The Lost Fleet Beyond the Frontier Invincible

Desjani nodded toward her display. “The survivors of the armada are still running for the jump point. Forty-one ships. I’m glad the spider-wolves are chasing them because even I don’t feel like that right now. But if the last Kick ship leaves this star system, and the superbattleship is still intact, we’re going to have to decide whether to run the risks of trying to take it.”

“I’m going to have to decide,” Geary corrected.

THE image of General Carabali gestured toward the display in Geary’s stateroom. “This is about that ship?”

“Yes, General.” Geary zoomed the display in on the crippled superbattleship. “Can your Marines take it?”

“Can we? Yes, Admiral, I am confident of that. What I can’t be confident about is how much it might cost.”

That was the big question. “I understand. In light of that, I need your best assessment on whether we should try to take it,” Geary said.

Carabali paused, thinking. “There are a lot of unknowns. We have only a general idea of current Kick individual combat capability, based on some of the videos we intercepted. But you know how much movies can vary from reality, and we don’t know if what we’ve seen are movies or documentaries. We also don’t know how many Kicks are still aboard that ship. I wouldn’t estimate less than a thousand, but it could be much more. A ship that size could hold ten thousand if they wanted to put that many aboard.”

“Ten thousand?” Geary asked in amazement. “That’s your estimate of the crew size?”

“No, sir. That’s our top end. The most plausible estimate of crew size is five or six thousand. That’s a lot of Kicks.” Carabali paused as she found her train of thought again. “We know nothing about the layout of the ship. During a normal boarding operation, my Marines would head for certain critical areas, gaining control of the power core controls, the bridge, and other vital places. We don’t know where those are in this ship or what form their controls take.”

“We don’t even know if they have compartments like that as we understand them,” Geary agreed.

“The internal layout . . .” Carabali shrugged. “The Kicks are a lot smaller than us. The size of their passageways might be very tight for a Marine in combat armor. Even if we have a firepower advantage on a Marine-to-Kick basis, employing that firepower might be difficult. It all adds up to a very challenging operation, something more like an assault on a fort than a ship-boarding operation.”

It wasn’t a pretty picture, but the Marine general hadn’t said it wasn’t doable. Indeed, she had said it could be done. The question remained whether the gains from seizing that ship justified the risks of trying to capture it. Captain Smythe and the civilian experts had already weighed in, all of them enthralled by the prospect of being able to exploit such a capture for information about the bear-cows and their technology.

Conceivably, there might be the clues aboard the ship that could lead to human discovery of how to build that defense against orbital bombardment. The value of that one thing alone would justify almost any price. Almost any sacrifice. “But you can do it.” Geary made that a statement, not a question this time.

“Yes, sir. Assuming the Kicks don’t blow the ship to hell before we can stop them. Before the landing operation can commence we’ll need to have the warship’s external defenses reduced, and we’ll need close support after that. That means significant fleet assets located near that huge ship, where they would also be endangered if it self-destructs.”

“Understood.” He would be committing a lot of his limited numbers of ships and Marines to this attack. If the bear-cows were just waiting to lure in humans, then they could destroy everything that Geary sent into or close to that superbattleship. There was a real chance that he could take hideous losses and gain nothing.

But if he didn’t take any risks, he was guaranteed to gain nothing, guaranteed to pass up the sort of opportunity that might never come again.

“Begin your planning,” Geary ordered. “Assume you have use of any available assets. I’ll be planning to use every warship necessary to take down the alien defenses before the Marines go in. It’s going to be a dirty job, but I know you can do it.”

Carabali saluted, smiling sardonically. “That’s why you have Marines along, to do the dirty jobs no one else wants or can do. When do you want my plan, Admiral?”

“As soon as possible, but take the time you need to get it right. We’re not going anywhere until a lot more repairs have been done on our damaged ships.”

“I understand, sir. Our planning in this case is going to be simplified by the lack of detailed knowledge. We’re going to have to do a lot of this op on the fly once we get inside that thing. Fortunately, Marines are good at that.”

Geary sat down after Carabali’s image had vanished, lowering his face into both hands as he thought about how many men and women had already died in this star system and how many more might die as a result of this decision.