“What about mentally? How are they?”
The doctor looked down before answering. “Fragile. They had constructed a society inside that asteroid, something stable enough to pass on knowledge and maintain order. There’s a council of sorts that made decisions. But they’ve been so isolated, subject to the whims of totally unseen and unknown captors. Now . . . some of them are excited at the thought of seeing the sky. Others are terrified of the same thing. Their world, their source of stability, has been destroyed, and not just in the literal sense of the asteroid being shattered.”
Geary sighed. “Surely we did the right thing by rescuing them.”
“Of course. A cage is a cage is a cage. But freedom will be hard for them to adjust to. What are you going to do with them?” the doctor asked.
“Take them home.” Geary paused, realizing that wasn’t as simple a thing as it sounded. “They should all have surviving relatives somewhere in Syndic territory.”
“Where central authority no longer governs many star systems,” the doctor pointed out. “For some of these people, reunions won’t be that difficult. They were first-generation prisoners. But others are the offspring of those captured more than a century ago. The only home they have ever known was the interior of an asteroid, the only family they know are the people who also lived there.”
Hesitating, the doctor finally spoke more slowly. “I fear for them, Admiral. They are . . . valuable and unique research subjects. There. I said it. There are plenty of people who would be willing to treat them as lab rats, just as the aliens did, and few who could speak on their behalf, especially in the Syndicate Worlds. They need protecting from those who would exploit them and use them.”
“There are limits to my ability to protect them, Doctor.”
“But you can take them home to the Alliance if they wish,” the doctor insisted. “Where others would stand up for their rights. And if Black Jack Geary publicly expresses a wish that they be treated as humans who have already suffered too much, it will influence their treatment. Perhaps even within Syndicate Worlds’ territory.”
It seemed a small thing to ask of him, but Geary saw the greatest roadblock to doing it. “I can and will make such public statements. But what if they don’t want to go to the Alliance?”
“Admiral, what will Syndic CEOs do with those people? You know the answer. I realize it will be a while before we return to human space, but I’d like you to think about it before then.”
The freed humans had all been gathered on Typhoon, which had required shifting some Marines, but the fleet’s doctors had insisted the freed prisoners should be kept together for their own peace of mind, such as it was. Conference software was modified so that Geary could address the entire group, his image appearing simultaneously in each of their berthing areas while to him the former captives all seemed to be in one large room listening to him.
He had seen prisoners liberated from Syndic labor camps, but this was different. The humans clustered together, almost clutching each other. Some wore new clothing provided from fleet stocks, but others still had on a strange mix of clothing, styles and fashions from different periods and professions, most of the clothes threadbare and heavily patched. “We’ll take you wherever you want to go,” Geary said. “Some of you wish to return to homes in the Syndicate Worlds. I know that you’ve been told that things have changed, that life in the Syndicate Worlds is much more uncertain than you may recall, but if that’s where you wish to go, we will try to ensure that you reach your former homes. All of you are welcome to come with us back to Alliance territory, where I give you my word of honor you will be welcomed and treated well.”
They all exchanged glances, some looking fearful and others hopeful, a few children clinging to mothers. “How long do we have to think about it?”
“A few months. That’s how long it will take us to get back to Syndic space because our mission here hasn’t ended.”
They didn’t want to say much more than that, huddled in among themselves, so after a short while, Geary broke the connection and sat down, his thoughts jumbled. And to think I felt sorry for myself when I came out of survival sleep to find a century gone. I was lucky in more ways than one. Forgive me, but I want to hurt those enigmas. Make them pay. But they have been hurt. A lot of them have died, and we’ve destroyed quite a few of their ships. Is it accomplishing anything? At least we got those people freed.
He called up the latest status reports for the fleet. Almost thirty destroyers had suffered sudden equipment failures requiring Captain Smythe’s auxiliaries to focus on those repairs as well as fixing up the latest battle damage. That had caused the planned replacement work to slide, pushing it closer to the looming rise of the failure curve waiting several months ahead.
His hatch alert chimed. He looked up, hoping for Tanya, and found himself looking at Victoria Rione. “What’s the occasion?” It came out more harshly than he intended.
Her expression hardened slightly. “I wanted to inform you that Commander Benan has received a feeler about propagandizing for your replacement.”
“Am I going somewhere?”
She came inside his stateroom. “Accidents happen.”
“Is that a warning or a philosophical musing?”
Rione just shook her head. “I don’t know of any threats to you from within the fleet.”
His mind seized on part of that. “From within the fleet?”
“I said what I said. Who will assume command of this fleet if something does happen to you?”
Geary played with the idea of refusing to answer, giving back her own hidden agendas, but decided to try playing to his own strength of being honest. “Captain Badaya, who has promised to listen to the advice of Tulev and Duellos. Do you want to sit down?”
She took a seat, eyeing him. “No command role for your captain?”
“It’s a safe assumption that if something happens to me, it will also happen to her. She also lacks the necessary seniority, and diplomacy isn’t Tanya’s greatest strength.”
“Oh, you’ve noticed that? But, in the unfortunate event it happened, wouldn’t she benefit from being the widow of Black Jack?” Rione asked.
“Tanya would never use that.”
“If necessary, she should.” Rione hesitated, looking for a tiny moment as if she had said more than she ought to have. “What about all of the admirals waiting on the transports?”
“They’ve all been officially placed on medical holds, awaiting full evaluation before being certified as capable of enduring the strains of active duty.”
Rione laughed. “The great Black Jack is stooping to political games?”
“The great Black Jack knows how badly post-traumatic stress can impact someone. It’s a miracle that I was able to get the fleet away from the Syndics when I was thrown into command. And none of those liberated admirals understand tactics.” He leaned back. “I’m looking out for the fleet.”
“By putting Badaya in command?”
“Badaya isn’t stupid, and he knows that Tulev has enough seniority to challenge him if he veers off course. Badaya also knows that without me, he couldn’t hope to control the Alliance. Did you come by to talk politics?”
She locked eyes with him. “Are you turning the fleet around now?”
“No. A few more star systems, then we turn.”
A careful nod. “I am required to remind you that you were ordered to find the boundaries of enigma space.”
“And you have so reminded me. Victoria, why did they send you as one of the emissaries?”
For a moment, her carefully shielded emotions showed. “I volunteered, after receiving an offer I could not refuse. I might have refused anyway, but I didn’t know who would be sent in my place.”
“Did you know your husband was at Dunai?”
“No. I knew it was a VIP labor camp, but Paol was only a commander.”
“A commander married to the Co-President of the Callas Republic.”
She shru
gged, the defenses falling back into place. “I really should have thought of that. These people we rescued. What will happen to them?”
“We’ll do our best to look out for them, but they’re all free human beings, so in the end the decisions will be theirs.”
“What deal did you make with CEO Iceni to get that Syndic device for preventing gate collapses?”
The question surprised him because he had thought Rione would already have discovered the answer. “Allowing the implication that I will not act against her. She is planning on breaking free from the Syndicate Worlds. It’s lucky the Syndics came up with that device, isn’t it? It would have been a long trip home without the Syndic hypernet,” he continued, deliberately making the dig to see how she would respond.
“Yes. It would have been a very long trip.” Another nod, then she stood up. “A few more star systems, Admiral? It might be tempting to keep going even after that.”
Her entire attitude conveyed that she thought that would be a mistake, though something was keeping her from saying it right out. “I understand. We’ve plotted out a track for seven more star systems, and the seventh is as far as we’re going.”
FOURTEEN
FROM Tartarus, the fleet jumped to Hades, only to find another hypernet gate there. Wondering if they were already nearing the other side of enigma-controlled space, they jumped to Perdition. There was little enigma presence there, but another hypernet gate. A jump from the same jump point almost sideways to the newly named star Gehenna found no gate in what seemed a fairly well-off star system. “Did we loop back deeper into enigma territory somehow?” Desjani wondered. But another jump to Inferno found a similarly long-settled star system, also lacking a gate.
And, at each jump, more and more alien warships could be seen trailing the fleet. As the fleet jumped away from Inferno, the alien armada had grown to more than sixty.
Two more stars, both with hypernet gates. The fleet made another risky dash to the next jump point and found itself at a star once again with a gate.
“Why should we keep going farther?” Armus asked.
Geary gestured to the star display. “We’re close to the turnaround. For every star we’ve been to, we’ve passed by three or four on average. It’s giving us an idea of the strength of the enigmas, but they’re still not talking to us, and we can’t learn anything more about them without triggering probable mass deaths among them.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” Captain Vitali grumbled. Just about everybody else nodded in agreement. Anger at deaths in combat had been magnified as word got around about the state of the humans once held captive by the enigma race.
“Our mission isn’t to kill them. Though we’ve taken out plenty of them up to now.” Geary singled out a star. “This is our next objective. It’s a long jump. We’ll see what’s there, then start jumping back, not retracing our steps, but angling along a different route to avoid running into that pack of warships that keeps following us. Maybe once we’ve left enigma space entirely, having demonstrated our ability to operate within their space but without trying to annihilate them or pushing any more to violate their fanatical sense of privacy, they’ll be willing to consider talking to us and accepting a fixed border.”
Dr. Shwartz gasped in frustration. “The border. Why doesn’t our willingness to discuss respecting a single border matter to them? During the conversations you had with the enigmas at Midway, they kept emphasizing that they owned Midway and other stars, and therefore we had no right to be there. Why isn’t that same thinking motivating them to negotiate with us for a mutually agreed-upon border that would guarantee their ownership of the star systems they now control?”
“It is a discrepancy,” Duellos agreed. “But only one of many.”
Charban, though, gazed at Shwartz as if something had just come to him, seemed about to speak, then subsided with the aspect of someone sunk into thought.
“If I could know one more thing about them,” Badaya said, “I’d want to know what sort of rhyme or reason they use to decide where they put hypernet gates. The idea that the gates are last-ditch, supermines aimed at deterring conquest seems like the best explanation for the first gates we encountered, but then why all these gates inside their territory? And why do we usually see them in consecutive star systems, followed by gaps?”
Commander Neeson spoke up. “I have an idea, a possible explanation, that is.” He pointed to the display. “Seen this way, in three dimensions with our path wending through them, Captain Badaya’s statement is accurate. There doesn’t seem to be any consistency to the placement of the gates. But it’s not just the gates. Defenses inside star systems with gates are also much more robust. I tried running an analysis viewing the data in a different way.” The three-dimensional star field blinked out, replaced by a simple two-dimensional graph.
“The bottom axis here is distance inside alien space, the vertical axis is the level of defenses we’ve seen. The initial alien star systems we entered had substantial defenses, as we’d expect. That’s their border with humanity.” Neeson indicated peaks in the graph near its beginning. “Then defenses tapered off, again as we’d expect. The aliens can’t afford to fortify every star system any more than we can, so they place their defenses on the border.”
Pointing farther along on the graph, Neeson centered the display on another peak. “But here we saw two more star systems with substantial defenses, and those star systems were neighbors in jump terms. Then some more stars without gates, before encountering more gates, again in two star systems that were next to each other for anyone using jump drives.”
Tulev was the first to comment. “Layers of defense? But if so, they’re not spaced in any uniform fashion, and I cannot see the sense in putting extra defenses so far from their borders.”
“Far from their borders with us,” Neeson said. “We’ve been looking at this as the enigma race. One entity. But if this were human space, and we saw these kind of defenses set up internally, facing each other, how would we interpret that? How would the border between the Alliance and the Syndicate Worlds look to an alien scouting force?”
Geary wanted to slap his forehead. “They’re not unified.”
“Internal borders,” Tulev agreed. “Internal defenses against other members of their own species. The aliens are not unified any more than humanity is. If we judge from the frequency of the defensive lines, they are more divided than we are.”
“Why did we assume they were unified?” General Carabali asked. “Because I realize that I did, too.”
“Probably because we knew so little,” Neeson said. “We had to fill in blanks, and they were very big blanks. That meant a lot of assumptions. Assuming the enigmas were unified simplified everything else mentally, so maybe that’s what drove that idea.”
General Charban nodded. “It simplified it emotionally, too, didn’t it? The enemy. The alien race. I believe your officer has hit upon a very important discovery, Admiral, one that wasn’t apparent on a three-dimensional display but seems obvious when viewed properly. Perhaps we can use these internal divisions among the aliens.”
Duellos sighed. “General, I would be happy if that were so, but we have seen the alien forces in pursuit of us grow with each star system we pass. We did not find it remarkable that they picked up reinforcements in each star system along the way, which would have been consistent with a unified race, but a divided race should have resulted in contingents falling away as we left their particular part of enigma space. That hasn’t happened. Those warships keep growing in numbers each time we see them. That argues that, whatever their internal divisions, they are more than willing to unite against us.”
“Which also shouldn’t be a surprise,” Bradamont commented. “The Alliance fleet defended a Syndicate Worlds’ star system against the aliens. We stood together with other humans, even humans we would not otherwise cooperate with. The aliens may dislike each other, may war with each other, but they dislike us a great deal more.
”
His frown growing as Duellos and Bradamont spoke, Charban shook his head. “But when you encountered the aliens at Midway, they seemed unable to understand why you would defend a Syndic star system. They don’t seem to grasp the idea of former enemies cooperating.”
“And yet they seem to be cooperating against us,” Geary pointed out. “It can’t be that . . . alien a concept to them.”
“They also thought we and the Syndics would use the hypernet gates to wipe each other out because we were enemies,” Carabali said. “But we’ve found no star systems in enigma space where gates were used as weapons against other members of their species.”
“They expected the worst of humanity,” Commander Shen said in a thoughtful tone not matching his usual dissatisfied expression. “Is that some bias, the result of considering us less than them? Or was the aliens’ assessment based on their interactions with the Syndicate Worlds’ leaders?”
Neeson brought back the star display. “Maybe they just assume we’re fundamentally different than them in every way. We all assumed the aliens were one united entity. Why? Because we thought aliens would have some fundamental differences from us, and since humans have trouble getting along with each other—”
“The aliens would be one big, paranoid-but-happy family,” Duellos finished. “Yes. It’s dangerous to assume anything about them, but it’s probably safe to assume that they have made assumptions about us. Observing the conduct of the war between us and the Syndics, the lack of limits on what was done and the massive losses of life, and the apparently unending nature of the conflict, could have easily led the aliens to conclude that no cooperation could ever be possible between human political factions. Unlike among their own numbers, which they might well regard as infinitely more right and proper in their thinking than those strange human creatures.”
Geary had his eyes on the star display. “Maybe we did exactly the wrong thing. By entering alien space, we united them against our ‘invasion.’ The alien force that attacked Midway was much bigger than what we’ve encountered so far on this mission. That argues it may have been a coalition or alliance of enigma factions. The failure of their attack at Midway could easily have shattered that coalition. But now it may be re-forming.”
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