She lifted her camera pod in a gesture of surprise, and looked about as if suddenly realizing how moody she was being. “I have no fighters or shuttles. They were all thrown from their racks in the wreck. I did not try to rebuild any, and I used their materials in my own reconstruction.”
Keflyn had started up the steps to the captain’s station on the upper bridge. Quendari jerked her camera pod around to watch her, a gesture that was apprehensive and protective, and the sudden movement was too much for the decaying material of the velvet ribbon tied around the camera pod. The strap broke and it fluttered to the floor, breaking into many pieces like the petals of a dried flower.
Keflyn waited anxiously, knowing that Quendari Valcyr must have cherished that simple thing to have kept it tied to her camera pod, a red ribbon that was nearly as old as the Kelvessan race, indeed nearly as old as human civilization. It was in a way her own fault that it had broken, for she had come here to innocently disturb the sleep of this ancient machine. Quendari’s camera pod just hovered motionless over the broken ribbon, her lenses rotated almost straight down.
“I am very sorry,” she offered apologetically.
“No, it was inevitable, it was so old,” Quendari answered. “I should have done something to preserve it long ago. It was given to me by my Commander.
“Your first Commander?” Keflyn asked.
“I had only the one.” She looked up at the young Starwolf. “Perhaps it is my turn to ask questions and receive explanations. First of all, I must ask what you plan to do now?”
“According to my original plan, I was to do what I could to determine the location of Terra and use my portable achronic transceiver to call in the Methryn to retrieve me.” Keflyn paused a moment, frowning. “It seems that I have found Terra, and that was never expected. I suppose that I might as well go home, although I would like a look at those carrier construction bays on this world’s moon. I wonder if they are still usable.”
“They were perfectly sealed for long-term storage when I returned.”
“That was also some forty thousand years ago,” Keflyn reminded her.
“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.