The transport rose and began moving slowly across the width of the bay, its speed hardly more than a hover. Velmeran lifted his own fighter from the floor of the bay, leaving his landing gear down as a caution against bumping the down-swept portions of his wings against the ground. The Starwolf ships were maneuverable, but these tunnels would still demand all the skills of the Methryn’s best pilots. He was most worried about Venn Keflyn. Her interceptor was twice as large as a transport, and wider by half again than the short-winged fighters.
He reminded himself that she had well over five hundred years of flying experience. It was like having a fox-faced Methuselah for a pilot. He hoped that she was bringing up the rear. Her big ship could settle down and shield itself like a turtle, or rotate to bring the firepower of a cruiser to bear on anything coming up behind.
Lenna led the transport into the larger tunnels of the freight trams, working their way around the burning areas of the installation. Velmeran did not like having to take the tram passages, and he would have trusted them even less if he had known what Lenna had done with a runaway security tram. Under the circumstances, he simply had no choice. At least they were able to make fairly good speed through the wider tunnels, and Lenna led them to their destination within a matter of minutes.
The transport slowed, then turned off down a side passage that led within a hundred meters to a landing bay, one that was vast in size. When Velmeran settled his fighter in the center of the bay, he guessed that it must be some 250 meters deep, 800 wide and more than 1,200 long. The bay was several times the size of the Union’s largest ships of war, except of course for the immense Fortresses. Four or possibly five of their largest carriers could be brought down side by side in this bay, with room left over for a small fleet of cruisers.
The most startling aspect was that no large warship in the Union fleet had the capabilities of landing itself planetside.
He unstrapped from his seat as quickly as he could and dropped down from the cockpit of his fighter. Lenna was already waiting for him, staring up at the tremendous double doors that closed the ceiling of the bay. She seemed to be very pleased with herself, in a grim manner.
“Commander, this bay was meant to service a single ship,” she told him. “There are sixteen bays exactly like this one located in a sub-complex in this section of the installation, which is separated from the main base by several kilometers. When this area was active — until about two months ago — no one except military personnel with special clearances were allowed through the very limited numbers of tunnels into this section. There are certain things that I do not have to tell you about a ship this size being able to land itself, but the ship that once filled this bay is by no means the Union’s secret weapon. It is only a tool for transporting and servicing that weapon.”
With that flourish of melodramatics out of the way, Lenna turned to lead him across the bay. Only Venn Keflyn followed, leaving the others to watch the ships.
“I went ahead and assembled some important pieces of evidence here, so that we would not have to spare the time for me to drag you over a wide area of this place,” she explained.
“Good,” Velmeran said quietly. Lenna might be used to it, but he did not care for walking about a major Union installation as if all the time in the world was his own.
They left the bay through a pair of wide doors in the very center of one long side, beneath entire banks of observation decks. Lenna seemed to know her way very well as she led them some distance along the wide corridor, turning off abruptly into an area which looked to be a large complex of apartments and personal support facilities. Suddenly the shapes of corridors, rooms and equipment reminded him less of the older portions of the installation and more of the interior of a ship, as if some effort had been made to surround those who had once lived here with an environment that was always familiar and comfortable to those who lived their entire lives in space. It was not standard Union practice to house any personnel so near to a landing area, except for small interceptors employed in defense that might need to launch on a moment’s notice. No ship made to fit that bay could have fallen into that category.
They entered yet another area of the complex, this part clearly a pilot’s training area. One large room contained a row of simulators along one wall, all complete with large, vision domes over their cockpits and multidirectional artificial gravity units to mimic the inertia of turns. Unfortunately, the simulators were entirely utilitarian on the outside and gave no hint of the size or form of the ship they imitated.
“As you can see, this is the larger training room where both pilots and service personnel were made familiar with their ships,”
Lenna explained. She indicated for them to wait as she walked toward one long door along the back wall. “They did have actual examples of their new fighters, presumably for their technicians to have to tear down and put back together again.”
Lenna pressed a button on the wall, and the wide, high door began to lift slowly into the ceiling. The keen eyes of both the Starwolf and, to a lesser extent the Kelvessan, could pierce the shadows somewhat, revealing to them a dim, massive form of sleek lines and sharp angles, clearly some manner of fighter possessing atmospheric control surfaces. Once the door was completely raised, Lenna pressed a second button and the lights inside the chamber came on.
After Lenna’s dramatic posturings, they had expected the worst. Velmeran felt oddly disappointed, if this was supposed to represent the end of civilization as they knew it. It looked, for all practical purposes, to be only a copy of a Starwolf fighter, slightly larger with more massive engine housings under its wings and a larger stardrive, the same dull, nonreflective black. To Velmeran, it all came back to that same old problem that the Union had always faced. No human pilot had the reflexes to match the enhanced abilities of the Starwolves, and the Union had never possessed the genetic technology to engineer pilots of their own, nor could they build computer control systems that could outfly a Starwolf.
He frowned mightily. “Lenna Makayen, pull down your pants to give me an unobstructed target and bend over. I am going to kick you all the way to Vannkani, and you can tell Donalt Trace personally that it will not work.”
Lenna looked extremely hurt. “Trust me to know my business better than that, Commander. This is just another tool, the fighters that go with that big new carrier. The real secret weapon is already gone, and you’ll not be finding any examples of the art lying about this place just waiting to make your acquaintance.”
She turned and stalked off toward one side of the chamber, leaving both Velmeran and Venn Keflyn to hurry after her.
“Then what in the name of the great Spirit of Space is it?” he demanded.
“Donalt Trace figured it out all for himself twenty years ago. What in all the universe is the only thing that can fly and fight and think as good and as quick as a Starwolf?”
In answer to her own question, she pulled open the double doors of a metal cabinet standing against the wall just inside the room. Inside, hanging on its rack, was an armored suit very much like that worn by the Starwolves. Most importantly, it had the same double set of arms.
“Oh, so there have been Kelvessan here!” Venn Keflyn exclaimed with surprise and tremendous delight for solving that mystery. Then, realizing what she had said, she glanced over at Velmeran very contritely, her large ears laid back. “You know, it might very well be the end of civilization as we know it.”
“Bill was able to get these figures for us,” Lenna said as she began spreading papers across the table in the training room. “The Union has all sixteen of their Mock Starwolf carriers in operation. Each carrier has the capabilities of carrying 1,000 fighters. At the moment, of course, they have only about 200 pilots to each ship, making a total of some 3,350 pilots. The Starwolves, of course, have some 5,000 trained pilots, so you are ahead of them there. Now the Union refers to their Mock Starwolf carriers as Special Assault Cruisers. The ships are about a third the size and weight of a ship like the Methryn, about as heavily armed and armored. They are slower in starflight, and of course they have no jump drives. But there are indications that they are just a bit faster and more maneuverable than your carriers. They don’t have conversion cannons, but they do carry a much larger array of conventional, nuclear, and conversion warheads in starflight-capable missiles.”
“I suppose that they have no sentient computer control,” Velmeran dared to ask, wondering just how many surprises he was in for this day.
“They have the same semi-sentient computer complexes used in the Fortresses,” she answered. “Of course, the Mock Starwolves take complete control over their ships during battle. The Mock Starwolves and their carriers are designed to work, at least in major battles, as the perfect complement to the Union’s Fortresses.”
“Where did Donalt Trace get Kelvessan of his own?” Venn Keflyn asked.
“They all came from Commander Velmeran,” Lenna responded.
The Valtrytian twitched her ears with surprise, and turned to look at him. “My, but you have been busy.”
“Well, more specifically, they all came from the genetic material from that hand that Trace got from the Commander more than twenty years ago,” Lenna explained. “Rather than just endlessly cloning perfect replicas of Commander Velmeran, they decoded the genetic material to the best of their abilities to clone new individuals with a relatively wide area of genetic variations. There are more than ten thousand in all, about evenly male and female, and no two are exactly alike.”
Velmeran frowned. “How very convenient for them.”
Lenna nodded. “To make matters even more interesting, while they might be Mock Starwolves, they are real Kelvessan. They are beginning to successfully reproduce among themselves, and they could just as easily reproduce with other Kelvessan.”
Velmeran stood for a moment, staring at the diagrams of the Mock Starwolf cruiser. He had to admit that the ship did have its virtues. It possessed all of the advantages of the Starwolf Carriers, in a package more dedicated to the role of fighting ship, patrol cruiser, and scout. Over a third of a Carrier’s interior space was devoted to massive bays and cargo holds. By deleting much of that empty space and by carrying a smaller and less specialized fleet of support vessels, the cruisers were a third the size of a Carrier, but with engines and generators that were only half as large. In comparative scale, the Cruiser had the potential of being the faster, more maneuverable, and more efficient fighting ship. At least it also possessed the handicap of Union technology.
But just how much a threat were ten thousand Mock Starwolves in sixteen Cruisers? He had fifty thousand Starwolves or more in twenty-three Carriers. The answer, unfortunately, was hardly that simple. He might have twenty-three superior ships, but they were spread over a vast area of space. If sixteen Cruisers came all at once against a single Carrier, or even two or three, then he did not doubt he would lose ships.
Life just became much more complicated, and it was up to him to find the best possible answer in a hurry. What were his priorities? Did he call in Starwolf Carriers from their patrols, where they were needed to protect the small, independent worlds from Union expansion, so that they could hunt the false Starwolves in powerful packs? He also needed those Carriers behind him when he returned to Alkayja to force the resignation of the present government and save the Kelvessan from slavery and extermination. And where were those Mock Starwolves right now? Were they coming up behind the Methryn at that very moment?
“What manner of control is Donalt Trace using against his Starwolves?” he asked after a long moment.
“The most subtle and cunning,” Lenna answered, her voice hard and angry. “I suppose that he never completely trusted his ability to just order them around like machines, as much as he might have wanted. No, he brought them up with a lifetime of instruction to believe that they are the true Starwolves, created by the noble Union to finally destroy a band of renegade genetic mutants released by a vile, alien enemy during an ancient war. The only way to control Kelvessan, actually. You just encourage them to believe that they are doing the right thing. Like Trace has done, you give them their freedom and then ask them to help you. As a gesture of his supreme and benevolent trust in them, his Mock Starwolves are answerable to no human commanders short of the Defense Council, and no humans ever go on board their ships. Autonomy of this nature does more than anything to encourage them to believe that they are on the side of right.”
“Commander?” Venn Keflyn asked gently. She had been watching him closely.
He looked up at her. “Your people created us, and then you set us free. It worked once before. It could work again.”
“No, the situation is very different,” she assured him. “Commander Trace must take many things for granted that we never did. He has to contend with the truth that he must hide from them. How can he set them free, yet hide the truth from them forever?”
Velmeran considered that, and after a moment he looked very surprised, even stricken. “No, he cannot, can he? Why would he exchange one set of Starwolves for another, unless he means to destroy both?”
“But what can he do about it now, once he has sent his own Starwolves out on their own?” Lenna asked, understanding what he meant.
“Trace has to destroy his own Starwolves as soon as they have completed the task they were created for,” Velmeran explained. “If I were him, I would have those Cruisers rigged to explode by remote detonation.”
“Commander?” Venn Keflyn prompted him softly, sensing his growing concern and fear.
“He is here,” Velmeran said. “He has been here all along, waiting for me to come to him.”
“Oh, yes. That is the part I was coming to,” Lenna exclaimed.
“I cannot say that he has necessarily been waiting,for you, but Donalt Trace has been here all along. Ever since his Mock Starwolves took off, which was only a matter of days before I arrived. That shadow of his, Maeken Kea, took off for Kanis on the very night I arrived.”
Velmeran was still pulling on his helmet as he hurried back to the landing bay, followed closely by Venn Keflyn and Lenna Makayen. This place had taken on all the characteristics of a trap, perhaps for just himself or for the Methryn, but quite possibly for them both. He would not feel better about it until he had himself off this planet, and had his ship well away from this system. Then he would have to decide what to do about his many problems, and in a hurry. But for right now, he was sure of just one thing. Donalt Trace had been waiting for him. That meant of course that Trace had intended for him to come.
“Everyone to your ships,” he ordered as soon as he had access to his suits regular com link. “We will be getting out of here in a hurry. Val?”