“Very well,” Desjani replied in the same steady voice. “Hold station. Continue firing.”

Geary had been proud to command this fleet when he wasn’t feeling overwhelmed by the responsibility. But now he felt such a strong sense of honor in commanding ships and sailors like this that he had to fight back tears. “Damn, you’re all good,” he stated roughly. “May the living stars reward such courage.”

“This is Diamond. My weapons have stopped firing. All combat systems nonoperational. Request further instructions.”

Geary slammed his hand onto the control. “Withdraw, Diamond. Maximum acceleration. Keep your shields facing the gate as strong as possible.”

“Diamond, aye. Unable to comply. Inertial compensators are still working but main maneuvering controls have just failed. Looks like we’re staying at the mouth of hell with you.”

“I couldn’t ask for better company there than you, Daring and Dauntless,” Geary replied. “Captain Duellos, if Dauntless is destroyed, you are to assume command of the fleet by my order.”

It would be a while before Duellos heard that order, assuming the strange static emanating from the gate didn’t mask it completely at a distance. Geary took a deep breath. “How much longer can we hold out, Captain Desjani?”

“No telling, sir,” she stated in a soft but firm voice that left Geary marveling at Desjani’s self-control. “The ship is undergoing a unique set of stresses.”

The pace of firing from the hell-lance batteries had finally slowed, with pauses of varying length occurring before the firing program ordered new shots to blow apart more tethers at locations all around the gate. The hell mouth inside the gate was fluctuating wildly, one moment swelling as if to burst the bounds of the gate and the next dwindling to a point almost too small to see.

Geary felt his body pulsing in time, wondering how long humans could endure whatever was happening to the structure of reality in this part of space.

The hell mouth shrank into nothingness in the blink of an eye, vanishing from sight. “What-?”

Geary’s question was cut off as a shock wave hit the Dauntless, traveling so fast that there’d been no warning time this close to the gate. He’d seen time-lapse images of the shock wave from a nova, and this seemed like that, though happening in real time the event was so fast his senses didn’t really register it. Dauntless shuddered under the impact, the inertial compensators whining as they dampened the effects of the force.

“Forward shields being reinforced.” The lights overhead dimmed. “All nonessential power being diverted to forward shields.”

It ended as fast as it had come. Geary blinked at the visual display, which showed nothing but normal space. The remaining gate tethers had been vaporized by the energy release from the gate collapse. “Diamond! Daring! Report your status!”

“Sir, communications are down. Systems being restored now. You have communications, sir.”

Geary punched the control again. “Diamond and Daring, request your status.”

The delay was agonizing, but a reply finally came. “This is Daring. A lot of equipment is off-line, but we haven’t taken serious damage. Estimate we can restore full capability given time. We’ll have a time guesstimate for repairs for you as soon as possible.”

“This is Diamond. We should be able to get moving again, though it will take a minimum of several hours and possibly much longer. We’ve lost a lot of vital systems. Diamond is in nonoperational status for an indefinite period.”

Geary let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding. “Daring, remain with Diamond. Captain Tyrosian, designate one of your auxiliaries to close on Diamond and render assistance.” Geary checked the system display, stunned to realize that the shock wave they’d ridden out was only now hitting the next-closest Alliance ships. “How much was that? Not a nova.”

“We wouldn’t be here if it’d been nova strength,” the sensor watch agreed shakily. “It was sort of a minor fractional nova. Even then we couldn’t have survived that kind of energy bombardment for any length of time, but there was just the one shock wave.”

Geary collapsed into his seat, weak with reaction. There wasn’t any way to get a message to any of the Alliance ships before the shock wave reached them, but they should be already facing the gate with their shields ready, and the energy at any point in the shock wave would be weakening rapidly as it expanded away from the gate. Cresida’s program hadn’t managed to eliminate the energy discharge completely, but it had kept it to a level low enough that everything remaining in the Sancere Star System should be able to ride it out. “Very good job, Captain Desjani. You and your crew. Dauntless is a great ship.”

“Thank you, sir.” Even now Desjani didn’t seem as rattled as everyone else. Apparently she really had believed that having Geary along would keep the worst from happening.

He heard a deep intake of breath behind and looked to see Co-President Rione there. She was looking down at the deck, her fists clenched, but as if aware of Geary’s gaze, Rione slowly raised and turned her head to face him. Rione’s eyes were haunted. Geary thought he knew why. They had just seen the sort of forces that could be deliberately unleashed using the program Geary had given her for safekeeping. Until now, even Geary hadn’t appreciated how terrible a burden that could be. “I’m sorry.”

She nodded, understanding exactly what he meant. “As am I, Captain Geary. We will speak later.” Rione inhaled slowly, straightening herself and standing erect, regaining her composure by an exercise of pure willpower. Even through his lingering shock from the destruction of the gate Geary found himself impressed by her.

Desjani seemed to have been impressed as well, despite herself. She watched Rione leave, then turned to Geary. “Orders, Captain Geary?”

“Return to the fleet, Captain Desjani.” He studied the fleet display, fighting off a wave of fatigue such as he hadn’t felt since the lingering effects of his long survival sleep had worn off. “All units with the exception of Task Force Furious, this is Captain Geary. After passage of the shock wave assume standard fleet formation Sigma. Task Force Furious, maintain screening position between Syndic Force Alpha and the rest of the fleet. Well done, everyone. Very well done. Sancere is ours.”

The Alliance fleet wouldn’t be flying home on the wings of the Syndic hypernet. Not from Sancere, anyway. But it had survived and was striking a major blow at the Syndics. Not bad for a fleet that had once seemed doomed to destruction.

IT took twelve hours to get the fleet back together in a tight formation after the shock wave from the collapsing hypernet gate passed. The subformations Geary had put together had followed his orders to run for it in what he had to admit was a gratifying fashion. Slowing, turning, and rejoining took a while, especially since Geary didn’t want to get too distant from where Daring was now towing Diamond toward the rest of the fleet.

With the thirty ships under Furious still close to two light-hours distant, much too far away to participate in a conference, the number of ship commanders around the virtual conference table seemed to have shrunk dramatically again. In this case, though, the missing ships would definitely be back. Geary nodded in greeting. “Excellent work, everyone. We have two major tasks remaining in Sancere system. The first is to acquire as much of what we need as we can. The fleet logistics system has matched Syndic stockpiles to our needs where possible. I’ve transmitted another message to the Syndics warning them to comply with any demands we make.”

“They probably won’t get it,” Captain Tulev noted. “That energy wave seems to have fried most of the Syndic systems that we’d left untouched.”