“Thanks.”
He meant it sarcastically, and was sure it sounded sarcastic, but Desjani smiled slightly at him. “Did you see how they looked at us? They were afraid, then they were disbelieving, and finally they were grateful.” She stopped smiling and looked outward. “I like fighting. I like going head-to-head with the best the Syndics have. But I’ve had enough of killing people like those. Can we convince the Syndics to stop bombarding civilian targets?”
“We can try. Our bombardment weapons are accurate enough that we can certainly continue to keep taking out industrial targets while minimizing civilian losses.”
Her face was grim now. “They kill ours, and we don’t kill theirs?”
“It’ll have to be a mutual deal. When we get back, we’ll tell them, stop bombarding our people, and we’ll continue not bombarding yours.”
“Why would they-?” Desjani stopped talking in mid-question, then gave Geary a long look. “And they might believe we’d abide by that since you’ve been demonstrating the willingness to do so.”
“Maybe.”
“And if they don’t stop?”
“We keep taking out their industry and military targets.” Desjani grimaced. “Listen, Tanya, if there’s nothing for those people to build or fight with, they’re a burden to the Syndics who have to worry about feeding them and taking care of them.”
“They’ll build new industrial sites. New defenses.”
“And we’ll blow those away, too.” Geary jerked his head to indicate roughly the space outside of
She thought about that, then nodded. “You’re right. But that same logic applied a long time ago when we started bombarding civilian populations as well as military and industrial targets. Why did we start, all those decades ago?”
“I don’t know.” Geary cast his mind back, trying to imagine the point at which the people he had known a century earlier had changed to become people like those now. But there hadn’t been any point, any single event, rather what Victoria Rione had called a slippery slope in which one seemingly reasonable decision to escalate led to another. “Maybe revenge for Syndic bombardments of Alliance worlds. Maybe a tactic of desperation when the war kept going on and on. An attempt to break the enemy morale. We studied that when I was a junior officer, but as a lesson in what hadn’t worked. Time and again in history people tried bombarding enemies enough to make them quit. But when the enemies thought their own homes or beliefs were in danger, they never quit. Totally irrational, but then we’re human. ”
“Syndic bombardments never made us want to give up,” Desjani agreed. “We’re very frustrated with our leaders, but we want them to win. We don’t want them to surrender. But not many people, especially in the fleet, still believe our leaders can win this war. That’s why-”
He glanced at her as she stopped speaking again. “Why I got a certain offer from Captain Badaya? You know about it, too?”
“Yes, sir. Of course, sir. It’s being widely talked about.”
“I won’t, Tanya. I won’t betray the Alliance that way, by accepting the offer to become a dictator. I told Badaya that.” She looked at the deck, her face expressionless. “It wouldn’t work, and it’d be wrong.”
Desjani spoke very, very quietly. “I have to ask you, have you been offered something else? If you agreed?”
He tried to remember, because whatever it was seemed to bother her a great deal, but couldn’t come up with anything.
“No. Nothing specific. It’s all been couched in very general terms.”
“You’re certain?” Her voice was angry now though still very quiet. “You haven’t been promised anything else, Captain Geary?” He shook his head, letting his puzzlement show. “Any
Anyone else? What could-? He was certain his shock showed. “You mean you?” he whispered, too stunned to speak in euphemisms.
She looked at him again, studying his face, and seemed to relax. “Yes. I’ve been urged by some individuals to… offer myself. I’ve wondered if they had offered me on their own.”
Geary felt heat in his face, embarrassment and anger rising in tandem. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so filled with rage. “Who?” he whispered savagely. “Who the hell had the bloody nerve to dare suggest such a thing to you? You’re not some prize or playing piece. Tell me who they are, and I’ll-” This time he had to choke off his words, aware that even a fleet commander couldn’t threaten to rip subordinates into tiny pieces and vent them out the air lock.
Desjani gave him a thin-lipped smile. “I can defend my own honor, sir. But thank you. Thank you very much.”
“Tanya, I swear, if I find out-”
“Let me deal with it, sir. Please.” He nodded reluctantly. “We should get back to the bridge, sir, to monitor what’s going on.” Another nod. One corner of Desjani’s mouth bent farther upward. “You wouldn’t make a good dictator, would you?”
“Probably not.”
“Perhaps there’s a reason for that, too.”
He kept waiting for something to go wrong, but the Alliance shuttles dropped off every Syndic civilian and lifted off again, then returned to their ships without any Syndic attempts to interfere with the operation. “Did we actually carry out an operation without the Syndics trying to double-cross us and booby-trap everything in sight?” Desjani asked.
“Looks like it. And so far our own double-crossers haven’t sprung any more traps on us, either.” Geary studied the display, as unwilling to believe it as Desjani. The shuttles all recovered, the Alliance fleet was cutting across one arc of Cavalos Star System toward the jump point that could access either Anahalt or Dilawa. “Three more days to the jump point?”
“Yes, sir. Unless something else happens.” Desjani clenched her jaw as alerts sounded. “And something just did.”
Syndic warships were becoming visible at the jump point they were heading toward.
TEN
“TEN Syndic battleships, twelve battle cruisers, seventeen heavy cruisers, twenty-five light cruisers, forty-two Hunter-Killers, ” the operations watch-stander announced.
“Roughly half our strength,” Desjani observed, “though we’ve got a much bigger advantage in lighter units. Will they avoid action or fight?”
“They’ve got to have orders to stop us or delay us,” Geary pointed out. “To do either of those things, they have to fight.”
“They might be too frightened to fight after what this fleet did at Lakota.” Then Desjani paused as something occurred to her. “They may not know what happened at Lakota. They may assume the pursuit force we destroyed at Lakota is still after us and may appear at any moment.”
“You’re probably right, since they came from either Anahalt or Dilawa.” Geary watched as the eight-light- hours-distant images of the Syndic formation could be seen coming around onto a new vector. The Syndics had already had eight hours to decide what to do and get started doing it. “It’s a standard Syndic box formation so far.”
“Maybe this CEO will be as stupid as the one at Kaliban,” Desjani suggested. That enemy commander had simply charged head-on at the superior numbers of the Alliance fleet, allowing Geary to annihilate the enemy forces by bringing all of his firepower to bear.
“That’d be nice,” Geary agreed, “but we can’t count on it. I’ve got a suspicion that we’re killing stupid CEOs
