Jack Campbell - Guardian

“Just what you’d expect from a Syndicate CEO,” Geary said. “She wants to stay an absolute ruler.”

“Yes, I think she wanted to. But. She’s already permitted things no Syndicate CEO would have allowed. There seem to be real reforms under way. Iceni may be faking it all, but my gut feeling is that she is pursuing some real changes despite whatever her initial plans were.”

He considered that, measuring it against his own impressions of Iceni. “An interesting assessment. What about General Drakon?”

“Ah. General Drakon.” Rione smiled with amusement. “No guesses are needed there. He’s military, and that’s all he wants to be. The Syndics made him play the CEO game.”

“That’s all? He just wants to be a soldier?”

“Do you find that so hard to understand, Admiral?”

“Those two aides of his. Morgan and… Malin.” Geary spoke slowly, trying to put his impressions into words. “They were… not like the sort of aides I would have expected from someone who just wants to be a soldier.”

Rione smiled thinly this time. “The assassins? The bodyguards? The trusted agents in tasks above and below the board? I am certain they are all of those things. Remember the environment in which Drakon operated. Such assistants may be as much a matter of survival for him as armor is for one of your battleships.”

She paused, then spoke in more serious tones. “We received a lot of reporting from the planet when the bombardment the enigmas launched was on its way. Free-press reports, but also a lot of chatter in personal conversations that your intelligence people have been busy vacuuming up. I assume you have seen the analysis of all that.”

“And I assume you have as well.”

“Of course. The bombardment would have inflicted massive damage on that world if the Dancers hadn’t stopped it, but every report agrees that neither Iceni nor Drakon made any moves to flee the surface. If what we’ve learned about Drakon so far is right, he has demonstrated loyalty to those who work for him before this, so that action would have been consistent with a man who never bought into the CEO-first-last-and-always attitude of the Syndicate Worlds.”

“That’s how I felt about him from the messages I’ve received from him,” Geary said. “I felt… well, I felt like he was somebody not all that different from me.”

“Be careful who you say that to,” Rione advised dryly. “A former Syndic CEO who is a decent commander and cares about those under him? ‘Heresy’ is too kind a word.”

Geary shook his head. “The Syndicate Worlds couldn’t have held together as long as it did, couldn’t have sustained the war as long at it did, unless there were some capable people in positions of authority. Some people who could inspire those under them or make the right decisions regardless of what it meant to them personally. Why people like that worked for a system like that I have no idea, but they must have been there.”

“Maybe you should have asked General Drakon,” Rione said with every appearance of meaning it.

“Maybe someday I will. But you said Iceni didn’t try to run to safety, either. She didn’t before, the first time we were here, when it looked like the enigmas were certain to take over this star system.”

“It is a pattern,” Rione agreed. “At the least, it implies a sense of responsibility consistent with her position of authority. I think both of them can be worked with in the long run, Admiral. More than that, I think if they avoid giving in to Syndic ways of doing things, they might be able to build something at Midway that the Alliance would be happy to do business with.”

“Assuming those monsters in the deep don’t devour them.”

“Assuming that, yes.” She looked over to the side again, a flicker of concern appearing before she could suppress it, and he realized that Commander Benan must be lying in his bunk over there in her stateroom. “Is that all, Admiral?”

“Yes. Thank you, Victoria.”

The alerts sounding as the fleet exited the hypernet gate at Sobek were cautionary, not full-scale alarms, but Geary still focused as quickly as possible on the objects highlighted on his display. “What are they?”

“Syndic courier ships,” Lieutenant Yuon replied. “Unarmed.”

That should have been reassuring information, but not in this case. You might occasionally see a couple of courier ships in a star system, especially if it was an important star system, but never a large group of them. Even stranger, these courier ships were not spread throughout Sobek Star System as if en route various missions, but were clustered together in a narrow swath of space facing the hypernet gate. “Why are there over twenty Syndic courier ships five light-minutes from this gate?”

“They’re broadcasting merchant identity codes,” Lieutenant Castries reported. “Not Syndic military and government codes. All twenty-three courier ships are claiming to be private shipping.”

“This stinks,” Desjani growled. “We’ve never encountered a Syndic courier model that wasn’t government or military. What are they doing here?”

Geary already had Lieutenant Iger on the line. “Can you confirm that, Lieutenant? These courier ships should actually be military or otherwise under the control of the Syndic government?”

“Yes, sir,” Iger replied after a two-second pause that felt far longer. “Proving that might be difficult. Very difficult. But all of our experience is that courier ships have always been reserved by the Syndics for official use only. The fact that these are pretending to be something else is highly suspicious.”

“What threat can those courier ships pose to us?”

“I don’t know, Admiral. Fleet sensors aren’t spotting any indications of weapons add-ons.”

“They’re not here for a party,” Desjani said.

He stared at his display, feeling the same sense of threat and wrongness that Tanya obviously was. His fleet had automatically slewed about after exiting the gate, carrying out the preplanned maneuver to avoid a possible minefield. But there were no mines, just that very odd grouping of courier ships. “All units in First Fleet, come starboard three zero degrees, up four five degrees at time two four. Maintain all systems at full readiness.”

The ships of the fleet were coming around to face the courier ships when the supposed merchant craft pivoted and began accelerating to meet the Alliance ships. “They’re approaching at maximum acceleration,” Lieutenant Castries said as alarms pulsed from the fleet’s combat systems. “Projected tracks are for an intercept with the center of our formation.”

Desjani took in a deep breath, then spoke calmly. “They’re coming straight at us at max acceleration, and they have no weapons.”

“Reconnaissance?” Geary asked, knowing that wasn’t the real answer.

“You know better than that. Those things accelerate like bats out of hell. By the time they reach us, they’ll have achieved a closing speed of at least point two light and probably faster. They’d want to be able to see details if they were on a recce mission, and at those kinds of velocities details tend to smear. No. There’s only one possible reason why those ships would be coming directly at us that way.”

He knew what she meant. “The Syndics haven’t done that before,” Geary said. “They haven’t sent ships on deliberate suicide runs.”

“The Syndic warships at Lakota were ordered to destroy the hypernet gate there—”

“Those warships didn’t know that was a suicide mission!”

She pointed to her display. “How large a crew does a courier ship need for a one-way mission?”

He took a second to reply. “One.”