The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Guardian

“It’s what they know,” Rione said. “And they are good at it, if ‘good’ is the right term to use.” She tapped some controls. “Did you see this? The room’s sensors picked it up.”

On the recorded images of the two colonels, a bright object now glowed on one of Morgan’s wrists, something so carefully matched to her skin that it was invisible to the naked eye. “What is it?” Geary asked.

Rione tapped a few more times, then glanced at him and Charban. “Not a threat, or you would have been alerted to it as soon as she entered here. It’s a very sophisticated recording device. Unless I’m wrong, it’s also sealed. Neither Morgan nor Malin could change anything on it.”

“They’re not trusted, either,” Charban said.

“Maybe. It would certainly provide someone like President Iceni with a record of what was actually said and done here. That could be why she allowed two of Drakon’s people to bring the proposal to you.” Rione lowered her head into one palm, thinking. “Their plan could work.”

“Do we dare trust them to carry through with it?” Charban asked.

“Drakon and Iceni? Or Morgan and Malin?”

“All of the above.” Charban winked at Geary, who nodded back in recognition of the joke. At some point in the past, the fleet had decided that multiple choice questions on training exams almost always had a correct answer of “all of the above.” Even though he was, like Rione, an emissary of the government, as a retired general of the ground forces, Charban had much more in common with Geary than he did with his fellow emissary.

Rione sighed in exaggerated fashion. “Drakon and Iceni would not have sent those two unless they trusted them. No. ‘Trust’ is the wrong word. I don’t know what the right word is. Some Syndic concept that involves having a good idea of whether or not someone else will betray you. You do realize that this won’t work without the full cooperation and assistance of me and Emissary Charban, right?”

“Yes,” Geary said. “It surprised me that those colonels, or rather Drakon and Iceni, didn’t also know that.”

“It surprised you?” Rione gusted a small laugh. “Would it have surprised Captain Badaya?”

“No, because he thinks . . .”

“Because he thinks you’re actually controlling the Alliance now, and the government is only a figurehead carrying out your orders.” Rione smiled in an unpleasant way. “Naturally, these former Syndics think the same thing. Who could possibly fail to grasp such power if it beckoned? You refused the chance, but Drakon and Iceni surely assume you seized it.”

Geary looked away, angry again. “All right. So they didn’t think I’d have to talk to you, to get your approval. But I do. What do you think?”

“I recommend that we do it, Admiral. It is a risk. It involves putting our confidence in people whose understanding of concepts like keeping their word is extremely elastic. But it will solve our problem as well as theirs.”

“Self-interest,” Charban said. “They want this to work more than we do.”

“Exactly. It would be unpleasant for us if we were to leave here with Boyens still holding superior firepower to the people of Midway, but it would be a disaster for Midway.”

“All right,” Geary repeated. “I’ll send the agreed code word to the freighter, and we’ll get this going. If it doesn’t work, there might be hell to pay.”

Rione shook her head, looking tired again. She had aged on this trip, and now seemed a decade older than when he had first met her. “Hell is going to get paid no matter what we do. There are no painless options, Admiral. Have the authorities here accepted your offer to leave Captain Bradamont at Midway as a liaison officer for the Alliance?”

“Yes.”

“Good. We can use that. CEO Boyens is about to catch a little hell himself.”

TWO

IT would require about two weeks for the plan proposed by the rulers of Midway to come to fruition. Two weeks during which the fleet should have been heading toward home. But scanning down the long, long list of repair work still required on many of his ships, Geary tried to make the best of it. “What ever happened to those plans for fully automated nanobased repair systems on ships?” he asked Captain Smythe, commanding officer of the auxiliary ship Tanuki and senior engineer in the fleet.

Smythe mimicked choking. “The same thing that always happens. The last test, to my knowledge, was about five years ago. The second generation of nanos started attacking ‘healthy’ parts of the test ship, except for those nanos that developed into nanocancer and began replicating out of control and harming critical systems. It took about two days for the ship’s repair system to turn it into a total wreck.”

“The same problem as a hundred years ago,” Geary agreed.