Tactical Error (26 page)

“I cannot help you with that,” Quendari said. “I have no
small ships left to me, and I could not get them from my bays even if I had
them.”

“Well, Mr. Addesin should be good for something.” Keflyn paused,
looking up at the camera pod. “What will you do if people come back to
this world? We need to have those construction bays back in operation. We need
more ships, if we are ever going to end this war.”

Quendari considered that for a moment. “I do not yet have an answer to
that. But it seems that, in any event, my long sleep is ended.”

It was the only piece of old Terra that had survived unharmed by the forces
of time and climate that had devastated that entire world, and only because it
was not a part of the planet.

They were quick to appreciate Quendari’s maps; the Lunar Industrial
Complex was vast, covering well over 500 square kilometers in a series of
linked clusters of large buildings. These were the oldest surviving human
artifacts in existence, dating from the first permanent off-world settlements
from as early as the twenty-first century. The low-gravity environment had been
a welcome alternative to the slow and awkward process of building large
spacecraft in open space. The Complex itself was easy enough to find, even as
they were orbiting down in one of the
Thermopylae’s
dismal
shuttles. Since the primitive machine could not hover, they had to make some
very hasty decisions when they were confronted by the confusing maze of
buildings. Then Keflyn saw four sets of doors so large that they could have
only been meant for one purpose, and she knew that they had come to the right
place.

Jon Addesin was rather annoyed with the whole affair by that time. For one
thing, Keflyn was at the controls of the shuttle and his ego, male and/or
professional, was seething. The trouble with the shuttle was that it had been
designed for atmospheric landings, or for docking in freefall. It had no
provisions for landing in any gravity on a planet with no atmosphere to provide
lift for its short wings. Addesin assumed that there was no way they could
land; if he had thought of that earlier, they would have still been back at the
colony. Keflyn assumed that she could invent something, and she sounded more
confident on the subject than she felt. Once she had manual control of the
Thermopylae’s
flying cargo canister, she was less certain.

Addesin also lost the next argument; he had assumed that the long doors set
in low platforms just above the dusty plains were landing strips. Keflyn was
finally obliged to use one as such, rolling the ungainly shuttle to a stop in
less than three kilometers under one-sixth standard gravity. It was a
controlled crash in nearly the worst sense of the word. Keflyn had landed on
the door reluctantly, not wanting to trust the sturdiness of a moveable
platform under any circumstances and certainly not one that had been setting
about for fifty thousand years.

Keflyn intended to make her investigation brief, not wanting to disturb the
base any more than she could help. As the Valcyr had been, the complex was
filled with inert gasses at low pressure, all traces of any corrosive
atmosphere removed, and just about as cold as the dark places of space. She had
brought her own armored suit in her luggage, separated into many pieces for
travel, but Addesin was forced to wear one of the
Thermopylae’s
rather awkward service engineer’s suits. As he explained, a simple freighter
never had to put people down in completely hostile environments, so there was
little need for suits except those meant for exterior engineering in open
space. But it did not improve his humor.

Keflyn kept to the major corridors, finding that the underground portions of
this complex were much larger than even the vast bay doors suggested. The first
bay was completely empty, except for a curious rack of immense proportions that
she supposed was meant to support a carrier under construction. The next bay
held a surprise that she had never expected. A nearly complete Starwolf carrier
sat in the rack, apparently lacking only her bay doors and large portions of
her hull over the engines and generators. All of her drives were in place, and
her spaceframe was obviously complete. Perhaps only a few short weeks of work
had been needed for this ship to have flown out under her own power, even if it
had been under manual control without a working sentient computer complex.

“A new ship, just waiting for Quendari to move in,” Keflyn said
to herself in her own language as she observed the ship through the windows of
the observation deck.

“What is that?” Addesin asked, still trying to hide his
impatience. The minimal lighting operating within the complex was hardly enough
for his mortal eyes, and he could make out little in the bay except the edges
of a vast, dark shape. It hardly helped that Starwolf ships were black.

“I wonder why they left all of this?” Keflyn asked. “Did
they think at the time that they had defeated us, or did it just get overlooked
in all of the confusion?”

“Chaos, I should say,” Addesin remarked in a rather staid voice.
“The destruction of Terra would have been a very unpopular military
action under any circumstances. It was also probably the most heavily defended
corner of your Republic at that time, so it was probably like hitting the nest
of some nasty stinging insect with a stick. And that also helps to explain why
they would have done something so drastic in the first place. They probably
just launched their bombs and made a run for cover.”

Keflyn did not feel it necessary to point out to him that she had figured
all of that out for herself long ago. But the war had been more evenly matched
at that time, and the Union had been on the attack more often than on the
defensive. The Republic had nearly been defeated, suffering from the loss of
first Terra and then Alameda, retreating to a handful of uninhabited worlds so
recentiy discovered that the Union had known nothing of their existence. The
Union may have assumed that it had won the war, since the Starwolves had
disappeared for centuries to recover from their losses.

“I have seen enough,” Keflyn declared, turning to march away at
a pace that Addesin found difficult to match in his bulky suit.

She might have done more investigating if she had been alone, but she
thought that Jon Addesin had suddenly seen more than was good for him. He was
going to have to start plying his trade in Republic space now. He knew the
location of Earth herself, to use the odd name that Quendari had for that
world. The Union would have taken him apart for that knowledge, and the
Starwolves would have been forced to kill him to keep that secret. Fortunately,
she believed that he would not object to that restriction. He probably had a
very good idea of exactly what his life was worth.

“So now what?” he asked.

Keflyn paused and turned so that she could see him, curious about the
desperate tone in his voice... and in his mind. “Now we go home. I will
have Quendari contact the Methryn, and we will have carriers here in a matter
of days.”

Addesin said no more on the subject. At least the lifts were still in
operation, and they returned to the surface in a matter of minutes. Addesin
maintained a calm facade, but Keflyn sensed that his thoughts were on the very
edge of exploding in both fury and fear. She thought that his mood would
improve once he was out of the claustrophobic suit, but it did not. And during
the long journey back, her own thoughts were increasingly overshadowed by the
feeling that something was about to happen. She could not completely dismiss
such premonitions out of hand, since a certain clairvoyance did run in the
family.

“Solar activity is up,” Addesin explained as the shuttle orbited
down, already biting into the upper atmosphere. They had been watching an
unusual amount of sheet lightning during the entire trip home. “That
always plays havoc with the planetary magnetics.”

“Induction shields over the poles would get rid of that, and supply
you with a tremendous amount of power in the bargain,” Keflyn mused.

“It would be a shame to see it go,” he reflected, leaning back
in his seat. “But I suppose that it would have to go, if you were trying
to conduct serious business here.”

Addesin was so distracted by his own thoughts that he had never noticed that
Keflyn had taken the controls of the shuttle upon their return. He sat in the
copilot’s seat, still brooding furiously, as Keflyn flipped the
little ship over to use the engines to slow the shuttle, allowing gravity to
draw them down. He was staring absently out the window when the sky outside
suddenly flashed blinding white. He had been unfortunate enough to have been
staring directly at the sheet lightning at the moment it hit, and the searing
glare left him blinking like an owl and unable to focus.

“What was that, high-altitude sheet lightning?” He rubbed his
watering eyes on his sleeve. “That was close.”

“It went right over us,” Keflyn told him. “All of our main
power systems are going down.”

“I never felt it hit,” Addesin protested.

“Lightning is not like a bolt from a ship’s cannons. Unless
there is an explosive discharge of electricity, which is not going to happen in
an ungrounded spacecraft, then it just quietly fries your electronics. How do I
get main power back up?”

“If the regular generator startup procedure does not work, then
you just ran out of options.”

Keflyn was beginning to get the idea that they were in a lot of trouble. The
atmospheric shields were not much, but they did protect the shuttle from more
than half of the heat of entry. They had also been down for the better part of
half a minute, and she had no sensor information coming in to tell her how the
ceramic alloy hull plates were handling the matter. Ships were not built to
take the heat of entry directly against their hulls; it was much too
inefficient, requiring extensive heat shielding, insulation, and bracing, and
far too risky. At least the shuttle had a fair amount of ceramic shielding to
take the heat that bled through the atmospheric shields, or they would not have
still been contemplating the matter. The question now was whether or not the
shuttle would survive the rest of the trip down.

“You should go get back into that suit of yours,” she said; she
was still wearing her own armor. “It would be good protection against the
heat, and I cannot promise that we will keep our atmosphere.”

From the curve of the planet emerging just under the nose of the shuttle,
she guessed that they still had the better part of sixty kilometers to go. At
this altitude, she thought that most of the sheet lightning had actually passed
far beneath them. She suspected that they had only been caught in a discharge
arc, bringing additional energy down from the magnetosphere.

In any case, they were not going to survive unless she did something to slow
this ship. The shuttle was beginning to hum and buffet slightly, an indication
that they were beginning to bite into denser air. Getting as much response as
she could from the atmospheric control surfaces, she brought the nose of the
shuttle up sharply, not to present heavier belly shielding to the heat –
which she doubted they had – but to simply present a larger surface to
the air to act as a brake. Then she noticed a series of switches in the bank of
emergency controls, four to provide added thrust and four for brakes. She
assumed that these would be either solid or liquid fuel boosters, and she
triggered the first shot of braking thrust. There was a small explosion
somewhere in the nose of the ship as access covers were blown away, then
perhaps half a minute of muted roar as the small engines burned.

At least it had some effect. Keflyn had precious few emergency readouts
for her use; all of the monitors were down, and the airspeed indicator had
already burned away. By the time Jon Addesin returned, again wearing the bulky
suit, she was firing the third braking shot.

“There’s some smoke coming up from beneath the cargo
deck,” he reported. “It’s a good thing we have suits. The
ship must be full of toxic fumes.”

“Are there any water tanks on board this ship?” Keflyn asked.
“If anything like that gets too hot, steam or other expanding gasses can
cause the container to explode like bombs.”

“No, nothing like that.”

Long, tense minutes passed, and the cargo hold became so filled with smoke
that Keflyn was given to wonder if she might find some way to vent it before it
ruptured the hull. The tires of the left main landing gears exploded, to judge
from the distant thuds she felt through the fabric of the ship, and she could
only hope that the blast had not ripped open the doors. Then they were down in
the widely-scattered clouds, losing speed quickly in the heavy air. They were
about twenty thousand meters up, in a shuttle that had no engines and was
starting to burn.

“We need off this ship as soon as possible,” Keflyn announced.
“And it seems that the closest place we can get off is straight down. I
think that I should get us there in as direct a path as I can manage. I think
that you should get yourself into the passenger cabin and strap yourself into
one of the seats with its back facing forward. When we hit, that should keep
you from being thrown.”

“When we hit what?” Addesin asked.

“The ground, I should imagine. We will have no landing field, and I
doubt that we have any landing gear anyway. All I hope is to hit something
soft.”

She certainly did her best, but she had her doubts at first. As she came
lower, she could see that her earlier guess was correct. The landscape below
was rugged and heavily wooded, but there were several grassy meadows to be
seen. She fired the remaining braking charge, dropping the shuttle’s
speed to perhaps half that of the speed of sound, then she turned the rudder in
one direction and the ailerons in the other, causing the huge machine to crab sideways,
slowing even more in the sideslip.