Tactical Error (37 page)

“Even Don suspected that the Starwolves would confound him in the
end,” Maeken Kea said, as she stood with Velmeran and Councilor Lake
after Keflyn related her story a second time. “I feel sorry for him, more
than anything.”

“And yet he kept you in reserve, for this,” Velmeran said.

She shook her head firmly. “He never knew that the High Council meant
to offer surrender if he failed. He honestly believed that, no matter how
things turned out, he had put you at too many disadvantages for you to recover.
Too many of the errors in tactics were his own.”

“We were lucky,” Velmeran told her. “He never expected the
defection of his own Starwolves even before the battle began. And none of us
expected the recovery of the Valcyr and her defeat of an entire Fortress
fleet.”

He turned abruptly to Richart Lake. “Why do we not go for a short
walk, just you and I?”

“What, now?” Lake was surprised, but obviously not reluctant to
the idea.

“What better time?” Velmeran asked. “I am not a diplomat
or a politician, yet I find myself the temporary ruler of an interstellar
empire. You seem to be speaking on behalf of the Union. The things that we are
about to decide have to serve hundreds of worlds for a very long time, so we
have to get it right.”

Leaving the others to stare, they turned and walked slowly along the wide
promenade deck, occasionally glancing out the wide bank of windows to one side.
If Richart Lake had been taken by surprise by this remarkable approach to
interstellar diplomacy, he also seemed quietly impressed. For his own part,
Velmeran was beginning to suspect that there was more of the old Jon Lake in
his grandson Richart than anyone had credited. “I am going to make a deal
with you,” the Starwolf continued. “The first problem with such negotiations
is that each side must figure out what the other wants, then work to some
mutual agreement. That slows things down and adds too much opportunity for
error. I am going to tell you what I want out of this, and you are going to
tell me what you want.”

Lake made some vague gesture of agreement. “Very well.”

Velmeran glanced out the window, where a Starwolf cruiser was drifting in a
shared orbit with the station, quietly standing guard. “The Starwolves
want out of the business of war. We want lives of our own and the ability to
find our own destinies. We want the assurance of knowing that no one will ever
again treat us like machines or property. The human race is going to have to
learn to police its own conscience.”

Lake nodded. “The Sector Families want out of the business of
government. Too many headaches and too much grief. We want to salvage what we
can of our business, but we are willing to give up our monopolies.”

“It took you fifty thousand years to decide this?” Velmeran
asked.

“No, we like things just the way they’ve always been,”
Lake corrected him. “There is tremendous profit in monopolies and
despotism, but we see that we’ve lost the war. We can draw this out and
force you to reduce us to poverty, or we can call an end to this now and
salvage what we can. So we offer you this deal. We will make it easy for you
and give you an immediate end to this war. We surrender nearly all political
power, and we break up the Companies into reasonable sizes. In return, you
allow us to survive – as free citizens – and to keep just enough of
our previous holdings to keep us from going begging.”

Velmeran considered that, and nodded. “That can be arranged. You
deserve some reward for being reasonable.”

Lake frowned. “Now we come to the part you might not like, considering
what you have just said. Union space is big and very diverse. For thousands of
years now, only two things have kept it together. One has been Starwolf threat.
The other is simple greed, and the Union has been an enormously profitable
venture for a long time. If you Starwolves simply disappear, the Union will
fall apart and be at war with itself in a matter of years.”

Velmeran stopped to stare at him. “Are you telling me that after fighting
this war for five hundred centuries, you now expect us to fight your
peace?”

Velmeran stepped onto the bridge of the Valcyr, looking about in curiosity.
Whatever he might have expected of a ship so immensely old, he had never
thought that it would look exactly like any other carrier he had ever seen.
There were exactly as many stations at the bridge, in exactly the same order.
When the Starwolves found a design they liked, they apparently stayed with it.
The first real difference in their design had come with the construction of the
Vardon, adapted to accommodate new technology and an extra pair of main drives.

Quendari Valcyr’s camera pod rotated around to watch him as he
entered, the lenses rotating to focus on him. Her movements reminded him for a
moment of Valthyrra, particularly in the way she moved her boom into position
just a moment before the camera pod itself completed its own turn. It was a
very lifelike gesture, imitating the way that most intelligent beings would
often turn their heads a moment before cutting their eyes in the direction of
whatever they saw. It was an acquired gesture rather than preprogrammed, and
not all of the ships shared it.

“Welcome aboard, Commander,” she said.

“Welcome home, Quendari Valcyr,” he replied. “Keflyn has
told me of your resourcefulness. Do you feel ready to rejoin the fleet?”

“Yes, I believe that I should,” she agreed. “I have almost
waited too long, it seems.”

“No, we need you more than ever now,” he said. “I would
like to begin moving crewmembers on board right away and have you back out
again in a few days. That leaves only the problem of finding you a
Commander.”

“I would like to have Keflyn,” the ship said without hesitation.

“That is entirely your own choice,” Velmeran told her. “If
you want, I can help you to find someone with more command experience.”

“Keflyn and I seem to understand each other very well,” Quendari
explained. “We are both a little short on battle experience. But I am no
warrior, no matter what role I was designed to fill, and the war is over
anyway.”

Velmeran nodded. “Perhaps your time has come, and none of us will be
warriors any longer. I certainly hope so.”

Velmeran turned to leave, walking quickly toward the lift. The lift doors
opened just before he arrived, and Keflyn stepped out. He took a step back and
bowed. “Your ship, Commander.”

“So, that is how it is done?” Keflyn asked, looking about as if
she expected a little more ceremony during the naming of a ship’s
Commander. “I never thought that you would agree.”

“The ships name their own Commanders,” he told her. “You
should never interfere with that. I think Quendari needs a friend just now.
Someone she trusts. Take care of her.”

Velmeran entered the lift and the door snapped shut. Keflyn turned and
stepped out slowly onto the bridge. Quendari brought her camera pod around to
face her as she walked up to stand just before the lenses of the pod.
“Hello, Quendi. I have brought you something.”

She brought out a large, red, velvet ribbon, already tied with an adjustable
loop. Keflyn slipped the loop around the pod and pulled it tight, checking the
fit. Quendari lifted her pod slightly, as if uncertain how to reply. She was
struggling with new emotions and responses that were beyond her very limited
experience.

“This is life,” Keflyn said. “Any regrets?”

“I grieved thousands of years for the loss of a very short, happy time
in my life,” Quendari said. “That time will always be special to
me, because it was the first time in my life that I was happy. Now I am
content. Thank you, my friend.”

Matters resolved themselves much more quickly and easily than Velmeran had
expected, and all he had to do was wait for the pieces to all fall into place
and then interpret them correctly. The final, missing piece had come with the
unexpected arrival of the Valcyr and her tale of where she had spent her time.
He decided that the gods of fortune must have forgiven him all the way around.

At first, he was at a loss to determine a way to salvage the Union that he
thought the delegates would be willing to accept. The easiest solution, of
course, was to declare that the human race could bloody well destroy itself if
it had not yet learned to behave itself, and allow them to have at it. That was
tempting, but Velmeran could not ignore an appeal for help. The Starwolves
had invested too much in the human race to allow them to destroy themselves in
war or genetic decay, at least as long as they were willing to try. But he
wanted to find a solution that involved the Starwolves to the least possible
extent, putting the greatest responsibility on the Union to police itself.

The answer that he eventually arrived at was to balance the forces that
would now be acting upon the Union, using the threat of war to discourage
fragmentation and the threat of alien intervention to discourage war. He sat
down with the delegates and a large map of all of human space, both Union and
Republic, and drew a line that divided the whole into two exactly even parts,
each half of Union space getting an even half of Republic space. One half
became the new Republic, with its capital at Vannkarn on Vinthra. The other
half, after some confusion and deliberation, adopted the name Terran
Confederation.

In order to strike a perfect balance, the two interstellar nations drafted
exactly the same constitutions with exactly the same governmental structure. To
insure peaceful cooperation and even development between the Republic and the
Terran Confederation, they were joined together with the Kelvessan in the
Triple Alliance, a hypothetical super nation with a congress which met at
regular intervals. As an added insurance, both the Alliance and the Starwolves
themselves had the legal right to intervene in the government of either nation
if the terms of the treaties were violated.

That left the Kelvessan looking for someplace to call home. Velmeran had
been quietly entertaining thoughts of his own ever since the unexpected
appearance of the Valcyr. Terra, because of its shift into a colder, deeper
orbit, was no longer an ideal world for human habitation, but it was perfectly
suited to Kelvessan and their need for a colder environment. The Kelvessan
would adopt Terra as their new home world, and Alkayja Station was to be moved
there to be the base of the combined Starwolf Fleet. To maintain their own self-sufficiency,
they were given control over a large area of space to form the basis of their
own nation, consisting mostly of several worlds abandoned by the Republic in
the distant past. Quendari Valcyr knew the location of a fair number of lost
colonies.

The solution ultimately pleased all concerned. The Kelvessan had been
betrayed by the very people they had trusted the most, and only autonomy would
restore their sense of independence and security. The delegates were uncertain
about turning over Terra herself, the cradle of human civilization, to be the
new Kelvessan homeworld. But when they thought about it, they were just as
pleased that they did not have the Starwolves in their own space.

One person who was not entirely pleased by the arrangements was Admiral
Laroose. His loyalties had been with the Starwolves and particularly with
Velmeran. But Alkayja would soon be a part of the new Republic, and he had been
appointed to be an advisor to the new government.

“It still takes a little getting used to, I say,” he declared.
“Of all possible turn of events, I never expected that I would be playing
politician out of an office in the underground city of Vannkarn, with that...
that Maeken Kea as my assistant. I will be glad when she is done with her quiet
mourning of that devil Trace.”

“Maeken Kea was perhaps the closest that anyone ever came to loving
Donalt Trace,” Velmeran said. “Let her mourn him all she wants. The
Great Spirit of Space knows that few enough do miss him.”

Laroose stared in disbelief. “After all the grief he’s caused
you! All the same, I will surely tear up your precious treaties and find myself
a gun if she ever again makes the slightest hint that your persecutions drove
Trace to act the way he did.”

“She said that?” Velmeran looked startled. “The
bitch!”

Laroose glanced at him, but declined to comment. “So what do you do
now? You have an interim government in place, and that finally gives you the
time to pay more attention to your own people.”

“I am leaving,” the Starwolf declared. “As soon as they
have Valthyrra up and going, Quendari Valcyr is going to lead the Methryn and
the Vardon on our first visit to Terra – Earth, as she calls it. Keflyn
is very anxious to get back. She was unable to tell the Feldenneh colonists
that the Union fleet had been destroyed, so they are still waiting for
their
world to be destroyed.”

With the eight memory cells locked into their secured access tunnels and all
connections installed and tested thoroughly, all of the physical stages of
bringing Valthyrra into her new home were complete. There was nothing to do now
but to access those memory units, assemble Valthyrra’s personality
program in the matrix of the sentient computer complex, and see how well it
worked.

Consherra was very glad to have Venn Saevyn to assist her in the process of
starting up the new computer complex. Venn Keflyn had anticipated the need, and
had arranged for an expert with considerable experience to accompany the
Valtrytian fleet. Saevyn was not only competent in the repair of sentient systems,
he had even designed a couple.

Consherra learned a few things about sentient machines that she had never
guessed. One thing was their size. Most of the sentient computers built by the
Aldessan were in self-contained units about the size of one of Valthyrra’s
memory cells, five tons of machinery that was mostly just its protective
housing in weight and memory storage in volume. The Starwolf sentient computers
were six hundred tons of storage cells, primary, secondary, and peripheral
units, a result mostly of their dedicated military roles, heavy shielding and
shock protection. Ninety percent of their system involved non-sentient systems
that could be accessed directly on either conscious or fully automatic levels.
They also had their own maze of redundancy; even their conscious systems were
spread throughout the nose of the carrier, and they could lose three-quarters
of their circuitry before it even began to effect their operation.