The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Guardian

He felt a growing tension as the fleet approached the gate, wondering if Sobek, too, would suddenly show up as unable to access. That would leave two alternatives, neither of which would be good. Funny. I never wanted to go to Sobek. But now I want to get there very badly. “All units be ready for combat when we exit at Sobek. Any ship facing danger upon exit is authorized to fire immediately.”

Charban sounded worried. “What if the Syndics at Sobek have a picket ship at the gate? A HuK or light cruiser?”

“Then I’ll apologize for my fleet having destroyed that picket ship,” Geary answered with a glare at Charban. “I didn’t create this situation. They did.”

“They may want you to do that, Admiral.”

“I’m sorry, but you were right earlier. This smells like an ambush. I won’t tie the hands of my ships when we’re heading into something that stinks as bad as this does. Have the Dancers been warned?”

Charban shrugged. “As best as we can communicate such a warning, Admiral. Their ships are ready to enter the gate along with ours. I do want to talk to you about the Dancers when you have the time.”

“Here we go,” Desjani announced. She sounded cheerful, as she usually did when Geary decided to go weapons free on anything that looked Syndic. “Request permission to enter the gate, Admiral.”

“Permission granted.”

There was no disorientation like that felt going into jump space. The stars vanished, replaced not with the gray nothingness of jump space but by literally nothing at all.

Geary slumped back, wondering if he would see Midway again. “How long to Sobek?”

“Twenty days,” Desjani said.

They were going an immense distance even by interstellar standards. Long ago, it seemed, when he had assumed command of a trapped fleet in the Syndic home star system, she had told him that with hypernet travel, the farther you went, the less time it could take. It was still jarring to be reminded of that, and disturbing not to see the familiar if uncanny gray of jump space or see the unexplained lights of jump space growing and fading randomly around them. It’s strange how Nothing can be more upsetting to me than the weirdness of jump space.

Charban shook his head. “It’s hard enough for me to grasp the velocities that spacecraft travel within star systems. Tens of thousands of kilometers a second is just too fast for my planetary-surface instincts to visualize. What sort of velocity are we traveling now, to go such a distance in such a span of time?”

“We’re not actually going any speed at all,” Desjani said with a smile. “That’s what an expert told me.” Her smile slipped, and Geary knew why. Cresida had been that expert, and a good friend of Desjani’s. “We’re at one gate, then a bit later we’re at another gate, but, technically, we didn’t travel the distance between them. We just went from being in one place to being at another.”

“Does anyone actually understand things like that?” Charban wondered. “Or are we still children, surrounded by things we don’t really grasp and poking at a few of them to see what happens?”

“I don’t know,” Desjani said, turning back to her display, which now showed nothing but the situation aboard Dauntless. “I just drive a battle cruiser.”

—

THE enforced isolation of hypernet travel, or that in jump space, left a lot of time to get backed-up work accomplished. Geary, sitting at his stateroom table and sourly eyeing the long list of backed-up items he still had to go through, was trying to decide whether that was a good or a bad thing. Why did I want to be an admiral? Oh, yeah, I didn’t ever want to be an admiral. I just wanted to do my job and do it well. Rise to command of a ship. But command of a fleet? A fleet far larger than the Alliance fleet that existed before the war? And be responsible for every man and woman, and now Dancer as well, who is part of that fleet? Nope, I never wanted that. But I’ve got it.

His hatch alert chimed.

Trying to not look too relieved at the diversion from administrative tasks, Geary spun in his seat to face the hatch and tapped an entry authorization.

He had half hoped it might be Tanya, visiting to snatch a few moments of being together without being under the eyes of the entire crew, or maybe Rione, ready to spill a few more clues about her mysterious secret orders. Instead, the hatch opened to reveal the earnest and melancholy face of Emissary Charban. “Have you a few moments, Admiral?”