“Gheldyn, are you accurate in your estimate?” she asked at last.
“Yes. We are making the final connections now.”
“Then I am going to move the ship quickly, even if it uses all the fuel elements left in the lines. You keep working straight through this, since I am going to need that power immediately. This tactic will not get us out of danger, but it will buy you that time.”
“I understand,” Gheldyn promised her.
“Commander, I am going to do something stupid,” she said, turning toward Gelrayen. “Stupid times demand stupid gestures. May the gods pity us one more time.”
Before he could reply, another concussion struck the ship violently. The moonlet was caught on the leading edge of a powerful shock wave and sent tumbling slowly by the force of that explosion, and the Methryn was carried with it. Only the fact that Valthyrra had maintained the hull integrity shields at battle intensity saved the carrier from damage as her wings and upper hull were dragged along the interior of the cubby. After the first few seconds, the moonlet settled into a predictable roll that Valthyrra could match.
“Scanner contact,” Valthyrra reported. “It knows where we are. I no longer have any choice.”
The ship engaged her main drives at full power without bothering to first move clear of her hiding place in the moonlet, hurtling herself out into open space and well beyond the Dreadnought. Even then she did not let up, switching from one conversion generator to the next to pull every remaining bit of water from each line in the distribution grid. By the time the last generator gave all it had, barely half a minute later, the Methryn was nearly two million kilometers out from the gas giant and drifting at a third the speed of light. Captain Tarrel had reacted to an abrupt twenty-seven G’s of sustained acceleration predictably. When she did come around, she was going to regret it. The stress drugs had her stirring weakly almost immediately.
“Gheldyn?”
“I still need just a moment.”
“Hurry,” Valthyrra insisted, then lifted her camera pod toward the main viewscreen as it shifted to show the image behind the ship. “Stupid idea to buy time, part two.”
The moment that the Methryn had left cover, Valthyrra had re-established contact with the drone that she had hidden earlier, ordering it to keep pace with her. Although she did not yet know it for certain, she had every reason to believe that the Dreadnought was somewhere behind her, in spite of the fact that it had never before pursued a fleeing ship. She had made herself particularly annoying, if not an actual threat, and her sudden loss of power probably made her a very tempting target. Even if it had not been following her from the start, it had almost certainly taken up the chase by now. And considering the display of speed that she had seen earlier, that was a disquieting thought indeed.
Valthyrra wished that she still had power enough to bring up her shields at stealth intensity — all she had left was battery power for environmental systems and herself — then the Dreadnought would have been forced to give itself away by targeting her with an impulse sweep. She was surprised and very gratified when that sweep came anyway. Perhaps the Dreadnought, fearful of yet another trap, was wondering what had become of the Maeridan, the first carrier that had attacked it. That sweep gave Valthyrra the very information she needed most. The alien weapon was indeed behind her, and coming up fast.
Fearful of being fired upon while she lacked the protection of shields, Valthyrra responded in the only way she could. Under her direction, the drone unit that had been standing idle just beside her raised its own shields to stealth intensity, a function very important to a reconnaissance probe. Then it turned and began to accelerate rapidly toward the Dreadnought, rapidly even by Starwolf standards. Being a fairly simple machine, it lacked the capacity to question any order it was given, as long as that order came from a valid source. It made its run directly toward the Dreadnought, which responded very predictably with another scanner sweep. It might have tried to open fire, but its discharge beams were barrage weapons and not designed for tracking such a small, swift target. Riding those impulse beams to their source, the drone rammed the Dreadnought at a combined speed over half that of light.
In a way, this was more than just a delaying tactic, but an experiment in itself. Normal shields were of three types. Defensive shields were designed to deflect or absorb energy weapons but could be penetrated fairly readily by solid objects, while navigational shields caught up any solid objects in a series of projected waves, clearing a safe path ahead of the ship, but were completely transparent even to delicate nuances of information in returning scanner beams. The Dreadnought’s powerful shell was, of course, a defensive shield, but one of such great intensity that it should have seemed solid to any physical object striking it. Valthyrra wanted to know that for certain, rather than simply continue to assume that it worked that way.
If the drone went through, the combined energy of impact at that speed would have to be measured in megatons of force. Indeed, it would have simply vaporized a very large portion of the Dreadnought and probably shattered the rest, and that would have been the end of their problems all the way around. Unfortunately, Valthyrra knew immediately that the intensity of the actual explosion indicated the destruction only of the drone, although the shield continued to flash with great sheets and flares of discharge for several seconds afterward. That had probably been the result not just of the explosion itself but the distortion of the shield under that impact. A ton of spacecraft hitting at over a hundred and fifty thousand kilometers a second has a lot of force behind it.
“The main line is in place,” Gheldyn reported.
“I am still getting no water into the pre-chamber,” Valthyrra said. “Have you checked every valve?”
“We checked the valves a final time before I called you.”
“Try it again.” She paused to make a quick check of her operational plans and information on the matter. “Oh hell, each intake chamber has a valve that closes automatically if it detects anything except water coming in. You have to bleed the air from the line at the intake to each generator. There will be a simple manual cock-valve in the end of each line.”
“I am already on my way,” Gheldyn assured her.
“Be sure to start with the big ones. I need all the power I can get.”
“What about the Dreadnought?” Gelrayen asked.
“At least it stopped for a moment to take an accounting of itself,” the ship replied. “I did buy us a little time there. It would have been on top of us already otherwise.”
“Just what did you do to it, anyway?”
“I had the drone ram it,” Valthyrra explained, then turned her camera pod toward the aft image on the main viewscreen. “Another sweep. One last look around for hidden dangers, and here it comes.”
“Valthyrra, you should be getting power now,” Gheldyn told her.
“Yes, the first conversion generator is coming up. And here comes the second.”
Before Valthyrra could do anything with that power, the first discharge beam hit her from behind, connecting squarely on the back of her twin star drives. Unfortunately, she did not have either defensive shields or even her hull integrity shields in place to make some attempt to deal with that wash of tremendous energy; her only protection was the fact that the armored drive doors had been closed. Actual physical damage was limited to simple scoring and burning of the metal. The danger to the Methryn was that the discharge itself was running through her frame and power systems in the form of searing bolts of electrical energy. She brought up her integrity shields first, getting that discharge under control, then engaged her defensive shields at stealth intensity as she accelerated quickly into an evasive path.