The Lost Fleet: Courageous

He regarded her in the dimness, barely seeing the shape of her face. She sounded sincere. Yet if Rione’s highest priority was saving the Alliance from Black Jack, then she’d want to have him sleeping next to her again. She knew he’d received the offer that she had predicted he’d get someday. And she knew he felt tempted by that offer. Was it a coincidence that she’d finally unbent toward him again on the night of the same day on which Captain Badaya had offered him a dictatorship with the backing of what was claimed to be a majority of the fleet?

Did she truly want him, or was she willing to do whatever it took to be able to act if the time came, or was she hitching herself firmly to his power, an amoral politician ensuring she’d be the consort of the possible future ruler of the Alliance?

Victoria Rione stood up, her clothing falling down around her feet, then walked across the short distance separating them and molded herself against his body. As her lips met his, Geary realized that at some level he didn’t care what the answer was as long as she was in his bed again. As she pushed him down and straddled his body, he realized he didn’t care if she had a knife in her free hand at that very moment.

“ALL ships prepare to jump.” The star Daiquon wasn’t much more than a bright point of light to the naked eye now. The fleet had been in Formation Kilo One for days now, ready for anything when they arrived at Ixion. Or so he hoped.

Victoria Rione was in the observer’s chair on the bridge of Dauntless again, watching the action as if there had never been an interval in which she avoided the bridge. Desjani had greeted Rione politely but with what Geary thought was an undercurrent of worry. For Rione’s part, Geary had suspected he caught a gleam of triumph in her eyes as she acknowledged Desjani’s welcome. But that was certainly just his imagination, wrought to a fever pitch by worries about what awaited them at Ixion.

“All units in the Alliance fleet, upon arrival at Ixion, immediately execute all preordered maneuvers and engage any enemy warships within range. Jump for Ixion now.”

SLIGHTLY less than four days in jump space to Ixion. It shouldn’t have been a big deal, but Geary found himself increasingly unhappy with the intervals in jump space. Given the risks they were running, he wished going to Ixion were bringing them closer to Alliance space than it was. Instead of offering a chance to rest and think without the pressure of an immediate Syndic threat, the jump space time felt more and more like wasted periods, the hours and days dragging by while nothing changed outside the ship. Nothing ever had changed outside a ship in jump space, of course, but now that bothered him. He wanted to do something. Confront the Syndics, beat them once and for all in battle, find out the truth about the alien intelligences he and Rione suspected lurked on the other side of Syndic space, and end this damned war.

The fact that he had no chance of actually accomplishing those things even in real space didn’t seem to make a difference to the frustration he felt. And he was coming to recognize that in jump space he had more dreams about the past, dreams with people he had known who were now long dead. It wasn’t pleasant to wake up from a dream holding a conversation with an old friend and realize the old friend would never speak with him again. Not in this life, anyway.

At least he didn’t have to spend this interval in jump space making guilty and sporadic attempts to locate Victoria Rione to learn how she was doing. Rione came to his stateroom every evening and spent every night, her lovemaking seeming to mix passion and desperation in equal measure. When not in bed with him, though, she continued to hide her innermost self, revealing neither passion nor desperation nor anything else.

Geary distracted himself by running simulations, trying to guess what Ixion would hold, what the fleet would have to do there. But it was all guesswork, and only arrival at Ixion would reveal any answers.

GEARY tried to focus his attention on the display as the time to leave jump space at Ixion approached. Right now all it showed was what had been in the obsolete Syndic records they had looted a dozen star systems ago. The data, several decades old, showed a relatively prosperous system with a nearly ideal planet holding a very respectable population and a lot of off-planet activity and facilities. The records, intended for use by merchant ships, contained nothing about defense capabilities except various standard warnings to do exactly as told if contacted by military authorities.

“Is something wrong, sir?” Captain Desjani asked.

“Just wondering what’s there,” Geary confessed. “And wondering why a star system this well off didn’t get a hypernet gate.”