At first, he was at a loss to determine a way to salvage the Union that he thought the delegates would be willing to accept. The easiest solution, of course, was to declare that the human race could bloody well destroy itself if it had not yet learned to behave itself, and allow them to have at it. That was tempting, but Velmeran could not ignore an appeal for help. The Starwolves had invested too much in the human race to allow them to destroy themselves in war or genetic decay, at least as long as they were willing to try. But he wanted to find a solution that involved the Starwolves to the least possible extent, putting the greatest responsibility on the Union to police itself.
The answer that he eventually arrived at was to balance the forces that would now be acting upon the Union, using the threat of war to discourage fragmentation and the threat of alien intervention to discourage war. He sat down with the delegates and a large map of all of human space, both Union and Republic, and drew a line that divided the whole into two exactly even parts, each half of Union space getting an even half of Republic space. One half became the new Republic, with its capital at Vannkarn on Vinthra. The other half, after some confusion and deliberation, adopted the name Terran Confederation.
In order to strike a perfect balance, the two interstellar nations drafted exactly the same constitutions with exactly the same governmental structure. To insure peaceful cooperation and even development between the Republic and the Terran Confederation, they were joined together with the Kelvessan in the Triple Alliance, a hypothetical super nation with a congress which met at regular intervals. As an added insurance, both the Alliance and the Starwolves themselves had the legal right to intervene in the government of either nation if the terms of the treaties were violated.
That left the Kelvessan looking for someplace to call home. Velmeran had been quietly entertaining thoughts of his own ever since the unexpected appearance of the Valcyr. Terra, because of its shift into a colder, deeper orbit, was no longer an ideal world for human habitation, but it was perfectly suited to Kelvessan and their need for a colder environment. The Kelvessan would adopt Terra as their new home world, and Alkayja Station was to be moved there to be the base of the combined Starwolf Fleet. To maintain their own self-sufficiency, they were given control over a large area of space to form the basis of their own nation, consisting mostly of several worlds abandoned by the Republic in the distant past. Quendari Valcyr knew the location of a fair number of lost colonies.
The solution ultimately pleased all concerned. The Kelvessan had been betrayed by the very people they had trusted the most, and only autonomy would restore their sense of independence and security. The delegates were uncertain about turning over Terra herself, the cradle of human civilization, to be the new Kelvessan homeworld. But when they thought about it, they were just as pleased that they did not have the Starwolves in their own space.
One person who was not entirely pleased by the arrangements was Admiral Laroose. His loyalties had been with the Starwolves and particularly with Velmeran. But Alkayja would soon be a part of the new Republic, and he had been appointed to be an advisor to the new government.
“It still takes a little getting used to, I say,” he declared. “Of all possible turn of events, I never expected that I would be playing politician out of an office in the underground city of Vannkarn, with that… that Maeken Kea as my assistant. I will be glad when she is done with her quiet mourning of that devil Trace.”
“Maeken Kea was perhaps the closest that anyone ever came to loving Donalt Trace,” Velmeran said. “Let her mourn him all she wants. The Great Spirit of Space knows that few enough do miss him.”
Laroose stared in disbelief. “After all the grief he’s caused you! All the same, I will surely tear up your precious treaties and find myself a gun if she ever again makes the slightest hint that your persecutions drove Trace to act the way he did.”
“She said that?” Velmeran looked startled. “The bitch!”
Laroose glanced at him, but declined to comment. “So what do you do now? You have an interim government in place, and that finally gives you the time to pay more attention to your own people.”
“I am leaving,” the Starwolf declared. “As soon as they have Valthyrra up and going, Quendari Valcyr is going to lead the Methryn and the Vardon on our first visit to Terra — Earth, as she calls it. Keflyn is very anxious to get back. She was unable to tell the Feldenneh colonists that the Union fleet had been destroyed, so they are still waiting for their world to be destroyed.”
With the eight memory cells locked into their secured access tunnels and all connections installed and tested thoroughly, all of the physical stages of bringing Valthyrra into her new home were complete. There was nothing to do now but to access those memory units, assemble Valthyrra’s personality program in the matrix of the sentient computer complex, and see how well it worked.
Consherra was very glad to have Venn Saevyn to assist her in the process of starting up the new computer complex. Venn Keflyn had anticipated the need, and had arranged for an expert with considerable experience to accompany the Valtrytian fleet. Saevyn was not only competent in the repair of sentient systems, he had even designed a couple.
Consherra learned a few things about sentient machines that she had never guessed. One thing was their size. Most of the sentient computers built by the Aldessan were in self-contained units about the size of one of Valthyrra’s memory cells, five tons of machinery that was mostly just its protective housing in weight and memory storage in volume. The Starwolf sentient computers were six hundred tons of storage cells, primary, secondary, and peripheral units, a result mostly of their dedicated military roles, heavy shielding and shock protection. Ninety percent of their system involved non-sentient systems that could be accessed directly on either conscious or fully automatic levels. They also had their own maze of redundancy; even their conscious systems were spread throughout the nose of the carrier, and they could lose three-quarters of their circuitry before it even began to effect their operation.
“The trick is to avoid shock,” Saevyn explained as he and Consherra opened the access door to Valthyrra’s main terminal station.
“But how do you manage that?” Consherra asked. She was busy using one of the large access wrenches on the door, which opened exactly like those over the memory cells.
She removed the outer door of the terminal station, and Saevyn politely stepped forward to take it from her. “The key to the conscious intelligence of the sentient computers is in their array of liquid crystal processors. The matrix in the processor can change on command, so that the processor adapts its internal circuitry according to its required function.”
“Yes, I know that much,” Consherra agreed. The inner door slid up, and she stepped through into Valthyrra’s computer core.
“With simple, stupid computers, there is no harm if the liquid crystal processors change their form abruptly, even as often as several times each second,” he continued as he slid his own massive form through the relatively small opening of the hatch. His slender draconic body fit through easily, but he had to fold each of his long, triple-jointed arms and legs into a variety of contortions to get them through, and he was wearing a full armored suit to contain any loose fur. “But your ship is quite another matter, with eight simultaneous levels of consciousness and quite literally billions of liquid crystal synaptic connections in a network of hundreds of major processors. A rapid startup of such a large and complex system can be a very great shock, especially if you suspect trouble with the personality programming anyway. It can place the system and the programming into a conflict that might never be resolved.”