The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Guardian (24 page)

He paused, thinking again. “Madam Emissary, would you contact the senior Syndic CEO in this star system and register a formal complaint about aggression by those warships against an Alliance fleet?”

Rione raised her eyebrows at him. “You know what the answer will be. The senior Syndic CEO will claim those warships are not Syndic.”

Geary nodded. “Yes, but those warships are also claiming to be under the control of
this
star system. That would make that senior CEO responsible regardless. I want to see what they say about that.”

“An interesting suggestion, Admiral.” Rione beckoned to Charban. “Let’s go send that message. We’ll talk about how to word it on the way to the conference room.”

But she paused as the specter missiles from Tulev’s battle cruisers began impacting on the derelicts. Some of the explosions were appropriate to the impact, the warheads of the missiles combining with the kinetic energy of the missile itself to blow apart ships that were already rickety.

Of the seven derelicts hit, however, four blew apart with much greater force than missile warhead and impact could explain. Geary watched the spread of shrapnel and high-velocity particles from the explosions, feeling cold satisfaction at having guessed right. Those derelicts had been weapons, planted across the path of the Alliance fleet, kept on station by maneuvering capabilities that mines could not match.

Rione sketched a brief, half-mocking salute Geary’s way, then left the bridge with Charban.

Geary kept his eyes on his display as the fleet coalesced into the tight sphere of the Armadillo formation. The four groups of new Syndic warships, apparently uncertain as to what the Alliance ships were doing, had all swung off from intercepts and were proceeding to positions at different points around the Alliance formation. He had a mental image of frustrated mosquitoes swarming around an impenetrable mesh of netting.

No. That’s wrong. That image assumes that those Syndic warships aren’t still a danger. I can’t be sure of that. I don’t know what else the Syndics might pull now that they can’t fight me on conventional terms. They used suicide attacks, a boarding operation, and a minefield at Sobek. That’s what we know of. What else is here?

“So far they haven’t repeated themselves,” Desjani mused.

Had he spoken that last aloud or was Tanya reading his mind again? “What else can those warships do?” Geary asked.

“Distract us?” She asked that as alerts sounded.

The vectors of all four groups of warships were changing as they swung around and accelerated toward different parts of the Alliance formation.

“They shouldn’t be able to damage the hide of the Alliance Armadillo!” Desjani observed with overstated bravado. Muffled laughter sounded from the back of the bridge as assorted lieutenants and other watch-standers absorbed their captain’s joke.

Geary ignored the mockery as he ran a couple of quick simulations. “Even if they go onto suicide vectors, we’ve got a tight enough formation with enough firepower on the outside to be able to blow them apart before they penetrate our, uh, formation.” He had almost said “hide,” which would have only reinforced Desjani’s joke.

As it was, he had a bad feeling that he would be hearing comments about the Alliance Armadillo for years to come.

Despite his certainty that the defensive arrangement of ships would frustrate the Syndic attackers, Geary still felt tense as the four groups of ships swung in against different parts of the outer shell of the Alliance formation. The Syndics bored in, entering the Alliance missile envelopes, and specters began leaping from the nearest Alliance warships.

But the Syndics pitched around and climbed or dove away almost as soon as they had entered missile range. Geary watched, angry, as dozens of missiles were wasted, their targets zooming out of range. “I should have guessed they’d do something like that.”

“They won’t get away with it again,” Desjani assured him. “I recommend you tell the ships to hold missile fire until the Syndics are too close to evade out of range.”

“Yeah. Good idea.” He transmitted the orders, glaring at his display. It wasn’t a stalemate. As long as the Alliance ships kept moving, they would reach the next jump point and leave Simur. But it felt like a stalemate as the Syndic warships bent their vectors back toward the Alliance formation again. “They may not be able to hurt us, but they’ve got the initiative. I don’t want to give them time to think up something.”

“Hmmm,” Desjani murmured. She hesitated as a thought struck her, then leaned toward her display, watching intently as she entered commands. “They’re using automated maneuvering. I’m sure of it.”

“How can you be sure?” Geary asked.

“The movements are extremely precise. Every ship moves at the exact same moment, and every maneuver is identical for every ship. Do a replay of their tracks when those four groups last came at us, then overlay the tracks of all four groups on each other.”

“Identical,” Geary said. “Not just each ship, the entire formation. The exact same approach vector and the same avoidance vector.”

“They’re new,” Desjani insisted. “Not just the ships. The crews. They don’t have the training to maneuver manually, so they’re letting their automated systems handle everything. Maybe they’ve got orders to do that. But if they’re using automated systems, then those systems will have patterns.”

“How long will it take us to analyze those patterns?”

She paused, then made an uncertain gesture. “A while. We’ll need examples of their attack patterns. I don’t know how many. Eventually, our combat systems will be able to predict their movements.”

“Eventually.” Hanging around Simur waiting an indefinite period while Syndic warships made repeated passes at his formation didn’t sound like a worthwhile strategy. His fleet wouldn’t be happy with remaining on the defensive while the Syndics nipped at the Alliance formation, but if the fleet kept heading home, that should counteract the unhappiness to a considerable extent. He still had to worry about getting the Dancers, and
Invincible
, safely back to Alliance territory. “Tanya, let’s aim for the jump point for Padronis. Circuitous path, just in case there are any more surprises in this star system.”

Desjani paused again, but whatever she planned to say was interrupted by a call to Geary from the intelligence compartment on
Dauntless
.

Lieutenant Iger looked almost apologetic. “Admiral, there’s a new POW camp here. A really big one, on the habitable planet, and there are Alliance military personnel there.”

HIS
head beginning to throb in time to a familiar headache, Geary rubbed one hand hard against his forehead. “There wasn’t before.”

“Not the last time the Alliance attacked this star system, no, sir.” Images appeared next to Iger. “This is new. Recent construction on the habitable world.”

Geary studied the images, seeing large barracks and warehouses arranged in a pattern that had become familiar. The new camp was located far from any of the cities on the planet, in an especially desolate region of the generally desolate planet. That also matched Syndic practice, which placed their prison and labor camps either close to a city or in the middle of nowhere. “It looks like a Syndic POW camp,” he conceded.

“We’ve also intercepted Syndic communications that indicate the camp was recently constructed as a central location for housing Alliance prisoners of war brought from smaller camps in other star systems,” Iger continued.

“They’re supposed to be turning those prisoners over to the Alliance as part of the peace agreement,” Geary said. “Why build a new camp here?”

“Admiral . . . perhaps the Syndics don’t intend to honor that part of the peace agreement.”

If that was so, it would be part and parcel of Syndic behavior as far as every other portion of the peace agreement was concerned. “How many POWs are here?”

“As many as twenty thousand, Admiral.”

“Twenty thousand?” Finding room on his ships for that many liberated prisoners would be extremely difficult.

“That’s the top end, Admiral, what the camp was designed to hold. The Syndic comms we’ve intercepted since arriving at Simur indicate thousands of Alliance prisoners are there, but we don’t know how many.”

Thousands. That was enough. Hundreds would be enough. Maybe even a couple would be enough.
There is so much we can’t do, but we can liberate prisoners still being held after the war that justified their imprisonment is over.

“Thank you, Lieutenant.” Geary sat back, rubbing his eyes with both hands, after Iger’s image vanished.

Desjani’s voice came from beside him. “This really stinks.”

“It does, doesn’t it?”

“Thousands of Alliance POWs. In a new camp. In a star system we had to come home through.”

It stank as badly as any bait could. “What’s the trap, though?” Geary asked.

“Do we want to find out?”

“Do we have any choice?” He called Rione. “Madam Emissary, we need to talk to the senior Syndic CEO in this star system about a prison camp.”

—

IT
took hours for Rione’s message to reach the habitable world where the Syndic CEO was probably located, and hours more for a reply to be received. Geary made good use of the time by heading his fleet inward toward the star and the habitable world.

The four Syndic ship groups made repeated passes at the fleet during that time, trying to provoke some response from the Alliance formation, but Geary held his fire, waiting for the Syndics to come in close enough to be attacked. They didn’t come near enough, and he didn’t let any of his ships leave formation to pursue the Syndics, so the stalemate continued. The fact that the Syndics were also being frustrated provided only a marginal sense of satisfaction.

The fleet had started out near the edges of the Simur Star System, about five light-hours from the star. The habitable world orbited about seven light-minutes from the star, so the curved trajectory that would intercept the habitable world was five point one light-hours long. Geary held the fleet’s velocity to point one light speed, which produced a travel time of fifty-one hours. Even at a speed of thirty thousand kilometers per second, the distances inside star systems took a while to cross. If the fleet had been limited to that velocity in journeying to the closest star to Simur, it would have required thirty-eight years of travel to reach Padronis at a distance of three point eight light-years.

“We have a reply,” Rione’s image said, her voice giving no clue as to the nature of the reply. “Do you want to see it?”

He was on
Dauntless
’s bridge, so Geary activated his privacy field, making sure it included Tanya so that she could hear and see the message as well. “Sure. Relay it to me.”

Another virtual window appeared next to the one that held Rione’s image. Geary found himself looking at a very stern-faced, elderly woman in a Syndic CEO suit. The suit, while immaculately tailored as CEO suits always were, appeared a bit worn, betraying how long it had been since the senior CEO at Simur could afford to replace her outfit.

The female CEO spoke in clipped tones, as if biting off the end of each word. “I must protest the aggressive actions of the Alliance armed forces in this star system. Only the commitment of the Syndicate Worlds to honoring the letter and spirit of the peace agreement between our two peoples restrains me from ordering an appropriate response to your fleet’s movements.”

He tried not to get angry, which would only make it harder to spot subtle clues in the words and actions of the Syndic CEO. But even through his attempts to stay calm and observant, Geary noticed that this CEO sounded slightly different, her posture not the same. She was speaking, he realized, not just to him but to some other audience.

“The mobile forces whose actions you protest are not under my control,” the Syndic CEO continued. Somehow, those words held an uncharacteristic ring of truth. Had there been a tiny extra emphasis on the word “my”?

“I can do nothing to stop them, I have not ordered them to harass you, they are not Syndicate Worlds’ mobile forces, and therefore I regard this as a matter between you and whoever commands those mobile forces.”

The CEO gestured impatiently, one hand flinging outward in a practiced move that must have terrified her subordinates for decades. “As to the prison camp, I am aware of the obligations incurred by the Syndicate Worlds under the peace agreement. I am nonetheless extremely unhappy to have you demanding the release of those prisoners instead of offering to discuss the issue. You have doubtless seen that we have inadequate defenses in this star system, so I cannot resist your demand to yield the prisoners of war to you. However, neither will I cooperate. Bring your fleet here, use your own means to lift the prisoners to it, then depart, the sooner the better. I will be just as glad not to have six thousand additional mouths to worry about feeding.

“For the people, Gawzi, out.”

As was usually the case with senior Syndics, the phrase “for the people” was uttered like a single, rushed word, lacking any meaning or feeling. Geary had almost stopped noticing that, until hearing the phrase recited with enthusiasm at Midway had reminded him that it could mean something.

Rione was waiting for his comments, looking mildly impatient. “What do you think of that message?” Geary asked. “That CEO sounded a little different to me.”

“That’s because someone is holding a gun to her head,” Rione replied.

“In what sense?”

“In a literal sense. There’s someone near her, but outside the transmission image, who is threatening her. It’s obvious.”

There were times when Rione’s ability to recognize situations could be disturbing. He couldn’t help wondering where she had gained experience in this particular situation. “Those internal-security people?”

She nodded judiciously. “Most likely. The ones the Syndic citizens call snakes. We can safely assume that they are running this star system right now. Not simply pulling strings from behind a curtain but overtly forcing actions.”

“If that’s so,” Geary said, “the internal security here is forcing the CEO to invite us to come get prisoners out of that camp.”

Rione nodded again. “It wasn’t a very nice invitation, but the way she formed it as a challenge to us was interesting. And she sent confirmation that Alliance prisoners are indeed there. Six thousand of them.”

“They want us there.”

“Indeed. But from what I understand, her statement that she lacks the means to resist us is accurate. The prisoners had better be very carefully screened for pathogens, nanoparticles, or any other form of human-transported sabotage.”

“Thank you.” Geary drummed his fingers on the arm of his seat for a few seconds, frowning, then glanced at Desjani.

She shrugged. “That’s as good a guess as any. They can’t do anything else, so they’ll try to sneak some kind of plague aboard our ships.”

“Isn’t that too obvious?”

“They’ve got four groups of obviously Syndic warships attacking us. and they’re claiming they can’t control them because they’re not really Syndic warships,” Desjani pointed out. “Obviousness doesn’t seem to worry them.”

“Yeah.” He hit another control. “Lieutenant Iger. Do we have anything new?”

“No new threats identified, Admiral.” Iger smiled slightly. “There are a few messages we’ve intercepted that indicate the locals are not happy about what the Syndic authorities are doing. This one from an orbiting mining facility near the gas giant is typical.”

Another image, this of a middle-aged man in a shabby executive suit. “They’re leaving us wide open for retaliatory bombardments! We received no warning, no opportunity to evacuate, and we don’t have enough lift capacity here to get everyone out! Am I just supposed to abandon half of my workers and their families? We don’t even have any defenses since they were never rebuilt after the last Alliance attack! Can’t someone stop those Syndicate mobile forces from provoking the Alliance?”

Geary didn’t feel like smiling. He knew why Iger did, and why Desjani probably would have grinned at the Syndic manager’s distress.
Serves them right,
those who had endured a lifetime of war would think.
They started it, they bombarded us countless times, they killed countless numbers of our people, and now they deserve to sweat as they wonder when our rocks will come down like vengeful hammers from the sky.

But he didn’t feel that way.
As much as I wanted to get back at the Syndics at Sobek, they had been cooperating with the attacks on us. Or their leaders had been doing that, anyway. But these people are helpless. That Syndic manager is worried about the people who work for him. He and they are just pawns in whatever the Syndic government is doing. Even the Syndic CEO here is being coerced into something.

“All right,” Geary said. “Is that all?”

“There are other messages like that,” Iger offered. “Otherwise, just the usual welter of fragmentary information. We can break out portions of coded messages and pick up open conversations where individuals talk about classified matters, but none of that adds up to any threat that we can identify.”

“Master Chief Gioninni hasn’t come up with anything else,” Desjani noted. “I was going to give him access to the intel summaries, but it turned out he’d already read them.”

“What was that?” Lieutenant Iger asked, alarmed. “The access list for
Dauntless
doesn’t include Master Chief Gioninni.”

“Isn’t
that
odd? Don’t worry about it, Lieutenant.”

“Maybe what we need isn’t just a scheming mind,” Geary said, before an aghast Iger could ask more questions about Gioninni. “Maybe what we need is someone who can spot—”
Someone who can spot patterns in a mess of data. Someone who can see things concealed in a confusing welter of detail.

And we’ve got that someone.

“Lieutenant Iger, you are to transmit to
Tanuki
all intelligence collected within this star system since our arrival. Mark it eyes only for Lieutenant Elysia Jamenson.”

Iger, appalled this time, stared back at Geary. “All intelligence? Admiral, who is this Lieutenant Jamenson?”

“An engineer.”

“An engine—” Iger caught himself and spoke with forced control. “Sir, the classification on some of this material—”

“I am aware of the classification and security concerns. On my authority as fleet commander, I am authorizing Lieutenant Jamenson access to any necessary level of data effective immediately. Make sure she sees everything you’ve collected here. Send to
Tanuki
any necessary read-in documents and security agreements she has to sign. Get this done quickly, Lieutenant Iger.”

“Quickly. Yes, sir.” Despite his words, Iger hesitated. “Admiral, I feel obligated to advise you that this action may result in serious ramifications when we return to Alliance space. Even though you have authority to do this, there may be strong questions raised as to the appropriateness of your decision.”

“I’ll assume that responsibility,” Geary said. “And, for the record, I want it to be clear that you properly advised me regarding your misgivings and that I acknowledged them. This is my decision.”

“Yes, sir. We will get the information package together and have it sent to
Tanuki
as soon as possible.”

“Make it quick,” Geary emphasized again.

Desjani was giving him a fish eye, but he ignored that for the moment as Iger’s image disappeared, instead calling
Tanuki
. “Captain Smythe, I need Lieutenant Jamenson. Don’t worry. It’s a temporary assignment, on my word of honor. There will be a package of intel information coming to
Tanuki
soon, eyes only for Lieutenant Jamenson. I want her to go over it and tell me what she sees.”

Smythe’s expression had shifted through worry to puzzlement and now surprise. “Intelligence material? Lieutenant Jamenson is very good at what she does, Admiral, but that is not something she has experience with.”

“I’m aware of that. But we’re dealing with new tactics by the enemy, and I want to see what a new perspective might spot among the information we have.”

“Very well, Admiral.” Smythe had a calculating look in his eyes. Geary could guess what he was thinking.
Is Jamenson even more valuable than I thought?

“Thank you, Captain Smythe. I have every confidence that I can count on you,” Geary said, emphasizing every word.

Smythe jerked as if the phrase had stung him, then smiled. “Of course, Admiral.”

Geary ended the call, then looked at Desjani, who was giving him a flat look. “Lieutenant Jamenson?” she asked. “The one with the green hair?”