The truth was that Velmeran had no idea just how effective a fighter would be, but he had little hope that this was the answer to his problem. That depended more than anything on how fast and accurate the Challenger was at tracking a target as small as a twenty-meter fighter. To destroy a cannon, the pilots were required to put a bolt through the small opening in the turret for its tracking lenses, a task complicated by the fact that they had to align their entire ship to fire their own cannons. That might prove impossible even for Starwolves, between dodging rocks and enemy fire. Still, he thought it was worth a try.
Velmeran allowed another hour’s rest before the next attack. Kelvessan, because of the tremendous demands of hypermetabolism, had surprisingly little endurance, but they also recovered very quickly. That was Lenna Makayen’s peculiar advantage over her fellow pilots. But when she did tire, she was much slower to recover. That was part of the reason why she did not protest when Velmeran told her that she would not take part in this attack. She really did know what she could and could not do; she could easily navigate the ring, something no true human would attempt, but not fight there.
The problem of endurance was also very much on Velmeran’s mind. He knew that his pilots were only good for about ten or twenty minutes of this kind of work. If this attack did show reasonable promise, it would take hours of picking away at the Challenger’s guns and engines to leave the ship vulnerable to the Methryn’s conversion cannon. He would have to divide his twenty packs into four groups of five each, each group attacking for fifteen minutes and then resting at a safe distance for forty-five.
“There simply are no easy answers,” Valthyrra had concluded when he had discussed his ideas with her. “The question, of course, is do we really have to defeat this thing as long as we can keep it here?”
“I have not forgotten that,” Velmeran said. “But this Maeken Kea is smarter than anyone I have fought before, and she is going to be hard to fool. I am sure that she expects me to put up a stiff fight, even if she also expects to win. It seems to me that there is little difference between doing my best and doing enough to keep her satisfied, so I might as well try to win.”
“And what if you do too good, and she decides that it is time to leave?” Valthyrra asked.
Velmeran smiled. “The Challenger is as penned inside this ring as they believe we are. She cannot open the shields on her engines to run without leaving them vulnerable to our attack. But I actually want them to run at the end. We certainly cannot use the conversion cannon here. We would blast away half the ring and ourselves with it.”
Valthyrra’s cameras had a decidedly shocked expression. “Funny I had not thought of that.”
“Then I suppose that I might as well get on with what I can do,” Velmeran said, already on his way down the steps from the upper bridge. “Call the pilots to their ships and have the capture ships stand by.”
Velmeran collected the packs just above the ring and backtracked along the Methryn’s path until he was sure that he was behind the Challenger. Returning to the ring, they quickly found the five-kilometer-wide corridor left by the Fortress’s passage. Velmeran sent two groups of six packs each into the ring to either side, then waited with the remaining eight packs until they were in place. When all was ready, he took his group down the length of the corridor in a high-speed run.
They came upon the Fortress suddenly, taking out the exposed engines quickly before the giant ship had time to react, then skimmed just meters over the surface of her hull and catching as many targets as they could as retractable turrets began to emerge from their protective sockets. This move was less effective than it might have been, since Velmeran had expected the cannons to be extended and ready for battle. As it was, the first wave of fighters was nearly past before any targets became available, and none was destroyed. The fighters separated immediately, disappearing into the ring before the Challenger’s forward battery could orient on them.
At that instant the other two groups of fighters attacked from either side. These fighters did not rush in but, paralleling the Fortress, used the cover of the ring as they darted back and forth on evasive paths, dipping in every few seconds for a shot volley of bolts before retreating. Their advantage was that the Challenger’s scanners could not identify and lock on individual targets, but had to direct its cannons at each ship as it appeared momentarily from the confusing background of static-laden debris. On the other hand, the Fortress had the advantage of just over eleven guns for each fighter.
These odds impressed themselves upon Velmeran very quickly, as if he had not been aware of it before. In the first half-minute the Challenger lost one cannon, and he lost one fighter. A bolt seared completely through the right wing of the ship, sending it tumbling through the ring to bounce off several large rocks, although never actually hitting because of its inner shields. After a third such impact the pilot regained some control, and a capture ship snapped up the fighter only seconds later.
Just over a minute into the attack the Methryn’s corridor turned sharply and began to head at a steep angle inward, and the Challenger began to accelerate quickly as she fell toward the planet. It was Velmeran’s hope that the vast ship would have to open her forward engines for short blasts of braking thrust rather than risk accelerating beyond her limit. Although there was an alternative that would spare her engines that risk.
Unfortunately, it seemed that Maeken Kea knew exactly what to do. For half a minute the Challenger began to gain speed, then turned abruptly to her right, looping around until she was heading back out. Within another minute she pulled to a stop, braking with field drive aided by the pull of gravity and the resistance of the material of the ring itself pushing against her shields. She corrected her course a final time and settled into a stationary orbit, motionless in respect to the movement of the ring, and turned her full attention to the attacking fighters.
Coming to a stop in the ring not only solved the Challenger’s problem of drift, it had the unfortunate effect of increasing her advantage tremendously. When she had been in motion, her scanners had been overturned with trying to distinguish real targets from countless metallic rocks shooting past; now they only directed the guns at anything that moved. Three ships were clipped in as many minutes, while the raiders destroyed only nine more guns. The odds remained in the Challenger’s favor, since Velmeran would run out of ships before she ran out of cannons.
Velmeran was just about to order a retreat when he saw a fighter just about a kilometer ahead take a bad hit that sent it tumbling end over end away from the Fortress. He accelerated and moved to intercept the stricken fighter, for a quick scan showed him that it was drifting without the protection of any shields and unlikely to survive a major impact. He was momentarily unaware of another ship following his own.
“Captain?” Tregloran asked uncertainly, identifying the pilot of the damaged ship.
“Hold on a moment, Treg,” Velmeran said as he dived in beside the tumbling fighter and used his auxiliary cannon to blast a small boulder in its path. “Who is behind me?”
“Steena?”
“Help keep the path cleared,” he ordered. “Baressa?”
“Here, Commander.”
“Order a very hasty retreat and collect the packs just above the ring,” he instructed quickly. “Treg, can you get your ship under control?”
“I am trying to get auxiliary power,” the younger pilot replied. “The main generator is cycling back into itself, and building slowly to an overload.”
“Forget it, then,” Velmeran said, and paused as he and Steena concentrated their fire on a larger rock. The boulder shattered at the last moment, and the fighter rolled through the opening as its pieces flew apart. “Treg, can you eject?”
“Sorry, Captain. The canopy locks are jammed by hydraulic back pressure, and I cannot get the leverage to force it. All I can hope for is auxiliary power.”
“Be quick about it, then,” Velmeran said. “You are about to come up on a group of very large rocks.”
That was something of an understatement. The larger pieces of debris, moonlets of several hundred meters to several kilometers across, tended to gather in small groups, drawn together by their own feeble gravity but never touching because of their tremendous static charge. If Tregloran’s ship was on a collision course with one of these massive rocks, nothing short of the Methryn would get it out of the way. And there were no capture ships free.
Two massive rocks, hundreds of meters across, emerged out of the background haze and grew quickly in size as the stricken fighter hurtled toward a deadly meeting. Tregloran remained blissfully unaware of the situation. He was busy at the keyboard of his on-board computer trying to force a reluctant auxiliary generator to start while trying to keep a damaged generator from exploding.
Velmeran had been watching the matter closely, however. It soon became apparent that the damaged fighter would catch the outer edge of the second, smaller rock, less than a kilometer behind the first. A small moonlet, six kilometers across, stood unavoidably ten kilometers behind that. Velmeran cautiously moved backward and to one side, using the inner shield of his ship to deflect Tregloran’s slightly.
Tregloran suddenly found enough power to halt the tumble of his fighter, and for the first time he became aware of the trouble he was in. He passed within a hundred meters of the larger rock, and barely two seconds later skimmed over the surface of the second with only five meters to spare. Velmeran, who continued to push from that side of his ship, barely cleared the surface. Tregloran put all the steering control of his own ship into turning away from the moonlet directly in his path.
The damaged fighter was sluggish and unresponsive. Velmeran never gave up, all but carrying the wrecked ship on the back of his own, even in the final seconds when it was obvious they had failed. But at the last instant Tregloran gained much more control and cleared the surface of the small moon through a pass between two ragged projections.
“Captain, can you lead me back to the corridor?” he asked immediately. “My main generator is going to explode at any moment.”
“You do that and I will back up along my corridor to intercept you,” Valthyrra insisted. “Can you hold out for another three minutes?”
“I am sure of it,” Tregloran said. “I am holding it by sheer will right now, and it is going to explode seconds after I let go of it.”
“Long enough for us to pry you loose and throw it overboard,” Valthyrra asserted. “Just pop your wings and slip in on the deck, gears up so that we can get to you.”
Tregloran’s ship had no drive power, just steering. The power lines of his main generator were burning now, as much as they could in the absence of air, leaving a trail of hot gasses and glowing particles behind the fighter. The Methryn, moving quickly up her own corridor, intercepted them as they reached it and began to accelerate forward to match the speed to that of the fighters approaching from behind.
Tregloran tripped the explosive bolts in the wings of his fighter as he moved behind the Methryn’s tail, and small, gas-filled pistons inside the downswept wings lifted them into a level position. Valthyrra matched his speed carefully so that he entered the bay at hardly more than a very fast run. Velmeran and Steena accelerated now, passing through the bay and out the forward door. Tregloran allowed his own fighter to travel half the length of the bay before lowering it gently to the deck, leaving a trail of sparks and thick smoke as it slid to a stop only five meters from the forward door.
Benthoran and an assistant were there immediately, and at the same time a pair of handling arms moved in from overhead to seize the damaged fighter. Flames and sparks shot out of every opening in the shattered hull as burning power lines exploded under the stress of a generator building quickly to an overload. The two crewmembers ripped loose the locked canopy and threw it aside, while Valthyrra gently lifted the fighter barely a centimeter from the floor and began to move it slowly toward the open door. While Benthoran helped the nervous pilot free himself from his ship, other crewmembers aimed a frigid blast of carbon dioxide into the fighter’s engine compartment to cool the faulty generator and delay its explosion.
At the last moment Benthoran bodily lifted Tregloran out of the cockpit and threw him to safety, then leaped over the fighter’s wing just before it swept him through the containment fields into open space. Valthyrra carried the ship free of the deck, as far out as her handling arms would reach, and gave it a firm push downward. Then she thrust herself forward, barely clearing the fighter before it exploded.
Benthoran walked over to where Tregloran’s motionless form lay on the deck, under the attentions of three crewmembers who had removed his helmet. “Are you all right?”
Tregloran glanced up at him. “Just glad to be here.”
“I can imagine.” Benthoran laughed softly, then gestured impatiently to one side of the bay. “Clear this wreckage from the deck. We have to land the damaged fighters before the packs can come in.”
“Damnation!” Maeken Kea muttered as she fell back into her seat, then immediately pushed herself back up again. “Marenna, give me a report. Are they really gone?”
“They appear to be,” the ship responded noncommittally. “All fighters have disappeared from scan.”
That did not mean much; inside this orbital rock quarry, everything disappeared from scan within a few kilometers. But Maeken Kea did not have long to decide. After a moment she launched herself from her seat and began to pace the edge of the central bridge. “Return to the Methryn’s corridor and follow her. Damage report.”
“I have lost two complete engine clusters, fourteen engines in all, although the loss will not seriously affect my speed even in starflight. I have also lost seventeen cannons.”
“Keep the units that still have functional generators so that we can have their power on the grid, and pitch the rest overboard,” Donalt Trace said as he joined her. “It occurred to me during the design of this machine that they would shoot up through the damaged units to get at the interior of the ship, so the module sockets have the same quartzite shielding.”
“Eject the malfunctioning units,” Maeken told the ship.