He returned a crooked smile. “I’m afraid I’m not half that clever. I think the Syndics will fight at the Branwyn jump exit. They know we have to use it. They don’t want to let us out of this system unscathed.”
Rione, her smile gone, searched Geary’s eyes. “Then what do you intend doing?”
“Like I said, it depends. Will the new Syndic force try a major engagement, hitting us full force? Or will they try to avoid a big battle and instead hammer at any weak points? If they want to do that, they can follow us through the jump point and be right on our tails at Branwyn.”
She considered that, sitting down and bending her head. After several minutes, Rione looked up at him again. “Are you sure you want to go to Branwyn?”
“What other choice do I have? It’s not like T’negu is a good option.”
“You’re getting into a situation where you have to fight this Syndic force.”
“I know.” Geary sat up a bit and called up something on the display above the table that he had only rarely consulted. “Recognize this?”
Rione stared at the display grimly. “The Syndic home system. I’m not likely to ever forget it.”
“The Alliance fleet suffered awful losses when it got ambushed there.” Geary pointed to where a long list of ship names shone in red. “The leading elements were annihilated and the rest mauled as they fought their way through the ambush.”
“You don’t have to remind me of that!” Rione looked away, her face pale. “Just the memories are bad enough.”
Geary nodded. “Sorry. But as you pointed out on the bridge, we’ve been winning some one-sided victories of our own. Not a one of them comes close to what the Syndics did to this fleet in their home system, but taken together, they’ve inflicted very heavy cumulative losses.”
Her eyes intent, Rione studied the display again. “And if you destroy this Syndic force in the same way, you’ll have come close to evening the score. Is that what this is about? Revenge? I thought better of you, John Geary, though I admit the idea of getting even with the Syndics is a pleasant one.”
“It’s not just revenge. Hell, it’s not really revenge. We’ve had to run like crazy because the ambush in the Syndic home system left the Syndics with a big numerical advantage over the Alliance.”
Her expression shifted again. “You’re erasing that advantage.”
“Right. We’ve come quite a way to doing that, which is why the Syndics had to employ barely trained crews and brand-new ships at Ixion. If I wipe out the new Syndic force that’s arrived in this system, the ability of the Syndics to meet us with equal force at any new star system will be severely impaired. They’ll have to spread out their remaining forces, so we’ll have the numerical advantage in any particular star system, which should give us the time we need to get the auxiliaries restocked again and all our ships loaded out with full inventories of fuel cells, specters, and grapeshot.”
Rione spent a while thinking about that, too, then turned a questioning gaze on Geary. “And if you get hurt as badly as the Syndic force?”
“Then we’re in trouble.”
“It’s a big risk.”
“Yeah. But we’re already in trouble. We’ve been in trouble since this fleet got mangled in the Syndic home system and ended up stuck deep in enemy territory. The big risk here comes with a potentially big payoff. I can easily lose by trying to play it safe, but I can’t win unless I throw the dice.”
In zero gravity dice never stop tumbling, and for the next day Geary felt like he was watching a pair endlessly rolling and never coming up with a result. Then another day dragging by. Nerves on edge, he snapped at Rione, and she snapped back harder. They spent half an hour arguing so heatedly that Geary wondered why the bulkheads in his stateroom didn’t melt. He finally left and wandered the passageways of Dauntless, trying to maintain a facade of confidence as sailors and junior officers greeted him with possessive pride. He might be the fleet commander, but this was Black Jack’s flagship, and they believed that made this ship and this crew special.
He ended up in the conference room again and morosely ran through possible battles with Syndic Flotilla Bravo at the jump point for Branwyn. But there was too much he didn’t know, like what the Syndics would do, to make the simulations meaningful.
Eventually he went back to his stateroom, determined not to be exiled from his own quarters even by Victoria Rione. She was waiting for him and pulled him to the bed without a word.
It helped the time pass but left him baffled again.
The third day. Geary sat on the bridge of Dauntless and glared at the display. The Syndics were still acting as if the Alliance fleet weren’t even there. “Any guesses for how we can get any Syndics in this system to react to us?” he finally asked Captain Desjani.
She gave him an apologetic look. “No, sir.” Desjani gestured toward the habitable planet. “Every Syndic military asset has surely received orders from the senior Syndic leadership in this star system, and Syndics follow orders slavishly.” She said it dismissively, and certainly that was a big difference between the current Alliance fleet and the current Syndic fleet. Geary had spent a good deal of his time in command convincing his ship commanders, with varying degrees of success, that following orders could be a good thing. The irony was that by this stage of the war, the rigid control of the Syndics and the rush-to-battle mob approach of the Alliance had produced the same results, both sides adopting bloody head-on clashes decided by attrition.
“I’m afraid Co-President Rione was right,” Geary replied. “This time they’re not going to engage this fleet until they’re good and ready.”
“Most likely,” Desjani agreed, her experience in the fleet generating a look of disdain at such an intellectual approach to battle before she remembered that Geary was teaching the Alliance fleet to act that way. “They’re learning, or starting to think, aren’t they?”
“Looks like it. Or maybe just losing a dangerous level of self-confidence.” Whichever it was, it was bad for the Alliance fleet.
“They’ll have to fight us at the jump point for Branwyn.”
Time to intercept with what had been labeled Syndic Flotilla Bravo now rested at twelve hours, if nobody maneuvered before then. The Syndic flotilla had been in a rectangular box-shaped formation since arriving and showed no signs of wanting to change that. But twelve hours from contact was still too early to start messing with the Alliance fleet’s formation.
He reviewed the status of the fleet’s supplies again. Ran out the projections for how many more fuel cells the auxiliaries could manufacture using the materials they had on hand. Simulated distributing that among the fleet. Not enough.
Stockpiles of mines were low, specter missile inventories on the warships ranged from low to moderate, but at least grapeshot load-outs were high. No surprise there, since metal ball bearings were pretty easy to manufacture.
Food stocks were okay, but that would be a problem, too, if he didn’t find more. The food brought from the Alliance was effectively gone, with the fleet subsisting mostly on Syndic rations looted from mothballed facilities or storage locations in Sancere. The Sancere stuff wasn’t too bad, for Syndic food, but when that was gone, all that would be left would be food regarded by the Syndics as not worth bringing with them when they abandoned facilities. He’d had some of that food, and even for someone accustomed to the dubious nature of military rations, it had been hard to stomach. It would keep a person alive, but that was its only virtue.