“Well, what are their chances?” Tarrel asked.
“Very good, I should think.”
Tarrel glanced down at the probe. “Valthyrra, did you ever have a chance to discuss this plan with Fleet Commander Asandi?”
“Yes, I discussed it with him by com during my approach to Alkayja station after my last battle with Dreadnought. He said then that the plan was too dangerous, that the packs would not survive in close range to the Dreadnought. We have already seen that they can. Commander Asandi told me that I should not discuss this plan with the other carriers.”
“I see.” Tarrel turned toward the lift, expecting the probe to follow her. “Did it ever occur to you that Commander Asandi deliberately sent this fleet into a battle that he knew would be too dangerous? To phrase things a little more plainly, do you suspect that it might have been in his interests to commit a portion of his fleet to their own destruction?”
“Is there any reason to suspect why he should?”
“Commander Asadi indicated to me that the Republic fears the Kelvessan and has reason to make certain that they do not prosper. I am betraying his trust in me, but I believe that he has failed in his trust with the Kelvessan and their ships.”
“I had suspected that the Republic, or at least the Fleet Commanders, had a history of failing to encourage Kelvessan scientific and cultural development. I am not convinced that Commander Asandi contrived the destruction of this fleet, only that he displayed poor judgement in refusing to consider my plan more seriously. I must discuss this privately with the other ships.”
Tarrel stepped inside the lift that opened at her approach, then moved aside as the probe drifted in behind her. “You carriers can make up for the lack of support from the Republic.”
Valthyrra looked up. “How?”
“You seem to have made a good start. Don’t let them wear their clothes. Do whatever it takes to keep them thinking about their own racial identity. Talk them into altering their appearance. Just do what you think best.”
The two fighters moved cautiously into position, engaging their main drives no more than absolutely necessary. They really did not believe that they were fooling anyone with such subtlety; least of all the Dreadnought, with its proven instinct for seeking out and destroying any machine it found in space, including many smaller and less obstructive than a Starwolf fighter. Their only hope was that the Dreadnought would remain drifting on its present course and continue to stubbornly ignore anything going on about it, and they simply wanted to encourage that condition to continue for as long as possible by being reasonably discreet.
Considering the fact that the Dreadnought had just devastated a fleet of Starwolf carriers, destroying two and severely damaging a third, the ability of two lone fighters to face and destroy that beast seemed very unlikely.
The Methryn’s scan gave them the Dreadnought’s position easily enough, bringing them slowly in with perfect accuracy, behind the target that they could not see. Eventually as Pack Leader Teraln had said, the Dreadnought could be seen. At very close range, it was darker than background space, and no stars could be seen through that blackness. It had been very considerate so far, staying on course and ignoring their presence if it knew they were there at all. Even Valthyrra had been unable to offer any explanation on what the Dreadnought could be doing while it drifted, seeming to have closed itself tightly inside its shield. It might have been contemplating strategies, believing that it had failed in its mission because it had been unable to destroy all the Starwolf carriers. It might have simply been repairing a wrecked sensor array. Whatever it was doing, it certainly went about it with single-minded determination and an absolute belief in its own invulnerability.
Commander Gelrayen brought his fighter in close behind the Dreadnought, so close that the fighter’s forward lights diffused into the shield only three meters away. The plan now depended completely upon their finding a sensor or scanning device protruding through the shield. Valthyrra had insisted that the Dreadnought would never leave itself completely blind unless it was-trying to protect its array from direct attack. After several moments of frantic search, fearful that the Dreadnought would move away at any time, he finally saw the slender whip of a receiver extended barely half a meter outside the shield. It was black and difficult to see, even in the flood of the fighter's auxiliary lights.
Gelrayen moved quickly, activating the remote device that Valthyrra had designed and built, now attached below the nose of his ship. A long probe extended forward of the ship, far enough that he could see the simple clawed end, and he moved his fighter forward until that claw touched the sensor probe just above the point where it disappeared within the shield. The claw rotated, sharp edges cutting away the insulation until it sensed contact with bare metal, then detached itself from its arm so that the fighter was tethered by a short cable. Gelrayen waited until Teraln’s fighter attached itself in the same manner, and the two ships pivoted carefully until they were facing the shield.
The next step had to be done quickly and nearly in unison, for fear that the Dreadnought might react to the intrusion. The harpoon device under each fighter’s nose opened into a spread of four long, slender legs, each one ending in an electromagnetic pad. The harpoons were launched, driven through the heavy resistance of the shield by their own small solid-fuel engines, but they did pass through and signaled back through the heavy cable trailed behind them that they had locked onto the ship within. The pilots hastily shut down the drives, main generators and major electronic systems of their fighters, then activated the powerful winches that pulled the small ships through the darkness of the shield. There was some static discharge — pale lights that raced along the sharp edges of their hulls — but nothing of consequence. And then they were through.
The device that Valthyrra had designed had included a powerful array of auxiliary lights, enough to flood vast areas of the interior of the Dreadnought’s shield. She had never anticipated that the ship itself would have been illuminated, and yet large areas of the Dreadnought were brilliantly lit. Even the darker regions of the immense ship, especially near the end, were partially lit by icy white sheets of light from small, powerful lamps.
And there was certainly enough to see. After the Methryn’s previous encounter with the Dreadnought, their one brief glimpse inside the shield had been enough to show them a complex array of shapes, rather than the smooth, armored hull they would have expected. Now they could see for the first time that the Dreadnought had no outer hull, and that it was in fact only a sweeping spaceframe containing the ship’s various generators, reactionless drives and other components. The outside of the frame bristled with countless slender towers or projections, no doubt the supports for sensors and probes that could be extended through the shield, and a scattering of machines as large as a Starwolf fighter that were built onto pivoting stands, probably the discharge cannons. The shield itself fit up close against the shell of the Dreadnought, averaging no more than twenty meters of clearance, although somewhat more at the end where the two fighters had penetrated. They were standing almost nose-down against the frame as it was.
“Well, that explains a lot,” Gelrayen commented aloud.
“That explains what?” Teraln asked.
“This ship has no physical hull. The shield must be intended to stay up at all times; the power assembly must be designed to feed it constantly without taking power from any other systems. Under the circumstances, an armored hull would be ten or fifteen million tons of superfluous weight. Of course, it does have one serious defensive flaw that we just exploited. I wonder if their original enemies ever figured that out.”