The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Guardian

“We’ll have to watch how they maneuver,” Lieutenant Iger chimed in. “That will give us some means to calculate their mass. Any mass in excess of a reasonable estimate for that size ship will likely represent armor.”

“What about the smaller ships?” Geary asked. His display was rapidly filling in details on the six escorts with the six bigger warships, showing barracuda shapes reminiscent of Alliance destroyers and Syndic Hunter-Killers, but not as large as either. “They’ve got less mass than even Syndic HuKs.”

“Corvettes?” Desjani guessed. “No. They’re even smaller than the Syndic Nickel corvettes.”

“Who do they belong to?” Senator Suva demanded. “You should know that! How can you not know that?”

Geary sighed and rubbed his forehead with one hand. “Senator, wherever these ships came from is not anywhere that the Alliance has current information on.”

“Where would that be?”

“I think I know.” Everyone’s attention centered on Senator Sakai. “I have studied much history,” he said. “Including the period when humanity first left Sol. The ships from Sol went in all directions, but there were two main paths. One path led inward along the spiral arm of the galaxy in which we reside. That resulted in the colonies near Sol in that direction, then the Alliance, the other groupings of star systems such as the Callas Republic and the Rift Federation, and beyond that the Syndicate Worlds. The other path led outward along our arm of the galaxy. Some of the earliest human colonies sprang into existence there. Perhaps these ships come from stars on the other side of the expansion from the one we occupy.”

Geary tapped in the same queries that everyone else was, seeing an image of the galaxy appear near his display with human-occupied space highlighted upon it. The image gave him momentary pause. We think we’ve come so far. In human terms, we have. Hundreds of light-years. Unimaginable distances. But lay out the region of the galaxy that we have explored and occupied, and it is just a small piece of one portion of that galaxy, which itself is but one of countless other galaxies. I’m used to space being huge, but even for me it is impossible to grasp how HUGE the universe is.

Rione commented first. “I never realized how lopsided human expansion has been. In terms of stars and distance, the vast majority has been inward toward the center of the galaxy. We’ve spread up and down and inward. I always assumed we started expanding in those directions. But my data says we first started going outward.”

“Something stopped us,” Costa said, her voice suspicious. “More threats like the enigmas who stopped our expansion inward?”

“How could that secret have been kept for so long and so close to Old Earth?” Rione asked. “The Syndics kept knowledge of the enigmas from us for a century, but that was because their contact with the enigmas was in regions of space far from our own, and the war drastically limited communications.”

“And,” Charban added, “we had stopped looking for other intelligent species after so many stars and worlds had yielded none. In the early days of human expansion, we expected to encounter such beings at any time.”

Geary had his eyes on the increasingly detailed images that Dauntless’s sensors were creating of the unknown warships. “They look human. The ships, I mean. We have some experience with nonhuman spacecraft designs. I don’t see anything on those warships that looks like the differences we saw on ships built by the enigmas or the Kicks or the Dancers.”

“What do I do?” Desjani asked him.

“Head for Old Earth,” Geary directed. “Transmit the standard arrival message to the Sol Star System authorities there. We’ll continue with our mission until something makes us do otherwise.”

Had one or more of the senators been ready to put their oar in? But none of them did, perhaps because none of them could think of any other useful form of action right now.

“Those may be human-built ships,” Desjani commented after adjusting the course of Dauntless slightly, “but look at all that extra junk on them. They look like something from one of those space fantasies. What do you call that stuff?”

Lieutenant Castries answered. “Frippery and furbelows, Captain. You’re right. Those ships look like the illustrations to a space fantasy with kings and princesses and wizards. They’re crawling with decorative detail. The ship’s systems are trying to analyze the purposes of those features, but I don’t think they have any other purpose but decoration.”