“Damned if I know.” On his display, the entire Syndic flotilla was together again, every ship headed for the hypernet gate, less than a minute from the point at which Geary could order his weapons to fire.
Desjani gave him a look, her hand hovering near her weapons controls. Everyone on the bridge was looking at him, everyone in the fleet waiting for his next words.
The Syndic flotilla vanished as it entered the gate.
He let out a long breath. “All units in Formation Alpha, reduce velocity to point zero two light speed, come port one nine zero degrees at time three zero. All units return to normal readiness condition.”
Desjani seemed to be out of sorts as she passed on the commands, so Geary smiled at her. “Are you unhappy that it worked?”
She didn’t return the smile. “We should have blown him away. We’re going to have to deal with him and that battleship again.”
“You may be right,” Geary conceded. “But I didn’t want to restart the war here and now.”
“Which sort of implies you expect to restart the war at some other place and time?”
He had a denial ready to go but felt a great uncertainty inside that stopped the words before they were spoken.
Now the only things holding the First Fleet at Midway were some final repair work and a personnel transfer. The personnel transfer was no afterthought, of course. Some of the humans once held prisoner by the enigmas would be handed over to the authorities at Midway. Those people had come from Midway and nearby star systems, and now dreamed of going home. Dr. Nasr, and Geary himself, didn’t believe that dream could come true, not as the former prisoners hoped and wished, but those individuals had the right to choose their own fates.
The repair work was only final in the sense of being the last to be done here. Only a few of Geary’s ships didn’t need additional work, and overage systems continued to fail on ships at random intervals that somehow seemed to occur in clusters whenever he was starting to feel better about the material condition of the ships in his fleet.
“We could spend the next six months here,” Captain Smythe explained, his image standing in Geary’s stateroom aboard Dauntless while Smythe remained physically aboard Tanuki, “and I couldn’t really get ahead of the game. Not with only eight auxiliaries and so many old ships to deal with.”
Old ships. Meaning more than two or three years since they were commissioned and sent off to battle in the expectation that they would be destroyed within a couple of years or less. “You and your engineers have done wonders,” Geary said. “I didn’t think some of the battleships would hold together this long.”
“It takes a lot to kill a Guardian-class battleship, Admiral,” Smythe reminded him. “All of that armor holds them together when by all rights they ought to be coming apart, and it’s not like warships in space can sink when they get too many holes in them.”
“Sink?”
“You know,” Smythe explained, “when a ship or a boat on a planetary ocean or sea loses buoyancy, when it takes on too much water, it sinks. It goes beneath the water. Some are designed to do that. Sub… somethings. But those can come up again. A ship designed to ride on the surface of the water is a write-off if it sinks. That’s how battleships and battle cruisers on planets, on oceans, used to be destroyed. They’d get enough holes in them to sink. I suppose at least a few must have blown up, but usually it was a matter of getting them under the water.”
Geary frowned at Smythe in puzzlement. “Why couldn’t the crews keep operating the battleships? Why did being under the water matter so much?”
“They didn’t have survival suits, Admiral. They couldn’t breathe! And the equipment didn’t work under the water. The engines used… internal combustion and… steam and… other methods that required oxygen and flame and… things.”
“Things?” Geary asked, smiling. “Is that the technical term?”
Smythe grinned. “Things. Junk. Stuff. All perfectly good engineering terms. But in all seriousness, if a ship designed to ride on the surface of the water were to sink, it was in some ways like a ship designed to operate in space making a destructive atmospheric entry. It’s not something they’re designed to survive.”
“All right, that comparison I understand. Have you had time to look at any of the data on Invincible? This conversation is making me wonder if the Kicks might not have designed it to handle things we don’t design our ships for.”
“It’s possible.” Smythe threw his hands upward helplessly. “There’s so much about that ship that is almost familiar, but not. As an engineer, it’s a fascinating and frustrating puzzle. Of course, it would help a great deal if we were able to power up any of the components aboard that ship.”
“No.”
“Something small? Something harmless?”
“How can you be sure it’s harmless?” Geary asked.
“Ah…” Smythe made the same gesture of confusion and bewilderment. “You have me there, Admiral. But maybe if we found out how at least one piece of equipment worked, we could put a dent in the superstitions developing about that Kick ship.”
“Superstitions?”
“The ghosts,” Smythe said apologetically.
“Captain, have you actually been aboard Invincible?”
“You mean physically? In person? No.” Smythe eyed Geary. “You have?”
“Yes.” Geary felt a sudden urge to shudder come over him and swallowed before he could speak. “I don’t know what the ghosts are, but the sensation is real and powerful. Is there some device that could create a sensation of immaterial dead crowding around you?”
“If they’re immaterial, they can’t crowd,” Smythe pointed out with an engineer’s precision. He pursed his lips in thought. “I’d have to discuss it with medical professionals. Maybe some sort of subsonic vibrations, but we haven’t picked any up on our equipment.”
“It might be something totally new to us,” Geary pointed out.
“Which is another reason for investigating the ship’s equipment!” Smythe pointed out triumphantly.
“But all power has been shut down on that ship, and all stored energy sources disconnected. How could something still be operating to unnerve anyone on that ship?”
Smythe leaned back, put a hand to his mouth, and thought. “Maybe… no… or, hmmm. If it was some sort of vibration or harmonic, operating at a level so low we couldn’t detect it even though humans could somehow sense it, you could in theory at least construct a structure like a ship so that it generated such harmonics naturally.” He nodded and smiled. “That could explain it. Purely guesswork at this point, but if the ship’s structure was designed to generate such harmonics, and the ship was equipped with some device that generated counterharmonics to damp out the effect, then shutting down everything would have shut down the counterharmonic equipment.”
“Seriously?” Geary asked, amazed.
“In theory,” Smythe emphasized. “I have no idea if that’s even remotely true, or how you would do it in practice. But then, I’m not a Kick.”
“Well, it may be just a wild-assed guess, but it’s still the only rational explanation I’ve heard for what Invincible feels like inside.”
“Admiral,” Captain Smythe said with exaggerated dignity, “I am a trained engineer. I don’t make wild-assed guesses. I make scientific wild-assed guesses.”
“I see.” Geary laughed, grateful for the diversion from too many problems and too few solutions. “Has Lieutenant Jamenson come up with any new scientific wild-assed guesses?”