“Where else could they have taken it where no one could find it?” Geary demanded. “What else would the Dancers have been looking for and worried about?”
“The dark ships,” Desjani said pointedly. “We need to find their base, and we haven’t been able to find any clue—” She stopped speaking, looking stunned.
“A secret base?” Charban said, astonished. “A secret hypernet gate? I didn’t think something on that scale could be possible.”
“Neither would anyone else,” Geary said, gazing at the depiction of the binary in his star display. “You said it yourself. No one thinks about binaries. No one can go to binaries. A binary would be the perfect place to set up a secret base, a place to hide the captured Kick battleship, a place to hide the base for the dark ships.”
Tanya shook her head, holding out both hands palm forward. “Hold on. We’re talking about a project that couldn’t have been dreamed up in the last few years. There would have been a huge investment in time and money. They would have had to start work on this a long time ago.”
“Maybe they did,” Geary said.
“And kept it secret from everybody?”
“No,” Geary said, looking at her now. “They couldn’t keep it entirely secret. Rumors got out. People talked about it. But no one ever found it, so after enough years had gone by, it was labeled a fantasy, a project that had never actually existed.”
Tanya’s eyes met his. “Unity Alternate? Ancestors save us. You’re talking about Unity Alternate.”
“Yes. The supposedly mythical government project to build a secret, fallback base to continue the war if Unity itself fell to the Syndics. A project important enough to justify a huge expense and a construction time line of more than a decade.”
“In a place no one would ever think to look,” she continued for him. “A place the Syndics would never find and couldn’t reach if somehow they did find it.”
“And maybe more than that,” Geary said. A place to set up the most secret projects, a place to hide anyone that the government, or portions of the government, didn’t want found, as well as a place to homeport a secret fleet.
“How do they get there?” Desjani demanded. “There must be a way. The dark ships use the hypernet. Invincible disappeared after entering the hypernet. There must be keys with access to a gate at that binary.”
“If there are,” Geary said, “we’ll find them.” He turned to Charban. “General, you may have given us the most important piece of information that we needed to have. I’m in your debt.”
Charban still looked dazed. “How did the Dancers know it was there? They are the ones you should thank, Admiral. This is unbelievable. First Black Jack returns, and defeats the Syndics just as he was supposed to, then Unity Alternate turns out to exist. Myths and legends are coming to life all around us.”
“I was never a myth,” Geary said. “And it turns out Unity Alternate wasn’t either. This is all as real as those dark ships, and now we know where they are hiding.”
Desjani grinned ferociously. “Destroy their base?”
“Right. That’s their Achilles heel. Destroy their base, their source of replacement fuel cells, and they’ll be helpless once the fuel cells they are carrying are used up. We’ve got a way to win, Tanya.”
If they could find a way to get there. And if they could get there when the dark ships were not there as well guarding their base.
“We’ll be taking the fight to the dark ships next time,” Geary told the images of his ship commanders assembled in the conference room. Tanya had reminded him that he needed to talk to them, needed to let them know that he and they were not beaten. “We believe that we have identified their base. I don’t know when we’ll be assaulting that base, but all of your ships need to be ready to go.”
“What’s the delay?” Captain Badaya asked. “Why not go now?”
“It’s hard to reach, and we need to find the best way to reach it. We also assume the dark ships are there now, refueling and repairing themselves. We want to give them time to finish that and leave, probably to try to set up another trap for us. While they’re doing that, we’ll go in and knock their feet out from under them.”
“Why couldn’t they have built those dark ships to go against the Syndics during the war?” Captain Armus grumbled. A low, angry murmur of agreement followed his words.
Captain Smythe answered. “The irony is that our victory in the war gave the government the breathing room to undertake such a project. Under the pressure of constant Syndic attacks, they could never divert resources to a risky project like the dark ships. But we lifted that pressure, thereby giving the government the luxury of seeing if they could replace us.”
“And,” Captain Duellos added, “our victory left some powerful forces in the Alliance searching for an enemy to replace the one we had finally beaten.”
“Why are we doing this?” Captain Parr asked, looking depressed. “Why are we fighting again, why are our people dying again, because of the mistakes made by people who will never pay the price for their errors?”
Every eye came to rest on Geary, expecting an answer from him. “If you want my personal opinion,” Geary said, “it’s because we’re better than those people. And if people like us don’t fix the problems created by people like them, if people like us don’t stand up for the core principles of the Alliance and for the people of the Alliance, who will? This is my fight, but it doesn’t have to be. I ‘died’ a century ago. Everyone I knew then is gone. I could have washed my hands of it all. Except that I couldn’t. Because, as some people never hesitate to remind me,” he said, not looking at Desjani but out of the corner of his eye seeing her smile, “Black Jack has a duty to the Alliance because the people of the Alliance are depending on him. Just like they depend on all of you and your crews. Yes, it sucks to be doing this, and doing this again, but it’s what we do. And I’ll keep on doing it until the job is done because I think it is worth doing.”
“Even now?” Parr asked, smiling wryly.
“Even now,” Geary said.
“I didn’t ask for a speech, but I guess a decent answer required one. All right, Admiral. Let’s go clean up the mess again.”
Not everyone seemed happy, plenty just appeared resigned to the prospect, but no one looked to be reluctant as Geary ended the meeting and watched the images vanishing in a flurry, the apparent size of the conference room shrinking to match the apparent number of occupants. It was the one part of meetings that Geary liked, watching the huge room dwindle into a small compartment.
One image remained. Commander Neeson, former commanding officer of Implacable who had moved over to assume command of Steadfast. “I asked you to stay on afterwards because you’re my best expert on hypernet issues,” Geary said. Best surviving expert, that was. Captain Jaylen Cresida had been the best, but she had died in battle when her battle cruiser Furious had been destroyed. “I’ve got an important job for you.”
“I’ll do my best, Admiral,” Neeson said, giving a curious glance at Tanya Desjani, who merely indicated Geary again.
“We have solid reason to believe that the dark ship base is at a star holding a hypernet gate that is not on the keys carried by our ships,” Geary began, watching the surprise bloom in Neeson’s eyes. “I need you to look into finding that gate and a way to get to it.”
“If it’s not on the Alliance hypernet,” Neeson began, then checked himself. “No. It would have to be. We’ve seen the dark ships use our hypernet gates. But that doesn’t rule out a minihypernet that somehow links into our own.” He frowned. “No. That couldn’t work. If it was on a separate hypernet, they would have to have a place where they could go to a separate gate after leaving our own hypernet. Let me see what I can find out, Admiral. If there’s a gate somewhere that is part of our hypernet, there must be some indications of that.”