“Destroyer Rapier is closest to the accident site,” the operations watch called out. “She’s requesting permission to proceed to the area in search of survivors and to collect physical evidence.”
He should have already thought of the need to send a ship to do that. “Tell Rapier that permission is granted,” Geary stated, still trying to grasp what had happened.
Desjani shook her head, looking angry. “Chances of survivors are nil, but maybe Rapier can find something in the wreckage that will help explain what happened.”
Rapier was still on her way to the field of debris that had been shuttle flight Omicron Five One when Rione came quickly onto the bridge, then bent down close to Geary to speak in the barest whisper. “A very unusual accident, and two officers who might have named names are now dead.”
He stared at her. “You think—?”
“Casia might have made a final statement when he faced the firing squad. Yin might have crumbled or revealed something if we decided to interrogate her. What do you think?”
He didn’t want to accept the idea, but the coincidence of a deadly accident on that particular shuttle flight made Rione’s suggestion too convincing to ignore. Someone had escalated their efforts against Geary into the realm of deadly force. He hadn’t really believed Rione’s warning before. Now there seemed little doubt. Whoever they were, they were willing to kill Alliance personnel in the name of contesting Geary’s command of the fleet. Though if what had turned out to be Commander Yin’s final statement was to be believed, they also wanted to prevent him from becoming a dictator if the fleet made it home, and, like Rione, were willing to kill to keep that from happening. Unlike Rione, they had not merely threatened such actions but carried them out, and, unlike her, they had struck not directly at Geary but at other officers in the fleet.
Which meant they were doubtless willing and able to commit more such attacks. The only questions were where, when, and how.
SEVEN
HE hadn’t seen Captain Numos since after the battle at Ilion. Numos didn’t get up when Geary’s image appeared in his stateroom/cell, instead eyeing Geary with the same mixture of contempt and dislike that he’d shown from their first meeting. “What do you want?”
Refusing to let Numos get to him, Geary shook his head. “As I’m sure you’ve already heard, the crew of a shuttle, four Marines, and two fleet officers are dead. Do you think I care right now how you act?”
“Are you accusing me of being involved?”
“No.” The direct answer seemed to startle Numos. “I just want you to consider the implications. Captain Casia and Commander Yin were silenced to prevent them from saying things. If you could say anything, you should be worried about what your alleged friends were planning.”
Numos snorted derisively. “I’m supposed to trust you instead? How do I know you didn’t arrange that little accident to get rid of two officers who had challenged your authority?”
“If I had wanted either of them dead,” Geary pointed out, “I had full justification to order it openly under fleet regulations. Captain Casia was on his way to face a firing squad. Why would I have destroyed a shuttle to kill a condemned man?”
“You’ve already eliminated Captain Franco, Captain Faresa, Captain Midea, Captain Kerestes . . . Have I missed anyone?”
Geary sat down, gazing intently at Numos. “You aren’t that stupid. You know those deaths happened in action. You know that Midea caused her own death. I’ve been wondering how you kept her under control.”
Numos shrugged. “She respected legitimate authority.”
He’d wondered if his dislike of Numos had tinged his memories, making them worse. Apparently not. “Maybe you are that stupid. Your friends have cold-bloodedly murdered members of the Alliance fleet.”
“I thought you said it was an accident.”
“Actually, no, I never said that. You’ve used the word repeatedly. Funny that you should be so certain.” Geary’s thrust went home as Numos’s eyes glittered with anger. “I don’t know whether you think there’s some tiny chance that you would be accepted as fleet commander if I were gone. There isn’t. I don’t know whether you think I plan on making myself dictator when we return to the Alliance. That isn’t going to happen.”
“I’m supposed to believe you?”
Geary studied Numos for a few seconds. “I did think you’d show a little more emotion over the deaths of fellow officers.” Numos gazed back impassively. “If any more accidents happen, you’re going to be in an interrogation facility, Captain Numos. I know you’ve received training on wording your replies to fool even brain scans, but we’ve got some very good interrogators in this fleet. I also know that while I can’t justify subjecting a fleet captain to interrogation without some grounds right now, another accident will arouse enough concern for me to do so.” Numos reddened but remained silent. “Tell your friends.”
Geary stood up, triggered his controls, and vanished from Numos’s stateroom.
“I told you that it would be a waste of time,” Rione remarked, lounging back in her seat. She hadn’t been part of the virtual meeting, but she’d been able to observe the entire thing.
“I had to try.” Geary shook his head. “I don’t know how I’ve managed to avoid ordering Numos shot and dumped out of the nearest air lock.”
“Black Jack could do it.” Rione seemed thoughtful. “Black Jack gets to make his own rules. I think Black Jack should order Numos into interrogation now.”
“So you told me.” Geary sat down, rubbing his forehead. “I’ve sounded out some other officers. They all agree that I could get away with it, but it would both frighten those who think I want to be a dictator and encourage everyone who wants me to be a dictator. Both things could trigger more events that I really don’t want. I need more justification.”
“That justification may involve more deaths,” Rione emphasized.
“I know that. Acting prematurely might cause even more. I take it your spies still have nothing to report?”
“No.” She frowned. “The fleet is buzzing over the shuttle accident, but it all seems to be surprise and conjecture over how the fuel-cell failure could have happened. No one seems to be openly implying that you might have had a role in it, since everyone else seems smarter than Numos and knows you didn’t need to blow up a shuttle if you wanted Casia and Yin both dead. The silence is deafening among your opponents in this fleet. I wish I knew what that meant.”
He studied her for almost a minute before asking a question that had been bothering him. “Why didn’t you ever tell me that some of those opposed to my commanding this fleet were motivated by fear of my becoming a dictator?”
Rione made a dismissive gesture. “Because their exact motives didn’t make any practical difference.”
“You were willing to kill me to prevent me from becoming a dictator.” She didn’t answer, and Geary felt the need to amend his statement. “I suppose you still are willing to do that if you think it becomes necessary. But I think their exact motive did matter if it was the same as yours. Why didn’t they contact you since your loyalty to the Alliance is so well-known? Or did they contact you?”
She laughed. “Getting paranoid? I’ll make a politician of you yet. No, John Geary, they didn’t. I’m convinced that our motives only partly coincided at any point. That is, both they and I don’t want you to be a dictator. But I also want the elected government of the Alliance to remain in power. I suspect that your foes such as the late Commander Yin and her friends believe in the need for a military dictator. They just don’t want you to be that dictator.”
That made sense. “Like Falco. Some other senior officer who thinks the way to save the Alliance is to overthrow its government.” Rione nodded. “I have increasing trouble believing that they are backing Numos though. That interview just confirmed for me that he’s too arrogant to make a decent pawn, and too dumb to function on his own. But he makes trouble for me, and that probably makes him useful to them.”
>
“That could well be true,” she said. “I think your assessment is right, that the conspirators are happy to take advantage of Numos’s hostility to you but that Numos is too prideful and unimaginative ever to work as a puppet for them. I suppose in that light there’s not much sense in pushing to have him interrogated quickly.”
“Yeah. I’ll bet he doesn’t know a thing that’ll help us.” Geary stared at the star display, feeling a need to bring something else up. “How many officers in this fleet are willing to back a dictatorship? I’ve been told it’s a strong majority, so maybe I should ask how many aren’t willing to do that, since that seems to be a much smaller number. Duellos wouldn’t, I don’t think Tulev would, or Cresida—”
“Don’t be so sure about Cresida,” Rione objected. “And I’m a little uncertain about Tulev now. Even before you miraculously returned from the dead, the civilian government was increasingly worried about the loyalty of its officer corps. It’s our own fault. We know that. They’re on the front lines, watching their friends and comrades die, and we can’t tell them that it’s bringing us any closer to victory. It’s been that way for a century. Their grandfathers and grandmothers, their fathers and mothers, watched comrades die or died themselves in the same war. I’m sometimes surprised that our elected government has managed to survive a war this long.”
“Has our government made that many mistakes?”
She waved an angry hand. “It’s made its share of mistakes. So has the military. But it’s not about that. It’s about frustration. A century of war and no end in sight. People want something, anything, that would hold out hope for an end to it.” Rione shook her head at Geary. “And then you show up. The hero who legend decreed would return to save the Alliance in its hour of greatest need. Do you wonder that so many are looking to you?”
“That hero is a myth,” Geary insisted.
“Not entirely, no, and in any event, what you think scarcely matters. It’s what everyone else thinks. You can save the Alliance. Or you can destroy it. It took me a while to put that together. You embody the ancient duality, the preserver on one side and the destroyer on the other. I saw the destroyer at first, then I saw the preserver, and now I see both.” She shook her head again. “I don’t envy you having to personify those two contrary roles, but that’s what comes with being the legendary hero.”
“I never volunteered to be a legendary hero!” Geary stood up and began pacing angrily again. “You did this to me, the government, while I drifted around Grendel Star System in survival sleep, making me into every schoolkid’s greatest idol so you’d have something to keep inspiring people to fight.”
“The Alliance government created a myth, John Geary. You’re real, and you have the real power to preserve or destroy the Alliance. If you haven’t fully accepted that yet, do it now.”
He stopped pacing and gave her a sour look. “I’ve never been the type to believe I was sent by the living stars to save the universe, or even just the Alliance.”
Rione raised an eyebrow at him. “That may be the only thing that keeps you from destroying the Alliance. Maybe that’s why you were chosen.”
“Don’t tell me that you’re starting to believe that, too!” Geary made a frustrated gesture. “I get too much of that as it is.”
“I thought you liked it when your special captain gazed at you with those worshipful eyes,” Rione observed.
“No, I don’t, and no, she doesn’t. And why the hell are we talking about Captain Desjani all of a sudden?”
Instead of answering, Rione simply stood up. “I have some other business to attend to. You’re still going to jump the fleet to Branwyn as scheduled?”
“Yes,” Geary snapped, still aggravated with her. “We’ll be at the jump point in four days, barring any more ‘accidents. ’ ”
She was heading for the hatch but paused to look back at him. “I would have tried to stop it if I’d known someone was going to sabotage that shuttle. Yes, I thought Casia and Yin should die because of their actions and because I saw them as a threat to the Alliance, but I wouldn’t have let a number of innocent people be killed.”
He stared at her. “It never occurred to me to think you would have.”
“Sooner or later, it would’ve occurred to you.”
Geary kept looking at the hatch after she had left, realizing that she was right, and wondering why sometimes his allies scared him as much as his enemies.
THE transmission from what had once been the habitable world in Lakota Star System was streaked with interference, the sound portion garbled by static. Geary tapped the control to apply enhancement filters, and the image cleared, the sound now audible, though with occasional odd gaps as attempts by the software to guess which word to use came up blank.
A man stood in the front of the image, behind him a table at which a half dozen other men and women sat. All of them looked as if they’d been wearing the same clothing for days, and as if those days had been arduous ones. They were in some room without visible windows, whose construction and fittings conveyed a feeling of being an underground shelter.
The man spoke with weary desperation, blinking with fatigue. “We are appealing to any ships in this star system to carry news of our disaster to authorities who can provide aid. Lakota Three is undergoing intense storm activity. Estimates are that between ten and twenty percent of the atmosphere is gone. Lakota star’s output may be fluctuating, causing more havoc on this world. Most electrical systems on the planet were destroyed by the energy pulse that struck us. We’re incapable of estimating the number of dead but it surely runs into many millions. We’ve been unable to establish contact with anyone in the hemisphere that faced the energy pulse. The survivors in this hemisphere are in desperate need of food, shelter, and other necessities. Please notify anyone who can help.”
The image stuttered, then the message began repeating.
Geary shut it off, letting out a long, despairing breath. “There’s nothing we can do.”
Desjani nodded gloomily. “We can’t even run shuttles down into that atmosphere right now without risking their loss.”
“Did you find any signs of Alliance prisoners of war on the planet?”
She shook her head, looking depressed now. “A few marginal indications. But even if they were there, we couldn’t get to them. The planet is going to be a hellhole until the atmosphere stabilizes again.”
Geary tapped his communications controls. “Authorities on Lakota Three, this is Captain John Geary, commanding officer of the Alliance fleet. We deeply regret our inability to offer immediate assistance, but have no capability for disaster relief. We will notify any and all Syndicate Worlds’ entities encountered of your need.” It occurred to him that with so many electronic systems destroyed, the authorities on Lakota Three might have no idea what was going on above the world’s atmosphere. “Be advised that a few Syndicate Worlds’ civilian ships survived the energy pulse and are heading for jump points out of this star system. I have given orders that they not be engaged by my units and have provided them with clear records of the disaster here to assist authorities in other Syndicate Worlds’ star systems in responding to your need. May the living stars provide for you and may your ancestors offer you what comfort they can.”
He ended the transmission, then looked to the communications watch. “Try to punch that through to the origin of the distress message, and set it to repeat until we leave this star system. Also forward that distress message to the Syndic merchant ships heading out of the star system.” With a fleet configured for war, there wasn’t much else he could do. “Captain Desjani, I’m going to hold a small meeting in one hour. I’d like you to be there.”
“Of course, sir,” Desjani acknowledged. “Is there anything I should do to prepare for the meeting?”
“Just bring your brains and your common sense.”
ONE hour later, Geary looked around the conference room, where he, Captain Desjani, and Co-President Rione were physically presen
t and Captains Duellos, Cresida, and Tulev were virtually present. To the naked eye, all six figures appeared identical, but the occasional extra couple of seconds’ delay in reactions from the three who were attending via conferencing software betrayed their virtual nature. “I wanted to talk to you because you’ve all been told about our belief that there’s a nonhuman sentient species on the other side of Syndic space.”
“Belief?” Captain Cresida questioned. “From the evidence I’ve seen, it’s a lot stronger than a belief.”
“And there’s more evidence that I haven’t had a chance to share before this.” Geary paused, uncertain how to say it. “You know we were on our way to defeating one of the Syndic flotillas in Lakota when a much larger Syndic force arrived via the hypernet gate. This fleet was almost trapped and destroyed as a result.” Rione knew what he was talking about, but none of the other officers did, and they were all watching him, plainly trying to figure out the connection to the aliens. “Intelligence on Dauntless intercepted a number of signals from the Syndic ships that had arrived via the hypernet gate, messages that clearly revealed that the Syndics were shocked to be in Lakota. They’d entered their hypernet system with a destination of Andvari Star System.”
He let them absorb that for a moment. Cresida, perhaps the fleet’s best expert on the hypernet, responded first. “They made that big a mistake? No, it’s impossible to make that kind of mistake. There’s no way to set one destination on the hypernet and end up in another.”
Geary nodded. “So I was told. No way that we know of.”
Desjani got it first, her face reddening with rage. “They did it. Whatever they are. They changed the destination of those Syndic ships so we’d be confronted by an overwhelming force.”
“That’s the only conclusion that makes sense,” Geary agreed. “They intervened in an attempt to destroy this fleet.”
“Why?” Tulev, not surprisingly, had been the first to look past the outrage of the aliens’ actions and search for a reason.