“My inclination is that we should run like hell,” Keflyn said candidly. “I did tell you about Fortresses. You have no shield detonation missiles to strip them of their quartzite shielding. That means that they will have both their hull shielding and their shell, both of which can easily turn a single shot from a conversion cannon. And you will have possibly only one shot from your own cannon, with whatever conversion missiles you might possess. You have no hope.”
“I see,” Quendari remarked thoughtfully. “My scanners report seven of these Fortresses, in addition to one ship that is even larger. It looks like this.”
She cleared her main viewscreen, replacing the image with the schematic of a very large ship. Seen in side view, it was obviously a ship of vast proportions, in most ways like the complex matrix of sharp edges and flat hull plates joined by shallow angles of the Fortresses. It appeared at first to be much lower in height than a Fortress, giving it the very long, slender appearance of a stingship. Then she realized that the height of the two ships was about the same, but this ship was nearly twice as long.
“Typical Union military thought,” she remarked. “When you find a weapon that works, make one twice as big, although I cannot imagine why Trace would bother. It does him no more good to have a larger one, certainly not as much good as two of the regular type would have.”
“Donalt Trace? He is the one who has been after your father these past few years?” Quendari asked. “What do your carriers do about these ships?”
“Sequential firing,” Keflyn explained. “Two carriers working together, or one of the new carriers that has two conversion cannons. The battle shells of the Fortresses can take anything you throw at them, but not for long. Operating under a load, they can only endure a matter of seconds before they have to come down. The sustained blast of a sequential firing overloads the shell and allows you to get at the meat. But that only works if you have already stripped them of their quartzite shielding.”
Quendari considered that for a moment. “So, I have to destroy eight invincible ships with only one shot, when one shot is not enough to destroy even one.”
“You do not have the power,” Keflyn reminded her. “But is there somewhere you can get it? Or is there some way that we could just render them harmless to the planet?”
“I think that I just might have a plan,” Quendari said. “But I need for them to follow me. Can we manage that?”
“We can try,” Keflyn agreed. “Put on your best aggressive stance and move out to meet them. Do something to make yourself inviting. They cannot afford to miss the chance to destroy a carrier.”
The Valcyr was already clear of the atmosphere by that time, free to pile on speed with complete impunity. She engaged her main drives at full power, fairly leaping out of the gravity well and hurtling into open space. It felt good to be able to stretch herself in this way, a pleasure that she had not enjoyed in a long time. A curious and entirely extravagant portion of her personality programming had been designed to interpret an array of sensory feedbacks, from the stress of acceleration on her space frame to the sudden thrust of power to her engines, as a pleasurable response. Such subtle things were the substance of life, the portion of her own self that she had once forgotten she possessed.
She circled wide, then hurled herself directly toward the group of Fortresses, accelerating rapidly to near light speed. The Fortresses were moving in a fairly tight formation, so vast in size that the kilometers which separated them seemed tight and confining. They had none of their riders out, not even stingships to scout their path or cruisers running vanguard. Their stance was a singularly aggressive one, suggesting that they were going into battle and would allow nothing to stop them.
“That Donalt Trace you mentioned,” Quendari said. “He is calling on a visual channel. He says he wants to talk.”
“Oh?” Keflyn was honestly surprised to hear that name. She suspected there was more about this business than there seemed, to bring him out, even considering how important the battle for the possession or destruction of Terra would be. He had learned to let better warriors do his actual fighting, freeing him to be the strategist. According to her father, he had always been a poor tactician once battle was engaged. “Have you declared your identity to him?”
“No, no return contact on my part at all.”
“If you really want him to chase you to the exclusion of all else, then give me a visual link,” she said. “Focus the camera very firmly on me, and make a little bridge noise.”
“You will have your link on the central monitor.”
The largest monitor in the center of the command console blanked out the scanner images that it had been relaying, then faded back in with a close image of Commander Donalt Trace. He was an older man with graying hair, looking more tired than old, with heavier, harsher features than she was used to seeing in most humans. She had heard stories that he was of older Terran stock, standing an almost incredible two meters tall. The sight of his own uniform reminded her that she was not in armor, or even in command white. She hoped that he would not take note of that first omission on her part.
He stared at her for a moment, not recognizing her. Or rather, he did not recognize her as Velmeran; she looked enough like her father that she meant to encourage him to make that mistake. She had heard that humans could not easily tell one Kelvessan from another, even the one Trace should have known better than all others. She just sat with her upper arms braced on the arms of her chair, her chin resting in her linked hands, waiting for him to speak first. This was a vaguely impatient gesture that she had often seen her father use with people whom he suspected were about to annoy him.
“This is Combined Fleet Commander Donalt Trace, on board the SuperFortress Challenger,” he declared at last. “You are trespassing in a secured Union system. Leave immediately or be destroyed.”
“Challenger? You seem to be overly fond of a name that was never very lucky for you, Don,” Keflyn answered, deepening her voice slightly. “This is Velmeran aboard the Methryn.”
Trace stared at her closely, and she was very careful not to betray her apprehension. Fortunately, Kelvessan did not have distinct male and female differences in their features, size, or general build, at least none that were readily obvious when they were fully dressed. She just hoped that Quendari had kept her visual image above the level of her breasts, which were rather prominent for a Starwolf.
Trace leaned back in his seat as he crossed his arms, although he still seemed more surprised than the appearance of satisfaction he wanted to convey. “So, it is you. I would have thought that you would have run home to Alkayja to intercept my invasion force. I thought that was where you were headed, the last time I saw you.”
Keflyn was trying hard not to look either surprised or dismayed. Apparently a lot had been going on out there in her absence. The very fact that he knew the name argued that his threatened invasion of Alkayja must be true.
“Or is this just revenge?” Trace continued, hardly giving her time to answer. “There was certainly nothing to be gained from even trying. Your own Republic has turned on you, naming you an outlaw race. They believe that they have made their peace with the Union, and they would never believe you if you did warn them. And I have my own Starwolves now. How can you fight that? They should just about be there by now.”
“Trust me to arrange things better than that,” Keflyn answered him with quiet satisfaction, as if she was very sure of herself. Then she reached over and cut the connection manually, a greater abruptness than if she had asked Quendari to do it. She sat back in the large, well-padded seat, wondering what in the name of perdition had happened in the last few weeks. She looked up at the hovering camera pod. “They will follow us through the gates of Hell if they have to. Trace will give,them no choice.”
The Valcyr changed course slightly, passing the fleet of Fortresses at a range that surely tempted the cannons of the immense ships, then corrected her course again as she came around in a wide curve, still moving out of the system. The Fortresses brought themselves about ponderously, breaking away one by one to reduce the chance of a collision. They were safe enough to fly grouped in a straight course, but their incredible mass reduced their turns to half-controlled slides.
“I had expected they could keep up better than that,” Quendari remarked with some disgust. “I will have to begin braking now, and give them a chance to catch up.”
“Where are we going?” Keflyn asked.
“Jupiter,” she explained, then paused when she saw that the young Starwolf did not recognize the name at all. “Jupiter. The fifth planet in this system, and a fairly hefty gas giant.”
“Why go there?”
“For our health,” the ship answered. “And also for the hydrogen.”
Quendari had to slow herself considerably, and the better part of twenty minutes passed before the massive shape of the gas giant began to grow large in the viewscreen. The tremendous gravitational surges of the sun had not greatly affected the larger, more remote outer worlds, although little Pluto had slipped its orbit completely and had disappeared long ago on its long, lonely voyage through the stars. Keflyn knew the names of none of those planets, forgotten in the depths of time. Jupiter had lost a few moons in its relatively small orbital slip, with no evidence of whether they had spiraled out or down.
The Valcyr looped around the planet in a quick, close orbit, the width of that world so great that the passage brought her several minutes she needed for the Fortresses to catch up with her. As she came around the other side, she moved forward aggressively in a sudden dart, rushing into the cover provided by a small moon that was between herself and the approaching Fortresses. The Union Forces moved out along a wider line into attack formation, giving every indication that they would be charging straight through, probably to hit the Valcyr from behind with their rear cannons. They were so completely armed that the direction of attack made little difference.
Quendari waited until they were almost within range, then she moved out from behind her cover slowly. She seemed to hesitate a moment before she banked completely over, belly up, and began to fall rapidly toward the planet. She approached straight in, her tapered nose aimed like a black arrowhead directly at the planet as she engaged enough reverse thrust to stand herself on end, holding herself to the greatest possible speed that she dared. She opened one transport bay just enough to eject a drone, which hurried to hide itself on the surface of the moon she had just left.
The Valcyr shaped her powerful battle shield into a long, narrow blade more than twenty kilometers in length, parting the cold, upper atmosphere of the planet in a fiery shell. She had only just returned to space after forty thousand years, and she seemed to have a hard time staying there.
Donalt Trace stood in the center of the Challenger’s vast, crowded bridge, watching the scan image as the Starwolf carrier continued its curious run straight in toward the planet. She was already slicing into the icy, upper layers of ammonia clouds at an almost impossible speed, more than thirty thousand kilometers per hour.
“Where the hell is she going?” he mused aloud. The old game began again. Velmeran began his feigns and ploys, luring Trace into the required response. His part now was to look beneath the obvious, to see how the proper and predictable reply was actually the first move into a trap. It reminded him very strongly of their last meeting, in a battle between a Fortress and a carrier above another giant world. He almost enjoyed a return to the game.
“Commander?” Captain Avaires moved closer, standing at dutiful, even eager attention. “It must be an evasive maneuver, sir. They bit off more than they could chew, and they know it.”
Trace frowned, displeased with the situation all the way around. He wished that Maeken Kea could have been here to command this ship. He wished even more that he could have spared her to lead the attack on Alkayja, but he dared not. She was too valuable held in reserve to pick up the pieces if something went wrong. And there were no bright, competent Feldenneh to crew his ships, their race once again refusing to accept duty in military ships.
“I think I know,” he said, pausing a moment to watch the screen. “They can lose themselves even from scan by dropping down into the upper reaches of the hydrogen layer, but it’s not just to hide. They can jump out of cover from time to time to draw our fire, showing themselves just enough to give us a ghost image and invite us to start mining the clouds with our missiles. If we throw away our missiles on the Methryn, then we cannot destroy Terra.”
“We ignore them, sir?” Avaires asked.
He shook his head. “Taking the Methryn is more important than destroying one essentially uninhabited world. But I do not want to throw everything we have at them and still have the Methryn hiding in these clouds. Order the Fortresses to spread themselves in an evenly spaced orbit as close as we dare to go down. The moment they show, I want to be able to drop a dozen missiles on and ahead of them before they can go back down.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Have missile bearing stingships ready to go down into the atmosphere if we get the chance, but launch no ships until I give the orders,” Trace added. “I want no energy emissions or other types of clutter in space to distract those scan images. Settle the ships in close orbit and close down the engines, but have shields standing by.”
“At once, sir.” Avaires hurried to the com station to relay those orders.
Trace stood alone on the bridge, watching as the Starwolf carrier disappeared into the deeper reaches of the planet’s hydrogen shell.
The Valcyr slowed quickly as she penetrated through Jupiter’s dense atmosphere and into the depthless ocean of liquid hydrogen. She elongated her shields even more, bringing them up to even greater strength as the pressures continued to mount, trapping a pool of low-pressure liquid hydrogen within her shields to act as insulation against the increasing temperature. Pouring all the power she dared through her main drives, she was barely able to maintain an initial speed of about seventeen thousand kilometers. That speed would continue to fall as she pushed steadily deeper and tremendous pressures turned the hydrogen from liquid to a thick plastic.
The heat was a strong consideration. Her shields were opaque to the radiation of heat, but temperatures inside that shell continued to climb. She had actually planned that reaction, since the volume of low-pressure hydrogen within the shell would try to expand as it warmed, providing outward pressure to reinforce the shields. Even so, the ship itself would eventually begin to heat dangerously as the trapped hydrogen against its hull warmed. Quendari estimated that she faced a journey of at least two-and-a-half hours, a long time to survive temperatures that might eventually reach twelve to fifteen thousand degrees in the surrounding hydrogen.