Tactical Error (15 page)

The three carriers suddenly turned sharply, banking steeply to show their
relatively unprotected bellies to the drone as they skimmed the outside range
of its cannons. The automated warship opened fire, but at that distance even
its efficient tracking sensors could not lock on target effectively and the
volley of shots, already dissipating, went wide. The carriers began to
accelerate again, moving out of range, and the drone moved to follow them, but
it could never hope to match their speed before they were gone. A few moments
later they disappeared into starflight.

Valthyrra turned her camera pod to stare at Velmeran. “You wanted that
thing to shoot at us.”

He shrugged helplessly. “Who says that a Starwolf cannot learn to play
politics? Laroose says that Delike and his friends are hanging on the very edge
of public condemnation as it is, and they just shot first at poor Starwolves
who were only running for their lives. Now we can go see what Lenna thinks will
be the end of civilization as we know it.”

Keflyn turned and looked up into the cool, clear morning sky, watching the
Thermopylae’s
shuttle as it circled around to land. She had not yet seen the unpowered
landing of the odd little spacecraft, and she definitely wanted to see this.
The shuttle had already brought its wings all the way forward and was now
rolling back its flaps. Riding the wind, it shook and dipped in a manner that
Keflyn would have ordinarily considered to be bordering on a loss of control.
Descending over the runway, it lifted its nose at the last moment and settled
onto its rear wheels. Still rolling at a fairly high speed, it dropped its nose
until the forward wheels touched down as well. Additional braking flaps in the
wings and to either side of the tail snapped open to assist the regular brakes
in slowing the ship. It slowed quickly but with obvious strain, turning off the
runway and pulling to a stop only a few meters from where Derrighan and Keflyn
watched.

“That always amazes me,” she remarked.

“That it flies?” the Feldenneh asked.

“No, that anyone would fly it.”

The nose of the shuttle split, moving open to either side, and the cargo
ramp rolled out. They approached the ramp, careful of the outer shell of the
ship, which was still radiating considerable heat acquired through its rather
inadequate shields. She did know from experience that the ship would be too hot
to touch for some time.

“I am not entirely thrilled by this,” Keflyn commented in the
Feldenneh language, to be very sure that Jon Addesin did not overhear her.
“Are you absolutely certain that your cargo scout cannot be
repaired?”

“You have not seen what is left of it,” Derrighan answered, and
his regret was genuine. If they had not needed Jon Addesin’s skyvan, they
would not have needed Jon Addesin.

They entered the shuttle’s long, narrow bay, which, Keflyn had always
been interested to note, was decked in worn, scratched wood. The skyvan was
lashed down in the center of the bay, held to the deck by a web of cargo
straps. It reminded Keflyn somewhat of a very small version of a Starwolf
transport, a long, rectangular hull with a blunt nose that contained the narrow
cockpit, the rest of the craft given over to a cargo hold. It had no wings or
control surfaces, relying entirely upon field drives, with pairs of retractable
wheels in front and rear for land use.

“I am somewhat relieved,” Keflyn commented as she began removing
the cargo straps. “It seems to be in a much higher state of preservation
than the rest of the ship.”

“Considering what you were able to dismantle and carry with you, I
suppose that you might have squeezed a ship of your own into two more
bags,” Derrighan remarked.

“So there you are,” Jon Addesin declared cheerfully as he
descended the ladder from the cockpit. “I hope you’re ready. We can
be on our way as soon as we can roll this baby out of the bay.”

Keflyn paused to stare at him. He was up to something, excited, nervous and
just a bit desperate, and acting very hard as if nothing was wrong. There was
now a timetable that she did not understand. For some reason, he wanted this
expedition done as soon as possible, although she was not telepathic enough
with humans to determine more. She doubted that it was anything more than the
launch of a major campaign to seduce her.

“Is your handsome pet going along?” he asked next, which
suggested that her guess was correct.

“I have duties of my own to attend here,” Derrighan answered
vaguely, his annoyance obvious at that less-than-subtle derogatory comment.

The young Feldenneh had first meant to go along, but according to their
plan, he was now to stay behind in the event of trouble. If Keflyn could not
return, he had been taught to assemble and use her achronic transceiver to call
in the Methryn. He was also the colony’s only qualified pilot and helm.
If necessary, he could use Addesin’s own shuttle to take a boarding party
up to commandeer the
Thermopylae
. This was by no means Keflyn’s
idea, but her capitulation of the fears of both Derrighan and Kalmedhae.
Whatever secret the Feldenneh were hiding on this icy world, they were
unusually fearful over it.

Addesin was perfectly true to his word on one point. The little transport
was already loaded with all of the supplies they needed for their journey, so
that Keflyn needed only to toss on board her personal belongings. One thing
that she insisted upon taking was a good supply of food that she had selected.
Kelvessan had to eat prodigiously to maintain their fierce metabolism, and they
generally did not share human tastes.

They were under way in a matter of minutes, traveling west and south over
the lesser mountains to the plains and light forests beyond. The skyvan was a
game little flyer but it was hardly capable of supersonic flights; at its best
speed of about 300 kilometers per hour, they would still need the rest of the
day to cross half a continent to reach their destination. Jon Addesin was as
secretive as the Feldenneh about their destination, but for his own reasons. He
was enjoying what he considered to be dramatic effect.

They were passing over one area of scattered plains and light forests when
Addesin suddenly turned the skyvan sharply to one side and began to climb
steeply. Keflyn knew an evasive maneuver when she saw one.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Spark dragon,” he explained simply.

“What?” Keflyn asked incredulously. Spark dragons were native to
a world very far away. The large, flying mammals possessed a sonic blast that
was as powerful as a disrupter at short range. Contrary to their names, they
generated no electricity at all, although their sonic beam caused metal to
throw bright sparks as it was molecularly disrupted. That made them dangerous
even to the skyvan, or at least its vulnerable electronics.

“Let me show you something especially interesting,” Addesin
said, turning the skyvan toward an open area of the plains.

He slowed the transport as they crossed the distance quickly, no more than a
couple of kilometers, and Keflyn saw what he was steering toward. There was a
herd of perhaps a couple of hundred large animals grazing their slow way
through the deep grass. Her enhanced vision had already shown her that there
were two similar species of animals gathered there. The largest group she
recognized immediately as thark bison, also native of a very distant world and
now domesticated throughout both Union and Republic space. The other, more
massive beasts she did not recognize at all.

“Thark bison and Terran bison,” he explained. “The two
types apparently get along quite well and often travel together. In the farther
north, you will also find them living alongside beasts the Feldenneh tell me
are the modern descendants of Terran musk ox. It took them a while to identify
those two, since they now exist only here. At night you will hear the howls of
the Terran wolves and the barks of the Callian herrimeyens that hunt
them.”

“This world is a regular zoo,” Keflyn commented, watching the
herd out of the skyvan’s side window as they moved past. In her own mind,
this was proof enough that this had once been a major world. Domestic breeds
were one thing, but no one imported something like a Kandian spark dragon or a
herrimeyen except for exhibition. The sonic dragons were dangerous enough to
have under any circumstances.

“You haven’t seen anything yet,” Addesin told her.
“This is definitely the strangest world I’ve ever seen, but I
don’t think you’ll be disappointed.”

Five hundred centuries, especially under a cruel climate, could be
disastrous to any civilization. It certainly had not done this planet any
favors. Keflyn had spent a long day poking through the ruins that Jon Addesin
had brought her to see, even employing her tremendous strength to do a fair
amount of excavation, and all that she could say for certain was that the ruins
of a large city lay beneath those rolling, sparsely wooded hills. Only the
downtown section had once had buildings large enough that their crumbled
remains were recognizable as anything that had never been a part of nature.

One thing that Keflyn had not discovered was evidence of battle. She had
found stone, metal, and even glass that was shattered, crumbling, and corroded
almost beyond recognition, but none of it burned or melted. Buildings had
slowly collapsed in upon themselves, and some of the taller ones had even
fallen, but she did not see any indication that they had been reduced by some
tremendous explosion, or that a large blast such as a nuclear or conversion
explosion had ever occurred anywhere in the area.

The frustrating part was that there was no real hint of the world this had
once been, no hint of the personal lives of the people who had built this city
or even any clear indication of their race. There was nothing she had seen to
even prove that they had been indisputably human. There had been no doorways or
windows left intact to suggest their shape or height, no furnishing buried
beneath collapsed walls or roofs. Metal, except for the splintered remains of
heavy beams, had been reduced to dust, and wood had been gone for ages.

Keflyn still felt the weight of incredible years that she had disturbed in
the dust of these ruins. Her own race might not have even existed at the time
when these buildings were new, before a recent river had cut this city nearly
in two, and the Kelvessan were now a fairly old race in their own right. This
place was so ancient, her investigation almost transcended archaeology into
paleontology. She fancied that she would find dinosaur bones if she was to dig
deeply enough.

“Once we knew what to look for from space, the
Thermopylae’s
scanners were able to trace the remains of over a hundred ancient
cities,” Jon Addesin told her over dinner that night. “None were
any better than this, and most were buried much deeper. They’re all
located in the warmer regions, of course, where the massive continental
glaciers never reached.”

“I recall from the maps that most of the continent regions are
actually removed from the equatorial areas,” Keflyn said, struggling with
the primitive skills required in cooking over an open fire. Having lived her
entire life in a spacecraft, she had never even seen a campfire before this.

“The map is a bit out of date, to say the least,” he told her.
“The sea level is still many meters lower than it used to be, with a lot
of water still locked into the remaining glaciers. There’s more land in
the tropical regions than there used to be.”

“Then this used to be a much warmer world, even than it is now,”
she concluded.

Jon Addesin had tried his best to be eager and cooperative. He apparently
had not expected that she would spend an entire day digging in old ruins. He
had tried to help her, but he had only been embarrassed to see her easily lift
blocks of stone several times heavier than he could even begin to shift. The
only high point of his day had been sneaking a peek at her while she had been
washing the dust of the ruins off herself in a nearby pool. She wondered which
had amazed him more, her four-armed body or the fact that she had been swimming
in glacial meltwater.

Keflyn was beginning to feel very frustrated with the whole affair. She had
been sent to find the clues that would lead the Starwolves to Terra itseff,
only to find an impoverished, ancient world where every clue had been utterly
destroyed under the weight of time and ice. All she had found was decayed
blocks of stone, a Feldenneh with a fascination for a sexual affair with a
Starwolf, and a human who was afraid he might get it in spite of himself.

At least she knew that this was almost certainly Alameda. “So now
what?” Addesin asked, as if he had been following her thoughts.

She shook her head. “I do not see that I can ever make sense of this.
It is a very big world, and we have very little time. I suppose that I can only
call in the Starwolves and get the help I need to search this world thoroughly.
Perhaps there is some structure or installation in this world that is buried
but otherwise intact. The Methryn’s scanners would turn that up in
minutes.”

“What are you looking for?” Addesin asked, then frowned.
“Forbidden question. I forgot.”

He sat for a long moment, so obviously debating some question with himself
so fiercely that Keflyn watched him. He did know something, that was obvious
enough. She wondered if he would volunteer his little prize of information, or
if she would have to force it out of him. One advantage to being a Starwolf was
the ability to break just about anyone’s arm.

Maybe that was her father’s secret for dealing with people.

“As I say, you can spend the rest of your life just digging through
ruins on this world,” he ventured at last. “Artifacts and ancient
civilizations are one thing, but there is something here that has scared the
Feldenneh half to death ever since they first found it. I promised them that I
would take you to it, but I thought that you wanted to establish just which
world this used to be first.”