“Let me build my speed another fifteen percent or the acceleration will kill our passengers.”
Tarrel glanced at the Starwolf Commander, but he did not even seem tempted to sacrifice her to save his ship greater harm. The Kerridayen was already accelerating so sharply that Tarrel was pinned to her protective seat, unable even to lift her arms. Her ears were ringing dully, and her vision was dim about the edges.
The release of pressure came suddenly at the same moment that the carrier took a particularly bad hit. They could actually hear the discharge boom and sizzle against the hull. Then the hull shields failed as well, allowing that energy to run directly through the systems of the ship. The monitors and console panels failed, while lights flashed dangerously. Trendaessa’s camera pod began to droop, settling slowly to the floor.
Daerran spat some oath in his own language. “Trendaessa just went down. Engineering, get power to the drives any way you can. Helm, take us out of here the first moment this ship responds.”
Perhaps the only thing that saved them was that the Dreadnought hesitated in its attack, an apparent response to the sudden loss of power on the Starwolf ship. The distance between them had grown steadily until it might have no longer been able to track the carrier accurately without generator and drive emissions to guide its scanners. Kenidayen’s systems began to clear as the discharge faded. The main generators returned first, and that power was immediately directed to the main drives. The carrier moved away quickly on an evasive course, escaping another hit from the devastating weapons of the Dreadnought until she was able to escape into starflight moments later.
Trendaessa lifted her camera pod and looked about, her gesture one of confusion and possibly some embarrassment. “I must have fallen asleep. Did I miss anything important?”
“Possibly your own destruction,” Daerran told her drily as he lifted himself from his station. “Engineering, get repair crews onto our power systems and put everything back into the grid. I want a list of every damaged system divided into those things we can fix and those we cannot. Trendaessa?”
“Our worst damage is to our power systems,” the ship answered. “We have no shields. The main drives are down to sixty percent, and I can get enough power to the star drives for only forty percent. We will not be going anywhere very fast unless we can replace quite a few power couplings. At least the generators are strong.”
Daerran nodded. “Set a course for Home Base.”
Trendaessa turned her camera pod to look at Captain Tarrel. “What about our passengers?”
“Just do it.”
He walked over to join Tarrel, who was stretching in an attempt to relieve cramped joints. “How do you feel?”
“I should live,” she said. “I just won’t like it for a while.” “Captain, we have a problem,” Daerran said, helping her to stand. “I need to take my ship and her information to our main base as quickly as we can get there. I would like to have you along, both as an advisor and a representative of the Union. But you will see and hear many things that you probably should not, and they might not allow me to take you home again. Are you willing to accept that risk? I can still have you put off.”
Tarrel considered that briefly. “If I can do anything to help, then it would be worth the risk. Did we learn anything?”
“We learned that there are a few things that we should never try to do again. I hope that it was worth it.”
3
Trendaessa Kerridayen took fourteen days to make her long, slow way home. Captain Tarrel had no idea of their course, nor did she ask. The location of the Starwolf main base was unknown in the Union, and she believed that it would have to remain unknown if she expected to ever be allowed to go home again. She was not even certain of the carrier’s speed, although she suspected that they were limping along at a pace her own battleship would have found hard to match. The Rane Sector bordered the frontier with the old Republic, an area that was now believed to be Starwolf territory. Fourteen days of travel at the speed and direction she suspected would have taken them well outside of Union space.
The Kerridayen had been in a constant state of repair since her battle with the Dreadnought. Starwolves, as Tarrel discovered to her great surprise, did not sleep, and they were willing to put in some very long hours. Even so, there were fewer than three thousand of them aboard the ship, only two-thirds of that number active crewmembers, and they had a very large ship to maintain. For all their efforts, they made very little progress toward repairing their ship during that long journey home. The greatest part of the damage was not structural but to the ship’s power grid and complex electronics; some of the damaged systems could not be replaced in flight, but would have to wait for a refitting in dock. Superficially the Kerridayen had been badly scorched—* hard to see on her black hull — but she had been far more badly damaged than it seemed.
Kerridayen dropped out of starflight well inside the Alkayja system and began braking smoothly for her approach. There sas none of the usual bravado and intimidation in her manner, such as she would have employed in Union space to remind people like Captain Tarrel that she was too dangerous for them to touch. This was her home, and here she was just a part of the regular local traffic. A small tender, painted bright orange and sporting powerful running lights, fell in just ahead of the carrier to escort her home, while Kerridayen herself ran with both her recognition lamps and the retractable main lights in her shock bumper burning. A Starwolf carrier was a very difficult ship to see, even considering her size, and she had to make her presence well known. It would have been better, of course, if so many of her lights had not burned out in the attack.
Alkayja station was rather more compact than the stations that Tarrel was used to seeing, particularly when compared to the kilometers of sprawling tubes and modules that formed the Vinthra Military complex. The main portion of the station consisted of two wide disks, each about twenty-five kilometers across. The thicker disk was lined along the outside with a continuous row of vast bays that allowed the carriers to dock facing in. The smaller disk above that was studded with bays for ships of a more conventional size. And the station was capped above and below with a flattened dome. Although it was a very visible white, Tarrel realized suddenly that the actual station shared certain similarities with the carriers. The flat, rounded domes on top and bottom offered armored protection against attack — just like the large, flat surfaces of the hulls of the carriers — with no sharp angles to catch a bolt that might have otherwise skipped harmlessly off that featureless surface. All machinery, pipes and ducting were within the shell, less vulnerable while keeping the exterior uncluttered. The station probably even had independent interplanetary drive capabilities.
Kerridayen’s maneuverability was compromised from having too many of her field drive projectors burnt out, and so the immense ship had to be moved into a refitting bay by a team of tenders. Since the carrier weighed some fifteen million tons that had to be stopped once it was set into motion, that was a long and difficult process indeed. Half an hour passed just drawing her slowly up the full length of the bay, three kilometers deep, before she nosed into the bracket designed to receive her forward shock bumper. After that, bringing in the braces that steadied the ship’s short wings and finally the two forward docking tubes was fairly easy.
“I hate that,” Trendaessa said when it was done, lowering her camera pod to the floor. “I hate being towed. I hate being pulled and pushed. I hate being shot at. Why could I have not been built a freighter?”