Jack Campbell - Guardian

“They’re not trusted, either,” Charban said.

“Maybe. It would certainly provide someone like President Iceni with a record of what was actually said and done here. That could be why she allowed two of Drakon’s people to bring the proposal to you.” Rione lowered her head into one palm, thinking. “Their plan could work.”

“Do we dare trust them to carry through with it?” Charban asked.

“Drakon and Iceni? Or Morgan and Malin?”

“All of the above.” Charban winked at Geary, who nodded back in recognition of the joke. At some point in the past, the fleet had decided that multiple choice questions on training exams almost always had a correct answer of “all of the above.” Even though he was, like Rione, an emissary of the government, as a retired general of the ground forces, Charban had much more in common with Geary than he did with his fellow emissary.

Rione sighed in exaggerated fashion. “Drakon and Iceni would not have sent those two unless they trusted them. No. ‘Trust’ is the wrong word. I don’t know what the right word is. Some Syndic concept that involves having a good idea of whether or not someone else will betray you. You do realize that this won’t work without the full cooperation and assistance of me and Emissary Charban, right?”

“Yes,” Geary said. “It surprised me that those colonels, or rather Drakon and Iceni, didn’t also know that.”

“It surprised you?” Rione gusted a small laugh. “Would it have surprised Captain Badaya?”

“No, because he thinks…”

“Because he thinks you’re actually controlling the Alliance now, and the government is only a figurehead carrying out your orders.” Rione smiled in an unpleasant way. “Naturally, these former Syndics think the same thing. Who could possibly fail to grasp such power if it beckoned? You refused the chance, but Drakon and Iceni surely assume you seized it.”

Geary looked away, angry again. “All right. So they didn’t think I’d have to talk to you, to get your approval. But I do. What do you think?”

“I recommend that we do it, Admiral. It is a risk. It involves putting our confidence in people whose understanding of concepts like keeping their word is extremely elastic. But it will solve our problem as well as theirs.”

“Self-interest,” Charban said. “They want this to work more than we do.”

“Exactly. It would be unpleasant for us if we were to leave here with Boyens still holding superior firepower to the people of Midway, but it would be a disaster for Midway.”

“All right,” Geary repeated. “I’ll send the agreed code word to the freighter, and we’ll get this going. If it doesn’t work, there might be hell to pay.”

Rione shook her head, looking tired again. She had aged on this trip, and now seemed a decade older than when he had first met her. “Hell is going to get paid no matter what we do. There are no painless options, Admiral. Have the authorities here accepted your offer to leave Captain Bradamont at Midway as a liaison officer for the Alliance?”

“Yes.”

“Good. We can use that. CEO Boyens is about to catch a little hell himself.”

It would require about two weeks for the plan proposed by the rulers of Midway to come to fruition. Two weeks during which the fleet should have been heading toward home. But scanning down the long, long list of repair work still required on many of his ships, Geary tried to make the best of it. “What ever happened to those plans for fully automated nanobased repair systems on ships?” he asked Captain Smythe, commanding officer of the auxiliary ship Tanuki and senior engineer in the fleet.

Smythe mimicked choking. “The same thing that always happens. The last test, to my knowledge, was about five years ago. The second generation of nanos started attacking ‘healthy’ parts of the test ship, except for those nanos that developed into nanocancer and began replicating out of control and harming critical systems. It took about two days for the ship’s repair system to turn it into a total wreck.”

“The same problem as a hundred years ago,” Geary agreed.

“And for long before that. We’re still working on trying to keep the repair and immune systems in our own bodies from going haywire and killing us quickly or slowly,” Smythe pointed out. “And those had who knows how many millions of years to develop. Making something that fixes anything that goes wrong but doesn’t damage things that are fine is not a simple problem.”

“What did they do with the last test ship?”

“An automated tug towed both test ship and itself into the nearest star. Good-bye nanos. Nobody wanted to risk them infecting other ships. You could lose a fleet that way before you knew what was happening.”

“How long before we can leave?” Geary asked.

“Today. Or tomorrow. Or a few months from now. Admiral, there’s only so much my auxiliaries can do. Some of the damage our ships have sustained requires a full repair dock. The longer we spend here, the better condition all of our ships will be in, but we’ll never hit one hundred percent until we get home.” Smythe cocked a questioning eyebrow at Geary. “Do you expect to face more fighting before then?”

“I have no idea. I hope not, but I don’t know. We’ve got the biggest threat magnet in the human-occupied region of space with us.”

“Ah, yes, Invincible .” Smythe looked both unhappy and enticed. “Have you been aboard her? There are so many puzzles inside that ship. I wish we could dig into them.”

“We can’t risk it, Captain.”

“I may be able to isolate something so we can at least try to figure out how it works,” Smythe pleaded. “My people will work it up on their own time. They’re itching to get their hands on that Kick equipment.”

“Send me your proposal,” Geary said reluctantly, “and I’ll think about it.”

Have you been aboard her? No, he hadn’t. The chance to visit a truly alien construction, to see the work of intelligent, nonhuman hands, and I’ve only seen as much of that superbattleship as could be seen through the views of numerous Marines during the capture of it.

Once we get Invincible home, odds are the ship will be completely isolated, only high-level researchers allowed aboard. Invincible will be taken far from any star system that I am likely to visit.

He called Tanya. “I want to see Invincible .”

In her command seat on the bridge of Dauntless , Desjani nodded absentmindedly. “They’ve got enough systems hooked up for you to do a virtual visit?”

“No. I figured I’d go in person.”

She jerked in surprise, her lips moved as she visibly counted to ten, then Desjani recited her next words in resigned and mechanical tones. “I must advise you of the dangers involved in physically visiting an alien warship containing unknown threats including but not limited to possible pathogens capable of infecting human hosts, equipment which works in unknown ways and which could reactivate at any time with unknown consequences, and aliens who could have survived the battle and remained hidden from our security sweeps and could still emerge to strike at a sufficiently high-value target.”

“Your concerns are noted,” Geary replied.

“And you’ll do it anyway.”

“This will probably be my only chance to visit that ship, Tanya. Once we get back to Alliance space, Invincible is sure to be quarantined.”

She put on a look of exaggerated wonder. “You don’t suppose there’s a reason they’ll put that ship in quarantine, do you?”

Seeing that Desjani wasn’t about to abandon her line of attack, and knowing that she indeed had a point, Geary played his last card. “Tanya, there are sailors and Marines aboard that ship by my command. I sent them there. Are you saying that I should avoid doing something I am willing to order those under my command to do?”