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  Geary could sense the tension on the bridge relaxing and feel the same sensation inside himself. “Do you ever find it odd,” he asked Tanya, “that we’re more comfortable right now?”

  “Why wouldn’t we be?” she asked, stretching like someone coming off a long and grueling task. “No one, and nothing, can touch a ship once inside the hypernet.”

  “Yeah, but, according to what Jaylen Cresida told me, that’s because while we’re in the hypernet we don’t actually exist except as some sort of probability wave.”

  She made a face at him. “That’s just how the rest of the universe sees it. From our frame of reference, we exist, and I’m not going to let you ruin a chance to unwind by overthinking things.” Desjani turned to face the bridge watch team. “Keep an eye on things. Pass the word for half-watch shift holiday routine for the rest of the day.”

  “You are in a good mood,” Geary muttered as they left the bridge.

  “I can start ordering floggings again tomorrow. For now, I’m going to talk to my ancestors for a little while, our ancestors that is, to give them some thanks for the safe recovery of my two lieutenants, which it wouldn’t hurt you to do, either, before I try to catch up on some paperwork.”

  “I’m going to look in on sick bay, first,” Geary said. “I want to see how Castries and Yuon are doing.”

  “Not all that well,” Desjani said with a grimace. “But you’ll see.”

  It wasn’t one of the blocks of time set aside for routine sick call by crew members concerned about nonemergency medical issues, and there weren’t any medical emergencies at the moment, so when Geary reached sick bay, he found Dr. Nasr sitting at a desk deep in study. Nasr only gradually became aware of Geary’s presence, blinking at him like a man coming up from deep sleep. “Is anything wrong, Admiral?”

  “Nothing beyond the usual at the moment.” Geary always felt uncomfortable in sick bay. He had been brought to Dauntless’s medical spaces after being recovered from the damaged escape pod in which he had drifted, frozen in survival sleep, for a century. From here, he couldn’t see the bunk in which he had awakened, disoriented and dazed, to learn that everyone he had once known was long dead, and that while he was supposedly dead he had been turned into the myth of Black Jack. Even his first sight of Tanya, an officer inexplicably wearing the Alliance Fleet Cross which no one had earned for almost a generation in Geary’s time, was bound up in the shock of those moments.

  He suppressed his uneasiness, trying to look unruffled as he gestured toward the bulkhead behind which Lieutenants Castries and Yuon were confined in medical quarantine. “How are the patients?”

  “You can view them remotely,” Nasr advised Geary as he brought up a virtual window.

  Geary peered into the window floating before him, seeing Yuon and Castries in the small compartment. They were sitting with their backs to each other, as far apart as the tiny space permitted (which was barely beyond touching distance), pieces of the Marine battle armor they had been cut out of piled between them like a wall. Far from betraying romantic involvement, Yuon and Castries were acting like a brother and a sister who could barely tolerate each other’s existence. “How much longer do they have to stay in there together?”

  “Two weeks, four days more,” Nasr said. “I am certain that Lieutenant Castries could provide you with the exact hours and minutes remaining as well if you asked it of her.”

  “Lieutenant Yuon doesn’t seem too happy, either.”

  “The feelings do appear to be mutual,” Dr. Nasr agreed.

  “No signs of infection yet?”

  “None. You will be informed immediately if there are any signs.”

  Geary watched small medical devices crawl up the right arms of Yuon and Castries, both of whom studiously pretended not to notice. “How often are you drawing fluids?”

  “Every four hours.” Nasr eyed the images with concern. “They are . . . unhappy with their circumstances. They have, I believe, gone through denial, anger, and bargaining. They are now in depression. I am not sure they will ever reach acceptance.”

  It might have been funny except for the obvious misery of the two lieutenants, who had one moment been walking along a street on Old Earth, and the next found themselves awakening together in the tightest form of medical quarantine current technology could achieve. “Are they being medicated?”

  “Yes. Minimum necessary doses.” Nasr squinted at the two figures again. “I will have to increase it. I do not know what else I can do to ease their mutual distress.”

  “I know how they feel, I think,” Geary said. “From what I’ve seen of Castries and Yuon, they get along all right normally, but these are not normal circumstances. On my first ship, there was another junior officer and I who did not get along at all. The only thing that made it tolerable was that we occupied different watch sections. When I was awake and working, he was usually asleep, and vice versa. We rarely had to actually interact. If we had, we probably would have been like those two are now.”

  The doctor frowned, then smiled. “We should speak more often, Admiral. That is an excellent solution.”

  “It is?” Geary asked, flattered by Nasr’s praise but also uncertain what solution he had apparently just provided.

  “Yes.” The doctor was already at work, entering commands on the unit he held in one hand. “I will shift the sleep cycle of one of them and keep the other awake, using the proper dosages of medications. Within a few days, I will have their patterns firmly established, so that when one is awake, the other is asleep. While they will continue to physically share the compartment, they will not have to endure the conscious presence of the other but can even feel some degree of privacy with their forced company rendered insensible.”

  “Will that be safe?” Geary asked. “Doping them for the next few weeks like that?”

  “Perfectly safe,” Nasr said, waving his hands in a dismissive way. “And much, much safer than keeping them both awake and aware of each other for that period! I am grateful to you, Admiral. I made the elementary mistake of assuming I knew what the question must be, which made me see the wrong paths to the answer.”

  Geary looked at Dr. Nasr, running the physician’s words through his mind. “We need to be sure we’re asking the right question in order to get the right answer? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Yes. If you only think you know the question, the answers you come up with will not be adequate or correct.”

  Geary left sick bay, deep in thought, barely aware of greeting the sailors he passed as he walked. What the doctor had told him was important. Very important. Something told him that.

  Unfortunately, whatever that something was could not tell him why the words were important.

  • • •

  AMONG the many things he had once never considered worrying about was what he might find when arriving at an Alliance star system. It would have been like being concerned every time he got home for the night and opened the door, wondering what might be inside. Certainly there was the chance of a surprise, but not the sort of surprise that might threaten not only him but also all he cared about.

  But that, and many other things, had changed in the last century.

  He was on the bridge again, which felt fairly crowded with all of the official representatives present. The three senators were at the back, pretending not to fight over precedence for the observer’s seat and its display. General Charban and Victoria Rione, the two envoys, stood to one side, pretending to be engaged in a casual conversation, having formed an unlikely alliance of their own against the covert pressures being brought against each of them.

  Desjani was doing her best to ignore all of the representatives, pretending to be totally absorbed in preparing her ship for arrival at Varandal.

  That left Geary to offer respectful greetings in a manner he hoped would not be interpreted as pretend, and to notice a certa
in level of tension among the three senators. They seemed to be just as worried about what they might find at Varandal as Geary was.

  There wasn’t any transition jolt confusing the mind such as occurred when coming out of jump. Instead, the stars appeared around them as Dauntless arrived at Varandal, the only immediate and obvious indication that they had left the bubble of nothing inside the hypernet and were surrounded by the real universe again. Geary dropped his study of the three senators and scanned his display, waiting as impatiently for it to update as he would when showing up at an enemy star system.

  “Dreadnaught is gone,” Tanya said just as he also caught that. “So are Dependable and Conqueror.”

  “There are some heavy cruisers and destroyers missing, too,” he said.

  “Looks like two divisions of heavy cruisers and four squadrons of destroyers.” Desjani shook her head. “A task force of some kind.”

  “Why would Jane leave Varandal when I left her in temporary command of the fleet?” Geary demanded, keeping his voice low.

  “If you’re thinking she just hared off on her own initiative, I don’t think that happened,” she cautioned. “This looks like an ordered movement to me.”

  “Those three battleships weren’t in very good shape. They needed a lot of repair work. Why would anyone order them—”

  Senator Costa’s voice broke into their discussion. “Some ships are missing! Why? Where did they go?”

  Geary took a moment to ensure that when he turned to answer, his irritation at both the question and the suspicious tone in which it had been voiced wasn’t showing. “I will let you know as soon as I know, Senator.”

  “You’re asking us to believe that major components of this fleet have gone somewhere without your orders?” Costa asked.

  Rione answered before he could. “Why is that so remarkable? Fleet headquarters, or the government, could have sent the entire fleet on some task while we were gone. Were you expecting something different here?”

  That question, though posed in a diffident and mild tone, made Costa flush slightly. “What are you implying?”

  “Nothing! Is anyone implying anything?” Rione could sound amazingly innocent when she wanted to.

  Costa’s flush changed into a glower. “I will go collect some updates on the situation here. I am certain there will be messages waiting for me,” she announced, pivoting to march off the bridge.

  Suva had said nothing, scanning the situation with wary eyes.

  Senator Sakai, though, walked up to Geary’s seat. “Admiral, I would be grateful for your honest appraisal of what we are seeing here.”

  “It’s still hard to tell much.” Geary hedged, trying to decide how much to trust Sakai. After all, Sakai must have voted in favor of a number of actions that struck Geary as misguided at best. But if he is trying to help, if what we saw on Old Earth has made Sakai rethink things, then I would be a fool to keep him at arm’s length.

  “But I am concerned,” Geary continued. “The battleship that is commanded by the acting fleet commander is gone, along with the rest of her division. She wouldn’t have left unless ordered to go, but none of those battleships was in good enough condition to conduct a combat mission after they were badly damaged fighting the Kicks and the enigmas.”

  “I will see what I can learn,” Sakai told Geary, then left.

  Geary beckoned to Rione, who came close enough to be inside the privacy field he activated around his seat. “Do you think that Costa or the other two senators were expecting anything to be happening here?”

  “I don’t know,” Rione said. “Costa sounded as if she was worried as well as suspicious, so if she was expecting something, it is not what we see. Suva has a deer-in-the-headlights look. I would guess that she has no idea what is going on and therefore is worried about what you, and Costa, and everyone else, is up to. But Sakai is sincere. I will stake my reputation on that.”

  “Your reputation?” The words slipped out before Geary could stop them. He waited, expecting Rione to flare with cold fury.

  Instead, she laughed. “You’re right. My reputation is something I would want to lose.”

  “Not with me,” he insisted.

  “I did lose it with you,” Rione said with self-mockery, a rare open (if oblique) mention of their brief liaison before they had learned that her husband had not died fighting the Syndics but was still alive as a prisoner. “I’ll see what I can find out,” she added, parroting Sakai, then left the bridge.

  Desjani was still studying her display. “Admiral,” she said in low tones, “I don’t entirely trust what we’re seeing.”

  He focused intensely on his display, seeing the many warships, each accompanied by status markers. The fleet looked like it had accomplished a lot of repair work while they had been gone.

  A whole lot of repair work. An impossible amount of repair work. “Everything looks really good,” he commented back to her in a skeptical voice.

  “That’s what I was thinking. The status feeds, the official status feeds, look like they’ve been heavily gun-decked. But this can’t be the work of a few officers falsifying the status of their ships to make them look good. Everybody must be doing it.” She gave him a frustrated look. “Let’s hope whoever has been in charge since Jane Geary left can explain what’s going on.”

  “It’s probably Duellos,” Geary guessed, though he wondered if that was only because he hoped that was the case.

  “Captain Duellos would be the wisest and best choice,” Desjani agreed in a way that made it clear that the last thing she expected from fleet headquarters was choices that were either wise or good. “The comm traffic we’re seeing is all routine, for what that is worth.”

  “If not Duellos, maybe Tulev,” Geary suggested.

  “If they went by seniority, it would be Badaya.” Tanya eyed him. “I admit that I’ve been wondering how much of his conversion to the wisdom of letting the government stay in control is real. He used to be very enthusiastic about the prospect of a military coup.”

  “I’ve convinced him otherwise,” Geary said with more certainty than he felt. “If Badaya had done something, we would be hearing all about it in the messages and news feeds we’re receiving.”

  “Except that the status reports for the warships in the fleet look faked,” she reminded him. “How do we know the rest of this stuff hasn’t been scrubbed and sanitized to present an image of normalcy?”

  “I don’t think ‘normalcy’ is a word,” he grumbled.

  “Yes, it is.”

  Instead of continuing the debate, Geary called up one of the news feeds which Dauntless could now receive. Even after so much time in space, he still half expected the news to be immediately filled with excited reports of Dauntless’s return to Varandal. But it would be hours before the light from Dauntless’s arrival got to the inner star system, and hours more before the reactions to that in the news would be seen by the battle cruiser. Instead, the news seemed to be the same mix of political turmoil and dissent, economic worries, concerns about what was happening in those Syndic star systems nearest to Alliance territory, and speculations about the future of the Alliance. A “special report” on the two new alien species whose existence had been discovered by Geary’s fleet in the regions beyond Syndicate Worlds space contained a great deal more speculation and some information he recognized as coming from his own reports to the government. Word that Dauntless had escorted the six Dancer ships to Sol Star System had clearly spread far and wide, with various “experts” who had never actually encountered the Dancers or any other alien species holding forth on the perceived wisdom and significance of that mission.

  At best, it was entertaining. But the plethora of message traffic and video feeds they could receive was more than anything else exasperating because none of them addressed the fact that Captain Jane Geary and her battleships had left Varandal or revealed who
had been in charge of the fleet since her departure. All Geary and the others aboard Dauntless could do was wait the more than three hours it took for a welcoming message to be sent and finally reach them.

  Humanity might still be trying to figure out what time was, but there was no doubt in Geary’s mind that time deliberately ran slower at times like this. The three hours felt like an entire day of waiting. He was nonetheless startled when a high-priority message was received within seconds of the earliest possible time they could have expected one.

  “Badaya?” Desjani murmured as that officer’s image appeared.

  The message-origin identification on the transmission left no doubt that Captain Badaya, once the loosest cannon among those in the fleet who proposed a military coup to replace an Alliance government seen as corrupt and incompetent, was acting commander of the fleet.

  As if anticipating the reaction to seeing him, Badaya grinned wolfishly.

  SEVEN

  BADAYA smiled wider. “Welcome back, Admiral. I am in command of the fleet.”

  He paused, while Geary glowered at his image and Desjani muttered some curses involving a quick trip to the afterlife and abundant torture therein for Badaya.

  “Or, I was in command,” Badaya continued. He seemed to be enjoying himself immensely. “I will now, of course, return command of the First Fleet to you. My report of significant activity while serving as acting commander of the fleet will be very brief because not much of significance happened. I am looking forward to seeing you in person, of course.

  “Just to clarify things, I was ordered to act as fleet commander until your return. Ordered by fleet headquarters, in the same set of orders that tasked Captain Jane Geary to take her battleship division and some supporting forces to recover some Alliance prisoners of war from former Syndicate territory. Captain Geary followed her orders, as did I.”