The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Guardian

“Clumsy of them not to forestall that option,” Desjani remarked.

“They had to make things look normal,” Geary said. “No other traffic within a light-hour would have looked very abnormal. So, the freighter and its crew, if there was one, is not a problem. We have to assume the Dancers are picking up the danger signs from the freighter’s power core and will get themselves clear, and that the Dancers can see any mines the Syndics laid near the jump point better than we can see them.”

“Right,” Desjani agreed. “That leaves just our own ships to worry about.”

“But . . . Captain . . . they said they have seriously injured personnel,” an increasingly baffled Lieutenant Castries reminded Desjani.

“Lieutenant,” Desjani replied, “odds are there are no seriously injured personnel on that escape pod. I would, in fact, be surprised if there are any personnel aboard it at all. Everything we’re seeing and hearing was very likely preprogrammed and that freighter sent out here without a human crew.”

“Very likely,” Geary said. The distraction had come too close to working, though that was because the Dancers had thrown an unexpected variable into the situation. He touched his comm controls. “All units in First Fleet. Immediate execute reduce velocity to point zero zero three light speed.” Another control. “Emissary Charban—”

The usually controlled Charban looked about ready himself to explode with frustration. “They just keep echoing back to us!” he said. “We say danger ahead, and they say danger ahead, then we do it again!”

“I think the Dancers are trying to warn us,” Geary said. “They’re not echoing. They’re agreeing with what you’re saying.”

“They’re—?” Charban visibly quivered as he fought to regain control. “That means I can stop trying.”

“Yes. But I want you to tell them something else. Please inform the Dancers that we are drastically reducing our speed due to the threats in front of the fleet. Tell them they must not precede us to the jump point.”

“Drastically reducing speed?” Charban asked. “What velocity does that mean? Never mind. I can’t convey it to the Dancers even if you told me. I’ll ask them to match our big reduction in speed. They can do that easily.”

Dauntless’s thrusters fired, bringing her bow over and around before her main propulsion lit off and began dropping the ship’s speed dramatically. The structure of Dauntless groaned audibly under the strain, but Desjani, her eyes on the strain meters displaying hull-stress readings, watched them with a reassuring lack of visible concern.

“Nine hundred kilometers a second?” she asked. “I could swim through space faster than that. Why are you slowing down the fleet that much? I thought you’d dodge the minefield.”

“Too hard,” Geary said. “We have to assume the minefield is right across the entrance to the jump exit. They couldn’t keep a minefield that close to a jump point for long, but from the prior attacks on us, they obviously knew we would soon arrive at Sobek. We’ll get down real slow, crawling along, which will allow the fleet’s sensors to spot every mine in our path and our weapons to take out the mines one by one. Our warships will blow a hole in that Syndic minefield big enough for the entire fleet to waltz through.”

“While they watch?” Desjani grinned. “They’re going to be real unhappy at us thumbing our noses at them like that.”

“And we’ll come out the jump exit at Simur still moving very slow,” Geary added. “That’s important. The Syndics are setting traps based on the paths we have to use and our normal methods of operation. If there’s a trap set up at Simur, they might have prepared for us evading immediately upon exit. They might have prepared for other actions we could take. The one thing they won’t be prepared for is us going at such a slow velocity because we never do that.”

“Not until now,” Desjani agreed.

“Power core overload imminent,” Lieutenant Castries said.

The Dancers, along with the escape pod, were still within the blast radius, but as Geary watched, the six Dancer ships leaped ahead, tearing past the escape pod and into the clear.

The freighter, now less than a light-minute ahead of the fleet, exploded as its power core overloaded, producing a burst of energy as well as a sphere of fragments ranging from dust specks to large chunks, all fouling the vision of the fleet’s sensors. As the globe of the explosion rapidly expanded, the escape pod reached the edge of the danger zone, taking enough impacts for damage to be visible.

“Good work on that,” Desjani admitted grudgingly. “They timed it perfectly, so the escape pod got hit but not destroyed, making quick rescue seem all the more critical.”

“And it looks like the Dancers did always know what they were doing. We’ve been breaking our backs worrying about protecting them, but then they went out of their way to protect us from a threat they saw.”