Relentless Read online

  The pod’s propulsion cut off, much earlier than it should have. No communications. No maneuvering controls. Environmental systems degraded. Geary’s seat reclined automatically as the pod prepared to put him into survival sleep, a frozen state where his body could rest safely until his escape pod was recovered. As Geary’s consciousness faded, his eyes on the blinking damage lights of the escape pod as they winked out into dormant status, he knew that someone would come looking for him. The Alliance fleet would repel the Syndic surprise attacks, reestablish control of the space around the star Grendel, and search for survivors from Merlon. He’d be picked up in no time.

  He opened his eyes on a blur of lights and shapes, his body feeling as if it were filled with ice and his thoughts coming slowly and with difficulty. People were talking. He tried to make out the words as the blurry shapes began to resolve themselves into men and women in uniform. One man with a big, confident voice was speaking. “It’s really him? You’ve confirmed it?”

  “DNA match with fleet records is perfect,” another voice said. “This is Captain Geary. He’s been badly physically stressed by the duration of his survival sleep. It’s a miracle he came through this well. It’s a miracle he came through at all.”

  “Of course it was a miracle!” the big voice boomed. A face leaned close, and Geary blinked to focus, making out a uniform that was the color of the Alliance fleet but otherwise different in details. The man beaming at him bore the stars of an admiral, but Geary didn’t recognize him. “Captain Geary?”

  “C . . . C . . . Com . . . man . . . der . . . Geary,” he finally managed to reply.

  “Captain Geary!” the admiral insisted. “You were promoted!”

  Promoted? Why? How long had he been out? Where was he?

  “What . . . ship?” Geary gasped, looking around. From the size of the sick bay, this ship was much larger than Merlon.

  The admiral smiled. “You’re aboard the battle cruiser Dauntless, flagship of the Alliance fleet!”

  Nothing made sense. There wasn’t any battle cruiser in the Alliance fleet named Dauntless. “Crew . . . my . . . crew?” Geary managed to say.

  The admiral frowned and stepped back, motioning forward a woman who wore captain’s insignia. Geary’s gaze left the woman’s face, unsettled by her expression of awe and distracted by the number of combat-action ribbons on the left breast of her uniform. Dozens of them, but that was ridiculous. Topping her rows of ribbons was the one for the Alliance Fleet Cross. He couldn’t even remember the last time one of those had been awarded. “I’m Captain Desjani,” the woman said, “commanding officer of Dauntless . I regret to inform you that the last surviving member of the crew of your heavy cruiser died about forty-five years ago.”

  Geary stared. Forty-five years? “How . . . long?”

  “Captain Geary, you were in survival sleep for ninety-nine years, eleven months, and twenty-three days. Only the fact that the pod had a single occupant enabled it to keep you alive so long.” She made a spiritual gesture he recognized. “By the grace of our ancestors and the mercy of the living stars you lived, and you have returned.”

  One hundred years? A wave of shock rode through Geary’s slow-moving thoughts as he tried to absorb the news, not even trying to grasp why the woman had apparently seen some religious significance in his survival.

  The bad news having been delivered by someone else, the admiral leaned forward again with another big smile. “Yes, Black Jack, you have returned!”

  He’d never liked the Black Jack nickname. But if Geary managed to show his reaction, the admiral didn’t notice it, speaking as if he was giving a speech. “Black Jack Geary, back from the dead, just as predicted in the legends, to help the Alliance win its greatest victory and finally put an end to this war with the Syndics!”

  Returned? Legends? The war was still going on after a century?

  Everyone he had known must be dead.

  Who were these people and who did they think he was?

  JOHN Geary bolted awake in his stateroom aboard Dauntless , gazing up at the overhead, breathing heavily and sweating even though his insides felt a lingering memory of the ice that had once filled him. It had been a while since he’d had flashbacks to the last moments of Merlon and his awakening aboard Dauntless a century later. He sat up, kneading his forehead with one hand while he tried to calm his breathing. Around him loomed the darkened outlines of his stateroom.

  The admiral with the big voice had died in the Syndicate Worlds’ home star system after his plan to win the war had turned out to be an ambush by the Syndics. A lot of other people and Alliance warships had died with him. The survivors had turned to the legendary Black Jack Geary to save them, and despite Geary’s abhorrence of the impossibly heroic figure that legends claimed Black Jack had been, he’d been forced to assume command of the fleet. After all, his commissioning date to captain had been almost a century earlier, and no other surviving officer in the fleet had anywhere near that much seniority. A number of them had doubted he could do it, doubted that he was truly the hero out of legend, but even though Geary privately shared those doubts, he’d known that he had to try.

  And so far he’d done what seemed impossible. He’d brought the Alliance fleet back through Syndic space, a long, fighting retreat using every skill he’d learned a century ago, skills lost to the fleet in the decades of bloodbath the war had become after Merlon’s destruction.

  His eyes went to the star display floating over the table in his stateroom. He’d left it active when he went to sleep, centered on the star Dilawa. Still inside Syndic space, but only three more jumps away from reaching safety in Alliance space. He was so close to saving those who had believed he could save them. But the fleet was still inside enemy territory, still had to fight its way past the Syndic flotilla that would surely be waiting at the end of one of those jumps, and the loss of the Merlon had come back to haunt him.

  Geary exhaled wearily, then dug in a drawer for a ration bar. He eyed the bar dubiously. Like most of the food left in the fleet, the bar had come from Syndic stockpiles abandoned in place when marginal star systems had been deserted after the introduction of the hypernet. It was food even the Syndics didn’t think worth hauling away. While no doubt long past its expiration date, the bar and the other food they’d picked up had been frozen in airless vacuum since abandonment and technically remained edible.

  The bar had a propaganda wrapper featuring impossibly heroic-looking Syndic ground troops marching from left to right. He tore the wrapper open, trying to avoid reading the ingredients, then started biting off and swallowing chunks of it. Despite his best efforts to avoid tasting the thing, he still ended up wincing at the flavor. Sailors in the Alliance fleet often complained about the food they got, but one of the few virtues of these Syndic supplies was that (aside from keeping you alive) they also made the Alliance rations taste wonderful by comparison.

  And, as the ancient joke went, not only was the food terrible but there wasn’t enough of it. The bar sat like a lead ball in Geary’s stomach, but that wasn’t why he didn’t get another. A fleet cut off from resupply and trapped in enemy territory had to get by on short rations. He wouldn’t eat better than his sailors. Though considering the quality of the Syndic food, “better” probably wasn’t the right term.

  His comm panel buzzed urgently, and Geary hit the acknowledge button.

  “Captain Geary, enemy ships have arrived at the jump point from Cavalos.”

  He slapped another control, and the star display winked out, to be replaced with a display showing just the Dilawa Star System and the ships within it. There hadn’t been much in the way of Syndicate Worlds’ warships left in the Cavalos Star System when the Alliance fleet departed, unless you counted the wreckage of the Syndic warships that orbited Cavalos in slowly spreading clouds of debris.

  But there were plenty more Syndic warships hunting Geary’s fleet, and the Alliance fleet was increasingly feeling the strain of the long retreat through Syndic sp
ace. Not all of the wreckage left at Cavalos had belonged to Syndic warships. The Alliance battle cruiser Opportune, the scout battleship Braveheart, and nine Alliance cruisers and destroyers had also been lost in the battle there, some torn apart in the battle and some blown to pieces on Geary’s orders because they had been too badly damaged to keep up with the retreating fleet.

  The pressure was wearing on him as well. His mind kept dwelling on the losses suffered thus far by the Alliance fleet, which was probably why he was getting post-traumatic-stress flashbacks again.

  With an effort, he focused on what was happening now. “Only one HuK and two nickel corvettes,” Geary commented.

  “That’s right,” Captain Desjani replied, her image popping up next to the display. She was on the bridge, of course, watching over her ship. “Too bad they’re almost three light-hours away. Dauntless’s hell-lance crews would enjoy the target practice.”

  “Not that your hell-lance crews need target practice, Tanya,” Geary agreed, his remark earning him a proud grin from Desjani. As she’d noted, the jump point was three light-hours distant from where the Alliance fleet was located deeper inside the star system, which meant the images he was seeing of the Syndic warships were three hours old. “No one’s following them in. They must be scouts.”

  “Agreed. We expect to see one of the nickels brake to stay near the jump point. The other nickel and the Hunter-Killer should accelerate toward the jump points for Kalixa and Heradao.” She paused. “This is the first time I’ve seen a nickel corvette outside a Syndic-occupied star system. Those things are so obsolete I’m surprised they risk them in jump space.”

  So obsolete, in fact, that nickel corvettes had been operating a hundred years ago, back when they’d been given that nickname by the Alliance because they were seen as cheap and easily expended in battle. Back when the war began. Images from his flashback returned, of nickel corvettes making firing runs on Merlon.

  “Sir?” Desjani asked.

  Geary shook his head, startled to realize he’d let his mind drift like that. “Sorry.”

  Only Geary might have been able to see the concern in the look Desjani gave him, but she went on speaking as if everything was routine. “The first nickel corvette may jump back for Cavalos in a little while to let them know we’re still here.” Her expression shifted, now professionally unrevealing. “Since we are still here.”

  “We need everything we can salvage from the materiel the Syndics left behind when they pulled the last people out of this star system decades ago,” Geary replied, trying not to speak angrily in response to Desjani’s prodding.

  “We’ve lifted all of the abandoned food already.” Desjani made a face. “If I can use the term ‘food’ loosely. The fleet is still going to have to reduce rations again to stretch out what food we’ve got left.” She shrugged. “That’s one good thing about the slop we’re getting from the cast-off Syndic stockpiles. No one really wants to eat a lot of it, so shortening the rations doesn’t bother the crews as much as it would if the food were edible.”

  “I guess there’s a bright side to everything.” Geary smiled briefly as he rechecked the information on the raw minerals being loaded into the bunkers on the fleet’s auxiliaries, then realized that Desjani had first made her point about the need for the fleet to move and then deliberately changed the subject to defuse his resentment.

  I shouldn’t be angry. It’s a legitimate concern for every commanding officer in this fleet. When are we leaving Dilawa, and where are we going? We’ve been here for almost a day and a half, and that’s probably at least one day too long.

  There weren’t any good reasons for staying at Dilawa. A star without any habitable worlds orbiting it, Dilawa had once boasted only a small human presence, perhaps several thousand judging from the facilities the Syndics had left behind. Those humans had been here because the old faster-than-light system jump drives could only take ships from star to nearby star, requiring ships to pass through every star system on the way to their objectives. The hypernet had changed that, allowing ships to go from any gate in the net directly to any other gate, leaving the human presence in many unexceptional star systems to dwindle gradually as the interstellar traffic bypassed them.

  But those old jump drives were getting his fleet home, one star system at a time, and the hypernet had proved to be a threat to the very existence of humanity. Dauntless was also carrying a Syndic hypernet key, which could provide a decisive advantage to the Alliance if it could be safely delivered into Alliance space. If he didn’t get the fleet home, that key and the knowledge of the threat posed by the hypernet would be lost along with the warships and their crews. The costs of failure seemed higher every time he thought about them. “Let me know if anything changes,” he asked Desjani.

  “Yes, sir.” Desjani’s image disappeared, but not before her expression and her tone somehow conveyed the message that something needed to be changing and wasn’t.

  He sat there, the star display centered on Dilawa once again floating above the table before him. No matter how long he stared at it, though, the display refused to perform like a crystal ball and offer answers from its depths to the questions he had to resolve.

  Primarily, where to go from Dilawa.

  Just make up your mind, Geary told himself. He’d done it many times already during the fleet’s long retreat through enemy space. It shouldn’t have been that hard a decision. There weren’t that many jumps left before the fleet reached a Syndicate Worlds’ border star system from which it could jump back to Alliance space. It should be easy, with safety so close. Instead it felt harder every time he approached the decision. He kept hesitating, each possible choice running hard into visions of what had gone wrong at Lakota and the losses suffered at Cavalos. And now memories from the destruction of Merlon were adding to the mix.

  He’d considered asking Victoria Rione, Co-President of the Callas Republic and a member of the Alliance Senate, for her opinion. But the Alliance politician had refused to offer advice of that nature for some time. Outwardly, Rione claimed it was because she’d been wrong so many times in what she wanted the fleet to do. If there was another agenda driving Rione in the matter, he wasn’t sure what it was. Though for a while they’d been off-and-on lovers in the physical sense, Rione had kept much of herself hidden from him even during that phase of their relationship, before they both ended it.

  In any event, he’d seen little of her in the last couple of days. “I need to concentrate on employing my informants throughout this fleet,” she’d told him. “We need to find which Alliance officers have escalated their opposition to your command of the fleet to the point of employing malicious worms in the fleet’s operating systems.” Since those worms had once nearly caused the destruction of some of the fleet’s ships, Geary couldn’t argue with her priorities.

  There were others he could ask. Intelligent, reliable, and thoughtful officers like Captain Duellos of the Courageous, Captain Tulev of the Leviathan, and Captain Cresida of the Furious.

  But Geary sat alone and eyed his star display, feeling a strange reluctance to seek advice, despite knowing that further delay could be fatal.

  His hatch alert chimed, identifying the person seeking entry as Captain Desjani. He authorized entry, wondering what could have brought her here. Given the widespread rumors about his being involved with Desjani, she didn’t come to his stateroom very often.

  The truth was that they were involved, though neither would, in any way, speak of or act on the feelings they hadn’t sought. Not while he was fleet commander and she was in his chain of command.

  “Has something happened?” he asked.

  Desjani nodded toward the star display. “I wanted to talk with you privately about your future operational plans, sir.”

  That should have been welcome, because he knew how well Desjani could handle a tactical situation, but this was an operational decision. Or so Geary told himself, wondering why he was reluctant to hear what she had to say. But
how could he put her off? Admitting uncertainty would only justify Desjani’s request to discuss the matter. “All right.”

  She walked in, seeming unusually distant, then stood before the star display, not directly facing Geary. “You seemed a little off earlier, sir.”

  “Bad dream.” Desjani looked his way with a wordless question, and Geary shrugged. “About my old ship, and waking up and everything.”

  “Oh.” Desjani’s eyes went back to the star display. “We were so caught up in finding you that we didn’t realize how badly shaken you were. I’ve often wished we’d handled it differently, telling you how long it had been, the fate of your crew. I must have sounded very callous.”

  “I don’t think there was any good way to tell me all of that, and no, you didn’t strike me as callous. It was obvious you knew I had to be told, and no one else was going to do it.”

  “Certainly not Admiral Bloch,” Desjani agreed. “I’ve often wondered what your first impressions of me were.”

  He grimaced, trying to remember. “I wasn’t thinking clearly at all. There was so much. I remember wondering how you could possibly have accumulated so many battle ribbons. And the Fleet Cross. How did you earn that, anyway?”

  Desjani sighed. “At Fingal. I was just a lieutenant on the old Buckler. We’d fought until the ship was a wreck, and the Syndics boarded.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I helped fight them off.” Her gaze lifted, focused somewhere else.

  “Any actions worthy of the Fleet Cross must have been a great deal more than ‘helped fight them off,’ ” Geary commented.

  “I did my duty.” She fell silent for a moment.

  Geary respected Desjani’s right to tell that story where and when she wanted. There might be a lot of trauma behind the events that had led to the medal. He watched her, surprised by the topics she’d brought up. “Did you come down here just to talk about those things?”

  “Not just that.” She paused and took a deep breath. “I’m aware that you don’t usually discuss your plans in advance,” Desjani began in much more formal tones.