Jack Campbell - Invincible

Captain Tulev had reported on everything collected at the site of the battle. At least they didn’t have to worry too much about the aliens’ analyzing any human wreckage or remains. Whatever the aliens might find after Tulev’s cleanup effort would provide a lot fewer clues than the aliens’ own wreckage had provided to humans.

Geary’s eye caught on a disciplinary summary from Dragon . A petty officer caught selling drugs synthesized from stolen medical supplies. Six cases of insubordination, and three fights, one of them involving several sailors. Was Captain Bradamont having trouble controlling her crew?

He told the system to summarize all disciplinary reports and give averages for each ship type. Dragon , it turned out, was a bit better than average. Even Dauntless had seen a significant uptick in incidents.

Geary sat looking at the numbers, knowing what they meant. Fights. Insubordination. Failure to carry out duties. All signs of trouble, and they were getting worse. Sailors who were unhappy but had nothing specific to vent their unhappiness on, so they were turning on each other, letting minor events escalate to levels where official action had to be taken. All of it was still minor. Nothing was at a critical stage yet, but he had to try to keep things from getting that bad.

Which meant getting home.

He finally fell asleep in his chair for a couple of hours, waking with a jerk to see before him a message summarizing fleet junior officer qualification progress. Small wonder that had put him to sleep.

A quick shift to the star display revealed that nothing much had changed in the star system. The human fleet and the alien armada had moved a bit closer to each other, slowly converging, and this fleet had also gotten a bit closer to the orbital fortress guarding the next jump point; but that was all.

Shutting off the display, Geary checked his appearance, pondered appearing on the bridge looking like he had just come in from a wild night of liberty, thought about what Tanya would do if he did that, then took enough time to clean himself up and put on a fresh uniform.

Desjani was on the bridge, looking immaculate in her uniform even though her face displayed signs of fatigue. She yawned as she waved Geary to his command seat. “Did you get some rest, Admiral?”

“A little.”

“Good. In exchange for your display of good judgment, I’ve got something to show you, Admiral.”

He sat down, eyeing her. “A workable plan?”

“A workable plan? No, Admiral. I’m going to show you a great plan.” She entered the commands, and Geary’s display came to life.

He watched the maneuvers play out, running the simulation to its end, then let out a long breath. “It works.”

“It could work,” she corrected him. “If the bear-cows do what we think they will. If they don’t, we can pull out of contact and try something else.” Desjani frowned at her display. “We can probably do that.”

“Probably?”

“I am fairly confident that we could, Admiral.” Tanya yawned again. “Even against the Syndics, this probably wouldn’t work, but I bounced some ideas off of Lieutenant Iger, and they match what his spooks have seen on the videos we’ve intercepted. But there’s not a lot of room for error. It’s a great plan, but it’s a terrible plan.”

Geary fought to keep from frowning. “A terrible plan?”

“Yes, sir. There’s a lot of guesswork, and if the enemy behaves differently than we expect, it won’t work. And if it doesn’t work, we could be in serious trouble.”

He was frowning now. Geary felt a mix of anger and unhappiness. He had hoped a solution had been found, and her first words had seemed to confirm those hopes. But if Tanya thought the plan was that bad… “So we need to try something else.”

“No.” Desjani shook her head, leaned back, and sighed with contentment. “First, because I already put a lot of work into this, and second, because even though it’s a terrible plan, it’s a lot better than any other idea that anybody else has come up with. You don’t even want to look at what the combat systems developed using their little artificial minds.”

“That bad?” Geary asked, his upset gone.

“Try projected fifty-percent losses.” She shook her head once more, this time in disgust. “I can’t believe people used to call that stuff artificial intelligence . It’s still dumber than a deck plate.”

“We couldn’t aim our weapons without it,” Geary pointed out. “Not with engagement envelopes measured in milliseconds. And I wouldn’t want to try maneuvering at the velocities we move without automated assist systems.”

“Yeah, but that’s all physics! We can model that, after we figure it out. But actually thinking? Coming up with something new? Hah! Fast and stupid is still stupid. It just gets to stupid a lot quicker than humans could on their own. Which, I admit, is an accomplishment,” she added, “because we’re pretty damn good at stupid.”

“That’s something to take pride in,” Geary agreed.

“I’ll take whatever I can get.” She waved one hand toward him. “Anyway, your plan isn’t nearly as stupid as any other alternatives anyone has thought of. Congratulations.”

He studied the display again, seeing every uncertainty, every assumption that Desjani had been forced to incorporate into the plan. If and if and if. It was up to him to decide whether to go with it despite all of those ifs. But they wouldn’t learn all the answers even if they stayed here for months dodging the alien armada. His instincts told him that they needed to move fast, before fleet supplies diminished, before morale sank even lower, before the bear-cows could deploy even more forces, using their overwhelming numbers and resources. “We’ll do it.”

Desjani nodded, her eyes closed for a moment. “Oh, by the way, you left out one step in the plan.”

“What step was that?”

“The one where we pray this works, Admiral.”

Geary sat in his fleet command seat on the bridge of Dauntless , watching the distance reading to the nearest alien fortress scrolling downward rapidly. From as far off as the fleet was, the fortress wasn’t yet growing in size at any appreciable rate, but Geary still had the sensation that Dauntless and the entire fleet were diving down toward it. An odd sensation, born of human instincts that came from ancient ancestors walking the surface of a planet far distant.

Since the fleet was on an intercept course with the jump point guarded by the alien fortress, it was curving slightly around the edge of the star system. The fortress physically appeared to be just slightly to the right of Geary, or just off the starboard bows of the human ships. They were still forty light-minutes from that fortress. Since Geary had chosen to hold the speed of the human fleet to point one light speed, it would be nearly seven hours until they reached that fortress.

Much farther to the side, nearly amidships, hung the shapes of the alien armada pursuing the human fleet. To the human eye, those alien warships were still invisible, but the displays showed exactly where those other ships were, still about a light-hour distant. The relative bearing of the alien armada had not changed for hours, seemingly unmoving off to the side toward the alien star. But the distance to the alien ships steadily decreased as they held to a course that would bring them to intercept the human fleet in roughly eight hours.

Human fleet, alien fortress, and alien armada formed the points of a triangle with curving sides marking their trajectories through space to reach one another, the length of the sides constantly changing as the human and alien warships converged toward the fortress.