“Commander Tarrel?” Daerran called, only moments later. She took the message at her station. “Captain Tarrel.”
“Excuse me. For us, Captain is the leader of a pack of fighters, while the Commander has the entire ship.”
“For us, Commander is any person of command grade,” she explained. “We use Captain for the commander of a ship out of tradition.”
“I will remember that. I was going to say that we have set a docking tube at what appears to us to be your main airlock. But you do not have to worry about accidents, whatever door you might open. We have provided atmosphere within the bay.” “When do you want me to come over?”
“Any time you desire. Someone will be at the docking tube to escort you to the bridge.”
Captain Tarrel put on her best dress uniform, told Pesca that she would have him court-martialed if he said so much as a single word, and took him to the main port airlock, with its wide double doors generally employed as a primary access at station dock. A quick glance out the window to one side of the lock had shown her that the docking tube was indeed waiting. She found, somewhat to her surprise, that the interior of the carrier was rather cool. This was enemy territory, the place that was death for humans to go; to her knowledge, she was the first Union officer ever to be invited aboard one of their carriers. Although the Starwolves rescued many from disabled ships each year, prisoners were usually kept very close to the bays and never saw the deep portions of the great ships. There was so much mystique woven about the Starwolves that she found herself honestly afraid to proceed, though she had thought herself too clever and jaded for such instinctive fears.
She was by no means prepared for her first sight of living Starwolves in their own element. Nine of them, wearing their black armored suits — which she recognized from their number and color as indicating that they formed a pack of fighter pilots— waited in the small lounge at the inner end of the tube. They were small people, all of them noticeably shorter than herself. Their appearance was vaguely human, although their vast, dark eyes and large pointed ears made them look more elfin. Their greatest obvious difference was the fact that they possessed two sets of arms, a second pair just below the normal arms and shoulders of her own race. She had heard stories of their lightning reflexes and their crushing strength. In spite of their small stature and delicate features, she could believe everything she had ever heard, although a more rational part of her mind argued that the black armor-plated suits made them appear more massive and menacing than they actually were.
At least they were courteous as they escorted her and Pesca to the lift — the fastest that she had ever ridden — and took them up to the Kerridayen’s bridge. Commander Daerran was waiting to greet her personally. He was the first Starwolf that she had ever seen not in armor, dressed as he was in what might have been a uniform of white tunic and pants. He seemed at the same time to be smaller than the pilots who had greeted her outside the docking tube, as she had expected, but she could also see how heavily muscled his small frame actually was. Of course, it was not bulk alone that gave the Starwolves their tremendous strength and speed. Theirs was an artificial race, created completely by genetic engineering, and even their most basic biochemistry was entirely their own. The fact that they looked vaguely human was an arbitrary factor, for there was no actual genetic relationship between the two races.
“Captain Tarrel, welcome aboard,” Daerran greeted her, his voice lighter and more musical than it had been over the com.
“Commander Daerran,” she responded. “This is my special advisor, Lieutenant Commander Walter Pesca.”
“A diplomatic liaison?”
“No,” she replied vaguely.
“Allow me to introduce relevant members of my own crew,” he said, leading them from the side corridor onto the bridge. “My first officer Kayell. And, of course, the present manifestation of Trendaessa Kerridayen.”
Tarrel was rather surprised when the long, double-armed boom fixed to the ceiling of the center of the bridge pivoted around, a pair of camera lenses rotating in unison to focus on her. After that startling introduction, she almost failed to notice the first officer, a young male Starwolf. As a bridge officer, his white tunic had black bands about the cuffs. She was glad for the distinction, about the only way she had to tell one Starwolf from the other.
The bridge of the carrier was not as large as she had anticipated for a ship of such tremendous proportions. A single vast viewscreen dominated the front of the wedge-shaped bridge, with a line of various stations along the front. The middle bridge, with its large consoles for the helm and weapons station, was elevated above the main level by a series of steps to either side. And above that was the upper bridge, the Commander’s station, where he could look down into every console on the bridge. Considering the telescopic vision of the Starwolves, he could probably read the data on the monitors at each station. Daerran immediately led them up to his own station. Trendaessa rotated her camera pod around to join them.
“Do you have your data on the thing?” Daerran asked as he lifted himself into his seat at the console, using the overhead bars.
Tarrel gave him a small optical disk, which he fed into a drive on one of the side consoles. The machine tried for a long moment to digest the disk, then abruptly spit it out again.
“Yo, incompatible format,” Trendaessa remarked. “Kayell, will you run that disk down to the number three optical reader at the engineering station. Now, Captain Tarrel, why don’t you tell us your impressions of what you saw.”
At the same time that she listened to Tarrel’s account of her three separate encounters with the Dreadnought, Trendaessa sifted through the various records that had been made aboard the Carthaginian at those times. She employed the three main monitors at the Commander’s station to project visually some of the images she was compiling, almost as if she was thinking aloud through those monitors. She never looked at the monitors themselves, so she must have had some way of viewing those images directly.
“I suspect that your assumptions are basically correct,” the ship said when Tarrel had concluded her account. “The Dreadnought, as you call it, is almost certainly only a machine, and not an especially clever one at that. Those times when it seemed only to be playing with convoy, destroying ships in an almost lazy manner, it was probably responding at a low-priority attack status. There was no need for it to be in any hurry.”
“What manner of machine?” Daerran asked.
“A ship-killing machine, of course,” Trendaessa explained. “It apparently scans large areas of space for the presence of artificial power sources and any machine that is intact and potentially functional. The attack on the station did show it destroying one larger ship that was not powered up, while shuttles escaped unharmed, so there must be some targeting priority other than just the sources of active power. My belief is that this is an automated weapon of unknown alien origin, designed to destroy a civilization’s ability to make war by decimating the ships and supporting devices that make interplanetary flight possible.”
“Did someone aim this damned thing at us?” Tarrel asked. “That is possible, but I doubt it,” Trendaessa said. “Most likely, this one was set loose and just never got turned off when the war was over, if there was anyone left to turn it off. The fact that it responded to your attempt to communicate is interesting. It was probably asking you if you were friend or foe. Needless to say, you did not know how to answer. Given much more information, which I doubt that I will be able to obtain, I might be able to learn the codes that identify a ship as a friend, or perhaps even tell it to shut itself down. It would probably take far less time to simply find a way to destroy it.”