“If they act like they did at Atalia,” Desjani insisted, “they’ll come for us as soon as they see us, so that seventeen hours will be more like eight or nine hours. Which is what you would do, right? But you cannot… cannot…” Even now, Tanya had enormous difficulty saying the word “retreat” when speaking of Alliance fleet forces.
“This fleet is the only substantial force the Alliance has that can stop the dark ships,” Geary said just as forcefully. “If it is destroyed or takes serious losses, the Alliance will be helpless.”
“If the star systems making up the Alliance hear that this fleet, with you in command, left an Alliance star system to its fate against a force that looks inferior in strength to our own, then there won’t be any Alliance left to worry about!” She glared at him. “You know that’s true! We have to hold the line. You have to hold the line. If Black Jack abandons the Alliance, the Alliance is done!”
He looked back at her, seeing the certainty in her eyes, and knew she was right. “That is one hell of a demand to put on me.”
“I… yes, it is.” Desjani shook her head. “But I didn’t make it that way, and I can’t change it. I can just help you handle it.”
“That’s a big thing,” Geary said. “Any ideas?”
“Give them a perfect run at you, then do the stupid thing again.” She must have seen something in him, her expression shading into questioning. “What?”
“I don’t know. Something else is bothering me, but I can’t figure out what it is.” He tried to drop all doubt and prepare for a battle that the other side would not even know was coming for another three hours. “At least our outguessing them on the planned ambush here proves that we can outthink the dark ships on strategy as well as tactics.”
He had arranged his own fleet into three formations again, this time three diamonds arranged vertically. The leading diamond contained all nine battle cruisers, while the other two, currently arranged one slightly behind and below and the other slightly behind and above, each held nine battleships. Ten heavy cruisers accompanied each battleship formation, along with ten light cruisers each, while the remaining twenty-one light cruisers were with the battle cruisers. Thirty destroyers were with each battleship formation, the remaining fifty-two with the battle cruisers.
It gave him a leading formation designed for fast attacks and two trailing formations designed to hit hard.
If Tanya was right, and he thought she was, the dark ships would aim to take out Geary’s battle cruiser formation first. “Our battle cruisers have to be the bait, and the two battleship formations will be the jaws of the trap,” Geary said.
She grinned at him. “Now that’s Black Jack talking.”
“I’ll have to see how the dark ships set up their formations to attack us,” he added. “They won’t hold that single rectangle.”
“Not if they’re programmed to simulate Black Jack. I bet you we’ll see three subformations,” Desjani added.
“I do that a lot?”
“Sure do. But that’s all right. If the dark ships see you doing what they expect you to do, it will feed their confidence.”
That sounded wrong. “They’re not capable of confidence,” Geary said. “How about saying they won’t question the assumptions in their calculations?”
She shook her head more firmly this time. “Look, those may be machines, but there are humans behind them. Humans cut the code, humans refined the results, humans ran the tests and decided what outcomes were good enough. As far as I’m concerned, we are fighting those humans. And I want to kick their butts.”
“Fair enough. That feels better than thinking we’re fighting monsters, doesn’t it?”
Desjani grinned. “Sure does. And it helps my confidence. I can beat up software designers without breaking a sweat.”
He gave her a surprised look. “Have you actually done that?”
“No!” She appeared to be genuinely offended by the idea. “I’ve always stood up for the nerds, ever since I was a kid. I was one of them! And look how they’ve repaid me.” Desjani waved at her display and the images of the dark ships on it.
“Creating monsters. Yeah.” But her words had given him an idea for demystifying the dark ships, which felt intimidating for their alienness as well as their strength. He reached for the comm control. “All units in First Fleet, stand down your crews from combat alert for the next five hours. We will be moving to intercept and engage the dark ships. Remember that when we fight those ships, we are fighting the humans who programmed them. Those are the people we have to beat. Geary, out.”
He thought for a moment longer, then touched an internal comm control. “Lieutenant Iger, please inform the alleged agents that we have in custody that we are about to engage in combat with a large force of dark ships. If they want to increase their odds of surviving that battle, they might want to start talking to us.”
“I will pass that on, Admiral,” Iger said, looking discouraged, “but it probably won’t influence them. Those two are hard-core knuckle-draggers. I’m certain they would take it as a point of pride to die not having told us a thing.”
“Even if it led to a disaster for the Alliance,” Geary said. “May the living stars preserve us from those so certain of their own virtue.”
Telling others to rest was one thing. Being able to rest himself was another.
His first stop after leaving the bridge had been his own stateroom, where Geary had carefully composed a message in the hope that Admiral Bloch was present with the dark ships and that Admiral Bloch still had control over them.
“Admiral Bloch, we are both on the side of the Alliance. The ships you command are a threat to the Alliance. We need every warship we can get to deal with threats posed by the remnants of the Syndicate Worlds, especially after what happened at Indras. We also face threats from the enigmas and possibly the creatures we have nicknamed Kicks. I assume you’ve seen the Kick battleship we captured and renamed Invincible. You know the level of danger they pose. We can work together to preserve the Alliance instead of destroying the means for the Alliance to defend itself. I await any communication from you to discuss our options and the best route forward from here. To the honor of our ancestors, Geary, out.”
He did not expect Bloch to reply. But maybe he would. Maybe they could make some sort of deal that would halt the dark ships long enough for the government to reestablish control over them.
After sending the message as a broadcast to the dark ships, he tried to get some sleep but could not, his mind irrationally waiting for a reply that could not appear for at least several more hours given that light could only travel a bit more than a billion kilometers an hour, and there were a lot of billions of kilometers between this battle cruiser and the dark ships. Giving up the effort to rest, Geary walked through the passageways of Dauntless, trying to sense the state of the crew’s morale and trying to settle his own nerves. There was something deeply disturbing about fighting a totally automated foe with no living creature in direct command. The upset didn’t make sense on any intellectual basis. Why did it matter what was trying to kill you? But it did. Somewhere inside, Geary had a firm conviction that it should always be who was trying to kill you. As Tulev had said, when it became accurate to instead say what was pulling the trigger, it felt wrong.
Up ahead in the passageway, Geary could see Master Chief Gioninni talking to a junior sailor. He knew what the conversation must be like, since the body language of both participants made it clear that the sailor had messed something up, and the master chief was “explaining” to the sailor why this was a bad thing and must not be repeated.