In the time that was left, Geary threw himself into designing more simulations to run. He kept hoping he could use them to impart some of the fighting skills he remembered from a century ago, skills lost to the fleet in the decades since, as devastating losses in ships and crews wiped out the institutional memory and skills of the smaller professional force Geary had once known. He didn’t know how much longer he might have to try to pass on such lessons.

GEARY strode onto the bridge of the Dauntless as the Alliance fleet prepared to leave jump.

Captain Desjani glanced back at him and nodded in greeting, her concern for him impossible to miss. Geary nodded heavily back as he sank into his command seat. He hadn’t realized how bad he must look in the aftermath of Falco’s betrayal. Bad enough for Desjani to notice, anyway. Hopefully, the crew hadn’t picked up on it. Or maybe he just looked particularly bad now, after an almost sleepless night wondering what might be in the Cydoni Star System. Wondering if any other ships would bolt the fleet there.

To cover the renewed anxiety he suddenly felt, Geary called up the fleet display and pretended to study it intently. He had been trying to come up with a plan for Sancere, given that he wouldn’t know what was there until they arrived. An idea had occurred to him yesterday, prompted ironically by what had happened in the Strabo Star System, and he spent a few minutes thinking about it, checking on the names and records of some of his ship commanders.

“Preparing to leave jump,” Desjani announced.

Geary hastily brought the system display to life and waited. All it showed now was the historical information the old Syndic Star System guides they had found on Sutrah Five had contained. As soon as the fleet arrived in normal space on the edge of Cydoni System, the sensors on Dauntless and every other ship in the fleet would start updating the display based on what could be seen from their arrival point.

Geary’s insides jerked, and the drab, dull black of jump space was replaced by the glittering, star-filled universe of real space. He waited, watching, as system updates popped onto the display. No ships. No mines detected. Nothing. Captain Desjani was grinning triumphantly.

But Geary still stared at the system display, where the expanding photosphere of Cydoni’s sun had been reaching out for the one habitable world this system had once boasted. The scene held the same sick fascination as a train wreck, though in this case the centuries-long process was playing out far slower than any human vehicle accident, and the wreck was of an entire world.

Most of the atmosphere of the formerly habitable planet had been stripped away by now. Empty ocean basins had long since been drained of their waters, also flung away into space by the bombardment of particles and heat from the swollen sun that had once made life possible on this world. Now that sun was slowly devouring the planet, and no trace of life in any form could be detected anywhere upon it.

“There’s probably some extreme-environment life-forms still existing beneath the crust of the planet,” one of the watch-standers reported. “They’ll hold on a little while longer.”

“How long until the photosphere actually envelops the planet?” Geary asked.

“It’s hard to say, sir. The expansion of a star like this takes place in fits and starts. Probably anywhere from fifty to two hundred years, depending on exactly what happens inside the star.”

“Thanks.” Geary took a look at a magnified image of the planet. Dauntless’s sensors had tagged some areas where ruins still existed, though badly battered and worn by the extreme environmental conditions they’d endured so that they seemed millennia old. One batch of ruins lay next to an empty sea, its partial walls almost submerged in dust dunes blown around before the atmosphere had thinned too much, the land glowing red from the light of the expanding star. Geary wondered what the city or town had looked like when there’d been waters rolling at its feet. The information from the Syndic system guides was at his fingertips, so Geary checked that. Port Junosa. Already completely abandoned before the outdated Syndic documents had been prepared. Lives had been devoted to that city, building it and sustaining it and making it a human community, but all that was left now were the battered ruins, and within another century even those would be annihilated by the expanding star. After seeing desolate places like Strabo and Cydoni, it would be a relief to see a bustling star system like Sancere, even if the robust human presence there was all enemy.

“We’ll have to take a course that will remain well out from that swollen photosphere,” Captain Desjani remarked.

Geary nodded. “Yeah. Do you have problems with the course recommended by the ship’s maneuvering systems? It’ll take us four days to reach the jump point for Sancere, but I don’t see a good alternative.”

“There isn’t one,” Desjani agreed. “This is the best option.”

Four days. Four days for the less reliable among his ship commanders to think about what other ships had done at Strabo. Four days for them to consider heading for another jump exit. I’ll have to keep them busy. Keep them focused on Sancere. Keep them too involved with simulations and maneuvers and plans to give them time to think about anything but Sancere. It’ll drive me to exhaustion, but I don’t see any alternative.

He started setting up a limited fleet conference, involving only the commanders of roughly thirty ships. Who should lead it? He hadn’t quite decided before, but looking at the list he’d compiled of able commanders, one name stood out. Still, there was one question he hadn’t looked up yet, and the answer didn’t seem readily available within the Dauntless’s databanks. Either that or Geary wasn’t asking the question right, and the artificial minds he was dealing with couldn’t understand him. He’d run into that too many times already. “How long will it take these intelligent agents to understand me?” he openly grumbled.

Desjani directed a glance to one of her watch-standers. That woman cleared her throat before speaking. “Sir, the intelligent agents have learned a pattern of responses based on the ways of thinking and writing or speaking characteristic of the people they deal with.” She hesitated.

“And I don’t think like them, do I?”

“No, sir. Your unspoken assumptions, patterns of thought, and ways of phrasing aren’t quite the same as…uh…”

“Modern minds?” Geary asked, unable to keep some dry humor out of his voice this time. It made sense, he realized. A century built up a lot of subtle as well as not-so-subtle differences in the way people thought and expressed those thoughts. Either I laugh at this or let it get to me, and I’ve got too many other things trying to get to me.

The watch-stander smiled nervously. “Yes, sir. I’m afraid so, sir. The agents factor in your responses, but the vast majority of people they deal with have, uh, different ways of handling information, which means they aren’t adjusting to you.”

“Why can’t you set up a subroutine for the intelligent agents to use when dealing with Captain Geary?” Desjani demanded. “Then they could reset to match his patterns of usage while remaining attuned to the rest of the officers and crew.”

“That’s prohibited by fleet regulations on the use of intelligent agents, Captain. Intelligent agents on ship systems are never supposed to become personal agents for any individual. That could create conflicts of interest in the artificial minds.”

Geary shook his head, wondering why even something like this had to be complicated. “Can the fleet commander override that regulation on an emergency basis?”

In response, the watch-stander looked troubled. “Sir, I’d have to look up what constitutes an emergency for official purposes.”