The Lost Fleet: Fearless

“Yes, sir.” She paused. “In truth, sir, if I’d met him before you, I might feel differently. The changes you’ve brought about were often hard to accept. But you truly have changed how I see senior officers.”

Geary looked away, embarrassed by the praise. “How about the other ship commanders? Do you think they’ll feel the same way?”

“It’s hard to say. There remains a hard core of ship captains who would rather lose fighting in what they see as the ‘honorable’ way than win by fighting in the more disciplined fashion you’ve brought. They believe that fighting spirit is the most important element in battle, and that you lack that spirit, sir.”

It wasn’t anything he hadn’t heard before. “So I understand. ‘The moral is to the material as three is to one.’ Surely there’s been enough disasters as a result of that attitude to impress even the firmest believers in fighting spirit as the silver bullet of warfare.”

Desjani smiled humorlessly. “A belief doesn’t rest on evidence but on faith, sir.”

Like the belief in him, or rather in Black Jack Geary, which he had been able to put to good use. Geary nodded. “True enough. Are there enough of these true believers in fighting spirit to give Captain Falco command?”

“No, sir. There’s many fence-sitters, still, but that wouldn’t incline them to support Captain Falco. Many have been impressed by your performance, sir.” She must have seen Geary’s self-consciousness this time. “You showed everyone at Kaliban, sir, even though the lessons from that battle are taking time to filter through the fleet. And I have to add, because you asked me to speak frankly, sir, that your moral stands have deeply moved a lot of officers and sailors because they’re based on what our ancestors truly believed and would expect from us. We’ve forgotten so much, or allowed ourselves to forget so much, and you’ve allowed us to regain those things.”

Geary kept his eyes on the deck, too embarrassed to meet her eyes. “Thank you. I hope I can live up to that sort of assessment. Captain Desjani, there may be trouble at the fleet conference I’m about to call.”

“There usually is trouble at fleet conferences,” Captain Desjani observed.

Geary smiled briefly. “Yeah. But I expect this to be worse than usual. Partly because I expect Captain Falco to be there, trying to throw his weight around, and partly because of what I’m going to propose to do.”

“What are you planning, sir?”

“I’m planning on taking this fleet to Sancere.”

“Sancere?” Desjani seemed puzzled, trying to recall where that was; then her eyes widened. “Yes, sir. There’ll be trouble.”

GEARY walked to the bridge, checking the time and barely arriving before the scheduled launch of the kinetic bombardment. He settled into his command seat as Captain Desjani nodded in welcome as if she’d been on the bridge for hours instead of getting there just minutes before Geary himself.

The planetary display obligingly popped up, the target sites glowing. Geary scanned them again, thinking about the power he had to ruin worlds. Falco had seemed ready and willing to exercise such power, but then after twenty years on a cold rock like Sutrah Five, maybe Geary would’ve also been eager to bomb the living hell out of the place. “You may proceed with launch of bombardment as scheduled.”

Desjani nodded again, then gestured to the combat system watch-stander, who tapped a single control, then entered the authorization.

It all seemed so simple, so clean and neat. Geary called up the fleet display, waiting, then saw his battleships and battle cruisers begin pumping out the bombardment rounds. Just solid chunks of metal, aerodynamic and with special ceramic coatings to keep them from vaporizing from the heat of atmospheric friction before impact. Inheriting a lot of speed from the ships that had dropped them, the kinetic rounds would fall toward their planetary targets, accelerating to even higher velocities under the pull of gravity and gaining more energy every meter of the way. When those simple metal chunks struck the surface of the planets, all of that kinetic energy would be released in explosions that would leave nothing but large craters and twisted wreckage in their wake.

Geary sat, watching the bombardment aimed at Sutrah Five arcing down into the atmosphere, wondering how it looked to those on the planet’s surface. “It must be a very helpless feeling.”

“Sir?” Desjani’s question made Geary realized he’d spoken out loud.

“I was just thinking how it’d feel to be on a planet and see that bombardment coming in,” Geary admitted. “No way to stop it, impossible to run fast enough to avoid one of the rounds if you were at a target site, no shelter capable of withstanding the impact.”

Desjani’s eyes shaded as she considered the idea. “I hadn’t really thought about it in those terms. Alliance worlds have felt it, too, and I know I’ve felt helpless when I’ve heard about it, not able to have stopped it. But, yes, I’d much rather be in something that can maneuver and fight.”