Valiant tlf-4

by Jack Campbell

  He wasn’t about to reject her, or condemn someone who’d already accepted a full measure of blame. But he could stand alongside her. “Yeah, maybe we are being punished.”

  Desjani frowned. “Sir? Why would you be punished for things done while you weren’t with us?”

  “I’m with you now, aren’t I? I’m part of this fleet and loyal to the Alliance. If you’re being punished, then so am I. I didn’t suffer through all the years of war that you have, but all I knew was taken from me.”

  She shook her head, frowning deeper. “You just said this is your fleet, and the Alliance has your loyalty. Those things weren’t taken from you.”

  Geary frowned back at her, surprised to realize he’d never thought of it that way.

  Desjani gave him an intent look. “They sent you when we needed you. They gave us a second chance. They gave you a second chance, instead of letting you die in the battle at Grendel or afterward, when your escape pod’s systems would have eventually given out. We’re being offered mercy if we can prove ourselves worthy of it.”

  She had startled him again, with a point of view he’d never considered, and by including him as part of them all. Not a separate hero out of myth but one of them. “Maybe you’re right,” Geary stated. “We can’t win this war by destruction unless we go all out with the hypernet gates and commit species suicide. If this war is ever to end, we’ll not only have to beat them on the battlefield but also be willing to forgive the Syndics if they’re willing to express real remorse. Maybe we’re being given an example to follow.”

  She was silent for a few moments, and he stayed quiet as well. The shuttle dock internal doors sealed between them and the shuttle, then the external ones opened, and the bird lifted off, carrying its passengers to the Syndic facility. Finally, Desjani looked back at him. “I’ve spent a long time wanting to punish the Syndics, to hurt them as they’ve hurt us.”

  “I can understand why,” Geary said. “Thanks for going along with me on helping those civilians. I know it went against a lot of what you believe.”

  “What I believed,” Desjani amended. She was quiet for a moment longer, but Geary waited, sensing that she had something else to say. “But that cycle of vengeance never ends. I realized something. I don’t want to have to kill that boy someday, when he’s old enough to fight.”

  “Me, neither. Or his father or his mother. And I don’t want that boy trying to kill Alliance citizens. How can we end this, Tanya?”

  “You’ll think of a way, sir.”

  “Thanks.”

  He meant it sarcastically, and was sure it sounded sarcastic, but Desjani smiled slightly at him. “Did you see how they looked at us? They were afraid, then they were disbelieving, and finally they were grateful.” She stopped smiling and looked outward. “I like fighting. I like going head-to-head with the best the Syndics have. But I’ve had enough of killing people like those. Can we convince the Syndics to stop bombarding civilian targets?”

  “We can try. Our bombardment weapons are accurate enough that we can certainly continue to keep taking out industrial targets while minimizing civilian losses.”

  Her face was grim now. “They kill ours, and we don’t kill theirs?”

  “It’ll have to be a mutual deal. When we get back, we’ll tell them, stop bombarding our people, and we’ll continue not bombarding yours.”

  “Why would they—?” Desjani stopped talking in mid-question, then gave Geary a long look. “And they might believe we’d abide by that since you’ve been demonstrating the willingness to do so.”

  “Maybe.”

  “And if they don’t stop?”

  “We keep taking out their industry and military targets.” Desjani grimaced. “Listen, Tanya, if there’s nothing for those people to build or fight with, they’re a burden to the Syndics who have to worry about feeding them and taking care of them.”

  “They’ll build new industrial sites. New defenses.”

  “And we’ll blow those away, too.” Geary jerked his head to indicate roughly the space outside of Dauntless’s hull. “Ever since humanity achieved routine space travel, we’ve had the ability to destroy things with rocks tossed from space far faster and easier than humans on planets can build things. The Syndics can sink endless effort and resources into rebuilding and never catch up.”

  She thought about that, then nodded. “You’re right. But that same logic applied a long time ago when we started bombarding civilian populations as well as military and industrial targets. Why did we start, all those decades ago?”

  “I don’t know.” Geary cast his mind back, trying to imagine the point at which the people he had known a century earlier had changed to become people like those now. But there hadn’t been any point, any single event, rather what Victoria Rione had called a slippery slope in which one seemingly reasonable decision to escalate led to another. “Maybe revenge for Syndic bombardments of Alliance worlds. Maybe a tactic of desperation when the war kept going on and on. An attempt to break the enemy morale. We studied that when I was a junior officer, but as a lesson in what hadn’t worked. Time and again in history people tried bombarding enemies enough to make them quit. But when the enemies thought their own homes or beliefs were in danger, they never quit. Totally irrational, but then we’re human.”

  “Syndic bombardments never made us want to give up,” Desjani agreed. “We’re very frustrated with our leaders, but we want them to win. We don’t want them to surrender. But not many people, especially in the fleet, still believe our leaders can win this war. That’s why—”

  He glanced at her as she stopped speaking again. “Why I got a certain offer from Captain Badaya? You know about it, too?”

  “Yes, sir. Of course, sir. It’s being widely talked about.”

  “I won’t, Tanya. I won’t betray the Alliance that way, by accepting the offer to become a dictator. I told Badaya that.” She looked at the deck, her face expressionless. “It wouldn’t work, and it’d be wrong.”

  Desjani spoke very, very quietly. “I have to ask you, have you been offered something else? If you agreed?”

  He tried to remember, because whatever it was seemed to bother her a great deal, but couldn’t come up with anything.

  “No. Nothing specific. It’s all been couched in very general terms.”

  “You’re certain?” Her voice was angry now though still very quiet. “You haven’t been promised anything else, Captain Geary?” He shook his head, letting his puzzlement show. “Anyone else, Captain Geary?”

  Anyone else? What could—? He was certain his shock showed. “You mean you?” he whispered, too stunned to speak in euphemisms.

  She looked at him again, studying his face, and seemed to relax. “Yes. I’ve been urged by some individuals to … offer myself. I’ve wondered if they had offered me on their own.”

  Geary felt heat in his face, embarrassment and anger rising in tandem. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so filled with rage. “Who?” he whispered savagely. “Who the hell had the bloody nerve to dare suggest such a thing to you? You’re not some prize or playing piece. Tell me who they are, and I’ll—” This time he had to choke off his words, aware that even a fleet commander couldn’t threaten to rip subordinates into tiny pieces and vent them out the air lock.

  Desjani gave him a thin-lipped smile. “I can defend my own honor, sir. But thank you. Thank you very much.”

  “Tanya, I swear, if I find out—”

  “Let me deal with it, sir. Please.” He nodded reluctantly. “We should get back to the bridge, sir, to monitor what’s going on.” Another nod. One corner of Desjani’s mouth bent farther upward. “You wouldn’t make a good dictator, would you?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Perhaps there’s a reason for that, too.”

  He kept waiting for something to go wrong, but the Alliance shuttles dropped off every Syndic civilian and lifted off again, then returned to their ships without any Syndic attempts to interfere wit
h the operation. “Did we actually carry out an operation without the Syndics trying to double-cross us and booby-trap everything in sight?” Desjani asked.

  “Looks like it. And so far our own double-crossers haven’t sprung any more traps on us, either.” Geary studied the display, as unwilling to believe it as Desjani. The shuttles all recovered, the Alliance fleet was cutting across one arc of Cavalos Star System toward the jump point that could access either Anahalt or Dilawa. “Three more days to the jump point?”

  “Yes, sir. Unless something else happens.” Desjani clenched her jaw as alerts sounded. “And something just did.”

  Syndic warships were becoming visible at the jump point they were heading toward.

  TEN

  “Ten Syndic battleships, twelve battle cruisers, seventeen heavy cruisers, twenty-five light cruisers, forty-two Hunter-Killers,” the operations watch-stander announced.

  “Roughly half our strength,” Desjani observed, “though we’ve got a much bigger advantage in lighter units. Will they avoid action or fight?”

  “They’ve got to have orders to stop us or delay us,” Geary pointed out. “To do either of those things, they have to fight.”

  “They might be too frightened to fight after what this fleet did at Lakota.” Then Desjani paused as something occurred to her. “They may not know what happened at Lakota. They may assume the pursuit force we destroyed at Lakota is still after us and may appear at any moment.”

  “You’re probably right, since they came from either Anahalt or Dilawa.” Geary watched as the eight-light-hours-distant images of the Syndic formation could be seen coming around onto a new vector. The Syndics had already had eight hours to decide what to do and get started doing it. “It’s a standard Syndic box formation so far.”

  “Maybe this CEO will be as stupid as the one at Kaliban,” Desjani suggested. That enemy commander had simply charged head-on at the superior numbers of the Alliance fleet, allowing Geary to annihilate the enemy forces by bringing all of his firepower to bear.

  “That’d be nice,” Geary agreed, “but we can’t count on it. I’ve got a suspicion that we’re killing stupid CEOs faster than the Syndics are promoting them.”

  “I’ve found it hard to overestimate the ability of any system to promote stupid people.”

  With the promise of combat looming, Desjani was in a good enough mood to crack jokes, although Geary had to admit she had a point. “Let’s assume he or she isn’t stupid. Do you think they’ll try hitting our flanks with fast runs, or if I have the formation divided, will they try to hit one of the subformations head-on?”

  Desjani considered that. “They’ve been taught to fight like we used to fight, with head-on charges. Even if they try something fancy, it’s more likely to be a charge against one portion of our formation rather than a firing pass against a flank or corner like you taught us. That’s what I’d expect.”

  Ideally, he’d just concentrate his own fleet into one big formation for the Syndic to charge toward. But such a big formation wouldn’t allow all of his ships to engage the smaller enemy formation, negating a lot of his superiority. On the other hand, if the Syndic was going to aim for a subformation rather than going straight for the main body of the fleet, tactics like those at Kaliban wouldn’t work either. He’d have to use something different.

  Rione reached the bridge then, pausing to look at the display before her seat before addressing Geary. “What do you plan on doing?”

  Geary indicated his own display, where the sweeping arc of the Syndic formation’s projected course and speed was coming around and steadying on a vector that intercepted the arc of the Alliance fleet’s own path, the two curved lines bending across light-hours of distance to join like twin sabers clashing. “I plan on meeting the enemy, Madam Co-President, in a little less than a day and a half.”

  Rione looked from her display with its readout of the enemy’s numbers, then to Geary, and shook her head. “It’s like fighting a hydra. No matter how many Syndic warships we destroy, there are always more.”

  “They keep building them, and unlike us, they can get reinforcements,” Geary pointed out.

  “I’d recommend trying to capture this CEO alive, Captain Geary. He or she may be able to answer some questions for us.”

  “I’ll do my best, Madam Co-President.”

  “Captain, we’re receiving a very tightly focused transmission from the direction of the primary inhabited world. It’s addressed to Captain Geary.”

  Desjani gave him a wary look. They were still almost eight hours from contact with the Syndic flotilla, not having assumed their combat formation yet. “I’ll take it,” Geary advised. “Let Captain Desjani see it, too.”

  The window that popped up before him showed an older woman seated at a desk, wearing a midrank Syndic CEO uniform. “I suppose you’re wondering why the senior Syndicate Worlds’ officer in this star system is communicating with you, Captain Geary, and doing it in a manner that minimizes any chance anyone else will discover that she did so.”

  She gestured to a picture on the desk, of a young man Geary vaguely recognized. “I had a brother, long dead in an accident, I thought. Now I have a brother, and the knowledge that a corporation tied to a very senior Syndicate Worlds’ leader wrote off actually removing him and hundreds of his coworkers from Wendig because it shaved a small amount off the expenses column in that corporation’s annual report. I also have a sister-in-law and some nieces and a nephew I’d never known of, all of whom owe their lives to you.”

  The face in the picture suddenly clicked in Geary’s mind. It was the mayor of Alpha, though decades younger.

  The Syndic planetary CEO shook her head. “Not to mention all of the lives that would have been lost in this star system if you had chosen to bombard this planet. But I’ve heard from people in places like Corvus and Sutrah and even Sancere, so I know you’ve been behaving the same way everywhere, striking only at military targets or industrial sites in retaliation for our own attacks on you. I don’t know how many millions or billions of Syndicate Worlds’ citizens you might have easily killed, but I do know you didn’t do it.”

  Now the Syndic planetary CEO smiled grimly. “Now I find myself thanking the Alliance fleet for all of those lives even though my orders are to take any actions that might cost you any ships or delay you in any way, regardless of the potential loss to the inhabitants of this star system. I’m well aware of the situation you find yourself in. We’ve been told a half dozen times that your fleet was trapped and soon to be destroyed. How you’ve made it this far the living stars alone know. That you came to be in command, Captain Geary, and the identification the Syndicate Worlds have been able to do on you seems positive, leads me to wonder if the living stars have actually intervened in this war. That you took a force built for war and used it to save the lives of your enemies causes me to be grateful that they have.

  “I owe you, Captain Geary, and I believe in repaying debts. Your fleet is headed for an engagement with a substantial Syndicate Worlds’ force, but one you outnumber significantly. Even though our leaders are trying to keep everything about you and your fleet highly classified, there are plenty of credible unofficial reports circulating. Based on those, I don’t expect the Syndic force to prevail here, but based on your actions to date, that expectation does not fill me with fear. Your fleet will be less a threat to the people here than one answering to the Syndicate Worlds’ Executive Council.”

  The Syndic CEO shook her head again. “I won’t forget what you did, Captain Geary. A lot of us have come to the understanding that this war stopped making sense the day it began. We’re tired of trying to hold things together in our star systems while our leaders squander the wealth of the Syndicate Worlds in a war that can’t be won. When you get home, tell your leaders that there are people here who are weary of fighting and want to talk.”

  The Syndic CEO paused. “When our facilities at Dilawa were mothballed about twenty years ago, it was judged uneconomic
al to remove the stockpiled materials at the mining facilities there. A lot of things were left in place. Just in case you have need of supplies after you leave here.”

  The window blanked, and Geary leaned back, thinking.

  “Can we trust her?” Desjani wondered.

  “I don’t know. Where’s Co-President Rione?”

  “In her stateroom, I think.”

  “Shoot her a copy of that and ask for her assessment.” Desjani’s mouth twitched, and she hesitated just enough for Geary to see. “Never mind. I’ll do it.”

  Five minutes later Rione was on the bridge. “I think she’s being honest.”

  “She wants to talk peace, and expects us to defeat this Syndic flotilla, and told us where we can find raw materials to resupply the auxiliaries,” Geary pointed out. “If the Syndic authorities find out any of that, they’ll have her head off in a heartbeat.”

  Rione nodded to Geary, her face thoughtful. “This implies a higher degree of rot within the Syndic hierarchy than we expected. A star-system CEO telling us directly that she no longer supports the war.”

  “She’s also sympathizing with us against her own forces,” Desjani pointed out to Geary, seeming to be torn between gratitude and revulsion.

  Instead of replying to her, Rione spoke to Geary. “The Syndic fleet has been a critical part of the mechanism by which the leaders of the Syndicate Worlds have maintained control over their territory. Anyone trying to display any independence would find warships arriving to enforce the will of their Executive Council. The more damage you do to that fleet, the greater the opportunity for local leaders such as this one to act on their own.”

  “That fleet is nonetheless made up of their own people,” Desjani told Geary. “The fact that she’s apparently willing to cheer us on against them should play a role in our assessment of her.”

  Rione shook her head as she addressed Geary again. “A hypernet-bypassed star system probably has proportionally fewer citizens in the fleet and feels far less a part of the Syndicate Worlds as time has gone by.”