Read Online Tactical Error by Thorarinn Gunnarsson - Free Book Online

the dark
clothes that Keflyn wore to cover her departure from the transport. As soon as
the hatch opened, she grabbed her things and made a rush for the concealment of
the shadows at the edge of the port buildings.
    “Miss Keflyn?”
    The voice had come out of the shadows of one dark corner, a rich, warm
baritone that was deeper than any male Kelvessan voice could ever be, and
holding a curious accent that she recognized instantly as being the same
as Lenna’s. She ducked into that same dark corner, her large, sensitive
eyes able to pierce the shadows and see the tall, broad-shouldered man who
waited for her.
    “You are?” she asked cautiously.
    “Iyan Makayen,” he answered briskly. He was wearing the uniform
of the local police; Keflyn remembered Lenna saying that he was a port
constable.
    “You look like Velmeran, for all that you’re a girl,” he
observed, peering at her closely.
    She nodded. “He is my father.”
    That seemed to startle this tall man, but he made no comment of it. He
reached to take a couple of her bags. “I should think that we would be
well advised to get you under cover as soon as possible. It’s a slow time
in the season here in town, with the rangers still in the wild and only the one
ship in port.”
    He turned and backed his way through a wide, double door into the hallway
beyond, gallantly holding the door for her. He had by chance taken the heaviest
of the bags, and he was having some trouble with their weight. She could have
carried all of the bags easier than he carried the two, but they had to
maintain appearances. He was a head taller than her and weighed more than half
again as much.
    The main, commercial district of Kalennes was enclosed into a single
structure known as the Mall, although the heavy, timber-supported roof was
meant more to keep out wind and weather than the cold itself. As her companion
had said, there were few people about even though the hour was still early.
These people were of a purer Terran stock than most humans, tall, light of skin
and hair, and heavy of build. Small and dark, Lenna was plainly of a very
different racial stock from these people. She was obviously an outworlder, in
spite of her disguise.
    “Is Lenna still on the Methryn?” Iyan asked quietly as they
walked quickly through the nearly deserted corridor, most of the shops already
closed.
    “No, she went over to the Vardon a year ago,” Keflyn replied,
wondering how much she should say. No one had told her anything about this.
“She is on an important mission of her own just now, or she would be here
instead of me.”
    “I always thought that she would come to a bad end, running off with
Starwolves like she did,” he remarked, mostly to himself. “It seems
that she had been much better at delaying that bad end than I would have
thought.”
     
    Out on the port field, a small, dark form skittered on spider’s legs
through the night. It was no living creature but an automaton, a small
mechanical device with a simple, box-like body and a single optical sensor for
an eye, carried on six long, multi-jointed legs. It scurried rapidly from one
patch of darkness to the next until it eventually disappeared into the
blackness beneath the transport that had just brought Keflyn to the surface. It
was still there when the transport lifted from the field a short time later.
    The transport moved back into its bay, hovering in place while the manipulator
arms moved in to capture it, lifting the small ship directly to its berth in
the racks so that the bay doors could remain open. Velmeran waited outside
while the transport was locked down and secured for flight. After a long
moment, the main hatch opened and Trel stepped out.
    “All set?” Velmeran asked.
    “I think so,” the special tactics pilot answered.
“Everything went according to plan, and I could not see that we were
observed.”
    “Well, we’ve done the best we can,” Velmeran remarked.
“That freighter is due to leave port early