Guardian

Eight

They had come up on the jump point from a high angle, curving the track of the fleet when close to bring the Alliance warships onto a vector aimed straight at the jump point.

“We’re not seeing anything yet,” Lieutenant Castries reported, her voice tense.

Everyone expected to see something. After the attacks at the hypernet gate, everyone thought the Syndics would try again here. “Mines still look like the best bet,” Desjani commented. “But we’re a little too far out to spot them if they’re just in front of the jump point.”

Geary watched the track of a single ship ahead of the Alliance fleet, one moving much more slowly as it approached the jump point. “Are we going to overtake that merchant ship?”

“It should jump out ten minutes before we reach the exit, Admiral,” Lieutenant Castries reported.

“Interesting timing,” Desjani commented.

“Yes.” He entered the commands to see the freighter’s track to this point. “A suspicious mind might wonder why, after we had swung back on a trajectory heading for the jump point, that freighter left an outer planet facility at just the right time to closely proceed us through the jump point.”

“It makes it look safe,” Desjani commented, “but that doesn’t seem enough of a diversion. Watching that freighter doesn’t require any concentration at all.”

Geary’s attention was drawn by movement within his formation. The Dancers. Their ships had left the vicinity of Invincible, darting forward through the formation as if eager to reach the jump point before any of the Alliance ships. “Emissary Charban! Tell the Dancers in the strongest possible terms that we suspect danger at that jump point! They must not move ahead of our ships!”

“Yes, Admiral,” Charban replied, concern and resignation warring in his expression. “They don’t always listen. I’ll tell the Dancers and leave out the suspect part. Maybe if we say we know there is danger there, it will make a difference.”

“What do we do,” Desjani asked, “if the Dancers race ahead of us into what we suspect is a minefield?”

“Pray,” Geary replied.

He watched with increasing dread as the Dancers got closer and closer to the leading ships in the Alliance formation. Whatever Charban was telling them wasn’t enough. I should call Charban. Tell him to put the fear of the living stars in the Dancers and do it now. But what if he is doing that and I interrupt him and that causes a critical delay in getting the message across to the Dancers? Damn, damn, damn…

The Dancer ships leaped past the forwardmost Alliance warships, weaving around each other as the Dancers aimed for the Syndic transport lumbering steadily toward the jump point.

An urgent alert sounded, jarring Geary and everyone else on the bridge out of their dismayed viewing of the Dancers’ movements.

“There’s a distress signal,” Lieutenant Castries said.

Geary squinted at his own display, where a new symbol had appeared on top of the freighter. “From the merchant ship ahead of us?”

“Yes, Admiral. They’re reporting fluctuations in their power core.”

“What do our sensors say?” Desjani demanded.

“There are fluctuations being detected, Captain. The fluctuations we’re picking up are consistent with a failure of power-core-control mechanisms.”

Was it the trick they had been expecting? Or a real problem?

And the Dancers were getting very close to the danger radius the fleet’s maneuvering systems had just illuminated around the Syndic freighter.

“For the love of our ancestors, Emissary Charban, tell the Dancers that freighter is about to blow up!”

Charban’s image, his face lined with strain, appeared just long enough to nod in reply. “Professor Shwartz and I are screaming at the Dancers! We’ll add that warning, too!”

“Maybe it won’t blow up,” Desjani suggested helpfully.

She winced at the look he turned on her. “Sorry, Admiral. But… there’s nothing else we can do.”

The Dancers were now well inside the danger radius from the freighter, splitting to swing around it as they continued on toward the jump point.

Geary watched them, glum. “The friendly aliens are causing me as much anxiety as the enemy aliens,” he grumbled.

“Fluctuations in the freighter’s power core are growing worse,” Lieutenant Castries reported, dismay creeping into her own voice.

“Warning shots?” Desjani suggested, sounding despairing herself.

“They’re out of range,” Geary said, “and if they won’t or can’t understand a warning to stay away from a dangerous region, how can we expect them to understand having us fire at them?”

Lieutenant Castries spoke up again. “Admiral, the freighter just broadcast an abandon-ship alert. The crew is heading for their survival pod.”

Geary looked toward Desjani, seeing the stony expression with which she was now watching her display. “Are you thinking what I am?”

“Probably,” Desjani said. “They’ll eject in their pod and request a humanitarian pickup. Then their freighter will explode. Then, when we’re distracted by both of those things and our sensors are hindered by the aftereffects of the freighter’s destruction, we start hitting mines. Assuming we’re not also distracted by watching the Dancer ships hitting mines.”

“Yeah. Another diversion, just as Master Gioninni predicted. There goes their escape pod.”

“And here comes the request for rescue.”

“Freighter crew requests emergency assistance,” Lieutenant Castries said. “They are reporting seriously injured personnel. Power fluctuations on the freighter are exceeding danger levels. We are well outside the danger radius if the freighter’s power core detonates. The Dancers—”

“Are well inside,” Desjani finished, “but they’re about to— Oh, hell!”

Geary felt the same way as he watched the Dancer ships, which had been close to the front edge of the danger zone around the freighter, suddenly alter tracks to come swooping back toward the newly launched escape pod. “They can’t be that stupid!” he erupted. “Even if Charban and Shwartz hadn’t told them anything, the Dancers would still have been able to pick up the power fluctuations on that freighter’s power core. They must know—” He paused as a thought hit him.

“What?” Desjani demanded.

“Are they just messing with us?” Geary wondered. “Are they deliberately going into danger so that they—”

“They’re heading for a minefield at high speed!” Desjani broke in. A sudden realization twisted her own expression. “They’ve got better stealth capability than us. That probably means they have better stealth detection capability than us.”

“They see mines that are still invisible to us? Then why are they—?” Geary hit the arm of his seat hard enough to hurt his hand. “They’re warning us!”

“Or screwing with us!”

The Dancers, displaying a maneuverability human ships could not hope to match, had nearly joined up with the escape pod from the freighter.

“Hold on!” Geary ordered as Desjani started to say something else. Too many things were happening, and his own thoughts were in a whirl. “I need to focus on all of these elements. Get everything straight. The minefield. We have to assume it is there, but beyond the freighter. The freighter. About to blow. We’re well outside the danger radius, though.”

“Of course,” Desjani said. “They don’t want us altering course.”

“Wait, Tanya, please. The Dancers. Outside our own formation, within the danger zone about the freighter but intercepting the escape pod. If they stay with it, they’ll be outside the danger radius when the freighter’s power core overloads.”

He paused, looking for anything he might have missed. “Lieutenant, are there Syndic assets in this star system that can recover that escape pod in time to save the crew?”

“Uh, yes, sir,” Castries replied. “There are at least two Syndic ships that could do a pickup well within the endurance of the life support on that escape pod.”

“So we don’t need to worry about that even though the pod is requesting rescue.”

“Clumsy of them not to forestall that option,” Desjani remarked.

“They had to make things look normal,” Geary said. “No other traffic within a light-hour would have looked very abnormal. So, the freighter and its crew, if there was one, is not a problem. We have to assume the Dancers are picking up the danger signs from the freighter’s power core and will get themselves clear, and that the Dancers can see any mines the Syndics laid near the jump point better than we can see them.”

“Right,” Desjani agreed. “That leaves just our own ships to worry about.”

“But… Captain… they said they have seriously injured personnel,” an increasingly baffled Lieutenant Castries reminded Desjani.

“Lieutenant,” Desjani replied, “odds are there are no seriously injured personnel on that escape pod. I would, in fact, be surprised if there are any personnel aboard it at all. Everything we’re seeing and hearing was very likely preprogrammed and that freighter sent out here without a human crew.”

“Very likely,” Geary said. The distraction had come too close to working, though that was because the Dancers had thrown an unexpected variable into the situation. He touched his comm controls. “All units in First Fleet. Immediate execute reduce velocity to point zero zero three light speed.” Another control. “Emissary Charban—”

The usually controlled Charban looked about ready himself to explode with frustration. “They just keep echoing back to us!” he said. “We say danger ahead, and they say danger ahead, then we do it again!”

“I think the Dancers are trying to warn us,” Geary said. “They’re not echoing. They’re agreeing with what you’re saying.”

“They’re—?” Charban visibly quivered as he fought to regain control. “That means I can stop trying.”

“Yes. But I want you to tell them something else. Please inform the Dancers that we are drastically reducing our speed due to the threats in front of the fleet. Tell them they must not precede us to the jump point.”

“Drastically reducing speed?” Charban asked. “What velocity does that mean? Never mind. I can’t convey it to the Dancers even if you told me. I’ll ask them to match our big reduction in speed. They can do that easily.”

Dauntless’s thrusters fired, bringing her bow over and around before her main propulsion lit off and began dropping the ship’s speed dramatically. The structure of Dauntless groaned audibly under the strain, but Desjani, her eyes on the strain meters displaying hull-stress readings, watched them with a reassuring lack of visible concern.

“Nine hundred kilometers a second?” she asked. “I could swim through space faster than that. Why are you slowing down the fleet that much? I thought you’d dodge the minefield.”

“Too hard,” Geary said. “We have to assume the minefield is right across the entrance to the jump exit. They couldn’t keep a minefield that close to a jump point for long, but from the prior attacks on us, they obviously knew we would soon arrive at Sobek. We’ll get down real slow, crawling along, which will allow the fleet’s sensors to spot every mine in our path and our weapons to take out the mines one by one. Our warships will blow a hole in that Syndic minefield big enough for the entire fleet to waltz through.”

“While they watch?” Desjani grinned. “They’re going to be real unhappy at us thumbing our noses at them like that.”

“And we’ll come out the jump exit at Simur still moving very slow,” Geary added. “That’s important. The Syndics are setting traps based on the paths we have to use and our normal methods of operation. If there’s a trap set up at Simur, they might have prepared for us evading immediately upon exit. They might have prepared for other actions we could take. The one thing they won’t be prepared for is us going at such a slow velocity because we never do that.”

“Not until now,” Desjani agreed.

“Power core overload imminent,” Lieutenant Castries said.

The Dancers, along with the escape pod, were still within the blast radius, but as Geary watched, the six Dancer ships leaped ahead, tearing past the escape pod and into the clear.

The freighter, now less than a light-minute ahead of the fleet, exploded as its power core overloaded, producing a burst of energy as well as a sphere of fragments ranging from dust specks to large chunks, all fouling the vision of the fleet’s sensors. As the globe of the explosion rapidly expanded, the escape pod reached the edge of the danger zone, taking enough impacts for damage to be visible.

“Good work on that,” Desjani admitted grudgingly. “They timed it perfectly, so the escape pod got hit but not destroyed, making quick rescue seem all the more critical.”

“And it looks like the Dancers did always know what they were doing. We’ve been breaking our backs worrying about protecting them, but then they went out of their way to protect us from a threat they saw.”

Desjani grimaced. “I want to feel like the senior partner when it comes to the Dancers. I’ve got this feeling that they consider themselves the senior partner, though. Older and wiser than us dumb humans.”

“I’ll ask Charban about that,” Geary said, realizing that the idea bothered him, too. It’s one thing to accept powers beyond human comprehension that know more than we do, but another thing entirely to accept another living creature as superior to us in any way. Has Charban picked up any signs of superior attitudes in the Dancers? Or would we even recognize superior attitudes in something so different from us?

But now was not the time for that discussion. His attention needed to remain focused on events outside of Dauntless. And Charban deserved a bit of a rest after the recent attempted-communication-with-aliens fiasco.

Dauntless didn’t feel any different when traveling at point zero zero three light speed. Space didn’t offer obvious signs of slower or faster movement, the sort of things you would experience on a planet, like air turbulence and noise or nearby objects whose own motion relative to yours would change as your speed did. The battle cruiser felt exactly the same as she did when moving at a velocity of point zero five, or point one, or point two light speed. Endless space outside of Dauntless’s hull looked the same. But on Geary’s display, the speed vector for the fleet had shrunk to a tiny stub, and that reduction in velocity had thrown off the calculations of those preparing this trap. The fragments of the exploded freighter would keep spreading, their density thinning with every cubic meter the sphere of wreckage expanded. By the time the Alliance warships actually reached the region of the explosion, there should be very little hindrance to their sensors.

“Nice,” Desjani approved.

“Thank you, Captain.”

“But don’t get complacent. There might be a trap within this trap.” She hit her comm controls. “Master Chief Gioninni, congratulations.”

“Excuse me, Captain?”

“You called it, Master Chief. Now I need to know what sort of fallback you might have created in case the mines failed.”

Gioninni sounded dubious. “A fallback to the fallback to the diversion?”

“Something like that, yes.”

“Captain, I have no idea. There’s no room or time left for them to hit us with something else in this star system. Now, the next star system. I’d keep an eye out there. But you’d need someone with a lot better, um, strategizing mind than mine to come up with another trap here before we jump.”

Desjani smiled, though it was hard to tell whether that was because of Gioninni’s statement or because the fleet’s ships were beginning to spot mines and detonate them using hell-lance shots. “No one’s better than you at that particular type of strategizing, Master Chief. You just out-thought some Syndics.”

“Well, hell, Captain, that ain’t nothing. Syndics are as dumb as dirt. That’s why they’re Syndics.”

“Good point, Master Chief. Stay out of trouble.” Desjani ended the call and leaned back in her seat, grimacing even though the destruction of mines was happening with greater frequency as the fleet moved into the minefield at a velocity that in space terms qualified as plodding. “If I never see this star system again, it will still be too soon.”

“We’ll never have any reason to come back here,” Geary said.

“We never expected to have to come here in the first place,” she reminded him. “Hey, I just thought of something.”

“What?” Geary searched his mind frantically for any possible threat he might have missed, any option be should have considered, any—

“The jump pool,” she explained. “You slowed us down so much, it’ll throw the jump pool off completely.”

“Tanya…”

But even he felt his spirits growing lighter as the First Fleet finally jumped out of Sobek Star System.

Four days to Simur.

Four days to second-guess every step he had taken since leaving Varandal.

Four days to dwell on the losses the fleet had suffered as it went through enigma space, into the Kick star system, then fought the Kicks at Honor Star System, before returning to human space through Dancer territory and fighting the enigmas again at Midway. And now the losses at Sobek.

He had thought it was over. That no one else serving under his command would have to die, that no more ships would be lost. But the enigmas, the Kicks, then the Syndics again had proven him wrong.

The enigmas had been beaten once more, and some little bit learned about them, but there had been no visible progress toward mutual understanding and peaceful coexistence. How many of his decisions in enigma space had been wrong, had led to more problems instead of any solutions?

Had he made the right decisions at Midway, or had he backed a couple of dictators who would rule as badly as the Syndic CEOs they had once been?

The last two surviving Kick prisoners continued to hover on the edge of death as Dr. Nasr tried to keep them sufficiently sedated to remain unconscious so they wouldn’t will themselves to death, yet not so heavily sedated that they would die from that. Medical calculations that even now sometimes went wrong with humans were much more difficult when dealing with living creatures with which human medicine had no experience.

And they had been forced to kill so many Kicks. Small wonder that Invincible felt like she was packed with angry ghosts. There had to be some material explanation for the ghosts, some Kick device, but he couldn’t imagine what could create such sensations, and part of him could not help wondering if the ghosts aboard Invincible were exactly what they felt like.

If Charban was right, even the Dancers might be playing some subtle games with humanity.

Getting home would offer little respite. If his guesses were right, powerful factions of the government and within the Alliance military were scheming and maneuvering against each other and against Geary and this fleet.

He didn’t really know anyone here, in this future a century removed from when he had once lived. Those he had known well, people who had shared the same life experiences as he in an Alliance at peace for the most part, were long dead. In their place were strangers who had grown up knowing nothing but war more terrible than Geary had once thought possible.

He was sitting slumped at his desk when Tanya stopped by his stateroom. “What’s the occasion?” he asked. “You never come by here.”

“I don’t come by often because I don’t want people thinking I’m grabbing a quick one with my Admiral and my husband,” she replied, eyeing him. “But my Admiral and my husband has been holed up in his stateroom for long enough that my crew is starting to comment on it. And now I’m looking at him, and he looks like hell. What’s the matter?”

His reluctance to talk shattered like a dam under too much pressure, words pouring out to his own surprise. “I’m not good enough for this, Tanya. I keep making mistakes. People keep dying. I screwed up with the enigmas and the Kicks. I shouldn’t have accepted the orders for this mission, and I shouldn’t have accepted command of this fleet.”

“Oh. Is that all?”

He stared at her in disbelief for several seconds before he could find his voice again. “How can you—?”

“Admiral, I’d be dead now if not for you. Because I would have fought Dauntless to the last when the Syndics crushed the Alliance fleet at Prime. You do remember that, right? What would have happened if you hadn’t been there?”

“Dammit, Tanya, that’s not—”

“You have to remain focused on the positives, Admiral. Because, yes, you will make mistakes. People under your command will die. Guess what? Even if you were perfect, even if you were the greatest, luckiest, most brilliant, and most talented commander in the entire history of humanity, people under your command would still die.”

She was speaking slowly, her tones hard enough to edge against being harsh. “Do you think you’re the only one who ever lost someone? Who ever wished they had done things differently? Who felt like they had let down everyone who had depended upon them? If you keep judging yourself against perfection, you will fall short. Feel free to aim for perfection. I like that in a commander and much prefer it to superiors who aim for perfection in their subordinates. But when you inevitably fall short of perfection, don’t consider yourself a failure. Look at what might have happened. Look at how many might have died. Look at what you couldn’t have done. We need Black Jack in command because he is the worst commanding officer we’ve ever had with the exception of every other commanding officer I have ever served under.”

“Is that everything?” he asked.

“No.” She leaned in closer, her eyes on his. “You’ve still got me.”

He felt the darkness that had been weighing upon him lighten. She was a child of war, but they had connected in a way he had never connected with anyone a hundred years before. He wasn’t alone. “So, it could be worse.”

“Hell, yes.” Desjani raised one eyebrow at him. “What else?”

“There isn’t anything else.”

“Are you lying to me as my Admiral or as my husband?”

Geary shook his head. “I should have known I couldn’t get anything past you. I’ve been wondering.”

After a long moment waiting for him to continue, Tanya smiled with obvious insincerity. “Thank you for filling me in on that.”

“Why do you put up with me? You could do a lot better.”

She laughed, which was the last reaction he had expected. “You found me out! I’m just keeping you around until something better shows up.”

“Tanya, dammit—”

“How could you even ask me that? How could you say that?” Desjani blew out a long breath, regaining her composure. “When was the last time you checked in with the head-menders in sick bay?”

“I haven’t… I don’t know offhand.”

“You’re supposed to be providing a good example to every other officer, sailor, and Marine in this fleet, Admiral. That includes getting your head checked when trauma stress gets too hard to deal with. If the men and women of this fleet don’t see you going to get taken care of, they’ll think they shouldn’t, either. They need to see you getting help, so they’ll get it when they need it, too.”

He nodded again. “Yes, ma’am.”

“And don’t start with that! You know I’m right! Why did I have to come looking for you to find out what was wrong? Why didn’t you call me? And when’s the last time you had a good talk with your ancestors? Our ancestors, that is, since you and I tied the knot.”

“About a week ago. To talk about Orion.”

She bit her lip, taking a moment to reply. “Good. I’ve been trying to put together a message for Shen’s daughter.”

“And I’ve been too sunk in my own slough of despair to help.” Geary extended a hand toward her but didn’t touch her. “Thanks, Tanya, for reminding me about my responsibilities. I have to use them to motivate me instead of letting them overwhelm me. I’ll go down to sick bay.”

“When?”

“Uh… later.”

“Fifteen minutes, Admiral. I’ll give you that long to straighten up. Then meet me at my stateroom, and we’ll both go to sick bay, and when we’re done there, we’ll go down to the worship spaces and have a talk with our ancestors.”

“Yes, ma—” Her eyes narrowed at him intensely enough that Geary halted in midword. “What I meant to say was, all right, Tanya.”

“Fifteen minutes,” she repeated sternly, then left.

He went to get cleaned up but paused for a moment to thank the living stars for her presence in his life. Even Black Jack needs a good kick in the rear every once in a while, and I’m lucky enough to have someone around who’ll do that when necessary.

Charban spread his hands, shrugged, and shook his head, all at the same time. “I don’t know! I don’t know what the Dancers think of us beyond the fact that they seem to see us as allies. It occurred to me as I was analyzing my own attempts to communicate with them that I was thinking of the Dancers as children. Perhaps because they can’t speak clearly to us, perhaps because they’re unpredictable, perhaps because it’s more comfortable for me to think of them that way. Do they think of us as children? It’s entirely possible. But is it true? I have no idea.”

“Has Dr. Shwartz mentioned any impressions like that?” Geary asked. They were in his stateroom, any evidence of Geary’s earlier depression put away and neatened up. Dr. Shwartz herself was on one of the assault transports, out of reach of all but the simplest communication while the ships were in jump space. There were other so-called experts on nonhuman intelligence with the fleet, but over time Geary had learned to trust in the insights of Dr. Shwartz far more than those of any other academic.

“No, she hasn’t.” Charban leaned back, looking up at the overhead. “Admiral, what do you see up there?”

“On the overhead?” Geary bent his head upward as well, seeing the welter of cable runs, piping, tubes, and vents that were a common feature of overheads throughout Dauntless and every other warship. “Equipment. It’s like an organ system in a living creature. The lifeblood of the ship flows through that junk up there, as does the air, all of the signals that make up what you could call the nerve system of the ship. We keep it uncovered so it’s easy to access if it needs repair.”

Charban nodded. “Do you see patterns? Pictures?”

“Sure. Sometimes. Doesn’t everybody?”

“Every human,” Charban said. “But what do the Dancers see? We haven’t been inside their ships. Do they have exposed ‘organs’ like those on human ships? Or is everything inside their ships as carefully smooth and clean-lined as the exterior of their ships? How would they describe what we are looking at? Would they see obscene clutter? Would they see pictures in that overhead? If they did, what pictures? Or patterns? We don’t know. And yet it is exactly those kinds of things that would help us understand the Dancers. We share those things with other humans, forming a connection, a shared understanding, even with humans we might detest. That allows us to guess at their motivations, their reasons for anything they do. But the Dancers? Why do they do anything?”

Geary stared at him for a while before answering. “What about the patterns? The way they seem to think?”

“I agree with Dr. Shwartz. The Dancers very likely do think in patterns, seeing everything in terms of interlocking components that form some image they can understand on their own terms.” Charban spread his hands helplessly again. “But where are we in those patterns? We still can only guess. I would interpret their interactions with me as being… polite. But you can be polite with a partner, or to a superior, or to someone far inferior to you. Noblesse oblige, as the very old saying has it. But there’s another alternative. That’s the possibility that the Dancers themselves are not certain of how to think of us, just as we are uncertain about them. In us, that produces contradictory impulses. We are in awe of the Dancers, yet we also view them in part as if they were irresponsible children who need constant supervision.”

“You’re saying the Dancers may be making it up as they go along?” Geary asked.

“It’s possible. They react to each event not in accordance with some unified image of us but in terms of what seems best to them when each of those events occur.” Charban paused, his face working as he thought. “I have an impression… Admiral, when someone has something they have to do, you can tell. There’s something about them, no matter who they are, that tells you they are preoccupied, driven, busy. Whatever term you want. I sometimes get that feeling with the Dancers. Before we left Midway, it was becoming stronger, a sense that the Dancers were eager to leave, to reach Alliance space, but refraining from saying so openly.”

It was Geary’s turn to shake his head. “Why would they be eager to go to Alliance space and yet not say so?”

“I don’t know. If you figure out the answer, could you tell me?”

Geary managed a smile. “What does Emissary Rione think?”

“Emissary Rione?” Charban asked. “What does she think? If you figure out the answer, could you tell me?”

Not everyone who was acting in unusual ways was an alien. After speaking with Charban, Geary realized something else had been bothering him, something that had been concealed under the stress that had been clouding his mind.

In this case, the answers might be found in the recent past.

He called up records, letting them scroll past, trying to give his subconscious the clues it would need to figure out what was going on.

When his hatch alert chimed, Geary absentmindedly granted entry, only gradually becoming aware that Desjani was back and glowering at him.

“What?” Geary asked, looking away from the display over his desk.

“I thought you were not going to get bogged down again this quickly in useless regrets about the past.”

“What?” he repeated, then understood. “I’m sorry, Tanya. Have I been out of communication for a while again?”

“An unusually long while,” she replied, eyeing him suspiciously. “If you’re not moping about mistakes, what are you doing? That’s a playback of the attack on Invincible at Sobek.”

Geary rubbed his mouth with one hand, looking at the recorded images once more as stealth shuttles were destroyed, and Marines counterattacked inside Invincible. “Something has shifted. I’m trying to figure out what.”

She came closer, studying the display. “The attack on Invincible was a classic special operation. Stealth approach and stealth suits, board a ship undetected, we’ve seen that before. We’ve done that as much as the Syndics have. It requires special circumstances to work, though.”

“But the suicide attacks. Those were different.”

“Yes,” Desjani agreed. “The minefield wasn’t different, but the way they tried to get us with it was unusual. You’re looking for some common element?”

He nodded, watching as the Marines once again annihilated the Syndics who had boarded Invincible. “These aren’t major attacks. It’s a series of small attacks, minor actions. They’re not marshaling as many forces in one place as possible. They’re not trying to defeat us in open battle.” Geary looked at her. “Do they still use the expression being nibbled to death by ducks?”

“Nibbled to—? Oh. We say cows,” Desjani said. “Licked to death by cows.”

“That’s disgusting.”

“How is it more disgusting than being nibbled to death by ducks?”

“I don’t know.” Geary scowled at the display. “The Syndics can’t hope to stop us or beat us. But what they’re doing is not just wearing us down ship by ship and encounter by encounter. These sudden attacks, without warning, seemed designed to also throw us mentally off-balance.”

Desjani nodded, her eyes thoughtful. “Small jabs at unexpected points. Like martial-arts fighting. Instead of going strength against strength, you try to get your opponent off-balance and get them to make mistakes.” She paused, then focused intently on him. “They can’t beat you.”

“I don’t need to hear—”

“I’m not praising you, Admiral.” She pointed a finger at the display. “Fact. The Syndics don’t have enough warships left at the moment to bring us to battle. Fact. If they did gather that many warships, they know that you would beat the hell out of them. They know you don’t have any match as a fleet combat commander. Fact. Even Syndics can figure out what they’re doing wrong if they get hit hard enough often enough.

“They’ve got a new plan, Admiral. They’re going to avoid a straight-up fight with you until you’ve been worn down so badly that Black Jack himself couldn’t win. Sorry, that’s one of those old sayings. Instead, they’re going to fight the sorts of battles you haven’t proven you can best them at. An ever-changing set of unconventional, surprise attacks, none of them using too many Syndic resources, but all of them aimed at wearing us down physically, mentally, and emotionally.”

He did not like hearing that the future would likely hold only more of what they had seen at Sobek. “How did you come up with that idea?”

“I heard it. A long time ago.” Desjani bit her lip, blinking as she looked to one side. “My brother. As a kid, he loved the whole ground forces thing. He would lecture us about different kinds of fighting. Guerrilla warfare. He had this fantasy where the Syndics would take over a planet he was on, and he would organize and lead resistance forces that would eventually triumph over the Syndic occupiers. He had it all worked out.”

Geary had looked up Desjani’s family history, the official side of it, anyway. He knew that Tanya’s younger brother had died the first time he fought the Syndics, one of thousands of Alliance ground forces soldiers dead in a failed offensive against a Syndic planet. Her brother had not lived to be the hero his child-self had spent years dreaming of, had never had the chance to carry out the detailed plans a kid had proudly described to his sister and parents.

What could he say? Tanya had recovered, as she must have a thousand thousand times before this, and was looking at him steadily again, as if nothing special or unusual had been said. He had been around her long enough to know what that steady gaze meant. Don’t go there. Nothing you can say will be the right thing, so let’s just drop it and move on.

“I think,” Geary said slowly, trying to ensure he didn’t say the wrong thing, “you may well be right. I haven’t proven any special ability to deal with that kind of frequent, low-level, unconventional attack. Maybe I’m not very good at it. I’m certainly not experienced at dealing with it. And this fleet is already being worn down by the age of the warships and the hard use they’ve seen.”

She nodded. “The Syndics are still fighting to win. They still think they can win. Part of it probably is an attempt to get us to restart the war so they can use that to hold together what’s left of the Syndicate Worlds, but even if the war starts again, don’t expect the Syndics to fight it on our terms.”

“How long could the Alliance sustain a war of attrition?” Geary wondered.

“You already know the answer to that, and it’s not a big number if you measure it in years or in months.”

After Tanya had left his stateroom with a firm directive that he needed to get out among the sailors again to see and be seen, Geary spent a while thinking, looking at nothing, his eyes unfocused. Physical wounds that didn’t kill outright were usually healed these days, everything made as good as new. But mental wounds, the memories and the events that left a different kind of injury, could only be treated. Removing the memories caused more damage than leaving them intact, so treatment was all about managing the injury, not curing it.

During their all-too-brief honeymoon, Tanya had woken him once with a scream that jolted them both out of sleep. She had claimed not to remember what dream had caused it. He would wake up at times drenched in sweat, having relived or imagined events in which death and failure were a common element.

Technically, the war was over. As far as the Syndics were concerned, the war had apparently just taken a different form. As far as the Alliance men and women who had fought in that war were concerned, the war would always be with them.

Geary sighed and got up. He needed to talk to the officers and crew of Dauntless, and he needed to swing by sick bay for another check on his meds. Maybe it was jump space getting on his nerves again. Humans could get used to a lot of things over time, but no one ever got used to jump space. Or maybe his nerves were on edge because of what might happen when they left jump space.

What did the Syndics have waiting at Simur?