“I hope I’m not interrupting anything,” Rione continued.
“I was just trying to remember why I wanted to rescue the Alliance POWs on Heradao,” Geary confessed.
She flicked a smile at him. “Because you have an annoying habit of insisting on doing what’s right even when common sense might dictate acting otherwise.”
“Thank you. I think. What brings you here?”
“The Alliance POWs liberated from Heradao.”
Geary didn’t quite stifle a groan. “Now what?”
“This may be good news, or perhaps useful.” Rione inclined her head toward another part of the ship.
“Sometime after you left us yesterday, Commander Fensin confessed to me that the best thing he could have been told was what your captain said to him, reminding him of his responsibilities as an officer of the Alliance and ordering him to live up to those responsibilities.” She paused before continuing. “From what Kai Fensin said, he and the other POWs on Heradao long lacked a firm hand they respected to give them purpose. He thought all of them would benefit from treatment such as your captain gave him.”
Geary refrained from pointing out that his “captain” had a name, and that Desjani wasn’t “his” in any case. “That makes a great deal of sense. They’re not used to having senior officers they respect or to whose orders they’d listen.”
“Kai suggested you might want to inform others in the fleet of this, so they’d be able to treat the other former prisoners accordingly. In that respect, they’re not like the ones we liberated from Sutrah.”
“Thank you,” Geary repeated. “I think he’s right.”
“Yes, and so was your captain. My instincts to protect Commander Fensin were wrong.”
“Don’t beat yourself up about that. Desjani and Fensin are both fleet.” Rione just nodded silently. “How are you doing?”
She gave him a searching glance. “Why do you ask?”
“You seem to have been very happy to find Commander Fensin.”
Rione’s eyes flashed. “If you’re implying—”
“No!” Geary raised both palms in apology. “That’s not what I meant. It just seems that meeting him was a good thing for you.”
She subsided as quickly as her anger had flared. “Yes. He reminds me of many things. Of the life I once had.”
“I could tell.” It was best not to tell Rione that Desjani had been able to see it as well.
“Could you?” Rione bent her head for a moment. “I sometimes wonder what will happen if my husband lives and we are united again. In the years since he left, I have changed in many ways, become harder and stronger and… not the woman he left.”
“I saw that woman. When you were with Kai Fensin.”
“You did?” Rione sighed. “Maybe there’s hope for me, then. Maybe she’s not dead after all.”
“She’s not, Victoria.”
Rione raised her gaze and looked at him with a twisted smile. “That’s one of the few circumstances under which you can still call me that, John Geary. Thank you. I’ve said what I needed to say.” She walked to the hatch but paused in it before leaving, her back to him. “Please thank your captain on my behalf for her words to Commander Fensin. I’m grateful.” Then she was gone and the hatch was sliding shut. He drafted up a message telling the fleet’s ship captains to be firm with the former POWs from Heradao and to get them assigned duties as soon as possible. After sending it, Geary settled back and stared at the star display again.
Roughly two more days until the fleet reached the jump point for Padronis. That star should be quiet, with no known Syndic presence. For that matter, Atalia, the next and last Syndic star system they had to transit, should be quiet, too, despite its human population. If Alliance intelligence was anywhere near right then the Syndics had used up everything they had. No significant number of warships could be available to contest the rest of the fleet’s journey home.
Could he finally relax?
Five minutes later, Lieutenant Iger called from the intelligence section with a very urgent summons.
SEVEN
Calls from Lieutenant Iger in the intelligence section were usually interesting and sometimes very surprising. Never pleasantly surprising in Geary’s experience, but the unpleasant news had often proven to be critically important.
Since Iger looked unhappy when Geary arrived, he assumed this would be one of those unpleasant news times. “Tell me the civil war in this star system isn’t going to cause us any more problems, Lieutenant.”
“Uh, yes, sir. The civil war here shouldn’t cause us any more trouble, sir. This is an entirely different problem.”
“Oh. Wonderful. Big problem?”
“Yes, sir. Real big.”
Geary rubbed the back of his neck, feeling a headache coming on. “All right. Lay it out.”
“We’ve been analyzing Syndic communications in this star system, Captain Geary,” Iger reported. “That is, the messages that were already on the fly when we arrived here. It’s standard procedure, trying to identify traffic patterns and important messages so we can try to break them out and decipher as much of them as we can. The first thing we noticed is that there’s been a much-higher-than-usual concentration of highest-priority messages sent in this star system. Again, that’s before central authority collapsed.”
Geary nodded. Light-speed limitations were usually a problem, but not if you were trying to intercept messages sent days or hours ago, before anyone knew the enemy would be arriving in a particular star system. Those messages were still heading outward at the speed of light if you could find them. “Any idea what they’re about? The Syndics thought we were coming here, so that might account for them.”
“No, sir, not all of them. We’ve been able to do some partial breaking of the high-priority messages we’ve intercepted.” Iger turned and tapped controls, bringing up a series of lines of information. “These are pulled from voice transmissions and various forms of text messaging. Those kind of informal communications are usually the most useful because people say things without thinking. There are several references in these to something we’ve never seen before. Right here, and here, and in this one.”
Geary read the indicated lines, frowning. “Reserve flotilla? You haven’t heard the Syndics use that phrase before?”
“No, sir. A search of intelligence databases turned up only three references to the term in reporting about the Syndics over the last few decades. No actual data exists, just identification of the use of the term ‘reserve flotilla’ by the Syndics without any means of determining what it meant.” Iger pointed to another line. “This was a requisition for supplies. We’ve been able to break a fair amount of this message because we know how the Syndics format those requisitions and so knew what certain sections had to mean. These parts are segments of the overall requirement, then here’s some of the portion of that requirement that Heradao was supposed to provide. One of the things about the Syndics is they use very rigid logistics. If you want to provide food for a D-Class battle cruiser for sixty days, you order X of this and Y of that and so on.”
“That looks like an awful lot of Xs and Ys,” Geary commented as he read the intercepted requisition.
“Yes, sir.” Iger blew out a long breath. “Assuming it’s a standard sixty-day supply, which the Syndics tend to adhere to, and a standard mix of units, this requisition would cover a force estimated to include fifteen to twenty battleships, fifteen to twenty battle cruisers, and somewhere between one hundred and two hundred heavy cruisers, light cruisers, and Hunter-Killers.”
Geary felt a lot of reactions, some of them very negative. How could a Syndic force of that size still exist?