The Vardon responded in about the only way she could, engaging her main drives to take her speed back up to a point where she could make a smooth, quiet transition into starflight. Her actual distance from the Dreadnought was over two light hours, since she had not penetrated very deeply into the system and was now looping around to head back out. Theralda assumed, or at least hoped, that she was out of the Dreadnought’s effective range. Achronic-based weaponry could be fired across light-years without serious loss of power or definition; the problem was finding the target precisely after the first few hundred thousand kilometers. Given enough distance, a variation of even a millionth of a degree became a significant miss.
“Impulse scan contact,” Theralda warned, although the members of the bridge crew had already noted her acceleration. “A second contact followed the first by several seconds, so I have to assume that I have been seen. The attack on the planet ceased at that same moment.”
“Is it following us?” Commander Schyrran asked as he returned to the Commander’s station on the upper bridge.
“I have no way of knowing,” she admitted. “If it is, the best evidence will come when it begins shooting at us.”
“You have us accelerating back to starflight?”. Schyrran assumed. “Take us through quickly, but try to be discreet about our course. Head somewhat away and then change course fiVe minutes into starflight.”
“Moving into starflight now.”
The Vardon made a very smooth transition back into starflight. A carrier could make an extremely abrupt transition, due partly to its superior drives and acceleration dampers, but mostly because the Starwolves themselves were able to handle harsh accelerations that would have killed anyone else. But a forced transition, engaging the star drives while the ship was still well below light speed, caused a very turbulent dispersion of emissions from the drives that was easy enough to follow. The Vardon did not want to draw a line leading straight to her destination, especially if the Dreadnought would not have been going on to Norden otherwise.
Theralda brought her camera pod into the upper bridge. “I will not say that I like that. The Dreadnought was ahead of us with no more than a five hour lead, possibly less. That means that it is at least as fast as my own best speed, and I was running my drives to within two percent of risking permanent heat damage to the crystals. How can anything that size be able to move so fast? I wonder what manner of drive it uses?”
“Are we away clear?” Schyrran asked.
“I certainly hope so, but it seems a little early to promise anything.” She lowered her camera pod slightly, a gesture of resignation or defeat. “I no longer know what to make of that machine or just what it might be capable of doing. We had assumed that it was slow because of the interval between attacks, but we now have every reason to believe that it loiters in-system after an attack to see what shows up, and that it actually travels at speeds a carrier would find hard to match. And that is probably only its cruising speed. I hesitate to think what it might be capable of doing in a pinch.”
Schyrran nodded. “Do you know of any reason why we cannot relay that information on a tight beam back to Alkayja station immediately?”
“A tight beam should be safe enough.”
“Then Norden is the next step. Get us there as fast as you can, and we should have two or three days from this point to get things ready before the Dreadnought shows itself.”
“I will need sixteen hours at least to reach Norden,” Theralda warned him. ‘‘My drives are hot. I knew that they would be, but I was anticipating a few hours at least in this last system to let them cool. I will have to reduce power by at least thirty percent to keep drive temperatures from going up any more.”
He nodded. “Do the best you can, but do not damage yourself. If you have a drive go down now, you could be out for months. It might seem like a harsh judgement, but a single carrier in good fighting condition is worth more right now than even a major system.”
Theralda did everything she could to keep her drives running at the best possible speed, keeping the phase rate for each of her two star drives calibrated for the greatest efficiency. She even tried shifting the frequency of her emissions in the attempt to convert some of that heat into a tremendous flare of visible light. In the end, she was finally forced to reduce her speed and keep it down, the one thing that she had not wanted to do. All such judgments were relative to the situation. Ordinarily, she would have considered her present speed to be fairly high, within her upper recommended limits. Now she felt that she was moving at barely a crawl.
More than anything, Theralda was feeling very helpless, and that was an unfamiliar experience for her. She was three kilometers of fighting machine and perfectly able to care for herself even without crew. Her speed was second only to that of her own fighters, and she had the power to destroy worlds. Now a thing that she could not even see was so much bigger, faster and stronger than herself that she could not hope to fight it. She hated to admit even to herself that she was doing nothing more now than making a constructive retreat, desperately struggling to stay ahead of a machine that would probably destroy her if it found her. The Union had come to the Starwolves, even proposed a truce that they would have never accepted otherwise, and the only thing she could do to protect them was to warn them to get out of the way of the engine of destruction following her. It was a lesson in humility. And frustration.
She entered the Norden system cautiously, not knowing what to expect, and so she ran with her shields at stealth intensity and her drives idle to reduce betraying emissions. Having made the run at much lower speed than she would have preferred, she almost expected to find that the Dreadnought had jumped ahead of her and was already attacking the system, or perhaps hiding silent and unseen to ambush her. Her first tentative scanner reports showed that the system was a scene of frantic activity, with hundreds of ships in flight at once, all seeming to be headed in different directions. But she could see no evidence of an attack. She opened a channel to the station. The response she received was unexpected.
“Attention Starwolf carrier. ’* The message was over one of the achronic bands normally reserved by the ships for communication between themselves. “Attention Starwolf carrier. This is the carrier Maeridan.”
“Khallenda?” Theralda asked in response, obviously mystified. “How did you know I was here?”
“Your drives are hot,” the other ship explained. “You might just as well forget stealth for now, since you are leaving the widest trail of secondary emissions I have ever seen. Do you never look behind you?”
“More and more, these days,” Theralda said. “So, when did you come into system?”
“Just a few hours ago. I caught the edge of your message and came running as fast as I could. The Karvand might be along in the next few hours. Are we going to have that much time?”
“I wish that I knew,” Theralda replied, then hesitated. “Could you excuse me for a moment. The System Commander is answering my call. Better yet, you should join us. Then I will only have to explain all of this once.”
“Would you find me a bother?”
“Oh no, not at all. I would consider it a pleasure.” She shifted her achronic channel to the Union’s short-range beams, remembering to speak the Terran language. “Commander? This is Theralda Vardon.”
“Yes, this is System Commander Carrel,” a man with a deep voice responded. “Do you have additional information on this Dreadnought? Is it really on the way here?”