The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Guardian

As Geary paused to think, Major Dietz provided the answer. “Boarding party.”

“Boarding party?” Geary repeated. “How?”

“With enough stealth suits, they could get a force aboard this ship,” Dietz explained. “Hit us while we’re transiting a star system.”

“They know where we have to go,” Lagemann pointed out. “They can plant stealth shuttles along the route from a hypernet gate to a jump point and just latch on as we pass.”

“There wouldn’t be much opportunity for that along the route from here to Varandal,” Geary began, then stopped as a memory came to him. “CEO Boyens strongly implied that obstacles would be established to keep us from getting back easily.”

“Any idea what or how?”

“No. What could a boarding party do?”

Major Dietz answered again. “Standard practice when boarding a ship is to head for the three vital control centers. The bridge, main engineering control, which also controls the power core on the ship, and weapons control.”

“There isn’t any main engineering control on this ship,” Geary said, reaching for another grip and pulling himself farther along the passageway, “unless you found one and didn’t tell me.”

He could hear Lagemann’s grin. “Nope. There are eight power cores, and eight control stations. Why? Our engineers say it’s not efficient. Two big cores would have worked better. But that’s what the Kicks did. All of the cores are fully shut down and none of the control stations are operational. At least, not by humans. Who knows what a Kick could do? And all main propulsion systems were blown to hell during the battle at Honor, so even with power, Invincible can’t do any serious movement under her own propulsion.”

“There are two operational weapons left,” Major Dietz offered. “Particle beam projectors similar to our hell lances. But both lack power. They’re useless even if someone could find the right control station for them.”

“And the bridge is also useless,” Geary said. “Right?”

“Right, sir. We still don’t understand that stadium seating in the back of it, but none of the controls are powered and working. It’s all dead.” Dietz made an annoyed sound, as if unhappy that he had used that term while it felt like Kick ghosts were hovering around.

“Then what’s the threat? I’m not discounting the impact on you if an attack force boards, but how can they take Invincible? All you have to do is hold out until we put reinforcements aboard.”

Admiral Lagemann waved one hand around them. “The threat is to the most valuable thing in human history. What can you do to keep someone else from using it, from learning from it, from putting aboard new forces to contest your control of it?”

The ghosts felt like they were crowding closer as the answer came to Geary. “Threaten to destroy it?”

“Give that man a prize. If they bring nuclear weapons aboard and set them off inside, they could turn this invaluable alien artifact into a giant stubby tube of armor containing radioactive slag. What would we do to keep them from doing that?”

He hated to think of the compromises that situation might require. Perhaps even surrendering Invincible to keep her interior intact in the hopes that she could be recaptured. “You think this will happen?”

“We think,” Major Dietz said, “that it’s the only possible way to threaten our control of this ship. But they’d have to eliminate my Marines to prevent us from stopping them from carrying out that kind of threat.”

Geary shrugged irritably, trying to ward off the ghosts his senses claimed were bunching around him as he moved. “Do you want reinforcements now?”

“We can’t use them, Admiral,” Dietz explained. “The safe area on Invincible can’t support many more humans. We’re better off with a smaller force that knows the ship fairly well and can hit attackers where they least expect it.”

“And where would they least expect it?” Geary asked.

“If they come, they’ll be Syndics. Or people who were trained as Syndics. That means they’ll follow standard procedures in their planning.”

Geary shook his head. “Surely they realize that the deck plan for this ship doesn’t match anything built by them or the Alliance.”

“Yes, sir,” Major Dietz said, then continued in very diplomatic tones for a Marine. “These plans will be very important. They’ll be drafted by the Syndic high command. Not by any field forces. By the highest-ranking CEOs in the Syndic military hierarchy.”

“Which means,” Admiral Lagemann added, “that any relationship between reality and those plans will be purely coincidental.”

“That’s the way it tends to work,” Geary agreed. “Those high-ranking planners far from the scene of the operations will use standard assumptions, so any attack force will come in and try to locate the three critical areas. I have to admit I have trouble believing that they could manage a boarding operation without our spotting it.”