The Lost Fleet Beyond the Frontier Invincible

Geary breathed a sigh of relief. “Chief Madigan, there’s a light cruiser on the way. Hang on. I think the spider-wolves came aboard to see if you needed assistance. I’ll get a battle cruiser over your way.” That was the fastest ship he could send with a large medical compartment and doctors aboard. It would take another several minutes for Chief Madigan to hear that reassurance, but he seemed to have the situation under control. “Good work. We’ll get you picked up soon.”

“Dragon,” Desjani said. “She’s the closest battle cruiser to them.”

He ordered Dragon into motion, then clenched his eyes shut, trying to refocus on other issues.

“What’s the name of the star?” Desjani asked. She looked tired, but relieved. Dauntless had taken damage, but aside from a few wounded had lost no crew members this time.

“I don’t know,” Geary said. “Why does it matter?”

“Ships died here, Admiral. Sailors died here. We should have a name for where they died.”

He closed his eyes again, embarrassed not to have thought of that. Part of him wanted a dark name, but another part said that this star marked the graves of dead humans and should reflect their sacrifice and courage. Something that said humans had placed their mark here, far beyond their own borders, fighting to save their comrades. “Is there a star named Honor?”

“Honor?” Desjani questioned, then checked the database. “No. That’s not a name . . . but you get to use any name you want, Admiral.”

“It’s for them,” he said.

“I understand.” She paused, then managed a smile. “It’s a good name to remember them by. Permission to enter the name Honor for this star in the fleet database.”

“Granted.”

Jane Geary had survived the charge she had led though Dreadnaught had suffered extensive damage. Captain Badaya, looking unusually subdued, had volunteered that Jane Geary had made that move on her own initiative while he was still trying to figure out how to save his other warships. Orion, already beaten up from fighting at Pandora, had been hammered again, but Commander Shen had, with considerable annoyance at the question, declared his ship still fit for battle.

The amount of damage inflicted on Dreadnaught, Orion, Relentless, Reprisal, Superb, and Splendid proved the old maxim that while battleships might take a while to get where they needed to go, once there they were amazingly hard to kill. Still, had the bear-cow commander peeled off even one of the superbattleships with some escorts and sent it after those six beat-up battleships, they probably wouldn’t have survived the fight.

Quarte reached the damaged escape pod from Balestra, the two spider-wolves on the pod withdrawing into their own ship as the light cruiser approached, the spider-wolf ship then soaring off in a grand leap back to its fellows. Dragon was still twenty minutes from reaching both Quarte and the damaged pod, but was coming on fast.

Geary thought about medical personnel all over the fleet, not just on Dragon, struggling with a tidal wave of injured personnel, sick bays and hospitals filled with those in desperate need of care for their wounds. Nowadays if someone made it to a hospital they were unlikely to die no matter how bad their injuries, but even then sometimes not enough could be done. “How do they do it?” he wondered aloud. Desjani turned a questioning glance his way, for once not reading his mind. “Doctors, nurses, corpsmen, medics, all of them,” Geary explained. “Sometimes, no matter what they do, the people they’re trying to help still die. How do they keep going?”

She pondered that. “How do you keep going? Knowing that no matter how well you do, people will still die?”

That stung, yet he saw her logic. “I guess I think about how much worse things would be if I didn’t do everything I could.”

“Yeah. Works for me, too. Usually.”

Captain Smythe was once again proving his value, coordinating a huge amount of repair activity around the fleet, his engineers running on caffeine and chocolate to keep working (“The food of the gods,” in Smythe’s words. “When the old myths talked about nectar and ambrosia, they meant coffee and chocolate.”), the eight auxiliaries each mated with or closing on one of the most badly hurt warships.

Commander Lommand of Titan had offered his resignation, which Geary had declined along with an order to Lommand to use his considerable talents to get ships fixed up, including his own.

The fleet administrative system popped up another alert, explaining in dispassionate terms that available storage for dead personnel had been exceeded and recommending burials be undertaken.