The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Steadfast

by Jack Campbell

  Geary took that in, then looked for the damage to his own ships. The enemy, in the seconds before contact in which he could spot what had happened and prioritize targets, had clearly concentrated his fire on the central subformation of Geary’s task force. Despite being badly outnumbered, the extra weapons on the dark ships had allowed them to score some blows. Daring had taken several hits and lost a hell-lance battery as well as two missile launchers. Victorious had also been hit and lost half her missile launchers, but both battle cruisers had not suffered any maneuvering or propulsion damage. Adroit, though, was sliding off to port without any maneuvering control at all.

  He could hear the damage reports coming in to Tanya Desjani. Hits amidships. Two hell-lance batteries out of commission. Minor damage to maneuvering systems. Through luck or her position in the subformation, Dauntless had come off relatively lightly.

  The heavy cruisers Bartizan and Haidate had taken hits on their bows but not serious damage. Light cruisers Absetzen and Toledo were hurt but still able to keep up, but their sister ship Lancer had been totally knocked out and was tumbling away.

  Oddly, only two Alliance destroyers had been hit, Kururi and Sabar. The dark ships had managed a better than usual concentration of fire against major combatants.

  Geary was already bringing all three formations around again, curving toward the star and slightly upward to meet the dark ships as they came around also toward the star. He was tempted to break two of the Alliance subformations loose, to maneuver each of the three separately to confuse an enemy already reeling from unexpected losses, but realized that was what Black Jack would do. “What do you think?” he asked Tanya.

  “Third time’s a charm.”

  “Do it again? But there isn’t any more left-hand subformation.”

  “There’s still a subformation to the left of the other one!” she insisted.

  Doing a third attack in the exact same manner was, his instincts told him, a recipe for disaster. “It’s really hard to do this,” he muttered. “I feel like I’m going to destroy half my ships.”

  The V of the Alliance task-force formations was now almost tilted on edge relative to the plane of the solar system, coming back toward the dark ships, which had closed down smoothly into a single, rectangular box formation with one long side facing forward. If neither opponent adjusted vectors, the three Alliance subformations in their V would slice through the dark ship rectangle at a right angle, like an arrowhead tearing through a bar of butter.

  But the dark ship formation was more like a bar of steel. The arrowhead might slice right through the center, carried by velocity and momentum, but it would take tremendous damage in the process.

  “The left,” Geary muttered.

  “Yes, the left,” Desjani affirmed.

  But where would the dark ships go? Would they wait for him to hit the center? No. Black Jack wouldn’t do that.

  Geary pivoted his point of view, imagining he was commanding the ships in the rectangle and trying to take down the arrowhead. I’d assume they were going to hit one side of my formation, and I’d go up slightly and swing one wing around to concentrate fire on the top of the arrowhead. And they won’t expect me to go left again. They’ll assume I’ll hit their right. Which means their last-minute maneuvers will be like . . . “Got it.”

  His focus wavered as the dark ship formation passed close enough to the drifting Adroit to fire another volley of missiles, all of them aimed at the helpless battle cruiser. There was no way that Adroit could survive that attack. “Adroit, abandon ship. I say again, Adroit, abandon ship immediately. Get your crew off as fast as possible.”

  Adroit’s crew apparently hadn’t needed any encouragement. He couldn’t blame them for that, though, as escape pods launched from the sole surviving example of what the fleet had jokingly nicknamed “economy-class” battle cruisers. In a few minutes, when the dark missiles arrived, the last surviving one of those ships would be gone.

  Reassured that Adroit’s crew was as safe as he could manage at this point, Geary called Captain Tulev. “Delta One took the brunt of the enemy fire on the last pass, so I’m going to adjust final approaches so Delta Two comes in ahead this time.”

  Tulev, as unshaken and impassive as ever, nodded. “They are concentrating fire on the battle cruisers, I see.”

  “Yes. But the heavy cruisers and light cruisers in Delta One took some hits, too. I’ll have Delta One and Delta Three coming in very close behind you to split the attention of the dark ships a bit.”

  The huge curves through space were steadying out as the two formations came around to face each other and raced toward another encounter. “Get those shields at one hundred percent,” Desjani snapped.

  “Captain, one of the shield generators was clipped during the last firing pass and we’re still—”

  “We’re ten minutes from contact. Get it done.”

  Geary, having given his orders, sat next to Desjani, watching the two groups of ships rushing toward contact. “It’s funny,” he said.

  “I could use a laugh,” she replied.

  “Not that kind of funny. I told you earlier that I thought I needed to work on building and strengthening the right patterns. Well, here we are facing the pattern of my own tactics, and we have to break that pattern.”

  “Maybe it’s an antipattern,” Desjani said. “You have to break it because it’s the anti version of your real pattern.”

  “Works for me.”

  In the last minutes before contact, the dark ship rectangle didn’t just pivot one wing forward and up to concentrate fire on Geary’s expected countermove while the rest of the rectangle swung upward as well. Instead, taking advantage of their superior maneuverability, the entire formation compressed and climbed. If Geary had done as their tactical model had predicted, his formation would have been badly raked.

  But his ships weren’t there.

  Instead, the Alliance task force had swung down and left again, buzz-sawing through the far left wing of the dark ships’ formation.

  Dauntless jerked only twice in the wake of the firing run, Geary watching his display tensely for the results. Damage reports were flowing in, most of them from Tulev’s ships, where the battle cruisers had once again been the target of most of the enemy fire. Leviathan and Dragon had taken the most hits, but were still moving. Behind them, in Badaya’s subformation, Steadfast had also accumulated a series of blows.

  But as Geary replayed in slow motion the hyperfast combat encounter, he saw that Steadfast had taken those hits because she had swung close enough to one of the dark battle cruisers to employ her null-field projector. The null field had eaten a huge hole out of the dark ship, leaving it rolling out of formation, most systems dead.

  Another dark battle cruiser had been destroyed, along with a dark heavy cruiser. Two more dark heavy cruisers had been hit hard and three destroyers either crippled or completely blown apart.

  “Come on, you guys,” Desjani said to the representations of the dark ships on her display. “One more time.”

  But as Geary began bringing his ships around again, he saw that the remaining two dark battle cruisers, one heavy cruiser, and five destroyers weren’t continuing their own turns in order to reengage. Instead, they had pivoted and were accelerating all out for the jump point for Varandal.

  “Looks like our berserkers have had enough.” He tried to keep triumph from his voice as he sent the next command. “All units in Task Force Dancer, immediate execute, come port four five degrees, up zero seven degrees, accelerate to point two light speed.”

  “We’ll never catch them,” Desjani said.

  “No, but we need to be on their tails if they jump for Varandal.” But her words broke his intense focus on the dark ships. Geary leaned back, looking at everything his display showed. A few crippled dark ships were drifting through the star system, as well as a few badly hurt Alli
ance warships, including the large number of escape pods from Adroit. Steadfast, whose close firing pass had taken out one of the dark battle cruisers, had partially paid for that with some hits on her main propulsion and was already lagging behind the rest of Captain Tulev’s formation. In Atalia as a whole, mercilessly battered by the dark ship attack, there were enough needs for rescue and support to keep a fleet busy.

  It all added up to a requirement to leave some ships here, and even if Steadfast hadn’t been unable to keep up, Tulev would have been Geary’s choice for the independent assignment.

  “Captain Tulev, I am detaching Formation Delta Two under your command. Your ships are to remain at Atalia and rescue everyone you can, recovering escape pods, assisting repairs to the damaged Alliance ships, and helping anyone you can in any of the damaged orbital facilities or other locations belonging to Atalia. Make sure none of those badly damaged dark ships get going again. I want them permanently neutralized. Get every prisoner you can off those dark ships. I need to know everything that you can learn from the prisoners as well as everything you can learn from examining the wrecks. We’ll bring the prisoners back to stand trial for war crimes. When you feel you have done all you can, return to Varandal.”

  Tulev saluted, his expression betraying no reaction to the orders. “I assume that if more dark ships appear, I am to treat them as hostile.”

  “Yes. I’m really hoping the surviving crews on those dark ships can explain—” Geary stopped speaking as he realized something. “We haven’t seen any escape pods leaving the dark ships we crippled.”

  “No. We shall approach the damaged dark ships with care, remembering the example of the enigmas.”

  The enigmas, who had destroyed their damaged ships in order to keep humans from capturing any or learning anything about their crews. But how could the crews of these ships be enigmas?

  “We’re going to pursue the surviving dark ships,” Geary told Tulev. “If they try to attack Varandal, the Alliance defenses there will need our system patches in order to see who the attackers are. If the dark ships keep going, we’ll follow them. We need to know where they came from.”

  Tulev’s face still revealed nothing of his feelings. “As far as we can tell, the problems in our software came from official sources. What if the answer to where these ships came from is not one we wish to know?”

  “I have to know. We have to know. This is the Alliance, not the Syndicate Worlds.”

  “I agree. You reminded us of that before. Perhaps there are others who have forgotten.”

  The tension, the constant worry of a short time before, had been replaced by a long stern chase with no possibility of catching their prey. The dark ships could always reverse course and charge back to the attack, but Geary did not expect that to happen. No tactical system based on his decisions would come up with that course of action unless the situation was incredibly desperate and left no alternative.

  “How’s Dauntless?” Geary asked.

  “Ready and willing,” Desjani replied, her expression serious. “I’m going to be honest with you. Those dark ships creep me out. I’m glad that Tulev’s boys and girls are the ones going in to investigate them.”

  “He’ll be careful.”

  As if mocking Geary’s words, an urgent alarm suddenly pulsed. “Admiral!” Lieutenant Yuon cried. “One of— Two of the— All of the crippled dark ships have self-destructed!”

  “No escape pods,” Desjani commented.

  Geary slumped back in his seat, wavering in his assessment of who and what these dark ships were. “At least none of Tulev’s ships were close enough to any of them yet. What the hell did they use to self-destruct? Even the broken segments that should have been nowhere near a power core have been blown into dust.”

  “Power-core-equivalent explosions in all segments,” Lieutenant Castries confirmed. “Those ships were rigged to be able to leave nothing for anyone to exploit.”

  “Would human crews sign on to that?” Desjani asked Geary.

  “I . . . Dammit, Tanya, I don’t know. How could they be enigmas this deep in human space? How could they have Alliance weapons? Why would the survivors be fleeing toward Varandal?”

  She laughed briefly and derisively. “Fair enough. I asked you a question you couldn’t answer. I deserved some back at me.”

  “We’ll stay on those survivors,” Geary said. “Until they either turn and fight, or they lead us to their base. Then we’ll get some answers.”

  “How about another question first?” Desjani was looking at her display, her expression somber. “Why did we spot those guys attacking Indras?”

  “How could we miss it?” Geary asked. “We couldn’t see them, but we couldn’t avoid seeing the destruction.”

  “Because we were transiting through Indras,” she emphasized. “Why were we transiting through Indras?”

  “That’s two questions. Because— Because the Dancers insisted on going home immediately.”

  “And they knew from previous discussions that our preferred route was through Indras.”

  Geary eyed her, troubled. “You think the Dancers might have intended us to go through Indras during a period when we could spot the attack?”

  “They told us they needed to go home right away, and then they told us to go home right away,” Desjani emphasized.

  “How could the Dancers have known what the black ships were going to do?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe that long, spherical route they took from Varandal and back was designed to collect information. I don’t know,” she repeated. “But doesn’t it feel as if we were led there?”

  “Maybe.” It could have been a coincidence. But he had a vision of the Dancers weaving a vast web, one spanning a good part of a galaxy, the web leading Geary and his ships to one particular place and one particular time. “If they did, at least they still left the decision on what to do up to us.”

  “True,” Tanya agreed. “You can lead a human to something, but figuring out what they’ll do once they get there is a lot harder.”

  One more complication. Perhaps a very big complication. Geary felt too tired to think it through. He checked his display. Even accelerating for all they were worth, and that was a lot, the dark ships would take about eight hours to reach the jump point for Varandal. Geary’s ships would take a few hours more.

  He should rest. He should relax. But he stayed on the bridge, watching his display where the ships all crawled with what seemed snail-like slowness across the vast, empty reaches of a star system.

  “Admiral?”

  Geary jerked back to alertness, wondering whether he had been dozing or just zoned out. A virtual window had opened next to his seat, revealing not just Lieutenant Iger but also Lieutenant Jamenson. “Yes?”

  “Sir, we have some important information,” Iger said.

  Shaking the last traces of fuzz out of his mind, Geary sat up and eyed Jamenson curiously. “We?”

  “Yes, sir. You did authorize Lieutenant Jamenson access to the intelligence compartment and to our information and, well, sir, my specialists and I thought it couldn’t hurt to bring in a fresh viewpoint because we hadn’t been able to reach any conclusions.”

  “And what has Lieutenant Jamenson concluded?” Geary asked.

  Lieutenant Jamenson’s usual ready smile wasn’t in evidence. Even her green hair seemed more a shade of somber Lincoln green than the usual bright Kelly green. Lieutenant Iger appeared equally solemn. “What is it?” Geary asked.

  “We don’t know any more about who built and controlled those dark ships,” Iger said, “but we, I mean, Lieutenant Jamenson, has managed to unravel how they were constructed.”

  Jamenson brought up a display next to her. “Admiral, I was looking for things that didn’t fit because that’s what I’m good at, and I thought, what’s missing from the wreckage? Or the dust from the wreckag
e, rather. Something should be there, and it’s not. A lot of somethings. There should be the usual amount of water molecules and organic matter from the supplies on the ships. And from . . . from the remains of the crew. There should be . . . pieces . . . of the crews, unless the ship was totally vaporized. There should be escape pods, and pieces of escape pods.”

  “There wasn’t any of that?” Geary asked, appalled by the implications.

  “No, sir. They weren’t there. But from the percentages of different kinds of molecules, there were an unusually large number of hull structural members, and there were all those extra weapons on those ships, and there was the way they maneuvered, as if they didn’t have to worry about the impacts on their crews.”

  “They didn’t have crews,” Geary said, making it a statement, not a question.

  “No, sir. They didn’t. They are all, at least all of the ones we destroyed, completely robotic, controlled by artificial-intelligence routines.”

  Iger nodded, his eyes downcast. “That may explain what happened here at Atalia, sir. The AIs may have suffered a malfunction, a problem with threat identification, a misinterpretation of their attack orders, any number of things that afflict automated systems at random, unpredictable times, and that human crews intervene to stop when they occur on a normal ship.”

  “That may explain a great deal,” Geary agreed, feeling numb inside. “Thank you. That’s a critically important thing to know. Well done.”

  He ended the call and looked at Desjani, who was staring back at him with a horrified expression.

  “You heard?”

  “I heard,” she said. “Fully robotic ships controlled by AIs? Sent out to operate totally independently with no human oversight? No one could be stupid enough to do that.”

  “They thought they were being smart.” The answers had come clearly to him, as plain as if they were spelled out in large letters in the air before his face. “That’s why they built the secret fleet and gave command to Bloch. Someone convinced them that this time the AI software was infallible, this time the software wouldn’t ever fail or have glitches or perform oddly or in unexpected ways.”