The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Invincible

by Campbell, Jack

  “Wouldn’t that be nice?” The same phrase he had used with Rione now seemed apt as well, but it was just as well that Tanya didn’t know he was repeating it.

  He stood silently for a moment after the hatch closed behind him, alone in the stateroom that had once belonged to Admiral Bloch, before the Syndics killed him during “negotiations,” and that had since been the only home Geary had in this time. What if Tanya had been captured by the Syndics while the war still raged? What if she were somehow captured now by the scattered and broken pieces that had replaced Syndicate Worlds’ authority in much of what had once been Syndic space? What would be done to the person closest to the great Black Jack Geary in the name of gaining information or of pressuring him, or simply out of a desire for revenge?

  He walled off the thought. Admitting such a possibility, considering such an outcome, would paralyze him.

  AS Geary watched the fleet brake at maximum capability past the looming bulk of the bear-cow fortress, the wave of hundreds of missile craft launched by the fortress caught the leading edge of the fleet. Massive explosions rippled down the length of the human formation as the suicide attackers drove their craft straight into scores of warships and auxiliaries.

  He canceled the simulation with a grunt of disgust. I’ve tried every possible angle of approach, every possible variation in velocity, but I can’t get around the fact that the fortress is there, and I have to take the fleet there where the jump point is, and it can’t be going faster than point one light speed when it gets there.

  There was something extremely aggravating about having literally the entire universe open before you and yet being unable to go where you needed to go.

  Geary reached for the comm panel, then hesitated as he saw the time. It was well after normal working hours, the passageways of Dauntless darkened to simulate the day/night cycle that humans favored and almost empty of personnel, with only the night watch on duty. He wanted to talk this over with Desjani, but Admiral Timbale’s warning that he and Tanya were being watched for any signs of unprofessional behavior couldn’t be ignored. Tanya wouldn’t do anything improper for a subordinate of his in the chain of command, but that didn’t mean innocent activity couldn’t be willfully misconstrued, especially if it involved her visiting his stateroom at such a time.

  Hell. He had a job to do. Geary sent the request for a call, then waited until her window popped up nearby.

  Tanya was in her own stateroom, which was good to see given the late hour. Sometimes he thought she lived on the bridge on the Dauntless, which wasn’t the best thing for her or for her own subordinates. “Good evening, Admiral. What’s up?”

  “Are you busy?”

  She looked back at him. “I’m commanding officer of a battle cruiser. Of course I’m busy. Why?”

  “I’m stuck.” Geary waved toward the display over the table in his stateroom. “I can figure out how to avoid the bear-cow warships, but I can’t figure out how to get past the fortresses at the jump exits. If I didn’t have to worry about the warships, I might be able to come up with a means of knocking out a fortress, but I don’t have that luxury.”

  “It’s all one problem,” Desjani agreed. “I personally tend to focus on the warships, but the biggest problems are those fortresses. Do we have to get within range of their weapons?”

  “No,” Geary said gloomily. “We can pass outside the likely threat radius of anything mounted on the fortresses. What we can’t possibly avoid is the swarm of missile craft that the fortress will launch to intercept us, knowing exactly where we have to go to get to the jump exit. Any ideas?”

  “I’d tell you if I’d come up with any. But I’m just a battle cruiser commander. You’re Black Jack Geary.”

  “You know I don’t like that nickname. Can you come down and go over this stuff with me?”

  Desjani laughed. “Oh, that would look good. Me sneaking into your stateroom in the middle of the night. Should I put on something sexy, like my full-dress uniform?”

  “You do look awfully good in that. Dammit, Tanya, we’re married.”

  “Off my ship we’re married, Admiral. On my ship, we’re captain and admiral. You knew that would be the case.”

  “It’s the sort of thing that’s easier to live with in theory than in practice,” Geary complained. “Besides, this is purely professional. Tanya, you’ve got a great tactical mind. I need some of that.”

  “You sure know how to sweet-talk a girl.” Tanya shook her head. “I think you need sleep more than you need my, um, tactical expertise. We’ve all been trying to figure out how to get past the fortress at the jump point we want to use. None of us has figured out how to do it. We need to try something different.”

  “Such as?”

  “What else is there? The home world of these bear-cows . . . no. We’ve already been thinking about what their warships are like.”

  “We don’t know how they’ll employ those warships, though,” Geary said.

  “No, but so far we’ve seen them all turn and head for us. And we’ve seen how those missile ships engaged us.” She shrugged. “It’s not a lot to go on, but we know a little about how they think. Maybe that’s what we should focus on. Tomorrow. You can’t think without sleep. Go to bed now, and we’ll talk in the morning.”

  “Are you going to sleep?” Geary demanded.

  “I’m a battle cruiser commander. Didn’t we already go over that? Sleep is a luxury.”

  “I could order you to go to sleep.”

  “Yes, you could,” Desjani agreed. “You’d regret it, but you could. If you insist on staying awake, think about how the bear-cows think so you can try to understand the enemy. That’s what you ended up doing with the enigmas, and that’s my best advice.”

  After the call ended, he sat in his darkened stateroom, thinking about her advice. Know the enemy. That was a very old piece of wisdom. And Tanya was right. He had been focusing solely on what his own forces could do and, physically, what the enemy forces should be able to do. Never mind what these aliens could do, what would the bear-cows do? Thinking that he had never expected to be asking himself that question, Geary started searching for answers. There were still precious few things known about the bear-cows, mainly some short assessments from Lieutenant Iger and the civilian experts, which were filled mostly with words like “unknown,” “assume,” “estimate,” and “possibility,” so he started looking up information on actual bears.

  The original bear had been found on Old Earth, but humanity had brought some bears with them into space, planting the species on distant worlds, and encountered on some other worlds animals which had bearlike characteristics enough to be added to the general term. Of course, technically, in terms of DNA, evolution, and countless other factors, those were all very specifically distinct species. But to the average human, all of those creatures were “bears” even though that attitude drove zoologists crazy.

  None of what he found on bears seemed to be useful. Bears were fairly solitary animals, especially compared to cows. One thing that seemed clear was that the bear-cows liked living close together. Bears were also omnivores, and continued analysis of the remains they had recovered had confirmed that the bear-cows were pure herbivores.

  He looked up cows, and cattle, and bulls, and herds, and everything else that came to mind, reading descriptions, analyses, watching videos (some of which were tagged as coming from Old Earth itself) and letting his mind roam free as he did so.

  Geary found himself thinking about those superbattleships. They weren’t inherently slower than the much smaller human battleships. Given time, the bear-cow superbattleships could reach the same velocities as the human warships. They were doing so now, accelerating steadily on an intercept with his fleet. But that acceleration would take more time, significantly more time, and attempting to alter their trajectories using thrusters would also take more time. It wasn’t just the relatively weak propulsion, it was also the greater mass of the superbattleships. Getting that much mass
to turn took a lot of power or a lot of time, and the superbattleships didn’t have the power.

  Like this video he was watching. A charging bull, thundering ahead, missing his target, slewing around to face a more nimble opponent in the form of a man wearing some sort of garish costume, but the man danced away from the bull, anticipating its moves . . .

  Geary looked at the frozen images of his last simulation, still floating above the table. The massive fortress, the wave of missile craft, the bear-cow armada outmaneuvered and out of position well off to one side. That was how he had done every simulation, outmaneuvering the bear-cow armada so it was out of the way. But if you could maneuver the armada into going somewhere, then maybe . . .

  “Tanya!”

  He had used the command override without thinking, blasting his message through her comm without her having a chance to wake and accept it, and now Tanya’s image blinked blearily at him. “This better really be about my tactical expertise, Admiral, since you seem to have ignored my advice while I took yours.”

  “I followed your other advice. Tanya, I think I know how to do it, but I’m not good enough at maneuvering to make it work. I need you to work up the maneuvers and see if it’s plausible.”

  “Now?”

  Geary hesitated, suddenly aware of the time. Hours had passed while he flipped through research files. Yet Tanya had asked the question in all seriousness. She would jump right on the problem if he asked her because she was a damned fine officer. “Uh . . . no. We’re still a long way from the jump point we need to use, and that bear-cow armada is a long way from intercept. You can look at it in the morning. Go ahead and go back to sleep.”

  That earned him a flat look that promised retribution at some future time. “You wake me up,” Desjani said, “tell me you have a possible solution, then tell me to get back to sleep. Thank you, sir. Send me your idea. I might as well look at it since the odds of my getting any more sleep before the ship’s day begins seem to be very remote. Not that there’s much time left before the ship’s day begins, is there?”

  Maybe she would forgive him if the idea proved to be workable.

  THE bear-cow armada continued to grow in size as individual ships joined up, the entire force continuing on a path to intercept the human fleet. The human fleet hadn’t altered its own vector, still curving through the outer edges of the star system toward the next jump point. If no one altered speeds or trajectories, in thirty-two hours, the fleet would come within estimated range of the missile ships based on the alien fortress, and in thirty-five hours, the alien armada would intercept whatever was left of the human fleet after that.

  Geary sat looking at the display, wondering what Desjani would think of his idea. At least she hadn’t already dismissed it as unworkable. Since no one had provided him with any alternative ideas as of yet, he had to keep hoping it could work.

  Worn-out, but too keyed up to sleep, he left his stateroom to walk the passageways of Dauntless as the morning crew came on duty. They had to see him, had to see the admiral looking confident and calm. He didn’t feel particularly confident or calm, but figuring out how to look that way regardless was an important part of being an officer. Don’t worry too much about the sailors’ seeing you get a little worried sometimes, one of his chief petty officers had told Geary when he was a lieutenant. That just tells them you’re smart enough to know when to worry. Don’t look too worried, or they’ll think you don’t know what to do. And, for the love of your ancestors, never look like you’re never worried. That’ll make the crew think you’re either an idiot or a fool. They know officers are human, and no human with half a brain is never worried. But as long as you seem to know what you’re doing, they’ll follow you.

  The memory, of a woman who had probably died eighty or more years ago in the first decades of the war with the Syndics, brought a smile to Geary’s lips. The Master Chief Gioninni he had met a while back didn’t have the same last name, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t have been a descendant of Senior Chief Voss. Certainly he seemed to have the same genes for conniving and chicanery that had made Voss extremely valuable to then-Lieutenant Geary, as well as a constant source of anxiety.

  The crew members he passed saw Geary’s smile, and their own worried expressions faded into confidence. The admiral obviously had the situation well in hand. It’s a good thing that Desjani is the only person on this ship who can read my mind, he thought wryly.

  His walk brought him past the worship spaces, where members of the crew could follow their own practices in privacy. Geary chose a small room and sat down alone, lighting the small candle that waited there. Ancestors, help me make the right decisions. What more could he ask? But he shouldn’t just ask for things. My thanks for helping to bring us this far.

  He was starting to stand when Geary remembered one other issue and sat back down. Commander Michael Geary. We still don’t know if you died when your ship Repulse was destroyed. Are you there with our ancestors? He tried to sense a response and felt nothing. Your sister, my grandniece, is acting odd. I don’t know what’s going on with her. It’s more than just a much higher level of aggressiveness. That’s just a symptom of something. But what? If you know, please help me understand.

  And if you’re still alive, captive of the Syndics, I’ll find you and liberate you someday. I won’t stop trying. I promise.

  Geary went back to his stateroom after that. He felt weary. Thinking about his grandniece and very-probably-dead grandnephew, the descendants of his own brother, who had aged and died long ago, had brought to the fore memories of that brother. The weight of the past had come down upon him again, and he could no longer smile, thinking of those who had died while he was in survival sleep for a century. Fortunately, there was always much to be done, and he could seek a small form of oblivion in the mass of work.

  Once back in his stateroom, Geary paged through the multitude of messages in his queue. The fleet commander received hundreds a day, only a few dealing with major factors requiring decisions from him. But to make those big decisions he needed to know a lot of little things, so many other bits of information and reports were either forwarded to him or just passed on for background. Geary skimmed through message headers, sometimes pausing to also skim through the underlying material, only occasionally pausing to read through something of particular import.

  The uncrewed probes sent to the wreckage of the alien ships to find traces of their former crews had also collected pieces of the wreckage. The report forwarded by Captain Smythe summarized what had been learned from those so far, which, unfortunately, wasn’t much. Unsurprising mix of alloys and composites . . . structural analysis of alloys reveals some intriguing signs of unusual casting techniques . . . composites tilted more heavily toward silicon than carbon, suggesting relative abundance of those elements on alien home world . . . no portions of equipment found large enough to provide critical information as to functions or design.

  Captain Tulev had reported on everything collected at the site of the battle. At least they didn’t have to worry too much about the aliens’ analyzing any human wreckage or remains. Whatever the aliens might find after Tulev’s cleanup effort would provide a lot fewer clues than the aliens’ own wreckage had provided to humans.

  Geary’s eye caught on a disciplinary summary from Dragon. A petty officer caught selling drugs synthesized from stolen medical supplies. Six cases of insubordination, and three fights, one of them involving several sailors. Was Captain Bradamont having trouble controlling her crew?

  He told the system to summarize all disciplinary reports and give averages for each ship type. Dragon, it turned out, was a bit better than average. Even Dauntless had seen a significant uptick in incidents.

  Geary sat looking at the numbers, knowing what they meant. Fights. Insubordination. Failure to carry out duties. All signs of trouble, and they were getting worse. Sailors who were unhappy but had nothing specific to vent their unhappiness on, so they were turning on each other, letting minor
events escalate to levels where official action had to be taken. All of it was still minor. Nothing was at a critical stage yet, but he had to try to keep things from getting that bad.

  Which meant getting home.

  He finally fell asleep in his chair for a couple of hours, waking with a jerk to see before him a message summarizing fleet junior officer qualification progress. Small wonder that had put him to sleep.

  A quick shift to the star display revealed that nothing much had changed in the star system. The human fleet and the alien armada had moved a bit closer to each other, slowly converging, and this fleet had also gotten a bit closer to the orbital fortress guarding the next jump point; but that was all.

  Shutting off the display, Geary checked his appearance, pondered appearing on the bridge looking like he had just come in from a wild night of liberty, thought about what Tanya would do if he did that, then took enough time to clean himself up and put on a fresh uniform.

  Desjani was on the bridge, looking immaculate in her uniform even though her face displayed signs of fatigue. She yawned as she waved Geary to his command seat. “Did you get some rest, Admiral?”

  “A little.”

  “Good. In exchange for your display of good judgment, I’ve got something to show you, Admiral.”

  He sat down, eyeing her. “A workable plan?”

  “A workable plan? No, Admiral. I’m going to show you a great plan.” She entered the commands, and Geary’s display came to life.

  He watched the maneuvers play out, running the simulation to its end, then let out a long breath. “It works.”

  “It could work,” she corrected him. “If the bear-cows do what we think they will. If they don’t, we can pull out of contact and try something else.” Desjani frowned at her display. “We can probably do that.”

  “Probably?”

  “I am fairly confident that we could, Admiral.” Tanya yawned again. “Even against the Syndics, this probably wouldn’t work, but I bounced some ideas off of Lieutenant Iger, and they match what his spooks have seen on the videos we’ve intercepted. But there’s not a lot of room for error. It’s a great plan, but it’s a terrible plan.”