Trace considered that, his face making no less than two almost comical contortions. “If I had children now, I would be just old enough to settle down and have grandchildren.”
Maeken frowned to herself. She could see that she would get nowhere along that line, at least not until the war was over. “Well, if those are your objectives, why not just make peace with the Starwolves? I’ve always found them a very reasonable and honorable people.”
“That is the contingency plan,” Trace said in a cold, tight voice. “But not now, not when we finally have them trapped. If we make peace with them, we’re stuck with them, and there is no place for Starwolves in our future. It’s their fault that this damned, ridiculous war has gone on so long. They would never leave us alone and give us a chance to go our own way, and I should hope that we have too much human pride to let a pack of glorified laboratory animals dictate our future to us. Right now, we’re fighting to stay alive as a race. If we have to turn ourselves over to the Starwolves to guard our collective conscience and police our every move, then we might just as well die.”
Trace walked in a rather angry silence, leaving Maeken Kea almost running to keep up with him. They crossed the twenty or so meters of the bay floor to the boarding ramp of the cutter. Trace passed her bags into the hands of a junior crewmember who was making final preparations for getting the little ship under way, indicating for another to take the bags she carried. They hurried into the ship with their burdens, and Trace turned to leave just as abruptly.
“Good luck, Commander,” Maeken called after him, determined that he would not simply disappear without a word. Once he developed a case of Starwolves on the mind, he forgot all else.
He paused only long enough to nod once, looking over his shoulder.
“Commander Trace!” she insisted, running after him a few paces. “You can surely spare me a moment more of your time. You’re on your way to your carefully contrived meeting with Velmeran, and if that goes the way it has in the past, then I may never see you again. There are a lot of things that I’ve never said, out of respect for military necessity, but you can damned well do better than that.”
Donalt Trace just stood where he was for a long moment, looking startled and slightly confused, before he turned and walked slowly back to stand before her. He towered over her, remote and silent, and Maeken wondered almost fearfully if her quiet hopes had only earned her his wrath. Then, to her great surprise, he bent to take her hand, and kissed it gently. From anyone else, that would have seemed a contrived and ridiculous gesture. Donalt Trace was, if nothing else, a man of quiet majesty and gallantry, and he had meant that gesture in perfect sincerity.
“To a future of many hopes, my little lady,” he said, then turned to walk away.
Maeken Kea wept silently, knowing that she had forced the question and wondering if she would have been better for never having known the truth in matters that she could never have the way she wanted.
2
Vast and dark, the Starwolf carrier moved quietly through the shadow of the ring, the black arrowhead shape of her armored hull almost invisible against the bands of bright colors of the immense gas giant. She stayed close to the underside of the ring, hiding in its pale shadow and the sensor distortion from the haze of fine particles of ice surrounding the ring, ready to run into the planet’s own deep shadow if unwanted visitors were to arrive in the system. No small, black fighters moved through her closed bays. Her few windows were sealed, and her running lights were dark.
On the Methryn’s bridge, Velmeran paced with pentup energy before the central bridge. Seated at the helm station, Consherra watched him quietly. She was reminded of Mayelna, his mother and predecessor, gone now these past twenty years. She had always been content to remain inconspicuously in the quiet recesses of the commander’s station of the upper bridge, while Velmeran would more often descend to the main bridge where he could move about, watching the various stations. He was a very capable commander, but he would never be completely at home on the bridge. He missed being a pilot more than he would ever admit, and Consherra would always regret the necessity that had taken him away from the one real delight in his life. He had been a legendary pilot, but he was needed too much on the bridge of this ship.
At least they would be meeting old friends this day. Tregloran had left the Methryn over a year before to prepare his own ship, the Vardon, for her launch and initial tour of duty. With him had gone Lenna, perhaps the most unusual crewmember ever to walk the corridors of a Starwolf carrier, as well as most of the rest of Velmeran’s old pack. Only the core of Velmeran’s special tactics team remained; Baress and the two transport pilots, Trel and Marlena. Baressa’s pack now served Velmeran for the remainder of his special tactics team.
Of course, Velmeran was anxious to see the newest ship in the Starwolf fleet. Valthyrra was a little anxious about that herself. Consherra had been quietly amused by watching the ship’s camera pod, which had been engaged in its own form of nervous pacing, looking over the shoulder of every bridge officer in an erratic cycle. Occasionally Commander and camera would fall in beside each other as they conversed privately. That was occasionally a bit of a trick for Valthyrra, who had to choreograph the movements of her camera boom.
“Have you heard any gossip?” Velmeran asked the ship as they both stopped just before Consherra at the helm station. “Has there been any hint that Theralda remembers anything important?”
“There has been precious little gossip on the subject of Theralda Vardon, beyond the fact that she is up and running,” Valthyrra explained. “It has been a closed subject, considering the importance of the information she may be carrying. Why did you never take me to look for Terra while you were still in the business of predicting the future?”
Velmeran did not answer, knowing when he was being teased and not necessarily too kindly. As it had turned out, the almost god-like psychic abilities of the High Kelvessan were limited to only a few months of hyper-sensitivity at the time when those talents were coming to their full maturity. Velmeran and several other of the Kelvessan aboard the Methryn were still remarkable telepaths, even by the standards of his own kind, but his apparent ability to predict the future had long since been severely diminished.
The Aldessan had been so disappointed, they had refused to have anything to do with him for a year.
Velmeran was still young for a Kelvessan — very young to command a ship of his own, young even for a pack leader. He was tall for one of his kind, although the Kelvessan did not vary greatly in most physical characteristics, and he was still smaller than most humans, even at the height of their genetic decline. Like all Kelvessan, he had large, dark eyes and long, thick hair of chestnut brown, but he was of mutant stock, the reason for his unusual height as well as the fact that he was somewhat less human in appearance than most of his kind, his long skull and hint of a short muzzle making him almost feral in appearance. Consherra, who shared his mutant features, had finally figured out that the High Kelvessan were beginning to resemble the Aldessan of Valthrys, their creators.
“Here they come,” Valthyrra announced, with an almost predatory eagerness that made Consherra look up. The ship dropped her voice in a conspiratorial manner. “They came out of jump exactly five light-minutes from the planet. I never had that kind of control from my jump drive.”