Dreadnought (16 page)

“Pack
your bags, Wally,” she declared, finding him in the common lounge of their
suite of apartments when she returned. “We’re moving aboard the Methryn right
away.”

“Is
the Methryn ready to go out?” he asked, looking surprised and curiously worried
about her announcement.

“No,
not for another week. But I’ve been invited aboard, and I’m not going to leave
you wandering about here on your own.” “But is that a good idea?” he asked,
still obviously concerned. “I mean, can’t you do your work better here at the
main base?” “No, I can do my work better aboard the Methryn when she goes into
Union space,” she said, wondering what was bothering him. “If you don’t want to
go back into battle, I can probably make arrangements to have you sent home.
But I’m not going to leave you here.”

“No,
I should go,” he agreed grudgingly. “You might need me. Besides, I seem to be
getting nowhere with their language.” “No, you never will,” she told him. “They
keep their secrets better than stones.”

The
first crisis had occurred by the time Captain Tarrel returned to the Methryn.
Kelvessan were running up and down the docking tube, to the point that she
spent half the walk through stepping to one side with her bags. A whole crowd
of people was outside in the bay itself in what looked like furious inactivity,
as if they very much wanted to do something but had no idea just what. None of
that was very promising for the Methryn. Captain Tarrel did not know what the
problem could be, but her first guess was that the scanner was somehow
involved. She doubted that there was anything that she could do to help, except
perhaps by staying out of the way. Her compromise to her own curiosity was to
stay in her cabin and make herself at home for a couple of hours, time enough
for the Starwolves to get over their initial panic and make some sense of the
situation.

When
Tarrel did finally present herself on the bridge , the crisis had settled
itself to a state of desperate industry, which was probably to say that things
were very much back to normal.

The
work on the new surveillance console was continuing at an unhurried pace, as if
nothing had happened, and that seemed to suggest that the trouble had not
occurred here. Commander Gelrayen had left a message for her with Valthyrra,
instructing her to join him on the floor of the construction bay.

As
soon as she could see the interior of the bay, Tarrel had a much better idea of
what was happening. Handling arms mounted on tracks on ceiling and floor had
been brought in both above and below the ship to begin the work of fitting the
remaining hull plates, suspended by the -deceptively slender arms out of range
of the artificial gravity that existed only at floor level. More plates were
being held in groups by other handling arms, but the work itself appeared to
have been suspended. Commander Gelrayen hurried over to join her before she saw
him. He was not in Starwolf Commander’s white, and she could not easily tell
him from many of the dozens of other Kelvessans on the bay floor.

“We
have a problem,” he told her simply. “We have to send these plates back to the
construction facilities. These plates were cast and shaped years ago, but this
is the first time that they have ever been brought out into the bay.”

“What
is the problem?” Tarrel asked. “Don’t they fit?” “They probably fit perfectly,”
he told her. “Unfortunately, they have not yet been prepared for final fitting.
Do you not see the difference?”

Tarrel
looked closely, but the only thing that she could see was that all of the
plates were shiny silver on both sides. “I suppose that the new plates haven’t
been painted yet. Can’t you do that after they go on?”

“That
is not paint,” Gelrayen said. “The plates are bonded to a thick polymer coating
that resists impacts and helps to insulate the hull against power discharge.
And considering what we have to fight, we will need that coating. We fuse the
sheets into a solid piece once it is on, and we can easily repair ripped and
burned sections. But this much work has to be sent back to be done properly,
and quickly enough to keep us on schedule.” “Can you still keep your schedule?”
Tarrel asked.

He
nodded. “Yes, we believe so. We began fitting the plates two days ahead of
schedule, and that gives us two extra days to make up for our little mistake.”

The
main bay doors began to open, the internal atmosphere held by containment
fields, while smaller tenders waited just outside to carry away the hull
plates. Considering the size of those plates, most of them almost sixty
meters'along each edge, this was the only door through which they would fit.
Tarrel looked up to see one of the massive plates pass directly over her head,
supported at one corner by a handling arm barely half a meter thick. For all
the years that she had lived in space, she still had some problems with
artificial-gravity environments.

“We
might just as well go back aboard,” Gelrayen commented. “There is nothing we
can do to help here, except to get out of the way. Valthyrra will be powering
up the scanners as soon as the bridge console is finished, and she told me to
expect that within the hour.”

Tarrel
was interested to watch the tenders move along the length of the Methryn to
collect the unfinished hull plates, but she did not necessarily want to be
beneath while the plates were being taken away. They took the lift back up
several levels to the observation deck, then crossed the docking tube back into
the carrier. Tarrel was compensated for not staying below to watch, since the
windows along the length of the tube gave her an excellent view of the tenders
operating on their own level. Commander Gelrayen indulged her curiosity a
moment, stopping to watch. The only problem with moving the weightless plates
was maneuvering their awkward size through the tight areas between the Methryn
and the walls of the bay.

“Will
Valthyrra be able to fly this ship?” Tarrel asked. “I would think that she
would need some practice to get the feel for anything this large and powerful.”

“She
has been practicing,” Gelrayen told her. “She has spent the last week moving
the Sharvaen in and out through the entire system by remote. She can establish
a multi-channel achronic link with any of the other ships that gives her
complete input of data and sensory devices and direct control over the other
ship’s major systems. So you might say that she really is getting the feel
along with the practical experience.”

“Can
these ships actually feel?” Tarrel asked, surprised. “I did not use the word in
that sense.”

“Oh
yes, they can feel,” he insisted. “They have various motion detectors that
allow them to judge degrees of accelerations and changes in direction, and they
have stress, compression and torsional sensors throughout their frame and hull.
They do not feel actual pain, but they know how different areas of the ship are
responding to stress. They have a better feel for flying than any other pilot
ever could.”

“So
all of the concern was only about her actual battle experience?”

“Unfortunately,
she cannot learn that from the other ships. Several of them have down-loaded
their own experiences to her, but I am told that it is not quite the same. There
are some things you can only learn by doing them yourself, and she can hardly
take one of the other carriers into battle.”

The
first of the tenders retreated from the construction bay, a plate of armor held
in each of its short forward handling arms. Each of those plates was probably
four or five times as massive as the little ship that was moving two of them
out of the bay, lifting to pass over the top of the carrier’s down-swept wing.
A second tender started out from the other side of the ship, something that
Tarrel had missed seeing so far.

“Will
the Starwolves fight to the death against the Dreadnought?” Tarrel asked
abruptly.

“No,
we have already decided that,” he admitted. “If we realize that we absolutely
cannot destroy it, then we will retreat. Our concern then will be the
evacuation of enough of Terran civilization, and our own ships along with this
station, to start again. You might think that we are cold, but we must be
practical. It is better to save something than lose everything.”

The
technicians had just finished closing up the panels on the new surveillance
console as they returned to the bridge. Valthyrra rotated her camera pod around
to look at them, obviously very pleased with the work. “The impulse scanner is
installed and ready for the first level of testing. I want to begin bringing it
into the main computer grid.”

Gelrayen
nodded. “Start getting comfortable with it, then. Anything else to worry
about?”

The
camera pod somehow managed to look uncomfortable. “Is there a very good estimate
on how long the closing of my hull will take?”

Gelrayen
regarded her suspiciously. “Probably a week. Why?”

“The
Vardon is coming in a few hours from now, and she needs more that a square
kilometer of new upper hull.”

“That
makes your poor nose look like a garden plot in comparison,” he commented.
“What happened to her?”

“Theralda
is reluctant to speak of the matter,” Valthyrra said. “She does relay important
information regarding the Dreadnought, although it is all more in the area of
bad news for us than good news, although still better for us to know. She says
that the Dreadnought is now attacking planets, and that it is faster and more
clever than we had first anticipated. She also warns us to use only tight-beam
achronic transitions, since she believes now that the Dreadnought has been
monitoring our wide-beam communications.”

Gelrayen
crossed both sets of his arms. “Wonderful! That monster knows everything we
plan, then. It will be waiting for us when we go out now, you realize.”

“We
can hope that it has not overheard everything,” Valthyrra suggested. “It is
easy enough to miss a sweep transition if you are in the wrong place.
Thirty-two percent of all such transitions are missed, especially at longer
ranges. I am hot speaking from personal experience, of course.”

“Wait
a moment,” Tarrel interrupted. “Are your transitions usually in your own
language?”

“Yes,
of course,” the ship answered.

“Then
the Dreadnought understands your language?”

“I
suppose that must follow, certainly. It is not difficult to figure out another
language, if you can find someone foolish enough to speak it to you. You might
try explaining that to your young companion. ”

Captain
Tarrel laughed softly. “He can go talk to the Dreadnought, if he wants. But if
he stays here, then we’re all better off for letting him have something
harmless to keep him busy.” “The Vardon will be here in perhaps eighteen
hours,” Valthyrra continued. “We will learn more about the matter then. She is
very reluctant to use the achronic to any extent, and she seems honestly
frightened. The scanner is fully integrated and nominally functional in as far
as I have been able to test it so far.”

“Very
well, then,” Gelrayen agreed. “Prepare the scanner for the second level of
testing. Are you going to try rapid sequencing?”

“I
thought I might. That is a key element in the grid.”

“Take
it easy, then,” he warned, stepping back toward the middle bridge to allow
members of the crew to take their stations for testing. Captain Tarrel joined
him, and he leaned back against the wall with his arms crossed. “The problem is
that all of these tests only tell us if we have installed it in the ship
properly. We will not know if it actually works until we can take the Methryn
out where she can maneuver.”

“Can
you take it out to test it now, before they’re ready to put the hull shields
back on?” Tarrel asked.

“I
wish we could. Unfortunately, we will not know how well we are actually
receiving because the receivers are calibrated to work surrounded by that great
mass of metal. Besides, Valthyrra is running the ship off of station power. It
would take hours to manually reconnect the power couplings and get her
running.” “Oh?” Tarrel was surprised to hear that. “Is there some reason to
keep the ship isolated from her own power? You certainly would not go to that
much trouble for an ordinary docking.”

“There
is no need for her to generate her own power, as little as she can use. I
suppose that keeping her in this state saves the time needed to change the
couplings to station power if the technicians want to modify her power grid.”
He shrugged both sets of arms, a serious expression of his own helplessness to
know the true reason. “As far as I know, she never has powered up her own
generators.”

“Then
how do you know that the power grid works properly. “Gelrayen glanced at her
impatiently. “Please, do not complicate my life any more than it already is.”

A
noise like distant thunder rolled through the frame of the carrier, a sound
that made Tarrel think immediately that the Methryn had just taken a hit or
some minor impact. Gelrayen seemed to think the same thing, and they both
paused to listen intently. Tarrel realized that such a sound was more ominous
here than it would have been on her own battleship, since any impact that would
have carried through the bulk of this ship probably indicated a much larger
blow than she first estimated. Her first thought was that there had been some
accident with the tenders removing those massive hull plates, or even that the
Dreadnought was attacking the station. She noticed first that all of the images
on the main viewscreen looking forward from the nose of the carrier had gone
suddenly black, and that sections of the main consoles were beginning to light
up in a way that suggested an emergency.

“What
do you have, Val?” Gelrayen asked cautiously.

She
brought her camera pod around slowly. “The primary and two secondary impulse
cannons in the shock bumper fired. There was no reason; they were not powered
up nearly far enough to pulse.”