Courageous tlf-3

by Jack Campbell

  Rione had one hand pressed against her forehead, an expression of resignation on what of her face could be seen. “Off to battle, Captain Geary?” she asked.

  “We’ll see.” He sat down and activated the fleetwide circuit. “All ships, turn starboard one three degrees, up zero four degrees, and increase speed to point seven light at time three two. We intend intercepting the new Syndic flotilla. Expect combat in about three days.” Hating to give the next order but unable to see any alternative after the arrival of the new Syndic flotilla, Geary spoke again. “Second and Seventh Destroyer Squadrons, set the power cores on those Syndic ore carriers to self-destruct and then rejoin the fleet at best speed. Ensure any remaining Syndic prisoners from the ore carriers are put into escape pods. I don’t want to have to worry about them on your ships during the battle.”

  What else? Oh, yes, the lure, which hadn’t attracted any Syndics. “Captain Tyrosian, ensure all resupply activity is completed and all shuttles recovered as soon as possible but no later than twenty-four hours from now. Captain Mosko, increase speed of Formation Echo Five Five as necessary to bring your formation back into position relative to the rest of the fleet.”

  “Three more days to wait before we close on the Syndics.” Desjani grimaced, plainly wishing the fleet was already approaching engagement range. “I hate this part.”

  “Are you planning on jumping the fleet out of this system or fighting those Syndic ships?” Rione demanded. She had kept quiet while they were walking back to his stateroom, but the moment the hatch sealed, she hurled the question at him.

  “That depends.” Geary flopped down on a seat and activated the display showing the situation in Lakota Star System. “What do the Syndics do? How do they react? I can’t chase them with this fleet. We don’t have the fuel cells to waste on that.”

  “There’s more fuel cells on the auxiliaries. If you—”

  “Not enough!” He made a face. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to cut you off.” Rione, whose eyes had started to blaze, relaxed slightly. “If I get every fuel cell the auxiliaries have managed to manufacture distributed throughout the fleet, it’ll bring the ships up to about sixty percent fuel cell reserves by the time we reach the jump exit for Branwyn if we don’t do any more maneuvering. That’s not enough of a safety margin for routine combat ops. For a fleet trapped behind enemy lines, it’s scary as hell.”

  “I thought you said the fleet would have to slow down to get through any mines the new Syndic force lays at that jump point. That’ll require burning more fuel cell reserves, won’t it?”

  “I did, and you’re right. So you see how bad it is.”

  Rione eyed Geary for a moment, then smiled. “I underestimated you again.”

  “You did?”

  “Yes, Captain John Geary.” Rione laughed. “Limited fuel cells so you can’t race around this star system, and subordinates who would create problems if they thought you were running from the enemy. So you pretend to head for battle on the straightest course to the jump point we need, knowing the Syndics are likely to pull back and let you get this fleet out of this star system. Well done! You might make a politician yet.”

  He returned a crooked smile. “I’m afraid I’m not half that clever. I think the Syndics will fight at the Branwyn jump exit. They know we have to use it. They don’t want to let us out of this system unscathed.”

  Rione, her smile gone, searched Geary’s eyes. “Then what do you intend doing?”

  “Like I said, it depends. Will the new Syndic force try a major engagement, hitting us full force? Or will they try to avoid a big battle and instead hammer at any weak points? If they want to do that, they can follow us through the jump point and be right on our tails at Branwyn.”

  She considered that, sitting down and bending her head. After several minutes, Rione looked up at him again. “Are you sure you want to go to Branwyn?”

  “What other choice do I have? It’s not like T’negu is a good option.”

  “You’re getting into a situation where you have to fight this Syndic force.”

  “I know.” Geary sat up a bit and called up something on the display above the table that he had only rarely consulted. “Recognize this?”

  Rione stared at the display grimly. “The Syndic home system. I’m not likely to ever forget it.”

  “The Alliance fleet suffered awful losses when it got ambushed there.” Geary pointed to where a long list of ship names shone in red. “The leading elements were annihilated and the rest mauled as they fought their way through the ambush.”

  “You don’t have to remind me of that!” Rione looked away, her face pale. “Just the memories are bad enough.”

  Geary nodded. “Sorry. But as you pointed out on the bridge, we’ve been winning some one-sided victories of our own. Not a one of them comes close to what the Syndics did to this fleet in their home system, but taken together, they’ve inflicted very heavy cumulative losses.”

  Her eyes intent, Rione studied the display again. “And if you destroy this Syndic force in the same way, you’ll have come close to evening the score. Is that what this is about? Revenge? I thought better of you, John Geary, though I admit the idea of getting even with the Syndics is a pleasant one.”

  “It’s not just revenge. Hell, it’s not really revenge. We’ve had to run like crazy because the ambush in the Syndic home system left the Syndics with a big numerical advantage over the Alliance.”

  Her expression shifted again. “You’re erasing that advantage.”

  “Right. We’ve come quite a way to doing that, which is why the Syndics had to employ barely trained crews and brand-new ships at Ixion. If I wipe out the new Syndic force that’s arrived in this system, the ability of the Syndics to meet us with equal force at any new star system will be severely impaired. They’ll have to spread out their remaining forces, so we’ll have the numerical advantage in any particular star system, which should give us the time we need to get the auxiliaries restocked again and all our ships loaded out with full inventories of fuel cells, specters, and grapeshot.”

  Rione spent a while thinking about that, too, then turned a questioning gaze on Geary. “And if you get hurt as badly as the Syndic force?”

  “Then we’re in trouble.”

  “It’s a big risk.”

  “Yeah. But we’re already in trouble. We’ve been in trouble since this fleet got mangled in the Syndic home system and ended up stuck deep in enemy territory. The big risk here comes with a potentially big payoff. I can easily lose by trying to play it safe, but I can’t win unless I throw the dice.”

  In zero gravity dice never stop tumbling, and for the next day Geary felt like he was watching a pair endlessly rolling and never coming up with a result. Then another day dragging by. Nerves on edge, he snapped at Rione, and she snapped back harder. They spent half an hour arguing so heatedly that Geary wondered why the bulkheads in his stateroom didn’t melt. He finally left and wandered the passageways of Dauntless, trying to maintain a facade of confidence as sailors and junior officers greeted him with possessive pride. He might be the fleet commander, but this was Black Jack’s flagship, and they believed that made this ship and this crew special.

  He ended up in the conference room again and morosely ran through possible battles with Syndic Flotilla Bravo at the jump point for Branwyn. But there was too much he didn’t know, like what the Syndics would do, to make the simulations meaningful.

  Eventually he went back to his stateroom, determined not to be exiled from his own quarters even by Victoria Rione. She was waiting for him and pulled him to the bed without a word.

  It helped the time pass but left him baffled again.

  The third day. Geary sat on the bridge of Dauntless and glared at the display. The Syndics were still acting as if the Alliance fleet weren’t even there. “Any guesses for how we can get any Syndics in this system to react to us?” he finally asked Captain Desjani.

  She gave him an apologetic look. “No, sir.” Desjani
gestured toward the habitable planet. “Every Syndic military asset has surely received orders from the senior Syndic leadership in this star system, and Syndics follow orders slavishly.” She said it dismissively, and certainly that was a big difference between the current Alliance fleet and the current Syndic fleet. Geary had spent a good deal of his time in command convincing his ship commanders, with varying degrees of success, that following orders could be a good thing. The irony was that by this stage of the war, the rigid control of the Syndics and the rush-to-battle mob approach of the Alliance had produced the same results, both sides adopting bloody head-on clashes decided by attrition.

  “I’m afraid Co-President Rione was right,” Geary replied. “This time they’re not going to engage this fleet until they’re good and ready.”

  “Most likely,” Desjani agreed, her experience in the fleet generating a look of disdain at such an intellectual approach to battle before she remembered that Geary was teaching the Alliance fleet to act that way. “They’re learning, or starting to think, aren’t they?”

  “Looks like it. Or maybe just losing a dangerous level of self-confidence.” Whichever it was, it was bad for the Alliance fleet.

  “They’ll have to fight us at the jump point for Branwyn.”

  Time to intercept with what had been labeled Syndic Flotilla Bravo now rested at twelve hours, if nobody maneuvered before then. The Syndic flotilla had been in a rectangular box-shaped formation since arriving and showed no signs of wanting to change that. But twelve hours from contact was still too early to start messing with the Alliance fleet’s formation.

  He reviewed the status of the fleet’s supplies again. Ran out the projections for how many more fuel cells the auxiliaries could manufacture using the materials they had on hand. Simulated distributing that among the fleet. Not enough.

  Stockpiles of mines were low, specter missile inventories on the warships ranged from low to moderate, but at least grapeshot load-outs were high. No surprise there, since metal ball bearings were pretty easy to manufacture.

  Food stocks were okay, but that would be a problem, too, if he didn’t find more. The food brought from the Alliance was effectively gone, with the fleet subsisting mostly on Syndic rations looted from mothballed facilities or storage locations in Sancere. The Sancere stuff wasn’t too bad, for Syndic food, but when that was gone, all that would be left would be food regarded by the Syndics as not worth bringing with them when they abandoned facilities. He’d had some of that food, and even for someone accustomed to the dubious nature of military rations, it had been hard to stomach. It would keep a person alive, but that was its only virtue.

  “Estimate twelve hours to combat. Please ensure your crews get plenty of rest,” Geary ordered his ship captains, then went off to pretend to rest himself.

  Five hours to intercept.

  “They’re sprinting, sir,” Desjani reported unhappily. “To get to the jump point for Branwyn before us. They started accelerating about an hour ago, but we just saw it. We can send some battle cruisers ahead to try to still make the intercept before the Syndics get to the jump point, but the entire fleet can’t accelerate fast enough to do it.”

  Throw unsupported battle cruisers at that Syndic formation? He could add in some light cruisers and destroyers as well, but that would still leave the battle cruisers badly outgunned. “No. We can’t risk the battle cruisers that way.”

  Desjani stiffened, her affronted pride clear. “Sir, battle cruisers are proud of their role as the fast-moving strike force of the fleet. We can hit the enemy fast and repeatedly while the rest of the fleet catches up.”

  We, of course. Dauntless being a battle cruiser, too. “I appreciate that, Captain Desjani, but in this case we’d have to divert the Syndic flotilla from their current course in order for it to make sense to separate the battle cruisers from the rest of the fleet. Our battle cruisers simply don’t have enough firepower to achieve that against a force the size of the Syndic flotilla.” He leaned closer to speak very quietly. “You know I couldn’t send Dauntless with such a strike force anyway. She’s the fleet flagship, and she carries something critically important.” He meant the Syndic hypernet key, something that could have a decisive effect on the war if they could get it home to Alliance space. Every ship in the fleet was important, but some were more important than others. Because of that hypernet key, Dauntless was by far the most important of the important.

  Desjani knew that and couldn’t argue with it, so even though she still looked unhappy, she nodded in agreement.

  Now Geary had to sit and watch the Syndic flotilla get to the jump point first. They’d timed their move right, leaving the Alliance fleet without enough time to respond. But when the two fleets closed to battle, he’d teach the Syndics a few things about timing maneuvers to discomfort the other side.

  At point one light speed, the enemy flotilla covered thirty thousand kilometers per second. On the scale of a planetary surface, the speed was unfathomable. Against the size of even an average solar system like Lakota, where the orbital diameter of the farthest-out officially designated planet spanned about ten light-hours or roughly eleven billion kilometers, ships seemed to crawl against the star-filled darkness. Geary had sometimes wondered how people had been able to stand it in the early days of human space flight, when ships hadn’t been able to achieve velocities of anywhere near a tenth of the speed of light and been forced to take weeks, months, or even years to reach other planets and moons in just a single solar system. But he supposed people living on planets then probably had trouble grasping that once it had taken weeks, months, or years for travelers to cross continental landmasses.

  “No matter how fast we go, it’s never fast enough,” Geary muttered.

  To his surprise, Desjani appeared taken aback by the comment. “Sir, if the fleet could do more—”

  “Sorry. That wasn’t about the fleet. The fleet’s doing wonders, as usual. No, I was just thinking about people.”

  “I see, sir.” No, she obviously didn’t, but since the honor of her ship and the fleet wasn’t at stake and there were enemies to watch, Desjani was willing to let it go.

  Geary did, too, watching the Syndics reach for the jump point for Branwyn and hoping they wouldn’t do what he fully expected them to do when they got there.

  They did.

  “They’re finally turning toward us,” Desjani announced. “They braked heavily to cross the jump point, and now they’re accelerating toward us.”

  Geary exhaled, wishing something would start going right, partly relieved that he no longer had to dread what had finally happened and partly tense because it had happened. “I need confirmation as soon as possible. Did they lay mines when they went past the jump point?” That seemed the only possible explanation for the braking maneuver, to slow the ships down so the mines could be laid fairly close together, but it could have been a bluff as well.

  “Yes, sir,” a watch-stander reported. “Our sensors are still trying to evaluate the minefield’s density and limits, but we’re picking up many visual anomalies. It looks like they dropped a lot of mines right off the jump point.”

  Desjani frowned. “That close? Look at it, sir. The mines are so close the presence of the jump point will cause them to drift out of position fairly quickly.”

  “Fairly quickly meaning what?” Geary asked, feeling a leap of hope.

  “A few weeks, maybe,” Desjani offered. “The physics of an area that close to a jump point are a little weird, but we can run an analysis for a better estimate.”

  “Unless that estimate is a lot less than a few weeks, it won’t do us much good.” He took another look as the fleet’s sensors painstakingly searched out the tiny visual anomalies that even the best stealth mines revealed, drawing in a depiction of where the mines were. Right on top of the jump point, just as Desjani had commented.

  They would drift out of position in a few weeks, maybe, but until then couldn’t be bypassed unless the Alliance fleet slowed
to almost a dead stop to make a very tight turn. And if the Alliance warships did that, they’d be sitting ducks for Syndic Flotilla Bravo making high-speed firing runs. “I liked it better when the Syndics were underestimating us,” Geary remarked to Desjani in a low voice.

  “Once we’ve destroyed that Syndic flotilla, we can maneuver around those mines safely. Or maybe wait in this system until the mines move out of the way,” Desjani suggested.

  “Maybe.” Wait a few weeks in Lakota? It didn’t sound like a good idea. The longer they stayed here, the worse things seemed to get.

  “Syndic Flotilla Bravo is steadying on an intercept course with us,” the maneuvering watch announced. “Still accelerating, now back up to point zero five light.”

  “They’ll come back up to point one light for the engagement,” Desjani predicted. “That’s standard practice for them.”

  “And for the Alliance,” Geary reminded her. “But I won’t bring our ships up to point one light for a while yet.”

  “If the Syndics come up to point one light and hold it there,” Desjani noted as she ran some calculations, “and we maintain point zero seven light, then we now have about one and one half hours to contact.”

  “Okay.” Geary thought for a moment, then called all of his ships. “All units in the Alliance fleet, we expect combat in approximately one hour. Maintain your places in formation, and I promise you we’ll teach these Syndics the same things we taught the other Syndic flotillas we’ve encountered.”

  He didn’t expect a reply, but one came from back in the formation. “Advise time we should accelerate to engagement speed of point one light.”