“That depends upon what you mean by salvage,” she answered after a long moment, breaking off small pieces of one slender stick to toss one by one into the fire. “We will almost certainly duplicate her memory cells and bring her to life in a new ship — if she will allow it, of course. It probably suits her just as well to brood inside that wall of ice until she finally hatches her personal little egg of grief.”
Addesin was startled by the force of her reaction. But he had to come back, as if driven against his will. “Then you mean that the Valcyr we know will never fly again?”
Keflyn glanced up at him. “She is old, Captain Addesin. She is two-and-a-half-times as old as any other ship in the Starwolf Fleet. More than three-fourths the age of human civilization. And she has been sitting locked inside that damned block of ice most of that time, without maintenance. Carriers need a complete overhaul every hundred years at the most, and it has been four hundred times as long since anyone poked into her works.”
“Yes, but just think of all the back pay she has coming.”
Keflyn looked over at him in surprise, and they both laughed. “Starwolves are poor people, Captain Addesin. You might as well go to bed. You know that I will watch all night if I have to.”
She paused for a moment, listening. Addesin watched her closely, wondering what her sensitive ears might have detected. He knew only that her hearing was very good, although he had no idea how good. He certainly did not know that she could hear in ways that he did not expect. After a moment she stood, turning to step nearer to the edge of the forest, away from the fitful light of the fire.
“Something is coming,” she said after a moment.
“The sky van?” Addesin asked. He rose to stand as well, moving slowly to stand immediately behind her, looking into the night over her shoulder. He also did not have her large, sensitive eyes.
“No, much smaller than that,” she said. “It might be one of Quendari’s probes.”
“Close?” he asked.
He pulled a large service pistol from within his jacket, bringing it up and then lowering its short, wide muzzle until it was aimed at the middle of her back, at the indentation in the very center between her four shoulder blades.
“It is circling around our camp now,” Keflyn answered, and she sounded puzzled. She had tried to sense the identity of that silent, flying thing, and it was nothing she had expected.
Addesin fired.
Perhaps, because she had been sensitive to thoughts, probing the night for other minds, the violence of his own thoughts came to her in a sudden rush. He was aiming for her heart, hoping that the shot would kill her quickly, wondering if her ferro-precipitate bones would block the bolt. Instinct operated quicker than conscious thought, and she dove for the cover of the glacial-tossed boulders in a move so fast that he did not even see her go before he pulled the trigger.
Still holding the gun, Addesin took several steps back, uncertain whether or not he had even hit her. She had leaped aside so suddenly and so swiftly that she had quite literally vanished from his sight. He knew that he had underestimated her reflexes, but he could not understand how she could have known. He stepped back, giving himself time to aim and fire as soon as she broke from cover. The gray boulders that filled the clearing provided her too much cover. Except for the protection they offered, she would have already been dead and he would have been spared the torment of hunting down someone he did not want to kill. Someone he might not be able to kill, now that she was warned. She had no weapons. Her speed and strength were weapon enough.
A scream broke the depths of the night. It was a strange, eerie scream like some shrill keening, so high in pitch that Addesin could not have heard it or he might have been warned, so high that even Keflyn was only dimly aware of it. The force of some unseen blow suddenly pushed Addesin to his knees, then he fell heavily to the ground. The back of his jacket was still smoking, yet Keflyn had seen no bolt.
Warned by something she could not understand, she stayed under cover. A large, black form sailed across the length of the clearing on broad wings, the faint whisper of wind through fur the only sound. Then Keflyn understood. The creature was a Kandian spark dragon, a fierce hunter thousands of light-years away from the world where it belonged but one that she knew inhabited the wilds of modern Terra. The odd movements that she had sensed were those of a small hunting pack. Addesin had been hit by the blast from a dragon’s tightbeam ultrasonics, fully as powerful as a small sonic disrupter. She doubted that Addesin was still alive, and hoped for his sake that he was not.
The harsh, hunting cries of the dragons began to grate against the gentle silence of the night. The pack knew she was there, hidden from them, and they were frustrated by their inability to get at their fallen prey. Keflyn expanded her senses, knowing now the nature of what she sought, and found that there were seven, enough that at least one of the circling pack had her within range at any time. Her guns were packed away with her armor. Addesin was laying across his own gun, and that was more than five meters away. Keflyn was already in hypermetabolism, but she was not sure that she was quick enough to get that gun and dive back under cover before one of the dragons caught her.
She was given to wonder if this was how freighter captains felt when they found Starwolves on their tails. The difference was that Keflyn felt certain that she could survive this trial, if she moved carefully.
A sudden bolt cut through the night, catching one of the dragons in a burst of flame that brought it from the sky. The dark shape of a carrier’s probe settled into the clearing, its flexible neck extended to bring to bear the small gun located below the lenses of its enclosed camera pod. It drifted forward, moving to shield Addesin’s motionless form with its own armored hull. A tight beam of ultrasonics from a dragon caught the probe on its upper hull, striking a scattering of bright sparks as it was deflected by the machine’s heavy armor. The probe seemed to flinch, lowering its camera pod to protect its lenses as the barrage of ultrasonics threatened its electronics.
Quendari herself was in no danger, even if the probe had been destroyed. But her plight forced an unconscious response from Keflyn’s protective instincts. She stepped out into the clearing and lifted her upper right arm, aimed at an approaching dragon. An almost invisible envelope of blue light surrounded her for just an instant as she commanded the tremendous psychic powers of her Kelvessan heritage to their fullest extent. A thin, blue bolt shot out from that envelope, aimed along the length of her arm, and the second dragon was hurtled from the sky as if it had been struck by some immense force. The rest of the pack gave up the hunt and fled into the night, screaming their fury.
Keflyn rushed to Addesin’s side, carefully turning him over. She was surprised enough to find that he was still alive, although she doubted that they could get him to the limited help available on this world in time to save him. She took the precaution of confiscating the gun, not trusting what he might try even yet.
“Your Feldennye friend will be here with the sky van very soon,” Quendari said, drawing the probe back a short distance. “I was leading him, since he had no way to track your position accurately. He will see your fire.”
Keflyn shook her head slowly. “It is too late.”
“Keflyn?”
Addesin was looking up at her, his pain obvious. She had nothing to spare him even that.
“It might be ridiculous to ask that you forgive me,” he said. Each breath he drew to speak brought searing pain; she suspected that the sonics must have nearly burned out his heart and lungs. “I got what I had meant for you, but that bolt would have still been in your back if you had not jumped. It took me a long time to talk myself into shooting you. All in all, I still wish that it had been you instead of me.”