The Lost Fleet Beyond the Frontier Invincible

As he read that last, Geary knew that if he threw anything at the display or punched it the blows would just go through the virtual information, leaving it unmarred. He was nonetheless tempted. “General Charban, Emissary Rione, we also need to know as quickly as possible, after we get across to the spider-wolves to lay off the last superbattleship, whether we can safely bury our dead in this star system.”

Rione looked away, but Charban nodded slowly. “I understand, Admiral.”

He undoubtedly did understand, Geary reflected. The ground forces had also often taken hideous casualties in the war, waging battles across entire worlds and devastating wide portions of those worlds in the process. How many soldiers had Charban lost in battle? How many times had those soldiers spent their lives, only to have the ground they had died for be abandoned with the next shift in strategy, or when the Alliance fleet was driven away and ground forces had to leave before Syndic warships rained death from orbit upon them?

Geary had slept through a century of that, while such sacrifices formed the men and women around him. Desjani would occasionally remind him, sometimes angrily, that he could not understand them even if they needed his reminders of the things their ancestors had believed in before the war warped those caught in it.

And now more of them had died in as vicious a fight as any during the war. He had managed to help them survive that war. Could he manage to ensure that these men and women survived peace?

“Admiral,” Rione called from the conference room aboard Dauntless where frantic attempts at communications with the spider-wolves continued, “we have gotten across to the people here that we will deal with the last superbattleship.”

“The people here?” It took him a moment to understand that. “You mean the spider-wolves?”

“Yes, Admiral.” Her voice took on a reproving cast. “We must think of them as people. Because they are people.”

“Exceptionally ugly people,” Desjani murmured.

He gave her a warning look before turning back to Rione’s image. “Thank you. I’ll do my best.”

Rione’s smile was pained. “I understand how hard that will be. Believe me.”

“Make sure you and General Charban take some breaks. You’ve been at this continuously for hours now.” Once Rione’s image vanished, Geary bent to his display. He had to start moving ships toward the crippled superbattleship drifting through this star system, ensuring that the spider-wolves didn’t question the human claim to it.

Some of the Alliance warships had only been moving toward an intercept with the superbattleship for half an hour when another alert pulsed. Geary, still anticipating a massive act of self-destruction by the bear-cows trapped on their ship, jerked as if he had been bitten.

But there was no marker showing a spreading cloud of debris where the superbattleship had been. Instead, that ship remained, but oddly changed. “Now what?”

A portion of the crippled superbattleship had been torn outward, making Geary think for a moment that an internal explosion had ripped the warship, too small to destroy it but enough to blow off a large piece. But within seconds it was clear that the detached piece was under power and shaped like a smaller version of one of the bear-cow ships. Where it had rested, cradled mostly inside the superbattleship, a matching depression now showed.

“Escape craft,” Lieutenant Castries reported. “Accelerating for the jump point.”

They had finally found an escape craft on a bear-cow ship. But only one? And configured for such speed and endurance? “Surely they don’t have the whole crew on that,” Geary said.

“No,” Desjani replied. “That would be impossible.”

The human ships were still too far from the superbattleship to intercept the escape ship, but spider-wolf warships were slewing about and leaping toward new prey.

“Do we want to warn them off that escape ship?” Desjani asked.

“I’m not sure we have time,” Geary said. Just the amount of time needed for a message to reach those spider-wolf ships was longer than it would take the first of them to achieve an intercept.

Desjani nodded in tight-lipped agreement. “I guess they’re going to blow the wreck now.”

“Maybe.” Geary frowned at his display. “That thing is big for an escape craft, but it’s still less than half the size of a destroyer.”

“About a third the mass and length,” Desjani agreed. “Lieutenant Castries, get me an estimate of how many Kicks could be on that escape ship.

The reply took a moment. “Our systems estimate the escape craft was designed to carry a maximum of one hundred creatures the size of the Kicks,” Castries reported. “That’s if they were crammed in, and if their equipment took about the same amount of internal space as standard human layouts. At the lower end, it might service as few as twenty Kicks.”

“One hundred at most.” Desjani made a face. “That superbattleship could easily have a crew of thousands.”