Jack Campbell - Invincible

“Being unafraid when you face danger! Everybody knows—”

“Then everybody is wrong.” Geary sat down again, looking at her. “You were terrified? Do you have any idea how frightened I was at Grendel? My ship was shot to pieces under me, the only crew left on Merlon were me and the dead, the power core self-destruct had been activated, and I couldn’t find a working escape pod.”

“You couldn’t find—? Nobody ever said that.”

“Nobody else knows! Except Tanya Desjani. And now you. Jane, when I was a lot younger, my father told me something. We were talking about heroes. I remember that I’d been reading histories and saying how great these people were who hadn’t been afraid when they faced great challenges. And my father laughed a lot harder than I just did; and then he said that courage wasn’t the absence of fear. Courage, real bravery, is being afraid and doing what you need to do anyway. I didn’t believe him. Not really.” Geary took a deep breath. “Not until I was on Merlon and ordering the surviving crew to evacuate while I kept fighting the ship a little longer. Not until I was pulling myself along a passageway littered with wreckage and the dead, trying to find a way off of a crippled ship that was about to explode.”

Jane Geary looked down at the deck. “People have told me that, too. I haven’t believed them. I feel like a fraud.”

“You’re human, Jane. And a good officer when you’re not trying to prove that you’re a hero. You showed that when you charged the enemy at Honor, thinking only of the necessity of doing that despite how scared you were.” Did she believe him? He couldn’t tell.

When she finally spoke again, it was in a voice so low he could barely hear. “Was Michael scared?”

“When he used Repulse to hold off the Syndics so the rest of the fleet could get away? Yes.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that?”

Why hadn’t he? He suddenly understood the reason why he had been reticent before this. “Because if you haven’t been through something like that,” Geary said slowly, “then telling someone that the person who did it was scared can sound like a criticism, a put-down, instead of what it really is—a testament to just how brave they actually were. Now, there are people who get so involved in what they must do, in doing this and that and the next thing, that they don’t have time to be scared. Tanya Desjani is like that. They’re brave, too, just in a different way because they submerge their fears long enough to get the job done. But feeling no fear? That would make machines the bravest things in the universe.”

She thought about that for a while, then spoke in a firm voice. “What do I need to do?”

That one was easy. “Be the officer I first saw at Varandal. I don’t need someone trying to prove that she’s Black Jack. I need Jane Geary.”

She looked up, meeting his eyes, then nodded. “I think I remember her. She was trying to prove something else, though. She was trying to prove who she wasn’t.”

“We all are trying to prove things. All of the time.” Geary stepped closer, searching her eyes. “Jane, we need to get that superbattleship, the new Invincible , home. Your battleships are the last line of defense before the four battleships towing the new Invincible . Don’t leave them hanging. They need you blocking any attacks that come at them.”

Her arm came up in a slow salute. “If anything gets through, it won’t be because I let them.”

After she ended the call, Geary stood looking at where his grandniece’s image had been. Once again, he had ordered her to stand and die. After this talk, he felt confident she would do it, not because of his order but because of who she was. That wouldn’t make him feel any less guilty if this time she did die carrying out his orders.

The battle cruisers and the rest of the pursuit force had gradually passed the six spider-wolf ships, so that now the alien craft were between the pursuit-force formation and the heavier main-body formation coming on behind. The gap between the two subformations of the human fleet grew steadily larger as the battle cruisers, light cruisers, and destroyers accelerated faster than the cumbersome battleships, auxiliaries, and assault transports could manage. Geary watched the status reports from the four battleships towing the former bear-cow superbattleship, seeing the stress readings in their hulls as Relentless , Reprisal , Superb , and Splendid strained to haul the massive Invincible at higher and higher velocities. Given enough time, even a small amount of thrust could do that, but they didn’t have decades to spend on slow acceleration, and so the four battleships were putting all they had into the task.

Status reports everywhere showed problems. Not anywhere near the scale that had happened at Honor, but as the ships of the pursuit force had pushed their maneuvering and propulsion systems to the maximum, there had been spot failures in a score of ships. Implacable and Intemperate had each lost a main propulsion unit, which they were frantically working to bring back on line, while Valiant had suffered failures in half of her maneuvering thruster systems. All three battle cruisers had lagged behind their places in formation. They were accompanied by several light cruisers as well as ten destroyers that had also lost partial propulsion or maneuvering. Geary started to think that at least no ship had lost all propulsion, then hastily cut off the thought lest it somehow jinx the fleet.

Dragon and Victorious were keeping place in formation but dealing with fluctuating shield failures, while individual hell-lance batteries were failing here and there on dozens of ships.

The main-body formation under Captain Armus was suffering from scattered problems as well, but they had the auxiliaries with them as well as more time to fix the sudden system failures.

As Captain Smythe had predicted, not only Witch but also Jinn and Goblin were out of critical materials and now unable to manufacture new items. Cyclops had an inventory so low that it would probably report the same condition within a few hours. Their engineers were assisting the crews of other ships in repair work, but that was all they could do for now.

“It could be worse,” Geary said. “We’ve got a few more hours for this formation to fix things before we enter jump, and then the transit time to Midway to do internal repairs.”

“And the Kicks aren’t still chasing us,” Desjani added.

He couldn’t help a brief smile, which faded as he reviewed the repair status of fleet ships again. Yes, they had time to work, but having the parts they needed was another matter. “I hope we’re not running low on duct tape, too. I think we’re going to need a lot of it.”

He had wondered if something else would show up at Pele while the fleet was passing through, perhaps more enigma ships racing to join up with their main force. But once the enigmas had jumped, there was nothing at Pele but the two human subformations and the spider-wolf formation between them. The main-body formation had fallen well behind the pursuit formation by the time the battle cruisers and their escorts pivoted to begin braking down to point one light speed for the jump.

Geary felt the stress as Dauntless ’s main propulsion units roared at maximum force to slow the ship. Tanya had cut the maneuver to the barest safety margins to shave a few more minutes off the time to jump. One of these days he would learn to double-check how many demands she was putting on propulsion units, ships’ structures, and the inertial nullifiers.