Jack Campbell: The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Steadfast

“Those Shield of Sol people from the outer stars?” Desjani asked.

“Possibly. The ones who escaped being killed by you didn’t know why their late and unlamented senior officer was so keen on attacking your ship, and we can’t ask that senior officer because, unfortunately, the technology available to us is not capable of reconstituting bodies and brains that have been blasted into their component atoms. You might be a little less thorough in your destruction of your opponents next time, Captain.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” Desjani hefted her bag and held Geary’s out to him.

He took the bag, then studied Lady Vitali. “How did you manage to get things done so quickly tonight despite the bureaucracy and red tape you spoke of earlier?”

Lady Vitali’s broad smile was back. “You would be amazed what can be done with the right combination of ingenuity, threats, and promises, Admiral. Or maybe you wouldn’t be surprised if half of what we’ve heard of you is true. If I discover anything about the source of this threat to you, I will send it on, though it may take a long while to reach you given the distance involved and lack of routine traffic between our home and yours.”

“Understood. Thank you. We’re in your debt.”

“Oh, nonsense. If you believe that you owe me anything, then if I ever reach your neighborhood, point me in the direction of the best beer.”

As they reached a side door of the castle, moving in silence through narrow stone corridors with just a dim light held by Lady Vitali, Geary wondered how many times others had fled this castle in centuries past, their flight perhaps illuminated by torches rather than modern lights, horses rather than a shuttle their method of escape. For a moment he felt displaced in time, so that he would not have been surprised if there had indeed been saddled horses awaiting them beyond the walls of the castle.

Once out near the landing area, one wall of the castle rising behind them and everything else shadowed by the night, the glamour of their late-night getaway faded abruptly, and worries set in once more. Could Lady Vitali really be trusted? Could this be a plot to get him and Tanya out in the open, where they would be better targets for assassins already awaiting them?

On the heels of that thought, Geary saw a darker shape detach itself from the rest of the night sky and come in to land with a degree of quietness that spoke of military-grade stealth technology. “Will you be all right?” he asked as Lady Vitali urged them to the shuttle.

“Oh, quite. Don’t worry about me. I have some other friends who will be on hand to greet our uninvited guests. But we wouldn’t want you to be caught in the cross fire! Off you go. Have a nice trip home.” Lady Vitali waved cheerfully as the closing boarding ramp cut off their view of her and of Old Earth.

“Lady Vitali has some interesting friends,” Geary remarked to Tanya, as they strapped into their seats, the shuttle already accelerating upward.

“And at least one of them is aboard Dauntless, it seems,” she replied, checking her comm unit. “That’s the only way she could have known the made-up name Anna Cresida. My ship is tracking us, by the way. Old Earth’s stealth tech is at least a couple of generations behind ours. The tracking confirms that we are on a vector to reach Dauntless.”

“Good. We were warned that some of the various governments and authorities on Old Earth might try to involve us in their own affairs. Do you think this might be some ploy to make us suspicious of other governments in Sol Star System?”

“No,” Tanya replied with a shake of her head. “If it were that, she wouldn’t have told us the money appeared to be coming from outside the star system. And, obviously, someone else from Dauntless thought she was trustworthy enough to share our code phrase. I think you and I narrowly avoided meeting our ancestors here in the wrong way.” She paused, then laughed. “I finally get it. What that one man said about us being their children. Everyone in the Alliance thinks of Old Earth, and Sol Star System, as someplace unimaginably special, a place of tranquillity and wisdom far surpassing our own. But that man had it right. We’re not different from them. The violence and politics and sheer stupidity we deal with are here, too. They’ve always been here.

“When humanity left Old Earth for the stars, we didn’t leave any of it behind. We took it all with us.”

She paused, eyeing her comm unit. “Dauntless says we’re veering off a direct vector to her.”

“What are we headed for?” Geary demanded. “Where does the new vector aim?”

“No telling.” Her eyes met his. “Dauntless was cut off in midmessage. Our comms are being jammed.”

Geary, his expression grim, tapped the comm panel near his seat. “No response from the pilot.”

“None here, either,” Tanya said, rapping a fist against the surface of her seat’s comm panel. “What do you suppose they’re planning?”

“Didn’t you say Dauntless was tracking us?”

“Yes, indeed.” She smiled unpleasantly. “If I know my crew, and I do know them better than anyone, my battle cruiser is currently accelerating to a fast intercept with this shuttle.”

The shuttle lurched as it twisted up and to their right. “Evasive maneuver,” Geary commented, checking his comm unit again. “The automated antijamming routines on my unit have found something.”

Desjani studied hers. “Mine, too. It found a path through the jamming to something, but it’s not Dauntless. Oh, hell, it’s internal.”

“The control deck on this shuttle,” Geary suggested.

“Probably. We might be able to screw with their controls if we established contact, but our units can’t shake hands with the Earth systems. This won’t get us anywhere.”

The shuttle rolled to their left.

Tanya frowned, then looked at Geary. “If they are trying to evade Dauntless, why aren’t they diving into atmosphere?”

“You think there’s—?”

The panel next to Geary suddenly flared to life, revealing a woman in the flight-engineer seat on the control deck. “Whatever you’re trying to do, please be so good as to stop. The signals coming out of there are confusing our systems.”

“Stop jamming our comms,” Desjani demanded before Geary could say anything.

“Your comms?” The woman appeared to be genuinely puzzled as she checked some of her readouts. “Oh. Our stealth systems cut in jamming automatically when they identified your signals.”

“Then manually override them,” Geary said.

“If you emit signals, you’ll compromise our stealth!” the woman pleaded. She looked to one side as if listening, then back at Geary. “Your ship keeps adjusting its track to maintain an intercept. You must still be sending it some locating data despite our jamming.”

“My ship doesn’t need any help from us to track this shuttle,” Desjani said. “You can’t evade her. I strongly suggest you give up trying.”

Puzzlement appeared on the woman’s face again. “Evade your ship? We’re not trying to evade them.”

Tanya glared at the woman’s image. “Who are you trying to evade?”

“We don’t know, exactly, but our flight controllers on the ground say there are at least two other stealth craft up here that are trying to close on us. We’re trying to remain clear of them until we reach your ship, which is very difficult when we have only vague ideas of where the other stealth craft are and is being complicated even more by your systems interfering with ours.”