Impávido (77 page)

I can’t see the issue gaining much traction, though, if you two continue to carry on as you have. The most damaging rumor would be that you’ve compelled Co-President Rione to become a sort of concubine, debasing her, but no one who has ever met that woman would believe such a rumor. Nor would rumors that you two are plotting against the Alliance hold up. Aside from the legend of Black Jack Geary’s devotion to the Alliance there’s also Co-President Rione’s well-known loyalty to her world and to the Alliance as a whole.” He gave Geary a questioning look. “How serious is it, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Frankly, I don’t know.”

“Not that you’ve asked, but I personally wouldn’t toy with the affections of a woman like Co-President Rione. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the expression about ‘hell hath no fury’ was coined about a woman very similar to her.”

Geary smiled again. “I’m pretty sure that’s not going to happen.”

Duellos frowned down at his hand as if examining it. “On the other hand, the woman standing beside Black Jack Geary when he returns this fleet safely to Alliance space will be in an enviable position for a politician.”

“That’s true,” Geary stated, keeping his voice carefully neutral.

Duellos glanced back at Geary. “You’re riding a tiger. You know that.”

“Yeah. I know that.” The old saying had already occurred to him, that someone riding a tiger is fine except for the fact that the tiger is taking them where it wants and they don’t dare get off, because the instant they do, the tiger can turn on them. She’s powerful and can be dangerous. I wonder if those are some of the things that attracted me to Victoria Rione?

GEARY was still musing over that when he got back to his stateroom and found Victoria Rione waiting for him there. “Did the conference go well?”

“Your spies haven’t reported in yet?” Geary replied.

It didn’t faze her in the slightest. “Not all of them, no. It’s rather inconvenient for them when you hold fleet conferences in the evening.” She indicated the star display over the table. “I have something to show you.”

He sat down, his eyes on the region of stars shown. He could usually guess which general area of space he was looking at by spotting particularly noteworthy stars, nebulas, or other features, but not this time.

There wasn’t a single thing he could identify from memory. “Where is this?”

“The far side of Syndicate Worlds space. It’s not surprising you can’t recognize it since no one from the Alliance has ever been allowed there, except perhaps as prisoners en route to labor camps.” Rione’s fingers danced delicately across the controls, rotating the view. “I’ve been studying some of the Syndic records we acquired at Sancere. This is the latest information available in them on the far side of the Syndicate Worlds. Do you notice anything?”

He watched the stars swing past slowly as the star field pivoted under Rione’s commands. The boundary with unexplored or uncolonized star systems was a lumpy thing, of course. The arrangement of stars in the cosmos didn’t lend itself to the neat lines that human minds liked to see. Something about the view teased at him, but he couldn’t figure out what it was. “What am I supposed to be seeing?”

“Perhaps if I highlight star systems abandoned within the last century,” Rione suggested. “And by abandoned I mean not left to wither, but rather star systems in which all human presence was withdrawn.” She pushed another control, and several stars glowed brighter.

The picture clicked into place in Geary’s mind. “It doesn’t look like a frontier. It looks like a border.”

“Yes,” Rione agreed calmly. “It shouldn’t look like a border, because there’s not supposed to be anything bordering the far side of Syndicate Worlds space, but it does. The region of occupied star systems doesn’t bulge and extend as it should to cover particularly rich stars. There’s no gaps where much poorer stars have been left unoccupied.”

“Just like the boundary between the Syndicate Worlds and the Alliance.” Geary leaned closer, studying the region. “Isn’t that interesting.” He moved one finger to point to the abandoned star systems that Rione had indicated. “And these places would’ve penetrated beyond that ‘border’ that isn’t supposed to be there.”

“I was put in mind of the buffer zone you had the Marines create in that orbital city,” Rione remarked. “A place no one is supposed to occupy to separate the Syndicate Worlds from…who or what? Now, I’m going to superimpose a representation of the Syndic hypernet in that region.” Stars glowed a different color, forming an intricate lattice. “What do you see?”

“Are you sure of this?”

“Absolutely.”

Geary stared at the depiction. He had been told hypernet gates had gone into the systems rich enough or unique enough to justify the expense, places people wanted to go, stars whose resources and populations generated enough wealth to make the gates worthwhile there. But the hypernet had a military use as well, of course, allowing forces to be shifted very rapidly to where they were needed. A poor star, but one strategically placed, could earn a gate on that basis. There were a lot of poor stars with hypernet gates on the far side of Syndicate Worlds space. “They seem to be worried about something, don’t they?”

Rione nodded. “But if your speculation is correct, whoever or whatever gave humanity the hypernet technology has simply given the Syndicate Worlds the means to build nova-scale bombs in every system facing this unknown-to-us threat. It looks like a wall of defenses. It’s actually a minefield on an unimaginable scale, aimed at the people who think it’s defending them.”

“It’s more than that,” Geary replied. “I talked to Commander—blast it, Captain Cresida about what happens to ships headed for a hypernet gate that ceases to exist. Those ships might be lost, or they might be dumped into interstellar space a decade of travel time at least from any star. If the Syndics tried to rush reinforcements to that area, anything actually there would be destroyed by the energy discharge from the gates, and anything on the way would either be destroyed or eliminated as a threat for years.”

“Thereby eliminating a very large proportion of the Syndicate Worlds’ military capability? A retaliatory strike would be rendered impossible.”

“Yeah.” Geary tried to get his mind around the potential scale of destruction those hypernet gates represented and couldn’t manage it. “How are they keeping this quiet, Victoria? How can even the Syndics keep knowledge of this from spreading?”

“It’s a society that tightly controls information anyway,” she pointed out. “Add in the war to justify telling people to keep their mouths shut. On top of that, add the sheer volume of information available. It’s easy to bury important facts in a mountain of trivia. We picked up a tremendous amount of material at abandoned installations at Sancere. I’ve only skimmed small parts of it. I’ll keep looking, but I don’t honestly expect to find some information that proves all of this. The records we seized are all at or near the lowest level of classification. Anything regarding a nonhuman intelligence, especially a threat from such, would be very highly classified.”

“Meaning we probably vaporized any copies of those records when we bombarded the Syndic headquarters sites at Sancere. I almost wish we could go to this far frontier ourselves to find out for sure, go beyond that border to see what lies on the other side.” Geary realized he had been mentally tracing possible paths to the far side of Syndicate Worlds space without realizing it.

“That would be suicide,” Rione stated crisply. “Even if the fleet would follow you.”

“Yeah. I know. They wouldn’t follow me. At least, I hope not.” Geary leaned back, closing his eyes.

“What can we tell anyone else about this?”

“Nothing, John Geary. Because, really, we have nothing but speculation.”

“Do you believe it?”

“I fear it.”

“Me, too.” Geary opened his eyes again, gazing upon the unfamiliar star systems of the far side of Syndicate Worlds space. “As if we didn’t have enough to worry about, already. I was told there isn’t recent intelligence about the progress of the war in the captured files. Have you found any?”

“No. It’s all old.”

Geary nodded, wondering again what had been happening on the border between the Alliance and the Syndicate Worlds. It occurred to him, looking at the picture from deep within Syndic space, that from the perspective of the Syndicate Worlds they might see themselves as being pinned between two other powers. Did that viewpoint cause the Syndicate Worlds’ leaders to feel menaced on two sides? “The Syndics told their own people that they’d destroyed this fleet in their home system. They surely announced the same thing to the Alliance, and the Alliance doesn’t have any way of knowing that’s a lie.

Do you think they’d sue for peace?”

“No.” Rione let pain show momentarily. “Many in the Alliance warm themselves against the cold of endless war with hatred of the Syndics. They wouldn’t trust any peace terms offered.”

“We’ve seen they have grounds for that distrust. The Syndics have broken every agreement we reached with them and laid traps everywhere they could.”

“Which has worked against them in the long run despite any temporary advantage they gained, because now they can’t even get an agreement favorable to them because they aren’t trusted to abide by it.”

Geary nodded, his eyes on the star display. “Since we’re keeping a lot of Syndic warships tied up trying to catch us, the Syndics hopefully haven’t been able to exploit the current military situation.”

“You’ve destroyed more than a few Syndic warships as well,” Rione noted.

“This fleet has,” Geary corrected, “but still…I wonder what kind of battles are being fought near the border with the Alliance right now? Those Syndic sailors we captured who had fought at Scylla couldn’t tell us anything.” Were there elements of the Alliance fleet that had been left behind fighting desperate battles against long odds while the Alliance frantically tried to construct replacement warships and train replacement crews? How many of the warships guarding the border would be lost while the fleet under Geary fought its way home? “I’ve got a grandniece on the Dreadnought.”

Rione raised her eyebrows in surprise. “How do you know that?”

“Michael Geary told me just before Repulse was destroyed.” Just before his grandnephew sacrificed himself and his ship to help the rest of the fleet escape from the trap in the Syndic home system. “He gave me a message for her.” “Tell her I didn’t hate you anymore.” Not that I could blame him for hating Black Jack Geary, the impossible-to-match hero whose shadow had dogged him his entire life. Thank the living stars we had a few brief moments for him to learn I wasn’t really the Black Jack he had grown to resent.

Does my grandniece hate me, too? What could she tell me of the family I lost to time?

“I hope you find her,” Rione stated quietly.

“You’ve never told me whether you have any family back home,” Geary noted.

“I have a brother and a sister. They have children. My parents still live. I have everything that was taken from you by chance. I hope you understand why I don’t speak of them much to you. I’m uncomfortable with the idea of forcing you to recall your own losses.”

He nodded. “I appreciate that. But feel free to discuss it if you want. Denying what you and other people have won’t bring back what I’ve lost.”

“You’re not very good at denial?” Rione asked with a small smile.

Geary snorted in self-derision. “I imagine I’m as good at it as anyone can be.”

“I disagree.” She indicated the star display. “You’ve found something the rest of us have missed. Or found reasons to avoid seeing.”

This time Geary shook his head. “We haven’t found anything. As you pointed out, there’s no proof here.

Do you think people in authority in Alliance space will believe it?”

“That worries me less than the fact that we might have to tell them about the potential to use hypernet gates as weapons in order to explain it.”

He stayed silent for a moment. “You still think they’d use those weapons?”

“I’m not certain, but if the Alliance governing council knew, I couldn’t swear a majority wouldn’t agree to use the Syndic hypernet gates as weapons. My instincts tell me they would decide to use them.” Rione gazed at the star display, her face bleak. “And the Alliance senate would very likely muster a majority in favor if given the opportunity for a vote. Think of it, John Geary. We could send task forces to every Syndic star system within range of our frontier and blow the gates in them, then proceed on deeper and deeper into Syndic space, leaving a trail of utter devastation behind.”

“That wouldn’t work,” Geary corrected. “You saw what the collapsing gate was like at Sancere. The energy burst released would destroy the ships that destroyed the gate. It would be a one-way mission.”

She nodded, her eyes distant. “So we would construct robotic warships, crewed and controlled by artificial intelligences, and send them to destroy star systems. And because space is vast, the Syndics would have time to realize what we were doing, time for their spies to report, and they would retaliate in kind. Fleets of artificial minds shattering star systems and wiping mankind from the galaxy. What a nightmare we could unleash.”

He felt a tight, sick feeling in his gut and knew Rione was right. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to dump this kind of thing on you.”

“You didn’t have much choice, and your intentions were good.” She sighed. “I can’t ask one man to carry every burden in this fleet.”

“I didn’t even ask you if you wanted to share those burdens.”

“Ah, well, you’re a man, aren’t you?” Rione shrugged. “It’s worked out all right.”

“Has it?”

Rione tilted her head slightly and regarded Geary. “What’s bothering you now? Unless I miss my guess, that last wasn’t about Syndics or aliens or robotic slayers of mankind.”

He returned her look. “It’s about you and me. I’m just trying to understand what’s going on between us.”

“Good sex. Comfort. Companionship. Are you looking for anything else in our relationship?”

“Are you?”

“I don’t know.” Rione considered the question, then shook her head. “I don’t know,” she repeated.