Duellos nodded thoughtfully. “I see where Tanya gets some of it from.”
“Naturally, her mother was horrified that we’d gotten married on the ship, saying that the whole planet would have wanted to see the ceremony, and it would have been the biggest thing on Kosatka since the royal wedding one hundred and ten years ago, and Tanya demands to know if her mother wants Tanya to have a stroke, and to try to calm everyone down, I mention that I was at that royal wedding over a century ago, and that didn’t exactly work as far as making me seem like just some average sailor who married her daughter.
“By that time, everybody has tracked us down to that building thanks to the city security-camera system, and we’re pretty much besieged in there. Tanya’s father got escorted through, wondering what the hell is going on, and we try to talk and get to know each other while every dignitary on Kosatka tries to crowd into the place. The local military had to establish a fortified perimeter with portable high blast barriers, because by then the word was spreading and the crowds were . . .” Geary’s smiled faded. “Ancestors help me, Roberto, the crowds. Everywhere I went, and on all the media channels, the crowds.”
“Chanting ‘Black Jack,’ no doubt.”
“Yeah. I don’t think before then it had really hit home to me just how dangerous I really was to the government. To the Alliance. Nobody should be that popular, have that much adulation, and especially not me.”
Duellos nodded, his own grin much smaller. “You’re lucky you didn’t see what was happening on my home world. I had people wanting to see me, to touch me, because I’d worked with you. The living stars alone know what sort of thing Jane Geary encountered when she went back to your home world, Glenlyon, for a short visit.”
“She did?” Was that what had caused the changes in Jane Geary? “Has she talked to you about that?”
“No.” Duellos gave him a quizzical look. “She hasn’t spoken to you of it, either? But her behavior in command does seem to have altered a bit since then.”
“Yes.” Maybe knowing that, he could finally get Jane to admit to whatever had caused her to act differently. “So . . . the crowds. Everywhere. Tanya could tell how those crowds are bothering me, and she wasn’t exactly thrilled that the times she got mentioned it was usually as ‘Black Jack’s new wife’ rather than Captain Tanya Desjani. We had to attend a number of official functions so the local authorities wouldn’t feel snubbed, but after a few days, I was happy to have the excuse of my orders to have to leave the planet.”
“You would think,” Duellos said, “that your obvious discomfort with the adulation would have reassured the government.”
Geary shrugged in reply. “Maybe the government is afraid I’ll get used to it.”
THE distance between the jump point from Varandal to the jump point for Kalixa was four light hours, which meant a forty-hour transit at the fleet’s velocity. With the primary inhabited world at Atalia orbiting on the far side of its star, the authorities there didn’t even know the Alliance fleet had arrived until more than five hours later. As a courtesy, Geary had sent a brief message to them saying that the fleet was simply passing through en route to business elsewhere. Their reply to his message took another five hours to reach Geary.
He listened, feeling growing discomfort, as the new rulers of Atalia fell over themselves offering greetings to the fleet in general and to Admiral Geary in particular. It was glaringly obvious that they feared him, they needed him, they wanted the protection of the fleet he commanded against their former Syndicate masters, and the barely concealed pleas from them left Geary unhappy. I’m not the master of this fleet. Ultimate authority rests with my government. Don’t they understand that? I can’t do what they want, what they need. The Alliance has a courier ship here, and, while that in itself offers no defense capability, it is a symbol of the Alliance’s interest here. Or at least the Alliance’s interest in knowing what happens here. That might not be much of a deterrent, but it’s something.
After several hours of postponing a reply, he sent another message, telling the rulers of Atalia that his fleet was proceeding on a mission elsewhere, and that their requests for further assistance would be passed to the Alliance government. Next time I guess I should let the emissaries talk to the Syndics, or used-to-be Syndics.
Aside from some wishes for a safe journey and swift return sent in answer to Geary’s last message, nothing else of note happened for the rest of the transit. The jump for Kalixa brought a different kind of dread, a reluctance to view that ruined star system again. He wondered if it would be easier to see it the second time.
It wasn’t.
The exit from jump at Kalixa still felt curiously abrupt, as if the impact of the hypernet gate’s collapse there had strained even the structure of space itself. A few moments’ observation confirmed that the star’s intensity continued to fluctuate rapidly. The storms had subsided a bit in the thin atmosphere, which was all the formerly inhabited world had left, but that just made it easier to see the lifeless and almost waterless landscape. Men and women on the bridge of Dauntless muttered prayers to themselves as they gazed on the destruction, and Geary believed crews were doing the same on every ship in the fleet.
He ramped the fleet up to point two light speed through Kalixa, cutting the amount of time spent there in half. It cost in fuel cell usage, but the benefit to morale was worth it.
Indras hadn’t offered any problems the last time the fleet had been through there, and as long as its hypernet gate was still in existence, the fleet wouldn’t linger at that star. “Do you think we should try out one of the copies of the Syndic hypernet key?” The original key aboard Dauntless had been painstakingly reproduced, but only a few copies were still available when the fleet had left. One had been installed on Warspite and the second on Leviathan.
Desjani shrugged. “If you want. The copies should work fine. But I’d advise against it.”
“Because?”
“The Syndics should be able to tell which ship used a key at the gate. They already know about the key on Dauntless. Keeping them in the dark about which other ships now have keys might be a good idea.”
He nodded in agreement. There might formally be peace at present, but trust would be a very long time in coming.
INDRAS and Hasadan had once been military objectives, enemy star systems to be attacked. Now they were simply waypoints, occupied by former enemies who could only watch the Alliance warships passing through their star systems. The hypernet transit from Indras to Hasadan was . . . boring, Geary decided. Jump space felt like a place even though it was a place with nothing there but the mysterious lights, which gave it a sense of being occupied by something unknown and perhaps unknowable to humans. A place humans didn’t belong, and felt increasingly uncomfortable being in the longer they were in jump space.
But for a ship conducting a hypernet transit, there was only an absence of everything, the feeling that the ship was nowhere, something Captain Cresida had once painstakingly tried to explain to him might be literally true. Our best theory is that as far as the outside universe is concerned, ships inside a hypernet have been transformed into probability waves that don’t really occupy any point. They really were nowhere.
And nowhere didn’t have a lot to recommend it, aside from the fact that it got you somewhere else very, very quickly compared even to jump space. “I wonder how jump space feels to the aliens?” Geary wondered out loud. “Does hypernet travel feel like being nowhere to them?”