“In a way…though the physical processes involved and the science are completely different.”

“What would you need to pursue this?” Geary pressed. “Can you get a workable answer?”

“Maybe.” Cresida shrugged apologetically. “I’d need priority access to the entire fleet-distributed network, sir.”

“The entire thing?” The amount of computational power in the network was far beyond Geary’s ability to grasp. That gave him some idea of the complexity of what Cresida was proposing. “All right. You’ve got it.”

He sat for a while after Cresida’s message ended, wondering if he really wanted her to succeed. But if she was right, he couldn’t afford to not find out.

THE combat simulations Geary ran as the fleet headed for the jump point to Sancere went well. But at the subsequent fleet conference, he found the absence of officers like Numos and Faresa to be jarring instead of welcome. Their absence only emphasized that forty of his ships had gone off to a fate Geary worried he could too easily predict. The way many of his remaining commanders kept looking around as if seeking familiar faces who weren’t present made it obvious that a lot of his officers were also aware of the absences.

It couldn’t hurt to try distracting people from that. “Has everyone received and entered the modified settings for their jump drives so we can make it all the way to Sancere?”

All of the officers ranged along the apparently huge table nodded, but their nervousness on those grounds was now easily apparent. He knew why they were worried. Leaping into battle against human foes was one thing, but jumping too far in the weirdness of jump space was another. Ships that jumped too far had never come out of jump space, though Geary knew sailors told stories about long-lost craft appearing suddenly at lonely star systems, their crews long ago dead in some particularly horrible ways, or simply haunting the ship still, changed by the strange nature of jump space into something no longer alive but unable to die. He’d heard the stories in bars and while standing watches late during a ship’s night period, when the darkened and deserted passageways of a familiar ship somehow became eerie in their silence. Geary wondered if the old, cheap jump space undead horror movies of his youth were still around in newer versions.

“I assure you,” Geary emphasized, “that the settings will work. I’ve personally made jumps of this distance more than once.” That didn’t seem to provide as much comfort as Geary had hoped. “You don’t have to take my word for it. If you search the fleet database, you’ll find accounts of it. I can show you the references.” The accounts were otherwise too easily lost in the mass of information available. He’d only found them because he’d known exactly what to look for since he’d been on some of the ships involved. Geary sometimes wondered just how much accumulated knowledge mankind had hopelessly buried within databases collecting and endlessly storing everything possible. In ancient times, knowledge had been lost because copies no longer existed. Nowadays it was lost because copies of everything existed and finding a particular piece of information made the old needle in a haystack look like an easy task, even if you knew the information was there to begin with.

The knowledge that they could find proof of Geary’s assertions cheered them up a little. “Believe me, the Syndics are going to be very unpleasantly surprised when we pop out of that jump exit at Sancere. As far as they’re concerned, the Alliance fleet will have done the impossible.” Geary finally saw smiles breaking out along the long, long virtual table. “We have every reason to believe we’ll achieve total surprise. That will give us an important window to act before the Syndics command authorities in Sancere even realize we’ve brought the war to them.”

“The shipyards at Sancere produce many Syndic battleships and battle cruisers,” Captain Duellos observed.

Geary gave his ship commanders a grim smile. “It’ll be a target-rich environment if even half of what we expect is there. That’s why it’ll be critically important that we coordinate our attacks. If ships start blazing away at the most attractive target they see, it could easily result in one Syndic ship getting blown to atoms while a half dozen other Syndics get away. We don’t want any of them getting away.” They liked hearing that, he could tell. It should go a long way to keeping them in check when confronted with a wealth of targets.

“Captain Tyrosian.”

She nodded.

“The fast fleet auxiliaries in your division have done a fantastic job of fabricating new kinetic bombardment rounds and getting them distributed to the other combatants. The crews of Titan, Witch, Goblin, and Jinn are all to be congratulated on their hard work and dedication.” Tyrosian looked pleased, which she had every right to be. Thank the living stars none of the auxiliary ships was foolish enough to leave with Falco. I need those ships and what they can do for this fleet if I’m to get it home.

Captain Tulev frowned. “While we have every reason to assume the Syndics will be caught totally unprepared, we have to also assume that defenses in the Sancere System are up-to-date and numerous.”

“Agreed,” Geary stated. “We’ll have the fleet in a general-purpose attack formation when we jump, but we’ll modify it as soon as I get a feel for the best way to take out the defenses. As you all know from the battle plan outline I provided, the ships in Task Force Furious will be pretending to break formation. They’ll hopefully draw any Syndic warships after them and leave us free to seize the hypernet gate.” He paused, not wanting to crush the enthusiasm he saw at the idea of reaching that gate. “We also have to assume that the Syndics will try to destroy that gate before we can use it.”

“The gates are very robust,” one of the other ship commanders pointed out. “They can take a lot of damage because of redundant components.”

“Yes,” Geary agreed. Built that way, I now know, because if they did fail, the consequences could be huge, but if I tell everyone that, I might end up with panic at a crucial point. “But they weren’t designed to withstand deliberate attack. It may not be possible to get to that gate in time. But we’re going to give it our best shot.”

Several seconds of silence passed, then one of the destroyer commanders spoke up. “Sir, what about the ships that left at Strabo?”

Geary clenched his teeth before he could answer. “There’s not much we can do. Hell, there’s nothing we can do. We couldn’t even go after them to help, because we didn’t know which star they were jumping for.” Because I’d blocked their communications, in which Captain Falco was doubtless trying to tell everyone exactly that, along with his brainless call to battle. “I believe they’re going to run into a Syndic buzz saw and get cut to ribbons. Fighting spirit is all very well, it’s absolutely critical in fact, but it’s a lousy shield against enemy weapons.” He paused, hating to have to say that out loud, but feeling he had to state a truth they all knew anyway. “But they do have one chance.”

“Ilion?” Captain Duellos asked. “You gave them the name of that star system before they jumped from Strabo. I couldn’t help noticing that it’s within jump range of Sancere.”

“Yes.” Geary pointed at the star display over the table. Of course Duellos has already researched that question. “If we can’t use the hypernet gate at Sancere, we’ll jump to Ilion from Sancere.”

“Why Ilion?” the captain of the Terrible demanded. “It’s not the best route back toward Alliance space from Sancere.”

“That’s true,” Geary stated calmly, “but it’s the only star system those ships that left the fleet could reach if they turned back and tried to rejoin us. If they manage to escape the Syndics, they can backtrack to Ilion and rendezvous with us there.”