The Lost Fleet Beyond the Frontier Invincible

After the call ended, he sat in his darkened stateroom, thinking about her advice. Know the enemy. That was a very old piece of wisdom. And Tanya was right. He had been focusing solely on what his own forces could do and, physically, what the enemy forces should be able to do. Never mind what these aliens could do, what would the bear-cows do? Thinking that he had never expected to be asking himself that question, Geary started searching for answers. There were still precious few things known about the bear-cows, mainly some short assessments from Lieutenant Iger and the civilian experts, which were filled mostly with words like “unknown,” “assume,” “estimate,” and “possibility,” so he started looking up information on actual bears.

The original bear had been found on Old Earth, but humanity had brought some bears with them into space, planting the species on distant worlds, and encountered on some other worlds animals which had bearlike characteristics enough to be added to the general term. Of course, technically, in terms of DNA, evolution, and countless other factors, those were all very specifically distinct species. But to the average human, all of those creatures were “bears” even though that attitude drove zoologists crazy.

None of what he found on bears seemed to be useful. Bears were fairly solitary animals, especially compared to cows. One thing that seemed clear was that the bear-cows liked living close together. Bears were also omnivores, and continued analysis of the remains they had recovered had confirmed that the bear-cows were pure herbivores.

He looked up cows, and cattle, and bulls, and herds, and everything else that came to mind, reading descriptions, analyses, watching videos (some of which were tagged as coming from Old Earth itself) and letting his mind roam free as he did so.

Geary found himself thinking about those superbattleships. They weren’t inherently slower than the much smaller human battleships. Given time, the bear-cow superbattleships could reach the same velocities as the human warships. They were doing so now, accelerating steadily on an intercept with his fleet. But that acceleration would take more time, significantly more time, and attempting to alter their trajectories using thrusters would also take more time. It wasn’t just the relatively weak propulsion, it was also the greater mass of the superbattleships. Getting that much mass to turn took a lot of power or a lot of time, and the superbattleships didn’t have the power.

Like this video he was watching. A charging bull, thundering ahead, missing his target, slewing around to face a more nimble opponent in the form of a man wearing some sort of garish costume, but the man danced away from the bull, anticipating its moves . . .

Geary looked at the frozen images of his last simulation, still floating above the table. The massive fortress, the wave of missile craft, the bear-cow armada outmaneuvered and out of position well off to one side. That was how he had done every simulation, outmaneuvering the bear-cow armada so it was out of the way. But if you could maneuver the armada into going somewhere, then maybe . . .

“Tanya!”

He had used the command override without thinking, blasting his message through her comm without her having a chance to wake and accept it, and now Tanya’s image blinked blearily at him. “This better really be about my tactical expertise, Admiral, since you seem to have ignored my advice while I took yours.”

“I followed your other advice. Tanya, I think I know how to do it, but I’m not good enough at maneuvering to make it work. I need you to work up the maneuvers and see if it’s plausible.”

“Now?”

Geary hesitated, suddenly aware of the time. Hours had passed while he flipped through research files. Yet Tanya had asked the question in all seriousness. She would jump right on the problem if he asked her because she was a damned fine officer. “Uh . . . no. We’re still a long way from the jump point we need to use, and that bear-cow armada is a long way from intercept. You can look at it in the morning. Go ahead and go back to sleep.”

That earned him a flat look that promised retribution at some future time. “You wake me up,” Desjani said, “tell me you have a possible solution, then tell me to get back to sleep. Thank you, sir. Send me your idea. I might as well look at it since the odds of my getting any more sleep before the ship’s day begins seem to be very remote. Not that there’s much time left before the ship’s day begins, is there?”

Maybe she would forgive him if the idea proved to be workable.