Tactical Error (33 page)

Quendari herself was in no danger, even if the probe had been destroyed. But
her plight forced an unconscious response from Keflyn’s protective
instincts. She stepped out into the clearing and lifted her upper right arm,
aimed at an approaching dragon. An almost invisible envelope of blue light
surrounded her for just an instant as she commanded the tremendous psychic
powers of her Kelvessan heritage to their fullest extent. A thin, blue bolt
shot out from that envelope, aimed along the length of her arm, and the second
dragon was hurtled from the sky as if it had been struck by some immense force.
The rest of the pack gave up the hunt and fled into the night, screaming their
fury.

Keflyn rushed to Addesin’s side, carefully turning him over. She was
surprised enough to find that he was still alive, although she doubted that
they could get him to the limited help available on this world in time to save
him. She took the precaution of confiscating the gun, not trusting what he
might try even yet.

“Your Feldennye friend will be here with the sky van very soon,”
Quendari said, drawing the probe back a short distance. “I was leading
him, since he had no way to track your position accurately. He will see your
fire.”

Keflyn shook her head slowly. “It is too late.”

“Keflyn?”

Addesin was looking up at her, his pain obvious. She had nothing to spare
him even that.

“It might be ridiculous to ask that you forgive me,” he said.
Each breath he drew to speak brought searing pain; she suspected that the
sonics must have nearly burned out his heart and lungs. “I got what I had
meant for you, but that bolt would have still been in your back if you had not
jumped. It took me a long time to talk myself into shooting you. All in all, I
still wish that it had been you instead of me.”

Keflyn drew back in surprise. “You are right. I do not forgive you.
But I might yet, if you will just tell me why.”

“Oh, not my idea,” he insisted, trying to cough and finding even
that impossible. “You see, Union Intelligence monitors my ship very
closely. They have known what this place really is for a long time now. When
the underground came to make arrangements to get you on board my ship, they
told me to take you. I never wanted to be a part of that. The Free Traders are
supposed to be neutral, and not answerable to the Union. But they have their
ways. To assure my loyalty, they keep a third of my crew detained at any
time.”

“Yes, I can understand,” Keflyn assured him.

“I never wanted to be involved in this,” he repeated bitterly.
“First they told me to keep you occupied any way I could, show you
anything, just as long as I kept you here. Then new orders came in. There is a
fleet of seven Fortresses and some new SuperFortress coming in to destroy the
planet. First they said to just abandon you here. Then they said that I have to
kill you.”

“You have been in communication with them?” Keflyn asked.

“Couriers have been coming and going from the start, slipping into the
edge of the system and sending it in their orders in tight-beam transmissions.”
He closed his eyes, panting heavily as if to catch his painful breath.
“They will be here some time later tomorrow. They say that they will most
likely destroy the planet, and they certainly won’t let anyone here live.
You can use the
Thermopylae
to evacuate the colonists.”

He opened his eyes, looking up at her. “I thought that I could just
ride it through, and everything would be fine. I thought that they would never
dare to touch a Starwolf, that they would just have me show you a lot of
nothing and send you on your way no more enlightened than before. If I had
known, I could have done something to frighten you away that first time you
came on board my ship. Please forgive me.”

Keflyn closed her eyes and nodded, knowing that he really never had any
choice, that he was just trying to survive a game that he had always known
would kill him in the end. “I forgive you.”

Keflyn sat alone on the bridge of the Valcyr, waiting for the world to end.
During the night, Quendari’s scanners had watched while a stingship
interceptor had dropped out of starflight just long enough to launch a single
missile, and the
Thermopylae
had ceased to exist in a single, fiery
instant. Now there was no possible escape from this world, for either the
Feldenneh colonists or even for Keflyn. Derrighan had elected to return to the
settlement to warn the Feldenneh colonists, knowing that he probably would not
get there in time. Keflyn had given him the hope that the Union might only seek
to occupy this world and not destroy it. She had little enough hope for that
herself.

Quendari’s camera pod turned to watch her from time to time, otherwise
moving her gaze aimlessly about the bridge. She had spent an eternity in grief
and silent brooding, yet she seemed at a loss in the face of the despair of
others. Now she began to realize what she had done to herself, and the mistake
she had made in the depth of time. She had been very young and inexperienced,
confused with thoughts and emotions that had been new to her. She had known
grief, but not what to do with it. In her innocence, she had allowed her grief
and guilt to become her entire existence, with no idea of how to find an end to
her pain.

Suddenly the pain was nearly gone, and that, too, was something which she
did not really understand. Perhaps it was just because she had something new to
occupy herself, and no longer relived endlessly in her mind the pain of her
loss. Perhaps seeing the loss and despair of another had given her a new
perspective. For all that she was hundreds of centuries old, she had still been
only a child in many ways, new and inexperienced. And experience was the
substance upon which the sentient computer systems of the carriers pieced
together bit by bit the fabric of their own minds and hearts. All that she had ever
been given the chance to learn was simple love and simple grief, and her world
was taking on whole new shades of complexity.

“You loved him?” Quendari asked at last, a hint of innocent
wonder in her voice.

Keflyn looked up at her in complete surprise. “Jon Addesin? No, not at
all. He was a very interesting person in his way, and very different from
anyone I had ever known. But there was also a shallowness to him that became
tiresome after a time. I pitied him in the end, knowing how he hated the cowardly
person they had driven him to become.”

“Then perhaps you love the Feldennye, Derrighan?”

Keflyn had to consider that, and nodded. “I suspect that I love him
very much. If he had been Kelvessan or if I had been Feldennye, we would have
done very well together.”

“So it is that simple?” Quendari mused. “The one you could
love, and you can walk away from that without regret. The other died trying to
kill you, and you pity him.”

“Life is like that,” Keflyn said, looking up at the camera pod
hovering only a short distance away. “Things happen. People come and go
all the time. I am a fighter pilot, you see. As High Kelvessan, they tell me
that I could easily live to be two or even four thousand years old. But because
I fly with the packs, I have always had to keep in mind that I could die at any
time. I guess that helps to keep the weight of the past in perspective. In some
ways, it is not so much what happens to you but what you make of it. It is your
decision, whether if something that has happened is unbearable pain that haunts
your life, or if something was good and pleasant, or if it really does not mean
much at all.”

“Then what do you feel?” Quendari asked.

Keflyn sighed, looking away. “I do feel sorry for those poor Feldenneh
colonists. Feldenneh are such quiet, polite people, but they always seem to be
in need of someone to take care of them. I feel sorry for myself, because I did
want to live longer than this. But more than anything, I feel sorry for you.
You have lived such a long time, yet you have hardly lived at all. You must
hold some sort of record in the history of the universe. You have managed to
make an absolute waste of fifty thousand years of life.”

Quendari looked away, rotating her lenses aimlessly as she realized that
Keflyn’s accusation was absolutely true. She had thought herself very
busy and very important with her eternal grief. Now it just seemed like the
most colossal waste of time in the history of intelligent thought.

“I suppose that I did,” she agreed. “Instead of degrading
my love by continuing with my life, I only cheated myself of whole centuries of
life and companionship. Is that so?”

Keflyn nodded. “Who did you love so much? You plagued me with that
question, so now you tell me.”

“Her,” Quendari answered, lifting her camera pod and rotating
around to face the blackness of the main viewscreen. “That was the
grandest day of my whole life, when she walked onto my bridge and was so kind.
I had only been a dull machine until then, with only technicians for my
companions. She woke me up and made me feel like a person. She walked right up
to me and tied that ribbon around my camera pod. She said it made me look
pretty.”

Keflyn remembered the red velvet ribbon that had crumbled to dust the first
time that she had stepped onto this bridge. Quendari had cherished it through
the centuries, making it into some sacred relic of a lost friend until the
weight of time had taken it from her, dried up and rotted with neglect because
she had held it too holy to be put away and preserved.

“There was nothing I could do,” she complained softly, weakly.

Keflyn nodded slowly, staring at the floor. “It often works that
way.”

After forty thousand years of sleep inside this bed of ice, Quendari
suddenly felt that it was time to do something different. Her scanners worked
quite well in spite of being buried so deeply within the glacier, and she knew
that the fleet of Fortresses had just left starflight and were moving quickly
but silently into the system. There was a distinct sense of determination in
the way they moved, and Quendari no longer doubted that they had come to
destroy this world.

The banks of silent, lifeless consoles on the Valcyr’s bridge slowly
began to come to life. The engineering station came up first, the handful of
lights that had been barely visible expanding across its entire bank of
monitors and consoles, the single largest station on the bridge. Defense and
scanning came fully into the grid, followed by running systems and
environmentals. The double navigation stations followed, then the helm console
on the central bridge. Even the weapons station came up. Finally the main
view-screen was brought up with a snap of static, although the scanner-enhanced
image was dark and hazy.

Keflyn looked up suddenly when Quendari brought the lighting up to the
normal level, surprised to see the bridge coming back to life. She stared in
complete confusion. Quendari swung her camera pod around, bringing it in
closely. “Commander, will you take your station on the upper bridge? I
have suddenly found that it is not in my nature to give up without a
fight.”

“But I have no command experience,” Keflyn protested.

“You have far more battle experience than myself,” Quendari
corrected her. “I have never fought. I need your help.”

“What do you intend to do?” Keflyn asked as she rose and began
to climb the steps to the commander’s station uncertainly. “I mean,
you can hardly bring your own weapons to bear on the ice to free
yourself.”

“I am better prepared than you might think.”

As soon as Keflyn had lifted herself into the commander’s station by
the overhead supports, Quendari rotated her camera pod around as if to face a
bridge crew that was not there. Carefully at first, she began to bring her main
generators on line. The large units responded willingly enough, one by one
adding their power to the line of indicators at the engineering station. A
distant vibration began to stir through the Valcyr’s space frame;
that feeling of life that Keflyn had missed in this ship was returning quickly.

“This could be the end of you,” Keflyn warned when Quendari
brought her camera pod into the upper bridge. She still remembered the ribbon
that had fallen away in dust.

“It will be the end of me if I do nothing,” Quendari answered.
“This way, at least I tried.”

She brought up her shields gradually. They strained against the weight of
ice, collapsed completely against the hull of the ship, but she continued to
add power until the ice began to snap. The surface of the glacier above the
Valcyr suddenly lifted in a long, law dome. Quendari relaxed the shields,
allowing the ice to settle, and suddenly brought them to battle intensity. The
ice was thrown aside, splitting into large fissures, massive blocks of it along
the forward edge collapsing to slide off the curve of her exposed hull into the
cold lake far below.

Quendari engaged her field drives, and those systems responded with the same
flawless ease. Pushing against the weight of ice still riding on her upper
hull, she began to lift herself slowly straight out of her ancient bed. Massive
blocks of ice, some dozens of meters across and weighing hundreds of tons,
began to fall away in the white fog of crushed powder that cascaded from the
wreckage in sheets and streams like waterfalls. Deep black against the white,
the Valcyr rose proudly from the clouds of powder, the last small boulders of
ice rolling from her hull as she rotated around to the east, the doors in her
shock bumper that covered her immense forward lights and high-intensity
scanners folding back as she faced into the planetary angle of rotation.
Engaging all four of her main drives in a sudden flare of power, the Valcyr
began to climb toward the stars.

“We are free and clear,” Quendari reported. “All systems
are operating perfectly. Power at less than five percent, all generators on
line. Weapons systems standing by. Present altitude is twenty kilometers at an
ambient speed of two thousand.”