The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Guardian (12 page)

“Are you saying that there’s some counterrevolution being planned to regain Syndic control of the star system from within? Or a revolution against the revolution of Iceni and Drakon to maintain an independent star system but with different leaders?”

“I don’t know. There are monsters in the deep, Admiral. Have you ever heard that saying?” Rione leaned back in her chair, closing her eyes. “Neither Iceni nor Drakon are fools. But neither are they all-wise and all-seeing.”

Rione opened her eyes and looked over to one side, her expression darkly thoughtful. “I have the distinct impression that President Iceni is making this up as she goes along. There are strong remnants of the Syndicate CEO attitude in her, leading me to think that Iceni planned on a change in title but not a change in function.”

“Just what you’d expect from a Syndicate CEO,” Geary said. “She wants to stay an absolute ruler.”

“Yes, I think she
wanted
to. But. She’s already permitted things no Syndicate CEO would have allowed. There seem to be real reforms under way. Iceni may be faking it all, but my gut feeling is that she is pursuing some real changes despite whatever her initial plans were.”

He considered that, measuring it against his own impressions of Iceni. “An interesting assessment. What about General Drakon?”

“Ah. General Drakon.” Rione smiled with amusement. “No guesses are needed there. He’s military, and that’s all he wants to be. The Syndics made him play the CEO game.”

“That’s all? He just wants to be a soldier?”

“Do you find that so hard to understand, Admiral?”

“Those two aides of his. Morgan and . . . Malin.” Geary spoke slowly, trying to put his impressions into words. “They were . . . not like the sort of aides I would have expected from someone who just wants to be a soldier.”

Rione smiled thinly this time. “The assassins? The bodyguards? The trusted agents in tasks above and below the board? I am certain they are all of those things. Remember the environment in which Drakon operated. Such assistants may be as much a matter of survival for him as armor is for one of your battleships.”

She paused, then spoke in more serious tones. “We received a lot of reporting from the planet when the bombardment the enigmas launched was on its way. Free-press reports, but also a lot of chatter in personal conversations that your intelligence people have been busy vacuuming up. I assume you have seen the analysis of all that.”

“And I assume you have as well.”

“Of course. The bombardment would have inflicted massive damage on that world if the Dancers hadn’t stopped it, but every report agrees that neither Iceni nor Drakon made any moves to flee the surface. If what we’ve learned about Drakon so far is right, he has demonstrated loyalty to those who work for him before this, so that action would have been consistent with a man who never bought into the CEO-first-last-and-always attitude of the Syndicate Worlds.”

“That’s how I felt about him from the messages I’ve received from him,” Geary said. “I felt . . . well, I felt like he was somebody not all that different from me.”

“Be careful who you say that to,” Rione advised dryly. “A former Syndic CEO who is a decent commander and cares about those under him? ‘Heresy’ is too kind a word.”

Geary shook his head. “The Syndicate Worlds couldn’t have held together as long as it did, couldn’t have sustained the war as long at it did, unless there were
some
capable people in positions of authority. Some people who could inspire those under them or make the right decisions regardless of what it meant to them personally. Why people like that worked for a system like that I have no idea, but they must have been there.”

“Maybe you should have asked General Drakon,” Rione said with every appearance of meaning it.

“Maybe someday I will. But you said Iceni didn’t try to run to safety, either. She didn’t before, the first time we were here, when it looked like the enigmas were certain to take over this star system.”

“It is a pattern,” Rione agreed. “At the least, it implies a sense of responsibility consistent with her position of authority. I think both of them can be worked with in the long run, Admiral. More than that, I think if they avoid giving in to Syndic ways of doing things, they might be able to build something at Midway that the Alliance would be happy to do business with.”

“Assuming those monsters in the deep don’t devour them.”

“Assuming that, yes.” She looked over to the side again, a flicker of concern appearing before she could suppress it, and he realized that Commander Benan must be lying in his bunk over there in her stateroom. “Is that all, Admiral?”

“Yes. Thank you, Victoria.”

—

THE
alerts sounding as the fleet exited the hypernet gate at Sobek were cautionary, not full-scale alarms, but Geary still focused as quickly as possible on the objects highlighted on his display. “What are they?”

“Syndic courier ships,” Lieutenant Yuon replied. “Unarmed.”

That should have been reassuring information, but not in this case. You might occasionally see a couple of courier ships in a star system, especially if it was an important star system, but never a large group of them. Even stranger, these courier ships were not spread throughout Sobek Star System as if en route various missions, but were clustered together in a narrow swath of space facing the hypernet gate. “Why are there over twenty Syndic courier ships five light-minutes from this gate?”

“They’re broadcasting merchant identity codes,” Lieutenant Castries reported. “Not Syndic military and government codes. All twenty-three courier ships are claiming to be private shipping.”

“This stinks,” Desjani growled. “We’ve never encountered a Syndic courier model that wasn’t government or military. What are they doing here?”

Geary already had Lieutenant Iger on the line. “Can you confirm that, Lieutenant? These courier ships should actually be military or otherwise under the control of the Syndic government?”

“Yes, sir,” Iger replied after a two-second pause that felt far longer. “Proving that might be difficult. Very difficult. But all of our experience is that courier ships have always been reserved by the Syndics for official use only. The fact that these are pretending to be something else is highly suspicious.”

“What threat can those courier ships pose to us?”

“I don’t know, Admiral. Fleet sensors aren’t spotting any indications of weapons add-ons.”

“They’re not here for a party,” Desjani said.

He stared at his display, feeling the same sense of threat and wrongness that Tanya obviously was. His fleet had automatically slewed about after exiting the gate, carrying out the preplanned maneuver to avoid a possible minefield. But there were no mines, just that very odd grouping of courier ships. “All units in First Fleet, come starboard three zero degrees, up four five degrees at time two four. Maintain all systems at full readiness.”

The ships of the fleet were coming around to face the courier ships when the supposed merchant craft pivoted and began accelerating to meet the Alliance ships. “They’re approaching at maximum acceleration,” Lieutenant Castries said as alarms pulsed from the fleet’s combat systems. “Projected tracks are for an intercept with the center of our formation.”

Desjani took in a deep breath, then spoke calmly. “They’re coming straight at us at max acceleration, and they have no weapons.”

“Reconnaissance?” Geary asked, knowing that wasn’t the real answer.

“You know better than that. Those things accelerate like bats out of hell. By the time they reach us, they’ll have achieved a closing speed of at least point two light and probably faster. They’d want to be able to see details if they were on a recce mission, and at those kinds of velocities details tend to smear. No. There’s only one possible reason why those ships would be coming directly at us that way.”

He knew what she meant. “The Syndics haven’t done that before,” Geary said. “They haven’t sent ships on deliberate suicide runs.”

“The Syndic warships at Lakota were ordered to destroy the hypernet gate there—”

“Those warships didn’t know that was a suicide mission!”

She pointed to her display. “How large a crew does a courier ship need for a one-way mission?”

He took a second to reply. “One.”

“Do you think the Syndics could find twenty maniacs willing to die for their CEOs?” Desjani asked. “Or some poor saps given a chance to wipe out their family’s debt or get a relative out of a death sentence at one of the Syndic labor camps? I don’t know. I do know the Syndics have often shown the willingness to sacrifice their ‘workers’ at the drop of a hat. It’s a suicide attack. That’s how the Syndics are balancing the odds since you beat the hell out of them using conventional tactics. Is there any other possible mission those ships coming at us could be carrying out?”

“No.” And at the rate they were coming, those ships would be plunging into his formation in about twenty minutes.

ACCORDING
to the terms of the peace treaty with the Syndicate Worlds, he couldn’t simply fire on unarmed ships broadcasting merchant identification. Geary didn’t bother saying that. Tanya knew it, and so did everybody else. Including the Syndic leaders who had ordered this operation. If those leaders had expected him to hesitate, to question what to do under these circumstances, they had made a mistake. “Those ships are operating in an aggressive and dangerous manner,” Geary announced for the benefit of the official record. “We have a right to act in self-defense. Broadcast a warning that any ship entering the weapons engagement zone for any of our ships will be fired upon. Repeat the broadcast eight times, on all standard safety and coordination circuits.”

As Desjani’s comm watch-stander scrambled to get that sent, Geary tapped his fleetwide comm control again. “All units in the First Fleet. The twenty-three courier ships accelerating toward an intercept with our formation have been warned to stay clear of us. If they continue on tracks toward us, they are to be regarded as hostile. Any of them that enter your weapons engagement envelopes are to be engaged with all weapons until disabled or destroyed.”

Another call, this time internal. “Emissary Rione and Emissary Charban, tell the Dancers that these ships are dangerous. Say they’re out of control, say they’re hostile, say whatever works to convince the Dancers that those courier ships might collide with them unless the Dancers evade for all they are worth.”

Rione answered, her voice tinged with resignation. “We will try. Even at the best of times, with all the time in the world, the Dancers don’t always listen to us. But we will try.”

“Thank you,” Geary said, putting feeling into the words.

“Lock weapons on those ships and prepare to engage,” Desjani told her crew, then gave Geary a measured look. “Just like old times. Kill the Syndics before they kill us. But. The Syndics know the odds of those ships getting through our defensive fire if they’re not moving fast enough. They’ll accelerate to the maximum velocity they can in the time and distance available in order to screw with our firing solutions.”

He grunted a vague reply as he frowned at his display. The courier ships were simply small crew, storage, and command compartments fastened to the front of outsized main propulsion units and a power core suitable for a ship twice their size. Built to move fast, they were already up to point one light speed and still accelerating.

In jump space, human ships did not actually travel faster than light. They went around that speed limit by going somewhere else, a different dimension or different universe. The experts still didn’t know which of those jump space represented, but they did know that jump space was a place where distances were much smaller than in our own universe. A week in jump space would take a ship the same distance as years of travel in normal space. Oddly enough, it didn’t matter how fast a ship was going when it entered and exited jump space. The length of the journey depended solely on the distance to be covered.

A hypernet avoided light-speed problems by another method, using quantum physics, which literally tossed human craft into a bubble of nothing that was nowhere, created at one gate and eventually reappearing at another linked gate without technically moving.

Both of those things were weird.

But what happened when human spacecraft pushed their velocities higher and higher in normal space was even weirder. Relativity had predicted the strange physical results long before humans could experience them. Objects accelerating toward light speed gained mass while time slowed inside them, all relative to the outside world. To an outside observer, the objects also got shorter as they moved faster. In theory, at the speed of light, the outside universe would see a ship with infinite mass, zero length, and no time passing inside it.

To those inside the ship, length and mass and time all seemed the same as always, but their vision of the outside would alter. The universe outside their ship grew more distorted to them the faster they went. This relativistic distortion became a significant problem at point one light speed, though human-designed sensors and combat systems could compensate accurately for relativistic errors up to point two light speed. Beyond that, the errors grew too large for existing human technology to compensate for, and the already incredibly difficult problem of hitting an object flying past at tens of thousands of kilometers a second became what fleet engineers described using the technical term TDH, which stood for Too Damned Hard.

Based on the projections of the fleet combat systems, those courier ships would have accelerated up past point two light speed by the time they got close enough for the weapons of Geary’s warships to fire at. Since Geary’s own ships were still moving at nearly point one light speed, that would produce a closing rate exceeding point three light speed, drastically impacting the accuracy of weapons fire.

Desjani bit her lip and shook her head. “We could slow down to reduce the relative velocity, but that would make it harder for our ships to evade any attempts at ramming.”

He nodded. “We’d have to go to a dead stop to get the relative speed of engagement down to point two light, and there’s not enough time to slow the fleet that much even if we wanted to do that. If we keep our velocity up, it will make scoring hits a lot harder, but make dodging attacks easier, and the courier ships will have more difficulty hitting their own targets. I’m going to accelerate at the last minute. The extra velocity won’t cause more accuracy problems than we’re already going to face, and might throw off the ramming courses of the courier ships.”

Those small courier ships were still coming, still accelerating, and the projected paths for the Syndic “merchant” craft were now, without doubt, aimed straight into the heart of the Alliance formation, where
Invincible
made perhaps the largest sitting duck in history.
Are they aiming for
Invincible
? Or for the Dancers who, for their own reasons, have been clustered near
Invincible
lately? Or for the assault transports and auxiliaries, which are also in that part of the formation? There are enough of those couriers to target almost all of them.
“All units in First Fleet, the ships heading for us are assessed to be on suicide runs. Vary vectors at random intervals to confuse their attack runs, and make wider individual vector changes when it’s too late for the attacker to compensate. All units, screen the assault transports, auxiliaries, and
Invincible
.”

“You’ve done all you can,” Desjani murmured, her gaze riveted on her display.

“It’s not enough.”

“That depends how you define ‘enough.’” Her eyes moved to meet his. “We used to lose half of our ships when we
won
. We may lose some now. That’s up to the living stars and the skill of each ship’s commanding officer.”

Geary didn’t answer, wanting to deny that reality but unable to muster any arguments. Something nagged at him, though, one more thing that might help but remained stubbornly just out of his mental grasp.

Then he got it, barely in time to do anything about it. Geary’s eyes fixed on the estimated time to intercept with the courier ships, a number that was sweeping downward so fast the digital readout seemed to blur. “All units in First Fleet, execute Modified Formation Foxtrot Three at time four one.”

“Mod Foxtrot Three?” Desjani asked, her own eyes not leaving her display. “Oh. That might help.”

“It can’t hurt.” Geary paused, trying to time his next command, then tapped his comm controls. “All units in First Fleet, immediate execute accelerate to point one five light speed.”

They wouldn’t make it. Even the ships capable of the fastest acceleration, Geary’s battle cruisers, light cruisers, and destroyers, would barely have begun leaping forward at increasing velocities. But space was very wide, even the largest human ship was very small in that vast emptiness, and at the speeds the Alliance ships and Syndic courier craft were rushing together, even the tiniest difference in a projected track could mean the difference between a near miss and a collision.

Dauntless
shuddered slightly as her thrusters fired at time four one, kicking her onto a new vector, while her main propulsion units kept shoving her ahead faster. The entire Alliance formation was splitting into three parts, each group heading outward from the other two, the mass of ships spreading off from their original vectors like water spraying outward in a cone. With vectors for each ship changing by the moment, the oncoming attackers would have to guess where the ship they were aiming for was going, further complicating their deadly task.

The Dancers were staying with
Invincible
, a threat magnet near a threat magnet, and in the last seconds before intercept, Geary could see the twenty-three courier ships bending their own tracks over and down to head where the Dancers and the lumbering mass of
Invincible
were moving. Even with four human battleships towing the mass of
Invincible
, the captured Kick superbattleship seemed to be changing its velocity and course at a snail’s pace.

He had eight battleships there, too, moving along with
Invincible
, four actually tethered to
Invincible
and four more escorting her. A fraction of a second before the forces tore into contact, something in Geary’s mind noted something about the movement of one of the battleships that seemed slightly off.
Orion
’s vector had altered in an unexpected way.

There was no time to ask Commander Shen what he was doing, no time to even understand what about
Orion
’s movement felt odd.

Even when warships limited their engagement speeds to point two light, the meetings were far too fast for human senses to register. Geary saw the twenty-three courier ships almost upon the portion of the Alliance formation holding
Invincible
, the assault transports, the auxiliaries, and the Dancer ships, then he saw four courier ships that had missed their targets and been missed by the avalanche of fire which the Alliance warships had pumped out under the control of automated systems able to react much faster than any living creature.

“What the hell happened?” Geary demanded. Something looked very wrong now. Something was missing in the Alliance formation.

The answer appeared on his display.

Orion.

Geary barely noticed as the last four courier ships tried to claw around for another run at the Alliance formation, did not feel any elation as specter missiles pursuing those four ships caught them in their turns and blew them apart.

His display replayed a slow-motion re-creation of the instant of contact. Some courier ships vanishing into irregular blots of dust and energy as lucky shots scored hits, others coming onward, aiming now clearly for the Dancers, who, damn them, seemed to be almost motionless as they hung near
Invincible
, and the rest targeting the assault transports and auxiliaries, the Dancers darting aside at the last moments to frustrate the attackers trying to hit them,
Titan
,
Typhoon
, and
Mistral
almost lined up relative to the attackers and twisting too slowly to evade the courier ships whose vectors aimed at them, hell-lance and grapeshot fire pouring from every Alliance ship in a last-ditch defensive effort,
Orion
rolling slightly in her track, coming over just a small amount, just enough that five surviving courier ships heading for
Titan
and the two assault transports instead struck
Orion
either glancing blows or direct hits.

Even a battleship couldn’t withstand that number of impacts by that much mass at those kinds of velocities. The energy liberated by the collisions was vast enough to reduce Orion and all five courier ships to gas and dust.

Orion
was gone, along with Commander Shen and his entire crew.

“All attackers destroyed,” Lieutenant Castries reported, her tone not jubilant but rather stunned. “
Orion
has been destroyed. No other damage to fleet ships.”

“Damn them,” Geary whispered. He could understand the hate Desjani still felt for the Syndics, understand why the Alliance fleet had retaliated and retaliated for such acts, losing track of its own honor and morality along the way, understand why the need to do the right thing had been forgotten in the desire for revenge.

“They’re going to claim they didn’t know anything about this,” Desjani said in a low, savage voice. “The Syndics in charge here. They’ll say they had no idea whose ships those were. You know they will.”

“Yes.” And there was no proof to the contrary. He was certain of that. The courier ships and their one-man crews had been blown to pieces. Dead men and women tell no tales.

He wanted to hurt the Syndics in this star system, hurt all of them, not just those who gave the orders but also those who stood by and let such things happen, whose own actions and passivity supported their leaders.

Don’t. Don’t do anything that will make this worse.

But
Orion
was gone, victim of an attack that could not possibly have accomplished anything but destruction.

“Admiral.” Rione’s voice broke through his rage. She sounded odd, too, as if emotions were boiling just beneath the rigid mask of her face. “I wanted to ask, Admiral, if the hypernet gate had been damaged during the fight so close to it. It would be a great loss to this star system if their hypernet gate was damaged so badly during this unnecessary and brutal attack that the gate collapsed.”

It took him several seconds to get it, then Geary felt a cold resolve warring with the heat of his anger. He touched a control. “Captain Smythe.”

Tanuki
was only a few light-seconds distant, so the reply came quickly. “Yes, Admiral?” Smythe asked in a subdued voice.

“I am worried that the hypernet gate may have sustained damage from stray shots or from debris from some of those courier ships. I want it inspected at close range to make sure it has not sustained the level of damage that would cause it to collapse. Even though the safe collapse mechanism will prevent a devastating pulse of energy from being emitted by the collapse, such an event would still cripple commerce through this star system for the foreseeable future.”