causes the Syndics to do something that fries not only Sancere and this fleet but a lot of nearby star systems? And even just having this fleet appear at Sancere might cause the Syndic commanders to destroy the hypernet gate as soon as they spot us. But I can’t afford not to go to Sancere and attack. This fleet needs the supplies there.
There’s no alternative. I have to hope for the best, that the energy release won’t be so large it threatens anything, either nearby stars or just my ships.
Oh, hell. I know what they’ll do.
“We have to assume the Syndics will plan on waiting until our fleet is near the gate, then destroy it,” Geary announced. The other ship commanders stared at him. “They’re going to hope the gate releases enough energy to fry us but not enough to fry Sancere or anything beyond it.”
Cresida nodded in agreement. “And if it does fry Sancere, then that’s just collateral damage in their eyes.”
“But then what do we do?” Neeson asked. “We can’t just ignore the gate.”
“I’ll think of something,” Geary promised. I hope. “If this diversion plan works, we can keep the Syndics from having forces in place to actually blow the gate. Now, it sounds like we’re in agreement on the best course of action for Task Force Furious. Break from the formation, charge at the Syndic defenders, make a high-speed firing pass, look like you’re heading for something very valuable, but divert after the Syndics commit to an intercept.” He paused. “I’ll send orders what to do after that, based on the situation. The most critical thing is that I don’t want you to actually dive into the heart of the Syndic defenses all by yourselves. Get back out of there so I can employ you in conjunction with the rest of the fleet.” Everyone nodded. “I’ll ensure orders are sent to each of you. Thank you. Commander Cresida, please wait.”
After the virtual presences of the others vanished, Geary turned a serious face to Commander Cresida. “You’re going to be a good ways away from the fleet after you charge the Syndics. You could easily be more than a light- hour distant from the fleet. That means I won’t know if you get into trouble until an hour after the fact. I’m trusting you to fight smart, Commander. Keep the Syndics occupied, keep their attention on you, but don’t get yourself shot up. Can you retreat when it’s the best course of action?”
Cresida seemed to ponder the question for a moment, then nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“I want you alive and fighting, not proud and dead.”
She grinned. “Sir, you’ve demonstrated we can be proud, alive, and fighting. I’m still trying to figure out how you managed to bring everything together at Kaliban to smash the Syndics.”
Geary smiled back at her. “Do a great job at Sancere, and I’ll give you personal lessons on how to do it.”
“That’s a deal, sir.” They both stood, and Cresida rendered a precise salute. She’d obviously been practicing. Geary didn’t tell her that fleet salutes tended to be sloppier than that and as a result she looked more like a Marine. Come to think of it, maybe Colonel Carabali had been the one teaching her how to do it. Geary knew the Marines had been deriving considerable amusement from watching the sailors’ attempts to deal with Geary’s moves to reintroduce saluting to the fleet.
He sat down again after Cresida’s departure, gazing at the display, especially the representation of the hypernet gate. It hadn’t occurred to him before now that the gates were potentially dangerous. Potentially extremely dangerous.
Potentially by far the deadliest weapons mankind had ever built.
And he had no alternative but to charge most of his fleet right at the hypernet gate at Sancere.
FIVE
THE communications alert chimed urgently, bringing Geary to full wakefulness. He rolled and hit the accept- message control automatically, fearing to hear that some more of his ships had bolted the formation.
“Captain Geary.” Commander Cresida seemed both anxious and excited. “I’ve been doing some thinking. Odd concepts. But it occurred to me that since the hypernet gate matrices are suspended between so many tethers, maybe a matrix would respond somewhat like a net or sail, which means exactly how it collapses would depend upon exactly how the tethers release.”
Geary tried to get his mind around that. Fortunately, Cresida’s analogy wasn’t too complicated. “What does that mean for us?”
“Well, sir, if the way the matrix collapses affects the amount of energy released, which it should, and if the way the matrix collapses is dependent on how the tethers fail, then in theory it should be possible to use selective failure of the tethers to regulate the amount of energy released.”
“Sort of like a nuclear weapon with a selectable yield?”
“In a way…though the physical processes involved and the science are completely different.”
“What would you need to pursue this?” Geary pressed. “Can you get a workable answer?”
“Maybe.” Cresida shrugged apologetically. “I’d need priority access to the entire fleet-distributed network, sir.”
“The entire thing?” The amount of computational power in the network was far beyond Geary’s ability to grasp. That gave him some idea of the complexity of what Cresida was proposing. “All right. You’ve got it.”
He sat for a while after Cresida’s message ended, wondering if he really wanted her to succeed. But if she was right, he couldn’t afford to not find out.
THE combat simulations Geary ran as the fleet headed for the jump point to Sancere went well. But at the subsequent fleet conference, he found the absence of officers like Numos and Faresa to be jarring instead of welcome. Their absence only emphasized that forty of his ships had gone off to a fate Geary worried he could too easily predict. The way many of his remaining commanders kept looking around as if seeking familiar faces who weren’t present made it obvious that a lot of his officers were also aware of the absences.
It couldn’t hurt to try distracting people from that. “Has everyone received and entered the modified settings for their jump drives so we can make it all the way to Sancere?”
All of the officers ranged along the apparently huge table nodded, but their nervousness on those grounds was now easily apparent. He knew why they were worried. Leaping into battle against human foes was one thing, but jumping too far in the weirdness of jump space was another. Ships that jumped too far had never come out of jump space, though Geary knew sailors told stories about long-lost craft appearing suddenly at lonely star systems, their crews long ago dead in some particularly horrible ways, or simply haunting the ship still, changed by the strange nature of jump space into something no longer alive but unable to die. He’d heard the stories in bars and while standing watches late during a ship’s night period, when the darkened and deserted passageways of a familiar ship somehow became eerie in their silence. Geary wondered if the old, cheap jump space undead horror movies of his youth were still around in newer versions.
“I assure you,” Geary emphasized, “that the settings will work. I’ve personally made jumps of this distance more than once.” That didn’t seem to provide as much comfort as Geary had hoped. “You don’t have to take my word for it. If you search the fleet database, you’ll find accounts of it. I can show you the references.” The accounts were otherwise too easily lost in the mass of information available. He’d only found them because he’d known exactly what to look for since he’d been on some of the ships involved. Geary sometimes wondered just how much accumulated knowledge mankind had hopelessly buried within databases collecting and endlessly storing everything possible. In ancient times, knowledge had been lost because copies no longer existed. Nowadays it was lost because copies of everything existed and finding a particular piece of information made the old needle in a haystack look like an easy task, even if you knew the information was there to begin with.
The knowledge that they could find proof of Geary’s assertions cheered them up a little. “Believe me, the Syndics are going to be very unpleasantly surprised when we pop out of that jump exit at Sancere. As far as they’re concerned, the Alliance fleet will have done the impossible.” Geary finally saw smiles breaking out along the long, long virtual table. “We have every reason to believe we’ll achieve total surprise. That will give us an important window to act before the Syndics command authorities in Sancere even realize we’ve brought the war to them.”
“The shipyards at Sancere produce many Syndic battleships and battle cruisers,” Captain Duellos observed.
