He shouldn’t need her to tell him that. Geary let his real feelings show for a moment, his sorrow and anguish, and saw Desjani react. “They trusted me to get them home. Now they won’t get home.”
“Sir.” Desjani leaned forward, her face lit with the intensity of her feelings. “Not everyone returns from battle.
We all learn that early on, and we’ve all lost many friends and comrades in action, as did our fathers and mothers and their fathers and mothers before them. But you were sent to save us. I know that. So do most of the officers and almost every sailor in this fleet. You are on a mission from the living stars to get this fleet home and save the Alliance, and that means you cannot fail. We all know that. Soon you’ll remember that, and you’ll figure out what to do next.”
Her belief was almost terrifying to him, because he knew how fallible he really was and couldn’t really believe that someone like him could be on a mission for any greater power. “I’m as human as you are, Tanya.”
“Of course you are! The living stars and our ancestors work through the living! Everyone knows that!”
“This fleet doesn’t need me. The Alliance doesn’t need me. I’m not—”
“Sir, yes we do!” Desjani almost pleaded this time. “I don’t know what I—what this fleet would do if you weren’t here, what would happen to the Alliance without you. You came to us when you did for a reason. Because if you hadn’t been there with us in the Syndic home system, then this fleet would have been wiped out and the Alliance lost. We followed you because we trusted you, and you have shown us again and again by your deeds and your words that you deserve that trust.”
Geary opened his mouth to protest again, then understood as if one of his ancestors had whispered it into his ear. He had let down the crews of the ships lost at Lakota. That was an awful thing. But it would be far more awful to let down the crews of all the surviving ships still in the fleet, to break faith with their belief in him when that faith was what was keeping them going. They were counting on him, and he knew it, just as the crews of Audacious, Defiant, and Indefatigable had known the rest of the fleet was counting on them. He had to come through, and Desjani and Rione were both right that it had to be him.
Because that faith others had in him meant only he had a halfway decent chance of keeping this fleet together, though keeping it from being destroyed would be just as hard a task. But he had to do it. And that meant he had to figure out what to do next.
So he sat a bit straighter, nodded, and spoke in a firmer voice. “I do have a responsibility.” Like it or not, and I don’t like it one bit. “Thank you for helping me remember that.”
She sat back, smiling with relief. “You didn’t need me.”
“Yes, as a matter of fact, I do.” He started to force a smile, then felt it become real. “Thank you. I’m very glad I’m on your ship.”
Desjani smiled at him again, then swallowed and looked uncertain before standing abruptly. “Thank you, sir. I should get back to the bridge.”
“Sure. If you see Co-President Rione, tell her I’m okay.”
“I will, sir.” Desjani saluted quickly and then hastened out the hatch.
Geary sat for a while, thinking, then reached slowly for the controls of the display. The image of Ixion Star System appeared, the Alliance fleet on it in the tangled disposition it had been in when it entered jump at Lakota, and in which it would be when it arrived at Ixion. I have to think of something. But what?
TWELVE
“SIR, this is Lieutenant Iger in intelligence. We have something important that we need to brief to you.”
Geary, feeling depression creeping up again as good options in Ixion eluded him, took a moment to consider whether he should answer, but duty sat on his chest and glared at him until he reached out to acknowledge the message. “What does important mean?” he asked.
“I…it’s hard to judge, sir. It’s something very unexpected, and we really don’t know what it means, but it could be critically important.”
Intelligence loved modifiers like “could be,” but it was unusual to have them frankly admit to not knowing what something meant.
“We have everything ready to show you down here, or I can come up there and brief you, sir,” Iger continued, “whenever it’s convenient.”
Geary looked around. Facing the crew of Dauntless again after the desperate retreat out of Lakota still felt, well, daunting. But he’d increasingly felt as if this stateroom were a prison, one that he had locked himself inside.
It was long past time he got out there and tried to be a fleet commander again. “I’ll come down there. Is right now okay?”
“Yes, sir. I’ll be waiting, sir.”
Standing up, Geary checked his appearance, grimaced, then took a while to clean up and put on a fresh uniform. No matter what had happened at Lakota, he couldn’t look defeated.
The members of Dauntless’s crew who he encountered wore expressions of worry, which lit with hope when they saw him. Geary tried to project confidence despite the gloom filling him and apparently fooled most or all of them. He’d learned as a junior officer dealing with superior officers that if you acted like you knew what you doing, everyone else assumed you really did know it.
“What will we do at Ixion?” an anxious sailor blurted at Geary. “Sir?”
“I’m still considering options,” Geary replied, as if there were a lot to choose from and any of them were good. But the sailor smiled, reassured, and saluted briskly.
As he reached the intelligence section, sealed behind multiple high-security hatches, Geary pondered the fact that an intelligence officer had been able to motivate him out of his stateroom, something that neither combat officer Desjani nor politician Rione had succeeded in doing. That had to rank high on the irony scale.
Lieutenant Iger awaited Geary, looking nervous as Geary took a seat and waited. “Sir, we’ve been analyzing the messages passed among the ships of the Syndic flotilla that arrived via the hypernet gate while we were in the Lakota Star System.”
“How much of that can you intercept and break?” Geary asked.
“Not a lot, but some stray signals always leak, and if we remain in the star system long enough for them to reach us, we can record them and then try to break the encryption,” Iger explained. “It’s not even remotely a source of real-time intelligence, though if we ever broke an enemy message in time to influence an ongoing engagement, we’d certainly bring it to your attention.”
“I assume you’d let me decide if the message could influence the engagement?” Geary asked, knowing that the intelligence types were probably making such calls themselves.
“Uh, yes, sir,” Lieutenant Iger assured him, doubtless already planning to make sure that was done in the future.
“I take it there was something important about the signals you picked up at Lakota?”
“Yes, sir,” Iger repeated. “Unusual. Very unusual.” He paused, licked his lips, then spoke quickly. “Sir, it’s our assessment that the Syndics were as surprised by their arrival in Lakota as we were.”
Geary wondered if he had heard right. “You mean the Syndics already in the star system were surprised by the arrival of reinforcements?” Why would that conclusion bother the intelligence officer?
“No, sir. The only interpretation that matches the messages we’ve been able to break is that the Syndic ships that arrived via the hypernet gate were totally surprised to be at Lakota. They thought they’d be arriving in Andvari Star System.”
It took a moment for Geary to realize he was staring at the lieutenant. “How often does that sort of thing happen with hypernet travel?” No one had ever mentioned to him ships getting lost in the hypernet.
“It doesn’t, sir,” Lieutenant Iger insisted. “The use of a key is exceedingly simple. On the control panel you choose the actual name of the star system you’re going to. Once you’re on your way between gates, the key still displays the destination star. It would take multiple acts of extreme st
upidity or denial to avoid knowing which star you were going to. As far as our files go, and they’re very detailed, no ship using the hypernet has ever gone to any star system except the one it intended going to. The process is too simple for even an idiot to mess up.”
“Don’t underestimate idiots, Lieutenant. Could something have been wrong with their hypernet key?”
Iger made a frustrated gesture. “Again, sir, as far as we know, any problem with the key serious enough to cause that kind of error should have led to it not operating at all.”
Geary sat back, thinking, while Lieutenant Iger waited, looking unhappy. He probably expects me to start tearing him and his analysis apart. So why would he brief it to me unless he believes it must be true? “Assume your analysis is correct,” Geary began, drawing a clear look of relief from Iger. “How could the destination of those ships have been different from what they keyed in?”
Iger shook his head. “According to our experts, there isn’t any way.”
“Did you talk to Captain Cresida?”
This time Iger looked surprised that Geary knew Cresida was one of the fleet’s experts on the hypernet system. “No, sir, we couldn’t get that long and complex a message to her ship while the fleet was in jump space. But we did call up a learning simulation based on the teachings of several of the Alliance’s leading experts on hypernet, presented it as a theoretical situation, and asked if it were possible. The avatars of the experts in the simulation were all positive that it couldn’t happen.”
“There’s no way to change a destination in midjourney on the hypernet? None at all?”
“No, sir,” Iger stated firmly. “But there’s only one alternative to that having happened. That’s if the Syndics were trying to deceive us and deliberately broadcast a lot of misleading messages knowing we’d pick up some of them and eventually break some of those we intercepted.”
“Why don’t you think they did that?”
Iger grimaced this time. “Occam’s razor mostly, sir. A deliberate deception in this case would be a very complex and uncertain operation. The simplest explanation, that the messages are real, is the best. And the messages feel real, sir. Nothing about them seems deceptive. Everything about them matches our experience with valid Syndic communications. And we can’t think of any explanation why the Syndics would try to fool us that way.”
“To keep us from using their own hypernet? Sow doubt that it was reliable?”
“But they couldn’t know we would pick those signals, sir. Some of them were flying as soon as the Syndics arrived at Lakota, before they even could have absorbed the news that our fleet was there as well.”
Geary nodded. “How confident are you of your assessment that the Syndic fleet that came out of the hypernet gate at Lakota didn’t intend going to Lakota?”
“It’s the only assessment that matches the message traffic, sir,” Iger stated miserably. “We wanted to find something else to explain it. But nothing else matches.”
“Fair enough.” Geary stood up. “Good job on the analysis and good job on telling me the truth as you think it is. But you did miss something.”
Iger looked even more worried. “What was that, sir?”
“You told me that there’s no way to change the destination of ships in a hypernet in midjourney. If the intelligence you collected is right, and I know of no reason to doubt it, then there must be such a way. We just don’t know what it is.”
Iger looked startled, then nodded, then appeared puzzled. “But if the Syndics know a way to do that, why were they so surprised to arrive in a different star system?”
“Maybe the Syndics don’t know how to do it, either, Lieutenant.” Geary paused to give Iger time to absorb the implications of that. “Is there anything you have that I don’t have access to? Any information deemed too sensitive for me to see?”
“No, sir,” Iger stated immediately. “As fleet commander you have access to everything. I can’t speak for files off of this ship, but anything on this ship is available to you, regardless of classification and other restrictions.”
There was a star display floating near one bulkhead. Geary went over to it and gazed into its depths. “Lieutenant, are you aware of any information that indicates or speculates that another intelligent species exists on the far side of Syndic space from the Alliance?”
He turned back to see Iger staring at him. “No, sir,” Lieutenant Iger stated in a surprised voice. “I’ve never seen anything like that.”
Geary nodded again. “Do me a favor, Lieutenant. Pull up the data that we’ve captured that provides information on the far side of Syndic space. Plot in occupied star systems, abandoned star systems, and hypernet gate placements. Then tell me what you think.”
Iger was staring at the star display now. “Have you already done that, sir?”
“I have. I want to see if you reach the same conclusion I did.”
RIONE was in his stateroom when Geary returned. She stood and gave him a searching look. “It didn’t quite feel the same in here without you slouched in a chair radiating gloom. Are you all right?”
“Yeah. I think so.”
“So Captain Desjani was able to give you something I couldn’t.”
“That’s…she helped. You and she both helped.”
“Uh-huh.” Rione sat back down, looking tired. “Good, anyway. Whatever did it. I was about to the point of standing over you and slapping you until you moved.”
“I might have started to like it,” Geary replied.
“A joke? You’ve gone from immobility to jokes?”
“Not really.” He sat down near her and made an uncertain gesture. “I don’t really understand how it worked, but responsibilities can weigh you down, or they can make you move. Sometimes both. Does that make sense?”
“Yes, it does,” Rione agreed, her voice uncharacteristically gentle. “Where were you?”
“I just came from the intelligence offices.” Geary called up a star display and explained what Lieutenant Iger had told him, Rione listening but giving little clue to her reactions. “How do you think that large formation of Syndic ships arrived in Lakota via hypernet in time to nearly destroy us?” he asked at the end.
Rione sat silently for a few moments, her eyes on the star display. “So it wasn’t exceptionally bad luck. It seems our unknown aliens have chosen to side with the Syndics. I warned you they wouldn’t let you win.”
“I’m not getting any closer to winning! I’m still focused on survival and not sure how long I can manage that.”
“Have you considered all of the implications of this?”
“Of course I have!” He glared at her, then paused to think. “Which implications?”
Rione gestured to the star display. “How did our increasingly less-hypothetical alien intelligences know that this fleet was headed for Lakota so that they could divert that Syndic fleet to there?”
Geary felt his guts tighten. “Either they have some means of detecting the movements of fleets in roughly real time across interstellar distances, or they have a spy in this fleet. Do you think they look human enough to pass?”
“If they aren’t indeed human. Or perhaps they’ve hired agents to spy for them. Or maybe the spy isn’t even living but a worm inserted in fleet systems to report on our activities.”
Geary nodded. “Those are possibilities, and frankly more believable for me than anything that can see across light-years of distance without any time delay. If those…whatever they are can do that, then the human race is very seriously outclassed in technology. Unpleasant though the thought is, I prefer believing that some kind of spy is providing that information.” He paused to think. “Obviously your spies in this fleet have never found signs of alien spies, or I’m sure you would have told me.”
Rione uttered a heavily exasperated sigh. “My spies are aware of many different spies working for many different people. But many informants remain unseen, I’m sure, and the identities of most of the employers of those sp
ies we know of remain uncertain at best. Now, the next implication. How did this spy get the information to the aliens in time for them to act?”
Geary stared at her. “I should have thought of that. The only way they could’ve is if these beings have a means of faster-than-light communications that doesn’t involve using a ship to physically transport the message.”
“We’ve speculated the hypernet gates could allow that somehow.”
“Yeah…but there wasn’t a hypernet gate in Ixion, which is where we decided to go to Lakota. We haven’t been in a star system containing a hypernet gate since Sancere, and that gate was destroyed before we left.”
“True.” Rione made a face. “A faster-than-light transmitter small enough to remain undetected on one of our ships. How much more technologically advanced than we are these alien intelligences?”
Geary was staring at the starscape when another realization hit. “Damn.”
“What?”
“The worst implication of all, maybe. We’ve been hoping to find a Syndic hypernet gate poorly enough defended to allow us to use it to get close to Alliance space.”
She nodded.
“But now we can’t, not even if one is sitting totally undefended.”
Rione got it then, digging her fingernails into her palms. “If we enter the Syndic hypernet system, and these aliens can redirect any ships within that system…”
“We could end up anywhere. Instead of arriving in our planned destination next to the border with Alliance space, we might come out on the opposite side of Syndic space. Or in a system where the entire Syndic fleet is gathered waiting for us again.”
“Or somewhere not even on the Syndic hypernet?” Rione wondered. “That’s not supposed to be possible, but it seems a number of impossible things must already be happening.”
Geary sat down, leaning back in his seat and trying to get his mind around all of the things that it seemed must be true. “I don’t get it. Say they’ve got those capabilities, and they must have some of that. Why would they tip their hands this way? Let us know they have those abilities?”