The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Invincible

by Campbell, Jack

  “I don’t know,” Geary said. “Why does it matter?”

  “Ships died here, Admiral. Sailors died here. We should have a name for where they died.”

  He closed his eyes again, embarrassed not to have thought of that. Part of him wanted a dark name, but another part said that this star marked the graves of dead humans and should reflect their sacrifice and courage. Something that said humans had placed their mark here, far beyond their own borders, fighting to save their comrades. “Is there a star named Honor?”

  “Honor?” Desjani questioned, then checked the database. “No. That’s not a name . . . but you get to use any name you want, Admiral.”

  “It’s for them,” he said.

  “I understand.” She paused, then managed a smile. “It’s a good name to remember them by. Permission to enter the name Honor for this star in the fleet database.”

  “Granted.”

  Jane Geary had survived the charge she had led though Dreadnaught had suffered extensive damage. Captain Badaya, looking unusually subdued, had volunteered that Jane Geary had made that move on her own initiative while he was still trying to figure out how to save his other warships. Orion, already beaten up from fighting at Pandora, had been hammered again, but Commander Shen had, with considerable annoyance at the question, declared his ship still fit for battle.

  The amount of damage inflicted on Dreadnaught, Orion, Relentless, Reprisal, Superb, and Splendid proved the old maxim that while battleships might take a while to get where they needed to go, once there they were amazingly hard to kill. Still, had the bear-cow commander peeled off even one of the superbattleships with some escorts and sent it after those six beat-up battleships, they probably wouldn’t have survived the fight.

  Quarte reached the damaged escape pod from Balestra, the two spider-wolves on the pod withdrawing into their own ship as the light cruiser approached, the spider-wolf ship then soaring off in a grand leap back to its fellows. Dragon was still twenty minutes from reaching both Quarte and the damaged pod, but was coming on fast.

  Geary thought about medical personnel all over the fleet, not just on Dragon, struggling with a tidal wave of injured personnel, sick bays and hospitals filled with those in desperate need of care for their wounds. Nowadays if someone made it to a hospital they were unlikely to die no matter how bad their injuries, but even then sometimes not enough could be done. “How do they do it?” he wondered aloud. Desjani turned a questioning glance his way, for once not reading his mind. “Doctors, nurses, corpsmen, medics, all of them,” Geary explained. “Sometimes, no matter what they do, the people they’re trying to help still die. How do they keep going?”

  She pondered that. “How do you keep going? Knowing that no matter how well you do, people will still die?”

  That stung, yet he saw her logic. “I guess I think about how much worse things would be if I didn’t do everything I could.”

  “Yeah. Works for me, too. Usually.”

  Captain Smythe was once again proving his value, coordinating a huge amount of repair activity around the fleet, his engineers running on caffeine and chocolate to keep working (“The food of the gods,” in Smythe’s words. “When the old myths talked about nectar and ambrosia, they meant coffee and chocolate.”), the eight auxiliaries each mated with or closing on one of the most badly hurt warships.

  Commander Lommand of Titan had offered his resignation, which Geary had declined along with an order to Lommand to use his considerable talents to get ships fixed up, including his own.

  The fleet administrative system popped up another alert, explaining in dispassionate terms that available storage for dead personnel had been exceeded and recommending burials be undertaken.

  As he read that last, Geary knew that if he threw anything at the display or punched it the blows would just go through the virtual information, leaving it unmarred. He was nonetheless tempted. “General Charban, Emissary Rione, we also need to know as quickly as possible, after we get across to the spider-wolves to lay off the last superbattleship, whether we can safely bury our dead in this star system.”

  Rione looked away, but Charban nodded slowly. “I understand, Admiral.”

  He undoubtedly did understand, Geary reflected. The ground forces had also often taken hideous casualties in the war, waging battles across entire worlds and devastating wide portions of those worlds in the process. How many soldiers had Charban lost in battle? How many times had those soldiers spent their lives, only to have the ground they had died for be abandoned with the next shift in strategy, or when the Alliance fleet was driven away and ground forces had to leave before Syndic warships rained death from orbit upon them?

  Geary had slept through a century of that, while such sacrifices formed the men and women around him. Desjani would occasionally remind him, sometimes angrily, that he could not understand them even if they needed his reminders of the things their ancestors had believed in before the war warped those caught in it.

  And now more of them had died in as vicious a fight as any during the war. He had managed to help them survive that war. Could he manage to ensure that these men and women survived peace?

  “Admiral,” Rione called from the conference room aboard Dauntless where frantic attempts at communications with the spider-wolves continued, “we have gotten across to the people here that we will deal with the last superbattleship.”

  “The people here?” It took him a moment to understand that. “You mean the spider-wolves?”

  “Yes, Admiral.” Her voice took on a reproving cast. “We must think of them as people. Because they are people.”

  “Exceptionally ugly people,” Desjani murmured.

  He gave her a warning look before turning back to Rione’s image. “Thank you. I’ll do my best.”

  Rione’s smile was pained. “I understand how hard that will be. Believe me.”

  “Make sure you and General Charban take some breaks. You’ve been at this continuously for hours now.” Once Rione’s image vanished, Geary bent to his display. He had to start moving ships toward the crippled superbattleship drifting through this star system, ensuring that the spider-wolves didn’t question the human claim to it.

  Some of the Alliance warships had only been moving toward an intercept with the superbattleship for half an hour when another alert pulsed. Geary, still anticipating a massive act of self-destruction by the bear-cows trapped on their ship, jerked as if he had been bitten.

  But there was no marker showing a spreading cloud of debris where the superbattleship had been. Instead, that ship remained, but oddly changed. “Now what?”

  A portion of the crippled superbattleship had been torn outward, making Geary think for a moment that an internal explosion had ripped the warship, too small to destroy it but enough to blow off a large piece. But within seconds it was clear that the detached piece was under power and shaped like a smaller version of one of the bear-cow ships. Where it had rested, cradled mostly inside the superbattleship, a matching depression now showed.

  “Escape craft,” Lieutenant Castries reported. “Accelerating for the jump point.”

  They had finally found an escape craft on a bear-cow ship. But only one? And configured for such speed and endurance? “Surely they don’t have the whole crew on that,” Geary said.

  “No,” Desjani replied. “That would be impossible.”

  The human ships were still too far from the superbattleship to intercept the escape ship, but spider-wolf warships were slewing about and leaping toward new prey.

  “Do we want to warn them off that escape ship?” Desjani asked.

  “I’m not sure we have time,” Geary said. Just the amount of time needed for a message to reach those spider-wolf ships was longer than it would take the first of them to achieve an intercept.

  Desjani nodded in tight-lipped agreement. “I guess they’re going to blow the wreck now.”

  “Maybe.” Geary frowned at his display. “That thing is big for an escape craft, but i
t’s still less than half the size of a destroyer.”

  “About a third the mass and length,” Desjani agreed. “Lieutenant Castries, get me an estimate of how many Kicks could be on that escape ship.

  The reply took a moment. “Our systems estimate the escape craft was designed to carry a maximum of one hundred creatures the size of the Kicks,” Castries reported. “That’s if they were crammed in, and if their equipment took about the same amount of internal space as standard human layouts. At the lower end, it might service as few as twenty Kicks.”

  “One hundred at most.” Desjani made a face. “That superbattleship could easily have a crew of thousands.”

  “Maybe a lot of automation,” Geary speculated. “No. Some of the videos we’ve seen take place on ships, and those showed many bear-cows crowding them. But only a hundred at the very most had a means of escape.” The answer came to him then. “The officers. The commanding officer, his or her staff, maybe family if they do that. The leaders of this part of the herd, leaving that herd behind while they head for safety.”

  “I prefer the term ‘herd-leaders,’” Desjani said sharply. “Officers should never abandon their crews, and there are no signs that huge warship has any other escape craft.”

  “Some bear-cows are more equal than others,” Geary said. “That shouldn’t be a surprise. We knew they had leaders, and leaders can easily become an elite caste.”

  “Like the Syndics.”

  “Maybe. In some ways.” Though even the Syndics had put escape pods on their warships. But then the Syndics didn’t have at least thirty billion spare worker bear-cows packed cheek to jowl. “These herd-leaders may be running, but they won’t get away.”

  Desjani smiled, letting out a small laugh. “Too many spiders blocking their way.”

  Indeed, right now the spider-wolf ships bearing down on the escape craft amid a welter of curving intercept vectors resembled a web rapidly ensnaring the fleeing bear-cow commander.

  For its size, the escape craft had impressive shields. But it couldn’t carry much armor, not and stay swift and agile, and it had few weapons, which fired desperately at the converging spider-wolf warships as they closed in for firing runs.

  A score of spider-wolf ships slashed at the escape craft in attacks that collapsed its shields, penetrated its hull, then must have triggered a core overload. As the spider-wolf attackers curved away after their strikes, only a blossoming field of debris remained of the escape ship.

  “I guess the spiders weren’t interested in prisoners,” Desjani remarked. “Why did the commander run? They’d have been safer staying on the superbattleship.”

  “That ship is doomed,” Geary said. “Perhaps the commander panicked, perhaps we’re going to see it self-destruct now, and the commander didn’t want to go out that way.”

  “The commander went out that way anyway,” Desjani said dryly, pointing toward the remnants of the escape ship. “Hmmm. They would have been well clear of that crippled ship by now. Even a worst-case estimate of the blast radius shows they would have been out of danger from that. Why hasn’t it blown?”

  “A booby trap? Like Captain Smythe suggested with Invincible? The bear-cows have rigged their superbattleship to blow up when we try to board?”

  “Or something went wrong,” Desjani suggested. “Or the Kicks left aboard aren’t interested in being blown to pieces. Or they never intended doing an overload. I checked the records of the engagement. None of the crippled Kick ships self-destructed. The spider-wolves blew apart any that were crippled but still intact.”

  “When did you have a chance to go over the records of the engagement?” Geary wondered, thinking of everything that he had been doing since the battle ended.

  “I used my copious free time. One second here, one second there . . . it adds up.”

  Geary clenched his fists. “There’s still a chance we can capture that thing.”

  “Yes,” Desjani agreed. “But whoever goes aboard will face the possibility of the superbattleship blowing up once they’re inside, as well as fighting thousands of Kicks who will probably fight to the death to avoid getting eaten alive, which they would expect us awful predators to do. Have I ever told you why I didn’t become a Marine?”

  “I know you’ve led boarding parties,” Geary said, recalling the Alliance Fleet Cross medal that Desjani never spoke about except in vague terms.

  “When I was young and foolish.” She shook her head. “Still no self-destruct. Hey, I thought of something. The spider-wolf tactics and weapons alone wouldn’t have taken down that armada, even though the spider-wolves must have some way of stopping the Kicks.”

  “You already mentioned that.”

  “Did I? This part I just thought of. Maybe the Kicks haven’t lost ships in hostile systems. Their battles have been at home or they’ve been able to get everyone who wasn’t blown apart home. They wouldn’t have procedures or plans for scuttling ships because it never happened. I mean, look at that thing.” She waved toward the image of the superbattleship. “Would you expect to have that thing trapped and helpless?”

  “It’s not exactly helpless. Weapons and shields are still operational. And what about that escape ship?”

  “Good point. The leaders aboard that thing must have had reasons to expect to need to be able to leave. Could that have been the armada flagship?”

  “It could have been.” A fleet commander would need some means of leaving a crippled ship during a fight so they could continue the battle from another flagship. “But even if you’re right, that doesn’t mean it would be impossible for the crew left on that battleship to rig up a means of self-destruct. We just don’t know.”

  Desjani nodded toward her display. “The survivors of the armada are still running for the jump point. Forty-one ships. I’m glad the spider-wolves are chasing them because even I don’t feel like that right now. But if the last Kick ship leaves this star system, and the superbattleship is still intact, we’re going to have to decide whether to run the risks of trying to take it.”

  “I’m going to have to decide,” Geary corrected.

  THE image of General Carabali gestured toward the display in Geary’s stateroom. “This is about that ship?”

  “Yes, General.” Geary zoomed the display in on the crippled superbattleship. “Can your Marines take it?”

  “Can we? Yes, Admiral, I am confident of that. What I can’t be confident about is how much it might cost.”

  That was the big question. “I understand. In light of that, I need your best assessment on whether we should try to take it,” Geary said.

  Carabali paused, thinking. “There are a lot of unknowns. We have only a general idea of current Kick individual combat capability, based on some of the videos we intercepted. But you know how much movies can vary from reality, and we don’t know if what we’ve seen are movies or documentaries. We also don’t know how many Kicks are still aboard that ship. I wouldn’t estimate less than a thousand, but it could be much more. A ship that size could hold ten thousand if they wanted to put that many aboard.”

  “Ten thousand?” Geary asked in amazement. “That’s your estimate of the crew size?”

  “No, sir. That’s our top end. The most plausible estimate of crew size is five or six thousand. That’s a lot of Kicks.” Carabali paused as she found her train of thought again. “We know nothing about the layout of the ship. During a normal boarding operation, my Marines would head for certain critical areas, gaining control of the power core controls, the bridge, and other vital places. We don’t know where those are in this ship or what form their controls take.”

  “We don’t even know if they have compartments like that as we understand them,” Geary agreed.

  “The internal layout . . .” Carabali shrugged. “The Kicks are a lot smaller than us. The size of their passageways might be very tight for a Marine in combat armor. Even if we have a firepower advantage on a Marine-to-Kick basis, employing that firepower might be difficult. It all add
s up to a very challenging operation, something more like an assault on a fort than a ship-boarding operation.”

  It wasn’t a pretty picture, but the Marine general hadn’t said it wasn’t doable. Indeed, she had said it could be done. The question remained whether the gains from seizing that ship justified the risks of trying to capture it. Captain Smythe and the civilian experts had already weighed in, all of them enthralled by the prospect of being able to exploit such a capture for information about the bear-cows and their technology.

  Conceivably, there might be the clues aboard the ship that could lead to human discovery of how to build that defense against orbital bombardment. The value of that one thing alone would justify almost any price. Almost any sacrifice. “But you can do it.” Geary made that a statement, not a question this time.

  “Yes, sir. Assuming the Kicks don’t blow the ship to hell before we can stop them. Before the landing operation can commence we’ll need to have the warship’s external defenses reduced, and we’ll need close support after that. That means significant fleet assets located near that huge ship, where they would also be endangered if it self-destructs.”

  “Understood.” He would be committing a lot of his limited numbers of ships and Marines to this attack. If the bear-cows were just waiting to lure in humans, then they could destroy everything that Geary sent into or close to that superbattleship. There was a real chance that he could take hideous losses and gain nothing.

  But if he didn’t take any risks, he was guaranteed to gain nothing, guaranteed to pass up the sort of opportunity that might never come again.

  “Begin your planning,” Geary ordered. “Assume you have use of any available assets. I’ll be planning to use every warship necessary to take down the alien defenses before the Marines go in. It’s going to be a dirty job, but I know you can do it.”

  Carabali saluted, smiling sardonically. “That’s why you have Marines along, to do the dirty jobs no one else wants or can do. When do you want my plan, Admiral?”

  “As soon as possible, but take the time you need to get it right. We’re not going anywhere until a lot more repairs have been done on our damaged ships.”