The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Guardian (45 page)

One of the Earth representatives came forward and took them gingerly. “Ancient data-storage devices. Even if these have been protected and stored properly, it’s very unlikely the data on them still exists in readable form after so long. We might be able to recover something, though.”

“What of this?” Dr. Nasr held up a metal pin that glinted with color in the bright sun.

More of the people from Earth came forward, studying it, then one held it out toward Geary and the others from the Alliance. “In the old form of the language, it says
Operation Long Jump
.”

“What was that?” Geary asked, looking at the pin but not touching it. It didn’t seem right to mar this object from history with the touch of his fingers.

“I’m checking.” Another Earth representative was consulting a data pad. “There is little here. Secrecy in the old days and destruction of records since then have cost us much information. What our historians have pieced together is that Operation Long Jump was one of the earliest attempts to use jump space to reach other stars. Several of the experimental ships were lost, some automated and some with human pilots. Subsequent experience proved those jumps were aimed too far, beyond the ability of jump drives of that time to work properly.”

“They didn’t come out of jump,” Desjani said, her voice filled with horror. If there was one thing that could seriously rattle any sailor, it was the prospect of being trapped in jump space. “They died in jump. May the living stars have mercy on them. All the way to Dancer space? Decades, maybe, in jump. This person must have died long before coming out of jump space. There couldn’t have been enough food, water, and life support on their ship to survive a fraction of that time, even if being alone in jump space that long didn’t drive him or her insane.”

“There is no sign of violence,” Dr. Nasr repeated. “Self-inflicted or otherwise. Perhaps oxygen or other critical life support failed, bringing as peaceful an end as this poor pilot could hope for.”

“But the ship carrying this pilot did come out of jump eventually,” Charban said. “How?”

“Who knows?” Desjani said. “Why would anyone want to conduct experiments that involve tossing something into jump space when there isn’t any expectation it would come out again? No human would agree to that, once they understood what was going on, and why waste automated ships?”

“Perhaps the ship accidentally came close enough to a jump point much farther along than its original destination, and it popped out,” Geary speculated. “Or maybe jump space will eventually eject anything that doesn’t belong there if the object gets close enough to a gravity well. But who was this person?”

“Perhaps this will tell us,” Dr. Nasr said, holding up a small rectangle of metal with tiny letters and numbers embossed on it.

“The same old form of the language,” an Earth representative said, taking the tag and tilting it to catch the light of Sol. “It is hard to read. It says, ‘Maior . . . Paul . . . Crabaugh. 954 . . . 457 . . . 9903.’ That first word must be Major. Rank and name and a personal identification number used back then.”

“This is the last object in the box,” Dr. Nasr said. He had in his hand another piece of metal, this one about half the size of the palm of a hand, rectangular, and with an enameled decoration on one side. The ancient enamel still shone brightly in the sunlight.

As the Earth representative took the object, Geary craned his head to see the decoration. There were big letters on it, easy enough to read, over a scene of fields of bright green vegetation heavily dotted with large flowers bearing vivid yellow petals.

“The large word says Kansas,” the man from Earth read. “The small word says Lyons. This place. A souvenir. Perhaps from his family. Made when this town still lived and such plants grew here, as they will again. He took this into space with him, to remind him of home.”

“Now we know why the Dancers wanted to come here,” Rione said. “They were bringing him back.”

For a long time, no one spoke. The Dancers waited silently near the hatch to their shuttle. The wind sighing through the ruins of the town was the only sound.

“Why didn’t they tell us why they needed to come here?” Desjani finally asked.

“How would they have explained it?” Charban replied. “Apparently, they felt an obligation to return the body here. If they had told us at Varandal that they had him, we would have wanted him given to us at Varandal. If they had then refused to turn over the remains for reasons they couldn’t convey to us, what would we have done?”

“Totally misinterpreted things,” Rione said.

Dr. Nasr knelt by the container holding the remains of Major Crabaugh. “I see no signs of autopsy or other invasive procedures. If they examined his body, they did so only by noninvasive means.”

“They respected him,” Costa said, sounding angry. But as she glared at the other humans, it was clear her anger was not aimed at the Dancers. “They didn’t take him apart, they didn’t desecrate the body, they didn’t treat him like some strange animal cast up on their doorstep. Instead, they treated his remains as if he were . . .” She struggled for words.

“One of theirs,” Dr. Nasr finished for her. He stood up but continued looking down at the remains. “They did not know who he was, or what he was, or where he had come from. His appearance was very different from their own, perhaps as hideous in their eyes as the Dancers appear to us. But they looked at the artifacts with him, they looked upon him, and they saw a creature who must be like themselves in many ways. A creature whose remains deserved respect. A creature with a family and a home, both of which might be waiting for his return. They looked upon him and did not see the differences. They saw what this human must have in common with them, and when they could, they brought his carefully protected remains back to his home.”

“They have shamed us,” Senator Suva said. She was standing very straight, tears running down her face. “They have shamed us. We would not have done as well. We never have, and even after so many centuries of supposed progress, we still look at each other and see only the differences between us.”

“I will not be shamed by something that looks like that,” Senator Costa muttered, then gave Suva a challenging look. “I won’t be less than them. What they can do, I can do.”

Suva hesitated, then nodded. “We can try.”

Standing beside Geary, Senator Sakai spoke softly. “For so many years we searched for them. For someone like ourselves, yet different. When we found them, we thought we could learn from them, that whatever they were they would see things in us that we did not. It seems the philosophers were right. But will knowing this be enough to overcome human folly?”

“We don’t even know if we’re interpreting their actions here correctly,” Geary said in a very low voice so only Sakai and Desjani could hear. “But I don’t think I want to bring up that possibility. Maybe what we think we’re seeing is best left unexamined for now.”

Tanya reached out and squeezed Geary’s wrist. “Those sorts of questions are way above my pay grade. We got the Dancers here, and the Dancers did what they wanted to do. What do
we
do now?”

Geary looked around at the crumbling ruins of this town, at the remains of Major Crabaugh, brought home at last, at the Dancers in their armor, and the humans from the Alliance and from Sol. At the new grass springing up nearby, grass that matched that in the ancient decoration. The past lay heavy on Old Earth, yet the living were looking to the future.

“Let’s go home,” he said. “Once the crew finishes visiting Home, once our senators finish their talks with the authorities here, and once all the ceremonies are done, we’ll go back to our own home. We have work to do.”

There have been a few changes around here.

—CAPTAIN TANYA DESJANI

Way back in the twentieth century (the late 1960s to be exact), I lived for a few years on Midway Island in the center of the Pacific Ocean. In those days satellite TV was, well, science fiction. The only TV we had on the island came from a single local station that broadcast old programs for a few hours a day. Even white sand beaches, a beautiful lagoon protected by a coral reef, and the antics of the gooney birds wear thin at times. When that happened, I could read, and most of what I read in those days was history.

But there was another diversion available at the base movie theater. On Saturdays and Sundays, it would show matinees consisting of a one-hour TV show like
Mission: Impossible
or
The Big Valley
, and a one-hour episode of
Star Trek
(the original series, of course). While the rest of the world watched Kirk, Spock, and McCoy on their small TV sets, I got to see their adventures on the big screen.

When I started writing I found that those influences showed up in my stories. History offered many ideas, and the original
Star Trek
had shown me how SF could be exciting, thought-provoking, and fun. It had also impressed upon me how important the characters were. The spaceships were cool, but the stories wouldn’t have been the same without people in them whose actions mattered and who tried their best even against seemingly impossible odds.

A lot of other things went into the Lost Fleet series. At its core lie those basic influences, but when a writer creates characters they can start influencing the story, telling you what they would and wouldn’t do, telling you they would make a different decision than you had originally planned. As I’ve told Black Jack’s story, he has surprised me more than once. He has found friends and allies, overcome a wide variety of enemies, and developed a very close relationship with a certain battle cruiser captain. When the opportunity arose to take him to new places and face new challenges, I was glad to carry on Geary’s story in the Beyond the Frontier series.

While I wrote about Black Jack Geary, I also wrote about his opponents, and foremost among those foes has been the Syndicate Worlds. In every challenge that he’s faced, Geary has done his best to hold to his duty, to simple truths, and to real honor grounded in how he acts. Against that, the Syndics have followed practices opposed to all that Geary believes in. Those characters could have been simple: people who were evil because they were evil. But that would have shortchanged the story because no enemy is monolithic, no foe is unvarying from person to person, with every man and woman marching in lockstep. The people of the Syndicate Worlds are human. Some are committed to the system that gives them power or have vested all of their faith in believing that only this system can maintain order. Others see the flaws in the system and work against it. Yet others have been turned against the system by the injustices they see or personally experience.

Many readers asked to know more about the Syndics, so I wanted to show this other side of the Lost Fleet saga. What about the Syndics who had believed their system was the best, until it failed spectacularly, with the Alliance triumphant? What about those who had long ago stopped believing in that system but saw no alternative while war still raged? The Syndicate empire is falling apart, the central government trying to hold on to as many star systems as it can while revolt and rebellion break out. And if revolution succeeds, what replaces the old way of doing things?

When the Alliance fleet returns to Midway near the end of
Invincible
, it discovers that the Syndicate Worlds is no longer in control. There has been fighting on the inhabited world and in space, and the two leaders of the star system now call themselves president and general.
The Lost Stars: Tarnished Knight
tells the story of the revolt at Midway. CEOs Gwen Iceni and Artur Drakon have had enough of the Syndic way of doing things, but it’s the only way they know. They can’t trust each other, they can’t trust
anyone
, because that is how politics and everything else works in the Syndicate Worlds. But Iceni and Drakon need each other as they fight to not only defend their own star system but also carry the battle to neighboring star systems wracked by internal fighting and Syndic counterattacks. Two people who have long since ceased trusting in anything have to find something to believe in. If they can live long enough.

It has been great to see how well the Lost Fleet saga has been received by readers. There is no better reward for a writer than for people to want to read the stories he creates. In turn, I want to offer more to readers, more stories about more parts of the Lost Fleet universe. The Lost Stars series takes us to a part of that universe where a lot is happening, where new characters face tremendous challenges and the shadow of Black Jack looms large.

The Lost Stars: Tarnished Knight
is now available from Ace Books.