Jack Campbell - Invincible

“Thank you.” She smiled wryly at him. “One crisis at a time.”

“Wouldn’t that be nice?” The same phrase he had used with Rione now seemed apt as well, but it was just as well that Tanya didn’t know he was repeating it.

He stood silently for a moment after the hatch closed behind him, alone in the stateroom that had once belonged to Admiral Bloch, before the Syndics killed him during “negotiations,” and that had since been the only home Geary had in this time. What if Tanya had been captured by the Syndics while the war still raged? What if she were somehow captured now by the scattered and broken pieces that had replaced Syndicate Worlds’ authority in much of what had once been Syndic space? What would be done to the person closest to the great Black Jack Geary in the name of gaining information or of pressuring him, or simply out of a desire for revenge?

He walled off the thought. Admitting such a possibility, considering such an outcome, would paralyze him.

As Geary watched the fleet brake at maximum capability past the looming bulk of the bear-cow fortress, the wave of hundreds of missile craft launched by the fortress caught the leading edge of the fleet. Massive explosions rippled down the length of the human formation as the suicide attackers drove their craft straight into scores of warships and auxiliaries.

He canceled the simulation with a grunt of disgust. I’ve tried every possible angle of approach, every possible variation in velocity, but I can’t get around the fact that the fortress is there , and I have to take the fleet there where the jump point is, and it can’t be going faster than point one light speed when it gets there.

There was something extremely aggravating about having literally the entire universe open before you and yet being unable to go where you needed to go.

Geary reached for the comm panel, then hesitated as he saw the time. It was well after normal working hours, the passageways of Dauntless darkened to simulate the day/night cycle that humans favored and almost empty of personnel, with only the night watch on duty. He wanted to talk this over with Desjani, but Admiral Timbale’s warning that he and Tanya were being watched for any signs of unprofessional behavior couldn’t be ignored. Tanya wouldn’t do anything improper for a subordinate of his in the chain of command, but that didn’t mean innocent activity couldn’t be willfully misconstrued, especially if it involved her visiting his stateroom at such a time.

Hell. He had a job to do. Geary sent the request for a call, then waited until her window popped up nearby.

Tanya was in her own stateroom, which was good to see given the late hour. Sometimes he thought she lived on the bridge on the Dauntless , which wasn’t the best thing for her or for her own subordinates. “Good evening, Admiral. What’s up?”

“Are you busy?”

She looked back at him. “I’m commanding officer of a battle cruiser. Of course I’m busy. Why?”

“I’m stuck.” Geary waved toward the display over the table in his stateroom. “I can figure out how to avoid the bear-cow warships, but I can’t figure out how to get past the fortresses at the jump exits. If I didn’t have to worry about the warships, I might be able to come up with a means of knocking out a fortress, but I don’t have that luxury.”

“It’s all one problem,” Desjani agreed. “I personally tend to focus on the warships, but the biggest problems are those fortresses. Do we have to get within range of their weapons?”

“No,” Geary said gloomily. “We can pass outside the likely threat radius of anything mounted on the fortresses. What we can’t possibly avoid is the swarm of missile craft that the fortress will launch to intercept us, knowing exactly where we have to go to get to the jump exit. Any ideas?”

“I’d tell you if I’d come up with any. But I’m just a battle cruiser commander. You’re Black Jack Geary.”

“You know I don’t like that nickname. Can you come down and go over this stuff with me?”

Desjani laughed. “Oh, that would look good. Me sneaking into your stateroom in the middle of the night. Should I put on something sexy, like my full-dress uniform?”

“You do look awfully good in that. Dammit, Tanya, we’re married.”

“Off my ship we’re married, Admiral. On my ship, we’re captain and admiral. You knew that would be the case.”

“It’s the sort of thing that’s easier to live with in theory than in practice,” Geary complained. “Besides, this is purely professional. Tanya, you’ve got a great tactical mind. I need some of that.”

“You sure know how to sweet-talk a girl.” Tanya shook her head. “I think you need sleep more than you need my, um, tactical expertise. We’ve all been trying to figure out how to get past the fortress at the jump point we want to use. None of us has figured out how to do it. We need to try something different.”

“Such as?”

“What else is there? The home world of these bear-cows… no. We’ve already been thinking about what their warships are like.”

“We don’t know how they’ll employ those warships, though,” Geary said.

“No, but so far we’ve seen them all turn and head for us. And we’ve seen how those missile ships engaged us.” She shrugged. “It’s not a lot to go on, but we know a little about how they think. Maybe that’s what we should focus on. Tomorrow. You can’t think without sleep. Go to bed now, and we’ll talk in the morning.”

“Are you going to sleep?” Geary demanded.

“I’m a battle cruiser commander. Didn’t we already go over that? Sleep is a luxury.”

“I could order you to go to sleep.”

“Yes, you could,” Desjani agreed. “You’d regret it, but you could. If you insist on staying awake, think about how the bear-cows think so you can try to understand the enemy. That’s what you ended up doing with the enigmas, and that’s my best advice.”

After the call ended, he sat in his darkened stateroom, thinking about her advice. Know the enemy. That was a very old piece of wisdom. And Tanya was right. He had been focusing solely on what his own forces could do and, physically, what the enemy forces should be able to do. Never mind what these aliens could do, what would the bear-cows do? Thinking that he had never expected to be asking himself that question, Geary started searching for answers. There were still precious few things known about the bear-cows, mainly some short assessments from Lieutenant Iger and the civilian experts, which were filled mostly with words like “unknown,” “assume,” “estimate,” and “possibility,” so he started looking up information on actual bears.

The original bear had been found on Old Earth, but humanity had brought some bears with them into space, planting the species on distant worlds, and encountered on some other worlds animals which had bearlike characteristics enough to be added to the general term. Of course, technically, in terms of DNA, evolution, and countless other factors, those were all very specifically distinct species. But to the average human, all of those creatures were “bears” even though that attitude drove zoologists crazy.

None of what he found on bears seemed to be useful. Bears were fairly solitary animals, especially compared to cows. One thing that seemed clear was that the bear-cows liked living close together. Bears were also omnivores, and continued analysis of the remains they had recovered had confirmed that the bear-cows were pure herbivores.

He looked up cows, and cattle, and bulls, and herds, and everything else that came to mind, reading descriptions, analyses, watching videos (some of which were tagged as coming from Old Earth itself) and letting his mind roam free as he did so.