The Lost Fleet Beyond the Frontier Invincible

Desjani shook her head. “In his words, ‘nothing to bother the admiral about.’ Meaning the usual level of under-the-sensors, unofficial activity, I would guess, but nothing worse than that.” She popped the last bit of her wrap into her mouth. “How about your green-haired lieutenant?”

“I haven’t heard any reports from Lieutenant Shamrock since we got here,” Geary said.

“Shamrock?”

“That’s her nickname. I don’t know why I keep remembering the nickname. Maybe it’s that hair. Lieutenant . . . Jamenson.”

Desjani grinned. “I’m glad my ancestors didn’t think it would be a good idea to implant green hair in my genetic code.”

“Me, too.” Geary sobered, thinking again about the mysterious warship construction activity that Lieutenant Jamenson had discovered amid details and minor items hidden in hundreds of routine messages. “All of the engineers have been working around the clock getting damage repaired. I doubt there’s been any free time to look into that more.”

“Captain Smythe has probably run scams that Master Chief Gioninni has only dreamed about pulling off,” Desjani warned.

“As long as he keeps my ships working, I can live with that.” Geary took a final bite of his own wrap. “Right?”

“Well, yeah. Want another one?”

The crew wasn’t happy, knowing that the fleet had turned toward a faster intercept with the bear-cow armada. Geary could feel on his back the worried looks of the watch-standers on the bridge. “Those bear-cows probably think we intend going head-to-head with them,” he said to Desjani loudly enough for the watch-standers to hear.

“They’re going to be disappointed,” she replied at the same volume.

But then she lowered her voice. “If this works.”

“Captain,” Lieutenant Yuon reported, “we’re receiving readings from the sensors on the latest kinetic projectile to be diverted by that alien defense system on their fortress.”

“What’s it telling us?” Desjani asked.

“Um, Captain, it . . .” Yuon shook his head helplessly. “It’s telling us its course was diverted.”

Desjani turned in her seat to look at Yuon. “That’s all?”

“Yes, Captain. The sensors didn’t detect anything except the change in vector that caused the rock to miss the fort.”

“Forward those readings throughout the fleet,” Geary ordered. “I want to see if anyone can spot anything in them.”

Yuon hesitated. “Sir, Lieutenant Iger said the readings are classified and need to be kept under single-user control.”

Intelligence didn’t want anyone seeing the new information? That made a strange kind of sense since the capabilities the bear-cows had in certain areas would grant a huge advantage to any humans who could employ them against other humans.

But getting to that point meant getting this fleet past those bear-cow capabilities, which meant he had to understand as much as he could as quickly as he could. “Inform Lieutenant Iger that I am overriding that order. In this case, the security of the fleet is best served by figuring out whatever we can about this alien technology.”

Geary settled back again to wait. At the moment, there wasn’t much else he could do.

“HERE we go,” Desjani said. “It took them less than a minute after they saw the vector we’d steadied on before they changed course to match.”

Geary nodded, his eyes on the display where the warships of the alien armada had come to port to bring about an even faster meeting with the human fleet. “Hold on. How much are they reducing velocity?”

“Quite a bit.” Desjani sounded thoughtful, one hand tracing out new data on her display. “Interesting. When we turned toward each other, it increased the combined speed we would meet at.”

“That’s right. To about point two five light speed if we both maintained our velocities. Too fast for our combat systems to compensate well for relativistic distortion.” The faster a ship went in normal space, subject to the rules of the ancient relativity physics, the more that ship’s image of the universe outside it was distorted. When it came to aiming weapons for millisecond-long engagement envelopes, even a tiny discrepancy between how the ship saw the universe and how that universe actually was would mean a clean miss. Human systems could compensate for that distortion fairly well up to point two light speed, but as velocities increased beyond that the systems increasingly developed too many errors to be accurate. “I expected them to slow at some point. But they’ve come down in speed immediately.”

“Still braking,” Desjani said. “Those superbattleships take a while to shed velocity. Lieutenant Castries.”

“Yes, Captain.”

“Keep an eye on the alien armada’s maneuvering and let me know when their velocity steadies out.” Desjani sat back, frowning now, her eyes intent as if aiming a weapon. “Earlier, they had stopped accelerating before I thought they would.” She tapped controls. “Yeah. Our combined velocities when we came together would have been . . . point one seven light speed.”