Velmeran glanced at her, startled. "You are a fighting ship. What will you do when the war is over?"
"I shall probably be decommissioned," she replied dryly.
"What?" he demanded. "You are not exactly a machine to be thrown away."
"No, and there certainly will be enough police work for me to do for some time to come. Humans are capable of incredible mischief. But, once our duties are fulfilled and our fates are our own, I am sure that our old alliance with the Aldessan will be strengthened. They made us both, you and I. At least they drew up the specifications. We are like them in heart and mind. Someday I would like to be an explorer, a long-range research vessel. I would need no special modifications."
13
Leaving Vinthra, the Methryn followed the freight lane directly to the Kalleth system. There she paused outside the system itself and far enough to one side of the freight lane to remain undetected. The Kalleth system was near to Vinthra, still very much in the inner systems even if it was not one of the rich inner worlds. Indeed it lacked a single world that could have been made even remotely inhabitable. It was just a system consisting of four gas giants and a wealth of ore-rich moons and debris, with a total population of nearly a billion divided between several large mining colonies and stations. Bulk freighters brought in all the necessary supplies and equipment, and left shifting all the mass they could manage in raw ores.
Velmeran approached this run with as much apprehension as he had the last time. Instead of demoralized students and an older pilot who should not have been flying, he now had seven eager and possibly overconfident students and a girl he could not quite consider his subordinate. In truth he had little to fear for the younger members. After their last battle, they were out to prove themselves experienced pilots and the only danger was that they might try too hard. But Dveyella was another matter altogether, and one that he did not know how to approach.
"Dveyella, we must be pack leader and pilot now," he reminded her gently, almost questioningly, as they rode the lift down to the bay.
"Meran, for as long as I fly with you, we must always be pack leader and pilot to a certain extent," she answered. "For now, we must forget that we are anything else. I will follow your orders without question or condition. You must not be afraid to give me those orders."
Velmeran smiled uncertainly. "Yes, I know. The problem is more likely to be with me, not you."
"Why? Because there is love between us, or because I have been a pack leader myself."
"Both, perhaps," he admitted.
"If that is the case, then I will leave the pack," she told him. "There are other things that I can do aboard this ship. But there is no one else I love. I will never allow anything to come between us."
The lift deposited them on the lower flight deck and they went directly to their ships. Time was running short, for their target ship would already be on the edge of the system before they could overtake it. Steena and Delvon would have as many chances at the freighter as time allowed before he let Dveyella pull it down — if necessary.
The nine fighters thundered out of the bay, holding formation so tightly that even Velmeran was impressed. He did not know whether they were inspired by their past performance or if they operated under a collective urge to impress their new member, but he was grateful for the change. The last time he had taken this pack out for battle, he had been concerned that Vayelryn might bump wings in her nervousness. Now she snapped her fighter up into its running position above the pack with casual precision.
Shayrn brought her own pack in close behind his own and the two formations moved as one into starflight. They were upon their prey almost immediately. Valthyrra Methryn had been flanking it as closely as she dared, every scanning device she had turned on it, remembering the misfired trap that had awaited them last time. She reported a crew of seven and a half-filled hold, mostly inexpensive bulk items and what appeared to be an uncertain number of very small ships, smaller even than fighters, but nothing that she could identify as dangerous.
Velmeran intended to verify that at even closer range, bringing his own ship to within a thousand meters of the freighter to allow his own scanners to pick it over as best they could. There was something about this that seemed wrong, but he had no idea what. His own readings confirmed Valthyrra's. He lifted slightly above the freighter and dropped back a short distance.
"Have at her!" he announced to the waiting pilots.
Delvon came in first, quick but careful in his approach, and fired. His target was an easy one; he missed, but not by much. He dropped back to await his second pass as Steena took his place. She was just moving in when Velmeran realized what he did not like.
"Scatter!"
His cry sent every fighter of both packs heading as fast as they could directly away from the freighter. Hardly an instant later nine small shapes shot out of openings in the freighter's hull, curious little ships that seemed to consist only of a generator, a large star drive in rear and a slightly smaller one forward for braking, and a single turret that might have belonged on a destroyer. Their targets had been selected before their launch. Each shot unerringly after one of the nine fighters of Velmeran's pack. And their speed was terrifying.
For the Starwolves, this was a new and frightening experience, for they had never met anything in actual battle that could match the speed of their wolf ships and their own reflexes. These machines could not only pace them, but at first threatened to overtake their prey. The fighters dodged and twisted as best they could, but their deadly pursuers reacted with the barest instant of hesitation. These were obviously robots, the best automated missiles the Union could build. Nothing but a Starwoff could have survived aboard them.
The Starwolves engaged their star drives at full thrust in an attempt to flee. Now the drives of the pursuing missiles flared like sustained explosions of raw energy, the roaring of those crystal engines filling the heads of the pilots and confusing them to an extent, their special senses blinded by that violence. The machines were tearing themselves apart, their drives unable to sustain more than perhaps a minute of that terrible abuse. But that minute was all they would need.
Then, as the first few seconds passed, their responses began to deteriorate as their engines overheated both themselves and their on-board systems. Velmeran destroyed his with a shot from his tail cannon after luring it in. Dveyella took out her own, and the free ships then went after the remaining missiles. The one weakness of the machines, they soon discovered, was that once locked on target they appeared to be blind to all else.
Steena was in the worst trouble. She had been in her run at the moment of Velmeran's warning. Three shots had glanced off the hull of her fighter before she was able to evade; the damage was not obvious, but the ship remained slow to respond.
Dveyella went to her aid, moving in on the missile with careful deliberation. Perhaps her attack was too slow. The machine proved to be more alert than she had anticipated, and sensing this new danger, rotated its turret completely around. Dveyella was not even aware of her own danger until it fired directly into her ship's forward hull. The stricken fighter tumbled off to one side, engines flaring but out of control, as the missile circled around for the kill. An instant later it was ripped apart as Velmeran dived to her aid, too late.
"Dveyella?" he called out questioningly as he fell in beside the damaged ship, but he could not wait for a reply. "Report!"