Desjani came to stand beside him. “It’s always the hardest part,” she commented. “Saying good-bye.”
“Yeah. I wish we could have taken them home for burials on their home worlds.”
She shook her head. “It’s not practical. We’d have to wrap garlands of the dead around the outer hulls of our ships. There wouldn’t be anything dignified about that. This way they get the most honorable burial possible, consigned to the embrace of a star.”
“Burials in space were rare in my time,” Geary said. “But then, we didn’t have so many dead to deal with.”
“It’s the best possible resting place,” Desjani insisted. She placed one hand on her heart. “Everything that makes us came from the stars. Now these dead are returning to a star, and someday it will cast the elements within them outward just as stars have done since the beginning, and in time those elements will combine to form new stars, new worlds, new lives. ‘From the stars we came, and to the stars we return,’ ” she quoted. “This is a good fate, the last honor we can render those who died alongside us.”
“You’re right.” Even the most militant agnostic couldn’t argue the literal truth of what Desjani had said, and though Geary found the sheer scale of the time involved to be unnerving, he also felt the comfort of being part of an eternal cycle symbolized by the gold strips on either side of the black mourning band he wore. Light, dark, light. The dark was just an interval.
“And you must never forget,” Desjani added, “that if not for you, every man and woman in this fleet would either already be dead, or would be in a Syndic labor camp with nothing to look forward to for the rest of their lives except their eventual deaths far from all they loved.”
“I didn’t do it alone. It couldn’t have happened without the efforts and courage of every one of those men and women. But thank you. You give me strength when I need it the most.”
“You’re welcome.” Her hand rested very briefly on his arm near the mourning band, then Desjani left without another word.
He stayed there a little longer, watching the capsules recede on their journey to the star. Several hours later, the Alliance fleet jumped for Padronis, the cities and planets of Heradao still convulsing in civil war in the fleet’s wake.
ANOTHER star system abandoned by humanity, Padronis held nothing the Alliance fleet could use. Geary shook his head as he took in the assessments of the fleet’s sensors on what the Syndics had left behind at one small rescue station when they abandoned this star. There couldn’t be anything there for which it would be worth slowing down any of his ships.
Not that they’d expected anything else. Padronis was a white dwarf star, glittering alone in the emptiness of space, unaccompanied by the array of planets and asteroids that usually orbited stars. Like other white dwarf stars, every once in a while Padronis would accumulate too much helium in its outer shell and go nova, ejecting the outer shell and brightening a great deal for a short time. These occasional novas hadn’t been beneficial for anything once near Padronis. Any worlds or rocks had all been long since smashed and hurled into the darkness between stars, leaving only the relatively recent and now-abandoned Syndic facility orbiting Padronis. Someday, Padronis would go nova again, and that facility would be blown away as well, but the fleet’s sensors had analyzed the star’s outer shell and concluded that the date of that event was still comfortably distant in the future.
“Imagine having to be the crew on that thing,” Geary remarked to Desjani, indicating the abandoned Syndic facility on his display. “They needed an emergency station here when lots of ships had to pass through using jump drives, but those on it must have felt murderously isolated. This is as close to nothing as any star system can be.”
She grimaced and nodded. “The only thing worse would be getting stuck in a black-hole system, though no one but science geeks would be likely to do that. I’ll lay you odds they crewed the station here using criminals. Go to a labor camp for years or go to Padronis. I wonder how many chose the labor camp.”
“I think I would’ve.” Geary was about to add something else when his display flickered, then vanished completely as the lights on Dauntless’s bridge dimmed.
“What happened?” Desjani demanded of her bridge crew, punching her own nonresponsive controls to try to get status reports.
“Emergency system shutdown,” a watch-stander reported, his voice startled. “As far as I can tell just about everything on the ship has gone off-line except for the emergency backups.”
“Why?”
“Cause unknown, Captain. I—Wait. Engineering is using the sound-powered comm system to update us. They say the power core did an emergency crash. They’re running evaluations on everything before bringing it back online.”
Desjani clenched her fists. “What could have caused the emergency crash?”
The engineering watch-stander looked pale under the dimmer emergency lighting. “Unknown as yet. Thank the living stars the core managed to shut itself down, Captain. Anything that would trigger an emergency crash would be as serious as it gets.”
Geary spoke into the silence that followed that report. “We just narrowly avoided a power-core failure?”
“Looks like it. A catastrophic power-core failure.” Desjani’s face was grim as she turned to her watch-standers. “I want full status reports from all departments as soon as possible and an estimated time from engineering to restart the core whenever they can provide one.”
“Do we have any communications with the rest of the fleet?” Geary asked.
“Emergency systems are online, sir. Voice only, no data net.”
“Notify the rest of the fleet what happened to us.”
“Yes, sir.” The communications watch paused, then drew in a shocked breath. “Sir, we have a message from Daring reporting that Lorica suffered a power-core failure at the same time as our system shutdown. Lorica was totally destroyed. No signs of survivors.”
One such failure in routine circumstances would be a rare but-not-impossible event. Two at the exact same time could only mean sabotage. Whoever had been planting worms in the fleet’s systems had struck again.
“Bastards,” Desjani breathed, her jaw muscles standing out. Raising her voice, she spoke with what Geary thought was amazing control. “Inform engineering that the likely cause of the emergency crash of the power core was a worm in the operating systems.”
All of the watch-standers stared back at her, their expressions horrified, then the engineering watch hastily nodded. “Yes, Captain.”
“Captain Geary,” the operations watch-stander called. “Daring is asking what instructions to relay to the rest of the fleet. Should they maintain station on Dauntless even if she drifts off course and speed?”
That had the virtue of being a relatively simple decision. Maneuvering one ship back into position would cost a lot less in fuel than having the entire fleet trying to match anything Dauntless did while her own propulsion and maneuvering systems were shut down. “Tell Daring to assume role as fleet guide until Dauntless gets power back.”
It was less than twenty minutes before Dauntless’s systems-security officer called the bridge, but it felt like the longest twenty minutes of Geary’s life. It was easy to overlook how accustomed he was to being able to scan a display and see everything he needed to see, easy until that display was gone and nothing could be seen in front of his fleet command seat but the part of Dauntless’s bridge visible from that angle. There weren’t any physical windows, of course, not here deep within Dauntless’s hull, and not on the outer hull, either. That arrangement made a great deal of sense in terms of maintaining hull strength and integrity, but at times like this even a single small window would have been a welcome connection to the rest of the fleet.