“Then listen to me. You can begin spreading the word that the Dreadnought seems to be gone, and it is unlikely to attack the planet itself again anyway. Try to get things up and running again as soon as possible. I would like to stay and help you, bill I must try to race the Dreadnought to the next system likely to come under attack and order an evacuation.”
“You can’t out-run that thing.”
“I am the Starwolf Carrier Vardon,” she said.
“Oh.” That was followed by a very long pause that Theralda found vaguely amusing. “Then they will probably accept your word that everything is safe enough now.”
“If you cannot trust a Starwolf, who can you trust?” she asked, knowing that it was unkind of her to tease humans in distress. “I am leaving orbit presently. Your own fleet should be here within a couple of days.”
Theralda shifted her attention back to her own bridge. Commander Schyrran had stepped down from his station and was comparing notes with the navigator and the first officer at the navigational station. They all looked up at her camera pod as the Vardon engaged her main drives and began to move swiftly out of orbit. She brought her pod closer.
“It has been about five hours since the last attack,” she announced. “My own suspicion is that the Dreadnought left this system to proceed to its next target immediately after that. It had been waiting for Starwolves, and they did not come.”
“You said that you know where it is going,” Schyrran reminded her.
“I believe that I do,” she said. “And if it continues on for a third attack in this group, then it will hit Norden within a week at most.”
That was very bad news. While Norden was not a Sector Capital, it was still one of the most important and populous worlds in this Sector, a crossroad of trade as well as a center of high-tech industry. If the Dreadnought did hit there, this Sector would lose two major commercial spaceports, and orbital manufacturing complexes in addition to a large military station. And if the attack was not anticipated, the losses would likely include not only the system fleet but a very large portion of the Sector Fleet as well, as many as twelve hundred heavier ships, and perhaps another two thousand commercial vessels caught at the stations. A major shipyard would be gone as well, and that loss would effect this Sector’s ability to recover quickly from its damages.
“Will you call ahead for support?” Schyrran asked.
“I will, but I doubt that any other carrier will get there sooner than myself,” she said. “Perhaps the damage might be less if I did not, but I still must proceed to the second system in this sequence and warn them that the Dreadnought is probably on its way. There is nothing I can help them to do otherwise.”
He nodded his agreement. “But what about Norden? Are you thinking about trying to fight?”
“No, I cannot fight the Dreadnought,” she admitted reluctantly. “Just the same, it very much goes against my nature to run away and allow that machine to have its way in a major system. That used to be my job.”
Several hours later, and with her star drives coming dangerously close to overheating, the Vardon arrived at her next destination. She was unable to know the speed of the Dreadnought, but with every previous indication being that it moved fairly slowly, she should have expected to arrive well in advance of the mysterious ship. But since she now had some reason to believe that the Dreadnought spent some time after its initial attack loitering about, waiting for more prey to appear, that implied that the Dreadnought might be capable of moving very quickly between systems. Knowing the time of its last attack, she wanted very much to learn when it had actually arrived in the next system.
She would not, however, be able to wait around to find out. This next system was a relatively unimportant one, the local station and traffic load smaller even than what it had been in the system she had just left. She felt obliged to deliver her warning and press on to Norden, where the danger was far greater, and every hour that she saved in getting there would allow the locals to salvage that much more. They should at least be able to get their ships to safety. Given enough time, they might even be able to dismember and tow away the stations, which lacked the ability to move under their own power and were too sprawling to tow intact. The problem, of course, was that in a system of that size, traffic that could not be warned away in advance was going to be coming in constantly, and the Dreadnought was going to snap those up even if it could not find anything else. And whether or not it would again attack surface installations, and how much damage it might do, might depend upon getting the major power sources shut down in time.
And of course, it might also depend on whether the locals were willing to listen to the advice of Starwolves. Commander Schyrran persisted in pointing out that pessimistic view, and Theralda could not deny that he might be correct. As far as either the Starwolves or their ships could determine, humans were largely motivated by greed, and could take some enormously ill-founded risks by weighing profit against danger as if the comparison was valid. The promise of profit did not reduce a risk, but humans could not always be convinced of that. If the local officials were unwilling to close to commercial traffic, much less haul away their stations, because of the threat of lost revenue, then they would find endless, and to them very valid reasons to question Theralda’s judgement that the Dreadnought was coming their way.
Frankly, the Starwolves themselves could not care less. They would fight to the death to protect the innocent, but they were not in the business of protecting people from their own stupidity. They were, of course, such clever people by genetic design that they did not really understand stupidity. The Kelvessan were generally great magnets for information, with a thought process that was largely comparative. They had their own form of stupidity, usually reserved for when they missed some important detail, and then their mistakes tended to be both monumental and memorable.
Theralda Vardon went into that first system aware that she could find trouble but not really expecting it, and trouble was exactly what she found. She could not see the Dreadnought directly, but the fact that the planet itself was under attack and the station was already gone argued that it was there. She cut the very low-intensity scans that she had been using and was grateful for having been warned to maintain her shields at stealth intensity. There was nothing she could do here, so she kept her engines idle and settled into a long, gentle loop that would take her back out of the system fairly quickly, setting her course for her next destination. She did not dare to engage her star drives until she was well out of the area.
“Trouble again,” she warned the bridge crew. “Our belligerent friend is already here.”
Commander Schyrran looked up from his monitors. “Running the ship in a permanent class two battle alert certainly is convenient. It saves having to wait for the crew to prepare itself. I suppose that there is nothing we can do here. At least now that we know we are ahead of the Dreadnought, I suppose that we should just keep going.”
“Yes, that was my thought,” the ship agreed. “I am already bringing us around on the best course for Norden. And I do not even want to know what the Dreadnought is doing to that poor planet. This can all be very hard on a ship like myself, you know. I am used to being able to stomp anything I wish.”
Theralda had no reason to expect that anything should be that easy, and she was right. The Dreadnought betrayed itself directly by suddenly sweeping all space around it with a powerful scan. Theralda had already wondered if its reason for loitering in that first system was to catch any Starwolves that might come along on a regular patrol, and it knew also from its fight with the Kerridayen that the carriers could cloak themselves with stealth-intensity shields. When that impulse sweep came around and registered on her passive scanners, she knew that it was looking for her. And if the Dreadnought was looking for Starwolves, there was certainly no difficulty in guessing why it wanted them.