But, with battle threatening at any time, the ship’s temperatures went down more than usual to cool the electronics and the Starwolves kept themselves inside their armor at all times. Captain Tarrel stayed inside her own armor as well, having developed an instinctive fear of being caught without it. When the time came, it happened suddenly and sooner than they had expected. The Dreadnought entered the system along the predicted approach and passed almost directly over the Methryn, at least in relative distances. In fact, the two ships missed each other by half a million kilometers. Valthyrra identified it even before it dropped sub-light.
“Contact,” she warned, sending the members of the bridge crew hurrying to their stations. Then she spun her camera pod around in a circle. “Perdition! I never thought about that.” “Thought about what?” Gelrayen asked as he helped Tarrel with the straps of her seat. “This is no time for anyone to be making a mistake.”
“I cannot warn the ships deeper in the system even with a tight beam, not without the Dreadnought intercepting it.” She paused a moment. “I am relaying my information to the freighter Taerregyn. Since she is sitting well outside the system, she can relay the report to the other ships by tight beam from a different angle.”
“Is everything going according to plan?” Gelrayen asked as he descended the steps to the main bridge level.
“It does seem to be. The Dreadnought is going straight in toward the one inhabited planet. Because I am closer than the Kerridayen, she has signaled that I should provide the only surveillance contact for now. I am using a very low-level sweep every twenty seconds, and I am now feeding the scanner images to the main carrier fleet through my link with the Taerregyn. The Mardayn is beginning her maneuvers that will eventually bring her slowly in behind the Dreadnought.”
“No impulse beams from the Dreadnought?” Gelrayen asked.
* “None that have been detected so far. The other carriers are now much closer, and might be able to detect an impulse sweep on their own passive impulse scanners. However, the Mardayn reports that she cannot detect my sweeps even knowing that they are there, but she does not have sensors.”
“Then you need to watch very carefully,” he reminded her. “Those ships are depending upon you to tell them when to run.” Over the next few minutes, the Mardayn fell in directly behind the Dreadnought and began to close the distance quickly as the alien weapon continued to brake on its approach toward the colony. Valthyrra was beginning to feel increasingly uncomfortable with the situation. The Dreadnought was not using its impulse scanner on routine sweeps, as it had in the past. She knew that it would never simply forget and she could not believe that she had damaged its impulse scanners beyond repair during their last encounter. That led her to the uncomfortable conclusion that it was up to something. Could it have refined its own sensors so greatly that it was reading the achronic echoes of her own sweeps? Even as the Mardayn moved in to attack, with every outward indication that she remained undetected, Valthyrra felt certain that the ambush was about to turn back on them.
“Commander, we have to decide something immediately,” she said at last. “I want to terminate this attack right now, before we get into trouble. This is not right. The Dreadnought is not making regular precautionary impulse sweeps, as it has been seen to do in the past. It knows.”
“How could it know anything specifically?” he asked. “Even if it is aware of us, how can it know the present location of our ships?”
“I suspect that it might be reading the echoes from my own sweeps. I also suggest that a Starwolf carrier puts a fifteen million ton dent in the fabric of space, a very small gravity well, but made very conspicuous by the fact that it is moving.”
Gelrayen made his decision quickly, and nodded. “Relay your suspicions to the Mardayn.”
“I am, Commander,” Valthyrra reported. “She agrees with my judgement of the situation, but she refuses to break off yet. She still wants a shot at the Dreadnought, in the hope that it is not entirely certain of how matters stand.”
With the Mardayn unwilling to withdraw, the other carriers had to hold their own positions for fear that any movement might alert the Dreadnought to their presence, if it did not know already. Distances within a system were deceptive; a system looked like a relatively small and crowded space, with no part of it more than a few minutes away to a fast ship like a Starwolf carrier. But those distances were still great enough that none of the five carriers could have moved quickly to assist another. Tracking with cannons would have been impossible at that range, and a missile would need minutes of flight time.
“Commander, I can see the flaw in this plan,” Valthyrra warned. “As the Mardayn comes closer to the Dreadnought, we will have to terminate our tight beam transmission of scanner images or the other ship is going to detect that signal for certain. And that is going to leave the Mardayn blind. I am now ordering the Mardayn to break off.”
“She can simply ignore you,” Gelrayen remarked. “Keep feeding her all the data you have, no matter what.”
“The Kaeridayen is supporting my decision to terminate the attack, and the Mardayn seems likely to agree. This is the very reason why I should have been the one to go in after the Dreadnought.”
Unfortunately, by the time the Mardayn agreed that it was time to retreat, it was already too late for her. The Dreadnought made no change in either course or speed; it simply attacked. The Starwolf carrier suddenly found herself caught in a broad, pale beam that was stripping away power from her shields faster than she could pour more energy into them, leaving her nothing left over for her weapons or drives. She called for help, loudly and directly, and the other carriers hurried to her rescue. The Methryn hurtled herself in through the system so quickly that Captain Tarrel lost consciousness during the first few moments.
If any of the other ships could have drawn a part of that fire or made a distraction of themselves, it would have helped. Unfortunately, they were simply too far away to be a threat. Even as the Mardayn struggled under that first assault, a single beam of intense power struck her in the nose and began to eat steadily along her length through the core of her main hull. After only seconds, that narrow beam had cut into her engineering regions and the powerful conversion generators already struggling to meet the demands placed upon them to maintain the shields. The Mardayn was lost in a blinding flash, like that of the explosion of a small star; an explosion so great that it knocked even the Dreadnought from its course a thousand kilometers away.
The other carriers reacted furiously to the sudden, violent death of their sister, turning to strike without hesitation. As soon as the Methryn was able to resume her transmission of impulse images, the two closer carriers hurtled in to attack while the Dreadnought was still disoriented from the force of that explosion. Captain Tarrel admired their determination. The absolute destruction of a Starwolf carrier was such a rare event that she found herself shaken almost beyond the ability to think clearly. Granted, the Starwolves and their ships were probably designed to always keep going, no matter what.
“I am advising the other carriers to keep themselves moving constantly and quickly,” Valthyrra reported with deceptive calm. “These new weapons are obviously effective only if they can be locked on target for several seconds. We can counter that by darting in and making rapid strikes with our main batteries.”
“Do the other carriers understand?” Gelrayen asked.
“They have acknowledged,” Valthyrra said, bringing her camera pod around to face where he stood behind the Commander’s station. “No doubt in response to its failure in its battle with me, the Dreadnought determined the need to increase its effectiveness. Either it had these more powerful weapons in reserve, it adapted weapons it already had, or it created new ones.”