If no one else was pleased with what had happened to the Methryn, it did at least put Theralda Vardon in a better mood. If nothing else, it encouraged her to hope that everyone else would be too impressed with Valthyrra’s embarrassment to pay much attention to her own stupidity. She was quite mistaken, especially so if she had ever believed that the sight of a Starwolf carrier coming into port with the wreckage of a Union commercial station still strapped to her hull could be ignored. Her crews had actually cut away large parts of the station components already, given the amount of time they were allowed, but nearly every piece of the station she carried had been fused to her armor in several places by the Dreadnought’s discharge beam. And with her shield projectors gone, the wreckage of the station components offered the best protection she had against attack.
Fleet Commander Asandi took one look at her and walked away shaking his head, muttering that the survival of known civilization was in the hands of idiots. Captain Tarrel was beginning to find it all very educational. She had discovered that not only were the Starwolves capable of making mistakes, sometimes they were also just plain unlucky.
“What I regret most, I suppose, is that it happened when we were actually doing so well,” Theralda remarked during an open conference between the carriers. “We were finally doing something constructive, even if we could not fight the Dreadnought itself.”
Although Fleet Commander Asandi had already gone aboard the Vardon to view the damage, Daerran had joined Tarrel and Gelrayen on the Methryn’s bridge for the conference. Valthyrra had channeled images of the Vardon to her main screen as well as the monitors at the Commander’s station on the upper bridge where the group was gathered. It was hard to tell that a Starwolf carrier was actually hidden beneath that wreckage. Theralda had removed only the segment that had been strapped across her nose. Tenders and crews working in suits were working to remove the wreckage as quickly as possible, although the process made some think of old stories they had read about sailing ships, and the removal of barnacles.
“Could you just run through your observations about the Dreadnought step by step,” Commander Asandi suggested.
“Well, the first thing we discovered was that the Dreadnought has begun attacking major surface targets,” Theralda began. “The damage that I observed was relatively limited, although the Dreadnought does identify and destroy all surface military targets. I have also found evidence that the Dreadnought lingers in system for a time to see what might come along responding to calls for help. That suggests to me that the Dreadnought moves more quickly between systems than we have first anticipated, and that it is capable of more sophisticated planning than suspected. My personal suspicion is that it is loitering about waiting for Starwolves.”
“But I already knew that it was waiting in system,’’ Tarrel added. “When I first encountered the Dreadnought, it attacked the convoy my battleship was escorting hours before it struck the station.”
“We had not forgotten that, even if Theralda had,” Trendaessa Kerridayen remarked.
“There is additional evidence that the Dreadnought is more than just a simple automated weapon,” Theralda continued.
“When I entered the system where I first encountered the Dreadnought, I was discovered when it made a routine impulse scanner sweep. It was looking for Starwolf carriers running with stealth-intensity shields, perhaps as a result of its battle with the Kerridayen. It definitely is more clever than we had assumed, or at least hoped. And being that clever, it is certainly capable of intercepting our achronic transitions and being prepared for what we plan to do.”
“We have to make plans for that possibility,” Asandi agreed, “Anything else?”
“Just more evidence of its intelligence,” she continued. “It followed me to Norden within hours, rather than loiter in the last system it attacked. A change in its usual methods. And when it came into the Norden system and saw the Maeridan and myself carrying away segments of the commercial stations, it followed us to see where we were going before it attacked. Those might all be automatic functions, but they are also evidence of a higher level of sophistication than we had first expected. But, when it did attack, it went after the station components rather than myself or the Maeridan, which gave me time enough to get away. That does not suggest careful planning, and that brings us back to assuming it is an automated machine rather than sentient.”
“I suspect that your assumptions are very accurate,” Asandi agreed. “Perhaps the Methryn can answer those questions more accurately in a couple of weeks. But we do have to be prepared for the fact that we are indeed fighting an enemy that is not just far more technically advanced than ourselves, on a scale of power far beyond ours, but clever enough to anticipate us.”
6
The wide door at the rear of the Methryn’s upper right fighter bay opened, revealing the open doors of the construction bay more than half a kilometer behind. Captain Tarrel stood well to the front of the bay with Commander Gelrayen, waiting for the arrival of the Methryn’s first pack of fighters. The packs were the most well-known of the Starwolves; the pilots in their black armor the only Starwolves that most people of Union space were likely to see. Certainly the packs were the most infamous, the most feared and also the most romanticized of all Starwolves; some believed, without really stopping to think about it, that Starwolves were all pilots.
Since coming aboard the Kerridayen, Tarrel had discovered that most of the massive carriers kept only ten to twelve packs each, ninety to a hundred and eight pilots. Of the carrier’s complete crew of about two thousand, only half were active crewmembers and most of these existed to serve the packs. The ship largely took care of itself, employing a small army of remote units. Each pack was commanded by a pack leader, that being in fact the most commonly-used name, although the official rank was that of Captain. The pack leader always ran in the center of the standard V-formation of the pack, with four fighters sitting to either side in each wing of that formation.
Tarrel had been told that the pack leaders held the rank of Captain, the same as her own, because the packs were intended to operate fairly independently once they were in space and their leader needed the authority to make major strategic decisions without the time-consuming process of consulting the carrier.
For that same reason, the senior officer of the carrier itself was not a Captain but a Commander, ranking higher than the Captains who served under him in the packs. That was supposedly how the Starwolves had received their name, since each carrier was in principle an armored and highly mobile base for a group of wolf packs. Curiously, the Union itself had first given them the name of Starwolves.
“They should be coming around any moment now,” Gelrayen warned.
Captain Tarrel was content to wait, using her time to inspect the bay itself. The bay was many times wider than it was high, giving the illusion that the ceiling was much lower than it actually was. And it was rather low by her estimate; she would not want to fly a relatively large fighter a hundred meters and more down the length of the bay with only twelve meters or so between floor and ceiling. The fighters would land near the front of the bay. Where she now stood, she could see the nine white lines painted on the floor of the bay, with a corresponding set of handling arms on ceiling tracks above. A massive framework called a rack waited to receive the fighter once it was down and secured. The rack had a double function preventing the fighter from being thrown around the inside of the ship by sudden turns, and serving as a launching platform for the fighter. When not in use, the fighters were carried in their racks to a separate holding bay.