Jack Campbell - Invincible

“Of course I do.”

“As you were saying that last, about the politicians, I imagined myself making political decisions in a crisis. It was all too easy to imagine feeling overwhelmed.” He paused. “That’s why you’re still letting them do most things, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” A partial lie, which made Geary cringe internally. Badaya thought Geary was actually directing the government now, behind the scenes. That had been necessary to avoid the chance of a coup in Geary’s name though without his approval, but Geary had been wanting to work his way out of that perception ever since he had been forced to adopt it. “As bad as they may be at it, most of them anyway, they’re still better at it than I am. There are some who are terrible by any standard, but there are also some who are good by any standard. And, most important, they derive their power from having been chosen by the people of the Alliance.”

Badaya bent an arch look at Geary. “The people of the Alliance would choose you if you asked for that openly.”

“I know.” Give him the full truth now. “That scares the hell out of me.”

“Understandably.” Badaya stood up, saluting. “Thank you, sir.”

His comm panel chimed the moment Badaya’s image vanished. “What did he want?” Desjani asked.

“He apologized,” Geary said.

“He apologized? Foot-in-mouth Badaya? Damn.” Desjani had never taken well Badaya’s often clumsy comments about her and Geary. “You are a miracle worker, aren’t you?”

“Very funny. Are you resting?”

“Resting? Me? Oh, yes, sir. I’m resting so hard that I’m sleeping in my sleep.”

“Tanya, set a good example for your crew.”

She offered him a rigidly proper salute. “Yes, Admiral. I hear and obey.”

With both Captain Badaya and Captain Desjani gone, Geary rubbed his eyes, thinking about trying to sleep…

Six bells chimed in spaced pairs across the ship’s general announcing system, followed by a voice saying “Admiral, Alliance fleet, arriving.”

An admiral. There were only two other sources of Alliance fleet admirals in this star system, among the liberated prisoners of war aboard Mistral and Typhoon . But none of them should be coming to Dauntless .

Geary was reaching toward his comm panel when it came to life, Desjani once again gazing out at him. “Admiral Lagemann has arrived on a shuttle and requests a meeting with you, Admiral.”

“Admiral Lagemann?” His sudden tension just as quickly gave way to relief. A personal visit was unusual, but not that strange with so many shuttles winging between ships. “Certainly. Send him to my stateroom.”

Admiral Lagemann took only five minutes to reach Geary’s stateroom, nodding in greeting as he entered. Geary was actually meeting him in person for the first time. “There was a shuttle run between Dauntless and Mistral , so I thought I’d take advantage of that to see you. I owe you a report, Admiral Geary.”

“About what?” he asked, unable to recall with his mind cluttered by everything he had to deal with in the aftermath of the battle and the capture of the bear-cow superbattleship. “It’s nice to meet you at last. Have a seat.”

“Thank you.” Lagemann sat down, looking around Geary’s stateroom with a small smile. “Nothing fancy, but it’s home, eh?”

“That’s a good way to describe it.” He didn’t have any other home. There was his home world, Glenlyon, where the cult of Black Jack had burned the brightest. The idea of going back there, to a world filled with familiar places but empty of all of the people he had once known who had died during the last century, to a world that would treat him as some superhuman hero, was more frightening than facing battle.

“It’s not too different from my last flagship.” A wry look crossed Admiral Lagemann’s face. “Also a battle cruiser. Invincible .”

“ Invincible ? I wonder how many Invincible s ago that was,” Geary said.

“Probably a dozen. I was in Syndic hands long enough, and everyone knows how long Invincible s last. I don’t know why I was foolish enough to put my flag on one of them. May I?” Lagemann reached for the display controls, bringing up the regions of space that the fleet had traversed. “You asked for an assessment of what we thought the enigmas might be up to.”

And had then forgotten about it. Thank goodness he had remembered to delegate that task. “What did you conclude?”

“A stab in the back.” Lagemann grinned lopsidedly. “Big surprise, huh?” He highlighted one star. “We jumped from here to the bear-cow star, Pandora. The enigmas were following us there with a fair-sized force, but they didn’t chase us to Pandora, doubtless knowing exactly what awaited us there. Now, since they knew what defenses the bear-cows had, the enigmas would have been justified in concluding that our chances of getting out of Pandora in one piece were pretty damned small.”

“It wasn’t a situation I’d want to be caught in again,” Geary agreed.

“So, if we fought our way back to this enigma star, going back the way we came, what remnants of our force reached them would be chewed up. A reasonable conclusion for the enigmas to make. They could leave a blocking force there to deal with whatever made it back to them. But that wouldn’t prevent another human fleet from showing up and driving through their space in the future.”

Lagemann shifted the star display back toward human space. “No. If they are going to ensure that no more humans come knocking, they need to lock the front door.”

“Pele?” Geary asked. “There’s nothing there.”

“No. But for us to get to Pele we had to go through—”

“Midway.” He stared at the star display, appalled. “The enigmas will try to eliminate our ability to use Midway as a stepping-stone into their territory.”

“That’s our assessment. At the least, they could move in and collapse the hypernet gate there the old-fashioned way, by shooting out all of the tethers. Are you sure the Syndics have systems on their gates that ensure a collapse doesn’t devastate the whole star system?”

“I’m certain of it,” Geary said. “We spotted the equipment on the hypernet gate at Midway when we came through there last.”

Lagemann chewed his lip, looking morose now. “You could have knocked me over with a feather when I found out how much damage a collapsing hypernet gate could do. Nova-scale energy bursts. And we built those damned things in all of our most valuable star systems.”

“That’s what the enigmas wanted when they secretly leaked the technology to us,” Geary said. “They wanted the Alliance and the Syndicate Worlds to build huge bombs in our own star systems. Either we and the Syndics would figure out they were weapons as well as transportation devices and use them to cripple or even exterminate humanity, or the enigmas would use them that way if we humans were too smart or moral to engage in self-genocide.”

“I wouldn’t have placed a lot of bets on us being too smart to do that,” Lagemann said. “But that plan fell through. Now the enigmas have to stop us one star system at a time. And the way to stop us is to take out Midway as a place we can use to stage new incursions into enigma territory. They could well have started that retaliation force on its way almost as soon as we jumped for Pandora.”

Midway couldn’t repel a strong attack by the enigmas. The Syndics there, if the authorities at Midway still answered to the Syndicate Worlds’ government, had only a small flotilla of cruisers and Hunter-Killers to protect the star system. Nor would reinforcements likely be coming, not with the Syndicate Worlds’ mobile forces crushed by Geary during the last stages of the war and the remnants of its military overstretched as the Syndicate Worlds’ government tried desperately to hold on to star systems breaking away from it everywhere.