Lost Fleet 6 - Victorious

by Jack Campbell

  “They’ll follow you,” Tulev stated bluntly. “You led them out of hell. You led them to this moment, when the war will finally end.”

  “But now I have to tell them that I’ve withheld critical information from them, information about a serious threat to this fleet and to the Alliance.”

  Desjani and Duellos hesitated, plainly trying to think of what to say, but Tulev immediately shook his head. “I do not often have the pleasure of telling an admiral he is wrong. What critical information has been withheld? Guesses, suppositions, possibilities. We did not even know for certain that this enigma race existed until the Syndics confirmed it.”

  “We avoided star systems with hypernet gates because of the threat from them,” Geary pointed out.

  “We avoided such star systems before we had any idea of aliens, Admiral, because the Syndics could too easily shift forces to them using their hypernet.” Tulev waved at the star display. “How would any of your orders to the fleet have been different, how would our path home have been different, if you had never suspected that the aliens existed?”

  Geary stared at the display, mentally replaying the long retreat home. “I honestly can’t think of anything that would have been done differently. We would even have developed the safe-fail systems to protect Alliance hypernet gates from Syndic attack after we realized the threat a collapsing gate posed to its own star system.”

  “Exactly. You withheld nothing that would have altered your actions or your orders.” Tulev leaned back, smiling thinly for a moment. “You need have nothing on your conscience in that regard.”

  Duellos raised an eyebrow at Tulev, then nodded. “Captain Tulev is right, Admiral. Even at Lakota we learned of the alien intervention after the initial actions, so that knowledge had no effect on your decisions during the actions.”

  Geary rubbed one side of his face, thinking. “You’ve got a good point, but we’ve scrubbed our warships’ systems of those alien worms. Other officers and sailors are rightly going to wonder why we didn’t tell them we believed those were of alien origin, and why they were never told that someone suspected that an intelligent alien race existed on the other side of Syndic space.”

  “No, they won’t wonder,” Desjani said. “They will assume that our political leaders knew something and never told us. They won’t blame you. They’ll blame the politicians because that’s what they usually do. And how do we know they’re wrong to do so? How do we know the Alliance government truly never suspected the existence of these aliens? The Syndics certainly kept it very quiet, keeping most of their own military in ignorance. The fleet won’t blame you.”

  “But—” He paused, thinking that through. Rione had said she had known nothing, and in that he believed her even though Geary was sure she would lie if she thought it necessary to protect the Alliance. But Rione had admitted that the grand council could easily have known things not shared with the rest of the senate. “All right. That’s possible.” Geary noticed a look on Desjani’s face he couldn’t decipher. “What?”

  She stayed silent, but eventually Duellos sighed. “Captain Desjani stated a truth, that the fleet will not blame you. Not in this. Not in other matters. They believe in you too much. Therefore, someone else must be to blame when something goes wrong. In some matters, that will be the politicians. In other matters, it will be those giving you military advice.”

  That took a moment to sink in. “You? The three of you?”

  “Are you really surprised?” Desjani demanded. “You’ve heard that clumsy oaf Badaya. As long as I’m doing the right things, you should be happy and aimed in the right direction. Whose fault is it if you’re unhappy?” She almost yelled that, then subsided, staring at the table surface, her face red.

  “Or if you fail,” Duellos added to break the renewed silence. “Nobody expects me to keep you happy, though.”

  “You are a jovial man, Roberto. Perhaps you should try,” Tulev suggested in the closest thing to a joke that Geary had ever heard from him. “Admiral, it is simply the other side of the coin. Many look at us and see those you trust the most. It is a status many envy. But if you fail, everyone will assume we have failed you.”

  Wonderful. He had tried to avoid showing favoritism, yet his reliance on certain officers for advice had apparently been obvious enough. What else might have been obvious?

  Desjani, her gaze still fixed on the table, spoke in hard tones. “I have no fear of being held to account for my professional advice to the admiral.”

  “Nor should you,” Duellos agreed.

  Another awkward silence descended, which Geary finally cut short. “Thank you. I’ll call the fleet meeting in about an hour and break the news. I’m very fortunate to have had the three of you serving with me.”

  The images of Duellos and Tulev rendered salutes, that of Duellos almost jaunty, while Tulev’s salute was steady and precise, then both men vanished from the room.

  Desjani stood up, still not looking at him. “By your leave, sir.”

  “Of course.” There were a million other things he wanted to say, at least several hundred thousand of which would have been catastrophically wrong. He couldn’t tell if even one of them would be right.

  But she said more, her eyes still on the table’s surface. “You haven’t mentioned this, but I know you’ve kept your promise to me. The fleet got home, and the war is over. You made no vow to stick with this, the aliens and the mess that is becoming the former Syndicate Worlds.”

  “I would not leave now. I know I’m still needed.” Geary wondered when it had all changed inside him, when he had realized that fleeing his responsibilities was no longer an action he could regard as honorable or realistic. He couldn’t simply carry out one mission and be done with it, because each new mission led into the next missions seamlessly. “I have a duty to the Alliance, and to my comrades in the fleet.”

  “All of them?”

  “All of them. I only wish my being here didn’t make it harder on some of those comrades, on one of those comrades in particular, who shouldn’t have to endure anything on my account.”

  “I am not without fault in that. Perhaps what I endure is the price the living stars demand for . . . things that must remain unspoken.” She finally looked directly at him again. “What changed? Why don’t you wish to leave?”

  He shrugged, uncomfortable with the question. “I’m not sure, but a big part of it was watching people like you, Duellos, and Tulev. None of you had given up, all of you kept doing your duty, even though you’d faced this war since you were born. You are all one hell of a good example of doing the right thing, of sticking to the job no matter what.”

  Desjani looked away again. “Then . . . you’ll remain in command of the fleet, Admiral.”

  “Until we return again to Alliance space, then I’ll relinquish command of the fleet and my temporary rank of admiral. I’ll be available if needed, but for a little while, at least, things will be different.”

  “You’re extremely stubborn. And insane. You know that, don’t you?” She moved to leave, then looked back, a small, ironic smile twisting her lips slightly. “Do me a favor and try to look happy.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “But not too happy.”

  It was easy to guess what everyone would think had happened between him and Desjani if he seemed too high-spirited all of a sudden. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And stop calling me ma’am. You outrank me.”

  “Yes, Tanya.”

  She glowered in exasperation for a moment, then shook her head, apparently couldn’t help another smile, and left.

  TEN

  THERE was a sense of relaxation in the fleet conference room, the atmosphere more tranquil than Geary had ever imagined it could be. But why shouldn’t the fleet’s ship captains feel happy and calm? He knew the rumor mill would have already carried to every ship in the fleet word of the treaty with the Syndics.

  Now he had to tell them that the job wasn’t done. Geary stood up, and
everyone turned to look at him with smiles, but the smiles grew a little uncertain as they noted his somber attitude. “I expect you’ve all heard that the new leaders of the Syndicate Worlds have agreed to an end to the war and immediate cessation of hostilities. Verification procedures have been agreed upon. They have also promised to repatriate all prisoners of war and provide a full accounting of those prisoners who died while in Syndic custody.”

  A wave of joy mixed with melancholy rolled through the men and women facing him. Those who had died in battle could never return, but their numbers would no longer be swelled by new battles. Those thought lost forever to Syndic prisoner-of-war labor camps would be returned, but many others had died of health problems or just old age while awaiting a liberation that came too late for them. Geary heard more references to the witch singing as officers congratulated each other.

  “That’s the good news,” Geary continued, hearing his voice becoming harsher. Well, that reflected how he felt, angry that the end wouldn’t end everything it should. “The bad news is that the Syndicate Worlds are disintegrating. We’re going to have to deal with long-term problems of successor states, which may need to be dealt with and required to abide by the terms of the treaty.”

  Commander Landis of Valiant spoke as Geary paused. “But we’re talking minor actions compared to the war, right, sir?”

  “Relatively speaking,” Geary agreed. “But a lot of such minor actions, and to someone involved in them, they won’t feel minor.”

  “Policing the decaying corpse of the Syndicate Worlds,” Armus grumbled.

  Commander Neeson shook his head. “That corpse may spawn some regional powers that are strong enough to worry about. This is a real can of worms, but I guess it was inevitable. The Syndics depended on their warships to keep their individual star systems intimidated, and we needed to destroy those warships to win.”

  Badaya snorted. “If the Syndics had shown the brains to quit a long time ago, they could have held on to their power. But they pushed it too far, and they’re getting what they deserve.”

  “Scores of star systems like Heradao?” Captain Vitali of Daring asked. “The Syndics are certainly going to keep paying a price for this war.”

  “Regardless,” Badaya said, “we have won, and the military threats we face from now on will be comparatively minor.”

  “Except for one,” Geary said. He saw puzzlement, as he adjusted the star display over the table to show the Syndic border region facing the aliens. “The Syndics have admitted to us that an intelligent, nonhuman race exists on the other side of Syndic space from the Alliance, along this border.”

  The silence was so absolute for a few moments that Geary wondered if he had suddenly gone completely deaf. “What are they?” Captain Duellos asked, in tones as if he, too, had just learned of this.

  “The Syndics don’t know. These aliens have successfully hidden themselves, maintaining a quarantine so tight that the Syndics have been unable over the course of a hundred years to learn anything significant about the aliens, which they call the enigma race.”

  General Carabali exhaled loudly. “Let me guess. They’re hostile.”

  “Apparently, though to what extent we don’t know.”

  Badaya finally recovered enough to speak. “What proof did the Syndics provide that this race actually exists?”

  “I’ll lay it out for you, but one proof has been in our hands. You all recall the discovery in fleet operating systems of worms using quantum probability as their programming. Such worms were beyond our own capabilities to create, and we’ve now confirmed that the Syndics have no such ability, either. As far as we can tell, they remain ignorant of the existence of such worms, which General Carabali can confirm were recently found in the systems of wrecked Syndic warships here. Those worms must instead have been the work of this race, implanted in our ships so the aliens could track our movements and actions.”

  “They’ve been working against us, or just monitoring us?”

  “Working against us. They can collapse gates with some kind of remote signal. That’s what happened at Kalixa. That’s what happened here.”

  “They tried to wipe us out?” Neeson asked.

  “Apparently. Let me lay out everything we’ve been able to reevaluate in light of our knowledge of these aliens and what the situation is on the Syndic border with the aliens.”

  He went on, outlining the evidence, showing the Syndic CEO pleading for help, and reporting what little could be said about the aliens’ capabilities. When he finished, no one spoke for a long time.

  Dragon’s captain finally broke the silence. “Are we talking about allying ourselves with the Syndics against these aliens?”

  “No.” Geary saw some of the tension go out of the men and women before him. “No one has suggested that we agree to defend the Syndicate Worlds. Such an agreement could be too easily twisted.” Many nods came in response to that. No one here trusted the Syndics at all. “But stopping an invasion is another matter. We don’t know what the goals of the enigma race are, and we don’t know where they would stop if the former Syndic border collapsed.”

  “You’re not talking about a threat to the Alliance, are you? That’s so distant.”

  “Four weeks’ travel time from the border with the Alliance to the border facing the aliens,” Desjani said. “By hypernet.”

  “Can they use the hypernet?” Warspite’s captain asked.

  “It’s possible,” Geary answered. “We have reason to believe that the aliens may in fact have covertly provided the hypernet technology to both the Alliance and the Syndicate Worlds.”

  Everyone stared again, then Commander Neeson spoke as if to himself. “That would explain . . . there’s so many things about the hypernet we barely understand . . . and the quantum-probability worms came from hypernet keys, didn’t they?”

  “Apparently so.”

  “Why?” Badaya asked, his eyes narrowing dangerously. “Give both sides such technology? What was their game?”

  Duellos seemed to be looking into the distance. “The hypernets provided boosts to the economies of the Alliance and the Syndicate Worlds just as the costs of the war were growing too great. They also greatly simplified fighting the war by improving logistics and allowing the rapid transfer and concentration of forces.”

  “They wanted us to keep fighting?” Badaya leaned back, his face reddening, but his expression thoughtful as well as angry. “Weaken us. Both sides. Set us up for their own takeover.”

  “That may be what was happening,” Geary agreed. “Our intent is to get across to these aliens that such meddling in the affairs of humanity will not be tolerated and that internal conflicts will not prevent part of humanity from striking back at any attempt to invade human space.”

  “Which may require a battle,” Jane Geary said. “A battle against a foe of unknown strength and unknown resources, with unknown weapons and unknown defensive capabilities.”

  “That’s right. But if we don’t fight now, we’ll have to fight some other time, when we’re weaker, and they’re stronger. We have a chance to draw a line in the sand at that border, make it clear that they cannot force humanity to retreat.”

  That went over right. He could see spines stiffen at the idea of being forced to retreat. They believed that they had never retreated from the Syndics. They wouldn’t accept the idea of retreating from anyone or anything else.

  “You said they’ve taken Syndic planets before this,” Captain Parr of Incredible remarked. “Planets with some humans left on them? But we don’t know what happened to those humans?”

  “No, we don’t. Nothing has ever been heard from any humans in areas taken by the aliens.” That bothered everyone, he could tell. It wasn’t simply fears born of millennia of stories about alien races intent on enslaving or destroying humanity, stories that in recent centuries had come to be regarded more and more as fantasy since no intelligent nonhuman species had been discovered until now. No, Geary thought, it was about
leaving people behind. The fleet didn’t do that by choice, and if it did, it always vowed to somehow return for those left behind. In practice, those vows had rarely been able to be carried out, but that didn’t mean they were any less heartfelt.

  Badaya glowered at the star display. “They’re Syndics, but they’re human. Or maybe they won’t be Syndics anymore. They’ll hang or shoot the CEOs and set up governments that we can deal with. These star systems that need to be evacuated. The Syndics can’t do it, can they?”

  “No,” Geary agreed. “Not enough ships, not enough time. You know how hard it is to evacuate even one star system, even drawing on all the resources of the Alliance. Millions of people would be abandoned on those worlds.”