"Valthyrra Methryn has something in mind for you, and I doubt that she would willingly let you go," Dveyella said. She rose slowly and shifted her shoulders to settle her armor into position, then turned back to Velmeran. "Perhaps you would be the most use here. We will go get Keth, and you can see for yourself what you think."
6
The Union carrier did not turn toward a new destination but dropped out of starflight and rushed into port so fast that it barely slowed itself for orbit. It was followed, discreetly and silently, by a machine hardly larger than a transport's star drive. The drone was fast and very maneuverable, and it had scanners and sensors of such range and sensitivity that the Union could only dream about. It also had the intelligence to perform its tasks efficiently, as well as judge new situations and act accordingly.
The drone watched patiently as the carrier settled into orbit, then it moved quickly, evading detection as it probed the planet to its very core. At last the little machine assembled all the information it had gathered into a neat package, opened an achronic channel and transferred it all back to the Methryn. Valthyrra quickly analyzed the information and was delighted with what she found. She quickly called Dveyella and the members of her pack to a meeting in one of the smaller conference rooms. The Commander left Consherra to watch the bridge, much to the first officer's dissatisfaction.
"My drone reported that the carrier reached its destination a short time ago," Valthyrra began. "It orbited just long enough to discharge a passenger and the remains of a fighter by way of a freight shuttle before moving on to the station to secure for repairs. The planet is called Bineck, fourth planet of a system by the same name, so called after the captain of the ship that first discovered it… a common enough ploy by otherwise unknown and unremarkable Union officers to stake a claim for immortality."
"If we can dispense with the trivialities," Mayelna remarked in her best patience-under-adversity voice.
"They seem to have decided upon stealth rather than security to hide their prize," the ship continued. She activated the viewscreen at the back of the small table where the group sat, turning her camera on its short boom to watch also. She quickly drew out the schematic for the system in question, showing the path of the carrier's approach, before moving on to the planet itself, drawing in features as she described them.
"The planet is uninhabited and uncolonized. The Union maintains a small orbital base, and there is also a major base on the planet itself, mostly a supply and refitting station for small ships. There are no facilities for larger ships, so they are dealing with the carrier as best they can. There are about fifty fighters at the station and some two hundred more at the base. There are also forty stingships and fifteen destroyers at the station. The carrier is in no condition to fight, and she is so tied up with cables and gantries that they could not have her free in time anyway."
"What about the carrier's fighters?" Dveyella asked.
"She lost those the last time we met," Valthyrra replied, and continued. "The extinct natives were great builders in stone. Even though they never developed a higher technology, they built fortresslike cities, kilometers across and so far down that the drone had to scan with deep-probe. Archeologists finished with these cities long ago and the Union has been using them ever since as longterm storage shelters. The native race died out about ten thousand years ago, long before the Union expanded into this area. We knew of them but never made contact. They were gone before we knew of their difficulties."
"Radiation traces?" Dveyella asked.
"No, the catastrophe was a natural one. A sudden, naturally mutated virus stripped the planet of vegetation in a quarter of a year's time. It was a type of super-virus, immense in size and complexity, that turned sugars into alcohols. Even grains stored in the deepest levels of the cities were ruined. The animal life either starved or died eating planet life that was infused with toxic alcohols… or from simply ingesting too much alcohol of any type."
"Quite an interesting little bug," Velmeran remarked. "Did the Union clear it properly?"
"They seeded a virus-chaser and imposed a full standard century of quarantine, but we had already eradicated it nine thousand years before. You do not leave nasty little things like that lying around for fools to blunder into. Which was a good thing, since survey teams came and went for half a planet year before they finally figured things out."
"But the Union is able to use these ruins, even after ten thousand years?" Dveyella asked.
"Ruins might not be an accurate word, since very little is ruined. These people built to last. And I will grant that the Union had to do a great deal of cleaning and a few repairs to make those cities fit for storage caches."
Valthyrra quickly pulled a file picture of a curious alien creature, short and powerful of build, with four long legs on a short main body and a pair of long arms attached to a small, vertical upper torso. Its eyes and ears were immense. "The natives were nocturnal cave dwellers. The cities they built are indeed more like caves, with few outer doors and no windows, and walls so thick that the temperature does not vary much throughout the year even in the levels aboveground. And most of the cities are well below the surface. They would come out on the surface — by night — to farm, but they would not dwell there by choice."
"The point of all this history and archeology is that Keth is being kept in one of the supply caches, not in the main base. He is under very little guard, and is in fact very easy to get at. There is nothing remarkable about the cell he is in, just an ordinary storage room like millions of other rooms in the eighty-seven major cities across the planet, but he is on a level so deep that Union technology could not possibly scan for him.
"So they stuck him in a hole as quickly as they could and are trying to pretend that nothing has happened, ready to feign bewilderment to any Starwolf that might descend upon them. But they made two mistakes. They do not know that we were aware of Keth's location from the moment they put him into safekeeping. And they have that half-wrecked carrier tied up at the station for repairs, right in plain sight. I can excuse the first, but hardly the second."
"Can you show me where they have Keth?" Dveyella asked.
"Simple enough," Valthyrra said as she began to display graphics on the viewscreen, beginning with a map of the planet. "Because of the great size of the major cities, the Union has always assumed that the native population was between two and five million each. We know, from actual observation, that few populations ever exceeded fifty thousand. Because of their naturally stable temperatures, these cities are to be found from the tropics to just within the arctic regions… just as long as a major crop could be grown in the region. The only exceptions are a few that were more dependent upon coastal fishing. They lived long lives, nearly as long as that of your own kind. They built to last, and they were very careful in their building."
Valthyrra paused to rotate her map of the planet, moving in on a single city. "The place where they have Keth is on the far northern coast of the larger continent, one of those fishing centers on the edge of the arctic sea. The city itself is just a few kilometers inland in a fold between ridges of a rather rugged band of mountains. The city is a fairly large one, for its coastal cliffs had caves enough for a vast fleet." The image focused on a section of the city. "Keth is here, in the southwest corner. You can land your ships here on this wide ledge on the ridge overlooking the city, no more than a kilometer from the southwest entrance."