Geary read it over again slowly, despite its necessary brevity. Regarding aliens—Watch your back. Lagemann.
He had asked Desjani to come down to his stateroom to look at it and talk about it, and now she frowned in puzzlement. “We know the aliens can’t be trusted. Is that all he’s saying?”
“I don’t think so. He and his fellows are supposed to be trying to guess how the aliens will fight.”
“This sounds more like a warning against a stab in the back.”
“What?” Geary whirled to stare at her.
She switched the puzzlement to his reaction. “I said it sounds more like a warning against them trying to stab us in the back.”
“A knife. In the back.”
“I wasn’t speaking literally.”
Geary made a fist and rapped it against the side of his head. “Damn! That’s what it means! That’s what’s been bothering me!” He called up a display showing the Alihi star system, or at least what that star system had looked like when the Syndics had outposts there. “They strike from hiding. From ambush. If your worms aren’t working anymore to conceal you from enemy sensors, where can you hide in a star system?”
Desjani shrugged. “Behind the star. Behind a planet or moon.”
“Behind a jump exit?”
“No!” She stabbed a finger at the display. “You’re talking about an ambush force positioned behind a jump exit to catch an arriving force in the rear? It doesn’t work. It can’t work. The physics are against you.”
“Why?” Geary asked.
“Because, one, you don’t know if or when someone is arriving at a jump exit. It’s hard to maintain a position close to one and even harder right behind one. You’re going to do that for days, weeks, months? Two, whoever shows up is heading out of the exit, away from you, at up to point one light speed. You’re starting from a dead stop relative to them, so you need to accelerate into a stern chase. Maybe you can catch them, but it’ll take a while. While they watch you coming. That’s not exactly a surprise.”
Geary nodded. “Those are the same reasons why we never planned for ambushes like that a century ago. But what if you have faster-than-light communications?”
She paused. “Someone at the star you left could tell someone at the star you were going to that you were coming.”
“And they’d know pretty accurately when you’d appear because jump physics are consistent. If you enter jump at x time here en route there, the journey will take y time.”
Desjani shook her head. “But even then they wouldn’t know exactly where you’d be. They’d still have to be able to maneuver and accelerate much better than—Son of a bitch.” She gave him a stricken look. “They could do it.”
“Yeah.” Geary slumped back, staring ahead of him. “The possibility didn’t occur to us because we can’t do it. But they have two big advantages that make it feasible. And because of the FTL communications, they might even know what our formation is like. We have to leave jump in the same formation we entered. There’s no way to maneuver in jump space.”
“They’ll hit the auxiliaries, and maybe the assault transports. They’re all in the rear of our main subformation, with no escorts behind them.” Desjani pressed her palms against her eyes. “Can we get enough of our force reversed and able to cover those ships in time?”
“It takes time to recover from jump,” Geary said bitterly. “And time to pivot ships and brake velocity so we can let the auxiliaries pass us. Even if we tell our comm systems to transmit prepared orders the instant we exit, it will still take precious moments for the other ships’ crews to recover enough to respond, and I have a nasty suspicion that every second will count.”
Desjani pointed to the message from Mistral. “Keep it simple, and we can send the messages in jump.”
Simple. Something simple that could counter what he hadn’t planned for at all.
“You’ve still got almost seven hours before we leave jump to think of something,” Desjani added.
“Oh, that helps take the pressure off.”
“Sorry.”
THE aliens were waiting at Alihi.
Geary’s brain hadn’t begun to focus when he felt Dauntless swinging her bow up and around, the battle cruiser pivoting in response to maneuvering orders entered while the ship was still in jump. Dauntless was lighting off her main propulsion units, braking the velocity of the ship at the maximum rate her crew and structure could survive, when alarms began blaring from the combat systems. As Geary’s vision began to finally clear, he felt Dauntless shudder slightly as specter missiles launched on orders from combat systems given freedom to immediately engage targets assessed hostile.
His message had gone to the other major warships in the main formation. Battle cruisers Dauntless, Daring, Victorious, and Intemperate, battleships Warspite, Vengeance, Revenge, Guardian, Fearless, Resolution , and Redoubtable. It had been as short and simple as required by the nature of jump space communications. Immediate Execute on exit, pivot one eight zero, brake point zero five, engage enemy. That was the fastest response he could create if the aliens were waiting to hit the back of his force.
There might be enigma warships waiting in front of the jump exit, but if so, hopefully the heavy and light cruisers and the destroyers remaining in the main formation would be able to handle them.
He finally managed to get a good look at his display as Dauntless’s hell lances started firing. Enigma warships were clawing their way toward the rear of the Alliance formation, the squat turtle shapes varying in size from rough equivalents to human destroyers to some massing a little more than heavy cruisers. Thirty . . . no forty. Forty-one. The courses of the enigma warships altered slightly as Dauntless, Daring, Victorious, and Intemperate slowed enough for the auxiliaries to lumber past, the battle cruisers pivoting and decelerating faster than the battleships could.
Dauntless shuddered repeatedly as the aliens concentrated their fire on the four battle cruisers. Even though the battle cruisers were bow on to the enemy, their weaker shields were failing, and shots were penetrating to strike their lightly armored hulls. Geary had only a second to decide what to do, his hand hitting his comm controls as Daring staggered under a particularly bad barrage. “Dauntless, Daring, Victorious, and Intemperate, continue to brake velocity at maximum sustainable rate!”
As the battered battle cruisers continued to slow, the aliens accelerated past them, aiming once again for the eight auxiliaries. Grapeshot from the battle cruisers hit the enigmas as they tore past, and Victorious caught one with its null field, carving out a large chunk of the alien ship.
His display showed no other aliens around the jump exit, so Geary hastily sent another command. “All ships maneuver freely to engage the enemy. Captain Smythe, get your ships clear!”
The remaining alien warships, only twenty-five still in the fight, had begun firing on the auxiliaries when the Alliance battleships finally trudged even with the lightly armed support ships. The cruisers and destroyers to either side and in front of the auxiliaries were now pivoting as well, the heavy cruisers unleashing some of their own specters.