Impávido (59 page)

Desjani’s eyes gleamed. “It’ll be a nasty blow to the Syndics, hitting something so important where they surely never expected it to be seriously threatened.”

“Right.” If they’re not waiting for us with the kind of ambush that almost annihilated this fleet in the Syndic home system. And if my fleet doesn’t fall apart any further before we get there. Geary stood. “I’ll be meeting with some of the ship commanders.”

COMMANDER Cresida appeared to sit next to Geary, the other twenty-eight ship commanders ranked down the table, all plainly curious why they’d been singled out for this virtual meeting.

“You’ve been selected because your records and the records of your ships mark you as both brave and steady in combat,” Geary explained. “We’ll be arriving in Sancere with no idea what sort of forces the Syndics have on hand. It’s not likely to be anything we can’t handle,” he stated confidently and hoped fervently, “but it might be enough to cause us losses if we don’t deal with it well. Here’s what I need from you. Commander Cresida on Furious will be in command of a special task force comprising your ships.

Task Force Furious won’t be broken out separately from the rest of the fleet when we arrive at Sancere.

What you’ll do is simulate breaking formation, Furious first and the others following, as if you were engaging in an undisciplined charge at the strongest force of Syndic ships we can spot.”

Commander Cresida and the other commanders couldn’t hide their puzzlement. “You want us to break formation?” Cresida asked. “To look like we’re being so aggressive we aren’t paying attention to orders?”

“Yes.” Geary pointed to a representation of Sancere’s system. “Charge headlong at the enemy. There’s not enough of you here to deal with the likely number of Syndic ships guarding Sancere or just there getting refitted or undergoing repairs. That’s deliberate. I want you to look like a small force that has rashly separated from the rest of the fleet and can be easily destroyed. You go racing down toward the enemy, but short of engagement range, I want you to turn, raggedly and still in an undisciplined fashion, and flee downward, away from the Syndics and the rest of the fleet.” Geary traced the imagined tracks with his finger.

Cresida looked horrified. “As if we were running from the enemy?”

“Exactly.” None of the commanders looked happy. “There’s a good reason for that. The idea is—”

“Sir,” Cresida interrupted, her expression concerned and earnest. “The Syndics won’t believe it.”

Geary had been momentarily upset at the thought that Cresida might act as bullheaded as Numos. But what she said nipped that anger in the bud because it seemed to have a good reason behind it. “Why not?”

“We don’t flee battle, sir.” The pride in Cresida’s voice couldn’t be missed. “Regardless of the odds.”

All of the other commanders nodded in agreement. “The Syndics know this. They won’t believe a feigned retreat.”

That was a problem, but Geary couldn’t see any grounds for denying Cresida’s assessment, especially with all of the other specially selected ship captains agreeing with her. It also matched the fighting-spirit-triumphing-over-all-odds nonsense that he had heard from Falco. How could he disregard the advice of commanders he had already decided were particularly trustworthy? “Then I want your advice. Any of you. How do we draw off Syndic defenders, get them chasing Task Force Furious instead of paying attention to what the rest of the fleet is doing?”

Commander Neeson of the Implacable shrugged. “Captain Geary, if you want to get the Syndics chasing us, then I’d recommend a firing pass. Come in hard and fast, hit the outermost units with everything we can throw at them, then sweep onward.”

Cresida nodded. “Yes. Get them mad. Even better if there’s a follow-on target we seem to be aiming for.

Something they can’t let us reach. We hit them, then alter course to head for the high-value target.”

“Sancere’s got to be full of high-value targets,” someone else observed. “We should be able to identify something on the fly.”

Geary thought about the plan, gazing at the representation of Sancere’s system. “What if you get too deep into the Syndic defenses? I don’t want this to be a real suicide charge. I want you to be able to get out without being cut to pieces.”

Neeson studied the system display as well. “We should be able to do that. Set off on a course aimed at something valuable, the Syndics get themselves onto an intercept and crank on the speed, then we swing out, leaving them out of position. What is it we’re trying to distract them from, sir?”

“I want our fleet to get to the hypernet gate before any Syndic ships realize they need to flee through it and manage to get there. If we can seize the gate and block any departures, we’ll have all the time we need to destroy Syndic facilities at Sancere and then ride the Syndic hypernet system back to the doorstep of Alliance space.”

“If they destroy the gate…” Cresida began reluctantly.

“We won’t have to worry about Syndic reinforcements rushing in,” Geary replied.

“But the energy pulse might be dangerous.”

It seemed he’d found that expert on hypernet gates that he needed. “Tell me about it.”

Cresida gestured toward the representation of the Sancere hypernet gate on the display. “The gate is sort of a bound energy matrix. A hypernet key works by pairing the matrix of particles within a gate to the matrix of particles at another gate, establishing a path that ships can use. The matrix is held by these structures,” she pointed to objects ranked around the gate. “As you can see, there’s hundreds of them.

They’re called tethers, even though they’re not really tethers, because in one sense they hold the particle matrix in the desired form. That’s how a gate would be destroyed, by disabling or destroying the tethers.

But when that happens, the matrix breaks, and the bound energy is released.” A couple of the other commanders present nodded in agreement.

“Good description, Commander,” Geary replied. Geary imagined that the actual science behind the gates was far more complicated than what Cresida had summarized. He wished everyone he needed technical descriptions from could render them so simply and concisely. “How much energy and in what form?”

Cresida grimaced unhappily. “That’s a theoretical question. It’s never been tested in practice. One extreme says the breaking of a gate matrix would generate a supernova-scale burst of energy.”

“A supernova?” Geary questioned, incredulous. “A supernova puts out as much energy in one blast as a star puts out over a ten billion year life span. An explosion like that would fry not only everything inside the entire star system it’s in but also surrounding star systems.”

“Yes,” Cresida agreed. “That’d be a negative outcome, obviously.”

“Obviously,” Geary agreed.

“But the other extreme says the energy in the matrix would, uh, fold in upon itself, like an infinite origami, getting ever smaller and tighter until it dropped into another state of existence and was lost to this universe. Energy output in this universe would be zero.”

Geary sat down, looking around and seeing the other knowledgeable commanders agreeing with Cresida again. “Then our two extremes are that the destruction of a gate would destroy an entire star system and adjacent star systems, or it’d do nothing at all. But what level of energy release is regarded as the most probable outcome?”

Cresida looked to her fellows as she spoke. “Most scientists believe the energy output would fall somewhere between less than that of a supernova and more than nothing, but no one’s been able to confidently predict how much that would be.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, sir.”

“That’s the best science can offer? And those gates got built knowing they could potentially blow the hell out of this part of the galaxy?”

“Yes, sir.”

“They let you go really fast,” Commander Neeson noted.

Geary stared at the representation of the hypernet gate at Sancere, wondering just how many disasters traced their origin to the human desire to travel faster than before. I’ve been wondering if nonhuman intelligences might be tied somehow to this horribly destructive war we’ve been fighting for the last century. But I ought to know by now that humans don’t need nonhuman intelligences to influence us to do something stupid.

Hey. Wait a minute. “Why is it we don’t know more about this? We designed and built the hypernet system. How could we be so uncertain about important characteristics of it?”

Commander Cresida exchanged glances with her comrades again. “I can’t answer that exactly, Captain Geary. I know the practical breakthroughs that let us build the hypernet came ahead of the theories that explained it. A lot of the theory is still being worked out. That’s not the first time that sort of thing has happened. People often figure out how to do something before they understand why it works.”

“Us and the Syndics? We both made these practical breakthroughs at about the same time?”

She shrugged. “The Syndics stole the knowledge from us, sir. That’s what we assume, though I don’t have the security clearances to know for sure.”

Or we stole it from them. “The bottom line is, you’re telling me the Syndics won’t dare destroy that gate?”

“Uh, no, sir. We don’t know. They may have decided the risk is acceptable.”

Geary tried not to let his feelings show. We don’t know. What if the extreme guess is right, and this fleet causes the Syndics to do something that fries not only Sancere and this fleet but a lot of nearby star systems? And even just having this fleet appear at Sancere might cause the Syndic commanders to destroy the hypernet gate as soon as they spot us. But I can’t afford not to go to Sancere and attack.

This fleet needs the supplies there.

There’s no alternative. I have to hope for the best, that the energy release won’t be so large it threatens anything, either nearby stars or just my ships.

Oh, hell. I know what they’ll do.

“We have to assume the Syndics will plan on waiting until our fleet is near the gate, then destroy it,”

Geary announced. The other ship commanders stared at him. “They’re going to hope the gate releases enough energy to fry us but not enough to fry Sancere or anything beyond it.”

Cresida nodded in agreement. “And if it does fry Sancere, then that’s just collateral damage in their eyes.”

“But then what do we do?” Neeson asked. “We can’t just ignore the gate.”

“I’ll think of something,” Geary promised. I hope. “If this diversion plan works, we can keep the Syndics from having forces in place to actually blow the gate. Now, it sounds like we’re in agreement on the best course of action for Task Force Furious. Break from the formation, charge at the Syndic defenders, make a high-speed firing pass, look like you’re heading for something very valuable, but divert after the Syndics commit to an intercept.” He paused. “I’ll send orders what to do after that, based on the situation. The most critical thing is that I don’t want you to actually dive into the heart of the Syndic defenses all by yourselves. Get back out of there so I can employ you in conjunction with the rest of the fleet.” Everyone nodded. “I’ll ensure orders are sent to each of you. Thank you. Commander Cresida, please wait.”

After the virtual presences of the others vanished, Geary turned a serious face to Commander Cresida.

“You’re going to be a good ways away from the fleet after you charge the Syndics. You could easily be more than a light-hour distant from the fleet. That means I won’t know if you get into trouble until an hour after the fact. I’m trusting you to fight smart, Commander. Keep the Syndics occupied, keep their attention on you, but don’t get yourself shot up. Can you retreat when it’s the best course of action?”

Cresida seemed to ponder the question for a moment, then nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“I want you alive and fighting, not proud and dead.”

She grinned. “Sir, you’ve demonstrated we can be proud, alive, and fighting. I’m still trying to figure out how you managed to bring everything together at Kaliban to smash the Syndics.”

Geary smiled back at her. “Do a great job at Sancere, and I’ll give you personal lessons on how to do it.”

“That’s a deal, sir.” They both stood, and Cresida rendered a precise salute. She’d obviously been practicing. Geary didn’t tell her that fleet salutes tended to be sloppier than that and as a result she looked more like a Marine. Come to think of it, maybe Colonel Carabali had been the one teaching her how to do it. Geary knew the Marines had been deriving considerable amusement from watching the sailors’ attempts to deal with Geary’s moves to reintroduce saluting to the fleet.

He sat down again after Cresida’s departure, gazing at the display, especially the representation of the hypernet gate. It hadn’t occurred to him before now that the gates were potentially dangerous. Potentially extremely dangerous.

Potentially by far the deadliest weapons mankind had ever built.

And he had no alternative but to charge most of his fleet right at the hypernet gate at Sancere.

THE communications alert chimed urgently, bringing Geary to full wakefulness. He rolled and hit the accept-message control automatically, fearing to hear that some more of his ships had bolted the formation.

“Captain Geary.” Commander Cresida seemed both anxious and excited. “I’ve been doing some thinking. Odd concepts. But it occurred to me that since the hypernet gate matrices are suspended between so many tethers, maybe a matrix would respond somewhat like a net or sail, which means exactly how it collapses would depend upon exactly how the tethers release.”

Geary tried to get his mind around that. Fortunately, Cresida’s analogy wasn’t too complicated. “What does that mean for us?”

“Well, sir, if the way the matrix collapses affects the amount of energy released, which it should, and if the way the matrix collapses is dependent on how the tethers fail, then in theory it should be possible to use selective failure of the tethers to regulate the amount of energy released.”

“Sort of like a nuclear weapon with a selectable yield?”

“In a way…though the physical processes involved and the science are completely different.”