“Mike said that? My brother said I was perfect?”
“Yes.”
He couldn’t help a brief laugh. “He certainly never told me that when—when he was alive. Damn. He’s dead. He’s been dead for a long time. Everybody’s dead.” Months of denial crumbled and Geary slumped, burying his face in his hands.
Jane Geary finally broke the silence. “I’m sorry. I have to tell you one other thing. We never really believed in you, Michael and me. Black Jack was a myth. But we were wrong.”
That jarred him out of his grief. “No, you weren’t. Black Jack is a myth. I’m just me.”
“I’ve reviewed the records since you assumed command, and I’ve spoken to the officers in this fleet! I couldn’t have done what you did. No one else could have done it, either.” She paused, then blurted out a question. “You’ve talked to our ancestors since coming back, haven’t you? Do you feel Michael is still alive?”
Geary made a fist and hit his chair arm. “I don’t know. My ancestors have never given me a clear feeling either way.”
She nodded, seeming relieved. “Me, too. You know what that can mean.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Seriously? It can mean that a life hangs in the balance. It can mean that your decisions, your actions can make a difference, decide whether that person has died or is still alive.”
“I’ve never heard that.” Beliefs had changed a bit in a century, it seemed. Easy enough to understand, with so many prisoners of war held and no exchanges of information about them. Families would have to grasp at any straw that offered hope or information about the fates of loved ones.
Jane Geary nodded firmly. “Everyone in the family agreed about you. We’d speak with our ancestors, but no one ever felt like you were among them. I swear. That’s why Grandfather told me to give you a message if I saw you. If you were dead, he would have expected to see you first, when he died and joined our ancestors, but none of us thought you were there.” Her expression turned fierce. “We never told anyone outside the family. That legend grew up, that you’d come back someday to save the Alliance, but it wasn’t because the family told anyone that you weren’t dead. I don’t know where that legend came from. But it was true. It took me a long time to accept that.”
“Jane, please don’t. I have enough expectations put on me as it is by people I’m not related to.” He spread his hands. “It’s nice to have people who believe I’m human. It’s important for me to have that.”
She thought, then nodded. “I think I understand. But I must ask, as family, for the truth. Were you there, during all those years? Among the lights in jump space? Among the living stars themselves?”
The question was obviously a serious one, so Geary managed to avoid a laugh, which might have stung his grandniece. “Not that I remember. I can’t remember anything, really. I fell asleep, then I awoke on Dauntless.”
“Not even any dreams?” Jane asked, her disappointment clear.
“I don’t—Not that I can be sure of,” Geary corrected himself. “Every once in a while I think I remember a fragment of something. But the doctors all tell me that in survival sleep everything in the body is stopped or slowed down as far as it possibly can be slowed. Thought processes, too. I wasn’t thinking, so I couldn’t have been dreaming. That’s what they say. If anything did happen, I can’t remember it.” Geary glanced at his grandniece, uncomfortable with this line of questions and wanting to change the subject. “What would you have done if you hadn’t gone into the fleet?”
Jane Geary smiled. “Something to do with structures. Architecture. People have drawn on living models for millennia, but I think there’s more we can learn when designing things.” Her smile faded. “Michael has a daughter and two sons. The daughter will be eligible to enter fleet-officer training in six months.”
He had known that but hadn’t wanted to bring it up, wondering how those children would feel about Black Jack, the Black Jack who had left their father in the Syndic home star system. “Is that what she wants to do?”
“Maybe you’ll get a chance to ask her.”
“As long as she really has a choice.”
Jane Geary nodded. “Maybe you’ll give her that choice, at long last. Please forgive me for not speaking with you earlier. I should go now and let you prepare for operations.”
He checked the time and nodded reluctantly. “Thank you. I can’t tell you how much this meant to me.”
“Perhaps we’ll both be able to speak with Michael again.” Jane Geary stood up, then saluted in the manner of someone to whom the gesture was recently learned. “By your leave, Admiral.”
“Granted.” He returned the salute, then stood for a moment, gazing at the place where her image had been before leaving for the bridge.
On Geary’s display on the bridge, the Syndic hypernet gate loomed. The actual gate was a bound-energy matrix invisible to human senses, but the hundreds of devices called tethers, which held that matrix stable and in place, were visible in a huge ring Dauntless seemed about to thread. He hadn’t been so close to a gate since Sancere, and that gate had been collapsing as a result of having too many of its tethers destroyed by Syndic warships trying to deny use of the gate to the Alliance fleet. Remembering the way space itself had seemed to fluctuate as the gate collapsed, Geary took a deep breath to calm himself.
“No problems,” Desjani advised him with a reassuring smile.
“Captain Desjani, I only remember approaching a hypernet gate once, and you’ll recall that wasn’t a pleasant experience.”
“We survived.”
After a century of war, Geary had to admit that was a reasonable standard for success.
Desjani gave Geary a speculative look. “This is where we find out if it all works right.”
He nodded, knowing that she was referring to things they shouldn’t discuss on the bridge. All of the probability-based worms they could find had been scrubbed out of the hypernet, maneuvering, and communications systems on every ship in the fleet. Hopefully that would mean the aliens couldn’t redirect the fleet while it was in the hypernet as they had a Syndic flotilla. But the Alliance fleet wouldn’t know for certain it was safe until they tried it. “How does this hypernet gate and key work again?”
“When we enter the hypernet gate’s field, the Syndic hypernet key aboard Dauntless will activate. We set the parameters for the transport field to be large enough to include the entire fleet, make sure the destination displayed on the key is what we want, then we order the key to transmit the execute command to the gate. It’s simple.”
He nodded. “Too simple. What human engineer ever designed something that easy to operate?”
“You’re right. We should have suspected that nonhumans were involved right from the start when the activation process didn’t involve a lot of arcane commands that had to be done in just the right order, and the destination was displayed as a name rather than using some counterintuitive code. No human software engineer would produce a device that easy to use.” Desjani grinned and indicated the fleet. “You’re happy with the formation?”
“Yeah. This formation can deal with anything we encounter if the Syndics are waiting at the hypernet gate at Zevos. But that’s really unlikely.”
Desjani looked over at another part of her display. “The key has activated. Do you want to punch in the data?”
“No. Go ahead, please.”
Her hands danced across controls, then she frowned at the display. “Operations watch-stander. Confirm transport field size is correctly entered.”