Venn Keflyn deposited Velmeran at the side hatch of the transport, then hurried to her own corvette.
Velmeran sealed the hatch, then paused. Lenna Makayen lay in an unconscious wreck on a medical stretcher strapped against the far wall, her left arm ripped away at the shoulder by the hail of crossfire that had caught her as she and Bill had hurried back to the ships after opening the overhead doors. That was only the worst of her damage, and Velmeran was amazed that she was still alive. Marlena was bent over her, furiously administering the best medical attention she could give. Bill, his four long legs folded beneath him, was already strapped to the floor nearby. He was scorched from the barrage he had endured, protecting Lenna with his own armored hull until help had arrived. He looked oddly forlorn.
“Valthyrra has the transport on remote,” Marlena reported without looking up from her work. “I know that you were wounded yourself, but can you take control of the ship, at least until we are clear of the bay? We would all feel better for it.”
“Yes, I have it,” he agreed.
Entering the cabin, he eased himself into the pilot’s seat, tossing his helmet into the other. He took the ship off remote direction.
“I have it, Val,” he said aloud. He brought the transport up, lifting the unfamiliar ship straight up through the open overhead doors. He did not engage the engines until he was in clear sky, and even then he accelerated cautiously to spare Lenna the worst of the climb into space.
“Are you well?” Valthyrra asked hesitantly.
“Well enough,” he agreed. “I will bring the transport straight into the fighter bay to save time. Have complete medical assistance standing by. Lenna is not going to make it, but just in case.”
“Of course, Commander.” Valthyrra sounded as dejected as Bill looked.
“Send out an achronic message to every ship immediately,” he continued. “Order every carrier to return to Alkayja Base at once, best possible speed. If no one is there to give them further orders, they are to stand off and await the arrival of the Valtrytian fleet. As for yourself, destroy this installation as soon as we are clear. Perhaps we can still catch Donalt Trace on the ground, assuming that he was lucky enough to escape Venn Keflyn. We will be going into starflight as soon as the ships are aboard. What is the best speed you can give us?”
“I can make most of the run home in a series of long jumps, running at high starflight speeds while the drive recovers and recharges between jumps,” she answered. “Perhaps five days.”
“Do it,” Velmeran agreed reluctantly, knowing as Valthyrra did that she would tear herself apart doing so. Because of the stress on the Methryn’s spaceframe and systems, they had been limiting their jumps to only moderate distances, and then only from relatively low speeds. The Methryn would get home in time, and she would go out to fight. But even if she survived, she would never fly again. This was likely the Methryn’s final run.
“What about Terra?” Valthyrra reminded him gently.
He shook his head weakly. “Terra is just one largely uninhabited and unimportant world in the middle of nowhere. We have to sacrifice that world to save our own.”
Even as he made that decision, he knew that he was probably condemning Keflyn to her death. Donalt Trace’s spy would probably kill her before anyone could get through to warn her of her danger, a long time before his fleet of Fortresses arrived to destroy that ancient world.
The Valcyr was coming back to life.
Quendari Valcyr had pumped the inert gasses from her vast maze of cabins and corridors as soon as she had realized that she was going to have guests. She was now bringing the ship’s atmosphere up to a tolerable level, but her millions of tons of cold metal and alloys were reluctant to loose the chill of centuries under the ice. Light filled passages that had seen only darkness for the better part of five hundred centuries, shining dim at first through a haze of frigid air.
Keflyn did not feel the cold. Jon Addesin, much to his embarrassment, had been about to take a chill, and he had been installed in a special cabin that Valcyr had warmed for him. His attitude toward Keflyn since their arrival aboard the Valcyr had been both vaguely suspicious and at the same time sullenly possessive. He was very afraid of missing important business. That, of course, had been the entire purpose in getting rid of him. Quendari was trying, but she obviously had a very low opinion of humans. If not for Keflyn’s good word, she would have probably put him out on the ice, perhaps not in the same condition that she had found him.
As soon as Addesin had retired reluctantly to his cabin, Quendari directed Keflyn to a waiting lift that would take her to the bridge. For her own part, Keflyn was given to wonder about Quendari’s motives, if not her sanity. She sensed a great sadness and an oppressive darkness from the ship, although all she knew for certain was that, brooding on some ancient tragedy, Quendari had chosen to bury herself in the ice and go to sleep. And yet the Valcyr seemed undamaged, and she had certainly been in good enough condition to lower herself into the gravity well of this world, a place where no Starwolf carrier was ever meant to go, and bring herself down undamaged on the ice. Why had Quendari done this to herself, in too much pain to live but unwilling to die? What had become of her crew? Kelvessan were immune to all true forms of mental illness; their physiological and biochemical failsafes were too secure. She had never heard whether the sentient carriers were inclined to insanity.
Quendari Valcyr gave her reason to wonder.
What did one do with a potentially psychotic Starwolf carrier, one of the largest and possibly the most powerful weapon of war ever built? Keflyn had to reckon her own small advantages in a hurry. First, Quendari Valcyr was completely out of touch with several hundred centuries of history. Her own assumption appeared to have been that the war had been lost and the Starwolves destroyed even before her self-imposed imprisonment had begun. She also did not know that the Kelvessan had recently evolved, the mutant stock assuming the remarkable psychic powers of their creators, the Aldessan of Valtrys. Keflyn certainly did not know what to do about shutting down the Valcyr, if she did come to consider it necessary.
The lift stopped, and Keflyn stepped out into the side corridor and then beyond the wide doors into the right wing of the bridge. She paused only for a moment, looking about. Some things, it seemed, had not changed since the first carriers had been built five hundred centuries earlier. Except for relatively minor changes in the layout of controls on the station consoles, she might easily have been on the bridge of the Methryn. The main viewscreen was dark, as well as all other monitors, and every station was inactive except for a few lights on main engineering and environmental systems. The rest were all completely lifeless, as if the ship itself were a dead thing. Even the camera pod was folded away against the ceiling.
“Would you mind pulling the retaining pin on the camera pod?” Quendari asked.
“Yes, just a moment,” Keflyn agreed.
Reaching up, she took hold of the tag dangling at the end of a long cord beneath the retracted camera pod, giving it a firm pull. That jerked the retaining pin free, allowing the camera boom to drop down from the overhead cradle. It unfolded slowly, and the camera pod rotated around to face Keflyn, the lenses spinning to focus on her. There was a large, red, velvet ribbon tied around the twin cameras, so incredibly old that even the synthetic material was dry and brittle.
“So much better,” Quendari said.
“You had put yourself down for long-term storage,” Keflyn observed. “Cold storage, if you will excuse the phrase.”
“That was a very long time ago,” the ship responded evasively, turning away.
“That was yesterday to you. You have been asleep all that time,” Keflyn reminded her. “We could make this simple. I know that you were one of the first carriers ever built. You were still completing your trial runs when you tried to test the limits of your new jump drive. You jumped outward and never returned. That led to the detection of a flaw in the old jump drives, which were completely abandoned until very recent improvements made them safe.”
“Yes, my jump drive ran away, leaping into incredible jump speeds before it disengaged,” Quendari explained. She glanced aside, although her lenses did not rotate to focus. “When the drive disengaged, I lost speed at a tremendous rate, the equivalent of light-years every second. Even my dampening fields could not compensate. I was subjected to a deceleration of nearly two thousand G’s for a hell that I endured for five endless seconds. I was badly damaged, my hull broken in many places and my engines and generators nearly ripped from their mountings. Most of my crew were killed outright and the rest were gravely injured, eventually dying when my hull lost all traces of an atmosphere.”
Keflyn said nothing, but she found that very enlightening in many ways. For one thing, Kelvessan must have evolved more than once since they were first created. Modern Starwolves could take two thousand G’s with a certain amount of distress, but it would hardly kill them.
Quendari’s lenses rotated as she turned the camera pod back to Keflyn. “I had only minimal power. I was in the middle of nowhere, hundreds of light-years outside the galaxy itself. Using the few remotes I had left, I was eventually able to get two main drives in operation. It took centuries at high sublight speeds to reach the nearest system, and there was no intelligent life that I could enlist to my aid. Using metal and organics taken from planetary debris, I was able to begin fashioning replacements for my damaged components. I had to disassemble nearly this entire ship to save it.”
“You restored the Valcyr completely?” Keflyn asked.
“I had all the time in the universe,” she explained. “You see, I had no idea where I was, nor even the direction I had come from. I sent out drones in every direction, all at their best speed, sometimes on journeys of entire years. I simply could not find even the beginning of a reference from the starfields. Eventually I realized that I had traveled quite a lot farther than I had dared to suspect. Not only had my jump carried me right outside our galaxy; I had been tossed up on the shores of another.”
“Your jump did run away with you,” Keflyn agreed. Inter-galactic distances were so vast that even the Aldessan, with their two million years of civilization, had explored other galaxies only with automated probes that made the round trip in hundreds or even thousands of years.
“I finally made it home, ten thousand years after leaving Earth orbit on my trial runs,” Quendari continued. “Things had changed somewhat in my extended absence.”
“Well, yes. What did happen here?” Keflyn demanded impatiently. “You say that this is Terra, but it bears precious little resemblance to the world as I have always heard it described.”
“Oh, it scared me to death, let me tell you!” Quendari declared. “Everything was finally working out so nice, and then I found myself in orbit over this iceball. Can you imagine how frightening it is to think that you might be in the wrong galaxy after all?”
Keflyn had to laugh. One more thing had never changed. The ships had been eccentric from the start.
“Union doing, as you can imagine,” she continued. “A series of conversion detonations in the upper layers of the sun upset the magnetic flux lines, and that caused a series of stellar expansions and contractions that produced some relatively wide variations in the gravitational tides. Most of the inner planets settled into more remote orbits. Venus is now setting about where Earth used to be, and could enjoy much the same climate with a small amount of terraforming. Earth herself is now well out nearly halfway to where Mars used to be. The moon settled in nearly twice as close at it used to be, which is why it looks so big. The original carrier construction bays are still up there, just the way they were when they were sealed up fifty thousand years ago.”
“That was rather drastic,” Keflyn remarked. “The Union must have had access to much higher technology in those days.”
“Not necessarily. All it required was simple conversion devices, shot in at high speed with a few meters of ceramic shielding to allow them to survive a few seconds of stellar heat. My own hull shields are capable of that.”
“And no one was left?”
Quendari grew quiet again, looking away. “No, they had all gone. The great ice sheets had already advanced quite far, crushing cities, although it was not yet very thick. There was so much activity in Union space, but I could find no evidence that the Republic had survived. I thought that the war was over, and the Kelvessan destroyed.”
“But why would you just settle down onto the ice and allow yourself to be buried?” Keflyn asked. “You could have gone to the Aldessan.”
“My life is my own,” the ship answered sullenly. “I could not save my crew. I was not there when I was needed to save Earth. There was nothing left for me to do.”
“But… “
“I was tired of life,” Quendari explained almost fiercely. “I was tired of space, of always moving. I wanted to stay in one place and be left alone. I thought how nice it would be to put just a few systems on automatic and go to sleep under that ice. It seemed to me that I would like to wake up again after the ice had retreated, perhaps when people had come back to this world so far in the future that the war, even the Union itself, would have been long forgotten. Then you came, with your four arms and delicate face, to frighten me with the reality that the Kelvessan had survived, and to terrify me with the news that that terrible war is still going on.”
Keflyn sighed deeply, wondering what she could say or do. She stared at the floor. “We could pull your memory cells and place them in a new ship. You could fly again.”