered safe. If he had only known. He sat alone in the middle of the
vast ship that he had come to destroy and grieved silently for what might have
been.

So it was that he grieved too long, lost amid regret and self-recrimination,
when Donalt Trace found him there minutes later.

When Donalt Trace first saw the single figure completely encased in Starwolf
armor sitting on the steps of the inclined ladder leading up into the machinery
of the field generator, he did not know what to make of it. Because the
Kelvessa was helmeted, he could not tell who it was or why he just sat
there in a decidely dejected altitude. He was aware that the Challenger had
been in battle, having ambushed the Methryn and apparently won. And so he
thought he knew from that who this must be.

Commander Trace checked his rifle a final time before moving in. Two other
crewmembers moved in along converging paths, their own rifles ready. The
sentries held back, too big and clunky to sneak up on anything short of a deaf
thark bison facing in the wrong direction. As versatile as the automatons were,
they were never subtle.

Three against one. Trace considered the odds slightly on his side because he
had the element of surprise. He would have felt safer if he could have gone in
shooting, but he desperately needed a live Starwolf.

“We have you surrounded!” he called out, a slight exaggeration.
“Put down your weapons and move in this direction.”

The Starwolf looked up, startled. Seeing the three rifles trained on him, he
decided quickly. Moving carefully, he released his belt with its two pistols
and remaining heat charges and laid it on the floor. Then he rose slowly and
walked half the distance to where Trace stood.

The Sector Commander called in the waiting sentries, ordering them to
surround the captive at a distance of only two meters and shoot if he made any
sudden moves. Only then did he receive the abandoned weapons. The rifle was a
greater burden than he cared to admit, and he hung it by its strap from the
access hook on the side of a sentry and slipped the latch of the belt on the
opposite side. He gave the Starwolf’s armor a quick inspection but
saw nothing he considered to be a weapon.

“Now, my busy little friend,” he said, facing his tiny captive.
“Why don’t you remove that helmet so that we can see who you
are.”

The Starwolf released the throat clips and pulled off his helmet. As much as
his kind looked alike to most humans, Donalt Trace recognized him immediately.
What surprised him was to find that Velmeran had been crying. His triumphant
look faded to one of sadness.

“Your ship?” he asked gently.

“You hit the bridge,” Velmeran explained simply.

“I am sorry,” Trace said, and his regret seemed very sincere.
“I never really meant to hurt you, not like I have. This is simply
business. I do what I have to do.”

“I am glad that you can appreciate that,” Velmeran remarked.

Trace looked at him sharply. “What do you mean by that?”

Velmeran only shrugged indifferently, as if he had a secret and considered
it very secure.

“You’ve put a bomb in the power core, haven’t you?”
Trace insisted. “All this minor sabotage... you could work at this for
hours and never get anywhere. Well, I know where you entered, about
three-quarters of a kilometer back. Your bomb has to be somewhere between that
point and here.”

Velmeran shrugged again. “And how many tens of thousands of access
plates will you have to check under in the next hour before it goes off before
you find it? It is not a very big bomb, but it is more than enough to snap this
power core in two.”

“We can reroute the network around the power core. Besides, the
Methryn is not going to fire on you – assuming she is still able – while
I have you.”

“The Methryn will do what she must,” the Starwolf assured
him.”And I will be gone by then, anyway.”

Trace grinned in wry amusement. “You know, I more than half believe
you will. That’s why I’m hoping to make it very, very hard for you.
If you’ll excuse me, I’ll leave you to my associates for a few
minutes while I call up to the bridge.”

Commander Trace sent him back to the steps where he had been sitting and put
the three watchful sentries to stand guard over him, their guns charged and ready
to fire. Then he withdrew around the corner, far enough to avoid being
overheard by the sharp ears of a Kelvessa.

Velmeran, distracted from his grief by matters at hand, gave some quick
thought to the immediate future. His claim that he could escape at any time was
not an idle threat. At least he hoped not. For now he had to buy time for
Consherra to reach the auxiliary bridge and complete her own task. As long as
Trace was preoccupied with him and the crew of the Challenger was distracted by
looking for a nonexistent bomb, Consherra was likely to remain forgotten.

Velmeran?

Yes, Sherry?
he responded silently.
Are you ready?

I am,
she said.
Give me access.

Velmeran concentrated his talent on forcing the Challenger to open her basic
programming. He found it easier to control this ship than to force Valthyrra to
recite Lenna’s rank poetry, but he also had to be far more subtle.

Your access is open,
he reported.
Take your time. I have found a
way to keep this entire ship preoccupied for at least the next hour.

Take care of yourself.
Consherra admonished before quickly breaking
contact. Velmeran was momentarily amused. He could guess what her reaction
would be if she knew how he was keeping this ship preoccupied.

Commander Trace returned presently, looking very pleased. Velmeran could
well imagine that everything must be going very well in his world.

“I thought that we might take a little trip up to sick bay,” he
announced.

“Sick bay?” Velmeran asked innocently. “Am I going to be
sick?”

Trace laughed as he indicated with his rifle for the Kelvessa to
precede his three mechanical guards out of the chamber. “No, but it seems
about the best place to try to keep you. Even our security cells are made of
ordinary floor and panel plating, which would not hold out very long against
your strength. No, the surest way to keep you is set you down somewhere and
surround you with more sentries than you can handle.”

Commander Trace led the odd procession out of the power core and back into
the main corridors of the ship, the unfortunate Starwolf packed between two
sentries ahead and three behind. They soon came to the lift and Trace went on
ahead with two of the sentries, sending the car back for Velmeran and the other
three. The ride was not long, the lift going up four levels and ahead only a
short distance. Velmeran thought that they could not be more than three hundred
meters from the auxiliary bridge, a little more than twice that far from the
main bridge.

The sick bay was clearly meant to serve a much larger crew; for the present
needs of the Challenger, one physician and three automated assistants were more
than enough for the single patient who waited for a plastifiber cast to cure
out. Velmeran was led into a very large general diagnostic ward just off the
main lobby. There he was set on a stool-like chair near the back wall,
surrounded at a discreet distance by two of his dutiful guards.

The other two remained to either side of the door that was the only exit.

There he sat, looking dejected but not particularly frightened. Trace
watched him with an expression of puzzlement as he conferred for a minute with
the physician. Dr. Wriestler seemed to Velmeran to be a fairly typical military
doctor, radiating an air of faint ineptitude. They spoke quietly for some time
before the physician hurried off on some errand. Trace, looking as if he had
just settled some major problem, walked slowly over to where the Starwolf
waited.

“I am about to take a terrible liberty, so I want to explain,”
he began, pulling up a chair of his own. “As you might have guessed, I
have gone into the ultimate weapon business. I already have a ship that has
proven its ability against Starwolves. I intend to build more like it,
certainly. But I also hope to build a smaller carrier version, a great deal faster
but just as invulnerable. Naturally, I want my own Starwolves to go with
it.”

Velmeran looked startled. “Me?”

Trace nodded slowly. “As much as I would prefer, we cannot begin to
design and create our own. But as long as we start with living genetic material,
we can clone our own. By fishing out your recessive traits, and introducing
genetic variables of our own, we can create an entire race out of you
alone.”

Wriestler returned at that moment, pushing a small cart that bore a
collection of medical supplies. Two Velmeran recognized instantly. One, a
curious boxlike device, was a suspension chamber, designed to keep organs alive
in stasis indefinitely until needed for transplant. The other was a large laser
cutting tool.