The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Steadfast (4 page)

“He’s not bad,” the engineer said. “Got a decent feel for the bird. Only crashed once since I’ve known him.”

“That wasn’t a crash,” the pilot replied, his voice sharp. “It was an abrupt landing aggravated by adverse conditions.”

“Glad to hear it,” Desjani said. “Because it’s up to you to get us through those guys. What do I tell
Dauntless
, Admiral?”

He knew what she meant.
Do I give the Alliance battle cruiser permission to fire on the three pursuers if necessary?
It shouldn’t have been that hard a question to answer; except from the way these people of Earth had reacted to the idea it was clear that doing so would cause a huge outcry, far greater than any upset over the annihilation of the Shield of Sol ships in the outer reaches of the star system.

“Just tell
Dauntless
to get here as quickly as she can,” Geary said.

“She’s coming around the curve of the planet now and braking to match velocity with us. Estimate three more minutes until we’re along-side.”

The shuttle lurched up, swinging to the left as it did so. “Weren’t expecting that, were you?” the pilot muttered fiercely, his eyes fixed on the display over Desjani’s comm unit.

The closest hunter slid past just beneath them, not realizing it had missed by a few hundred meters getting close enough to establish a firm lock on the shuttle’s position.

But the evasive maneuver had brought them up toward the higher hunter, and now the pilot brought the shuttle back down with a swift change in vector. “They’ll see that!” the flight engineer warned the pilot. “You’re maneuvering too hard.”

“I know! They’re getting too close! We can’t hide any longer. Our only chance is to keep dodging away from them until that battle cruiser gets here!”

“But they might—”

“I don’t have any other options!”

The shuttle ducked and darted through space, evading each time one of the hunters threatened to get too close, maneuvers complicated by the need to avoid hitting anything else around them. Geary’s breath caught as they zipped over a stodgy tug plodding obliviously through space, then narrowly avoided hitting a satellite racing along on its fixed orbit. Despite the pilot’s evasive moves, the net kept tightening around them, the distances to the pursuers shrinking as they gradually converged on the desperate flight of the shuttle.

“One minute until
Dauntless
gets here,” Desjani reported.

A high-pitched keening sounded just as she finished speaking. The flight engineer silenced the alarm and called to the pilot. “They’re targeting us! Trying for a lock-on!”

“Try active jamming!”

“If I do, they’ll fire on the jamming source! We wouldn’t last five seconds! I’m doing all I can with passive countermeasures.”

“
Dauntless
,” Desjani said in a voice whose calm tone contrasted with the frantic words of the pilot and the flight engineer. “We are being targeted. I see you forty seconds from intercept, stern on. Override the collision-avoidance systems and maximize after shields. Your relative speed at contact should be enough to brush aside the two closest of our pursuers without hazarding the ship.”

“Captain?” the reply came. “We can nail them with hell lances easy.”

“Firing is not authorized,” Desjani said.

“Captain, just to be clear, you are directing us to make shield contact with the closest pursuers of your shuttle.”

“That’s correct. Do it.”

“Follow your captain’s orders,” Geary said, leaning in toward her comm unit.
I just concurred in ordering my flagship to deliberately collide with other spacecraft.
“Are you sure?” he muttered to Desjani.

“I know my ship,” she insisted. “And I know maneuvering in space. Right now, those guys after us are moving just a little faster than we are and in the same direction, so they can stay close.
Dauntless
is slowing to match our speed, so when her shields make contact with any of them, the impact should be at a relative velocity of only about ten meters per second and dropping.”

“About ten meters per second? There’s a significant amount of mass in whatever is hunting us. That will still be a dangerous impact.”

“
Dauntless
’s shields can handle it.”

It was one of those moments in which he either accepted her judgment or undercut her, and he knew that Tanya had a lot more combat experience than he did, as well as a lot more experience with current warships. “All right.”

“Steady out,” Desjani ordered the pilot. “Get on a vector and hold it. I don’t want my ship hitting you, too, because you’re bouncing around.”

With a stunned look at her, the pilot did as he was told, settling the shuttle onto a single course and speed. Almost instantly, the three pursuers, unaware of how accurately they were being tracked by
Dauntless
, turned onto intercept vectors that would get them close enough to lock onto the stealthed shuttle and open fire.

A bright star coming toward them grew rapidly in size as the remaining distance dwindled,
Dauntless
’s main propulsion units straining at full capacity to reduce her speed to match that of the shuttle. Her dark, shark-shaped hull was invisible behind the hellish glare from the propulsion units.

One of the pursuers, with less nerve or more brains than its companions, broke off and accelerated away moments before
Dauntless
slid with enormous grace and enormous mass into position next to the shuttle. One of the pursuers took a glancing blow from the battle cruiser’s shields, knocking it off in a wild tumble as the craft’s stealth systems failed under the impact and made clear to all there was a small vessel careening uncontrolled among them. Other ships and craft frantically dodged the wreckage, filling emergency communications with warnings and complaints about the sudden appearance of a navigational hazard.

The third pursuer wasn’t nearly so lucky.
Dauntless
hit it almost dead center on her stern, bracketed by the energies being hurled out by the battle cruiser’s main propulsion units. The craft blew backwards under the impact, disintegrating as it went, the pieces, most of them too small for anyone to worry about evading, showing up easily now to all observers.

The pilot and flight engineer were staring at the menacing bulk of
Dauntless
next to them as if fearing they would be next.

“My ship is opening up her shuttle dock,” Desjani told them with a smile. “Drop your stealth systems, and they’ll guide you in.”

 • • • 

AS
Geary and Desjani walked down the ramp off the shuttle, the sound of six distinct bells resounded through the dock, followed by the announcement “Admiral, Alliance fleet, arriving,” then four more bells and “
Dauntless
, arriving.”

“No damage from the, uh, accidental collisions,” the battle cruiser’s second in command reported, saluting, his expression unaccountably grim despite that good news.

“Well done,” Desjani said, with a brief I-told-you-my-ship-could-do-it glance at Geary. “A lot of people saw those collisions. We’ll file a standard collision report with the Sol Star System authorities about encountering stealthed craft we could not see in time to avoid. With their reverence for rules here, the local authorities are certain to still abide by the one that says stealth craft are obligated to stay clear of all others, and any collision is automatically their fault. Is everyone else back?”

“No, Captain. We’re short two officers. Lieutenant Castries and Lieutenant Yuon. They didn’t report back on time to the shuttle that returned their group, and local authorities have so far failed to locate them.”

“Why wasn’t I informed earlier?” Desjani said in a low, angry voice.

“I was waiting on a report from the local authorities, Captain,” her second in command replied, both his posture and his voice stiffening. “When I tried notifying you, you were already aboard this shuttle.”

“Why did you wait on a report from the locals?” Desjani asked.

“Because we thought that they might have decided to elope, and the locals were certain they could locate them quickly.”

“Castries and Yuon? When did they become a couple?”

“They haven’t, officially, Captain. They’re usually arguing, though.”

“Oh, for the love of my ancestors! That is
not
a surefire sign of pending romance! I want to find those two lieutenants now. If they were civilians, they might be eloping,” Desjani said. “Since they’re officers in the Alliance fleet, they would instead be deserting. But I don’t like this. It doesn’t match what I know of Castries or Yuon. I take it the locals didn’t find them yet?”

“No, Captain. But they remain confident that they will find them within an hour. Old Earth is laced with so many surveillance networks that just about everything anyone does gets spotted.”

“It sounds like a Syndic planet,” Desjani grumbled.

“All of the senators are back?” Geary asked.

“Yes, Admiral. And both envoys as well. We didn’t have time to tell the Dancer ships what we were doing, but they stuck with us when we came for you, holding position exactly one hundred kilometers from us through every maneuver we did, so they are also accounted for.”

Among those awaiting them was Master Chief Gioninni, carrying a bottle. Desjani beckoned to Gioninni and examined the bottle. “Whiskey from Vernon? Is this from the ship’s supply?”

“Yes, Captain, properly signed for and everything,” Gioninni assured her with a slight wariness as he judged her mood. “You know the tradition. When sailors get rescued, the ship pays a ransom to whoever picked them up. From what I hear, the folks on this bird deserve the ransom.”

“They do,” Desjani agreed. “But we’ll hold them here while you also get some beer sent to the dock. We owe Lady Vitali a ransom, too.”

“Beer, Captain?”

“Yes, Master Chief. The good stuff. Not from the officers’ supply. Get it from the chiefs’ supply.”

“If you say so, Captain. I will, uh, have to charge—”

“I’m sure I can count on you to take care of the paperwork, Master Chief,” Desjani said. As Gioninni hastened off to do her bidding, she looked at Geary again. “He’ll write off twice as much beer as he actually provides to the shuttle.”

“I was wondering why you were trusting Gioninni to play it straight in the face of that kind of temptation and how large his profit margin would be. Are you going to nail him for it?”

“Not for that, but I’ll use it to make him cough up the extra bottle of whiskey he surely pulled out of our stocks when he got that one. He won’t have left any tracks, so it’s the only way I’ll get the extra bottle back. Do you think my missing lieutenants fell afoul of the same sort of people who came after us?”

“Let’s hope not. But if Castries and Yuon did, the locals may be our best hope for locating them.”

“That was my thought,” Desjani said. “Which is why I approved of Gioninni’s ransom payment and sweetened it a little.”

Several minutes later, they watched the shuttle depart and begin its dive back into the atmosphere of Old Earth, lighter by two passengers and heavier by bottles of some of the best whiskey and the best beer the Alliance had to offer.

“So much for our vacation,” Desjani commented. “For some reason, I don’t feel very rested. I hope you’re not too eager to leave, Admiral.”

“No, Captain,” Geary said. “Even if we weren’t waiting to hear more from the locals, I don’t want anyone thinking we’re bolting out of here as if we were guilty or scared. We’ll hold here for at least the next few hours. That will also give us time for the envoys to get across to the Dancers that we’re leaving Home and heading back to our homes.”

She saluted, all formality again now that they were back aboard her ship. “Yes, sir. I’ll pass that on to General Charban as soon as I get to the bridge.”

“Thank you, Captain. I’m going to drop off my gear in my stateroom, then I’ll join you on the bridge.” He returned the salute, then left the shuttle dock, walking through the now-familiar and comforting passageways of
Dauntless
, passing officers and sailors and Marines whom he knew by sight and in most cases by name now. Technically, Old Earth was Home to all humanity, and, technically, Geary’s personal home was on the planet Glenlyon in the star system of the same name. But the reality was that
Dauntless
was as close to a real home as he had in this time a century removed from his own.

And he had become increasingly grateful for that.

 • • • 

HE
found Alliance Envoy Victoria Rione waiting at the hatch to his stateroom. “Did you get the message about talking to the Dancers?” he asked. She had been visiting locations on Earth for the past week as well, supposedly just as a tourist/touring representative of the Alliance, but he suspected Rione had been up to more than that.

“Yes,” she replied. “Charban is handling it. There is something else we need to talk about.”

“The missing lieutenants?”

“Among other things.”

“Good. There’s something else I need to ask you as well,” he said, waving her inside the stateroom and following her. He didn’t feel an urgent need to reach the bridge despite his concerns for Castries and Yuon. If any word came about them, it would reach him just as quickly here as on the bridge, and Rione might have some important information. “Have a seat.”

She had already made herself at home, lounging into one of the seats around the low table in the stateroom. “I understand that you had an interesting trip back to the ship.”

“It wasn’t boring. And I understand you had a working vacation on Old Earth,” Geary observed, sitting down across from her.

Rione gave him a blandly uncomprehending look. “Why do you say that?”

“We encountered Lady Vitali.”

“Lady Vitali of Essex? I hear she throws a good party.”

“She does. But I want to know how Lady Vitali knew to tell me the name Anna Cresida when I needed to know whether or not to trust her.”

Rione studied him, her eyes hooded with calculation, then shrugged and made a casting-away gesture with one hand. “I told her. One of my clandestine assignments on this mission, one I’m not supposed to let you know about, was to establish ties with some of the governments in Sol Star System. Our experience with the surprise attack by the Shield of Sol ships only emphasized the importance of that task. Lady Vitali is one of those contacts who struck me as potentially very useful to us.”