“No, all we have on line are drives and partial navigational shields. No scanners except some passive, and no battle shielding.”
“Then time is the one defense you have,” Varnoy told her.
“I’ll call ahead and have Carthaginian standing by to move the moment you come aboard. Now go.”
Captain Tarrel left without a word of farewell or a glance back, and she did not even think to ask until it was too late whether he meant to join the evacuation or stay at his post. So much probably depended upon whether or not there was time to clear the entire station of inhabitants. The halls of the station were filled with people hurrying to find shuttle bays and life boats, many of them struggling to carry small children or valuable records. All in all, this was a relatively small station serving a limited colony. They might just all get away, especially if the unseen enemy was having to maneuver or decelerate to attack. And if the major power systems were shut down, there was some reason to hope that the station would be spared destruction. She still held to her pet theory that high-level emissions drew attention from the automated attack systems of their adversary.
She made it to Carthaginian’s nose lock quickly enough, in spite of the confusion in the station. She sealed the lock herself and released the docking grapples manually, and the battleship began sliding backward out of her berth only a few seconds later, drawing back somewhat faster than her usual habit. Tarrel approved completely, although she was given to wonder just who had the helm at that moment.
By the time she reached the bridge, they were already pulling clear of the station and turning about to maneuver clear. The area was full of ships; even the Sector Fleet was running, so there was no doubt that Commander Varnoy had considered them ineffective in covering the evacuation. The ships were moving up from the station, away from the planet below, while the shuttles and pods were dropping away quickly toward atmosphere. Anything else would have made navigation completely impossible.
“What does it look like outside?” she demanded, hurrying to her seat before accelerations put her against the walls.
“We have nothing absolutely certain since the station stopped relaying active scanner data,” the surveillance officer reported. “I have recorded the destruction of two more ships, one within two light-minutes of the planet and one just outside of orbit.”
“What the hell do they want?” Tarrel asked quietly. The Starwolves would never wantonly take out a tactically unimportant station, just for the sake of destruction. “Take us out of this system as fast as this ship will move. Our destination is Sector Headquarters.”
“Still maneuvering for room to run, Captain,” the helm responded. “The local traffic is rather heavy.”
“Make it quick. And give me the station centered on the main viewscreen.”
There was no indication of attack at first, until a small freighter pulling away from the far side of the station suddenly flashed like ball lightning for a prolonged moment before it exploded. At least the little ship’s destruction was relatively feeble, since her generators had not yet been brought up to power to feed her drives. A second freighter exploded, then one of the ships of the system fleet and a freighter still at dock. The explosions continued to intensify, until Tarrel was certain that they had come under multiple simultaneous attack. That had not happened during the earlier attack. The ships had been taken out one by one. Beneath her awareness of this change in tactics and demonstration of new abilities, she realized that it meant they had probably just lost their only chance of escape.
“Get us under way if you have to go through something,” she snapped.
Carthaginian began to move forward rapidly, still swinging around her nose in the process. But the viewscreen remained fixed on the station, and Tarrel could see clearly the moment the assault was turned upon the station itself. Great arcs and branches of lightning began to leap over the far end of the station, as small portions of its components began to explode in a series of sustained blasts. Tarrel thought the effect was much the same as if the beams of some powerful weapon were being played across the surface of the immense structure, pouring in raw energy until metal exploded, white-hot, nibbling away at the five mile long station. In spite of that concentrated barrage, ships still fleeing the station were still being taken out at regular intervals. If this attack came from a single ship, then it could divide its attention and, firepower among many targets.
Moments later, the members of the bridge crew were pressed into their seats as the Carthaginian began to accelerate rapidly toward her transition into starflight.
The Carthaginian arrived at the military complex of Vinthra five days later, the best speed that the rather abused battleship could manage. At least the time allowed her crew to make what repairs they could, so that she did not limp into port nearly a derelict. Captain Tarrel did not know until later, but her proud ship was in fact severely scorched from the discharge of energy that had nearly destroyed her. At least the active scanners were mostly back into the grid by the time they arrived, and the hull shields were fully operational after extensive rewiring. Carthaginian was an old ship, her frame and most of her hull over two hundred years old, although she had seen no less than five complete refittings in her life. After switching out some damaged components, the old battlewagon could easily go out for another two hundred years, assuming that Starwolves and other mysterious things bumping about the stars did not make short work of her.
Carthaginian was a lucky ship. She had fought Starwolves, minor encounters to be true, twenty-one times in her long career, five of those encounters resulting in her unscheduled refittings. Once she had even been captured and sold back, that being one method Starwolves had for earning their living. Now she had survived two brushes with this new, devastating weapon. Captain Tarrel considered that to be nothing short of a miracle, failing to credit that this matter was largely due to her own cleverness and her uncanny ability to know when it was time to run.
A meeting of the Sector’s senior coordinating officers was scheduled as soon as Carthaginian came into the system, the data she carried and the personal observations of her captain very much in demand. Although Janus Tarrel was young, she did possess a gift of listening to, understanding and remembering everything she heard, and that gave her a wealth of experience to call upon that was not necessarily her own. She knew what to expect from this meeting, so she was not taken by surprise. The minds of armchair admirals with policies cast in stone followed predictable paths. They accused her first of fabricating the whole affair to excuse her incompetence in losing the entire convoy. They questioned her resourcefulness in failing to find a way to protect her convoy against this new weapon, although they could think of none themselves. Finally, having failed to discredit her, they politely asked her advice. Which they largely ignored.
Her one, curious ally through all of this was Victor Lake, the young Sector Commander. They had served together in their earliest days as junior officers, including that first assignment aboard the Carthaginian, and at one time they had been quite close. Lake had come from what was now a rather obscure branch of the ruling Sector Family, unimportant enough to think that the only favors his connections would gain him had already been granted in his commission in the Sector Fleet. But he was clever, earning for himself first a ship, then the post of System Commander, and finally the unexpected title of Sector Commander.