Charban shuddered. “Like the man the Dancers returned to Old Earth?”
“Like that, maybe, yes. The ship might eventually find another jump point and return to normal space, but you’ve been to jump space. You know humans don’t belong there and can’t manage more than a couple of weeks without developing serious problems.”
“Like that itchy, unnatural feeling that your skin no longer fits?” Charban asked. “Yes. The longest jump I was ever on was about two weeks, and I’m not sure I could have endured three weeks. I can understand why no one would want to risk being stuck there. That’s why we’ve never gone to that binary star?”
“Maybe never to any binary star,” Geary said. “I don’t know. You’d have to either risk losing the ships you send, and there’s a high probability of loss, or send the ships through normal space, which would mean a really long voyage even with current propulsion technology. There have been more than enough single stars for humanity. Hell, we’ve abandoned a lot of marginal star systems in the last decades because the hypernet made it easy to bypass them. With no shortage of stellar real estate, why go to the trouble of visiting a binary?”
Charban nodded. “I understand. Indulge me, Admiral. I’m not sure why, yet. What would it take to get to that particular binary star?”
Geary shrugged. “I can estimate that easily enough. Let’s see. The closest star to that binary is Puerta. There’s nothing much at Puerta. It’s a white dwarf, but you could jump there and have less than one and a half light-years to the binary. That’s pretty close as stars go. Load up on sufficient fuel, accelerate to better than point five light speed, then brake down before you get to the binary, and you could make the trip in ten years easy. Maybe significantly less than that.”
“What about a hypernet gate?” Charban asked, squinting at the representation of the binary star. “Would one of those work in a binary star system?”
“I think so. I don’t know why not,” Geary said. “I can ask Commander Neeson on Implacable. The hypernet gates work using something related to quantum entanglement, totally different from the jump drives. They shouldn’t be impacted by the interacting gravity fields of the two stars. But you’d have to get everything to build a hypernet gate to that star system. Aside from taking about a decade, it would be hugely expensive to build a gate to get to a place where there wasn’t anything worth going to. Why do you think the Dancers would have been interested in that binary?”
“Because the Dancers all but drew a bull’s-eye around that binary star! But you have no idea why they would do that?”
“No. Even they couldn’t get there, apparently.”
“Are we certain that there is not a hypernet gate there?” Charban asked.
“There isn’t a hypernet gate for that star in our hypernet keys,” Geary said. “I don’t think.” He touched his comm panel to call Desjani in her own stateroom. “Tanya, are any of the hypernet gates at a binary star?”
“A what?” Seated at her desk, her image focused on Geary as if trying to figure out whether he was serious. “Why would anyone build a hypernet gate at a binary star? How could anyone build a hypernet gate at a binary star?”
“You could send the hypernet gate components through normal space and use robotics to assemble them in the binary star system,” Geary said, wondering why he was justifying the outlandish idea. “You’d probably need some humans to do the oversight and final work and calibrations, but if they didn’t want to put up with a decade-long journey they could be frozen into survival sleep and then be reawakened to work on the gate. Once the gate was done, they would be able to come back immediately.”
“Why would we do that?” Desjani asked. “Do you have any idea how complicated and expensive that would be?”
“Tanya, I don’t know! But the Dancers seem to have tried to focus our attention on one particular binary, one that’s not too far from a white dwarf that could have been a launching point for a normal-space trip to that binary.”
She gave a long-suffering sigh, tapped in some commands, then shook her head. “No. There is no binary star in the destinations available to our hypernet key. Or among the destinations available to the Syndic hypernet key that we acquired.”
“Do you have any ideas why the Dancers would try to focus our attention on a binary like that?”
Another sigh. “Maybe they were looking for something and thought it was hidden there.”
Charban gave a derisive snort. “If someone wanted to hide something, it sounds like a binary star would be the perfect place.”
Geary stared at him. “What?”
“Um, a joke, Admiral. A binary would be a wonderful place to hide something, right? No one goes there. No one can go there. You space travelers don’t even think about them! I had to point that one out to you even though it was in plain sight on the display.”
Tanya was gazing intently at Geary. “What are you thinking?”
“What would the Dancers be looking for?” he asked her. “Something that we know of. Something that has apparently disappeared.”
“Big or little? Are we talking a person?”
“Maybe a person. Maybe something very big,” Geary said, his thoughts crystallizing. “What left Varandal, by hypernet gate, and apparently vanished from human-occupied space? Something that should have been impossible to hide no matter what star system it was taken to?”
Her face lit with understanding. “Invincible. The Kick superbattleship we captured. You think the government took it to that binary?”
“Where else could they have taken it where no one could find it?” Geary demanded. “What else would the Dancers have been looking for and worried about?”
“The dark ships,” Desjani said pointedly. “We need to find their base, and we haven’t been able to find any clue—” She stopped speaking, looking stunned.
“A secret base?” Charban said, astonished. “A secret hypernet gate? I didn’t think something on that scale could be possible.”
“Neither would anyone else,” Geary said, gazing at the depiction of the binary in his star display. “You said it yourself. No one thinks about binaries. No one can go to binaries. A binary would be the perfect place to set up a secret base, a place to hide the captured Kick battleship, a place to hide the base for the dark ships.”
Tanya shook her head, holding out both hands palm forward. “Hold on. We’re talking about a project that couldn’t have been dreamed up in the last few years. There would have been a huge investment in time and money. They would have had to start work on this a long time ago.”
“Maybe they did,” Geary said.
“And kept it secret from everybody?”
“No,” Geary said, looking at her now. “They couldn’t keep it entirely secret. Rumors got out. People talked about it. But no one ever found it, so after enough years had gone by, it was labeled a fantasy, a project that had never actually existed.”
Tanya’s eyes met his. “Unity Alternate? Ancestors save us. You’re talking about Unity Alternate.”
“Yes. The supposedly mythical government project to build a secret, fallback base to continue the war if Unity itself fell to the Syndics. A project important enough to justify a huge expense and a construction time line of more than a decade.”
“In a place no one would ever think to look,” she continued for him. “A place the Syndics would never find and couldn’t reach if somehow they did find it.”
“And maybe more than that,” Geary said. A place to set up the most secret projects, a place to hide anyone that the government, or portions of the government, didn’t want found, as well as a place to homeport a secret fleet.
“How do they get there?” Desjani demanded. “There must be a way. The dark ships use the hypernet. Invincible disappeared after entering the hypernet. There must be keys with access to a gate at that binary.”
“I
f there are,” Geary said, “we’ll find them.” He turned to Charban. “General, you may have given us the most important piece of information that we needed to have. I’m in your debt.”
Charban still looked dazed. “How did the Dancers know it was there? They are the ones you should thank, Admiral. This is unbelievable. First Black Jack returns, and defeats the Syndics just as he was supposed to, then Unity Alternate turns out to exist. Myths and legends are coming to life all around us.”
“I was never a myth,” Geary said. “And it turns out Unity Alternate wasn’t either. This is all as real as those dark ships, and now we know where they are hiding.”
Desjani grinned ferociously. “Destroy their base?”
“Right. That’s their Achilles heel. Destroy their base, their source of replacement fuel cells, and they’ll be helpless once the fuel cells they are carrying are used up. We’ve got a way to win, Tanya.”
If they could find a way to get there. And if they could get there when the dark ships were not there as well guarding their base.
—
“WE’LL be taking the fight to the dark ships next time,” Geary told the images of his ship commanders assembled in the conference room. Tanya had reminded him that he needed to talk to them, needed to let them know that he and they were not beaten. “We believe that we have identified their base. I don’t know when we’ll be assaulting that base, but all of your ships need to be ready to go.”
“What’s the delay?” Captain Badaya asked. “Why not go now?”
“It’s hard to reach, and we need to find the best way to reach it. We also assume the dark ships are there now, refueling and repairing themselves. We want to give them time to finish that and leave, probably to try to set up another trap for us. While they’re doing that, we’ll go in and knock their feet out from under them.”
“Why couldn’t they have built those dark ships to go against the Syndics during the war?” Captain Armus grumbled. A low, angry murmur of agreement followed his words.
Captain Smythe answered. “The irony is that our victory in the war gave the government the breathing room to undertake such a project. Under the pressure of constant Syndic attacks, they could never divert resources to a risky project like the dark ships. But we lifted that pressure, thereby giving the government the luxury of seeing if they could replace us.”
“And,” Captain Duellos added, “our victory left some powerful forces in the Alliance searching for an enemy to replace the one we had finally beaten.”
“Why are we doing this?” Captain Parr asked, looking depressed. “Why are we fighting again, why are our people dying again, because of the mistakes made by people who will never pay the price for their errors?”
Every eye came to rest on Geary, expecting an answer from him. “If you want my personal opinion,” Geary said, “it’s because we’re better than those people. And if people like us don’t fix the problems created by people like them, if people like us don’t stand up for the core principles of the Alliance and for the people of the Alliance, who will? This is my fight, but it doesn’t have to be. I ‘died’ a century ago. Everyone I knew then is gone. I could have washed my hands of it all. Except that I couldn’t. Because, as some people never hesitate to remind me,” he said, not looking at Desjani but out of the corner of his eye seeing her smile, “Black Jack has a duty to the Alliance because the people of the Alliance are depending on him. Just like they depend on all of you and your crews. Yes, it sucks to be doing this, and doing this again, but it’s what we do. And I’ll keep on doing it until the job is done because I think it is worth doing.”
“Even now?” Parr asked, smiling wryly.
“Even now,” Geary said.
“I didn’t ask for a speech, but I guess a decent answer required one. All right, Admiral. Let’s go clean up the mess again.”
Not everyone seemed happy, plenty just appeared resigned to the prospect, but no one looked to be reluctant as Geary ended the meeting and watched the images vanishing in a flurry, the apparent size of the conference room shrinking to match the apparent number of occupants. It was the one part of meetings that Geary liked, watching the huge room dwindle into a small compartment.
One image remained. Commander Neeson, former commanding officer of Implacable who had moved over to assume command of Steadfast. “I asked you to stay on afterwards because you’re my best expert on hypernet issues,” Geary said. Best surviving expert, that was. Captain Jaylen Cresida had been the best, but she had died in battle when her battle cruiser Furious had been destroyed. “I’ve got an important job for you.”
“I’ll do my best, Admiral,” Neeson said, giving a curious glance at Tanya Desjani, who merely indicated Geary again.
“We have solid reason to believe that the dark ship base is at a star holding a hypernet gate that is not on the keys carried by our ships,” Geary began, watching the surprise bloom in Neeson’s eyes. “I need you to look into finding that gate and a way to get to it.”
“If it’s not on the Alliance hypernet,” Neeson began, then checked himself. “No. It would have to be. We’ve seen the dark ships use our hypernet gates. But that doesn’t rule out a minihypernet that somehow links into our own.” He frowned. “No. That couldn’t work. If it was on a separate hypernet, they would have to have a place where they could go to a separate gate after leaving our own hypernet. Let me see what I can find out, Admiral. If there’s a gate somewhere that is part of our hypernet, there must be some indications of that.”
“Do everything you can and let me know if you run into any obstacles,” Geary told him.
After Neeson’s image vanished, Tanya Desjani smiled at Geary and gave a slow clap. “Nice speech, Admiral.”
“Thank you, Captain. I was inspired by my audience.” He looked at her and smiled ruefully. “Is it wrong that with everything else going on, I wish that you and I could take a shuttle somewhere off this blasted ship and be man and wife for just a little while instead of Admiral and Captain who cannot even touch each other?”
“Good order and discipline require sacrifices, Admiral,” Desjani said. “And kindly do not refer to Dauntless as ‘this blasted ship.’ And I wish the same thing. But you and I have our jobs to do, and people to lead who would not be impressed by our taking time for ourselves when others are giving all that they have.”
“Do you always have to be right?” he asked as he opened the hatch to leave the meeting compartment.
“No. I just usually am.”
—
HE entered his stateroom, feeling weary after the meeting, trying to decide which matter to try to tackle next, but immediately jerked to full attention at the sight of someone sitting in one of the chairs. His stateroom was guarded by a variety of security measures, including locks that were not supposed to let anyone in without Geary’s specific approval.
The seated person stood and turned toward him. “Admiral.”
Geary nodded in reply, startled and yet not surprised by who it was. “Victoria.”
“Nice speech,” Victoria Rione said. When he had first met her, she had been co-president of the Callas Republic and an Alliance senator. After losing a snap election in the aftermath of the war, she had been made an emissary of the Alliance, working for her former colleagues in the Alliance Senate. But he knew that assignment had ended, at least officially. Was she still covertly working for the likes of Senator Navarro? Or was Rione now a free agent, pursuing her own ends and dodging enemies made when she was working for the Alliance government?
“You were listening in?” Geary asked. “To a maximum-security conference?”
“Oh, you make that sound wrong.” She waved Geary to a seat as if this were her stateroom. “Relax.”
He sat down opposite her, studying Rione. She rarely revealed her inner feelings, but he could see that her eyes were slightly sunken from tiredness and her face thi
nner than he remembered. “You look like you’ve been under a lot of stress.”
She leaned back, shrugging. “I’m still alive and free.”
“How did you get aboard Dauntless and in here without setting off any alerts?”
“I left a few special apps in place in the systems of this ship before I left,” Rione said, her voice casual. “It’s not like enigma-stuff or that nonsense the government has been using to render ships and personnel invisible to sensors. Quite the opposite. The apps reassure anything that sees me that I am indeed authorized to be there, that I am no threat, and no reports of any kind need to be made. Being apparently authorized to be anywhere beats the hell out of hiding, let me tell you.”
“Some of the crew must have seen you,” Geary said.
“Of course they did. And they knew who I was, and that I had been aboard this ship before, and that I was a trusted ally of their beloved Black Jack. They may have their own suspicions of me, being that I am one of those horrible politicians, but they assumed I was back under authorized circumstances and all of the official t’s had been crossed and i’s dotted.” She cocked her head to one side as she regarded him. “So, how is the great hero?”
“I’ve been better,” Geary said. “Sometimes it seems that people start fires just because they know I’ll come running to put them out.”
“It is fun to watch. Nobody but you could have gotten this fleet out of Bhavan in one piece, you know.”
“Are you the same person who once thought I would lead the fleet to ruin? Don’t forget that I got the fleet to Bhavan in the first place,” he reminded her, hearing the bitterness in his voice.
“You made what seemed to be the best decision,” she said. “It doesn’t make sense to blame yourself for that. Take it from me. I’m an expert at blaming myself for bad decisions.” Rione looked down, then back up at him under lowered brows. “Speaking of bad decisions that you haven’t made, you’re not going to do it, are you?”
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