Dreadnaught

“Naturally,” Badaya replied, seemingly oblivious to alternate meanings to Desjani’s statement, though Duellos seemed on the verge of choking for a moment as he coughed several times. “The point now is, you’re heading out. A long ways out. What happens here while you’re far from home?”

Desjani answered him again, this time speaking with flat, professional tones. “There’s a major threat outside of Alliance space that must be evaluated and confronted, and if necessary defeated once more. Who would you select for that task?”

Badaya stayed silent for a few moments. “I don’t know. I couldn’t do it. If I’d been in command at Midway, I wouldn’t have figured out what was happening in time, and those damned aliens would have hurt us very badly and won the star system. As good as you are, Tanya, and you, Roberto, I don’t think you would have done so, either. Not on your own.” He sat back, rubbing his chin, his eyes going from Geary to Desjani. “Some tasks can be delegated, but when it comes to fleet operations . . .”

“Admiral Geary has no equal,” Desjani finished, acting as if she were oblivious to Geary’s discomfort at the statement. “There are messes inside the Alliance, political messes, which others can contain and control. But the threats outside the Alliance require his personal attention. Do you agree?”

“Absolutely! These others . . . do you trust them?”

Geary thought about the grand council, the worn-out but apparently sincere Navarro, the hard-to-read Sakai, and the worrisome Suva. Not to mention the other senators he had met previously. What option did he have but to trust them? And whom did he know better qualified or more trustworthy, even if he could pick and choose? “They’re what we have to work with,” he finally said.

“The old dilemma of any commander,” Duellos commented. “You have to carry out actions with what you have, not what you’d like to have. More than one disaster has taken place when people operate as if what they wish for was what they actually had.”

“I’d say countless disasters,” Badaya agreed. “But, speaking of what we have, the ships from the Callas Republic and the Rift Federation seem very confident that they’ll be leaving us soon.”

“It’s understandable,” Duellos said. “They were attached to us for the war, and the war is now officially over.”

“But official endings leave a lot of messes behind, don’t they?” Badaya frowned again. “There are rumors that the Callas Republic and the Rift Federation are actually going to leave the Alliance, sever all ties now that they think they don’t need us anymore.”

“There’s talk of that,” Geary said. “They were always independent powers who chose to join with the Alliance during the war.”

“But to let them walk away from the Alliance now—”

“The Alliance never controlled them,” Duellos pointed out. “We don’t control them now. They have independent ground forces and space forces, and independent governments.”

Badaya made a disgusted face. “We’d have to defeat them to keep them in the fold. Civil war.”

“Or a straight-out war of conquest,” Duellos agreed, “depending on how people chose to define the current relationships of those powers with the Alliance. But either way, it would be the sort of action for which the Syndicate Worlds have long been notorious.”

“They’re not worth that kind of stain on our honor,” Badaya grumbled. “You made a good decision to let them go if they want, Admiral.”

Duellos coughed slightly, probably covering up another laugh, as Geary nodded to Badaya as if he had indeed decided what would happen. “The departure of those ships will leave a hole in the fleet,” Geary said, “but nothing we can’t handle. It’s not as if we could keep them by force in any event. I’ll miss having them, but I don’t want to go into battle alongside people who are only on our side because we have guns at their backs.”

He paused, watching Badaya. As difficult a problem as Badaya could pose, he was also a decent commanding officer with a quick mind. He was also, as far as Geary could tell, honorable enough except for his willingness to act against the government of the Alliance. But even that willingness Badaya justified by believing the Alliance government had become too corrupt and no longer representative of the people of the Alliance. And I hate even misleading people like Badaya about my role now. I hate lying to them even worse. If I can walk them toward accepting the government now . . . “In the long run, the government has to be trusted again.”

“You have no disagreement from me on that,” Badaya said.