The Lost Fleet Beyond the Frontier Invincible

“Captain Smythe, it’s not worth the headaches it would cause me.” Morale in the fleet balanced on a knife-edge as it was. They should have all been at their homes, enjoying the fruits of victory over the Syndicate Worlds after a war that had lasted a century. But Geary had been ordered to take these ships far from human-explored and -controlled territory to learn more about the threats posed by a nonhuman intelligent species known as the enigmas. He had followed orders, the ships under his command had followed orders, but their officers and crews were war-weary and unhappy. Even a small thing could drop morale to disastrous levels, and to the sailors of this fleet, the use of parts from dead ships was far from a small thing.

“Tsunami is already coming alongside Invincible to take off her wounded,” Geary told Smythe. “I’m going to tell Tsunami to evacuate the rest of the crew, but she may not have room. Since Tanuki is also close to Invincible, I want her to handle the overflow until we can redistribute the sailors through the fleet.”

“Aye aye, sir.” Smythe paused, then shook his head. “Those sailors are also coming off of Invincible,” he pointed out. “You’re going to reuse them.”

“Thank you, Captain Smythe.”

“Do you want me to leave Captain Vente aboard as a special case? I assume you are less than eager to reuse him, and Captain Badaya on Illustrious doesn’t seem to want him.”

“Don’t tempt me.” Even before his latest failure, Vente’s arrogance and can’t-do attitude had managed to get him on the wrong side of nearly every other officer in the fleet. Vente had also made a habit of balking at orders from Badaya, who was in charge of the Sixth Battle Cruiser Division, to which Invincible belonged. “Is that all, Captain Smythe?”

“Not quite.” Smythe smiled. “We can rig Invincible so she doesn’t blow until the aliens here try to board her.”

That was even more tempting. Geary’s eyes went to the casualty list from the recent engagement. These aliens had attacked without even trying to determine the intent of the human fleet and had thus far refused to communicate or respond to messages from the humans . . .

But a desire for vengeance was a lousy basis for making a decision of so much importance. “No, Captain Smythe. We don’t know if it will be possible to eventually work with whatever these beings are. A booby trap like that might permanently poison any chance of relations, though I admit the odds of ever developing peaceful ones look pretty slim at the moment.”

“A powerful lesson of what we can do to those who want to fight us might help convince them not to underestimate us, Admiral,” Smythe suggested.

That was a good point. Geary pondered it for a moment.

Desjani spoke up while he was still thinking. “We don’t know what these creatures can do. We don’t know what tech they have. Maybe they could override whatever trigger we use on the booby trap. If that happened, they’d have Invincible and all of her human tech almost intact.”

Smythe frowned, then nodded. “That is a very good point.”

“Then rig Invincible to scuttle once our own ships are clear,” Geary ordered.

“Very well, Admiral. We’re on it. Oh, Kupua just reported to me that she has completed an evaluation of that main propulsion unit on Orion and estimates she will have the unit going again in ten hours. Until then, Orion can keep up as long as you don’t do anything wild with the fleet.” Just before breaking the connection, Smythe sighed theatrically. “All that equipment on Invincible . . .”

Geary looked over at Desjani. “I thought you would have supported the idea of turning Invincible into a trap.”

She flipped a brief smile his way. “I have to keep you guessing. Besides, I was just being pragmatic.”

On the heels of her words, another message arrived—the senior fleet medical officer beaming at Geary. “Admiral, uncrewed probes examining what’s left of some of the alien attackers have found partial remains. Not a lot, and most of them are just small fragments, but we should be able to piece something together.”

That sounded ugly. “Can you tell if they were human or enigmas?”

The doctor appeared startled at the question. “No. Definitely not. We’re still trying to determine what they are, but I can tell you what they aren’t.”

So this was a second intelligent alien race, and it, too, was an alien race whose response to encountering humans was to attack. “Those ships that went after us had crews? All of them? They weren’t automated?”

“Crews? Yes. The craft we could examine, that is. There isn’t much left of many of the ships. We could have used more intact specimens, Admiral,” the doctor added in an almost scolding tone of voice.

“I’ll keep that in mind the next time we face an immediate close-in fight with large numbers of attack craft belonging to an unknown alien species.”