Jack Campbell: The Lost Fleet: Fearless

He’d lost everyone once. It could happen again. He didn’t want it to hurt so much the next time.

The fifth planet looked like exactly the sort of place made for a Syndic labor camp. Too far from its sun to ever know a true summer, most of the world seemed to be featureless fields of tundra that on rare occasions ran into bare, jagged mountain ranges rising like islands from the sea of low, tough vegetation. Glaciers extending from the poles appeared to hold a good portion of the planet’s water, with only shallow, small seas dotting the areas not covered by ice. Looking at the dismal place, Geary didn’t have any trouble understanding why Sutrah hadn’t been deemed worthy of the expense of a hypernet gate. Unless the fourth planet was an absolute paradise, which it certainly wasn’t since it was a shade too close to its sun and probably unpleasantly warm. Sutrah was just the sort of place that had ceased to matter when the Syndic hypernet was created.

Once, using the system jump drives that could take ships from star to star, anyone going anywhere had to traverse all of the star systems in between. Every one of those systems was guaranteed a certain amount of traffic passing through en route to other destinations. But the hypernet allowed ships to go directly from one star to another, no matter how far the distance between them. Without the ships passing through, and without any particular value other than as the homes of people who had suddenly found themselves living in nowhere, the systems off the hypernet were slowly dying, with everyone who could migrate moving to hypernet-linked systems. The human communities on the fifth planet of Sutrah were fading even faster than usual. Judging from what the Alliance sensors could see, fully two-thirds of the former habitations on the world were now vacant, showing no signs of heating or activity.

Geary focused back on the depiction of the labor camp on the fifth planet. There were mines nearby, which might represent actual economic value but also might exist solely as a place to work the life from the prisoners in the camp. There weren’t any walls, but then there didn’t have to be. Outside the camp was nothing but those empty fields of tundra. Escape would simply be suicide, unless someone tried to get out through the landing field, and there walls of razor wire did exist.

He became aware that Captain Desjani was waiting patiently for his attention. “Sorry, Captain. What do you think of my plan?” Geary, uncomfortable with trying to place his fleet in orbit about the planet, had put together a plan calling for the fleet to slow down, dropping the shuttles as it passed closest to the world, then looping around in a wide turn outside the orbits of the fifth planet’s small moons before returning again to pick up the shuttles as they returned with the liberated prisoners.

“The pickup would go quicker if we put ships in orbit,” Desjani suggested.

“Yeah.” Geary frowned at the display. “There’s no sign of minefields, we can’t see any major defensive weaponry on the planet, and even the Syndic military base there seems to be half shut down. But something’s still bothering me.”

Desjani nodded thoughtfully. “After the Syndic attempt to use merchant ships on suicide missions against us, it’s understandable to be worried about undetected threats.”

“The Syndics had time to lay that minefield trap for us. That means they also had time to try to conceal that labor camp or even try to move the prisoners in it. But there’s no sign they did that. Why? Because it’s bait far more attractive to us than those light warships near the jump point? The sort of thing we can’t pass up?”

“Yet there’s no sign of an ambush this time. No sign of anything that could strike at us.”

“No,” Geary agreed, wondering if he really was just being hypercautious. “Co-President Rione said the Syndic civilian planetary leaders she talked to seemed scared witless. But not a single military officer was available to talk.”

That made Desjani frown. “Interesting. But what could they be planning? If there was anything hidden, we should’ve spotted it.”

Geary tapped some controls irritably. “Let’s assume we do go into orbit. The fleet’s so big we’d have to be way out from the planet.”

“These moons will be an annoyance, but they’re not much bigger than asteroids. Any formations running past them can dodge easily enough since they’re traveling in a loose cluster and on fixed orbits.”

“Yeah, and we have to swing past the moons anyway, even with my plan.” He scowled at the display. Nothing he’d learned of the war since being rescued seemed to be helping, so Geary cast his mind back, trying to remember the lessons imparted to him by experienced officers long dead, the sort of professionals who’d been killed in the earliest decades of the war along with everyone they’d managed to teach their tricks of the trade. For some reason the sight of the small moons triggered memories of one such trick, a single ship hiding behind a much larger world to lunge out on a passing target. But that didn’t make sense. The moons of the fifth planet were too small for anything but a few light units to hide behind, and even suicide attacks by such small ships would fail against the massed might of the Alliance fleet, concentrated in a tight formation to minimize the distance the shuttles would have to travel.

But what had the commander of that other ship said? “If I’d been a snake, I could’ve bit you! I was right on top of you, and you didn’t even know it.”

Geary grinned unpleasantly. “I think I know what the Syndic military is planning, and why those civilians on the fifth world are so scared. Let’s make a few modifications to this plan of mine.”

The fifth world, which Geary had now learned had been given the poetic name Sutrah Five in typical Syndicate Worlds bureaucratic style, lay only thirty minutes away now at the Alliance fleet’s current velocity. Under his original plan, the fleet would have begun braking and swinging to port now, setting up a pass over the planet and inevitably crossing through the space where the moons of Sutrah were orbiting.

He glanced at the five moons again. They orbited in a cluster, only a few tens of thousands of kilometers from each other. Once upon a time they’d probably been a single large chunk of matter, but at some point tidal stresses from the fifth planet, or perhaps the near passage of some other large object, had torn that single moon into the five fragments.

Geary tapped his communications controls. “Captain Tulev, are your ships ready?”

“Standing by,” Tulev reported, his voice betraying no excitement.

“You may fire when ready,” Geary ordered.

“Understood. Firing projectiles now.”

On Geary’s display, large objects detached themselves from the bulks of Tulev’s ships, hurled forward by propulsion and guidance packs that boosted their speed a little higher than the nearly .1 light speed of the fleet.

Co-President Rione, occupying the observer’s seat on the bridge of the Dauntless , stared at Geary. “We’re firing? At what?”

“Those moons,” Geary advised. He noticed Captain Desjani trying to hide a smile at Rione’s surprise.

“The moons of the fifth world?” Co-President Rione’s voice expressed skeptical curiosity. “Do you have some particular dislike of moons, Captain Geary?”

“Not usually.” Geary got a perverse satisfaction out of knowing that Rione’s spies in his fleet hadn’t heard about this operation.

She waited, then finally unbent enough to ask more. “Why are you launching an attack on those moons?”

“Because I think they’re weapons.” Geary tapped some controls, bringing up magnified images of the moons, their surfaces resembling those of asteroids. “See this? Signs that excavation activity was conducted. Well-concealed, so we had to look for it to find it, but there it is.”