The Marine’s face brightened. “Could you make it a rolling barrage, sir? As my people pull back, the ships can walk their bombardment through the facility behind them, getting a head start on demolishing it and discouraging pursuit.”
“Excellent suggestion, Colonel. I’ll pass those orders on to Exemplar and Braveheart.” Another message popped up. “The cows have picked up everything we need and are on the way to their shuttles.”
“I’ll prepare my Marines to fall back toward them.” Carabali’s image saluted and vanished.
Geary called up the two scout battleships, ensured they understood their orders, and added a requirement to ensure the facility was wrecked except for one small set of rooms and their associated life support. Life wouldn’t be easy for the Syndics left behind until the inhabited world in this system sent ships to lift them off, but since they could easily have been slaughtered to the last individual by the Alliance ships, Geary didn’t think they had any grounds for complaints.
Things were finally happening again, though at a seemingly glacial pace as the symbols marking Marines and the cows fell back toward their respective shuttles. Used to dealing with velocities measured in tenths of the speed of light, Geary found himself amazed at how long it took something on the surface to go a few hundred meters.
It took the Syndics a very short while to figure out that the Marines were withdrawing; then scattered figures began pouring out of the exits from the mine shafts. But the nearest Alliance Marines were still within three hundred meters. Geary crossed his fingers, but both scout battleships held their fire as the Syndics moved in pursuit of the slowly withdrawing Marines.
At this rate the Marines would never get three hundred meters from the enemy.
But maybe that wouldn’t matter. Exemplar and then Braveheart opened fire, their hell lances dancing across the area near the mine shaft exits, the charged-particle spears slashing through metal, rock, and human bodies. Geary stared as symbols marking Syndics simply vanished in quick succession as hell lances scored direct hits on the individual enemies and vaporized them as well as everything else in the immediate area.
The Syndics closest to the Marines were still within three hundred meters, but their movement halted as they saw the havoc being wreaked behind them. A natural reaction, and exactly the wrong one. The Marines kept withdrawing, the nearest enemies fell outside the three hundred meter no-fire zone, and the hell lances blew the Syndic defenders to atoms.
No more enemy shapes could be seen on the surface by the fleet’s sensors. It was possible a few members of the Syndic pursuit force had survived, hidden under the wreckage of the facility as Exemplar and Braveheart enthusiastically pounded it into scrap. But it didn’t matter, since nothing moved in the firing zone now but structures collapsing and debris flying away from the sites of hits.
Safely separated from the devastation, the shuttles carrying the cows lifted from the surface. Around them, the last Marines were falling back by sections into their own shuttles. As Geary watched, the Marine shuttles leaped into space behind the heavy-lift shuttles loaded with the cows, escorting the trace elements needed back to Titan, from which they could be distributed to the other auxiliaries.
Another two minutes and Geary would have had to slow the fleet down to allow the shuttles to catch up. But the shuttles could still manage an intercept now.
He let out a long breath. One more crisis surmounted.
I wonder what the next one will be.
“CONGRATULATIONS to everyone who helped make the last operation a success.” Geary nodded toward Colonel Carabali, Captain Tyrosian, and Commander Lommand, and the commanding officers of Exemplar and Braveheart. “Captain Tyrosian informs me that the necessary trace elements are being distributed among the four auxiliaries as we speak. Expendable weapons and fuel cells the auxiliaries have already manufactured have been delivered to warships. As soon as the final deliveries have been made and the shuttles recovered, we’ll head for the jump point out of Baldur.”
Not everyone seemed to share Geary’s sentiments about Tyrosian and Lommand. Captain Casia from Conqueror and Commander Yin from Orion smiled approvingly at the commanding officers of the scout battleships but bent lowered brows toward the two engineering officers. Geary took a moment to scan down the very long virtual table, trying to gauge how many other commanding officers were following the lead of Casia and Yin. There didn’t seem to be many, but it wasn’t easy to tell, and Geary suspected his most dangerous opponents within the fleet wouldn’t be as obvious about their hostility as Casia and Yin.
Still, it was both aggravating and important to know that those who disapproved of Geary’s command of the fleet were trying to use the engineers as a wedge issue with the other ship commanders.
“Captain Geary,” a new voice spoke up. It took Geary a moment to realize who it was, aided by the meeting software, which helpfully highlighted a name not far down the table. Captain Badaya of the Illustrious. He was also commander of what was left of the Sixth Battle Cruiser Division, which now consisted only of Illustrious and Incredible. “Captain Geary,” Badaya repeated slowly, as if still thinking through his words, “before we discuss other matters, there’s something I wanted to bring up. We face major difficulties to get back to Alliance space and can’t spend much time considering means of harming the Syndics where it will hurt them the most. The sort of thing we did at Sancere. I’ve been thinking about what happened at Sancere.”
That could mean many things, and Badaya didn’t seem to be challenging his authority, so Geary just nodded to acknowledge the statement and waited.
“The hypernet gate at Sancere,” Badaya suggested. “When it collapsed, there was an energy pulse that strained the shields of our ships. I understand that the actions of Dauntless, Daring, and Diamond prevented the pulse from being even worse.” He paused.
Badaya’s words were straying onto territory that Geary preferred to avoid, but he couldn’t think of any way to shut down the other officer without drawing even more attention to the topic. For once, Geary was grateful that Victoria Rione wasn’t present in the meeting. If she had been, he probably couldn’t have avoided a quick look her way that might have conveyed to others that she and Geary shared information that they hadn’t provided to the others present. “That’s correct,” Geary stated calmly.
“Could we use that?” Badaya wondered. “It might offer the means to inflict serious damage on enemy star systems as we make our way home, and in a small fraction of the time required to reduce a system using conventional means.”
It might indeed. It might also trigger the genocidal warfare that Geary feared. He was searching for an answer, knowing that whatever he said might have very serious repercussions, when Captain Cresida answered in regretful tones. “Captain Geary asked me about that,” she stated, “and I had to tell him that the energy output seems to be unpredictable. It might amount to a lot less than we experienced, or even nothing.”
Captain Tulev nodded judiciously. “And we hope to use such a gate to get home.” No one disagreed with that. Instead of having to skip from star to star using the old jump drives, the hypernet could not only take them directly to a Syndic star system bordering on the Alliance but also do it far faster than travel through jump space. “If we destroyed it instead, we couldn’t use it.”
“Loss of benefit to us and the chance of no damage to the Syndic star system,” Captain Duellos observed. “An interesting suggestion, Captain Badaya, but it may not be practical for us.”
Badaya frowned but nodded as well. “That’s true. I guess it’s not a viable option right now. We should keep it in mind, though.”
Geary tried to look thoughtful. “Thank you, Captain. That’s an intriguing possibility. I appreciate you bringing it up.” Like hell. I wish you’d never said a word. Forgive me the lie, ancestors. It’s not to benefit me but to possibly save uncounted others. He lowered his head for a moment, thinking and wondering at the way both Cresida and Tulev had jumped in to quash the idea of using hypernet gates as weapons. Cresida knew, of course, because she’d developed the targeting algorithms that had kept Sancere’s hypernet gate from putting out a nova-scale blast. But Tulev didn’t. Or did he? Was there a group of officers aware that hypernet gates could be used to wipe out the human race in a mutual burst of genocide, and determined to help Geary suppress that knowledge as long as possible?
What would they do with that knowledge in the long run if they decided Geary wasn’t using it properly?
He had to move on, get the subject out of the minds of the officers present. Fortunately, he had just the topic guaranteed to do that. “I’ve been considering our next course of action. As you know, I intended taking the fleet to Wendaya from here. I’ve been reconsidering that.”
