Impávido (48 page)

“All right.” That made sense, even if Geary didn’t like the idea of sweeping the fleet close to the fifth planet and slowing down so his shuttles could pick up the prisoners. “I assume the Syndic shuttles aren’t to be trusted, and we have to depend on our own.” Everyone nodded this time. “Everyone with shuttles on your ships prepare them for some heavy use. I’ll ask Co-President Rione to deliver our ultimatum to the Syndics regarding the prisoners.”

Numos gave Geary a look of exaggerated disbelief. “Why should she be involved?”

Not sure why Numos had developed a dislike of Rione, Geary answered bluntly. “She’s our most capable negotiator.”

“Her blunders at Corvus nearly costs us the Titan!”

Geary felt anger rising in him. The Syndic betrayal at Corvus involving merchant ships supposedly delivering supplies to the Alliance fleet hadn’t been Rione’s fault, hadn’t been anyone’s fault, really.

Surely Numos knew that. “That’s not my assessment.”

“Of course not! Since Co-President Rione has been spending a great deal of time alone with you in your stateroom, I’m sure you think—”

Geary cut off Numos with a fist slamming to the table’s surface. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the outraged faces of the commanders of ships belonging to the Rift Federation and the Callas Republic.

“Captain Numos, you are out of order,” Geary stated in a deathly low voice.

Captain Faresa stepped in with characteristic certitude. “Captain Numos is only stating what everyone—”

“Captain Faresa,” Geary stopped her with a glare. “I never thought to see the day when officers of the Alliance fleet would behave like gossips in a schoolyard. Both you and Captain Numos obviously need to review the personal and professional standards to which an officer is expected to adhere.” Faresa’s face had gone white, Numos’s red, but their eyes glinted with the same hatred of Geary. “Co-President Rione of the Callas Republic is a member of the Alliance senate. She is to be treated with the respect that position requires. If you feel yourselves unable to provide due respect to a senior civilian member of the Alliance government, then you are obligated to submit your resignations from the fleet. I will not tolerate insults aimed at any officer or any representative of the Alliance government in this fleet. Is that clear?”

Geary took a long breath and looked around the table, unable to be sure how this latest speech had been received. Captain Tulev, his face grim, was nodding in agreement, though. “There’s been too much gossip, too many rumors. Insults aimed at those in command,” Tulev added with a glance at Numos.

“Rumors that encouraged ship commanders to adhere to the old traditions of all-out pursuit, with consequences we have seen this day.”

A chill ran around the table at the direct reference to whatever might have motivated the captains of four ships to ignore Geary’s orders and leave the formation to chase the Syndic warships. Captain Numos swallowed, his mouth working, then finally got out some words. “I had nothing to do with that, and if you’re implying—”

“He’s implying nothing!” Geary snapped. “He’s bringing to our attention that encouraging ships to ignore orders, that attempts to undermine the commander of this fleet, can have serious consequences. I’m aware of the rumors Captain Tulev speaks of, and let me assure you that if I ever discover that anyone encouraged the commanding officers of the Anelace, Baselard, Mace, and Cuirass”—he recited the names slowly to make sure their impact was felt—“to act in the way they did, I will personally make sure that whoever that is will wish they’d died an honorable death with the crews of those ships.” As he finished speaking, Geary let his gaze rest on Numos, who reddened so much more that he looked like he’d suffered a radiation burn. But Numos sat silent, having apparently realized that Geary was in no mood to be antagonized further.

“Now,” Geary continued in a calmer voice, “at our present speed we’re about forty hours from the fifth planet. Make sure the shuttles are ready. I have a plan here for distributing the Alliance personnel we pick up from the planet among the ships of the fleet.” It had been absurdly easy, just a matter of calling up the intelligent agent on his system and asking it how to add five thousand more personnel to the ships in the fleet. Since that was a simple but tedious exercise in math, comparing berths and complements of personnel and support facilities on all of the available ships with the numbers needed, the computer had handled it within moments. It was the sort of thing fleet commanders had required staffs for in the old days, but the ability of automated systems to handle administrative and command tasks had eliminated much of the grunt work those staffs had handled. On top of that, Geary had learned that after the terrible losses suffered year in and year out in this apparently endless war, the need for as many officers as possible to be available to crew replacement ships had led to the cannibalization of the remnants of the old staffs.

Technically, as fleet commander, Geary was still authorized a chief of staff, but that officer had died along with the former fleet commander Admiral Bloch as a result of Syndic treachery during negotiations. He was also authorized an aide, but Geary was damned if he was going to pull a junior officer out of a combat job to act as his personal servant.

“Look at the plan,” Geary continued, “see what it says your ship can handle, and let me know if there’s any problems with it. I want to know, so don’t just suck it up and hope you can handle more than your ship is able to carry safely. There appear to be between three and five thousand prisoners by initial estimates, which we can handle. We’ll worry about identifying skills in any fleet personnel who were prisoners and getting them to ships that need them later.

“Colonel Carabali.”

The Marine nodded.

“Prepare your Marines. I’d like to see your plan for handling this no later than five hours before we reach the planet.

“Are there any questions?” Geary asked the entire group.

“How will we handle the Syndic military base on the fifth planet?” someone asked.

“That’s yet to be determined,” Geary advised. He could see dissatisfaction rippling around the table. To many of his commanders, the only good Syndic was a dead Syndic, and no opportunity to kill Syndics should be passed up. “I’ll remind you that the installations in this system are obsolete. It costs the Syndics to keep them running. Leaving those installations intact means Syndic funds spent on them and means Syndic troops trained and committed to them. If that base turns out to be a real threat, we’ll take it out.

Otherwise, I’m not interested in doing the Syndics a favor by removing it from the list of things they need to worry about.”

He paused, trying to remember what else he’d planned on saying. “We won’t know if this is real until the Marines see Alliance prisoners of war at that camp. Everyone needs to stay alert.” He couldn’t imagine even the Syndics would risk the population of a habitable world in order to try to destroy a few more Alliance ships, but then he’d seen a lot of things since he’d been rescued that he had never imagined.

“We have a chance to do a great good for people who never expected to be liberated. Thank the living stars for that, and let’s do our ancestors proud.”

The crowd dwindled with the usual amazing speed as the virtual images of ship captains vanished like popping soap bubbles, both Numos and Faresa disappearing on the very heels of Geary’s dismissal.

Captain Desjani, with a meaningful glare at the place where those two had apparently been sitting, shook her head and then excused herself before leaving the compartment the old-fashioned way by walking out.

As Geary had hoped, the reassuring image of Captain Duellos remained at the end. Duellos also indicated the places where Numos and Faresa had been. “I wouldn’t have said this before, but those two are a danger to this fleet.”

Geary sat back, feeling weary and rubbing his forehead. “You wouldn’t have said that before what?”

“Before four ships of this fleet set off on an insane charge.” The image of Duellos seemed to walk up to Geary and take the next seat. “Valiant! Glorious! Brainless! I have no proof, but I know Numos was behind that.”

“I figure he is, too. But,” Geary admitted bitterly, “the lack of proof is a problem. My command of this fleet is still far too shaky. If I start sacking commanding officers, especially one with Numos’s seniority, without being able to prove misconduct I might find way too many of my other ships valiantly and brainlessly dashing into minefields.”

Captain Duellos looked down and grimaced. “The lesson of those four ships was a powerful one. No matter what lies Numos encourages, everyone will remember that you were right to warn those ships off and to avoid chasing pell-mell after a few Syndic HuKs.”

Geary couldn’t help a snort of derision. “You’d think being right would gain me a little more credit than that. What do you think? Will everyone follow my orders when we approach the fifth planet?”

“At this point, yes.”

“Do you have any idea where that nonsense about Co-President Rione came from?”

Duellos looked mildly surprised. “I assumed you two were on friendly terms, but even if you’re extremely friendly, it’s no affair of mine. Co-President Rione is not an officer or sailor under your command, and a personal relationship with her has no bearing on your performance in command.”

Geary stared for a moment, then laughed. “Personal relationship? With Co-President Rione?”

This time Duellos shrugged. “Scuttlebutt declares that you spend time together alone.”

“For conferences! I need her advice.” Geary laughed again. “By our ancestors, Victoria Rione doesn’t like me at all! She makes no bones about it. I frighten her because she worries I’ll turn into Black Jack Geary at any moment and sail this fleet home to depose the elected leaders of the Alliance and become god-emperor or something.”

“Co-President Rione is a shrewd and intelligent woman,” Duellos observed with absolute seriousness.

“She’s told you she doesn’t like you?”

“Yes! She—” Come to think of it, Rione had several times expressed distrust of Geary, but he couldn’t remember at the moment her ever saying she didn’t like him. “Yeah, I think so.”

Duellos shrugged again. “Whether she does or not makes no difference. I say once more, she is not your subordinate, not in the military at all, and any personal relationship with her is perfectly appropriate.

Should one occur.”

Geary couldn’t help a third laugh as he bade farewell to Captain Duellos, but as he began to leave the room, he paused in thought. Surely Rione’s spies in the fleet had reported to her the rumors about a relationship between her and Geary. Why hadn’t Rione told him of those rumors when she’d spoken of the other rumors?

Could the iron politician he’d dealt with actually be embarrassed by the rumors? But if so, why had she continued visiting him?

Geary leaned one arm against the bulkhead for a moment, staring at the deck, remembering the first days after he was revived from the survival sleep that had kept him alive for a century, a span of time in which everyone in his life had died in battle or of old age. The shock of learning that everyone he had once known and loved, men and women, were long dead had led him to wall off the idea of new relationships.

The ice that had once filled him seemed almost gone, but it still occupied that one place, afraid to retreat and let warmth grow again.

He’d lost everyone once. It could happen again. He didn’t want it to hurt so much the next time.

THE fifth planet looked like exactly the sort of place made for a Syndic labor camp. Too far from its sun to ever know a true summer, most of the world seemed to be featureless fields of tundra that on rare occasions ran into bare, jagged mountain ranges rising like islands from the sea of low, tough vegetation.

Glaciers extending from the poles appeared to hold a good portion of the planet’s water, with only shallow, small seas dotting the areas not covered by ice. Looking at the dismal place, Geary didn’t have any trouble understanding why Sutrah hadn’t been deemed worthy of the expense of a hypernet gate.

Unless the fourth planet was an absolute paradise, which it certainly wasn’t since it was a shade too close to its sun and probably unpleasantly warm. Sutrah was just the sort of place that had ceased to matter when the Syndic hypernet was created.

Once, using the system jump drives that could take ships from star to star, anyone going anywhere had to traverse all of the star systems in between. Every one of those systems was guaranteed a certain amount of traffic passing through en route to other destinations. But the hypernet allowed ships to go directly from one star to another, no matter how far the distance between them. Without the ships passing through, and without any particular value other than as the homes of people who had suddenly found themselves living in nowhere, the systems off the hypernet were slowly dying, with everyone who could migrate moving to hypernet-linked systems. The human communities on the fifth planet of Sutrah were fading even faster than usual. Judging from what the Alliance sensors could see, fully two-thirds of the former habitations on the world were now vacant, showing no signs of heating or activity.

Geary focused back on the depiction of the labor camp on the fifth planet. There were mines nearby, which might represent actual economic value but also might exist solely as a place to work the life from the prisoners in the camp. There weren’t any walls, but then there didn’t have to be. Outside the camp was nothing but those empty fields of tundra. Escape would simply be suicide, unless someone tried to get out through the landing field, and there walls of razor wire did exist.

He became aware that Captain Desjani was waiting patiently for his attention. “Sorry, Captain. What do you think of my plan?” Geary, uncomfortable with trying to place his fleet in orbit about the planet, had put together a plan calling for the fleet to slow down, dropping the shuttles as it passed closest to the world, then looping around in a wide turn outside the orbits of the fifth planet’s small moons before returning again to pick up the shuttles as they returned with the liberated prisoners.