The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Guardian

by Jack Campbell

  In this case, the answers might be found in the recent past.

  He called up records, letting them scroll past, trying to give his subconscious the clues it would need to figure out what was going on.

  When his hatch alert chimed, Geary absentmindedly granted entry, only gradually becoming aware that Desjani was back and glowering at him.

  “What?” Geary asked, looking away from the display over his desk.

  “I thought you were not going to get bogged down again this quickly in useless regrets about the past.”

  “What?” he repeated, then understood. “I’m sorry, Tanya. Have I been out of communication for a while again?”

  “An unusually long while,” she replied, eyeing him suspiciously. “If you’re not moping about mistakes, what are you doing? That’s a playback of the attack on Invincible at Sobek.”

  Geary rubbed his mouth with one hand, looking at the recorded images once more as stealth shuttles were destroyed, and Marines counterattacked inside Invincible. “Something has shifted. I’m trying to figure out what.”

  She came closer, studying the display. “The attack on Invincible was a classic special operation. Stealth approach and stealth suits, board a ship undetected, we’ve seen that before. We’ve done that as much as the Syndics have. It requires special circumstances to work, though.”

  “But the suicide attacks. Those were different.”

  “Yes,” Desjani agreed. “The minefield wasn’t different, but the way they tried to get us with it was unusual. You’re looking for some common element?”

  He nodded, watching as the Marines once again annihilated the Syndics who had boarded Invincible. “These aren’t major attacks. It’s a series of small attacks, minor actions. They’re not marshaling as many forces in one place as possible. They’re not trying to defeat us in open battle.” Geary looked at her. “Do they still use the expression being nibbled to death by ducks?”

  “Nibbled to—? Oh. We say cows,” Desjani said. “Licked to death by cows.”

  “That’s disgusting.”

  “How is it more disgusting than being nibbled to death by ducks?”

  “I don’t know.” Geary scowled at the display. “The Syndics can’t hope to stop us or beat us. But what they’re doing is not just wearing us down ship by ship and encounter by encounter. These sudden attacks, without warning, seemed designed to also throw us mentally off-balance.”

  Desjani nodded, her eyes thoughtful. “Small jabs at unexpected points. Like martial-arts fighting. Instead of going strength against strength, you try to get your opponent off-balance and get them to make mistakes.” She paused, then focused intently on him. “They can’t beat you.”

  “I don’t need to hear—”

  “I’m not praising you, Admiral.” She pointed a finger at the display. “Fact. The Syndics don’t have enough warships left at the moment to bring us to battle. Fact. If they did gather that many warships, they know that you would beat the hell out of them. They know you don’t have any match as a fleet combat commander. Fact. Even Syndics can figure out what they’re doing wrong if they get hit hard enough often enough.

  “They’ve got a new plan, Admiral. They’re going to avoid a straight-up fight with you until you’ve been worn down so badly that Black Jack himself couldn’t win. Sorry, that’s one of those old sayings. Instead, they’re going to fight the sorts of battles you haven’t proven you can best them at. An ever-changing set of unconventional, surprise attacks, none of them using too many Syndic resources, but all of them aimed at wearing us down physically, mentally, and emotionally.”

  He did not like hearing that the future would likely hold only more of what they had seen at Sobek. “How did you come up with that idea?”

  “I heard it. A long time ago.” Desjani bit her lip, blinking as she looked to one side. “My brother. As a kid, he loved the whole ground forces thing. He would lecture us about different kinds of fighting. Guerrilla warfare. He had this fantasy where the Syndics would take over a planet he was on, and he would organize and lead resistance forces that would eventually triumph over the Syndic occupiers. He had it all worked out.”

  Geary had looked up Desjani’s family history, the official side of it, anyway. He knew that Tanya’s younger brother had died the first time he fought the Syndics, one of thousands of Alliance ground forces soldiers dead in a failed offensive against a Syndic planet. Her brother had not lived to be the hero his child-self had spent years dreaming of, had never had the chance to carry out the detailed plans a kid had proudly described to his sister and parents.

  What could he say? Tanya had recovered, as she must have a thousand thousand times before this, and was looking at him steadily again, as if nothing special or unusual had been said. He had been around her long enough to know what that steady gaze meant. Don’t go there. Nothing you can say will be the right thing, so let’s just drop it and move on.

  “I think,” Geary said slowly, trying to ensure he didn’t say the wrong thing, “you may well be right. I haven’t proven any special ability to deal with that kind of frequent, low-level, unconventional attack. Maybe I’m not very good at it. I’m certainly not experienced at dealing with it. And this fleet is already being worn down by the age of the warships and the hard use they’ve seen.”

  She nodded. “The Syndics are still fighting to win. They still think they can win. Part of it probably is an attempt to get us to restart the war so they can use that to hold together what’s left of the Syndicate Worlds, but even if the war starts again, don’t expect the Syndics to fight it on our terms.”

  “How long could the Alliance sustain a war of attrition?” Geary wondered.

  “You already know the answer to that, and it’s not a big number if you measure it in years or in months.”

  After Tanya had left his stateroom with a firm directive that he needed to get out among the sailors again to see and be seen, Geary spent a while thinking, looking at nothing, his eyes unfocused. Physical wounds that didn’t kill outright were usually healed these days, everything made as good as new. But mental wounds, the memories and the events that left a different kind of injury, could only be treated. Removing the memories caused more damage than leaving them intact, so treatment was all about managing the injury, not curing it.

  During their all-too-brief honeymoon, Tanya had woken him once with a scream that jolted them both out of sleep. She had claimed not to remember what dream had caused it. He would wake up at times drenched in sweat, having relived or imagined events in which death and failure were a common element.

  Technically, the war was over. As far as the Syndics were concerned, the war had apparently just taken a different form. As far as the Alliance men and women who had fought in that war were concerned, the war would always be with them.

  Geary sighed and got up. He needed to talk to the officers and crew of Dauntless, and he needed to swing by sick bay for another check on his meds. Maybe it was jump space getting on his nerves again. Humans could get used to a lot of things over time, but no one ever got used to jump space. Or maybe his nerves were on edge because of what might happen when they left jump space.

  What did the Syndics have waiting at Simur?

  NINE

  SIMUR had never been an exceptional star system, and the twin blows of the war and the creation of a Syndic hypernet had done nothing to improve its prospects. Close enough to the border region with the Alliance to be the target of occasional attacks, and never that wealthy a star system to begin with, Simur had been hit especially hard by the creation of a hypernet gate at Sobek. Most of the traffic to and from the rich Sobek Star System that used to have to jump through Simur on its way had been able to go directly to Sobek thanks to the gate. For the last several decades, Simur had been declining from the not-particularly-well-off state it had once enjoyed.

  Intelligence collected during the last Alliance attack to strike Simur, which had been eight years ago, had shown stretches of abandoned faci
lities, abandoned towns, shrinking cities and still-unrepaired damage from a previous attack six years before that. Simur only had a half dozen planets worthy of the name, and four of those were either hot rocks whirling too close to the star or icy rocks too far from the star. Of the remaining two planets, one orbiting a light-hour from the star was barely large enough to qualify as a gas giant, while the last orbited seven light-minutes from the star but was barely habitable by humans, with an axial tilt high enough to keep the northern hemisphere uncomfortably warm and the southern hemisphere uncomfortably chilly.

  “At least the lack of worthwhile targets will help us hold back if we’re tempted to retaliate for more attacks by bombarding them,” Desjani remarked, as they waited for Dauntless to exit jump. “Unless the Syndics pumped a huge amount of money and resources into Simur since the last time the Alliance was here, there’s not much even worth a rock dropped on it from orbit. Why hasn’t Simur been abandoned?”

  “Maybe it was cheaper to let it slowly dwindle than it would have been to evacuate the remaining inhabitants,” Geary suggested. “Let’s hope there’s nothing there waiting for us. It’s possible the Syndics concentrated all of their efforts at Sobek.”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  “No.”

  “One minute to jump exit,” Lieutenant Castries said.

  “All weapons ready, shields at maximum,” Lieutenant Yuon added.

  “And,” Desjani grumbled, “we’ll enter normal space barely moving.”

  “If anything will throw off a Syndic surprise,” Geary said, “that will.” I hope.

  He watched his display, waiting for the moment when Dauntless and the rest of the fleet would leave jump space, for the moment when the featureless, endless gray would be replaced by the spangled black of familiar space and its countless stars.

  The strange lights of jump space always came and went at unpredictable times, but as Geary watched, several bloomed near Dauntless, off to one side.

  “A cluster?” Desjani asked in disbelief. “Jump-space lights never appear in groups. Do they?”

  “Not that I ever heard,” Geary said.

  “There have been more of them this time,” Lieutenant Castries said hesitantly. “More than usual. That’s what the old hands say.”

  Did the presence of the Dancers with the human ships have any relationship to the unusual behavior of the lights in jump space? Geary almost spoke the question out loud, then saw that there were only a few seconds left before jump exit.

  Desjani saw that, too. “Everyone focus on your jobs!”

  The moment came, Geary striving to fight off the disorientation that entering and exiting jump always caused. He had been doing it enough lately that his recovery periods were getting shorter and now spanned only a few seconds.

  He heard combat systems alarms blaring before his eyes could focus.

  But as he struggled to see his display, one other fact penetrated.

  None of Dauntless’s weapons were firing. Whatever the alarms warned of, it was not close enough to engage, meaning the threat also was not close enough to fire upon Dauntless or hopefully any of the rest of his fleet.

  Not yet, anyway.

  Geary finally managed to get a clear look at his display, then had to study it for a few seconds to grasp what he was seeing. “Freighters?”

  “Junk freighters,” Desjani growled. “And obsolete warships.”

  Directly in the path of the fleet were several ships ranged close to the jump exit. None of them were going anywhere. “They’re almost on top of the jump exit,” Lieutenant Castries reported. “They must be using their own maneuvering systems to stay on station. We’re getting power core readings from them. They’re all live ships.”

  “They may be live,” Desjani said sharply, “but they’re limping. They look like they were hauled out of a breaking yard. Six light-seconds distant. If we’d come out of jump doing point one light—”

  “We’d already be in the middle of them,” Geary finished. “At point one light, we couldn’t have turned fast enough to avoid them even if the maneuver had been preprogrammed.” He hadn’t absorbed all of the information on his display, but he had picked up that there was nothing directly above the Alliance ships. “All units in First Fleet, immediate execute, turn up zero nine zero degrees.”

  Dauntless pitched upward, thrusters firing to alter her trajectory into a climb straight above the plane of this star system. Geary watched the paths of his other ships doing the same. Not all could alter vectors as quickly as Dauntless, so his neat formation was smearing across a wide expanse of space, but thanks to the very low velocity at which they had exited the jump point, none of his ships would come within the danger zones surrounding the old freighters and warships positioned directly outside the exit.

  That maneuver would get the fleet clear of the potential threats directly in front of the jump exit, but bring it closer to some of the other threats being highlighted on the displays.

  Four groups of ships, none of them particularly large, all three light-minutes from the hypernet gate, evenly spaced as if they occupied the corners of a vast, imaginary square centered on the gate.

  Three of the small groupings held a single heavy cruiser, two light cruisers, and five Hunter-Killers. The fourth had two heavy cruisers and six HuKs.

  “Our systems are assessing those warships as being brand-new,” Lieutenant Castries reported. “Minimal signs of wear, and they’re all the latest Syndic models of each kind of warship. But . . . Captain, they’re broadcasting identity codes that are not Syndic.”

  “Another star system that revolted?” Geary wondered. “Maybe this reception committee is here in case a Syndic force aimed at suppressing their rebellion came from Sobek after using the hypernet gate to get there.”

  “I don’t like it,” Desjani replied. “Where would a star system that revolted get all of those new-construction Syndic warships? They didn’t build them here. And there’s no sign of combat damage on any of those ships. Did you read the reports Captain Bradamont sent about the fights at Midway when they revolted?”

  “Yes,” Geary said. “Some very bitter fighting and some ugly events. You’re right. The condition of those warships doesn’t match what we should see if Midway was in any way representative of what revolt is like for Syndic-controlled star systems.”

  An alert beeped, and next to Geary a virtual window appeared in which Lieutenant Iger could be seen. “Admiral, everything coming from the old ships directly in front of the jump exit is totally routine, as if they were conducting normal transits or operations. All of that has to be faked given the poor condition of those ships.”

  “What about the new ones?” Geary asked, eyeing the two groups closest to the upward-bending path of the fleet.

  “Their identity codes claim that they are all units of the Strike Combat Attack Forces of the Simur Star System.”

  Desjani’s snort of derision was loud enough for Iger to hear. He nodded in agreement. “There is a lot of interesting message traffic flying around this star system, Admiral,” Iger continued. “But nothing that would indicate a revolt against Syndic authority. What we are picking up was transmitted prior to our arrival and consists of speculation about what the Syndic warships were doing here. Those warships showed up a couple of weeks ago and have apparently refused to communicate with anyone in this star system.”

  “They haven’t communicated with anyone?” Geary asked. “Not even the senior Syndic CEO in Simur?”

  Iger smiled despite his best efforts to suppress a grin. “Since the Syndic warships were hanging out near this jump point, messages sent to them came right where we could pick them up, too. We’ve got one of them. It’s coded, of course, but we could break enough of it to indicate that the senior CEO here is demanding to know what their mission is. There’s a fragment of the message that may indicate that the senior CEO received some sort of instructions from the Syndic warships and is disputing those instructions.”


  “There’s no doubt in your mind,” Geary said, “that those ships are still Syndic despite claiming to belong to this star system?”

  “Don’t answer that, Lieutenant,” someone interrupted before Iger could speak.

  Desjani clenched her teeth but stayed silent as Geary turned to see that Rione was on the bridge. “Why shouldn’t Lieutenant Iger answer that question?” Geary demanded.

  “Because, Admiral,” Rione said, looking and sounding as if she were explaining the obvious, “the Alliance has a peace agreement with the Syndicate Worlds which limits our possible actions against any ships or star systems of the Syndicate Worlds. The Alliance has no peace treaty with the Simur Star System. If those warships claiming to belong to Simur and not to the Syndicate Worlds act in a hostile or just a threatening manner, you can act in whatever way you wish without concerning yourself about the legalities of the peace agreement with the Syndicate Worlds.”

  That could be useful. Geary kept one eye on the nearest groups of Syndic warships as he spoke again. “Why would the Syndics give us that opportunity?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps they simply didn’t think of that possibility. There is a great deal that we don’t know. All we can be certain of is that the Syndics very likely are trying to lure you into doing something that you don’t want to do.”

  Another alert, this time from the displays, as Lieutenant Castries echoed the information. “Ship groups Alpha and Bravo are accelerating on intercept tracks.”

  The fleet’s automated systems had designated the four groups of new warships as Alpha, Bravo, Cable, and Delta. Alpha and Bravo were the two groups at the top of the imaginary square, and the two groups closest to the Alliance fleet as it climbed away from the threat posed by the suspicious old ships in front of the jump exit.

  “More suicide attacks?” Geary asked. With the new warships fairly close and accelerating toward intercept, they were only about twenty minutes from getting within range of his ships. And his fleet was still crawling along at point zero zero three light speed, putting them at a disadvantage. “All units in First Fleet, immediate execute increase velocity to point one light speed. The warships approaching us are assessed hostile. You are authorized to engage and destroy them if they enter your weapons envelopes.”