The Lost Fleet: Fearless

Captain Duellos looked down and grimaced. “The lesson of those four ships was a powerful one. No matter what lies Numos encourages, everyone will remember that you were right to warn those ships off and to avoid chasing pell-mell after a few Syndic HuKs.”

Geary couldn’t help a snort of derision. “You’d think being right would gain me a little more credit than that. What do you think? Will everyone follow my orders when we approach the fifth planet?”

“At this point, yes.”

“Do you have any idea where that nonsense about Co-President Rione came from?”

Duellos looked mildly surprised. “I assumed you two were on friendly terms, but even if you’re extremely friendly, it’s no affair of mine. Co-President Rione is not an officer or sailor under your command, and a personal relationship with her has no bearing on your performance in command.”

Geary stared for a moment, then laughed. “Personal relationship? With Co-President Rione?”

This time Duellos shrugged. “Scuttlebutt declares that you spend time together alone.”

“For conferences! I need her advice.” Geary laughed again. “By our ancestors, Victoria Rione doesn’t like me at all! She makes no bones about it. I frighten her because she worries I’ll turn into Black Jack Geary at any moment and sail this fleet home to depose the elected leaders of the Alliance and become god-emperor or something.”

“Co-President Rione is a shrewd and intelligent woman,” Duellos observed with absolute seriousness. “She’s told you she doesn’t like you?”

“Yes! She-” Come to think of it, Rione had several times expressed distrust of Geary, but he couldn’t remember at the moment her ever saying she didn’t like him. “Yeah, I think so.”

Duellos shrugged again. “Whether she does or not makes no difference. I say once more, she is not your subordinate, not in the military at all, and any personal relationship with her is perfectly appropriate. Should one occur.”

Geary couldn’t help a third laugh as he bade farewell to Captain Duellos, but as he began to leave the room, he paused in thought. Surely Rione’s spies in the fleet had reported to her the rumors about a relationship between her and Geary. Why hadn’t Rione told him of those rumors when she’d spoken of the other rumors?

Could the iron politician he’d dealt with actually be embarrassed by the rumors? But if so, why had she continued visiting him?

Geary leaned one arm against the bulkhead for a moment, staring at the deck, remembering the first days after he was revived from the survival sleep that had kept him alive for a century, a span of time in which everyone in his life had died in battle or of old age. The shock of learning that everyone he had once known and loved, men and women, were long dead had led him to wall off the idea of new relationships. The ice that had once filled him seemed almost gone, but it still occupied that one place, afraid to retreat and let warmth grow again.

He’d lost everyone once. It could happen again. He didn’t want it to hurt so much the next time.

TWO

THE fifth planet looked like exactly the sort of place made for a Syndic labor camp. Too far from its sun to ever know a true summer, most of the world seemed to be featureless fields of tundra that on rare occasions ran into bare, jagged mountain ranges rising like islands from the sea of low, tough vegetation. Glaciers extending from the poles appeared to hold a good portion of the planet’s water, with only shallow, small seas dotting the areas not covered by ice. Looking at the dismal place, Geary didn’t have any trouble understanding why Sutrah hadn’t been deemed worthy of the expense of a hypernet gate. Unless the fourth planet was an absolute paradise, which it certainly wasn’t since it was a shade too close to its sun and probably unpleasantly warm. Sutrah was just the sort of place that had ceased to matter when the Syndic hypernet was created.

Once, using the system jump drives that could take ships from star to star, anyone going anywhere had to traverse all of the star systems in between. Every one of those systems was guaranteed a certain amount of traffic passing through en route to other destinations. But the hypernet allowed ships to go directly from one star to another, no matter how far the distance between them. Without the ships passing through, and without any particular value other than as the homes of people who had suddenly found themselves living in nowhere, the systems off the hypernet were slowly dying, with everyone who could migrate moving to hypernet-linked systems. The human communities on the fifth planet of Sutrah were fading even faster than usual. Judging from what the Alliance sensors could see, fully two-thirds of the former habitations on the world were now vacant, showing no signs of heating or activity.