The Lost Fleet: Courageous

As he had guessed, just about everyone else in the crew seemed to be awake already as well. Even those who had come off the watches that ended at midnight had stayed up to mingle restlessly with others in mess areas or at duty stations. Geary fixed a hopefully calm and confident look on his face and walked among them, exchanging greetings and making small talk about homes and how they’d surely beat the Syndics again in Lakota System. Whenever conversations veered to when the fleet would get home, Geary tried to be honest. He didn’t know when the fleet would once again reach Alliance space, but he was doing all he could to make it happen.

And they trusted him. They trusted him when he said that. They trusted him with their lives. In a very real way, they trusted him to save the Alliance, though saving the Alliance didn’t always mean the same thing, depending on who they were.

He paid a little more attention to how the crew members of Dauntless talked about home, about the Alliance, trying to see if they expressed the same frustrations with politicians, the same feelings that the blame for the state of the war rested there. Perhaps he was hypersensitive to the issue now, but Geary thought he heard more of that sort of thing than he’d ever realized was being said. Like Rione told me that time, it doesn’t matter what you say as much as what people think they hear. I haven’t been hearing this stuff.

No wonder they welcomed the “miraculous” return of Black Jack Geary so much. They weren’t looking for just a military leader but for someone to lead the Alliance itself. Ancestors, help me.

He returned to the bridge with about an hour to go, finding that Rione was now there in the observer’s seat, she and Desjani being outwardly polite when dealing with each other.

The only option left for killing time was calling up the local star systems display and trying to figure out where to go if the fleet couldn’t employ the Syndic hypernet gate at Lakota, which was the most likely outcome. As usual, the lack of current intelligence on surrounding star systems ranged from being annoying to infuriating. Branwyn seemed relatively safe as stars went, but had its small human presence and associated mining facilities been abandoned in the decades since the latest reports available to Geary, or were the Syndics still there to complicate any attempt to get more materials for the auxiliaries? Going to Branwyn would also continue toward Alliance space. Had its jump points already been mined? Were Syndic blocking forces already moving into position?

Of the other options, T’negu was actually reachable from Lakota just as it had been from Ixion. Would the jump exit from Lakota be mined or left unobstructed, since the Alliance fleet wasn’t supposed to enter T’negu from that direction? Seruta seemed average, bypassed by the hypernet system, with a single harsh but habitable world holding a population measured in tens of millions and a scattering of off-planet facilities. No special threat there, but going to Seruta angled away from Alliance space again. And of course Ixion, the place they’d left.

He didn’t like the options, but they were better than in any other place he could have taken the fleet.

“Five minutes to jump exit,” a watch-stander called, startling Geary out of his thoughts.

Captain Desjani tapped an intercom control. “All hands prepare for battle upon exit. Remember that the eyes of Captain Geary are upon us.”

He tried not to flinch, but something made Geary look back to see Rione’s reaction. She gazed back at him with an unreadable expression, but her eyes betrayed nervousness.

“One minute to jump exit.”

Geary tried to calm his breathing, focusing on the display where a portrayal of Lakota Star System now hung before him, showing what the old records knew of that star and the Syndic presence there. In moments that display would begin frantically updating as the fleet entered normal space again and the fleet’s sensors began spotting everything that wasn’t in those old records.

“Stand by. Exit.”

Grayness turned to blackness, then Geary felt himself being pushed to one side as Dauntless swung through the tight turn preprogrammed into the maneuvering systems. All around Dauntless, the rest of the ships of the main body swung together in the same turn. Up ahead, the vanguard was already well into the turn, and to either side the flanking formations were turning along with the main body. Moments later, the trailing formation flashed into existence, then began the same swing to port.