Jack Campbell - Guardian

She nodded. “The Syndics are still fighting to win. They still think they can win. Part of it probably is an attempt to get us to restart the war so they can use that to hold together what’s left of the Syndicate Worlds, but even if the war starts again, don’t expect the Syndics to fight it on our terms.”

“How long could the Alliance sustain a war of attrition?” Geary wondered.

“You already know the answer to that, and it’s not a big number if you measure it in years or in months.”

After Tanya had left his stateroom with a firm directive that he needed to get out among the sailors again to see and be seen, Geary spent a while thinking, looking at nothing, his eyes unfocused. Physical wounds that didn’t kill outright were usually healed these days, everything made as good as new. But mental wounds, the memories and the events that left a different kind of injury, could only be treated. Removing the memories caused more damage than leaving them intact, so treatment was all about managing the injury, not curing it.

During their all-too-brief honeymoon, Tanya had woken him once with a scream that jolted them both out of sleep. She had claimed not to remember what dream had caused it. He would wake up at times drenched in sweat, having relived or imagined events in which death and failure were a common element.

Technically, the war was over. As far as the Syndics were concerned, the war had apparently just taken a different form. As far as the Alliance men and women who had fought in that war were concerned, the war would always be with them.

Geary sighed and got up. He needed to talk to the officers and crew of Dauntless , and he needed to swing by sick bay for another check on his meds. Maybe it was jump space getting on his nerves again. Humans could get used to a lot of things over time, but no one ever got used to jump space. Or maybe his nerves were on edge because of what might happen when they left jump space.

What did the Syndics have waiting at Simur?

Simur had never been an exceptional star system, and the twin blows of the war and the creation of a Syndic hypernet had done nothing to improve its prospects. Close enough to the border region with the Alliance to be the target of occasional attacks, and never that wealthy a star system to begin with, Simur had been hit especially hard by the creation of a hypernet gate at Sobek. Most of the traffic to and from the rich Sobek Star System that used to have to jump through Simur on its way had been able to go directly to Sobek thanks to the gate. For the last several decades, Simur had been declining from the not-particularly-well-off state it had once enjoyed.

Intelligence collected during the last Alliance attack to strike Simur, which had been eight years ago, had shown stretches of abandoned facilities, abandoned towns, shrinking cities and still-unrepaired damage from a previous attack six years before that. Simur only had a half dozen planets worthy of the name, and four of those were either hot rocks whirling too close to the star or icy rocks too far from the star. Of the remaining two planets, one orbiting a light-hour from the star was barely large enough to qualify as a gas giant, while the last orbited seven light-minutes from the star but was barely habitable by humans, with an axial tilt high enough to keep the northern hemisphere uncomfortably warm and the southern hemisphere uncomfortably chilly.

“At least the lack of worthwhile targets will help us hold back if we’re tempted to retaliate for more attacks by bombarding them,” Desjani remarked, as they waited for Dauntless to exit jump. “Unless the Syndics pumped a huge amount of money and resources into Simur since the last time the Alliance was here, there’s not much even worth a rock dropped on it from orbit. Why hasn’t Simur been abandoned?”

“Maybe it was cheaper to let it slowly dwindle than it would have been to evacuate the remaining inhabitants,” Geary suggested. “Let’s hope there’s nothing there waiting for us. It’s possible the Syndics concentrated all of their efforts at Sobek.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“No.”

“One minute to jump exit,” Lieutenant Castries said.

“All weapons ready, shields at maximum,” Lieutenant Yuon added.

“And,” Desjani grumbled, “we’ll enter normal space barely moving.”

“If anything will throw off a Syndic surprise,” Geary said, “that will.” I hope.

He watched his display, waiting for the moment when Dauntless and the rest of the fleet would leave jump space, for the moment when the featureless, endless gray would be replaced by the spangled black of familiar space and its countless stars.

The strange lights of jump space always came and went at unpredictable times, but as Geary watched, several bloomed near Dauntless , off to one side.

“A cluster?” Desjani asked in disbelief. “Jump-space lights never appear in groups. Do they?”

“Not that I ever heard,” Geary said.

“There have been more of them this time,” Lieutenant Castries said hesitantly. “More than usual. That’s what the old hands say.”

Did the presence of the Dancers with the human ships have any relationship to the unusual behavior of the lights in jump space? Geary almost spoke the question out loud, then saw that there were only a few seconds left before jump exit.

Desjani saw that, too. “Everyone focus on your jobs!”

The moment came, Geary striving to fight off the disorientation that entering and exiting jump always caused. He had been doing it enough lately that his recovery periods were getting shorter and now spanned only a few seconds.

He heard combat systems alarms blaring before his eyes could focus.

But as he struggled to see his display, one other fact penetrated.

None of Dauntless ’s weapons were firing. Whatever the alarms warned of, it was not close enough to engage, meaning the threat also was not close enough to fire upon Dauntless or hopefully any of the rest of his fleet.

Not yet, anyway.

Geary finally managed to get a clear look at his display, then had to study it for a few seconds to grasp what he was seeing. “Freighters?”

“Junk freighters,” Desjani growled. “And obsolete warships.”

Directly in the path of the fleet were several ships ranged close to the jump exit. None of them were going anywhere. “They’re almost on top of the jump exit,” Lieutenant Castries reported. “They must be using their own maneuvering systems to stay on station. We’re getting power core readings from them. They’re all live ships.”

“They may be live,” Desjani said sharply, “but they’re limping. They look like they were hauled out of a breaking yard. Six light-seconds distant. If we’d come out of jump doing point one light—”

“We’d already be in the middle of them,” Geary finished. “At point one light, we couldn’t have turned fast enough to avoid them even if the maneuver had been preprogrammed.” He hadn’t absorbed all of the information on his display, but he had picked up that there was nothing directly above the Alliance ships. “All units in First Fleet, immediate execute, turn up zero nine zero degrees.”

Dauntless pitched upward, thrusters firing to alter her trajectory into a climb straight above the plane of this star system. Geary watched the paths of his other ships doing the same. Not all could alter vectors as quickly as Dauntless , so his neat formation was smearing across a wide expanse of space, but thanks to the very low velocity at which they had exited the jump point, none of his ships would come within the danger zones surrounding the old freighters and warships positioned directly outside the exit.