“Hello,” Bill answered pleasantly.
“Oh, debug yourself!” Lenna snapped, waving him away impatiently. She had been bent over the control panel in the front of the compartment, where the operator could select from between some three dozen tram routes. There was a very extensive map of both the passenger and heavier cargo tram routes. “Why, just look at this map. This place must be as large as a city. And a fairly large city, at that.”
“Many places to look,” Bill remarked innocently.
Maeken Kea stood at the window of the observation deck, watching the loading of the cutter that would take her back to Vannkarn. The ship looked small and lonely in the immense, underground bay now that the fleet was under way, just as this entire complex seemed silent and empty now that its primary function was done. She wanted out of here, but she did not want to go home. She wanted to be out with her fleet, at the command of a swift, powerful ship. Even a Fortress would do, for all that she seemed to have bad luck with the monsters.
Donalt Trace stood a short distance behind her, leaning back with crossed arms against the table that rested against the inner wall. He was a towering man, as big as she was small, a stately, ruggedly handsome man with streaks of white in his hair and a regal face lined by years of care and reconstructive surgery. They were both growing old in the pursuit of his schemes.
“It’s just not fair,” she insisted, turning to face him. “We’ve worked on this for years. Twenty years of planning all coming together at the same time, hitting the Starwolves in more ways than they can possibly handle. Next to you, I’ve done more than anyone else to make this happen. I want to be a part of it.”
Trace shook his head slowly, perhaps even sadly. Maeken expected no concessions from this man, not even for her. Obsessed men were supposed to be cold and uncaring, to use others as they used themselves. Most people assumed that Donalt Trace was a man obsessed with the destruction of the Starwolves, a certain Starwolf named Velmeran in particular. But Maeken thought that she knew him better. Fighting Starwolves was simply his job, and he took it very seriously.
Trace’s task was simple in definition, but seemingly impossible in actual implementation. He had to find a way to destroy the Starwolves so that the Union would be free to turn its military might inward to enforce the sterilization of complete segments of its own population. Genetic drift was slowly degenerating the human species; the essential rule of nature that only the strong should survive had not been in effect in hundreds of centuries, and the Union wished to impose its own standards of just who should survive and reproduce. The Starwolves were enough of a distraction that the Union’s ability to police and control its own was beginning to slip, with elements of internal rebellion growing rapidly for the first time in thousands of years.
Fighting the Starwolves meant fighting Velmeran, their tactical leader, a Starwolf of tremendous cunning and initiative. Twenty years and more had passed since Donalt Trace’s last meeting with Velmeran, and he had, in a strange way, benefited from that meeting. He had been matured by what had happened to him that last time. He had shed his blind loyalties, beliefs, and prejudices, his foolish self-limitations that had made him the simple, shallow man he had been. He had learned wisdom the hard way, through defeat and the cynicism born of his failures. He had become a serene, calculating man of tremendous depth, a man qualified at last for defeating the ultimate weapon of war, the sentient fighting machine of artificial design known as the Starwolf.
He had learned to defeat them in the only way he could. He knew now that he could never build better ships or weapons than they possessed. He had come to realize that he could never build better pilots, living or mechanical. The only way to defeat Starwolves was to be more creative than they were. The only weapon that would work against the Starwolves was themselves. Twenty years of careful planning had gone into a relentless series of attacks designed to make the Starwolves outsmart themselves.
He pushed himself away from the table, his biomechanical arms moving with their typical hesitation. “Every part of my plan is ready except for the contingency clause. That’s the part that only you can do for me. If we win, we win everything, perhaps even an immediate end to this ancient war. We certainly make our victory inevitable. If we lose, we lose everything. That means that someone I can trust has to be there to pick up the pieces.”
“No, don’t say that,” Maeken protested. “There’s no way that we can fail now.”
He stepped up close behind her, placing his hands on her shoulders. She almost could not stop herself from flinching under that touch, knowing the incredible strength contained in those hands. Stronger even than the hands of Starwolves, although he had only the two. “Just keep in mind who it is we’re fighting, and never underestimate them. They are very, very good. Their only weakness is that the only way they know how to think is like themselves. My only remaining concern is how much Velmeran might have learned from fighting us.”
Maeken glanced out the window, seeing that the cutter was being sealed for flight. She bent to collect her bags. “Well, I suppose that I should be on my way. They seem to be ready.”
“They have to wait for you,” Trace pointed out as he took one of her bags for her. “It’s your ship.”
Maeken laughed, giving him the benefit of the doubt. He joked so seldom, but he was often funny without intending to be. “So, what will you do when it’s all over? Retire?”
“If I can,” he said as they walked over to take the lift down to the main level of the bay. “It’s hardly going to be that simple, as if the war will just end. I don’t know how many of their carriers we can catch all at once. We might be hunting down Starwolves for some time yet to come. But it is good to know that we can finally defeat them.”
“If you are so sure of that, then why do I have to stay behind to pick up the pieces if something goes wrong?” Maeken said softly, mostly to herself. Trace did not seem to hear as he pressed the call button for the lift. Maeken frowned. “What will happen, when the war is over? I mean, everything about our military, our government, even our economy, is designed to run on this war. We build a massive amount of ships, weapons and equipment each year, and the Starwolves oblige us by destroying a large part of it all so that we can build some more. I had always assumed that we would have done something to end this war one way or another a long time ago, if we really wanted.”
“That might have been true, in the past,” Trace answered. “The war was a ready-made justification for limitless spending on construction and research, for tight control on trade and interplanetary travel. But then this business of genetic deterioration became an inescapable fact, and the war has turned from an asset to a liability.”
“But what do we do now?” Maeken insisted. “If the basic economic structure of our civilization is about to come to an end, what do we put in its place? What can we do?”
“What can’t we do?” Trace asked in return, then stepped out of the lift when the doors snapped open. “Don’t you understand? The Union wants to take itself apart. A war economy is a system that belongs to a forgotten age. I like to think that we have outgrown that, that perhaps we outgrew such things a long time ago and just never realized it. I would like to see my fleet become something very different than it is now, perhaps a body of explorers and peacetime troubleshooters, and I don’t mean anything military or clandestine by that, but an organization of scientists and diplomats and teachers.”
“In all the years that I’ve known you, I never suspected that you were secretly a starry-eyed optimist,” Maeken remarked as she hurried to keep pace with him. “So with everything else in the known universe about to change, what is to become of you? Time at last to be yourself? Maybe settle down and have children?”