Jack Campbell - Victorious

He leaned forward, frowning more heavily, letting Desjani’s statements run through his mind. It was odd. Yes, they were dealing with something that didn’t think like humans did, but still seemed to be plenty merciless when it wanted. They didn’t know the aliens’ motivations, but nothing the aliens had done so far seemed outright irrational to humans even though examples like Kalixa showed that the aliens were definitely not merciful when it came to dealing with humans. The aliens seemed pragmatic, in the most cold-blooded sense of the word. Which didn’t make them demonic, it just made them self-interested, and humanity didn’t have a lot of room to criticize any other intelligent race in that regard. But Desjani had put her finger on the big question and focused Geary’s attention there as well instead of just on the looming threat of the alien armada. Why would a pragmatic race of aliens capable of ruthless acts show mercy to a human fleet they might have to face again someday?

If they were human, and offering the Alliance fleet this kind of escape, he would wonder why. What possible reasons could he consider? “If they want us to leave instead of destroying us, why?”

“I asked first,” Desjani replied. “I think we can assume they don’t have any moral qualms about destroying this fleet.”

“Not after they tricked us into building the hypernet gates, destroyed Kalixa, and tried to destroy the Syndic home star system while we were there, no.”

“And, they didn’t attack when the Syndics had the reserve flotilla here,” Desjani repeated.

True enough. “Meaning that flotilla was probably strong enough to concern them even though an alien fleet of the size we’re looking at could have easily overwhelmed the Syndic reserve flotilla. Which means we’re strong enough to concern them even if it doesn’t look that way to us.”

“Then,” Desjani concluded, “maybe they’re not as strong as they look, maybe they’re more concerned about being able to win than the odds indicate.”

That made sense, but why would the aliens be concerned when they had that many ships? Fear of casualties? But the aliens had fought the Syndics more than once. Maybe it was like the hypernet gate at the Syndic home star system. They were seeing something but not knowing what it meant. Like a Trojan horse of some kind. For some reason Geary didn’t understand, his mind kept fixing on the phrases he and Desjani had been using. It doesn’t look that way … maybe they’re not as strong as they look … “Look.” Why was his mind telling him that word was important?

It shouldn’t be. No one was actually looking directly at the aliens. Every observation came through the fleet’s sensors, and those sensors were very good, able to see much, much farther and much, much more clearly than any human eye could. Syndic sensors differed in small ways but were basically the same, and the Syndics had been trying to find out more about the aliens for decades, with no success to show for it.

Desjani must have been thinking along the same lines. She was frowning heavily at her display as she raised one hand and pointed her finger at it. “It looks like we’re badly outnumbered.”

“That’s what our sensors are telling us.”

“But what our sensors are telling us doesn’t make sense given everything else we know, given how the aliens have acted in the past, given how they’re acting now. If this picture is right, then everything else we know has to be wrong.”

He knew where she was going, toward the same conclusions Geary’s mind had been developing. “The Syndics think they know some things about the aliens, and what they think they know has driven their conclusions about what the aliens can do.” Like Boyens, certain that the aliens couldn’t have been responsible for collapsing the hypernet gate at Kalixa. Like the Syndics at the home star system, who had been unaware that their warships carried alien worms. “But we didn’t start our analysis of the aliens thinking we knew some things about them. Everything we think we know came from new observations, from learning and watching events, and I’d swear on the honor of my ancestors that our conclusions about the aliens and their actions, what we believe we know, isn’t wrong. So if those are all correct …”

“The picture we’re seeing has to be wrong,” Desjani concluded.

A Trojan horse. An unseen threat hidden within. And his attention, along with that of every other officer, was focused externally, on the alien armada. “We’ve scrubbed every one of our warships’ systems of those alien worms, right?”

Desjani nodded. “It’s part of the normal system security routines now.”

“Have we scrubbed our systems since we arrived here?”

She gave him a grim smile, then turned. “Lieutenant Castries, find out the last time the ship’s systems were scrubbed for quantum-probability worms.”

A startled Lieutenant Castries hastily checked. “Two days ago, Captain.”

“Before we first saw the aliens,” Geary commented.

Desjani nodded, her lips drawing back to expose her teeth in what wasn’t really a smile anymore. “Lieutenant, order the ship’s security personnel to run another detection routine, in all ship’s systems.”

“ All ship’s systems? Now, Captain?”

“Half an hour ago, Lieutenant.”

“Yes, ma’am!”

As the lieutenant raced to notify the systems-security officer and run the system scrub, Desjani gave Geary a sidelong glance. “They activated new worms.”

“I’ll lay you odds.”

“In the sensor systems. And the analysis systems. And the display systems.”

“Yup.”

“Because we have no idea how they create those worms. They could be somehow dormant and undetectable until an alien ship arrives and sends an activation signal. And if their ability to track the fleet was any clue, that activation signal moves faster than light, so those worms would have been activated before we even knew the aliens had arrived. All we would have ever seen was what they wanted us to see.”

Geary nodded. “It’s like you said, why aren’t they attacking when the odds favor them so much?”

“Because the odds aren’t what we think.” She looked into his eyes, grinning, and he felt it, too, the unparalleled feeling when someone else is totally in sync with you, filling in some parts of a puzzle while you fill in the rest, two minds working perfectly together. Her smile turned rueful. “We’re one hell of a team.”

“That we are.” He left it at that, and they both waited until a window popped up between them and a startled systems-security officer reported in.

“Captain, Admiral, we found a bunch of quantum-probability worms in the systems. Combat, sensors, maneuvering, analysis. Just ugly as all hell. I have no idea where they came from or what they’re doing, but we’re getting rid of them.”

Geary’s display flickered, then updated, wavered again, updated once more, each time large numbers of alien ships simply vanishing, the alien fleet dwindling as fast as the worms were wiped from Dauntless ’s systems. The alien ships that had recently appeared from nowhere vanished completely, while the great majority of the alien ships in the lower two v’s also disappeared.

Desjani’s fierce grin was now definitely a ferocious snarl. “We can see them.”

The blurring that had kept even the shapes of the alien spacecraft hidden had vanished, revealing that every alien ship, regardless of size, had roughly the same shape, blunter and more rounded than the human warships. If the human ships were sharklike, the alien craft more closely resembled spiny tortoises. “I’ll be damned. No wonder the alien stealth system always fooled the Syndics so well. It wasn’t anything on the alien ships. It was alien worms altering the picture the Syndics’ own sensors were seeing.”