Jack Campbell - Guardian

Geary stared at him for a while before answering. “What about the patterns? The way they seem to think?”

“I agree with Dr. Shwartz. The Dancers very likely do think in patterns, seeing everything in terms of interlocking components that form some image they can understand on their own terms.” Charban spread his hands helplessly again. “But where are we in those patterns? We still can only guess. I would interpret their interactions with me as being… polite. But you can be polite with a partner, or to a superior, or to someone far inferior to you. Noblesse oblige , as the very old saying has it. But there’s another alternative. That’s the possibility that the Dancers themselves are not certain of how to think of us, just as we are uncertain about them. In us, that produces contradictory impulses. We are in awe of the Dancers, yet we also view them in part as if they were irresponsible children who need constant supervision.”

“You’re saying the Dancers may be making it up as they go along?” Geary asked.

“It’s possible. They react to each event not in accordance with some unified image of us but in terms of what seems best to them when each of those events occur.” Charban paused, his face working as he thought. “I have an impression… Admiral, when someone has something they have to do, you can tell. There’s something about them, no matter who they are, that tells you they are preoccupied, driven, busy. Whatever term you want. I sometimes get that feeling with the Dancers. Before we left Midway, it was becoming stronger, a sense that the Dancers were eager to leave, to reach Alliance space, but refraining from saying so openly.”

It was Geary’s turn to shake his head. “Why would they be eager to go to Alliance space and yet not say so?”

“I don’t know. If you figure out the answer, could you tell me?”

Geary managed a smile. “What does Emissary Rione think?”

“Emissary Rione?” Charban asked. “What does she think? If you figure out the answer, could you tell me?”

Not everyone who was acting in unusual ways was an alien. After speaking with Charban, Geary realized something else had been bothering him, something that had been concealed under the stress that had been clouding his mind.

In this case, the answers might be found in the recent past.

He called up records, letting them scroll past, trying to give his subconscious the clues it would need to figure out what was going on.

When his hatch alert chimed, Geary absentmindedly granted entry, only gradually becoming aware that Desjani was back and glowering at him.

“What?” Geary asked, looking away from the display over his desk.

“I thought you were not going to get bogged down again this quickly in useless regrets about the past.”

“What?” he repeated, then understood. “I’m sorry, Tanya. Have I been out of communication for a while again?”

“An unusually long while,” she replied, eyeing him suspiciously. “If you’re not moping about mistakes, what are you doing? That’s a playback of the attack on Invincible at Sobek.”

Geary rubbed his mouth with one hand, looking at the recorded images once more as stealth shuttles were destroyed, and Marines counterattacked inside Invincible . “Something has shifted. I’m trying to figure out what.”

She came closer, studying the display. “The attack on Invincible was a classic special operation. Stealth approach and stealth suits, board a ship undetected, we’ve seen that before. We’ve done that as much as the Syndics have. It requires special circumstances to work, though.”

“But the suicide attacks. Those were different.”

“Yes,” Desjani agreed. “The minefield wasn’t different, but the way they tried to get us with it was unusual. You’re looking for some common element?”

He nodded, watching as the Marines once again annihilated the Syndics who had boarded Invincible . “These aren’t major attacks. It’s a series of small attacks, minor actions. They’re not marshaling as many forces in one place as possible. They’re not trying to defeat us in open battle.” Geary looked at her. “Do they still use the expression being nibbled to death by ducks?”

“Nibbled to—? Oh. We say cows,” Desjani said. “Licked to death by cows.”

“That’s disgusting.”

“How is it more disgusting than being nibbled to death by ducks?”

“I don’t know.” Geary scowled at the display. “The Syndics can’t hope to stop us or beat us. But what they’re doing is not just wearing us down ship by ship and encounter by encounter. These sudden attacks, without warning, seemed designed to also throw us mentally off-balance.”

Desjani nodded, her eyes thoughtful. “Small jabs at unexpected points. Like martial-arts fighting. Instead of going strength against strength, you try to get your opponent off-balance and get them to make mistakes.” She paused, then focused intently on him. “They can’t beat you.”

“I don’t need to hear—”

“I’m not praising you, Admiral.” She pointed a finger at the display. “Fact. The Syndics don’t have enough warships left at the moment to bring us to battle. Fact. If they did gather that many warships, they know that you would beat the hell out of them. They know you don’t have any match as a fleet combat commander. Fact. Even Syndics can figure out what they’re doing wrong if they get hit hard enough often enough.

“They’ve got a new plan, Admiral. They’re going to avoid a straight-up fight with you until you’ve been worn down so badly that Black Jack himself couldn’t win. Sorry, that’s one of those old sayings. Instead, they’re going to fight the sorts of battles you haven’t proven you can best them at. An ever-changing set of unconventional, surprise attacks, none of them using too many Syndic resources, but all of them aimed at wearing us down physically, mentally, and emotionally.”

He did not like hearing that the future would likely hold only more of what they had seen at Sobek. “How did you come up with that idea?”

“I heard it. A long time ago.” Desjani bit her lip, blinking as she looked to one side. “My brother. As a kid, he loved the whole ground forces thing. He would lecture us about different kinds of fighting. Guerrilla warfare. He had this fantasy where the Syndics would take over a planet he was on, and he would organize and lead resistance forces that would eventually triumph over the Syndic occupiers. He had it all worked out.”

Geary had looked up Desjani’s family history, the official side of it, anyway. He knew that Tanya’s younger brother had died the first time he fought the Syndics, one of thousands of Alliance ground forces soldiers dead in a failed offensive against a Syndic planet. Her brother had not lived to be the hero his child-self had spent years dreaming of, had never had the chance to carry out the detailed plans a kid had proudly described to his sister and parents.

What could he say? Tanya had recovered, as she must have a thousand thousand times before this, and was looking at him steadily again, as if nothing special or unusual had been said. He had been around her long enough to know what that steady gaze meant. Don’t go there. Nothing you can say will be the right thing, so let’s just drop it and move on.

“I think,” Geary said slowly, trying to ensure he didn’t say the wrong thing, “you may well be right. I haven’t proven any special ability to deal with that kind of frequent, low-level, unconventional attack. Maybe I’m not very good at it. I’m certainly not experienced at dealing with it. And this fleet is already being worn down by the age of the warships and the hard use they’ve seen.”