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  Duellos answered, his voice unusually harsh. “Nothing would stop them, no argument would dissuade them. They’d want every Syndic dead by any means possible.”

  “Bloody hell.” Geary wondered why most of his contributions to these discussions were curses. “All right. We can guess that we have some brief grace period after getting home in which the aliens will wait to see if humanity takes the poison bait. If we don’t go for it within whatever period of time they think reasonable, the aliens will start trying to trigger what could well be humanity’s last offensive. I wish I knew what they wanted or intended.”

  “We have no way of answering that,” Rione said. “We believe we know what they’ve done. They seem very comfortable with placing weapons in our hands and waiting for us to use them on each other. But we don’t know if they’re avoiding direct actions against us as some sort of strategy or if it reflects some moral or religious aspect of their thinking.”

  “What could possibly be moral about that?” Cresida wondered.

  “From an alien perspective? They could believe that simply providing the tools places no guilt on them as long we’re the ones who pull the triggers. I don’t know that, it’s just a possible explanation.”

  “Or,” Tulev stated, “it could be equally possible that it is a totally amoral strategy to ensure humanity is eliminated or contained as a threat or rival in the most efficient manner possible for these aliens. We have no way of knowing, so we must base our assumptions of future actions on what they have done in the past.”

  “You’re right. Unfortunately, if our guesses are accurate, what they’ve done in the past has been very bad for us.” Geary turned back to Rione. “Co-President Rione, can you put together a list of the stars with the highest symbolic importance? We’ll have to make sure those star systems get the highest priority on safe-collapse systems for their hypernet gates.”

  “Do you think such a thing could be done? Opinions on levels of symbolic importance will vary.” She eyed Geary for a long moment. “If they wish to incite a massive retaliation against the Syndics, the aliens might target the home star system of the fleet commander and legendary hero Black Jack Geary.”

  His breath caught, his eyes suddenly seeing not the compartment they were in or the companions with him, but the world where he’d grown up. The world where his parents and other family members were buried. Home, even though it had surely changed a lot in the century he had been in survival sleep. He imagined a shock wave hitting it like the one that had devastated Lakota Star System, instantly turning a pleasant, well-populated world into a corner of hell and a charnel house. How could he accept a low priority for his home world? Geary’s vision cleared and he looked at those with him. They all had their own home worlds. Which one did he bump down in priority for his home?

  Geary sighed, shaking his head. “I’m not very good at making the sorts of decisions reserved for the living stars, I’m afraid. Madam Co-President, if you could just make your best appraisal—”

  “You think I’m qualified to play at being a deity? Or desire to do so?” Rione cut in, her voice clipped with anger.

  Tulev spoke into the awkward silence that followed. “I will make the list.” He gazed into the star display, his eyes distant. “I have nothing left to bias me.”

  The image of Duellos on one side of Tulev leaned forward, resting a hand on Tulev’s wrist, while from the other side Desjani wordlessly did the same. Cresida, farther away, nodded once to him, her expression conveying understanding. Tulev nodded to each of them, then to Geary. “I’ll do it,” he repeated.

  “Thank you, Captain Tulev,” Geary said. “At some point I’m going to have to tell the fleet the aliens exist, but for now I think we should continue pretending that the danger posed by the hypernet gates is simply an unintended technological side effect.”

  “That’s all it has to be,” Cresida agreed. “If it’s presented as a possibility of any hypernet gate’s spontaneously collapsing at any time or subject to the Syndics causing a collapse, backed up by images of what happened at Lakota, then people will have all the reasons they need to act.”

  “Okay. We’ll talk again before we jump for Varandal. Thank you for coming to this meeting, thank you for your advice, and thank you for your continued discretion on what we think is true about these aliens.”

  “If only we knew more,” Cresida commented. “I’m still working on my design for a safe-fail system we can install on hypernet gates as quickly and easily as possible. I think I’ll have it ready by the time we reach Atalia.”

  “Let’s hope so.” Duellos sighed. “Since we know so little of what these creatures may do or what they want.”

  “Feathers or lead?” Desjani asked, invoking the ancient riddle in which only the demon asking the question knew the right answer and could change it at any time. As Duellos had once pointed out, the aliens, too, were riddles in which both the answers and the questions did not just remain unknown but also reflected thought processes estranged from the humans trying to understand their purposes and meaning.

  “That’s my question, Captain Desjani. I’ll thank you not to play demon with my riddle. Just out of curiosity, though, what was the right answer this time?”

  She smiled unpleasantly. “Wouldn’t you like to know? Women can be just as enigmatic as demons.”

  “You don’t honestly think I’m going to touch that line, do you?”

  As the images of Tulev, Cresida, and Duellos disappeared, Desjani frowned down at her personal data unit. “Excuse me, sir, but I’m needed in engineering.” She hastened out, leaving Geary and Rione alone. Rione, seeming uncharacteristically subdued, turned to go as well, but stopped before leaving. Standing near the hatch and still facing it, she spoke to Geary. “What happened to Captain Tulev? He said he had nothing left.”

  Geary nodded, recalling the personnel files he had read. “His family, wife, and children died in a Syndic bombardment of their home world.”

  “Oh, damn.” Rione shook her head. “That’s horrible, but it should’ve left something. Some other relatives. What world was it?”

  He tried to remember. There were so many worlds. “Elys… Elysa?”

  “Elyzia?”

  “Yeah, that’s it.” Geary stared at her, bothered that the name had come so readily to her. “What happened to it?”

  “Syndic bombardment,” Rione murmured so low he almost didn’t hear. “But prolonged, part of a very large strike at the Alliance. Most of the world’s surface was devastated, the great majority of the population killed. After the Syndics were repelled, the world was written off, the survivors evacuated except for a few who insisted on staying to occupy rebuilt defensive installations, in case the Syndics ever came back. Captain Tulev spoke the literal truth. He has nothing left.” She looked directly at him.

  “Except the fleet. Did you realize that you and he share that?”

  “No.” Geary searched for other words and couldn’t find any.

  “We retaliated at Yunren,” Rione continued, as if speaking to herself. “A Syndic border star system. There’s nothing left of Yunren, either, except a few defenses occupied by diehards who continue to live only for the chance to kill some of those who wiped out their world. Both sides have avoided repeating that since then, though I don’t know if that’s because it takes so much work to devastate an entire world or because everyone was horrified at how low we had sunk.”

  Geary shook his head, feeling sick inside. “How could anyone give such orders?”

  “Oh, it’s easy enough, Captain Geary. You just have to form your plans somewhere far from the enemy while looking at a large star display with lots of little planets on it. Just dots with strange names. Targets. Not the homes of people like you, but targets that must be wiped out in the name of protecting people like you. It’s very easy,” she repeated, “to rationalize the murder of millions or billions.”

  “That’s strange,” Geary commented. “I’ve talked to Marines. They say they h
ave to dehumanize the individuals they kill in order to be able to fight, and they have to worry that the process will go too far and they’ll kill individuals who aren’t really a threat. But on the other end of the scale, the highest-ranking individuals, who’ll never confront an individual enemy, have to dehumanize them by the hundreds, thousands, or millions.”

  She turned to look at him. “I sometimes wonder if the aliens are right, and that humanity can be counted upon to wipe itself out someday.”

  “I hope not. Personally viewing the events at Lakota seems to have impressed a lot of people in this fleet. There’s no way to distance yourself from events when you watch a habitable planet be devastated that way by a single blow.”

  “It does appear to have had a strong impact. What about Captain Cresida? The way she looked at Tulev as if they shared something. Was her family from Elyzia as well?”

  “No,” Geary replied. “Her husband was a fleet officer. They were married about a year before he died in battle.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “Two years.”

  Rione nodded. “After ten years I still expect to see my husband sometimes. Would Captain Cresida accept condolences from me?”

  “I think so. She’s never spoken of it to me, but you do share that kind of loss.”

  Her sigh came out slow and long, like the last breath of a dying runner. “I don’t know if the living stars truly arranged for you to be here now, John Geary, but there are times when I think about this war and pray desperately that they did, and that you can bring an end to this.”

  She left then, leaving Geary looking at the closed hatch.

  THREE

  Heradao. As the ships of the Alliance fleet flashed into existence at the jump exit from Dilawa, Geary’s first thought was that only three more jumps would bring the fleet home. His second thought was to wonder how hard it would be to get through Heradao Star System, but he’d have the answer to that soon enough. The fleet’s sensors, sensitive enough to spot small objects across light-hours of distance, scanned their surroundings and rapidly updated the display before Geary.

  “They’re here,” Desjani noted calmly, even though her eyes were lighting with enthusiasm at the prospect of combat. “But nowhere close by.”

  Geary kept his breathing slow and calm as enemy warships multiplied on his display in a flurry of updates. The main Syndic flotilla, arrayed in their customary box formation, was almost four light-hours away, loitering in an orbit around Heradao’s star. A second and much smaller flotilla orbited a bit farther off, about five light-hours from the Alliance ships. As Desjani said, that wasn’t close. Even if the main Syndic flotilla turned directly toward the Alliance fleet for an intercept, it would still be more than a day before the opposing forces got close enough to fight. “I thought we’d see more in the way of system defenses since we’re getting closer to the border.”

  Desjani made a noncommittal gesture. “Yes and no. The warships assigned to defend this star system would have been substantially more in quality and quantity than we’ve been encountering deeper in Syndic space. The smaller flotilla we’re seeing may be made up of those system-defense forces. But I’m not surprised to see nothing significant in the way of new fixed defenses. We’re still two jumps from a Syndic star system right on the border. The border star systems get priority on defenses. I’m sure the Syndics would like to be able to place more defenses in star systems farther from the border, but they face the same constraints on resources and funds that we do.” She popped up a display spanning a huge region of space, centered on the border. “That’s especially true because as you get one jump in from the border, you greatly expand the number of star systems that need to be defended. Go two jumps from the border, and the number of star systems in the zone increases exponentially. It’s simply too huge an area with too many star systems to disperse strong defenses across evenly.”

  “We assumed Kalixa would be more heavily defended,” Geary agreed, “since it has a hypernet gate and is a wealthier star system than Heradao.”

  “Yes, and when we get to Padronis, we’ll probably find nothing there because there’s nothing there worth defending. Atalia will be a much harder nut to crack.” Desjani made an annoyed sound, then gestured at her display. “I ran out the course to the jump point for Padronis. The Syndics are in orbits which allow them to intercept us if we head for that jump point.”

  Geary frowned, his mind locked on the main enemy force. Against the Alliance fleet’s twenty battleships and sixteen battle cruisers, the Syndics had a flotilla containing twenty-three battleships and twenty-one battle cruisers, plus enough heavy cruisers, light cruisers, and destroyers to give them an advantage there as well. The second enemy flotilla was much lighter, consisting of an even dozen heavy cruisers and a score of light cruisers and destroyers. The coming encounter wouldn’t be easy, and could be worse than Lakota and Cavalos if he screwed up. “Why are you bothered by that?” he asked Desjani. “We expected them to block us from reaching the next star system home.”

  “Because from where they are, they couldn’t stop us from reaching the jump point for Kalixa,” Desjani pointed out. “If our estimates are anywhere near accurate, then after the losses this fleet has inflicted in the last few months, the flotilla here must have almost all of the Syndics’ surviving major warships. Why aren’t they worried about our going to Kalixa? Its system defenses can’t be that good.”

  He got it then, his frown matching hers. “Kalixa has a hypernet gate. Maybe they’re planning on blowing it when we arrive.” Geary couldn’t keep from wincing at the idea, imagining another inhabited star system devastated or completely destroyed by a collapsing hypernet gate. It wasn’t unthinkable, though, given the sort of tactics the Syndic leadership had employed in the past.

  “Maybe,” Desjani agreed with visible reluctance. “They’re leaving us an open path there, almost as if they want us to go that way. They could follow us to Kalixa with an idea of mopping up whatever survived the hypernet gate collapse. But the Syndics know we survived the collapse of the gate at Lakota without serious damage, so they should realize that they couldn’t be sure that would cripple this fleet. If it didn’t hurt us badly, the flotilla here would be in a stern chase and couldn’t catch us unless we deliberately lingered to wait for them. Why take that chance?”

  She was thinking it through, and her questions sounded uncomfortably close to those Geary was coming up with. “What else could be at Kalixa?”

  “I don’t know, but if the Syndics want us to go there…”

  “Then we don’t want to go there.” Had the Syndics struck a deal with the aliens? Would they let the Alliance fleet use the hypernet gate at Kalixa with the understanding that the aliens would divert the Alliance warships from their chosen goal to some location deep within Syndic territory? The fleet couldn’t possibly fight its way out of some place far within Syndic-controlled space again. “Whatever the explanation, our questions add up to more reasons for getting past these guys and going to Padronis instead of heading for Kalixa.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” Desjani concurred. “Besides, I hate leaving Syndic warships in one piece. Their formation is a little unusual this time around.”

  “I’d noticed that.” Even though the Syndic flotilla was formed into an overall box, that box was formed from five distinct subformations, one at each corner and one in the center. “Interesting.”

  “I wonder where they learned that,” Desjani said mockingly.

  “The question is whether they’re actually going to try maneuvering those five subformations independently, or if they’re just groping toward doing that and will keep the subformations slaved to their places in the box.” If the Syndics did try moving each formation separately, it would probably be a fiasco on their end since such skills were hard-won by training and experience he knew the Syndics couldn’t yet have gained. If they didn’t move them independently, the five subformations were within supporting distance of each oth
er, but barely.

  He pulled his focus off the Syndic flotillas so he could evaluate the entire star system. “They’ve got pickets out.” Geary indicated the jump exits for Padronis and Kalixa, where the Alliance fleet’s sensors had identified Syndic Hunter-Killers. It would be several hours before any of those HuKs saw the light waves carrying images of the Alliance fleet, but once they did, some of them would surely jump to carry the news to other Syndic star systems. “No nickel corvettes this close to the border, I guess.”

  “I’d never seen one operational before Corvus,” Desjani reminded him. Mention of the first star the fleet had reached during its retreat from the Syndic home star system jerked Geary’s mind back to that time, and his eyes went to the portion of the display showing the Alliance fleet. At Corvus he’d been appalled to see the Alliance fleet falling apart as every ship raced to engage the weak Syndic defenders. But those days were past. The Alliance fleet held its formation now, trusting to Geary’s command to ensure that the Syndic flotilla would be crushed. He wondered how much small gestures like reintroducing saluting to the fleet had helped forge that discipline. Their bravery had never been in question, but now these Alliance warships fought as intelligently as they did courageously. The field of battle where they’d be engaging the enemy this time mostly involved empty space, of course, and, for the rest, Heradao wasn’t too unusual as habitable star systems went. Four planets orbited in the inner system, the closest to the star only about two light-minutes out from it in a fast orbit, as if the small world were trying to outrun the heat and radiation pummeling it. The other three inner-system planets orbited about four light-minutes, seven light-minutes, and nine and a half light-minutes from the star. Given the intensity of the star Heradao, the world at seven-light minutes out had not perfect but endurable conditions for human life, and humans had taken advantage of that even though at that distance from its star the radiation bombardment was probably high enough to cause extra health problems. Cities and towns dotted the surface of that planet, and even though Heradao had been bypassed by the Syndic hypernet, that third world was apparently attractive or wealthy enough to sustain a decent population. Surprisingly for a star system bypassed by the hypernet, the cold fourth world had more human activity than had once been the case according to the old Syndic records the Alliance fleet had seized at Sancere.