The Lost Fleet Beyond the Frontier Invincible

The main alien armada would be seeing the light of the human fleet’s arrival in about another two hours, doubtless at the same time as they received messages from the orbiting alien fortress alerting them to the presence of intruders in this star system. Closer alien warships would already have seen the human fleet, but the light showing their reactions wouldn’t reach Geary’s ships for hours yet.

He had little doubt what those reactions would be. However, at the moment, the danger of further combat with these aliens was as distant as it would be for the remainder of their time in this system. There wouldn’t be a better time for sharing his plans and receiving any inputs from the fleet’s ship captains.

Geary sent out the announcement, half-wishing he could just fight the aliens again instead, and half-fearing that all of his options from here on would be bad ones.

TWO

THE conference room could really hold only a dozen people or so, but the meeting software allowed it to “expand” to fit the number of individuals attending meetings virtually. Geary looked down the long length of the table, which had apparently expanded in size to match the numbers of officers present. The commanding officers of every ship in the fleet looked back at him, along with other individuals such as Lieutenant Iger, the fleet’s chief medical officer Captain Nasr, both General Charban and Emissary Rione, and some of the civilian experts on intelligent aliens.

A few others were hidden from sight and hearing by the rest of the participants except for Geary and Desjani. Those few, picked representatives from the former prisoners of war now berthed on Mistral and Typhoon, were being allowed to watch and listen to the proceedings. If their many high-ranking and self-important peers on those same assault transports knew, they would all clamor for seats (and voices) in the meeting as well, and that simply wasn’t going to happen.

Far too many of the meetings held in here since Geary had assumed command of the fleet had involved far too much drama for Geary’s taste. During the century he had been in survival sleep, fleet conferences had degenerated into political free-for-alls in which fleet commanders vied for support from their subordinates. When he was found and awakened, it was to discover that he, Captain Geary, was by far the most senior captain in the Alliance fleet, with a date of rank nearly a century before. That hadn’t mattered to him, but it had meant that when Admiral Bloch died, Geary had been the next in line to command the fleet by seniority, by Bloch’s own last command, and by the requirements of what Geary saw as his duty. Enough of the then-commanders of the fleet’s ships had been swayed by one or more of those factors to agree to Geary’s assuming command. The entire process, of not just soliciting advice from subordinates but of cultivating their support for his own position in command, had struck Geary as outrageously wrong. Back then, he had only dimly grasped how badly a century of bloody war had battered the structure of the fleet and the nature of its officers.

He was fixing that. Slowly and all-too-often painfully, but meetings now tended to be much more professional. “My first order of business,” Geary said, “is to express my appreciation for the skill with which the fleet fought our last engagement. Well done.”

He would have had a great deal of trouble saying that if Captain Vente of what had been the latest Invincible (but was now a rapidly expanding ball of dust following the controlled detonation of its power core) had been present. However, as Vente was no longer a ship’s commanding officer, he had no right to attend this meeting. Right now Vente was sitting in a spare stateroom on Tanuki oblivious to this conference. “We took some losses, too,” Geary continued. “May the ancestors of the dead welcome them with the honor they deserve.”

Captain Badaya scowled, his eyes on the table’s surface. “We’ll avenge Invincible. Perhaps the Alliance will finally stop giving that ill-omened name to new battle cruisers.”

“It shouldn’t happen again,” Captain Vitali of Daring pointed out. “They’ve stopped building new ships since the war ended. There are no new battle cruisers under construction to give that name.”

Geary’s eyes went to meet the gaze of Captain Smythe, who made no gesture or expression but nonetheless conveyed his understanding of the same thing that Geary was thinking. There were new warships being constructed by the Alliance government if what Smythe and his staff had uncovered was true, but that fact was being kept secret from Geary and everyone else in this fleet. Why that was so was just one of the questions Geary had to resolve.

For now, it was best to get the conversation onto other tracks. “I want to make special note of the performance of Orion in the recent engagement.”