“This is as far as we go,” Quendari announced. “My speed has been cut so low that I could spend hours trying to push forward enough to make any difference in our distance from the core.”
“Are they still out there?” Keflyn asked.
“Yes, I suppose,” she answered, not very certain. The drone that she had left had only one command, to transmit a tight, achronic beam into the core of the planet if the fleet moved out of close orbit. Otherwise it was to keep communication silence, reducing the possibility if giving itself away.
“We might as well do it,” Keflyn agreed. “At your discretion.”
“Warming the conversion cannon for firing, building the power reserve to one hundred percent,” Quendari reported. “The jump drive is powered up and standing by.”
Keflyn nodded. “When you are ready.”
She would have been amused, if the circumstances had not been so incredible. Quendari persisted in granting her every courtesy as Commander, although she felt that she was just along for the ride. She had been able to make a few suggestions in recalibrating the jump drive so that it was far less likely to run away with itself, until permanent alterations could be made.
“All ready,” Quendari reported a few moments later. “At my count. Three. Two. One.”
The tubular shield of the conversion cannon shot out from the nose of the Valcyr, striking deep into the heart of the planet to its rocky core, and Quendari poured all the power she had to give through that passage. Jupiter was just large enough to be a failed star, lacking the mass to generate the pressures and temperatures in the liquid, metallic hydrogen to allow fusion reactions to begin. Quendari bridged that gap, pouring billions of megatons of explosive force into the heart of the planet. Fusion began as a sudden spark, adding more and more power into the system with each small reaction, the process expanding so rapidly that the heart of the planet went up in a flash of stellar flame.
Driven by that fierce, internal heat, the outer hydrogen shell of the planet expanded rapidly outward as it was warmed from within. The Fortresses came quickly to life in a desperate attempt to engage their engines and escape as the bands of color melted away in a stellar flare of brilliant light and searing heat, and the surface of the newborn star reached out to trap them. Some ran a short distance before they were caught, while others hid within their shields before the defensive shells were overloaded and collapsed.
Barely twenty million kilometers away, space itself erupted in a sudden flare of white-hot gas. The Valcyr hurtled out of the core of that brief, brilliant explosion, the substance of stellar material suddenly released from under vast pressures as it was carried through with the carrier’s short jump. She looped around wide, coasting on the thrust of her jump, turning back for a clear view of the new star.
“We got them?” Keflyn asked, daring to look up and see that they had indeed survived.
“Nothing escaped that I have detected,” Quendari reported. “I am still scanning the area carefully for even small ships, although I doubt that they had time to even think about getting to their escape pods. In fact, escape pods would not have had the speed to escape the shock wave.”
“And yourself?” Keflyn asked as she lifted herself from her seat at the commander’s station.
“My condition appears to be perfect. Even my conversion cannon seems to have survived the firing.”
Keflyn nodded. “Set course for Alkayja, then. Best possible speed, with the largest jumps you dare take. We might not yet be too late.” She paused at the bottom of the steps. “I do not like to leave Terra itself unprotected, with the possibility of more Union warships coming along behind the main fleet at any time.”
“If they do not arrive within the next few hours, they will find nothing but some odd energy readings from the area of the fifth planet,” Quendari explained. “There is no battle debris to be found, except for the wreckage of the Thermopylae. The explosion swallowed it all. Is anyone likely to leap to the true conclusion, as unlikely as it was what we did, or will they simply assume that the party has gone on somewhere else?”
Keflyn watched the newborn star for the moment that it was still on the forward viewscreen, before the Valcyr began to accelerate to starflight. “Then you are saying that it will not stay like that for long?”
“Probably no more than a few hours,” Quendari explained. “There is not enough mass to maintain the temperatures necessary to continue natural fusion reactions. Given enough time, it will eventually cool off, stratify itself back out, and look much the same as always.”
“How much time?” Keflyn asked.
“Perhaps only a few thousand years.”
“Oh.”
Velmeran stood for a moment longer, watching the black forms of the Mock Starwolf cruisers surrounding the three remaining carriers. Then he turned and hurried up the steps to the Commander’s station on the upper bridge.
“Get me a direct visual channel to the main monitor at my console,” he ordered, obviously very pleased with himself. “This is perfect. I have them right where I want them.”
Consherra turned in her seat to stare at him. “I beg your pardon? You were telling us a minute ago that Mock Starwolves do not even exist. Now we are up to our apertures in Mock Starwolves telling us to surrender.”
“They are talking to us and not shooting,” he explained as he lifted himself into the seat and rolled it forward. He leaned closer to the monitor, which remained obstinately blank. He waited a moment more, then looked up impatiently. “What is he waiting for?”
“He seems hesitant to open a visual line,” Korlaran answered.
“Then give me an audio line,” Velmeran declared impatiently, although he had no intention of surrendering the point. He wanted this errant Starwolf to see him clearly, and to see a few truths.
“This is Jaeryn of the Avenger,” the Mock Starwolf commander responded immediately, speaking Terran like a human would. Velmeran realized that he did not even speak the language of his own kind. “What is your answer?”
“This is Commander Velmeran of the Starwolf Fleet,” he responded, sounding very stern and impatient on his own part. “If you want to talk to me, you are going to give me that visual channel I asked for and then speak to me in a more reasonable manner.”
That was calculated to surprise, and it did. Velmeran knew that he was speaking to a very young and inexperienced Kelvessan, and someone who was not entirely sure of the things that he had been told were true. The monitor lit up a moment later. They were both surprised to see each other’s face, but Velmeran was the first to comprehend the full meaning. He sat back, smiling. “Yes, I think that you do understand. Where did they tell you they got you? That they had bred you themselves from original genetic material?”
“Well, yes,” Jaeryn admitted, obviously disconcerted. “They did warn us that you would look quite a lot like us.”
“But you look almost exactly like me, is that it?” Velmeran asked. “The Kelvessan were created by the Aldessan of Valtrys fifty thousand years ago. You and all of your companions were cloned from genetic material taken from me personally during a little accident I had about a year before you were born. You were not created by them, and your genetic material was not altered in any way. They do not have that ability. And I suppose that I might warn you now that Commander Trace would never trust you. I suspect that there are very likely to be self-destruct devices built into your ships that can be detonated by external remote control.”
“Yes, we found those long ago,” Jaeryn admitted thoughtfully. “Those things are no longer in our ships. How did you know?”
“A simple, logical deduction, based upon a long history of associating with Commander Donalt Trace,” he explained. “So there you are, I suppose. You can no longer trust the Union, and you have reason to doubt just about everything they ever told you. Now you are wondering if you belong anywhere. That is why you held back from the battle.”
“Exactly,” Jaeryn agreed, regaining some authority of his own. “Of course, the fact that they betrayed us does not automatically make you our friends. They raised us to believe in a great many high ideals that they apparently do not believe in themselves, and they told us many things about you that appearances argue could be true. It seemed to me that the best way to prove matters was to arrange a confrontation under circumstances that we could control.”
Consherra, seated at the helm station, rolled her eyes. “You would almost think that he is talking to himself.”
“Listening to your communications has also been very informative,” he continued. “Actually, we arrived before you did, so we have overheard quite a lot. It seems that we are both orphans in this universe. Are we people or are we property, Commander Velmeran?”
“I was just about to stress that very point,” Velmeran answered. “I would like for you to declare your intentions and be done with it. I have some very important business to attend right now. For one thing, I am going to make certain that Kelvessan are not treated like property again. Are you going to help me?”
Jaeryn considered that briefly. “Are you asking me to surrender to you?”
“I am asking you to join your ships to the Starwolf Fleet and help your own people in a time when we need you most,” he answered. “If you are not yet certain that you can trust us, then remove your ships until you have enough evidence to decide.”
“I think that we will take the chance, Commander,” Jaeryn said. “What can we do?”
“Move your cruisers in to guard those captured Union ships and give my poor carriers a rest. Have this channel stand by.” He sighed heavily, leaning back in his seat and permitting himself a moment of looking incredibly relieved. There was a limit to how many miracles even a Starwolf could pull off in one day. Then he looked up. “Get President Delike back on the channel. We were discussing a surrender.”
Velmeran had the Maeridyen and the Karvand returned to their bays, to act as an occupation force within the station itself. The military, under Admiral Laroose, was loyal to the Starwolves and following Velmeran’s orders. The civilian Kelvessan were otherwise in command of the station, and they had kept the situation there from falling into confusion and panic during the battle.
The president and leaders of the Senate, or at least those who had not already been arrested, had retreated to the government compound within the station, not daring to leave for fear of the crowds, mostly human, who wanted nothing more than to administer their own justice to the traitors. President Delike and his friends feared the Kelvessan, and with good reason. But it was their own kind, people who now felt that they had been deceived into embracing philosophies they now detested for the promise of simple greed and hate, who would have gone into the compound after the traitors except for Starwolf intervention.
Fearing unexpected trouble to come, Velmeran ordered work to begin on the Maeridyen immediately. At least none of the three remaining ships had taken any damage during the battle, even though both of the two new ships had taken missiles directly against their shielded hulls. Velmeran’s first task was to formalize the surrender of the Republic to Starwolf authority. That was a rather desperate act on his part, and one that was not strictly necessary. But he considered the act itself most important, the ability to begin fresh with a new Republic, bound by the laws of a new constitution that would guarantee the irrevocable rights and freedom of the Kelvessan.
Velmeran had never realized the hollow, pointless lives that all Kelvessan were forced to lead. They were an entire race of people eternally waiting for something they could not name to begin. The time had come for him to win this war, so that they could be united in purpose rather than bound to the service of need and duty, so that others could have the freedom they surrendered. Sixteen new cruisers, once they were modified for Kelvessan technology and their crews trained, would make all the difference.
He went to the Government Compound for the signing of the treaties of surrender in the company of Admiral Laroose, who was standing in as representative of the new Republic. With him went Commanders Tregloran and Daelyn and also Jaeryn of the Avenger, so that he could see for himself what to make of his choice. President Delike signed the papers reluctantly, still accepting the weight of his duty enough to dislike the circumstances. Marten Alberes and First Senator Saith only looked upon it as a tedious necessity. They were already packed and ready to be taken to the ship that they had been promised in exchange for their cooperation.
“This isn’t justice,” Laroose complained, glaring as he watched Alberes put the final signature to the treaties. “If you ever return to Republic space, you’ll answer to me.”