“Perhaps the Dreadnought has a software problem,” Teraln suggested. “They could have prevented this kind of little problem by having it shoot anything of any size that came within a certain range. But, if they did, that feature is malfunctioning. There is one thing I do wonder about, Commander.”
“Yes?”
“All of these lights. Could this machine be an inhabited ship, or might it have been one originally? We knew already that it is nothing more than a giant, automated hazard to navigation. Perhaps it was meant to have supervision in handling more complex problems.”
“I suspect that these auxiliary lights are meant for visual inspection of the ship by its own maintenance remotes,” Gelrayen answered. “Nothing about the Dreadnought is a flaw or deficiency if you consider that this machine was probably built to destroy an enemy whose almost infinite numbers made up for an inferior technology, less complex than our own. If they had been on about the same level as the Union, they never would have been able to track it, much less fight it.”
He disconnected his fighter from the harpoon, jettisoning the entire winch assembly now that the device had served its function, keeping only the rack of auxiliary lights, anticipating a future need for those. Then he rotated his fighter around and began to move slowly forward along the length of the Dreadnought, using only field drive. The fact that the Dreadnought did not have a physical hull made their task a great deal easier, and the effectiveness of their attack potentially considerably greater. The machinery was built on a scale that was vast even by the standards of the Starwolf carriers, with enough room to navigate the fighters slowly through the interior of the ship. The conversion devices could be planted deep inside, where they would do the greatest damage.
As they moved along the length of the Dreadnought, they came soon to the first of four areas that were the most brilliantly lit. This was the result of long rows or grids of crystalline lights set into long, rectangular recessed areas in the side of the ship, obviously designed to serve some function other than simply providing illumination for the maintenance of the ship.
“Radiant intercoolers,” Gelrayen observed.
“You expected to find something like this?” Teraln asked.
“Valthyrra checked her archives and found that radiant intercoolers were associated with experimental jump drives. You might notice that these grids are surrounded by reflective pans designed to direct the light outward into the shield, where it is likely absorbed as energy and directed back into the power grid. Very efficient. Considering the fact that these drives are idle at the moment, I would not want to be here when they are engaged. We would be fried.”
Since he had seen enough of the exterior of the ship, Gelrayen directed his fighter inward, finding an opening around the radiant intercoolers. The passage was often tight or dimly lit, but they were always able to find a way through. The maze of machinery meant little in itself, but Gelrayen was able to begin piecing together a general design of the Dreadnought. He found that it was built in segments; four short segments that appeared to contain the jump drives with their intercooler grids facing outward. To either side of each drive segment was a power segment, containing nothing except stacked arrays of scores of vast conversion generators. The Dreadnought was perhaps ten times the size and weight of a single Starwolf carrier, but its generating capacity was at least a hundred times greater. The armored double tube of the power core ran along the center length of the ship, distributing and directing that tremendous power to where it was needed. The power core was itself surrounded by the bundled tubes of the flux coils that generated the powerful shield.
Gelrayen was able to plot his pattern of destruction easily. He was fearful of trying to destroy any of the conversion generators themselves, knowing that an overload could cascade through that entire array of generators with the power to destroy a large part of that entire system. Instead the two fighters moved along either side of the power core, placing their conversion devices between the shield flux coils and the jump drives. The detonation of those relatively weak devices would wreck the drives and destroy that section of both the flux coils and probably the power core itself, leaving the Dreadnought disabled and fairly harmless. At five second intervals, each of four pair of conversion devices was set to detonate. The shield would almost certainly come down with the first blast, and that would give the two fighters time to get away.
Once the conversion devices were in place, the two Starwolves retreated as far as they could to the back of the Dreadnought, using the ship’s bulk to protect their fighters from the explosion. They had no way back through the shield on their own. Even if they could have reattached the grounding cables, there was no way to pull the fighters back through. And taking an active drive through that shield would have been disastrous.
“Be ready to run the very moment the shield comes down,” Gelrayen warned. “There is still a chance that the generators will overload.”
“It seems a shame to destroy this machine,” Teraln commented.
“The shame is that we did not try this plan sooner. I should have been more supportive of Valthyrra, but too many elements of this plan sounded impractical. I would have never expected the Dreadnought to simply sit still and allow us to destroy it. Coming up on the first round of detonations,”
They engaged the primary generators of their fighters and brought forward engines to hold the ships stationary. As long as the drives were at least idling and warm, they would respond much more quickly to a sudden demand for full power. If the Dreadnought did happen to explode in a massive overload, a blast that would likely be measured in billions of megatons, then the Starwolves would have to race a double shock wave. The first would be a mass of radiation across a wide spectrum, the greatest and most deadly amount being a seemingly solid wall of intense light and heat, and an electromagnetic flare that would wreck a ship’s electronics. This shock wave would be moving at or very near the speed of light, meaning that the fighters would have to get into starflight to outrun it. Pushed to its limits, under an acceleration that even Kelvessan would find hard to endure, a fighter could kick itself over threshold prematurely after a thirty second run. The second wave, superheated plasma — the vaporized remains of the Dreadnought itself — would be much slower and would dissipate fairly rapidly, and so was of no consequence.
“On the mark. . now!” Gelrayen warned.
There followed a distant flare of light and a deep shudder passed along the frame of the Dreadnought, imperceptible to the fighters isolated in the vacuum of space within the shield. Because that first set of detonations was some ten kilometers up the length of the ship and contained deep within its machinery, the effects were outwardly deceptively restrained. The only drastic result was the abrupt failure of the shield, which collapsed without even an instant of hesitation. As soon as the two pilots could see the stars, they engaged their main drives and accelerated away. They were already well beyond visual range before the next set of explosions wrecked the second jump drive assembly.
“Commander, were you successful?” Valthyrra asked as soon as she was able to identify the two fighters and establish contact.
“Valthyrra, are you anywhere near?” Gelrayen asked in turn. “That machine has an array of generators that could feed an entire Union sector with power, and I cannot say whether or not they will explode.”
“I will maintain a safe distance,” she agreed. “I am detecting a series of major explosions within the Dreadnought.”