“There was nothing I could do,” she complained softly, weakly.
Keflyn nodded slowly, staring at the floor. “It often works that way.”
After forty thousand years of sleep inside this bed of ice, Quendari suddenly felt that it was time to do something different. Her scanners worked quite well in spite of being buried so deeply within the glacier, and she knew that the fleet of Fortresses had just left starflight and were moving quickly but silently into the system. There was a distinct sense of determination in the way they moved, and Quendari no longer doubted that they had come to destroy this world.
The banks of silent, lifeless consoles on the Valcyr’s bridge slowly began to come to life. The engineering station came up first, the handful of lights that had been barely visible expanding across its entire bank of monitors and consoles, the single largest station on the bridge. Defense and scanning came fully into the grid, followed by running systems and environmentals. The double navigation stations followed, then the helm console on the central bridge. Even the weapons station came up. Finally the main viewscreen was brought up with a snap of static, although the scanner-enhanced image was dark and hazy.
Keflyn looked up suddenly when Quendari brought the lighting up to the normal level, surprised to see the bridge coming back to life. She stared in complete confusion. Quendari swung her camera pod around, bringing it in closely. “Commander, will you take your station on the upper bridge? I have suddenly found that it is not in my nature to give up without a fight.”
“But I have no command experience,” Keflyn protested.
“You have far more battle experience than myself,” Quendari corrected her. “I have never fought. I need your help.”
“What do you intend to do?” Keflyn asked as she rose and began to climb the steps to the commander’s station uncertainly. “I mean, you can hardly bring your own weapons to bear on the ice to free yourself.”
“I am better prepared than you might think.”
As soon as Keflyn had lifted herself into the commander’s station by the overhead supports, Quendari rotated her camera pod around as if to face a bridge crew that was not there. Carefully at first, she began to bring her main generators on line. The large units responded willingly enough, one by one adding their power to the line of indicators at the engineering station. A distant vibration began to stir through the Valcyr’s space frame; that feeling of life that Keflyn had missed in this ship was returning quickly.
“This could be the end of you,” Keflyn warned when Quendari brought her camera pod into the upper bridge. She still remembered the ribbon that had fallen away in dust.
“It will be the end of me if I do nothing,” Quendari answered. “This way, at least I tried.”
She brought up her shields gradually. They strained against the weight of ice, collapsed completely against the hull of the ship, but she continued to add power until the ice began to snap. The surface of the glacier above the Valcyr suddenly lifted in a long, law dome. Quendari relaxed the shields, allowing the ice to settle, and suddenly brought them to battle intensity. The ice was thrown aside, splitting into large fissures, massive blocks of it along the forward edge collapsing to slide off the curve of her exposed hull into the cold lake far below.
Quendari engaged her field drives, and those systems responded with the same flawless ease. Pushing against the weight of ice still riding on her upper hull, she began to lift herself slowly straight out of her ancient bed. Massive blocks of ice, some dozens of meters across and weighing hundreds of tons, began to fall away in the white fog of crushed powder that cascaded from the wreckage in sheets and streams like waterfalls. Deep black against the white, the Valcyr rose proudly from the clouds of powder, the last small boulders of ice rolling from her hull as she rotated around to the east, the doors in her shock bumper that covered her immense forward lights and high-intensity scanners folding back as she faced into the planetary angle of rotation. Engaging all four of her main drives in a sudden flare of power, the Valcyr began to climb toward the stars.
“We are free and clear,” Quendari reported. “All systems are operating perfectly. Power at less than five percent, all generators on line. Weapons systems standing by. Present altitude is twenty kilometers at an ambient speed of two thousand.”
Keflyn stared at her questioningly. “How did you manage?… “
“I am not in so bad a shape as you seemed to think,” the ship explained. “Although my conscious systems were shut down, my automatic computer systems continued to care for this ship, providing constant maintenance and even fabricating new parts. Constant internal shields have protected my hull and space frame against deterioration and fatigue. My present condition is as good as if I had just completed a major overhull.”
Keflyn nodded to herself. “How are you doing?”
“The Valcyr is clear of planetary orbit,” the ship responded. “What recommendation would you make on our present situation?”
“My inclination is that we should run like hell,” Keflyn said candidly. “I did tell you about Fortresses. You have no shield detonation missiles to strip them of their quartzite shielding. That means that they will have both their hull shielding and their shell, both of which can easily turn a single shot from a conversion cannon. And you will have possibly only one shot from your own cannon, with whatever conversion missiles you might possess. You have no hope.”
“I see,” Quendari remarked thoughtfully. “My scanners report seven of these Fortresses, in addition to one ship that is even larger. It looks like this.”
She cleared her main viewscreen, replacing the image with the schematic of a very large ship. Seen in side view, it was obviously a ship of vast proportions, in most ways like the complex matrix of sharp edges and flat hull plates joined by shallow angles of the Fortresses. It appeared at first to be much lower in height than a Fortress, giving it the very long, slender appearance of a stingship. Then she realized that the height of the two ships was about the same, but this ship was nearly twice as long.
“Typical Union military thought,” she remarked. “When you find a weapon that works, make one twice as big, although I cannot imagine why Trace would bother. It does him no more good to have a larger one, certainly not as much good as two of the regular type would have.”
“Donalt Trace? He is the one who has been after your father these past few years?” Quendari asked. “What do your carriers do about these ships?”
“Sequential firing,” Keflyn explained. “Two carriers working together, or one of the new carriers that has two conversion cannons. The battle shells of the Fortresses can take anything you throw at them, but not for long. Operating under a load, they can only endure a matter of seconds before they have to come down. The sustained blast of a sequential firing overloads the shell and allows you to get at the meat. But that only works if you have already stripped them of their quartzite shielding.”
Quendari considered that for a moment. “So, I have to destroy eight invincible ships with only one shot, when one shot is not enough to destroy even one.”
“You do not have the power,” Keflyn reminded her. “But is there somewhere you can get it? Or is there some way that we could just render them harmless to the planet?”
“I think that I just might have a plan,” Quendari said. “But I need for them to follow me. Can we manage that?”
“We can try,” Keflyn agreed. “Put on your best aggressive stance and move out to meet them. Do something to make yourself inviting. They cannot afford to miss the chance to destroy a carrier.”