The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Leviathan (23 page)

“And we know how important patterns are to the Dancers! Of course their methods of communication would reflect that! Maybe it’s a sort of verbal handshake! ‘Hi, I’m intelligent and want to talk about intelligent things!’ ‘Hi, I am also intelligent and want to talk about intelligent things, too!’ We have to try this. Do you have any singers in your fleet, Admiral?” Charban asked.

Geary looked at Desjani, who made the universal human gesture of ignorance. “There must be some,” she said. “None of my officers, judging from their efforts during our occasional karaoke nights.”

“I didn’t know you had karaoke nights on
Dauntless
,” Geary said.

“If you heard my lieutenants and ensigns trying to sing, you’d know why it’s been a while since we held one,” Desjani said. “You can send out a message to all of the ships in the fleet, and I can have my crew checked to see if any claim singing talent—”

“I’d prefer not to spend a long time searching for singers before we can test this idea,” Geary said.

“Please don’t look at me,” Jamenson said. “If you put enough whiskey down me, I sometimes try to sing, but it’s the sort of sounds that would make any self-respecting alien within a hundred light-years run for home. How about poets? Maybe poems would work. Lieutenant Iger does haiku.”

Everyone looked at her.

“Lieutenant Iger does haiku?” Geary finally asked. Somehow, the image of the serious, straightforward intelligence officer didn’t fit such a thing.

“Yes, sir. That’s a kind of poem. They’re good,” Jamenson added. “Lieutenant Iger’s haiku, I mean. He really has a poetic soul. I think.”

“Lieutenant Iger?” Desjani asked in disbelieving tones.

“Yes, Captain.”

“Fine.” Desjani sighed. “Admiral, I recommend we get our intelligence officer up here to see if he can craft lovely poems for the singing spider wolves.”

Summoned on the double, Lieutenant Iger showed up at the conference room slightly out of breath. His eyes first fell upon Lieutenant Jamenson and her bright green hair, producing a reflexive smile that vanished as soon as Iger realized who else was present. Turning his usual sober and studious expression on Geary, Iger saluted. “You sent for me, sir?”

“That’s right,” Geary said, pointing to General Charban. “We need you to sit down with the general and write a poem for the Dancers.”

Iger blinked before managing to respond. “Sir?”

“Sit down with General Charban and write a poem to the Dancers,” Geary repeated. “What are the types of poems that you’re skilled at? Haiku? One of those.”

“For the Dancers?” Iger flushed slightly. “Admiral, my . . . hobby . . . is just a pastime. I’m not any good at it.”

“Lieutenant Jamenson says you are.”

Iger jerked with surprise and glanced at Jamenson. “She did? I mean . . . yes, sir. I’ll try, sir. A poem for the Dancers?”

“General Charban and Lieutenant Jamenson will explain,” Geary said, waving Iger in their direction.

He and Desjani stood watching as Lieutenants Iger and Jamenson huddled with Charban. “Who would have guessed that Iger had an, um, poetic soul?” Desjani murmured to Geary.

“I have a feeling that Lieutenant Jamenson may have awakened that particular part of Lieutenant Iger’s soul,” Geary commented dryly.

“Well, yeah, that’s what women do. We take rough objects and polish them up a bit. What if this doesn’t work, Admiral?”

“Then we’re no worse off than we were before.”

Lieutenant Iger was sitting, looking distressed and running one hand
through his hair, while Lieutenant Jamenson spoke to him in a low voice, her expression encouraging. General Charban had leaned back and was pretending not to be aware of what the lieutenants were doing.

Finally, Iger stood up. “Admiral, I think this will do to convey the message General Charban wants to send. Ummm . . .

“Dark is this winter,

“Come now our friends from far stars,

“What do they seek here?”

Lieutenant Jamenson beamed at Iger with what seemed to Geary to be possessive pride, General Charban nodded approvingly, and even Tanya Desjani smiled. “Why the reference to winter?” Geary asked.

“It’s traditional in haiku, sir,” Iger explained. “There’s often a seasonal reference, and I thought—”

“That’s fine. I just wondered. Send it,” Geary said.

Charban poked the haiku into the transmitter, then everyone waited. “If they want to respond,” Charban said, “they’ll usually answer very quickly, and by now those Dancer ships are only a couple of light-minutes from this ship, so there shouldn’t be any major comm delays caused by distance.”

An alert tone sounded. Charban slapped the control, reading intently. He smiled, then sighed, then lowered his head to the table as if immensely tired.

“What’s wrong?” Geary demanded.

“Do you have any idea how much sleep and how much hair I have lost trying to figure out how to communicate better with the Dancers?” Charban said, his voice partly muffled against the table’s surface. He sat up, sighed again, then read. “Here’s the reply from the Dancers—

“Now we speak clearly,

“As one to one, side by side,

“To mend the pattern.”

Charban shook his head, looking dejected. “I feel like such an idiot.”

“No one else thought of it until now,” Geary said. “Lieutenant Jamenson, I’m going to get you promoted if it kills me.”

“Here’s the next message,” Jamenson said, looking abashed, as another tone sounded.

Charban read it out loud at once this time.

“Cold minds must be stopped,

“This mistake is an old one,

“We fight beside you.”

“The meaning of that is very clear,” Iger said, sounding surprised.

“They’re here to help us fight the dark ships,” Geary said. “I can’t believe that all this time they were waiting for us to sing back at them.”

“It must be how they regard serious talk,” Charban said. “As long as we avoided using any sort of rhythmic patterns in our speech, we must have sounded to them as if we didn’t want to talk about anything important. We kept giving them baby speech, and they kept responding in kind.”

“Find out what they regard as fighting beside us,” Geary ordered. “Make the questions as poetical as you want, but I need to know if that means they’re taking orders from me, or if they’re planning on operating independently on the same battlefield. They need to know that we’re leaving in a few days for Unity Alternate. Also, see if you can find out whether they did jump here from somewhere in Dancer-controlled space.”

“I have a list a kilometer long of things we need to get answers to from the Dancers,” Charban said. “But I will give priority to those. What do you think of ‘this mistake is an old one’?”

“We’re not the first species to try to outsource responsibility for killing,” Desjani said. “Apparently that can produce results bad enough that the Dancers want to help us stop humanity’s efforts in that direction.”

“Did someone among the Dancers do it?” Geary wondered. “Put AIs in complete control of weapons?”

“They are natural engineers,” Charban noted. “And you know engineers. Wouldn’t it be cool if we could build this? Let’s try! The awesomeness of building it fills their imaginations, and as a result, the question of whether or not building it would be a good idea doesn’t always get asked.”

“In that respect, they may be very much like us,” Geary agreed. “Lieutenant Iger, you are to work directly with General Charban and Lieutenant Jamenson to facilitate communications with the Dancers. That task takes priority over any other assignment.”

“Yes, sir.” Iger did not appear to be too put out at the prospect of working closely with Jamenson for an indefinite period. “My chiefs can run my intelligence section for a while and will let me know if they discover anything.”

Geary and Desjani left the other three, walking through the passageways of the battle cruiser, Desjani looking around in a way that conveyed concern. “They’re going to target
Dauntless
again,” she said to Geary.

“There’s no doubt of that. Our goal is to hit their base while most or all of the dark ships are away,” Geary reminded her. “We knock out their support structure, and, in time, they’ll run low enough on fuel cells and expendable munitions for us to be able to take them down.”

“And if a lot of the dark ships are there when we arrive?” Desjani asked. “Forty Dancer ships are welcome reinforcements, but they’re not enough to even the odds.”

“That’s an unusually cautious attitude for you,” he commented.

“I’ve got a bad feeling.” She frowned at the deck, causing some passing sailors to hastily check the deck for any signs of trash or other problems. “Like before we went to Prime with Bloch in command.”

“You think we’re running into an ambush?” Geary asked.

“I don’t know. But we have to try this, don’t we? There’s no telling where those dark ships might hit next. Time is not on our side.”

He had just reached his stateroom when Charban called, looking unusually triumphant. “The Dancers will come to Unity Alternate
with us. They feel that they will be needed and that destroying the ‘cold minds’ is too important a task to risk an unsuccessful mission.”

“Will the Dancers operate under my command?” Geary asked.

“No. They want to be free to operate independently there.”

It was Geary’s turn to sigh. “I can’t make them follow my orders. Those forty Dancer ships could be enormously useful anyway if any dark ships are defending their base. And if they come with us, I won’t have to explain leaving an alien armada at Varandal while I take my fleet off somewhere else.”

“It is a
friendly
alien armada,” Charban pointed out.

“I’ll let you inform the press of that.”

“No, thank you, Admiral. Communicating with the Dancers is so important, I would hate to take time away from them to deal with human reporters,” Charban intoned piously.

—

THIRTY-FIVE
hours later, the First Fleet began to move, assembling its hundreds of warships from orbits dispersed around Varandal Star System.
Dauntless
, the guide on which every other warship took station, held her orbit as the other ships swung close, forming into a lattice in which every ship’s weapons supported other ships, and any target would be engaged by many ships.

Normally, Geary took pride in the precise and effective arrangements of his ships. The current formation was shaped like a single, huge cylinder containing thirteen battle cruisers, twenty-one battleships, twenty-four heavy cruisers, forty-four light cruisers, and ninety-one destroyers. The attack transport
Mistral
was tucked well inside the cylinder, as protected from attack as possible.

But human formations, no matter how elegant, always looked crude and clumsy next to Dancer arrangements of ships. The forty Dancer ships had also formed into a cylinder, as if advertising their association with Geary’s warships. But the Dancer formation radiated
a relaxed perfection that made it appear like a grouping of living things in faultless synchronization with each other. Whenever they maneuvered, the Dancers lived up to their names, their ships gliding smoothly through space, moving in intricate choreographies that appeared natural rather than planned and practiced.

“Show-offs,” Desjani grumbled. A widely acknowledged expert ship driver among humans, her skills paled next to those of the Dancers.

Geary wisely refrained from responding to her comment. They were all in the conference room again, a star display showing the shapes of the human and alien formations floating apparently right before every image of every ship commanding officer in the fleet.

How many times had he held these conferences? How many times had every commanding officer in the fleet looked to him for orders and inspiration and hope?

Why hadn’t it gotten any easier?

“As I told you last time we met, we’ve located the base the dark ships are using,” Geary began. “We’ve learned how to reach that base, and now we’re going to go there, destroy the support facilities for the dark ships and any dark ships that are present. We’re bringing along our last remaining assault transport and enough Marines to occupy a facility that we expect to be there, so we can collect all of the intelligence possible and rescue anyone trapped there by the dark ships.”

“Where is this mysterious base?” Captain Badaya asked. “Why haven’t we been able to find it before now? And why was it so hard to find out a means to reach it? Is it in Syndic territory?”

“Where is it?” Geary shifted the star display to focus on the binary, deriving some satisfaction from the uncomprehending looks most of his commanders gave the image. He must have looked exactly like that when Charban first asked about the two stars. “Right there. A binary star system.”

“We’re going to jump to a binary?” Captain Vitali asked. “There’s a stable jump point there?”

“No, as far as we can tell there are no stable jump points,” Geary said. “This star system has a hypernet gate. That’s how we’ll get there. I know what the next question is. Why did the Alliance build a hypernet gate at a binary? The answer is two words. Unity Alternate.”

The resulting silence around the table was finally broken by Captain Armus. “There is a real Unity Alternate?”

“Yes,” Geary replied. “The code for the gate there was already in our hypernet keys but needed to be unlocked for us to see it. The key aboard
Dauntless
has already had the necessary unlocking code loaded, and after this conference, I will be transmitting that same code to all of your ships.” He paused, seeing in everyone’s expressions the questions that statement created. “This is a fully authorized software patch. I received it from the government. This is an official tasking. The government wants Unity Alternate neutralized.”

“Neutralized?” Badaya exploded. “What is it we are neutralizing at our own government’s secret alternative command base?”

“The dark ships,” Geary said. “As well as potentially rogue elements of certain organizations.”

“Which organizations?” Captain Vitali asked.

“I don’t know. Neither does the government.”

“You did say rogue elements,” Captain Duellos conceded.