Tactical Error (21 page)

“What word, Bill?” he asked.

“Haste,” the sentry offered. He was, as always, a very literal
bastard. It was always reassuring to find that some things never changed.

“I keep that always and ever in mind,” Velmeran commented,
mostly to himself. “What about Lenna?”

“Lenna Makayen is not here,” Bill answered. Strike two.

“Any word from Lenna Makayen?” Velmeran asked, putting the two
parts of his previous question together in what seemed to be a precise and
reasonable manner.

“Careful.” Strike three.

Velmeran frowned, for all the good that did machines. “What were
Lenna’s last words to you?”

“By the balls of Saint Peter!” Bill obliged, speaking in
Lenna’s own voice before returning to his own. “Then there was a
very big explosion, and the channel went dead.”

Velmeran sighed – very loudly – and very studiously ignored the
fact that all the members of the special tactics team were staring at him
expectantly. The end of civilization as they knew it was hidden somewhere in
this ice-bound warren. But unless someone was here to lead them to it, they
might as well go home. He just wished that Lenna had been there to meet them.
Although Bill probably knew as much on the subject as Lenna, somehow he just
could not bring himself to ask the sentry to lead them. Perhaps because he felt
that dealing with the collapse of civilization as they knew it would be easier
for him to deal with than the automaton’s obtuse logic. He also felt
obliged to wait as long as he could for Lenna, since he was her only ride home.

“Are we going to look for Lenna?” Baressa asked.

“I was just wondering about that,” he admitted.

Well, there was no hope for it. Time was of the essence. The essence of
what, Velmeran could hardly guess, but time was passing and important matters
could not wait, and they had to be on with it. Even if it meant matching wits
with Bill the automaton, who had the cold, calculating intellect of a machine
and the conversational talents of an ape.

He looked up at Bill, his reluctance very plain. “Bill, will you take
us to where you would expect to find Lenna?”

“I think that she is dead,” the sentry replied without
hesitation. “I would not know where to look.”

“Heaven or hell, take your choice,” Baress quipped. “I
know where I would look first.”

Velmeran waved him aside impatiently. “Bill, take me to the place
where you think Lenna was at the time of the explosion.”

“I will attempt that.”

“Keep to the larger corridors,” Velmeran told him. “We
will be following in our ships. Proceed.”

Bill turned and started off, circling wide around their small, tight group
and heading across the bay, to the other side of the parked ships. Intent upon
his task, he walked right past Lenna Makayen without a word or a glance as she
stood behind Venn Keflyn’s large, lanky armored form, having just arrived
quietly and unnoticed. She just stood for a long moment, looking very disheveled
in a torn and slightly singed Union uniform, watching Bill setting off on his
quest with quiet determination.

“Miss Makayen, if you... “ Velmeran paused, seeing that Bill was
not going to stop. “Oh, Great Spirit of Space. I told that mechanical
idiot to lead us to the place where he thinks that you executed your little
diversion. Bill, come back!”

“I am sorry, Commander,” Lenna said. “Things got rather
out of hand.”

Velmeran sensed that she was somewhat contrite and even calm in her
behavior, having surprised herself that she was still alive and still somewhat
dazed by the explosion. He considered it an improvement.

“You can tell us about it after we stop the collapse of civilization
as we know it,” he told her. “Take me to see this great secret of
yours, so we can get out of here before they come looking for us.”

“You can get there from here through the freight tram tunnels,”
she explained simply. “I suppose that I can guide you from the
transport.”

He nodded. “The word, I am told, is haste. Get to it.”

“Come along, Bill,” Lenna called to the sentry as she followed
Trel and Marlena to the transport. The other pilots hurried to their own
fighters, but Venn Keflyn hesitated a moment.

“I sense something familiar in this place,” she said.
“Something that has since gone away, leaving only a shadow of its
presence.”

Velmeran glanced at herjn surprise. “Strange. Somehow, I sense that I
have been here before. How do you sense yourself, as you would seem to another
Kelvessan?”

Since the others were already in their ships, they did not have the time to
discuss it further. Velmeran thought his answers lay ahead, wherever Lenna
meant to take them. Venn Keflyn thrust her vulpine head back inside her helmet
as she pulled herself into the main hatch on the underside of her ship.
Velmeran hurried to his own fighter, knowing that the transport would be ready
to leave as soon as Lenna had her mechanical companion strapped down in the
cargo compartment.

All the same, Velmeran knew that he was in trouble. One major key to his two
decades of consistent success was that he had never allowed himself to be
distracted by thoughts of failure. He made his plans thoroughly, and he took
all surprises as they came. Fear, anticipation of failure, and compulsive haste
were the greatest enemies of anyone operating under pressure, but he never
allowed himself to respond to such impulses. This time he was working almost
completely blind, with no more plans to guide him and no idea of what he had
yet to face. He was at Lenna’s mercy, and she was determined to keep her
secrets until she could show him what she had discovered.

More than that, he was afraid. That odd, shadowy presence he sensed, that
seemed in some unexplainable way to be himself, had disturbed him more than he
wanted to admit. He was afraid, and that fear had awakened apprehensions of his
ability to deal with any surprises. He tried to put such thoughts and fears
from his mind, knowing that they only distracted him from his true business,
and yet they remained, demanding attention that he could not spare.

The transport rose and began moving slowly across the width of the bay, its
speed hardly more than a hover. Velmeran lifted his own fighter from the floor
of the bay, leaving his landing gear down as a caution against bumping the
down-swept portions of his wings against the ground. The Starwolf ships were
maneuverable, but these tunnels would still demand all the skills of the
Methryn’s best pilots. He was most worried about Venn Keflyn. Her
interceptor was twice as large as a transport, and wider by half again than the
short-winged fighters.

He reminded himself that she had well over five hundred years of flying
experience. It was like having a fox-faced Methuselah for a pilot. He hoped
that she was bringing up the rear. Her big ship could settle down and shield
itself like a turtle, or rotate to bring the firepower of a cruiser to bear on
anything coming up behind.

Lenna led the transport into the larger tunnels of the freight trams,
working their way around the burning areas of the installation. Velmeran did
not like having to take the tram passages, and he would have trusted them even
less if he had known what Lenna had done with a runaway security tram.
Under the circumstances, he simply had no choice. At least they were able to
make fairly good speed through the wider tunnels, and Lenna led them to their
destination within a matter of minutes.

The transport slowed, then turned off down a side passage that led within a
hundred meters to a landing bay, one that was vast in size. When Velmeran
settled his fighter in the center of the bay, he guessed that it must be some
250 meters deep, 800 wide and more than 1,200 long. The bay was several times
the size of the Union’s largest ships of war, except of course for the
immense Fortresses. Four or possibly five of their largest carriers could be
brought down side by side in this bay, with room left over for a small fleet of
cruisers.

The most startling aspect was that no large warship in the Union fleet had
the capabilities of landing itself planetside.

He unstrapped from his seat as quickly as he could and dropped down from the
cockpit of his fighter. Lenna was already waiting for him, staring up at the
tremendous double doors that closed the ceiling of the bay. She seemed to be
very pleased with herself, in a grim manner.

“Commander, this bay was meant to service a single ship,” she
told him. “There are sixteen bays exactly like this one located in a
sub-complex in this section of the installation, which is separated from
the main base by several kilometers. When this area was active – until
about two months ago – no one except military personnel with special
clearances were allowed through the very limited numbers of tunnels into this
section. There are certain things that I do not have to tell you about a ship
this size being able to land itself, but the ship that once filled this bay is
by no means the Union’s secret weapon. It is only a tool for transporting
and servicing that weapon.”

With that flourish of melodramatics out of the way, Lenna turned to lead him
across the bay. Only Venn Keflyn followed, leaving the others to watch the
ships.

“I went ahead and assembled some important pieces of evidence here, so
that we would not have to spare the time for me to drag you over a wide area of
this place,” she explained.

“Good,” Velmeran said quietly. Lenna might be used to it, but he
did not care for walking about a major Union installation as if all the time in
the world was his own.

They left the bay through a pair of wide doors in the very center of one
long side, beneath entire banks of observation decks. Lenna seemed to know her
way very well as she led them some distance along the wide corridor, turning
off abruptly into an area which looked to be a large complex of apartments and personal
support facilities. Suddenly the shapes of corridors, rooms and equipment
reminded him less of the older portions of the installation and more of the
interior of a ship, as if some effort had been made to surround those who had
once lived here with an environment that was always familiar and comfortable to
those who lived their entire lives in space. It was not standard Union practice
to house any personnel so near to a landing area, except for small interceptors
employed in defense that might need to launch on a moment’s notice. No
ship made to fit that bay could have fallen into that category.

They entered yet another area of the complex, this part clearly a
pilot’s training area. One large room contained a row of simulators along
one wall, all complete with large, vision domes over their cockpits and multidirectional
artificial gravity units to mimic the inertia of turns. Unfortunately, the
simulators were entirely utilitarian on the outside and gave no hint of the
size or form of the ship they imitated.

“As you can see, this is the larger training room where both pilots
and service personnel were made familiar with their ships,”

Lenna explained. She indicated for them to wait as she walked toward one
long door along the back wall. “They did have actual examples of their
new fighters, presumably for their technicians to have to tear down and put
back together again.”

Lenna pressed a button on the wall, and the wide, high door began to lift
slowly into the ceiling. The keen eyes of both the Starwolf and, to a lesser
extent the Kelvessan, could pierce the shadows somewhat, revealing to them a
dim, massive form of sleek lines and sharp angles, clearly some manner of
fighter possessing atmospheric control surfaces. Once the door was completely
raised, Lenna pressed a second button and the lights inside the chamber came
on.

After Lenna’s dramatic posturings, they had expected the worst.
Velmeran felt oddly disappointed, if this was supposed to represent the end of
civilization as they knew it. It looked, for all practical purposes, to be only
a copy of a Starwolf fighter, slightly larger with more massive engine housings
under its wings and a larger stardrive, the same dull, nonreflective
black. To Velmeran, it all came back to that same old problem that the Union
had always faced. No human pilot had the reflexes to match the enhanced
abilities of the Starwolves, and the Union had never possessed the genetic
technology to engineer pilots of their own, nor could they build computer
control systems that could outfly a Starwolf.

He frowned mightily. “Lenna Makayen, pull down your pants to give me
an unobstructed target and bend over. I am going to kick you all the way to
Vannkani, and you can tell Donalt Trace personally that it will not
work.”

Lenna looked extremely hurt. “Trust me to know my business better than
that, Commander. This is just another tool, the fighters that go with that big
new carrier. The real secret weapon is already gone, and you’ll not be
finding any examples of the art lying about this place just waiting to make
your acquaintance.”

She turned and stalked off toward one side of the chamber, leaving both
Velmeran and Venn Keflyn to hurry after her.

“Then what in the name of the great Spirit of Space is it?” he
demanded.

“Donalt Trace figured it out all for himself twenty years ago. What in
all the universe is the only thing that can fly and fight and think as good and
as quick as a Starwolf?”

In answer to her own question, she pulled open the double doors of a metal
cabinet standing against the wall just inside the room. Inside, hanging on its
rack, was an armored suit very much like that worn by the Starwolves. Most
importantly, it had the same double set of arms.

“Oh, so there have been Kelvessan here!” Venn Keflyn exclaimed
with surprise and tremendous delight for solving that mystery. Then, realizing
what she had said, she glanced over at Velmeran very contritely, her large ears
laid back. “You know, it might very well be the end of civilization as we
know it.”