Free Dreadnought by Thorarinn Gunnarsson

had been far more badly damaged than it
seemed.
    Kerridayen
dropped out of starflight well inside the Alkayja system and began braking
smoothly for her approach. There sas none of the usual bravado and intimidation
in her manner, such as she would have employed in Union space to remind people
like Captain Tarrel that she was too dangerous for them to touch. This was her
home, and here she was just a part of the regular local traffic. A small
tender, painted bright orange and sporting powerful running lights, fell in
just ahead of the carrier to escort her home, while Kerridayen herself ran with
both her recognition lamps and the retractable main lights in her shock bumper
burning. A Starwolf carrier was a very difficult ship to see, even considering
her size, and she had to make her presence well known. It would have been
better, of course, if so many of her lights had not burned out in the attack.
    Alkayja
station was rather more compact than the stations that Tarrel was used to
seeing, particularly when compared to the kilometers of sprawling tubes and
modules that formed the Vinthra Military complex. The main portion of the
station consisted of two wide disks, each about twenty-five kilometers across.
The thicker disk was lined along the outside with a continuous row of vast bays
that allowed the carriers to dock facing in. The smaller disk above that was
studded with bays for ships of a more conventional size. And the station was
capped above and below with a flattened dome. Although it was a very visible
white, Tarrel realized suddenly that the actual station shared certain
similarities with the carriers. The flat, rounded domes on top and bottom
offered armored protection against attack—just like the large, flat surfaces of
the hulls of the carriers—with no sharp angles to catch a bolt that might have
otherwise skipped harmlessly off that featureless surface. All machinery, pipes
and ducting were within the shell, less vulnerable while keeping the exterior
uncluttered. The station probably even had independent interplanetary drive
capabilities.
    Kerridayen’s
maneuverability was compromised from having too many of her field drive
projectors burnt out, and so the immense ship had to be moved into a refitting
bay by a team of tenders. Since the carrier weighed some fifteen million tons
that had to be stopped once it was set into motion, that was a long and
difficult process indeed. Half an hour passed just drawing her slowly up the
full length of the bay, three kilometers deep, before she nosed into the
bracket designed to receive her forward shock bumper. After that, bringing in
the braces that steadied the ship’s short wings and finally the two forward
docking tubes was fairly easy.
    “I
hate that,” Trendaessa said when it was done, lowering her camera pod to the
floor. “I hate being towed. I hate being pulled and pushed. I hate being shot
at. Why could I have not been built a freighter?”
    “Freighters
are stupid,” Daerran told her. “Freighters are the cattle of the lanes. Do you
want to be a cow?”
    She
lifted her camera pod. “No, not really.”
    “Send
your data over to the station, and shut yourself down for a few weeks of
convalescence,” he told her, then turned to Captain Tarrel. “I would suppose
that your stay with us is just about at an end. When you go out from this
station again, it will probably be aboard another carrier. For now, we should
go into the station and see what they have planned.”
    They
took a lift down to the main starboard docking tube, which led them, after a
walk of nearly a hundred meters along the nose of the carrier and into the
station itself, to one side of the bay control station and the observation
rooms to either side. It seemed that the station air, which also filled the
tube, was something of a compromise. It was warmer than that within the ship,
but still slightly cool by human standards.
    Whether
Commander Daerran had expected it or not, something of a