Dreadnaught

“Yes, you are. What are you going to do about it?”

“I could resign—”

Emotion blazed in her again. “Who else could better keep them alive, Admiral? Resign, and they’ll be in the hands of some fool like Admiral Otropa. Do you want them dead?”

“That’s completely unfair!”

“You still believe in ‘fair’?” Rione asked.

“Oddly enough, yes.” But she had spoken a truth. Their own people are casting them aside. Someone has to look out for them. Until I can think of somebody else, that someone has to be me. “I’ll do my job to the best of my ability.”

“You’ll still follow your orders?” Rione asked, her voice growing softer but more intense.

“Yes.” Geary bared his teeth at her. “As I see them. That means doing everything I legally can for the people under my command.”

“And the aliens?”

“You have your instructions, and I have mine. My orders require me to not only deal with short-term threats and problems, but also to handle them in ways that work in the long term. If the government or its emissaries have any problems with that, they can find someone else to use as their toy soldier.”

Rione slowly smiled though she still looked tired and somehow older. “Everyone underestimates you. Everyone but me.”

“And Tanya.”

“Oh, but she also worships you. That I won’t do.” Rione hauled herself to her feet. “I need some rest. Charban shouldn’t show up before tomorrow at the earliest. You may consider yourself once more politician-free for a while.”

“I’m sure your stateroom is ready.” He eyed her, wondering why he kept getting the impression that Rione was slightly different from when he had last seen her. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.” She smiled again, the gesture this time as empty of real feeling as the smile of a Syndic CEO, her eyes betraying nothing.

After she left, he stayed seated for a while, thinking through their conversation. Some of the things she had said, like alluding in front of Tanya to her role in getting him and Desjani together, had been uncharacteristically reckless. But Rione had also given the impression at times of playing a more subtle game than in the past, even when she seemed to be speaking candidly. Why did you really come back to this fleet, Victoria? How much are you an ally of mine, how much are you following the government’s line, and how much are you working to further your own goals, whatever those are?

Under the cover of what you did tell me, how did much did you not tell me?

MUCH later that day, he met Tanya walking through the passageways again. “Did you get a chance to look at those special orders from the grand council?” The orders Rione had brought for him. The orders marked for his eyes only. To hell with that. I want other inputs on this.

Desjani grimaced. “Yes. Painful.”

“Yeah. A lot of ‘do this unless you shouldn’t and don’t do that unless you should’ directives.”

She didn’t answer again for a moment, her eyes fixed straight ahead. “Please understand that my personal feelings aren’t factoring into this. That woman brought special orders for us. What are her orders?”

“I’ve wondered the same thing.”

“They didn’t need her just to be a courier. She’s here for another reason or reasons. Until we find out what those are, please treat her as a potential threat.”

“I will,” Geary said. “I’m already unhappy enough with the orders she let us know about, or at least the part telling us to go to the Dunai Star System. I was planning on jumping to Indras in Syndic space and taking the Syndic hypernet from there all the way to Midway before jumping into alien space. Simple and as fast a journey as we can make it. But instead, the grand council wants the fleet to go via Dunai to pick up the Alliance prisoners at a Syndic POW camp there.” He felt angry and trapped. These orders he couldn’t ignore. “The extra stops and jumps will add three weeks to our journey before we reach Midway.”

“Why Dunai?” Desjani pressed. “What makes the POW camp there more important than all of the other camps still full of Alliance prisoners in Syndic territory?”

“The orders don’t say, and Rione insists that she doesn’t know.”

“Let me put her in an interrogation cell for half an hour—”

Geary made a helpless gesture. “I wish I could, but there are no grounds for treating a civilian and a governmental representative that way. We have to go to Dunai, Tanya.”