Impávido (54 page)

“You wish me to speak frankly, sir?” Geary nodded. “If Black Jack Geary was regarded as the fleet’s god, then Fighting Falco was a sort of demigod. Officers I’ve spoken to told tales approving of Captain Falco’s fighting spirit and his general attitude.”

Geary nodded again, pondering the irony of the fact that the two things Captain Falco had been admired for were the exact two things Geary disliked most in Falco. “He’s still thought of as a good commander?”

Desjani thought for a few seconds. “If any captain but you had been in command of this fleet, then Captain Falco would’ve very likely ended up in command instead.”

“How would you feel about that?”

Desjani grimaced again. “At one time…I’ve gotten used to dealing with a commander who wasn’t seeking my vote in a fleet conference, sir. You gave me some praise while we were on the shuttle dock if you recall, and that meant a great deal, because you had grounds for making an assessment of me and my ship. When Captain Falco offered praise…I knew it couldn’t have been earned. The contrast was very clear: one commander who respected what I did and another who saw me as someone he could flatter and use.”

Geary thanked whatever had prompted him to say what he had when he had. Perhaps his ancestors were lending him a hand sometimes. “Did you have any other impressions?”

She hesitated, thinking. “He’s very personable, sir. I thought Admiral Bloch was good, but he wasn’t in Captain Falco’s class at all. And I’ve had time for a couple of more brief talks with Lieutenant Riva. He and the other liberated prisoners believe Captain Falco is deeply devoted to the welfare of the Alliance.

Captain Falco dedicated great efforts in the labor camp to keeping up morale and assuring everyone that Alliance victory would come. Lieutenant Riva thinks many prisoners would have given up hope and let themselves die without Captain Falco’s example.”

This would be easier if Falco was simply a glory hound, Geary reflected. But he is an inspiring leader, and he does care about the Alliance. Unfortunately, his vision of saving the Alliance would mean turning it into a reflection of the Syndicate Worlds. May our ancestors preserve us from those who would destroy the things that make the Alliance worth fighting for in the name of defending it. “Thank you, Captain Desjani. I have reason to believe that Captain Falco intends promoting himself as the rightful commander of the fleet.”

That got another grimace from Desjani. “Sir, as I said, if it were any captain but you, if you had not already successfully brought us this far and won a great victory at Kaliban, then Captain Falco would be in command within a few days at the most. He’s…um…”

“A little more charming than me?” Geary asked dryly.

“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.”

By now the kinetic rounds aimed at Sutrah Five were all glowing brightly with the heat of their passage, dozens of deadly fireflies curving toward the planet’s surface. From Dauntless’s position, Geary could see part of Sutrah Five covered by night and watch the brilliant display of fiery destruction lighting the darkness of the skies there. “There’s no honor in killing helpless people,” he murmured, thinking of what Falco had urged.

To his surprise, Captain Desjani nodded in agreement. “No.”

He remembered her once expressing regret that the null-field weapons were short-range and couldn’t work near gravity wells, and therefore couldn’t be used against planets. Geary wondered if Desjani still felt that way.

He zoomed in the scale on his display, getting a good picture of one of the targets, a still-functioning industrial site that, on multispectral imagery, displayed heat from warm equipment and radiation of electronic signals leaking from wiring. There were no signs of people at the location, though, all of them apparently having taken the warning seriously and evacuated. Geary didn’t really see the kinetic round come in, as it was moving far too fast for his eye to register, but his mind imagined seeing a blur rocket in followed by an intense flash of light automatically blocked by Dauntless’s sensors. Pulling back the scale again, Geary saw shock waves radiating out from a cloud of vaporized material, shattering buildings and making the planet’s surface ripple like the hide of a living beast stung by an insect. He pulled back the scale again, much farther, seeing the mushroom-shaped clouds that mankind had grown to know all too well rising high into the skies of Sutrah Five as impacts occurred at multiple sites, smashing in moments all of the industrial and transportation hubs that humans had spent centuries creating on Sutrah Five.

Torn between fascination at the destruction and sorrow over its necessity, Geary selected one special site and homed in on it. The target in the mountain range didn’t show as much obvious destruction as other locations, because the kinetic round fired at it had been shaped to penetrate deeply into the rock on impact. The crater was deeper but smaller than at other locations, as if a spear had lanced into the planet seeking a special target. As it had, because this was where the hidden command post had once existed.

Geary wondered if the high-ranking leaders who’d been willing to subject others to the risk of bombardment had themselves had time to realize they wouldn’t be safe after all.

“I know the Syndic military base is an obsolete burden to them,” Desjani remarked, “but it wouldn’t have cost us much to eliminate it as well, as long as we were trying to teach the Syndics a lesson.”

Geary shook his head, his eyes still on the impact site where the planetary high command had been sheltered. “That depends on what lesson we’re trying to teach, doesn’t it? Vengeance? Or justice?”

Desjani spent a long time quiet. “Vengeance is easier to inflict, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. It doesn’t require much thought.”

She nodded slowly. Whatever lesson he’d taught the Syndics, Desjani seemed to be thinking a great deal.

On his display, Geary could see the swarm of projectiles headed for Sutrah Four. The people there would be seeing the impacts on their sister world and would know a similar fate awaited many locations on the planet they called home. They would also get to watch the bombardment heading their way for another hour or so, prolonging the suffering of their experience. He wondered if they’d blame the Alliance or the Syndic leaders who had been willing to sacrifice them.

ANOTHER conference, the atmosphere tense because every ship commander present knew that Geary intended laying out his next course of action. Granted, besides Geary himself, only Captain Desjani was actually physically present. Once again, Co-President Rione wasn’t in the room. Geary wondered this time if her absence had anything to do with the rumors that she and Geary were personally involved.

The absence of Captain Fighting Falco was a pleasant surprise but left Geary worrying what Falco was up to. Falco didn’t seem like the sort to give up easily, and Geary would’ve much preferred to see any political games being played right before him to having them occur in shadows outside of his knowledge.

He hoped that Rione’s spies would tell her of anything Geary had to worry about and that she would pass those reports on to him.

Geary looked around the table, knowing he was about to set off a firestorm and seeing no alternative.

“Ladies and gentlemen, the Syndics are drawing a net about us. The traps we encountered in this system are clear evidence that the Syndics are predicting our next objectives well enough to prepare for us. As you all know,” or should know, Geary added to himself, “the Syndics had light ships posted at all of the jump points in this system. As the light from our arrival reached them, three of those ships jumped out.

There are three possible destinations through those gates, and all will be warned of our possible impending arrival.”

He waited for any comments, but there were none. Everyone seemed to be waiting to hear his proposal.

“I’ve taken a look at our possible objectives from this point, and the reachable stars beyond those, and it’s all too clear that the Syndics will be able to channel our options down to the point of being able to trap us with greatly superior forces no matter what we do.” He paused, letting that sink in. “I have no doubt that we’d inflict terrible losses on those Syndic forces, but this fleet would be destroyed in the process.” That was a valuable offering to their pride, Geary thought, as well as a reminder that this was still about trying to get home.

“The Marine exploitation groups were able to get an outdated but useful Syndicate Worlds star system guide from files left behind at the labor camp.” Geary nodded toward Colonel Carabali. “After reviewing that, I believe there’s another option, which I think gives us a chance to not only avoid that trap but also to inflict a powerful blow to the Syndics, totally disrupt their plans, and leave us many options for heading back toward Alliance space again.” He used his finger to draw a line through the display. “We take the fleet back to the jump point we used to arrive. Not to go back to Kaliban but to jump to Strabo.”

“Strabo?” someone blurted after several seconds of silence. “What’s at Strabo?”

“Nothing. Not even enough rocks to have developed much of a human presence and now completely abandoned.”

The captain of the Polaris was staring at the display. “Strabo is almost directly away from Alliance space.”