The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Dreadnaught (27 page)

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Authors: Jack Campbell

BOOK: The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Dreadnaught
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The only difference was the amount of rank present. As far as Geary could tell, there were only a few commanders or majors among them, everyone else being at least colonels or captains, and almost half wearing the tarnished insignia of admirals and generals. Iger hadn’t been exaggerating in the least.
He was gazing at the prisoners, searching for Captain Michael Geary even though he knew the odds of his great-nephew being alive and being here were very small, when a noise from Rione caught his attention. A wordless gasp, it somehow carried across the dock. Several of the former prisoners heard and turned to look, one man among them stumbling to a halt, then running toward her. “Vic! By the living stars, is it really you?”
Geary took a step away as they embraced, feeling embarrassed to be witnessing such raw emotion, actual tears flowing from Rione as she held him.
He started to look aside, then focused back on Rione’s face. Amid the wonder and happiness, did he also see horror? How could that be?
But then she noticed him and averted her own face for a moment. When he saw it again, Rione had only the natural emotions from such a reunion visible.
She broke the embrace, turning toward Geary, reestablishing the iron control Rione usually displayed. “Admiral, may I present Commander Paol Benan, my husband.”
Geary waited for a salute, which didn’t come, and he belatedly realized that, of course, these officers had been imprisoned when he had reintroduced saluting to the fleet.
Benan grinned broadly. “It’s really you. Well, damn, of course it is. The Marines told us Black Jack was in command. Who else could have brought the fleet this deep into Syndic space? You must have them on the run. We can beat them now, crush them so they never again pose a threat to the Alliance! Now that we’re off that planet, you can hit it with everything you’ve got!”
It took both Rione and Geary a moment to realize what he meant, that the Syndic authorities here had cruelly withheld news of the end of the war. “Paol,” she said, “the war is over. We already won.”
“What?” Benan looked completely lost for a moment. “When? How?”
“Admiral Geary. He wiped out the Syndic fleet and forced them to agree to peace.”
“Peace.” Benan said the word as if he had heard it for the very first time in his life and had no idea of its meaning. “That’s . . . but you attacked the planet. The Marines assaulted the camp.”
“The Syndic CEO here balked at his obligations under the peace agreement,” Geary explained. “We took necessary actions to liberate you and your fellow prisoners.”
“Yes.” Benan still seemed uncertain. “We can help with some targeting for your follow-up bombardments. There are some buried installations, well concealed, that we know the locations of.”
“There will be no more bombardment of that planet, Commander.”
“But . . . the manufacturing centers . . . population centers—”
Geary heard his voice hardening. “This fleet no longer wars on civilians, Commander. We attack military targets only, and those attacks now will come only as necessary to ensure that the Syndics abide by the peace treaty.”
Benan simply looked at Geary as if he had heard words in an unknown language.
Taking his arm in a gentle grasp, Rione spoke for them both. “My husband needs to be checked in and receive his medical evaluation, Admiral. I will have an opportunity to bring him up to date while that is under way. I hope you will forgive us now.”
“Of course.” He felt ashamed for his anger of a moment earlier. Benan and the others liberated with him were still stressed by the long captivity and bewildered by recent events. They needed to know how things had changed, that the fleet had returned to the honorable practices of their ancestors.
Gazing back at the other liberated prisoners, Geary saw an admiral and a general looking his way.
Time to reposition before I get pinned down.
“I need to return to the bridge,” he said to no one in particular in a voice loud enough to carry. He offered the prisoners a quick wave and smile, then dashed off before they could leave the line.
He made it there only twenty minutes after leaving, finding everything still going well. Of course, he could have directed the operation from anywhere within
Dauntless
, but humans had long since learned that leaders needed to be seen and needed to issue orders from professionally appropriate locations. Geary had discovered that the old (and apparently true) story of the admiral who had issued orders during a battle from the comfort of his stateroom while drinking beer was still well-known.
Carabali’s shuttle was the last to dock on
Tsunami
. “All shuttles recovered, all Marines accounted for, all prisoners located and liberated,” she reported to Geary. “No damage to shuttles, personnel casualties limited to several sprains incurred during the landings.”
“Outstanding job, General.” Geary let out a long breath that felt like he had been holding it for hours. “All units, execute Formation November at time four zero.”
Forming into five rectangles, broad sides facing forward, the largest rectangle in the middle itself centered on
Dauntless
, the Alliance fleet accelerated away from the Syndic planet, heading for the jump point that would take it back to Hasadan. But this time, from Hasadan the fleet would take the Syndic hypernet to Midway. He stood again, stretching out the accumulated tension. “I think I’ll take a break in my stateroom, Captain Desjani.”
“Get something to eat, too,” she said.
Resisting the urge to say, “Yes, ma’am,” and salute her in front of the bridge crew, Geary headed for his stateroom by way of a mess compartment to pick up a battle ration. It wasn’t the best food, and arguments within the fleet debated whether battle rations qualified as food at all using most definitions of that word, but the rations filled you up and met minimum daily nutrition requirements.
He was almost to his stateroom when Desjani came quickly toward him down the passageway, her expression stiff. She gestured wordlessly toward Geary’s stateroom, letting him enter and following closely behind. Once inside she closed the door with great care, then turned to him, her face a mask of barely contained fury, all the more fearsome for the coldness of the fire in her eyes. “Request permission to speak freely, sir.”
“You never require permission to do that,” he replied, keeping his own voice low and steady.
“I have been informed of the identity of one of the liberated prisoners.
Her
husband.”
“That’s right.” He wondered if her anger was directed at him for not telling her, but it seemed aimed elsewhere.
“What an amazing coincidence. She came aboard with new orders, diverting this fleet from its planned course and its planned mission in order to come to the prisoner-of-war camp in this star system, a camp that just happened to have her husband among its number.” Desjani’s words came out clipped, hard as a barrage of grapeshot. “We came here on
her personal errand
.”
“That’s possible, but—”
“
Possible?
She
jerked
around this
fleet
for her own
personal
purposes—”
“Tanya, hear me out!” He waited as she took a deep breath, the heat in her eyes subsiding to a controlled blaze. “I’ve had time to think about this. First, my impression was that she was shocked to see her husband. But she’s very good at concealing her real feelings, so that’s far from definitive.”
“She’s—”
“I’m
more
worried about dealing with all of the
other
VIPs.”
Desjani took a long, slow breath, still furious but keeping the feelings on a shorter leash. “Like Falco.”
“Multiplied a hundred times.”
Her eyes narrowed as the fires in them became a white-hot, focused torch. “Why? She didn’t like Falco. Neither did the government. Why unleash dozens more like him?”
“I don’t know.” He sat down, one hand to his forehead, trying to blank out anger and frustration. The battle ration sat untouched, his appetite fled for the moment. “All I know for certain is that they’re here, and we’re taking them into alien space with us.”
“Hundreds of loose cannons.” Now Desjani seemed baffled. “What possible advantage does that give anyone?”
“I think Rione knows why we were sent here to get them.”
“Her secret orders. But why wouldn’t the government want those Falco-wannabes left in Syndic hands as long as possible? Why make them a priority for release?”
“I don’t know.” Geary let his eyes rest on the star display floating above the table, which he had left centered on Dunai Star System. “Even if Rione knew that her husband was at Dunai, why would the government have agreed to let her divert this fleet for a personal matter? She’s not that powerful. She’s been voted out of office. And what possible reason would the government have for agreeing if it had any idea that all of those other senior officers were there?”
“It must have been a price,” Desjani insisted. “Something she demanded in exchange for agreeing to go on this mission and carry out whatever orders she has.” Desjani seemed ready to order Rione’s arrest.
“She’s still a legal, authorized representative of the government, Tanya. Even if the government agreed to order us to this star system to satisfy Rione’s personal agenda, it’s within the rights of the government to do that.”
Desjani sat down, too, glaring at him. “Are you sure you don’t want to be dictator?”
“Yes.” That brought up another thought, though. “We know the government fears this fleet. They fear what I might do with it. But now they’ve ensured that lots of other senior officers who might back a coup are also present with the fleet. It’s either irrational or so brilliantly Byzantine it only seems to make no sense at all.”
“What if those secret orders jeopardize the safety of this fleet?”
“We don’t know that—”
“We don’t
know
anything.” Desjani jumped up, walked to the hatch, and yanked it open. “It’s like dealing with the aliens.”
 
 
“SOME
amount of disorientation is normal in cases like this,” the fleet’s senior medical officer explained to Geary. “But the readjustment difficulties are higher than usual for these individuals. It was a good idea to place many of them on
Mistral
, where I could conduct personal examinations.”
Geary smiled and nodded as if he had indeed thought about that on the spur of the moment.
“Call me old-fashioned,” the doctor continued, “but I think even the best virtual-meeting software misses things. Tiny things, but important in evaluating an individual.”
“Can you summarize your impressions?” Geary asked.
“I already did.” The physician hesitated. “I could go into a little more detail, I suppose. As I said, some disorientation is normal. They’ve been in a Syndic labor camp for years at least and, in many cases, decades. They are accustomed to being confined to certain areas, to being subject to arbitrary rules, to having their actions controlled by authorities whose judgment can’t be questioned.”
That sounds a lot like just being in the military,
Geary thought.
“But in addition to that, there’s the fact that basic certainties are different. The war is over. That’s a major alteration in what they considered a fixed reality, and unlike those of us who were free to see events unfold recently, it is hitting them all at once. They have been told an intelligent species of aliens exists beyond human space, something totally unexpected. Then there’s you, yourself, that Black Jack, against all rational odds, did indeed return from the dead (figuratively speaking naturally) and achieve the seemingly impossible. To these former prisoners, it’s as if they have suddenly found themselves in a fantasy world rather than the universe they occupied before being captured.”
The fleet physician looked down, sighing once, before focusing back on Geary. “There’s one other factor unique to these prisoners. As you may have already been informed, many are fairly senior officers. Before being captured, they were used to either being in charge or being highly influential. Many of them believed that they would play an exceptional, personal role in the war because of their own abilities, that they were fated to do great things. There’s a medical term for this set of beliefs.”
Geary fought down his own sigh. “Geary Syndrome.”
“Yes! You’ve heard of it?” the doctor said in surprised tones, as if amazed that a nonphysician would have such knowledge.
“It’s been brought to my attention.”
“Then I’m sure you understand that they find it hard to deal with a situation where they lack authority in this fleet despite their rank and seniority. Many of them believed that somehow, despite being imprisoned, they would still save the Alliance and defeat the Syndics. Such beliefs helped sustain them. But you already won the war, leaving them without any clear sense of their own destinies.”
He didn’t need any further explanations to see how much trouble all of those disorientations could add up to. “I’m going to speak with them as a group. It’s already set up for ten minutes from now.”

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