“Very,” Geary agreed, flopping down into his seat. “Why is everybody being so quiet and accepting? Why aren’t I getting more questions?”

Duellos bent a enigmatic look toward Geary. “Because everybody else is frustrated, too. They want to help those fools who ran off with Falco, but they can’t think of any way to do it better than what we are doing, waiting here and hoping some of them make it to Ilion. Even the worst skeptic with the fleet approves of the risk you’re taking in waiting here. If Falco was around to rally them with some fool plan to charge back and forth among Syndic star systems looking for our missing ships, then it might be different. But Falco didn’t want to wait to build up more support.”

“Lucky for me, I guess,” Geary noted gloomily.

“Lucky for all those ships that didn’t go with him as a result,” Duellos corrected. “Cheer up, Captain Geary. Things are going well.”

“They could be worse.” Geary paused. “Okay, I’ve got a personal question. About me.”

“About you? Or about you and the iron-jawed Co-President of the Callas Republic?”

Geary smiled. “Iron-jawed?”

“She’s a tough woman,” Duellos explained. “The sort who makes a valuable friend and a dangerous enemy.”

“That describes Co-President Rione,” Geary agreed.

“But I understand you’re on friendly terms with her at the moment.”

“You might say that. The entire fleet knows, right?”

Duellos nodded. “I haven’t personally polled every sailor in the fleet, but I think it would be hard to find one who hasn’t heard.”

“No one’s saying anything.”

“What are we supposed to say?” Duellos asked. “Congratulations? Ask you what tactics you employed to achieve your objective?”

Geary laughed as Duellos grinned. “That’s a good point. I just want to know if it’s causing any problems. I know Numos and his friends wanted to make an issue of my relationship with Rione back before there was any substance to the rumors.”

“I’ve heard little,” Duellos admitted. “As I once told you, it’s your business and doesn’t reflect on your professionalism. As long as you and Co-President Rione refrain from acting out in public, I expect no one will say anything. Openly that is. Those opposed to you will try to find a way to paint it in a negative light. I can’t see the issue gaining much traction, though, if you two continue to carry on as you have. The most damaging rumor would be that you’ve compelled Co-President Rione to become a sort of concubine, debasing her, but no one who has ever met that woman would believe such a rumor. Nor would rumors that you two are plotting against the Alliance hold up. Aside from the legend of Black Jack Geary’s devotion to the Alliance there’s also Co-President Rione’s well-known loyalty to her world and to the Alliance as a whole.” He gave Geary a questioning look. “How serious is it, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Frankly, I don’t know.”

“Not that you’ve asked, but I personally wouldn’t toy with the affections of a woman like Co-President Rione. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the expression about ‘hell hath no fury’ was coined about a woman very similar to her.”

Geary smiled again. “I’m pretty sure that’s not going to happen.”

Duellos frowned down at his hand as if examining it. “On the other hand, the woman standing beside Black Jack Geary when he returns this fleet safely to Alliance space will be in an enviable position for a politician.”

“That’s true,” Geary stated, keeping his voice carefully neutral.

Duellos glanced back at Geary. “You’re riding a tiger. You know that.”

“Yeah. I know that.” The old saying had already occurred to him, that someone riding a tiger is fine except for the fact that the tiger is taking them where it wants and they don’t dare get off, because the instant they do, the tiger can turn on them. She’s powerful and can be dangerous. I wonder if those are some of the things that attracted me to Victoria Rione?

GEARY was still musing over that when he got back to his stateroom and found Victoria Rione waiting for him there. “Did the conference go well?”

“Your spies haven’t reported in yet?” Geary replied.

It didn’t faze her in the slightest. “Not all of them, no. It’s rather inconvenient for them when you hold fleet conferences in the evening.” She indicated the star display over the table. “I have something to show you.”

He sat down, his eyes on the region of stars shown. He could usually guess which general area of space he was looking at by spotting particularly noteworthy stars, nebulas, or other features, but not this time. There wasn’t a single thing he could identify from memory. “Where is this?”

“The far side of Syndicate Worlds space. It’s not surprising you can’t recognize it since no one from the Alliance has ever been allowed there, except perhaps as prisoners en route to labor camps.” Rione’s fingers danced delicately across the controls, rotating the view. “I’ve been studying some of the Syndic records we acquired at Sancere. This is the latest information available in them on the far side of the Syndicate Worlds. Do you notice anything?”

He watched the stars swing past slowly as the star field pivoted under Rione’s commands. The boundary with unexplored or uncolonized star systems was a lumpy thing, of course. The arrangement of stars in the cosmos didn’t lend itself to the neat lines that human minds liked to see. Something about the view teased at him, but he couldn’t figure out what it was. “What am I supposed to be seeing?”

“Perhaps if I highlight star systems abandoned within the last century,” Rione suggested. “And by abandoned I mean not left to wither, but rather star systems in which all human presence was withdrawn.” She pushed another control, and several stars glowed brighter.

The picture clicked into place in Geary’s mind. “It doesn’t look like a frontier. It looks like a border.”

“Yes,” Rione agreed calmly. “It shouldn’t look like a border, because there’s not supposed to be anything bordering the far side of Syndicate Worlds space, but it does. The region of occupied star systems doesn’t bulge and extend as it should to cover particularly rich stars. There’s no gaps where much poorer stars have been left unoccupied.”

“Just like the boundary between the Syndicate Worlds and the Alliance.” Geary leaned closer, studying the region. “Isn’t that interesting.” He moved one finger to point to the abandoned star systems that Rione had indicated. “And these places would’ve penetrated beyond that ‘border’ that isn’t supposed to be there.”

“I was put in mind of the buffer zone you had the Marines create in that orbital city,” Rione remarked. “A place no one is supposed to occupy to separate the Syndicate Worlds from…who or what? Now, I’m going to superimpose a representation of the Syndic hypernet in that region.” Stars glowed a different color, forming an intricate lattice. “What do you see?”

“Are you sure of this?”

“Absolutely.”

Geary stared at the depiction. He had been told hypernet gates had gone into the systems rich enough or unique enough to justify the expense, places people wanted to go, stars whose resources and populations generated enough wealth to make the gates worthwhile there. But the hypernet had a military use as well, of course, allowing forces to be shifted very rapidly to where they were needed. A poor star, but one strategically placed, could earn a gate on that basis. There were a lot of poor stars with hypernet gates on the far side of Syndicate Worlds space. “They seem to be worried about something, don’t they?”

Rione nodded. “But if your speculation is correct, whoever or whatever gave humanity the hypernet technology has simply given the Syndicate Worlds the means to build nova-scale bombs in every system facing this unknown-to-us threat. It looks like a wall of defenses. It’s actually a minefield on an unimaginable scale, aimed at the people who think it’s defending them.”