Valiant tlf-4

by Jack Campbell

  “No, sir. The highest-ranking officer on one of the pods is a Lieutenant Rana, who is badly wounded.”

  He felt curiously detached as he saw the symbols of the escape pods racing away from Warrior, his mind numb after all of the other losses this day. Escape pods were designed to boost rapidly away from their ship on the assumption that distance would be critical, and in this case that was certainly true. “How much longer until the escape pods are outside the estimated danger zone for Warrior’s power-core blast radius? ”

  “Five minutes, sir. That’s the estimate based on the known state of Warrior’s power core and the readings we’re picking up on it.”

  Seven minutes later, with the destroyers of the Twentieth Squadron still sixteen minutes away, Geary watched the image of Warrior blossom into an irregular sphere of light and debris. He confirmed that the escape pods were far enough outside the blast area to be able to ride out the shock wave, then closed his eyes, took a long, slow breath, and called Gavelock. “Lieutenant Commander Pastak, please alter your mission to recovery of the escape pods from Warrior. They were close enough to the core overload that many probably received some damage. Thank you, thank all of your ships, for your efforts.”

  Pastak’s somber acknowledgment came a few minutes later, then Geary leaned back and closed his eyes again. “Sir?” Desjani whispered. He shook his head, denying any conversation. After a moment, her hand closed over his wrist and squeezed tightly for a second in wordless comfort before being withdrawn. She knew how he felt, and somehow that made it a little easier to bear.

  FIVE

  Geary sighed as the tensions of worrying about the upcoming battle were replaced by the pains of dealing with the aftermath of that engagement. He felt incredibly weary, as though he had been on the bridge of Dauntless for most of a week instead of most of a day.

  “The Syndic guard force is still about thirty light-minutes from the hypernet gate,” Desjani reported, her own voice tired. “If they keep up their speed, they’ll reach it in about four and a half hours.”

  “Fine.” Geary rubbed his eyes, then looked back at his display. That Syndic guard force was now almost two light-hours away from the Alliance fleet. If it had been a lot, lot closer, he might have had to worry about a suicide charge against Dauntless or the auxiliaries, but at this distance the Syndics would take almost a day to get here after they started such a charge. “I guess we can decide what to do about them later.”

  There didn’t seem to be much to worry about for the moment. The guard force was clearly going to stick close to the hypernet gate, just as it had last time the Alliance fleet was here, and that gate lay about two and a half light-hours off to port of the Alliance fleet. The habitable world that Lakota boasted was orbiting on the opposite side of its star from the Alliance fleet, almost two and a quarter light-hours to starboard. The Syndic military assets there wouldn’t be any threat unless the Alliance fleet came close to that world, and Geary had no intention of doing that.

  Otherwise, the Syndic presence here seemed rapidly to be going to ground as the light from the latest engagement reached different parts of Lakota Star System. Merchant ships were fleeing for whatever sanctuary they could find, and colonies and mining operations on outer planets were shutting down equipment as they sent their populace to whatever shelters existed. Accustomed to having Alliance forces bombard Syndic worlds, the people in the system expected the worst from the victorious fleet. It wasn’t going to happen, but Geary didn’t feel like explaining that to them at the moment.

  All around Dauntless, the now-widely dispersed ships of the Alliance fleet were making emergency battle repairs and running down Syndic warships knocked out but not destroyed in the battle, to ensure that their power cores were overloaded. Nothing was to be left for the Syndics to salvage. Shuttles flew between Alliance ships, carrying critically needed replacement parts for those warships requiring them. Destroyers and light cruisers darted around, finding and picking up every Alliance escape pod ejected by ships lost during the battle. Geary had already heard of one such pod, containing sailors who had abandoned the battleship Indefatigable during the first engagement in Lakota Star System weeks ago, been captured by the Syndics and taken to the wreck of Audacious, been liberated by Alliance Marines earlier today and taken to the heavy cruiser Fascine, then had to abandon Fascine when the heavy cruiser was shot up, and finally been rescued again by the light cruiser Tsuba. He wondered if those sailors regarded themselves as lucky or unlucky, and whether or not they were worried by the fact that they’d kept ending up on progressively smaller warships.

  Rione stood up with her own heavy sigh. “I need to check on a few things. Let me know if you need me,” she told Geary.

  Needing her could mean a number of different things. The ambiguity of the phrase made him wonder if Rione had decided it was time for them to share a physical relationship again. Then Geary spotted Desjani’s teeth clenching for a moment, her eyes rigidly fixed on her display before she relaxed herself. Apparently Desjani had interpreted the phrase the same way and hadn’t liked it. He hadn’t noticed that kind of reaction from her before and wondered if Desjani was more worried about Rione’s influence on him than he had realized.

  He could scarcely discuss that now, though, so Geary turned toward Rione and shook his head. “I’ll be fine. Get some rest.”

  “That’s not too likely, but I’ll try.”

  Desjani visibly relaxed after Rione had left. “You should get some rest, too, sir.”

  “There’s a lot of after-battle mess to clean up,” Geary replied.

  “We can handle that. You’ve already ordered our ships to return to their places in Fleet Formation Delta Two once they finish their postbattle operations. They can do that without you watching them. Even Orion and Conqueror can carry out tasks reliably if they’re not being shot at.”

  “Yeah, I guess they can.” Geary stood, surprised by how unsteady on his feet he felt. “Are you going to get any rest?”

  Desjani shrugged apologetically. “I’m the captain of Dauntless, sir.”

  “And captains of warships never get to rest.” He hesitated, then asked the question he had wanted to avoid. “How many did Dauntless lose?”

  She took a deep breath, then answered in a steady voice. “Twelve. We were lucky. Another nineteen wounded, two critically.”

  “I’m sorry.” Geary rubbed his forehead, meaningless phrases about honoring their sacrifices rolling through his brain. Twelve more sailors who would never again see Alliance space, never again see their homes, families, and loved ones. Twelve more just on this lightly damaged ship. Multiply that across the fleet, and the great victory suddenly felt even less worthy of celebration.

  Maybe Desjani felt the same. As if reading his mind, she shook her head. “I guess we’re all a little shell-shocked, sir. Tomorrow I’ll be able to appreciate what we did here. Right now I’m just trying to keep going.”

  “You and me both.” He frowned down at the deck. “What was I doing?”

  “Rest, sir,” Desjani prodded.

  “If you can remember that, you’re in better shape than I am. I’ll be back up here in a little while.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Call me in an hour or so.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I mean it, Captain Desjani.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He left the bridge, somehow certain that Desjani had decided that she wouldn’t actually call him unless another emergency erupted but too tired to debate the issue any longer.

  His stateroom comm alert buzzed angrily, jerking Geary awake. He’d fallen asleep in a chair and took a moment to orient himself before acknowledging the call.

  “Captain Geary,” Desjani reported, “there’s a problem at the Syndic hypernet gate.”

  His stomach turned to lead. “Reinforcements for the Syndics? ” His fleet wasn’t in any shape to fight another major engagement. The aliens on the other side of Syndic space had diverted a big Syn
dic force to Lakota the last time the Alliance fleet was in the star system, baffling the Syndics but giving them an opportunity to destroy the Alliance fleet. They’d come far too close to succeeding. Somehow the aliens had known the Alliance fleet would be at Lakota the first time, but his immediate jump back should have thrown off even whatever means of tracking the aliens were using.

  “No, sir.” Geary’s initial relief at Desjani’s words vanished as she continued speaking. “The Syndic guard force is destroying the gate.”

  Geary took the distance to the bridge in record time, coming to a halt beside his command seat and staring at the images on his display. It took him a moment to accept what he was seeing. As Desjani had reported, the Syndic guard force at the hypernet gate had opened fire on the gate. “They’re taking down the gate. While we’re still light-hours away.” His disbelief must have been obvious.

  Desjani was checking her own display and made a gesture of contempt. “The Syndic commanding that guard force has panicked. He or she has orders to ensure you don’t use that gate, so they’re acting long before they have to act.”

  “But this fleet is so far away, we’re much less likely to be damaged by the resulting energy discharge!” Geary stared at the representations of the Syndic guard force. “And his or her own ships are right there. Why commit probable suicide if you don’t have to?”

  Rione answered, her voice sharp. He hadn’t noticed her coming onto the bridge, but she must have been right behind him. “Obviously because the Syndic commander doesn’t know what’s going to happen when that hypernet gate collapses. The commander wasn’t informed, either because of a misplaced emphasis on secrecy or because no one thought to do so in the wake of this fleet’s apparent defeat in this same star system almost two weeks ago.”

  Desjani spoke as if to herself. “Or because the Syndic Executive Council didn’t want their on-scene commander knowing what would happen and deliberately kept that commander in the dark to ensure their orders would be followed.”

  Geary had a sick feeling that Desjani’s guess was the right one. The Syndic leadership would have wanted to ensure that the Alliance fleet couldn’t use the hypernet gate, and would have decided to withhold any information that might have caused their own commander to hesitate in carrying out orders to destroy it.

  “Therefore,” Rione continued as if Desjani hadn’t spoken, “that commander is playing it safe, terrified that this fleet will once again do something that is supposed to be impossible, not realizing that playing it safe is actually dooming them.”

  Geary turned on her. “The Syndics are playing it safe because they think this fleet can do the impossible?” he demanded.

  She met his gaze coolly. “Don’t blame me. You’re the one who keeps achieving the impossible.”

  Arguing with Rione would obviously be as futile as usual. He took a moment to think, then called Furious. “Captain Cresida, can you give me an estimate of how long it would take the Syndic guard force to cause that hypernet gate to collapse?”

  Several seconds later, Cresida’s image appeared and nodded. “Just a moment, sir.” She looked to one side, her eyes examining something, then back at Geary. “Assuming they continue firing and destroying gate tethers at their current observed rate, my calculations indicate that it would take between twenty and thirty minutes more for the gate to begin uncontrollable collapse. I’m sorry I can’t be more precise, but it’s mostly theory since we just don’t have enough actual gate-collapse data to reference.”

  Twenty or thirty minutes. And the gate was two and a half light-hours away. “So it probably collapsed a little over two hours ago.”

  A few more seconds, then Cresida nodded again. “Yes, sir.”

  “Is there any way to estimate the level of the energy discharge before it gets to us?”

  “The energy pulse is going to propagate outward at the speed of light, Captain Geary.” Cresida shook her head. “We’ll find out when it hits us. Which could happen in about twenty minutes.”

  There was very little time left to react. Geary spun to Desjani. “Get me a course directly away from the hypernet gate’s location.” While she was coming up with that, he studied his display, looking at the disposition of his ships and realizing he had no time to rearrange them.

  “Port one four zero degrees, down one two degrees,” Desjani announced.

  Geary slapped the fleetwide command circuit. “All units in the Alliance fleet. Immediate course change. All ships come port one four zero degrees, down one two degrees, and accelerate to point one light. I say again, immediate execute turn port one four zero degrees, down one two degrees, and accelerate to point one light. The Syndic guard force has caused the hypernet gate in this system to collapse, generating an energy discharge of unknown scale. The energy discharge is theoretically capable of a nova-scale level. In one five minutes all ships are to cease acceleration, pivot to place themselves bow-on to the Syndic hypernet gate’s location, reinforce bow shields to the maximum strength possible, and set maximum preparation levels for damage control and repair.”

  He slumped backward as Desjani rapped out orders and Dauntless swung onto the new course, her propulsion units kicking in hard enough once again to make the inertial dampers whine in protest. “Captain Desjani,” Geary asked, “can this ship survive a nova-scale burst of energy at this distance from the source?” He was pretty sure he already knew the answer and pretty sure it wasn’t a happy one, but he wanted to be certain.

  “I seriously doubt it.” Desjani frowned, then glanced around the bridge, focusing on one watch-stander. “Assessment? ” she demanded.

  The watch-stander tapped a data pad frantically, then shook his head. “No, ma’am. As the burst expands away from the source, its single-point intensity is going to be dropping rapidly, but not nearly fast enough. A battle cruiser’s shields and armor, even at full strength, couldn’t withstand it even with maximum preparations. Destroyers, cruisers, they’d be totally overwhelmed. Battleships might have a chance at this distance. Not a big one, but some might make it through, though they’d be completely crippled.” He paused and tapped a couple of more times. “The battleships’ crews would all be killed by the radiation, though, after it collapsed their shields, so I guess it wouldn’t matter.”

  Desjani blew out a long breath, then looked to Geary. “We’d better hope it’s not nova-scale.”

  “I was thinking the same thing,” he agreed.

  Desjani seemed to hesitate, then turned back to the same watch-stander. “What about the inhabited world in this star system?”

  Geary stared at her. In his concern for the fleet, he hadn’t yet considered what would happen to that world. Yet Desjani had, or at least had realized that he would care.

  The watch-stander rubbed his brow with one hand and tapped his data pad again. “There’s a lot of uncertainties. If the energy wave is nova-scale or anywhere near that, the planet will be turned into a cinder. If it’s something a great deal lower than that, the side facing the hypernet gate’s former location when the shock wave hits will be fried, but the sheltered side might be able to ride it out though they’ll face horrific storms. Whether the planet will be habitable after that is hard to say.”

  “What about the star itself?” Geary asked. “What’ll be the effect on Lakota?”

  “That’s impossible to determine without knowing how much energy will hit it, sir.” The watch-stander shook his head. “If it’s nova-scale, the star will be really messed up, but then no one will be left around here to care. Anything less than that, it’s just too hard to estimate. Stars have incredibly complex internal reactions going on constantly. They’re remarkably self-regulating, but even the most stable star has some variability in output. If I had to guess, I’d say that if this energy burst we’re expecting is at all significant, it will cause enough problems inside the star Lakota’s photosphere to make it experience more variability at shorter intervals.”

  “So even if the habitable world remains
able to support life, the star Lakota may render it uninhabitable in the near future.”

  “Yes, sir. I can’t say that will happen, but I’d regard it as a probable outcome.”

  Desjani frowned and checked her display. “That world is almost five light-hours from the hypernet gate and two and a quarter light-hours from this fleet. If we sent a warning message, they would get it in time to at least order people into shelter, though that’s unlikely to matter to those on the side of the planet that gets hit.”

  The woman warrior who had once expressed regret that null-field weapons couldn’t be used against enemy planets was now willing to warn enemy civilians. “Thank you for thinking of that,” Geary told her.

  “We need survivors, sir. People who can tell other Syndics that the Alliance fleet didn’t do this.”

  Desjani was just being pragmatic, then. Or justifying her actions on pragmatic grounds. He wondered which it was. Geary’s eyes strayed back to the display of Lakota Star System. He looked at the data for the main inhabited world, at the representations of colonies on other worlds or moons, at the orbital facilities and the civilian space traffic that hadn’t yet reached a place where the crews could take refuge if the Alliance fleet sent warships after them. And at the clusters of small symbols that marked escape pods from Syndic warships and repair ships fleeing for safety. Hundreds, probably thousands of Syndic personnel in those escape pods, but Geary didn’t want an estimate of their numbers. They wouldn’t stand a chance if the energy discharge from the collapsing gate had any power at all, and there was nothing he could do about it. “I need a broadcast to the entire star system.”

  How do you tell so many people that death may already be on its way? Geary tried to speak calmly, but knew his voice sounded bleak. “People of Lakota Star System, the Syndicate Worlds’ warships at your hypernet gate have opened fire on it to prevent its use by the Alliance fleet. By the time you receive this message, the hypernet gate will certainly have collapsed. When it does so, a burst of energy will be released, a burst which could be powerful enough to wipe out all life in this star system. If we’re fortunate, the energy burst will be much weaker than that, but it could easily be extremely dangerous to all human lives, ships, and installations in this star system. I urge you to take all possible measures in the very short time available to protect yourselves.”