The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Guardian

by Jack Campbell

  Within a couple of minutes, the master chief’s image appeared in a virtual window near her. “Someone with a devious mind? Do you want me to locate someone like that for you, Captain?” Gioninni asked with a remarkably sincere tone of voice.

  “I’ll settle for you, Master Chief. You’ve been keeping up on events in this star system so far, haven’t you?”

  “Yes, Captain. At least, I’ve been keeping up on everything appropriate to my position within the fleet—”

  “Spare me the false piety, Master Chief,” Desjani said. “I want you to consider the following question very carefully. If you were going to try to inflict more damage on this fleet while it was in this star system, what would you do?”

  “You mean if I were a Syndic, Captain?”

  “If it makes you more comfortable, imagine that this is a Syndic fleet, and you’re trying to figure out how to mess with it again before it leaves this star system.”

  Gioninni’s answer came without hesitation. “Mines at the jump exit. We can take all kinds of paths through the star system to get there, but we’ve got to use that exit, Captain. They know that.”

  “How would you keep us from spotting those mines in time to avoid them?” Desjani asked. “They know that we’d be alert after the earlier attacks and watching for anything else. Syndic stealth tech on their mines is good, but not good enough to keep them undetectable if we’re looking for them in a specific spot, and we’re fairly close to it.”

  “A diversion, Captain,” Gioninni replied. “Something to distract us again. Something to help hide those mines a little better from our sensors. It’s like sleight of hand. It works not because what you’re doing couldn’t be seen but because you’re doing something else as well that draws the attention of the people watching you.”

  “Any ideas what form that diversion would take?” Desjani asked.

  This time Gioninni did pause before answering. “I’d have to think about that, Captain. It would have to complicate the picture for the fleet sensor automated hazard detection as well as divert the attention of the human operators.”

  “Please do think about it, Master Chief. Thank you for your valuable input. Are there any other matters to report?”

  “Ah, one thing, Captain. It’s sort of private.”

  Desjani tapped her controls. “I’ve got the privacy field activated around me.”

  And around him, Geary realized, since he had heard her words clearly, but he didn’t comment on that and thereby draw Gioninni’s attention to it.

  “Yes, Captain. All right, you asked me to keep an eye out for anything out of the ordinary in a certain portion of the fleet?”

  “The auxiliaries. Right. What is it?”

  “Well, Captain, I have it on pretty solid authority that a lot of premium booze got delivered to one of the auxiliaries—”

  “Tanuki?”

  “That’s what I heard, Captain. This is embargoed stuff from Syndic planets, the sorts of things that would be in high demand back home.”

  “I see. And just how did you become aware of this, Master Chief?”

  “I got offered a deal by the same supplier, Captain. Naturally, I didn’t agree to anything.”

  “The supplier wanted too much for the product?” Desjani asked. “And even you couldn’t haggle the price down?”

  “Now, Captain, paying extortionate prices is no way to make a profit. Not that I would ever engage in such a transaction, which, as you know, would be contrary to fleet regulations. But I did feel required to learn all I could about the deal just in case it constituted some sort of threat to the fleet or its personnel,” Gioninni added piously.

  “Your dedication to duty is a shining example to us all,” Desjani said. “Do you have any idea what Tanuki paid for the black-market booze?”

  “No, Captain. I couldn’t find that out.”

  “Thank you, Master Chief. Do you have anything else?”

  “Just one very minor thing, Captain,” Gioninni said, smiling winningly. “A question. Will there be any other major course alterations before we reach the jump point?”

  “That’s hard to say, Master Chief, and it will be up to Admiral Geary in any event.”

  “I understand that, Captain, but you see when we went on this roundabout track to the jump point, I had to cancel all the bets in the jump pool and restart the whole thing.”

  “That must have been a lot of work, Master Chief,” Desjani said with false sympathy.

  Unseen by Gioninni, Geary grinned. Jump pools had been around as long as jump drives. Crew members would place minor wagers on the exact moment when the ship would enter jump, and whoever came closest to the actual time won the whole pot. For some inexplicable reason, the fleet had never cracked down on the practice, instead recognizing its importance for morale and as a relief valve for gambling cravings that might otherwise show up in worse forms. To Geary’s knowledge, the only times the official hammer had come down on jump pools were when the sizes of the individual wagers grew too large.

  “Master Chief, I will ensure that the Admiral takes into account the impact on your workload if he orders another significant change in the arrival time at the jump point,” Desjani continued.

  “Now, Captain,” Gioninni protested, “you know I’m the hardest-working sailor on this ship. Excepting for you and the Admiral, of course.”

  “That depends upon how we define ‘work,’ Master Chief. Thank you again for your information and your suggestion.”

  Desjani ended the call and looked pointedly at Geary. “What do you think, Admiral?”

  “About the jump pool, the booze, or the Syndic plans?”

  “I told you that you had to keep an eye on Smythe.”

  “Which you are doing a good job of,” Geary pointed out. “Did you know that the auxiliaries also acquired some important rare-earth materials while we were at Midway? They didn’t get those from any asteroid mining, but we needed them, so I didn’t ask inconvenient questions. Smythe has probably broken half of the rules in the book, but a lot of the time he’s breaking the rules to get the job done.”

  “And you’re willing to look the other way at the other times because of that?”

  “Yes. As long as he’s not hurting the fleet. I will ask some leading questions about Syndic booze to let him know he’s being watched and had better not play any criminal games with it.” He could see she was getting ready to argue the point. “It’s just like your not asking certain questions of Master Chief Gioninni because his particular skills can be very useful to you and to Dauntless.”

  She paused in the midst of starting to say something, then nodded ruefully. “You’ve got me there. What about the master chief’s guess about what the Syndics will do?”

  “I think he’s very likely right,” Geary said. “You and I should have seen that, but we were too focused on threats along the path to that jump point to realize that the final approach to that jump exit is the only place left in this star system that we have to go.” He ran a quick query on his display. “There have been a couple of merchant ships seen leaving via that jump point since we arrived, but those ships could have been sent through on purpose on paths to avoid any mines so we would think there’s no threat there.”

  “But there has to be a diversion to distract us when we’re near that jump point. What would work? Stealth shuttles aren’t cheap or available in large numbers, and we put a decent dent in how many of them the Syndics must have in this region of space. And that boarding operation only succeeded as much as it did because we were already distracted by another attack.”

  “Something different,” Geary said. “They’ll know we’re watching for the same things coming at us. They’ll want to do something we’re not watching for. Whatever that is. All right. I’m calling a fleet conference.”

  —

  HE never looked forward to conferences like this, even when there was nothing but good news or routine events to discuss. So far, Sobek had provided nothing good
or routine, so this virtual gathering of the fleet’s ship captains promised to be the same.

  Geary stood in the fleet conference room, looking across the assembled images of his ships’ commanding officers. A rather small compartment in reality, the meeting software made it seem vast enough to hold everyone, the table in front of Geary virtually expanded to seat hundreds of men and women. The most senior officers, the captains and commanders in charge of battleships and battle cruisers, General Carabali of the Marines and the senior fleet engineers, were “seated” closest to Geary, with the others farther way in descending order of seniority and the size of their command. He could look at any one of them, though, and the software would automatically zoom in on that individual, displaying name, rank, and command.

  It all made meetings very easy to hold. For the most part, Geary considered that a negative aspect of the software. As a rule, he thought that meetings should be hard to hold and hard to get to, crowded into stuffy, uncomfortable rooms where everyone wanted to leave as soon as possible.

  But sometimes even he had to hold meetings like this, and at those times the software was a very nice thing to have.

  “You’re all familiar with the situation,” Geary said. “The loss of Orion was a terrible blow, but her crew died with honor, doing their duty, and will surely be welcomed by the living stars.”

  “A terrible loss,” Captain Duellos of the battle cruiser Inspire commented with unusual harshness. “We have lost too many comrades in battle. I wish Orion had been able to take more of the enemy with her and that we had more means of making pay those who ordered that attack. What a shame that the hypernet gate here was so badly damaged as well in that action.”

  “Yes,” Captain Badaya of Illustrious agreed, his face reddened with anger. “But not enough of a shame. It’s too bad a few stray bombardment projectiles didn’t put craters into a lot of important Syndic facilities here.”

  A low rumble of concurrence sounded around the huge, virtual table.

  “Why not?” Commander Neeson of Implacable asked. “Why not make them pay a higher price? They attacked us. They destroyed Orion. Why not retaliate?”

  Geary waited for another burst of agreement to subside instead of quelling it using the meeting software. Let them blow off a little steam. We all need to. “I haven’t ordered that kind of retaliation because that’s exactly what the leaders of the Syndics want us to do. They want us to break the peace agreement in such a way that they can claim we attacked them first.”

  That statement brought silence, finally broken by Captain Tulev of Leviathan. “Why would the Syndics seek war with the Alliance again when the Syndics do not even have the military means left to force all of their own star systems to remain loyal to them?” Tulev sounded questioning, not challenging.

  “Because they want an external enemy again,” Geary said. “The Syndic leaders know they can’t hold what’s left of the Syndicate Worlds together by using the force available to them, but they also know that fear of the Alliance provided a powerful reason for star systems not to revolt during the war. They think if we attack them, if the Alliance can be painted as an aggressive enemy that everyone must fear, it will again give the Syndic leaders a strong tool for keeping star systems loyal to them.”

  Badaya shook his head. “That genie is out of the bottle. Even if we came rampaging through Syndic space bombarding right and left, the Syndic empire isn’t going to reconstitute itself.”

  “I’m not so sure of that,” General Carabali said, her words coming slowly and carefully. “As weak as they are in the wake of the war, the Syndicate Worlds can still offer a greater degree of security to individual star systems than those star systems can muster on their own. That greater security against external threats and the promise of internal stability are the only things the Syndics can offer those star systems now.”

  “It creates a choice of enemies again,” Duellos said. “At this time, with the Alliance at peace, the only enemies those star systems see are the rulers of the Syndicate Worlds. Their own rulers. Start the war again, and there are other enemies to worry about. It might work.”

  “It might,” Tulev agreed. “If only a little. But from small advantages, large changes can grow over time. I see your logic, Admiral.”

  Badaya was still angry, but he was thinking. “They are goading us to attack. Why would they do that unless they want us to attack? I see your point as well, Admiral. But it is still a very bitter thing to leave this star system with only the loss of their hypernet gate to avenge the loss of Orion.”

  “I agree,” said Geary. “It feels like far too little. Yet the loss of the hypernet gate here will have a serious impact on the local economy, as well as on the ability of the Syndics to move military forces quickly.”

  “As far as we know, this was their last functioning hypernet gate, except for Midway’s, which they no longer control,” Neeson pointed out.

  “Yes, that’s why the Syndics here are so upset about—” Geary stopped speaking as he realized that something major didn’t fit.

  Captain Hiyen grasped just what that was before anyone else. “Why are the Syndics here so upset about losing their hypernet gate if the only other gate they could access was Midway’s? The gate was already effectively almost useless.”

  Emissary Charban had his eyes on the star display positioned above the conference table. “If they are that upset, it argues that the gate was still useful to them, that there were other places they could access through it.”

  “We ran the checks,” Desjani insisted. “The only gate accessible was Sobek.”

  Hiyen shook his head. “The only gate accessible from Midway when we tried to access the Syndic hypernet was Sobek,” he said, carefully emphasizing certain words. “We know that is true.”

  Commander Neeson was staring at Hiyen. “Have the Syndics developed some means of selectively blocking access to gates within their hypernet? Is that even possible?”

  “I don’t know,” Hiyen admitted. “I don’t know that anyone has ever looked into it. Why would we?”

  “Why would the Syndics have done that? Tried to develop something like that?” Badaya demanded.

  “Oh, hell,” Desjani said with disgust. “The answer to that is aboard Dauntless, and has been ever since we got the Syndic hypernet key from that damned supposed Syndic traitor.”

  Duellos looked pained. “Of course. As soon as we escaped the trap intended for us at Prime, the Syndics knew the Alliance fleet was loose with a key to their hypernet. We assumed they were trying to counter that by catching and destroying this fleet. But why would they stop at that? Why wouldn’t they also start trying to figure out how to limit the usefulness of the key to keep us from going anywhere we wanted within their hypernet?”

  “They’ve been working on it ever since we escaped Prime,” Neeson said angrily. “And it never even occurred to us.”

  “We won,” Charban said. “Why should we have looked for new capabilities?”

  “We do not know the Syndics have done this,” Tulev cautioned. “It is a reasonable guess, I agree. But it is not confirmed.”

  Geary looked toward Rione. She nodded, so he turned to face the whole table again. “We do know the Syndics conducted some new research into the hypernet. They developed a means to block the collapse of hypernet gates by remote signals, the sort of thing that destroyed Kalixa. I don’t know whether or not the Alliance has engaged in similar research.”

  “We didn’t have the same incentive, did we?” Duellos asked. “We didn’t have a star system turned into a charnel house like the Syndics did at Kalixa.”

  “The enigmas tried to do the same thing to Petit Star System in the Alliance,” Desjani pointed out.

  “But they did not succeed thanks to the anticollapse device created by our late and very lamented colleague Jaylen Cresida. A star system without a hypernet gate is a far cry from a star system destroyed by its hypernet gate.”

  Geary glanced around, but no one else s
eemed to have any suggestions. Is this somehow related to fleet headquarters’ attempt to pull anyone with hypernet expertise from this fleet prior to our departure from Varandal? I thought it might be to keep us from learning about the possibility of the entire Syndic hypernet being collapsed by remote signal, but was it about more than that?

  Jane Geary looked up with a stunned expression. “Lakota. Didn’t you tell me, Admiral, that Syndic reinforcements showed up at Lakota and were surprised to be there because they had entered a different destination into their controls?”

  “Yes,” Geary said.

  “How much do the Syndics know about that? The Syndics at Lakota had time to report it, didn’t they, between the time our fleet left Lakota and returned to fight the second battle there? The Syndics would have learned then that there was some means of altering the destination of ships that had already entered the hypernet. What if they’ve been trying to learn how to do that as well?”

  “This just keeps getting better,” Badaya said in disgust. “Our trump card, the ability to use the Syndic hypernet while they can’t use ours, is turning into a wild card.”

  “Maybe the Alliance government is researching the same things,” Charban suggested. “Perhaps when we return to Varandal, we will find that countermeasures have already been prepared.”

  There was a slight pause, then scornful mirth rippled around the vast, virtual table.

  “With all due respect to your record as a ground forces officer,” Duellos said, “are you proposing that we should trust that our government has anticipated a problem and worked to correct it before it went nova?”

  Charban had the good grace to smile slightly. “That does sound like a reach, doesn’t it? But don’t forget that the Syndic system is plagued by many problems, not the least being its own leaders, and still has apparently managed to produce some results.”