The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Leviathan (29 page)

Desjani growled something in a voice so low that Geary could not make out the words.

“I am senior to you, Admiral Geary,” Bloch continued, trying to firm his voice as he spoke. “But even though I am the senior Alliance fleet officer in this star system, I will not insist upon assuming command of the forces here. Your command, your status, is safe from me. I have one shuttle left, which I can use to try to escape . . . my flagship. When the opportunity arises, I will use the shuttle to reach your forces or perhaps the government facility. I see you have Marines there. Excellent. Cover me as best you can. Together, we can destroy the Defender fleet.”

Bloch paused, his eyes haunted. “You may hesitate to accept my offer. I understand. You must realize that I know things. I can tell you who approved all of this, what orders I was given, and what understandings existed with which particular people. You want that, I am sure. And, most importantly for you, I know where Captain Michael Geary is.”

Geary wasn’t sure whether or not Tanya had gasped. His own attention was riveted on Bloch’s words.

“I can tell you where they’ve got him,” Bloch continued. “The Syndics. Just help me get off this . . . off my flagship and I will—”

His image vanished.

“What happened?” Geary demanded.

“The signal cut off clean,” the comm watch-stander said. “It must have been stopped at the source.”

“Admiral Bloch’s flagship figured out that he was plotting against it,” Desjani said. “Once enough word matches and phrases were identified, it pulled the plug on him. What’s the matter, Lieutenant Castries?”

“I’m sorry, Captain,” Castries replied, looking ill. “He’s a prisoner
on his own flagship? The idea of our ship turning against us, controlling us—”

“Yeah,” Desjani said. “Why would we give it the power to do that? Ask the idiots who keep coming up with the idea.”

“Do we know which ship the transmission came from?” Geary asked.

“Yes, Admiral. This one.”

On his display, one of the dark battle cruisers that had not been at Bhavan glowed brighter.

Geary shook his head, not sure whether to be angry or frustrated. “That confirms that whether or not Bloch came up with that ambush plan, he was not in command at Bhavan. But we can’t get him off that ship he is trapped on. All I can do is keep fighting the dark ships, and if Bloch sees a chance while I’m doing that, he can take it.”

“He wouldn’t have told you where Michael Geary was even if his flagship hadn’t cut Bloch off,” Desjani said. “That’s his biggest lever to get you to act on his behalf. He could always be lying about your grand-nephew being alive and in some Syndic labor camp,” she added. “Just to manipulate you to help him escape.”

“There’s no way of telling, and there is nothing I can do about it anyway. Do you think he was lying about the Armageddon Option?”

Desjani hesitated. “It sounds way too plausible. And it’s not like you needed more motivation to defeat the dark ships. But giving those ships the codes to enable them to use hypernet gates to destroy entire Alliance star systems? Who would do that?”

“Someone determined to pull everything down around them if they were losing,” Geary said. “It’s happened before, strategies designed to ensure that the victor inherited as little as possible, no matter the cost to the people on your own side. There are people I have met who I believe would adopt that idea. If the Syndics are going to own everything, destroy as much as you can to keep it from benefiting them.”

“How many billions of people in Alliance star systems would die?” Desjani demanded.

“If you’re a narcissist, that’s not the important thing,” Geary said, surprised at the viciousness in his voice. “All that matters is that you’ve lost, and you don’t want the winner to enjoy the victory. A few powerful people who didn’t care what would happen to many other people were in the right places to make that happen. We have to assume Bloch did not lie about the Armageddon Option and the gate codes. The dark ships must be destroyed before they can do those things.”

“Yes, sir.” Her smile held no humor, just agreement. “I don’t know how we can survive this, but we can do our best to ensure none of the dark ships survive, either. As long as we manage to take out one of the dark ships for every one of ours that gets destroyed, we’ll get the job done.”

He stared at his display as if concentration on it would somehow change what it portrayed. “Everything I was trained, everything I was taught, was to avoid that kind of fight. No decent commander engaged in that kind of ugly math.”

“What about a decent commander whose back is to the wall?” Desjani asked. “You got taught not to trade ship for ship. Your training has served this fleet well. But what’s our objective, Admiral?”

“Save the Alliance.”

“How do we do that, this time, without paying the necessary price? Doesn’t the decent commander do what is necessary to ensure that the sacrifice of his or her people is not in vain?”

He nodded. “That is true. But if I don’t set my attacks up right, we’ll lose our ships without taking out enough of the dark ships.”

“So do it right, Admiral.”

“Four formations,” Geary said. “Plus the Dancers. We’ll see how the dark ships handle that.”

With Desjani’s help and the simple-to-use features of his maneuvering display, Geary swiftly set up four formations, using all of the ships in his main body plus those which had been in Delta One. “All units in First Fleet, immediate execute, assume Formations Gamma One, Two, Three, and Four.”

The two Alliance groupings disintegrated, the hundreds of warships weaving onto new vectors to take their assigned places in the four new subformations. Each was in the shape of a thick coin or section of a cylinder, layers of warships that could engage in all directions and help defend each other.

Dauntless
,
Daring
,
Victorious
, and
Intemperate
were joined by
Illustrious
and
Incredible
along with half of the remaining heavy cruisers and a quarter of the destroyers to constitute Gamma One under command of Captain Desjani. Captain Tulev’s battle cruisers and those of Captain Duellos as well as the other heavy cruisers and another quarter of the destroyers formed Gamma Two under Tulev’s command. The Second, Third, and Fourth Battleship Divisions gathered with half of the surviving light cruisers and a quarter of the destroyers into Gamma Three commanded by Captain Jane Geary, while the Fifth, Seventh, and Eighth Battleship Divisions took the rest of the light cruisers and destroyers into Gamma Four under Captain Armus.

The four fat discs of Alliance warships were arrayed in a vertical diamond, Gamma One and Three in the middle, Gamma Two above, and Gamma Four below.

The Dancers had stayed well above Geary’s ships, and now were above and slightly ahead of Gamma Two.

The five dark ship formations were all coming in from behind the Alliance ships. As Geary’s forces swung through their wide arc, the dark ships were cutting across that arc, aiming to intercept the Alliance warships by slashing through the rear of the formations at an angle of about thirty degrees.

Geary took a moment to call Captain Tulev, Captain Jane Geary, and Captain Armus. “You need to know everything we have learned about this situation.” He described what he had been told by Admiral Bloch. “That defines our mission. We must stop the dark ships here. If
Dauntless
or myself are unable to continue the fight, you must do so,
and all of your individual ship commanders must do so. Every ship must continue this fight until every dark ship has been destroyed.”

They all nodded, Jane Geary looking stricken, and Armus bleak. Only Tulev replied in words. “To the last, Admiral.”

“To the last,” Geary agreed. The three captains saluted, he returned the gesture, then faced the battle once more.

Rearranging the Alliance warships had taken time, and Geary had held his velocity down to point one light speed during that period to help his ships take their assigned stations. He was also tired of running.

He gazed at his display, nerving himself for the sort of battle he had always sought to avoid. If they had to fight a battle of attrition, he was going to fight the best damned battle of attrition he possibly could.

“Ten minutes until the first of the dark ship formations overtakes us,” Lieutenant Castries reported. “All dark ship formations are projected to pass through the rear quarter of our formations within a span of five seconds, separated by an average of one second.”

“Textbook attack,” Desjani scoffed. “What are we going to do?”

“Mess up their textbook,” Geary said. “And then complicate their next moves.” He was entering maneuvering commands rapidly. “All units in Gamma One, Two, Three, and Four, execute attached maneuvers at time two five.”

With the dark ships racing to hit the Alliance subformations, Geary’s warships pivoted again under the push of their maneuvering thrusters, facing the enemy almost bow on, then using their main propulsion to shift their vectors. The coin-shaped formations had turned edge on toward the approaching dark ships.

The dark ships tried to adjust their own vectors to continue their planned attack, but Geary’s warships were already changing their approach again, aiming to counter the move that Geary knew he would have made if he were commanding the dark ships, the move the artificial intelligences would have been programmed to use in this situation.

He had concentrated his attacks against the dark ship formation
containing four battleships, using each of his formations to slice through the array of dark ships in even quicker succession than the dark ships had aimed at the Alliance forces. The dark ships were trying to shift vectors again, trying to bring their other four formations onto paths that would allow them shots at the Alliance formations that were ducking inside the curves of the dark ships’ approaches.

Gamma Four went through first, ten of Geary’s battleships against four of the dark ships. Despite the advantage in numbers, the superior firepower on the dark battleships and the accumulated damage on Geary’s battleships meant the forces were roughly equal. The battleships on both sides threw avalanches of fire at their enemies as the Alliance formation cut edge on through the rectangular dark ship formation.

If that had been it, the engagement would have been inconclusive. But on the heels of Gamma Four came Gamma Three, eleven more Alliance battleships hammering at the dark battleships that had just been flayed by Gamma Four. Overstressed shields collapsed on the dark battleships, hell lances and grapeshot penetrating to flash against the dark ships’ armor.

Reeling from those blows, the dark ships immediately faced the seven battle cruisers of Gamma Two. Battle cruisers didn’t have the same punch as battleships, but they were hitting dark ships that had already been struck by two attacks within seconds. Tulev’s and Duellos’s warships slammed shots into the dark warships, then as they raced onward, Gamma One came through, another six battle cruisers striking enemies reeling from the prior blows.

As the Alliance formations and the dark ship formations separated and tore away in different directions, Geary ordered more course changes even before seeing the results of the attacks. Gamma Four stayed on the same vector, sliding in a vast curve opposite its former path. Gamma Three pushed its main propulsion units, forcing its warships into a tighter curve, and also angling upward. Gamma Two let
momentum carry its ships in a wider curve and down. And Gamma One began coming about under full thrust from its battle cruisers’ main propulsion to climb between the other three formations at an angle to them.

Then he looked back, seeing what had happened in those flashes of combat.

Two of the dark battleships were knocked out, one drifting helpless and the other one torn apart. The dark ship formation had also lost two heavy cruisers, three light cruisers, and a dozen destroyers.

Gamma Four, the first Alliance formation to face the dark battleships, had not come off unscathed.
Amazon
had taken the brunt of the dark ships’ fire and was rolling slowly through space at a slight angle to her previous vector, unable to maneuver, many of her weapons knocked out. Captain Armus’s
Colossus
had also taken a lot of hits but was in good enough shape to remain with the formation and continue in the fight. Heavy cruiser
Turret
was gone, along with light cruisers
Chase
,
Corona
, and
Foin
. Amazingly, only one destroyer,
Annellet
, had been lost.

An image appeared before Geary, an officer in a survival suit, on the darkened and damaged bridge of a battleship. “Commander Choiseul reporting in. Captain Penthe is dead.
Amazon
’s power core is damaged and unstable. We are conducting an emergency shutdown. All propulsion is out. Most weapons destroyed. Given dark ship targeting of escape pods in previous engagements, I have refrained from ordering personnel to abandon ship, but if it becomes obvious that
Amazon
is about to be destroyed, I will order the escape pods launched. To the honor of our ancestors, Choiseul, out.”

The image vanished.

One of the dark ship formations, the one holding ten battle cruisers, had bent through the tightest turn it could manage, clearly aiming to finish off
Amazon
.

“They’re giving us an opening,” Desjani said quickly.

“I see it.” The two Alliance battleship formations could not alter vectors quickly enough to engage the dark battle cruisers, but Geary’s battle cruisers could. “Gamma Two,” he sent, “intercept the dark battle cruisers targeting
Amazon
. Gamma One will assist.”

Geary looked over at Desjani. “Captain, this one is yours.”

“Yes, sir.” She didn’t sound as exultant as she usually did when given such an opportunity. Tanya instead radiated grim determination as she gave orders that continued Gamma One’s turn and bent the vector downward again.

Gamma Two had dramatically tightened its turn, also coming up, as Tulev’s
Leviathan
led the charge to assist Amazon’s survivors.