The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Dreadnaught (14 page)

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Authors: Jack Campbell

BOOK: The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Dreadnaught
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“Thank you, sir.”
She didn’t believe him. What had changed for her while he had been gone? “I want the officer I saw defending Varandal. Forget Black Jack. I want you to be Jane Geary.”
“Yes, sir.”
Damned military formality. When all else failed, it offered the perfect hiding place for real feelings and thoughts. Geary leaned back, tapping the table. “Sit down please, Jane. I have to confess that I thought you’d leave the fleet and get on with your life now that the war’s over.”
She sat but still seemed rigid. “Not every mission is over,” Jane said quietly.
“If Michael still lives, I’ll find him.”
“You have plenty of other jobs, Admiral. I can do that one.”
“Is that why you’re staying in the fleet? To search for Michael?”
Jane hesitated. “There are a number of reasons.”
“You’ve done your part,” Geary urged her. “I’m stuck here. You can do something else.”
“I’m a Geary.” She said it in a low voice, but the force behind the words carried clearly. “More so than ever.”
He stared at her, unable to find words for a long moment. “Let’s just be clear that I believe that you have a right to your own life. Don’t stay in this fleet because of me. I’ve done enough damage to the family. But if you do stay, I need to know that I can count on you.”
“You can count on me.” She watched him steadily, no wavering in her eyes.
“I have always known that.” This wasn’t going anywhere. “Jane, as your commanding officer, I hope you will keep me informed of any matters that might impact on your ability to continue serving as well as you have in the past. As your uncle, I hope you will feel free to speak with me on any matter.”
Jane didn’t reply for a long moment, then shook her head. “I’m older than you are, Uncle. You spent a century not aging.”
“I’ve been making up for it since being recovered from survival sleep. With everything that’s been happening, I think I’ve been aging a few years every month.” The attempt at humor didn’t change her expression, so Geary gestured to her. “That’s all I had to say.”
“Thank you.” She stood once again, saluted even though the meeting had become informal, then her image vanished, leaving Geary glowering at the space where she had been.
What the hell? “I’m a Geary.” That’s what she ran away from all her life. Why is she embracing it now? And how would that—
Damn. Is she embracing the
legend
? Does she now think she has to live up to that?
I
can’t live up to that.
She can’t be thinking she has to be like Black Jack.
But what Jane Geary had
Dreadnaught
do during that mess over the courts-martial. Isn’t that what the myths say Black Jack would have done?
Please let me be wrong. The last thing this fleet needs is that mythical Black Jack.
 
 
FINALLY
free to hide in his stateroom for a few minutes, Geary found himself too restless to sit there. He decided to take a walk around the ship. As he went through the familiar passageways, he felt a lightening of his spirit.
Dauntless
had been built to as austere a scheme as Ambaru station’s new sections, but the battle cruiser had something the station did not.
Dauntless
felt like home.
He wasn’t surprised to encounter Tanya, walking steadily along, checking out everything on her ship.
Dauntless
had probably been a beehive of activity before she arrived, with everyone striving to ensure that not a single speck of dust marred any surface and not a single item was out of place or functioning at less-than-optimum levels. “Good afternoon, Captain Desjani.”
“Good afternoon, Admiral Geary,” she returned in the same tones, as if they had spent the last few weeks just working side by side as usual.
He fell in beside her as they walked, being careful to maintain a distance between them. This was her ship, and the crew would surely note any unprofessional familiarity. “It’s odd. Being back in my stateroom, I started to feel like everything in the previous weeks was some kind of dream.”
She raised one eyebrow at him, then brought up her left hand, holding it straight up with the back facing him so that the new ring on it glinted clearly. “I don’t usually acquire jewelry in my dreams.”
“Me, neither.”
“Something has you on edge. How did your individual meeting go?”
“Well enough, but odd.” He got another questioning look as he described his meeting with Jane Geary. “I don’t know what’s gotten into her. Jane made it clear when I first talked to her that she only joined the fleet because she had to, because she was a Geary. The war’s over now. She’s done her duty, and then some. There’s nothing holding her to the fleet.”
“
Something
is holding her to the fleet.”
“I told her she was free to leave, to get on with her life.”
Desjani smiled wryly. “Life isn’t usually what we plan. Whatever Jane Geary once thought she’d be, she’s spent her adult life as a fleet officer. Maybe she’s finally realizing that
this
has become her life. Maybe she no longer knows what else she wants to do. And maybe . . .”
“Maybe what?” Geary asked.
“You’ve told me about your family issues, how they felt about Black Jack.” Desjani bit her lower lip before saying more. “Maybe part of her was
not
being Black Jack, because she could hate him and think he was nothing actually worth emulating. But now she knows the real Black Jack.”
“Black Jack was never real.”
“Are you always going to be in denial about that? The point is, Jane Geary may be trying to figure who she wants to be now. Not just ‘not Black Jack.’ Something else.”
He grimaced. “That’s what I’m worried about, that she might want to be more like the imaginary Black Jack. Not like the real me. I wish she’d talk to me about it. I’m going to go talk to my ancestors. Maybe they’ll offer some understanding.”
“Have fun and say hi to them for me,” Desjani said. “I need to finish looking over the ship. I’ll go down to the worship spaces after that. To give thanks,” she added with a meaningful look at him, “for all that has gone well and all that could have gone much worse.”
“Message noted, Captain Desjani.” They were together, even if that togetherness would be severely limited, and only a fool wouldn’t give thanks for worst cases that had been averted today.
 
 
THE
organization message from fleet headquarters had arrived just as Desjani and Duellos had predicted, one week after Geary had assumed command of the fleet and four days after he had organized the fleet himself. He hadn’t been sure how much the other two might have been joking about the nature of headquarters’ micromanagement, but couldn’t resist a grunt of disbelief at the size and detail of the message.
Put
Inspire
and
Leviathan
in the same battle cruiser division? Why the hell would I do that since it would mean Duellos and Tulev would both be in the same division instead of leading their separate divisions as they’ve done so well? Why scramble the battleship divisions instead of keeping the ships with the comrades they’ve been working with for a while?
No further promotions had been approved. Not the ones Geary had proposed, and none based on length of service or heroic actions or new assignments. With the end of the war and the freezing of the fleet’s size, officer promotions had skidded to an abrupt halt, a standstill all the more jarring for the officers nowadays, who had been accustomed by constant and serious battle casualties to expect promotions as fast as other officers were killed in action and needed to be replaced. Aside from the Alliance’s apparent need to keep promoting him to admiral, and Carabali’s promotion from colonel to general, no one else had been approved for higher rank, not even Lieutenant Iger. “Unfair” was the mildest way of describing it, but the system had been carefully designed so that promotions were never guaranteed, so there were no legal grounds for fighting the lack of promotions. Geary wondered how long it would be before his officers began chafing at the sudden halt to upward mobility and the apparent failure of the fleet to any longer recognize superior performance with higher rank.
And they would be looking to him, wondering why he didn’t fix things and get promotions going again.
Field promotions. Maybe headquarters forgot to restrict my ability as fleet commander to promote officers in the field for exceptional performance. But I’ll have to make a bunch of those all at once because once I do it the first time, headquarters and the government will realize that loophole still exists.
He paged down deep in the message and saw the crew lists. Sure enough, every man and woman, officer and enlisted, was assigned by ship, duty, and berthing compartment or stateroom.
Can I really just ignore this?
He wondered for the first time about the fleet status reports that went out when the fleet was in home space. He knew the reports he received from each ship were accurate, but what got forwarded to headquarters?
Desjani blinked at the question after he called her. “It’s a simulation,” she explained. “You don’t have to do a thing. The fleet database is set to automatically generate a simulation based on headquarters messages like that one. It gets updated by real data when necessary, like combat losses and damage, but administratively it’s an alternate universe that gets fed back to headquarters to keep them quiet. Didn’t you do that a century ago?”
“No.” Should he be horrified? Or thankful that a cure for bureaucratic meddling had been discovered by the operational forces? “Why hasn’t headquarters figured out what’s happening?”
“They know it’s happening. Of course, operational units are so far away, it takes headquarters a while to figure it out. Then they tell us to do what we’re told and stop running the simulation, and the simulated fleet agrees and tells them everything is fine. After a while, headquarters figures out they’re still hearing from the simulation and tell us again, and the simulated fleet agrees again. And so on and so on. Officers at headquarters vow to change the system, but if any of them ever get out with the operational forces, their perspective changes.”
It made sense, but it could also be an enormous practical joke on him. Geary studied her intently, looking for any sign that Desjani was pulling his leg. “Nobody ever talks about it?”
“We don’t have to talk about it much. It’s all automatic on our end though I guess headquarters devotes a lot of effort to telling our simulated fleet how to behave. Haven’t you heard anyone talk about the Potemkin fleet? I don’t know where the name came from, maybe it was the name of whoever first designed the system or maybe it was a name someone found in a database that seemed to fit. The point is, it means the fleet that headquarters wants to see, so that’s what we show them. We follow operational orders, of course, but the micromanagement of everything else is just ignored.”
After he had ended the conversation, Geary still spent a few minutes staring at the message. Despite Desjani’s ease with the situation, part of him still revolted against the idea of feeding headquarters a lot of simulated data. But then he took another look at the detailed instructions, focusing on one line pertaining to one officer on one ship.
Ensign Door should make reports twice each week to his department head Lieutenant Orp on his progress in qualifying as an emergency damage repair party leader per fleet instruction 554499A. Should Ensign Door fail to make adequate progress, reports documenting his shortfalls should be prepared weekly using form B334.900 . . .
Geary deleted the message from his queue.
Naturally, it was only the first of many from fleet headquarters.
The next arrived the following day in the form of a high-priority alert flashing an angry demand for attention. That alone gave Geary a bad feeling since he was busy reviewing the readiness state of the ships assigned to the First Fleet. With a sigh of resignation, he tapped receive, seeing the image of the new chief of fleet headquarters for the Alliance, Admiral Celu, appear standing before him. Celu had a strong chin, which she jutted out as if challenging Geary.
“Admiral Geary, we are in receipt of reports that indicate that you do not intend proceeding on your assigned mission for thirty standard days after assuming command. This mission is of the highest priority to the security of the Alliance. You are directed to move up your intended date of departure by a minimum of two weeks. You are to acknowledge receipt of this message and respond with your intended date of departure as soon as possible. Celu, out.”
Not even a polite and proper “to the honor of our ancestors” at the end of the message. And not a simple text message or even a video headshot to convey the short message, but a full-body image plainly intended to impress or intimidate. At one time it would have driven home to him the need to comply with an order whether he thought it wise or not. But in the last several months, he had done a lot of operating without the benefit of senior guidance, faced down plenty of opponents doubting his authority, and sent far too many men and women to their deaths on his orders during battle. His own perspective had shifted quite a bit, and actions aimed at pleasing his superiors even at risk to his subordinates had even less appeal than they had once had. Having confronted more than one collapsing hypernet gate, the image of an admiral standing before him held far less impact by comparison.

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