The Lost Fleet Beyond the Frontier Invincible

“THEY’RE going to come after us,” Desjani said. Outside of Dauntless, nothing was visible now except the dull gray emptiness of jump space. “Those civilian experts are right.”

“Yeah.” He had the same feeling. Geary watched one of the mysterious lights of jump space flare off to one side of the ship, then vanish. “The star we’re heading for is a white dwarf. The odds of a habitable world are very small. Unless the bear-cows have heavily fortified a distant outpost, we’ll be in a better position to take them out.”

“We hit some of those superbattleships hard as we went past,” Desjani pointed out. “But we didn’t inflict much damage. They’re going to be very hard to kill. And did you notice this?” She sent a record to Geary’s display. “Watch the top layer of ships in our formation as they pass closest to the fortress.”

He watched the replay, spotting what she had seen. During the moments when the human ships had been nearest to the fortress, passing beneath it though still thousands of kilometers distant, something had pushed them down and farther away from the fortress. “The bear-cow planetary defense. Whatever that is. At least those unexpected vector changes messed up some of the bear-cow fire aimed at those ships.”

“And made some of the shots from those ships miss, too,” Desjani said. “I think we’ve got a real good picture of the maximum range of that defense mechanism now.”

“Good call.” Tension was still draining from him. How long had he been up on the bridge, for how many hours had he been engaged in the bullfight with the alien armada? “We’ve got eight days in jump space. A really long leap.”

“Are you finally going to get enough sleep?”

“That’s my intent.” He didn’t have to tell Desjani to order maximum crew rest for the next couple of days. He knew that she would do that. Captains sometimes had to demand intense efforts from their crews for extended periods. All captains understood that. Good captains also knew the need to compensate for that extra effort when opportunity permitted, to let their crews know the additional exertion wasn’t taken for granted. “First, I’m going to go down and give my thanks to my ancestors, though. We’re going to need their help when we meet up with the bear-cows again.”

It hadn’t exactly been a victory, but it hadn’t been a defeat. The fleet was clear of Pandora, and it was heading back toward home, even if that path back would be a somewhat crooked one of necessity as the fleet jumped from star to star. Once they reached Syndicate Worlds’ space, they would be able to use the Syndic hypernet to get back to Alliance space quickly, but that option did not exist out here far beyond human-occupied space.

No one could claim that he personally and this fleet as an arm of the Alliance government had not followed their orders. Geary had done exactly what his orders called for, to learn more about the strength and numbers of the enigma race and to learn how far regions controlled by the enigmas extended beyond human-occupied space. Now it was time to take that information home.

The crew members whom Geary encountered in the passageways seemed cheerful enough in a “we survived that, and we’re on the way home” sort of way.

He made his thanks to those powers who were hopefully watching out for him and the rest of the fleet, then made it to his stateroom, fell into his bunk, and finally let himself relax into blessed sleep.

“I’M going to have that talk with Commander Benan,” Geary said. After three days in jump space, he had managed to catch up considerably on sleep and was not yet affected by the strange sensations of discomfort that grew in humans the longer they stayed in jump space.

Desjani raised beseeching eyes upward. It was odd, Geary thought, that humans still instinctively looked up toward the divinities they believed in. Even though humans had penetrated far into the heavens and among the stars, they still somehow thought of something greater being “up there.”

“Admiral, I repeat that is a horrible idea.”

“Understood. I think it’s a horrible idea, too.” He groped for the right words. “But I just have a gut feeling that I need to do this.”

She eyed him. “A gut feeling?”

“Yes. Something keeps telling me that talking alone with Benan will accomplish something.” Geary spread his hands as if trying to clutch at something insubstantial. “I owe that man. Personally, for what happened between me and his wife. And as a representative of the Alliance, for what happened to him in the line of duty. My brain tells me that there’s nothing more I can accomplish, that I have done all that duty requires, but then something else says maybe honor requires a bit more. Requires me to try something that I have no right to expect will work. Because not trying something that might work would be safe but wrong.”

Desjani sighed. “You’re letting guilt drive you to this?”