The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Guardian Read online

  He understood Tanya’s attempts to separate herself emotionally from what they were watching. They were much too distant to do anything to influence the events near the hypernet gate. Those who were to die were already dead. But it was very hard to pretend not to care about that.

  Geary felt a temptation to shut off his display, to avoid watching the inevitable. The best he could hope for was that before it was destroyed, the fleeing cruiser would damage some of Boyens’s ships, and that a portion of the Midway flotilla would survive their own attack on the much more powerful force of Syndic heavy cruisers and HuKs.

  But he kept watching because that was his job, watching with a sick sensation in his gut as the unavoidable results played out.

  “What the hell?”

  He hadn’t realized that he had said that until he heard Desjani laugh in reluctant admiration. “The Midway warships aren’t trying to rescue that single cruiser. Their Kommodor is aiming for the Syndic battleship!”

  “That’s . . .” Geary studied the developing situation as the vector of the Midway force steadied out, aiming for an intercept with the orbit of Boyens’s single battleship and the light cruisers still with it. “What is she doing? The Midway flotilla can’t take on a battleship, even with so many of the battleship’s escorts gone.”

  “Check the geometry, Admiral,” Desjani advised. “They couldn’t get to the lone cruiser before Boyens’s own cruisers caught it. But they can get to the battleship before Boyens’s cruisers can nail the lone cruiser and return to protect the battleship.”

  “Boyens still doesn’t have much to worry about. He might lose some light cruisers, but the battleship—” A bright red symbol appeared on the Syndic formation. A collision warning, blinking steadily over the Syndic battleship. Geary followed the arcs of two projected, lethal vectors back to the ships that had settled on those courses. Two of the Midway HuKs. “Ancestors save us. Do you think they’ll go through with it?”

  Desjani was rubbing her chin, her eyes calculating as she studied her display. “It’s the only way they could cripple or destroy Boyens’s battleship. With the heavy cruisers and HuKs gone from the Syndic formation, and the rest of the Midway ships screening those two HuKs to make sure they can get through the remaining Syndic escorts, it could work. Crazy tactics, though.”

  “Kommodor Marphissa is an ex-Syndic,” Geary observed. “Boyens might know something about her.”

  “You mean the fact that she mad hates Syndic CEOs?” Desjani asked. “And therefore might actually have two of her ships ram Boyens’s battleship? Yeah. Boyens might know that.”

  Geary’s gaze on his display was now horrified. Would he have to watch two ships destroy themselves in the hope of crippling the Syndic force in this star system? “Hold on. There’s something about this that doesn’t fit. Assume the Kommodor really intends to nail that battleship. Why would she set them on collision courses with the battleship that far out?”

  “Unless she’s an idiot, and I’m willing to admit she isn’t, if she meant to ram that battleship, she wouldn’t have broadcast her intentions that early.” Desjani laughed again, low and admiring. “It’s a bluff. Boyens can’t afford to risk losing that battleship. But he can’t be certain of stopping those HuKs with the escorts he’s got. What’s he going to do?”

  “Hopefully, the only safe option,” Geary said, his eyes back on the Syndic heavy cruisers and HuKs heading to intercept the lone cruiser still fleeing at the maximum acceleration it could achieve.

  Because of the time delays involved in communicating across even such a relatively short distance as a few light-minutes, it took about ten minutes before the tracks of the six heavy cruisers and nine HuKs that Boyens had sent out began changing rapidly as the fifteen Syndic warships bent up and back, coming around and accelerating toward the battleship they had left not long before.

  “The Syndics have abandoned their attempt to intercept the new cruiser,” Lieutenant Castries reported, as if not believing what she was saying. “The Midway flotilla is continuing en route an intercept with the Syndic battleship.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t a bluff,” Desjani said, eyeing her display. “We’ll know in twenty minutes.”

  “Captain?” Castries asked.

  “If the Midway flotilla acted to ensure that lone cruiser got clear, they’ll maintain their threatening vectors against the battleship until the Syndic cruiser force can’t turn again and overtake the new ship.”

  Geary felt confident that Kommodor Marphissa had been bluffing, but he still watched, with increasing tension, as those twenty minutes crawled by. Because Tanya is right. From all that we have learned of her, Marphissa does hate the Syndic CEOs who once controlled her life. Does she hate them enough to let that hatred override her responsibility to conserve her forces and use them wisely? Syndic commanders aren’t taught to worry about casualties in carrying out their missions, and Marphissa learned her trade under the Syndic system.

  “It’s been twenty minutes, Captain,” Lieutenant Castries pointed out. “The single cruiser is now safe from intercept by the Syndic force.”

  Desjani nodded wordlessly in acknowledgment. If she was worried, she didn’t let it show.

  Not that she, or anyone, could change what had already happened two hours ago.

  Twenty-one minutes after the Syndic heavy cruisers had turned back, the Midway flotilla pivoted and began a wide, sweeping turn back toward its previous orbit five light-minutes from the Syndicate flotilla.

  Geary let out a breath he had been holding for a good portion of that last minute. “She kept her course longer just to mess with Boyens.”

  “Probably,” Desjani agreed, smiling. “It’s too bad that Kommodor is a Syndic.”

  “Ex-Syndic.”

  “Yeah. All right. She might make a decent ship driver someday.”

  It was Geary’s turn to reply with just a nod. Coming from Desjani, that statement was a huge concession and considerable praise. But she wouldn’t want anyone pointing that out. “After having Boyens taunt us with our inability to get him to leave, it was nice seeing him get shown up in such a public way. The whole star system will see what happened, how he got out-thought and outmaneuvered.”

  “That’s good, sure, but it doesn’t solve anything,” Desjani grumbled.

  “No.” He knew what she meant. The presence of Geary’s fleet here was the only thing preventing Boyens from using his flotilla to reconquer the Midway Star System for the Syndicate Worlds. Technically, Midway Star System was under the control of a so-called president and a so-called general who had formerly been Syndicate CEOs. In reality, the amount of firepower present in Geary’s Alliance fleet made him the effective ruler here. But for all the power in his fleet, Geary’s hands were tied when it came to dealing with the Syndics.

  This fleet had to get back to the Alliance, far distant on the other side of Syndicate space. There had been other reasons, besides the Syndic flotilla, to linger here after fighting its way through alien space beyond the frontier of human expansion. The Alliance ships had faced repeated battles and taken a lot of damage. The auxiliary ships accompanying the fleet had restocked their raw materials by mining asteroids in this star system with the permission of the authorities on Midway, and had been busy using those materials to manufacture replacement parts for the battered warships. Everyone in every crew had been working to repair the damage they had sustained.

  Nonetheless, they needed to get home. As Geary gazed glumly at his display, another collision warning popped up, this time on the captured superbattleship that had been christened Invincible. Dwarfing even the four massive battleships mated to it, Invincible was the work of an alien species nicknamed the Kicks, who had matched their adorable teddy bear/cow appearance with a ferocious refusal to interact with humanity in any way other than all-out attack. To the Kicks, humans were predators, and the evolved-from-herd-animals Kicks did not negotiate with predators. Invincible held within her countless clues and information about the Kick
s and their technology, which made her by far the most valuable object in human space. The sooner Invincible was safely back in Alliance space, the better.

  He didn’t worry about the collision warning, though. It had been triggered by the movements of six ships, nearly featureless ovoids, which flitted among the human ships of this star system like graceful birds swooping around clumsy animals. “The Dancers are going to give our warning systems a heart attack,” Geary commented. The Alliance sailors called these aliens Dancers because of the agile ease with which the aliens swung their ships through maneuvers that even the best human ship driver or human-built automated system could not match.

  No one knew how long the Dancers would loiter here waiting for the human fleet to move, and as the only alien species that had shown any desire to speak with humans as well as the only alien species that had helped humans instead of attacking them, Geary had to get these representatives of the Dancers back to the Alliance government as quickly as he could.

  Not every reason for leaving Midway and heading for Alliance space could be seen. An invisible and intangible element, morale among the men and women of the fleet, was very poor. They had fought long and hard, and they wanted some time to enjoy the peace that allegedly now existed. They wanted time at home. But home, or powerful factions of the government of the Alliance at least, was worried about those weary combatants. Worried about their loyalties, worried about the costs of keeping their ships going, worried about the huge numbers of veterans already dumped into the reeling economies of the Alliance’s star systems after the strains of the war.

  There were plots under way back home as well. How many, he didn’t know. How many were aimed at him, he didn’t know. How many would undermine the Alliance or cause it to break apart like the crumbling empire of the Syndicate Worlds, he also didn’t know. But he couldn’t deal with any of those plots while as far away from Alliance territory as it was possible to be and still be in human-occupied space.

  If this was what victory had gained, then he hated to imagine what a mess defeat might have generated.

  He watched the track of the fleeing heavy cruiser altering, probably in response to offers of assistance from the Midway flotilla. Geary still couldn’t figure out how to get rid of the Syndic flotilla commanded by Boyens without blowing to shreds the peace agreement between the Alliance and the Syndicate Worlds. But if he left without dealing with Boyens, the potentially extremely valuable allies here at Midway might be lost to the Alliance, and if he lost access to Midway, he would also lose access to the regions of space beyond where the Dancers were.

  —

  DAYS later, his nerves jumpy, Geary watched a freighter belonging to Midway easing its boxy hull in among the shark shapes of the Alliance warships. His experiences with Syndic freighters during the war had usually involved cunning attempts to damage or destroy Alliance ships by means of hidden or improvised weapons. Seeing such a freighter gliding close to his warships, Geary had to fight the urge to target it and order it destroyed.

  He glanced over at Desjani, whose glare told him that she was having an even harder time accepting the freighter’s near presence.

  “We need the food,” Geary said. “We’ve eaten Syndic rations before, and Midway has some substantial stockpiles since they were a central supply node for this region of Syndic space.”

  “I know!” Desjani replied. “But the Syndic rations we picked up before had been abandoned in place when the installations holding them were vacated. We didn’t have to worry too much about those rations being poisoned or otherwise sabotaged.”

  “The fleet physicians and Captain Smythe’s engineers are going to check these rations with every test known to humanity to ensure they’re safe, without poison, bacteria, viruses, nanoplagues, or other dirty tricks.”

  “Fine,” she said. “Though given how bad Syndic rations taste, I wonder how hard it would be to tell if they had spoiled.”

  “At least Syndic rations make Alliance fleet food seem decent by comparison,” Geary pointed out as he watched Alliance shuttles mating with the main hatches on the Syndic freighter to take on cargo. He didn’t mention another advantage that easily aroused suspicions as well. The authorities on Midway were providing these rations for free rather than haggling over the highest possible price. He knew they were doing that because they desperately needed the good favor of the Alliance against the threat posed by the Syndicate Worlds, but it was still a very uncharacteristic action, a very peculiar action, compared to the usual behaviors inside Syndic space.

  His display told him that fleet medical personnel and equipment, as well as engineers with their own scanning gear, were on every shuttle for what would be just the first safety check of the rations.

  A soft tone drew Geary’s attention to his comm display. Why is Emissary of the Alliance government Victoria Rione calling me now? He tapped the accept command and saw her image appear slightly to one side of the display.

  Rione, calling from her stateroom on Dauntless, blinked weariness from her eyes and gestured in the direction of the Midway freighter. “There’s something unexpected on that freighter.”

  “Now what?” He didn’t bother trying to disguise his anger. If Midway was going to play games with him after all this fleet had done to defend the people here—

  “Not a bad thing, I think. Two representatives from General Drakon. They used the private comm channel I’ve been talking with President Iceni on.” Rione smiled crookedly. “I have already inquired whether they intended asking for your support for General Drakon against President Iceni. They insist that is not why they are here.”

  “Good. They wouldn’t have gotten that support.” He drummed his fingers on the side of his seat, giving Rione’s image a skeptical look. She had every right to look tired, as she been negotiating for over a week with the authorities here, wrangling with CEO Boyens, and trying to develop better communications with the Dancers. “What do they want?” Geary asked. “What’s so secret that they had to sneak up here in person?”

  “Something they will only discuss with you. In person. You may safely assume it is a matter too sensitive to risk any chance at all of a message being intercepted.”

  “The hell.” Geary glowered at the depiction of the freighter on his display. He had learned all too well how even the most secure communications channels could be penetrated, so he understood that aspect of the matter. But . . . “Me alone? No. There will be at least one other person in any meeting with me and those two.”

  “Not me,” Rione said. “I can’t give any implied endorsement by the Alliance government to whatever Drakon is proposing until I have some idea what it is about. Take your captain. She’s equal in rank to the two representatives from Drakon, and she’s sufficiently protective of you to give them pause if they wanted to try anything.”

  “It wouldn’t hurt you to occasionally say Tanya Desjani’s name,” Geary pointed out.

  “How do you know it wouldn’t hurt?” Rione asked with a smile that carried a great many possible meanings, none of which he wanted to pursue further. “You’ll have to give approval to a shuttle to bring Drakon’s people to Dauntless’s dock. Have fun.”

  After breaking the connection with Rione, Geary looked over at Desjani, who was pretending not to have noticed the conversation. “Did you hear any of that?”

  She shook her head. “Your privacy field cut in. What did that woman want?”

  “Is it so hard for you to say Victoria Rione’s name?” he persisted against his better judgment.

  “Yes. Yes, it is.”

  “All right.” He would never win this argument, so instead Geary passed on what Rione had told him. “I’ll tell one of the shuttles to bring those two here, and we’ll see what they say.”

  “Ancestors help us,” Desjani muttered, then turned to her watch team. “I need combat-configured Marine guards at the shuttle dock, secure conference room 4D576 cleared, and all passageways from the dock to that conference room kept empty
of traffic until further notice.”

  “Yes, Captain,” Lieutenant Castries replied immediately.

  By the time Geary and Tanya reached the shuttle dock, the Marines were already there, fully outfitted in combat armor.

  Desjani smiled at the sight of them. “Excellent. There’s nothing like a few Marines when it comes to impressing Syndics face-to-face.”

  She led the way inside the dock, where the shuttle had come in and settled, its ramp still sealed. “Open up,” Desjani ordered.

  The ramp dropped, and Geary walked to the end of the shuttle’s ramp to look inside.

  It only took a few seconds before the two representatives sent by General Drakon appeared at the head of the ramp. Geary had seen both of them before, standing behind General Drakon during some of his messages. One man, one woman, both in uniform. He felt an indefinable sense of alarm as they walked toward him at a measured pace. These two did not look dangerous, but something inside Geary was nonetheless warning him not to underestimate them.

  He noticed out of the corners of his eyes the Marine guards shifting positions slightly, preparing themselves to counter anything these two visitors might try.

  It had not even occurred to Geary that he might face a personal threat of assassination from Drakon’s representatives. An unpardonably careless failure on his part when meeting face-to-face with Syndics, or former Syndics, he realized. But at least Tanya had shown the foresight to have the Marines on hand.

  “Colonel Morgan,” the woman said, as if that name told him everything he would ever need to know about her. She said it like Geary could have said “I’m Black Jack.” But he never did that, and he wondered at this woman who projected that kind of arrogant competence. She was undeniably attractive, in a way that once again disquieted Geary, and she moved with the unconscious grace of someone trained as a dancer or in lethal martial arts. Colonel Morgan was ignoring the presence of the Marines, as if they did not matter, and Geary had the unpleasant feeling that if she had been sent to kill him, the fact that the Marines were here would not have hindered her too much in carrying out that task.