“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.