“You’re not in love with me, then.”
She had that cool, amused expression again. “Not as far as I know. Are you disappointed?” Geary’s face or body language must have betrayed his feelings, because Rione dropped the amusement. “John Geary, there has been one love in my life. I told you that. He’s dead, but that hasn’t changed my love for him. I’ve dedicated myself since then to the Alliance, trying in my own way to serve the people my husband gave his life for. What’s left over is currently yours, for what it’s worth.”
Geary found himself laughing softly. “Your heart can’t be mine, and your soul belongs to the Alliance.
Just what is left over?”
“My mind. That’s no small thing.”
He nodded. “No, it’s not.”
“Can you be happy with that part of me, knowing the rest belongs to others?” Rione asked calmly.
“I don’t know.”
“You’re too honest, John Geary.” She sighed. “But then so am I. Perhaps we should try lying to each other.”
“I don’t think that would work,” he stated dryly, unable to keep from wondering if she was being honest, if there wasn’t still some agenda here that he didn’t know about. In many ways, Victoria Rione’s mind seemed as unknown to him as the far frontier of the Syndicate Worlds.
“No, lying probably wouldn’t work.” Rione gazed past Geary. “But then, will honesty work?”
“I don’t know that, either.”
“Time will tell.” She reached to turn off the display of stars, then stood up, regarding him with an expression Geary couldn’t interpret. “I forgot that there’s one more part of me available to you. My body. You haven’t asked, but I’ll tell you. That has been offered to no one else since my husband died.”
He couldn’t see any trace of insincerity in her and wouldn’t have been fool enough to question her statement even if he had. “I really don’t understand you, Victoria.”
“Is that why you’re keeping your emotional distance from me?”
“Maybe.”
“That may be for the best.”
“You’re not exactly opening up to me,” Geary pointed out.
“That’s true enough. I haven’t given you any promises. You shouldn’t give me any. We’re both veterans of life, John Geary, scarred by the losses we’ve endured because we cared for others. Someday you should tell me about her.”
“Her?” He knew exactly who Rione meant but didn’t want to admit it.
“Whoever she was. The one you left behind. The one I see you thinking of sometimes.”
He looked down, feeling an emptiness inside born of might-have-beens. “I should. Someday.”
“You told me you weren’t married.”
“No. I wasn’t. It was something that could have happened and didn’t. I’m still not sure why. But there was a lot left unsaid that should have been said.”
“Do you know what happened to her after your supposed death in battle?”
Geary stared at nothing, remembering. “Something happened before my battle. An accident. A stupid accident. Because her ship was a long ways off I didn’t even hear about it until she’d been dead for three months. I’d been planning on getting back in touch and apologizing for being an idiot, rehearsing what I was going to say.”
“I’m very sorry, John Geary.” Rione looked at him with eyes filled with shared sorrow. “It’s not easy for dreams to die, even when they’ve remained only dreams.” She reached down to take his hand and pull Geary up to stand next to her. “When you’re ready, you can speak more of it. You never have spoken of it to anyone, have you? I thought not. Open wounds don’t heal, John Geary.” She stepped close and kissed him slowly, her lips lingering on his. “That’s enough companionship for one night and far too much thinking for both of us. I’d like to enjoy the other benefit of our relationship now.”
Her body was warm and alive in his arms, and for a short while at least the concerns of the present and memories of the past were forgotten.
THE right formation had been the dilemma. The Alliance fleet was pretty close to the jump point from which any Syndic force would exit. That meant he would have little time to adjust his formation and would probably have to fight from whatever formation he had the fleet in when the enemy arrived. But he wouldn’t know how the enemy was formed up until they got here.
The one thing he did know was that if the Syndics were in hot pursuit of a small, badly battered Alliance force, they wouldn’t be wasting time. It was a safe bet that there would be fast, light units coming in right behind any fleeing Alliance ships. Those would be easily disposed of no matter what formation Geary adopted. The problem was what came next. Heavy cruisers would be quickly annihilated, but if the Syndics had battleships coming in soon after the light units, Geary had to make sure those capital ships couldn’t take too many of his own ships with them.
In the worst case, the Syndics would have a superior force, in which case the Alliance would have to strike fast and hard to take advantage of any element of surprise and any momentary numerical lead as Syndic ships exited the jump point.
“It could be very ugly,” Geary remarked after discussing options with Captain Duellos. “But we’ll be close to the gate, which means they can’t be spread out. I’m going to keep us in a modified cup formation.” On the display floating between them, the formation resembled its namesake, with a thick circular bottom formed by over half the fleet in a matrix with interlocking fields of fire, the remainder of the ships arranged in flat, semicircular formations extending outward toward the enemy. “We’ll be able to hit them hard in one spot, then come back and hit another part of whatever formation they’re in.”
“If they’re truly superior in numbers to us, we will beat the hell out of them even if we’re destroyed in the process,” Duellos replied. “Not the best outcome, but combined with the losses we inflicted at Kaliban and Sancere, it will leave the Syndics without numerical advantage in the war.”
Geary nodded, gazing at the star display. “So the war would just go on.”
“The war would just go on,” Duellos agreed.
“I’d like to manage a better outcome than that.”
Duellos grinned sardonically. “You can count on the fleet. Everything’s coming together here. The pride of the fleet, the need to rescue our fellow ships, the confidence born of recent victories, and the training you’ve given us. We’ve got a chance, even if the odds are bad.” His grin widened. “And I just thought of something else we can do to even the odds a bit.”
YOU would think someone who had spent so many years in the fleet would be used to waiting by now, Geary thought as he wandered the passageways of Dauntless. A very large amount of time in the fleet was spent just waiting. Waiting to get somewhere, waiting once you got there, waiting for an emergency or crisis that might not happen, waiting to find out how long you would have to wait. That seemed to be as much a part of military life as risking your life and bad food.
None of which made waiting to find out if any ships would rejoin them here any easier. The fleet had been positioned facing the jump point from which any of the missing ships would have to come, hanging in space with its movements slaved to the slow progression of the jump point around its star. The auxiliaries were busy enough building new weapons and parts, and every other ship needed routine upkeep and repair, but Geary had done everything he personally could do to prepare. Too restless to address other tasks, he went through Dauntless seeing the crew, finding his increasing ability to recognize the sailors and officers he encountered to be a source of comfort. Slowly, very slowly, he was beginning to feel like he belonged here.
In one passageway he encountered Captain Desjani, surprised to see that she was demonstrating the sort of cheerfulness that usually only appeared after Desjani had watched a lot of Syndic ships be destroyed.
“You seem in a good mood,” he commented.
She smiled back. “I recently had a long conversation with someone on Furious, sir.”
Furious was a ways off, with her once-again reconstituted task force, ready to carry off another special mission. Geary spent a moment wondering why Desjani would have had a long talk with Captain Cresida, given the time delay involved, then realized that hadn’t been who she had talked to. “How is Lieutenant Casell Riva?”
Desjani actually blushed slightly. “Very well, Captain Geary. He’s impressed by Captain Cresida and the new sensors and weaponry we have.”
“I see. I’m glad he’s pleased by the new weapons in the fleet.”
“Actually, he’s happy to be liberated, and seemed pleased to talk to me,” Desjani confessed.
“I suspect he really is pleased, Tanya. He’s fitting in okay, then?”
Her smiled faded a bit. “There’s been some rough moments, he said. That much time in a Syndic labor camp with no hope of release or rescue will take a while to overcome. Sometimes he wakes up in a panic, fearing that his liberation was only a hallucination. But of course he has hope now.” Desjani paused. “Cas—Lieutenant Riva was surprised to see the way you’re directing the fleet. The tactics you’re using. He’s still puzzled and torn by Captain Falco’s departure from the fleet. But he watched everything that happened at Sancere and was astounded, sir.”
Geary felt embarrassed himself. “A lot of things worked right. We were lucky.”
“You make much of your own luck, sir, if you don’t mind my saying so.” She paused again. “He’s still the man I remembered. Perhaps something will come of it.”
“I hope so. War messes up enough lives. It’s nice to think that two of them can have a chance to get back on track.”
Desjani nodded, her eyes distant with memory. “We’ll see. There’s a lot of time to make up and experiences to share. Did you know that among the records we downloaded at Sancere there was a huge database of Alliance prisoners of war? It’s not up to date, the latest information is about three years old, but it has a lot of names of people who for all we knew were dead. If—excuse me, sir—when we get back to Alliance space, a lot of people will be happy to see some of the names on that list.”
Geary gave her a curious look. “How long has it been since the Syndics shared captured personnel lists with the Alliance?”
“Decades at least. I’d have to check. At some point they decided not knowing if lost personnel were alive or dead would harm Alliance morale and stopped providing lists of prisoners. The Alliance did the same in retaliation, of course.”
That wasn’t a pleasant thought. Sending friends, lovers, and family off to battle was bad enough, but not knowing afterward what had happened to them was a form of slow torture. “We’ll have to get that list back, and maybe convince the Syndics to swap up-to-date lists.”
Desjani nodded. “If anyone can do that, you can,” she replied. “I’ve just started to look at the list.
There’s so many names and the list is organized in an odd way, so I’m stumbling through it usually getting results I didn’t ask for. But there’s some people whose fates I’d like to check. Some of them were supposedly captured, some supposedly killed in battle. Maybe I can confirm those things now.”
“I guess you and a lot of other people will be doing that,” Geary noted, thinking that a list three years old wouldn’t tell him if some miracle had allowed his grandnephew to escape from Repulse before its destruction in the Syndic home system. That would remain an unknown for him, but best to assume Michael Geary was dead and be very pleasantly surprised if he turned up alive. There really weren’t many grounds for assuming he had survived the death of his ship.
Which brought his thoughts back to the thirty-nine ships that had accompanied Captain Falco at Strabo.
How many of those had survived? He wished he already knew the answer, as terrible as that was likely to be. The uncertainty was almost as bad as the nagging, ugly conviction that few if any of them would survive to reach Ilion.
“THEY’RE here.”
Geary bolted from his stateroom without bothering to check his own display. He ran down long passageways and up ladders until he reached the bridge, gasping for breath as he dropped into his seat.
Only then did he call up the display with a silent prayer for as many survivors as possible.
Amazingly, three battleships were there. Dauntless’s systems quickly identified them as Warrior, Orion, and Majestic. And a single battle cruiser, Invincible, so badly damaged that Geary had to double-check the assessment before he believed it. Of the six heavy cruisers that had accompanied the capital ships, only two remained. None of the four light cruisers were there, and of the nineteen destroyers only seven had survived.
“Those stupid bastards,” Geary muttered. A battleship and two battle cruisers lost, along with a lot of lighter ships. Of the thirty-nine warships that had followed Falco, only thirteen had made it to Ilion.
Captain Desjani’s face was white with anger. “Triumph didn’t make it. I’ll lay you any odds you care to name that Triumph stayed behind to hold off the pursuit while the other big ships got away.”
“That didn’t do Polaris and Vanguard any good,” Geary noted, knowing how much fury his voice was showing. “Look at Invincible. How is she still functioning?”
“I have no idea, sir. But all of those ships are beat up. I don’t know if even Titan can restore those ships to full service no matter how much time she’s given.”
“We’ll find out.” Geary finally punched his communications controls. “Colonel Carabali. Get in touch with your Marine detachments on Warrior, Orion, and Majestic. Captains Kerestes, Numos, and Faresa have been relieved of command effective immediately and are to be placed under arrest. Captain Falco is also to be placed under arrest for the negligent and criminal loss of ships of the Alliance fleet.” Charges of mutiny could wait until later. What really mattered to Geary was knowing that Falco’s stupidity had caused the loss of so many ships. He pushed another control. “Warrior, Orion, and Majestic, this is Captain Geary, acting commander of the Alliance fleet. Your commanding officers are relieved effective immediately. Executive officers are to assume temporary command.” Another push, this time on the fleetwide circuit. “All units that have just arrived in the Ilion system are to accelerate at your best speed, passing through the fleet formation and joining up with the fast fleet auxiliaries and their escorts in the rear.