“Yes, he will understand and remember what you tell him,” the physician agreed reluctantly. “If you consider it absolutely necessary…”
“It is so ordered,” Maeken said with enough firmness to make him understand that she was not offering him a choice. “If you would care to go up to the galley for something to drink, I will call you when I’m finished. This will not take long.”
Wriestler recognized the implicit order that he was to make himself scarce in a hurry and withdrew. Maeken watched until he was gone before entering the room that he had been guarding bodily. The cabin was small, dominated by a curious apparatus that was half bed and half low-walled tub, fed by a maze of opaque plastic tubes connected to a series of machines and tanks. A dark figure lay in the tub, encased in a cocoon of microscopic tubes that covered the burnt upper half of the body like a pelt of long white hair. She braced herself and approached slowly.
She could not imagine how Commander Trace could have survived. Dr. Wriestler had plucked the bits of metal out of his chest and face and had set him in the tank to regenerate his burnt skin. Once that was done, teams of specialists would be able to concentrate on making replacements for his right eye and the arms that had been quite literally ripped to shreds in the explosion of his gun. Maeken had not been able to look upon him when the medical automatons had come to collect him on the Challenger’s auxiliary bridge. At least most of his body was now mercifully hidden within the machine.
“Commander?” she called softly.
He responded more quickly than she had anticipated, opening his one good eye to stare up at her.
“My ship?” he asked weakly, his voice a faint, hoarse whisper.
“I lost the Challenger,” she replied simply. “The Starwolves had her fixed too many ways. Velmeran gave me fifteen minutes to abandon ship.”
Trace closed his one good eye and nodded weakly. “He fooled us both. You did what you had to do. How… how did you get me away from him?”
“I recalled something I had heard about Starwolves being gullible,” she explained. “I told him a sad, sad tale and he bought it. Of course, neither of us had any idea that you had actually survived. As far as that goes, he probably still thinks you’re dead.”
She paused a moment, leaning even closer. “Listen carefully, now. The High Council might be ready and willing to descend upon you like scavengers for losing that very expensive ship, but we can still turn this into a victory. We lost the Challenger, but the experiment was a success. The Starwolves could not destroy a Fortress from the outside, and we sure as hell won’t give them a second chance to destroy one from within.”
“Very encouraging,” Trace remarked. “What about…”
“Wriestler brought it,” she assured him. “Now this is the plan, at least as we will present it. We continue to build Fortresses but hold them back, adding to the fleet and using the ships only to defend the inner worlds. We build our own big, fast carriers full of quick little fighters. And in about twenty years we will have thousands of our own Starwolves grown up and ready to fight.”
Donalt Trace sighed heavily. “Twenty years. At this rate, I should last so long.”
“For now you stay well away from Starwolves,” Maeken said firmly. “You have no good sense where Velmeran is concerned. Twenty years, and you can retire successfully. You let me do the talking, and I’ll start talking as fast as I can as soon as we reach port. You rest now. We’ll talk again as soon as you’re up to it.”
“Do the best you can,” he answered weakly.
Maeken withdrew quietly and hurried to the galley. After the spaciousness of the Challenger, the compactness of the destroyer was confining. There were no lifts, but the galley was less than half a minute’s walk from the cramped sick bay. She found Wriestler seated at a small table, leaning over the hot drink he had ordered.
“Finished,” she said as she took the opposite seat. “Shouldn’t you hurry back?”
Wriestler shrugged. “He’s in no danger now that he’s on the machine.”
“Then why were you so reluctant to let me speak with him?”
“Just being the proper doctor,” he said. “A large part of your internship is just learning to be a self-important ass. They teach the same thing to officers, although you seem to have missed the point.”
“It never did anyone any good, as far as I can tell. But there is one extraordinarily tall ass that needs to be back to work as soon as possible.”
“Half a year at most,” Wriestler said, and smiled at her reaction of surprise. “Yes, it took him the better part of two years to recover from that last one. But, in a strange way, he’s not in nearly as bad a shape. The machine will have new skin on him in two weeks. The eye should be no problem, and we can fit him with a pair of mechanical arms as soon as a pair his size can be made.”
“Mechanical?” Maeken asked.
“He asked for it and, under the circumstances, it’s the best way to go. There’s a limit to how many regenerated parts you can stick in a person, and he’s pushing the limit right now. I once had a young officer who was half a year from receiving two legs, half an arm, and a rebuilt face. Halfway to nowhere he began to reject his new skin, and nothing would stop it. He screamed every waking minute… which I kept to a minimum.”
“In pain?” Maeken asked cautiously.
“In terror. I could block the pain.”
The Methryn remained with the Kalvyn over Tryalna for another day and a half until the Karvand arrived and the freighter Lesdryn had slipped unobserved into the fringes of the system. The Starwolves could not keep a ship in this system for very long, since the twenty remaining carriers had to adjust their patrols to allow for the two damaged vessels. The Lesdryn would be back in a couple of weeks, her caverous holds filled with rebuilt destroyers and battleships to replace the system fleet.
Daelyn was understandably shocked and saddened to hear that her mother was dead, although the rare opportunity to visit with both her father and brother distracted her from her grief and she went away with more good than bitter memories. Both she and Commander Schayranna thoroughly approved of the new Commander, but the strange girl with two arms who sat familiarizing herself with the helm controls on the auxiliary bridge took a little getting used to.
Lenna was at the controls when the Methryn, the Kalvyn, and the Lesdryn left orbit, an occurrence that took more than just a little getting used to for the ship, the regular helm, and the new Commander. The auxiliary bridge had no commander’s console, which gave Velmeran the excuse to loiter about and watch her every move. Since it was Consherra’s responsibility to teach her young assistant, she also made it her business to watch over the girl. And since Valthyrra’s camera pod was mounted overhead, she had the best view of all. Besides that, she had the reassurance of having an override on every control.
Once she got the Methryn out of orbit and accelerating to starflight along the proper flight path, however, they began to relax. Lenna had grown up with the desire to be the helm on a starship, and now she had her hands on a bigger, faster ship than any Trader had ever hoped for.
This scene was repeated several days later as the three Starwolf ships decelerated in their approach on the planet Alkayja. They moved out of starflight together, the Methryn and the Kalvyn flying side by side with barely their own length between them while the freighter Lesdryn followed at about three times that distance.
Everyone on the bridge watched the viewscreen expectantly for their first glimpse of Alkayja and its immense orbital base. For many, like Velmeran and Consherra, this was the first time that the Methryn had been in port in their lifetimes. Valthyrra’s earliest memories were of this place. Her first run under her own power had been in this space, executing experimental trajectories around the four smaller and three larger planets. And yet even she had spent less than a score of years out of her eighteen centuries here, most of that time in refitting. Carriers never returned home except at need.