“What?” Jon Addesin asked, as if he had heard nothing. He laughed. “It was nothing, just a night bird singing in the trees. You’ve heard birds before, I’m sure.”
“No, not so close,” she answered. Birds were known to this world but very scarce; Keflyn thought that few breeds had survived the violence of the deep ice age.
He returned a moment later, holding a length of some tough vine of large, dark leaves and half a dozen large, red flowers like roses. He twisted the ends together and slipped it around her neck. “Flowers, growing on the very edge of ice. That’s the remarkable thing. Nature can make a thing of beauty to fill half the sky or small enough to fit in your hands, both of equal complexity. The first is as thin and transparent as mist, yet can rival the power of a starship. The other is fragile enough to crush carelessly in your hands, and yet it thrives within sight of glaciers that crushed an entire civilization from existence. Can Starwolves smell flowers?”
“Just barely. Our designers saw no great need for that sense.” She still made the gesture of inhaling the soft fragrance, doing honor to the gift. As a matter of fact, she could smell nothing at all. She looked up at him. “I never expected that you would suddenly turn into a poet.”
“A fair night brings it out in our kind, like wolves howling at the moon.” He stood for a moment, listening to the singing of the night bird. Its call had begun as a series of almost questioning calls, settling now into a simple, fragmentary song, as if answering some music that only it could hear. “They say that there is magic in a night like this.”
“I have heard that said,” Keflyn agreed. “I never thought there was any truth in that.”
Addesin offered her his hand. “What do you suppose would happen, if a mortal like myself happened to kiss a Starwolf?”
Keflyn laid aside the vine with its flowers, which had come apart and fallen from about her neck. She took his hand, rising gracefully to stand close before him. “I expect that nothing at all would happen, as long as a certain Starwolf was careful about her strength.”
She placed both sets of her arms gently about him and drew him close, a gesture that surprised him with its subtle boldness, and they kissed. Unseen for the moment, the single large moon of that world rose slowly over the eastern edge of the dale. Standing nearly full, it cast a cold, bright light that turned the waterfall golden. Arm in arm, Jon and Keflyn turned away from the secluded pool and sought the simple path leading back to camp.
Unnoticed in the night, a small, dark shape left the shadows of the woods. As it moved noiselessly into the moonlight, it was revealed as a machine, the rounded, featureless hull of a small automaton with a pair of cameras in a protective housing at the end of a flexible armored neck. It drifted slowly forward, suspended on silent field drives, its snake-like neck bent as it watched the retreating pair. Although it was no part of this world, Keflyn would have found it a familiar sight. It was a probe, the durable all-purpose remote employed by Starwolf carriers as their eyes and ears outside their own hulls. If she had seen it, Keflyn would have wondered why it was there. As far as she knew, there were no Starwolf carriers anywhere in the area, nor would any have cause to hide from her.
The probe paused at the edge of the pool where the two had sat. A pair of long, narrow bays opened in its lower hull, and a set of mechanical arms unfolded slowly. One small, slender mechanical hand reached down to take up the length of flowered vine that Keflyn had forgotten, the machine’s camera pod bent low, a gesture that was gentle, yet somehow sad. For ages she had slept, desiring never to awaken. The coming of first the Union and then the Feldenneh had caused her to stir, but she had slept again unconcerned. But the coming of a Kelvessan was something that she could not ignore, stirring memories as old and deep as the stars. She lifted her pod and quickly looked around a second time, watching the pair as they retreated over the edge of the dale and disappeared into the forest and the night. Slowly her gaze drifted back to the vine, which she laid gently back into the bed of grass and leaves, withdrawing the probe’s hands into itself. So she stood, hovering motionless in the night.
“This is it,” Jon Addesin said, stopping in the middle of the trail halfway up the ridge to block her path. “Are you prepared to be astounded?”
“Just go ahead,” Keflyn answered impatiently. She still had no idea of just what waited on the other side of that low hill, but she knew that Addesin was excited and extremely pleased with himself. At least he did not presume upon their one, rather brief intimacy. It had satisfied her curiosity, and his was the attitude of a man who had gotten rather more than he had bargained for. She followed him to the top of the ridge, and stopped.
She was every bit as surprised as Addesin could have hoped.
Previously hidden by the dense forest, the towering face of the glacier suddenly soared before her, a crumbling cliff of ice well over a kilometer in height and stretching away to either side in a broken line that eventually disappeared into the distance. The glacier was bordered closely by a string of long, narrow lakes, sometimes extending several kilometers away from the base. A thin layer of soil that had collected over the centuries had covered large areas of the top, bearing carpets of grass and occasional trees. The very sheer face of the glacier was characteristic of its present state of retreat, a condition also born out by the thin ribbons of waterfalls that spilled over the top.
The surprising thing was what she saw embedded in the dark ice. Protruding from the very center of the glacier was the black nose of a Starwolf carrier. Although only a small fraction of the ship was visible, over a hundred meters of the forward hull hung out like a dark ledge.
“Varth! Val traron de altrys calderron!” Keflyn exclaimed.
“Yes, I had thought so,” Addesin remarked, grinning hugely. “Now you know why the Feldenneh are so nervous about having something like that lying about. Even wrecked, a ship like that is something that the Union would give a lot to get in their possession, but they would have to be extremely secretive about it. They would probably eliminate all the colonists on this planet to maintain security.”
“But that is not a wrecked ship,” Keflyn insisted as she started down the hill toward the glacier.
“What?” he demanded as he hurried after her. “But that thing has to have been trapped in the ice for tens of thousands of years.
“There are carriers in space right now that are tens of thousands of years old,” she told him. “Even so, although we might build those ships to last, that one has been under half a kilometer or more of ice for a very long time, and even continental glaciers will slide and flow for vast distances. She would have been ripped to much smaller pieces than that a long time ago. She must be powered up, with structural shields in her hull and space frame.”
“Where are you going?” Addesin demanded, almost having to run to keep up with her.
“Since she is still alive, there might be a way in.”
He expected that she would have to stop when she reached the edge of the lake that stretched along the base of the glaciers for some distance to either side of the carrier’s nose. After all, it was at least half a kilometer across and the water was just barely above freezing… with nothing but ice waiting on the other side. Starwolves, however, could take worse than that in stride. Keflyn immediately began removing her clothes.
“Oh, be practical!” Addesin exclaimed irritably. “I’ll go get the skyvan. It can hover well enough, and it certainly floats.”
“I will get the skyvan,” she said. Although she did not explain herself, he had to agree with her reasoning. She seemed determined to run all the way back to camp some three times faster than he could, assuming that he could have even run the entire distance.
The skyvan hovered well enough for their purposes, and there was also a narrow beach of rounded stones and boulders of broken ice where they could land. They did not have to look for very long. There was evidence of old, collapsed caverns in the ice in the glacier to either side of the stranded carrier, and they soon found one that was very recent. It was obvious that new access caverns were constantly being cut as soon as the old ones were crushed by the shifting ice.
Unfortunately, the cavern — like all of the others — was four hundred meters up the side of the glacier. Addesin held the skyvan in a hover while Keflyn leaped overboard, then he landed the machine on a ledge some distance below and let the Starwolf haul him up with the length of rope she carried. He was even less enthusiastic when he found that the tunnel was fairly small, so that he had to walk slightly bent over.
“Is this entirely safe?” he asked as he followed her into the depths of the tunnel. The ice cavern seemed much colder on the inside than outside. “I mean, how do we really know who is living at the far end of this passage?”
“Starwolves, I imagine,” she answered. Then she realized what he was thinking and paused to turn to him. “In truth, I expect only to find the ship itself. You see, our carriers have sentient computer systems. They can take care of themselves.”
The most important question in Keflyn’s mind was not so much what she was going to find but how it even got there in the first place. A Starwolf carrier was a versatile ship. Although it had never been meant for atmospheric flight, its armored hull was certainly streamlined enough even without atmospheric shields and its field drive was powerful enough to bring it down slowly, even hover. The problem then, of course, was that a carrier had no landing gear. On level ground, the main body would be supported by the tips of the down-swept wings and the forward edge of the nose. She did think that the ship was leaning slightly nose-down, but it was hard to tell with so little of the hull exposed.
She still could not imagine why anyone would want to land a Starwolf carrier in the middle of a glacier. The best place to park a ship of any great size was in space. And while the inside of a glacier was perhaps the last place where anyone would look for three kilometers of starship, it would take hundreds if not thousands of years to bury anything that size.
The tunnel had so far been following a long, gentle curve inward toward the buried ship, although they could see only a very short distance ahead in the absolute darkness. Glacier ice was not very translucent, and a kilometer thickness of the stuff might as well have been a kilometer of rock. Keflyn’s small torch suddenly illuminated a blackness at the end of the tunnel that was the hull of the ship itself, centering on a sealed airlock.
“So now what?” Addesin asked. “We knock?”
“There is hardly any need,” a precise female voice declared from behind them.
They turned quickly to see a carrier’s probe hovering in the tunnel some ten meters behind them, at the very limit of Keflyn’s weak light. Jon Addesin had never seen anything like it in his life, and he drew back fearfully as the strange machine drifted noiselessly closer, its snake-like head with two large, bright eyes bent to watch him. It was a very disconcerting thing to find blocking the only way out at the end of a long tunnel inside a glacier, especially when it was watching him in such a baleful manner.
“You knew that we were coming?” Keflyn asked.
“I have been watching,” the machine answered vaguely.
Well, this was certainly a Starwolf carrier. Keflyn recognized that very typical manner well enough. Certainly well enough to know that she was facing a very perturbed and anti-social example of the species.
‘I am Keflyn, daughter of Velmeran, Commander of the Carrier Methryn and of the combined Starwolf fleet,” she offered, realizing that she was expected to make the first overtures. “This is Jon Addesin, Captain of the Free Trader Thermopylae.”
“What is a Starwolf?” the ship asked.
“Oh, my,” Keflyn muttered to herself, suddenly aware of the incredible antiquity of this ship. “Starwolves are those Kelvessan who still live on board the ships. There are still twenty-three carriers. We believe that we are in the final days of the war, although we have no idea how much longer the Union can hold out. From your point of view, it has to be just about over.”
“The Republic survives, and the Kelvessan are still fighting the war?” she asked, her camera pod dipping reflectively. “I had never expected that.”
The airlock door suddenly snapped open, the warm, bright light of the corridor beyond flooding out in welcome. Whatever this ship thought of her unexpected visitors, she had apparently decided to trust them enough to ask them in. Keflyn realized that the poor ship probably had no idea what to think, as long as she had been in isolation.
“I am Quendari Valcyr,” she introduced herself simply.
Keflyn stopped short, and turned abruptly to stare. “But the Valcyr was lost a very long time ago, in the earliest days of the Starwolves. You were the first jump ship.”
“That is a very long story,” the ship said, drifting slowly forward to encourage them to enter the airlock. Keflyn suspected that she was unwilling to speak before Jon Addesin.
The airlock closed behind them. Addesin was enormously relieved to be out of the intense cold of the cavern, although his joy was short-lived when he discovered the pronounced chill inside the ship. Starwolves required a cool environment for comfort, and Quendari had dropped her internal temperature even more to save power and preserve her electronics against heat decay. Then, as the inner airlock door closed, he seemed to realize where he was. For the first time since Keflyn had met him, he appeared impressed and even just a bit frightened by Starwolves.
Keflyn found the corridors familiar so far, and headed toward the nearest lift. She assumed that Quendari would then direct the lift to whatever part of the ship she meant to keep her uninvited guests, probably to put Jon Addesin into safekeeping so that they could speak privately.