“Surely they’re going to figure out what you’re doing now,” Rione noted.

“I sure as hell hope not,” Geary replied. “It shouldn’t be as obvious to the Syndics. To them, it’s going to look as if we’re bending on speed but won’t be able to reach them at engagement speeds before they reach Formation Gamma. Same for Formation Bravo, since its intercept location is even farther off than ours. The Syndics are thinking they’ve caught a weaker formation that we let get too far from supporting formations. They’re planning to come in fast, brake hard, rake Gamma with everything they’ve got, then accelerate away and frustrate our planned intercepts by this formation and Formation Bravo.”

“You’re a more devious man than I’d thought, Captain Geary,” Rione observed.

“Captain Desjani helped come up with the plan.”

Desjani grinned.

“Anyway, if all goes right, the Syndic plan won’t even survive until contact with Gamma. It’ll start falling apart well before then. The really hard part in setting this up was getting enough ships to cross through the area where the Syndics will have to transit to intercept Gamma, without the Syndics figuring out those ships were dropping strings of mines along a single relatively narrow channel.”

“And,” Desjani added, “since the Syndic plan clearly requires them to come in fast, maintaining close to point two light as long as they can before braking hard to engage Gamma, relativistic distortion is going to make it very difficult for them to see the mines, especially since it’s not a single, dense minefield but a diffuse series of strings.”

Now it was just a matter of watching again. Everyone remained several hours away from any contact, the representations of the various formations seeming to crawl through the display of Sancere Star System. Geary took advantage of the time to arrange his formation for what he expected would work best. Assuming the Syndics would seek to avoid a fight with him, Geary arranged his ships in a rectangular block, the battleships and battle cruisers clustered by divisions down the center, the escorts around the outside. If he only got one firing pass, he wanted to ensure his heaviest units could all hit the Syndics in succession.

Increasingly restless, Geary finally stood up. “I’m going to walk around the ship.” The crew undoubtedly thought his walks were a sign of his interest in them, and they certainly were that, but at times like this, the walks were also a way to work out nervousness and kill time during the long, slow approach to combat.

The crew members he met all seemed tired from the long days at increased alert while in Sancere Star System, but cheerful and confident. The hopeful and certain expressions they turned on Geary still had a tendency to unnerve him, since he knew how fallible he really was, but at least he also knew he hadn’t let them down yet. As he walked around, Geary noticed crew members looking past him as if expecting to see someone with him, and realized they were looking for Co-President Rione, even though none of them mentioned her. That was a little unnerving, too.

At some point, he went past the worship area and walked into the area set aside for ancestors, entering one of the small rooms and lighting a candle before saying a brief prayer. The living stars knew he needed all of the help he could get. But tempting as it was to linger and speak for a while to the one audience he felt sure of, his dead ancestors, Geary knew he couldn’t hide in here while the fleet headed for battle.

All of that didn’t kill nearly enough time. Geary confirmed that nothing had changed in the situation, everybody rushing toward their respective intercept points and the Syndics still closing in on the path to the mines, then forced himself to go by the meal areas and pretend to eat. Most of what they had now was Syndic rations looted from places like Kaliban and now Sancere. The best thing about the Syndic food, Geary and the sailors he spoke with agreed, was that it made the usual fleet food seem good by comparison. “If we offered the Syndics decent meals, they’d probably surrender in droves,” one of the sailors suggested as she choked down something that was apparently supposed to be hash, though made up of unidentifiable meat and some very odd looking potatoes with the texture and taste of blocks of cardboard.

Geary returned to the bridge. Rione wasn’t there, and Desjani was asleep in her chair again. A captain who spent that much time on the bridge could drive her crew insane, but Desjani wasn’t a screamer or a micromanager, so her presence didn’t wear on her watch-standers. She woke up as Geary entered and nodded to him. “One more hour until the Syndics reach the first mines. They’re still heading right down the chute.”

“When do you think they’ll start braking?” Geary asked.

“In about half an hour. That’ll leave them a very slight margin for error.” Desjani indicated the projected track on the display. “If they brake too early, they’ll slide off the path to the mines, but we’ll have a much better shot at catching them with this formation. But if they want to hit Formation Gamma, they’ll have to start braking at this point.”

Geary settled in, relaxing as best he could. To kill time, he began rechecking the supplies the fleet had picked up here at Sancere, and how the auxiliaries were doing on manufacturing replacement items. There had been a lot of maneuvering here in Sancere, burning through fuel cells, so Geary tossed off a quick message to Captain Tyrosian on Witch to make sure new fuel cells were a priority. All of the grapeshot, mines, and missiles in the world wouldn’t provide enough help to ships that couldn’t maneuver.

Co-President Rione returned, surveying the bridge of the Dauntless, Captain Desjani, and Captain Geary with her usual unruffled and challenging attitude. Nodding in greeting, Geary realized there was little chance of him ever accidentally calling her Victoria while on the bridge. The Co-President Rione who occupied the observer’s seat on the bridge might look like the Victoria who shared Geary’s bed, but her attitude was so different that she seemed to really be another person, one who retained distance and distrust toward Captain Geary. I did ask her to stay challenging, after all. But I have a feeling she’d be like this whether I’d asked it of her or not.

Desjani also nodded in almost-friendly greeting. Being involved with Geary had clearly made Rione more trustworthy in Desjani’s eyes, though he suspected Rione would react pretty negatively to the idea. He certainly wasn’t going to mention it to her. But then she probably already had realized that, which might be contributing to the frosty way Rione was treating Geary on the bridge. Maybe he should put off mentioning to Rione that the crew seemed to be expecting to see them together. Or maybe she wanted to be seen with him, to make as public a spectacle as possible of their association.

Geary turned back to the much less complicated situation playing out between the Syndic flotilla and his five formations. His display indicated every Alliance ship had come to full battle readiness. He and thousands of other officers and sailors had nothing to do for a while yet but watch the time scroll down to the moments when the Syndics would encounter the first mines.

The Syndics pivoted up and over in place almost exactly when predicted, bringing their propulsion units to face forward so they could brake the Syndic formation’s velocity down to engagement speed. A few minutes later, Geary saw Formation Gamma increase speed a fraction to move the Syndic track to intercept exactly back onto the path through the mines. Surely the Syndics would get suspicious? But, perhaps because they were fixed on their intended targets, the Syndics adjusted their course just as the Alliance needed them to.

Fifteen more minutes crawled by. “Here they come,” Desjani murmured.