“Your dedication to duty is a shining example to us all,” Desjani said. “Do you have any idea what Tanuki paid for the black-market booze?”
“No, Captain. I couldn’t find that out.”
“Thank you, Master Chief. Do you have anything else?”
“Just one very minor thing, Captain,” Gioninni said, smiling winningly. “A question. Will there be any other major course alterations before we reach the jump point?”
“That’s hard to say, Master Chief, and it will be up to Admiral Geary in any event.”
“I understand that, Captain, but you see when we went on this roundabout track to the jump point, I had to cancel all the bets in the jump pool and restart the whole thing.”
“That must have been a lot of work, Master Chief,” Desjani said with false sympathy.
Unseen by Gioninni, Geary grinned. Jump pools had been around as long as jump drives. Crew members would place minor wagers on the exact moment when the ship would enter jump, and whoever came closest to the actual time won the whole pot. For some inexplicable reason, the fleet had never cracked down on the practice, instead recognizing its importance for morale and as a relief valve for gambling cravings that might otherwise show up in worse forms. To Geary’s knowledge, the only times the official hammer had come down on jump pools were when the sizes of the individual wagers grew too large.
“Master Chief, I will ensure that the Admiral takes into account the impact on your workload if he orders another significant change in the arrival time at the jump point,” Desjani continued.
“Now, Captain,” Gioninni protested, “you know I’m the hardest-working sailor on this ship. Excepting for you and the Admiral, of course.”
“That depends upon how we define ‘work,’ Master Chief. Thank you again for your information and your suggestion.”
Desjani ended the call and looked pointedly at Geary. “What do you think, Admiral?”
“About the jump pool, the booze, or the Syndic plans?”
“I told you that you had to keep an eye on Smythe.”
“Which you are doing a good job of,” Geary pointed out. “Did you know that the auxiliaries also acquired some important rare-earth materials while we were at Midway? They didn’t get those from any asteroid mining, but we needed them, so I didn’t ask inconvenient questions. Smythe has probably broken half of the rules in the book, but a lot of the time he’s breaking the rules to get the job done.”
“And you’re willing to look the other way at the other times because of that?”
“Yes. As long as he’s not hurting the fleet. I will ask some leading questions about Syndic booze to let him know he’s being watched and had better not play any criminal games with it.” He could see she was getting ready to argue the point. “It’s just like your not asking certain questions of Master Chief Gioninni because his particular skills can be very useful to you and to Dauntless.”
She paused in the midst of starting to say something, then nodded ruefully. “You’ve got me there. What about the master chief’s guess about what the Syndics will do?”
“I think he’s very likely right,” Geary said. “You and I should have seen that, but we were too focused on threats along the path to that jump point to realize that the final approach to that jump exit is the only place left in this star system that we have to go.” He ran a quick query on his display. “There have been a couple of merchant ships seen leaving via that jump point since we arrived, but those ships could have been sent through on purpose on paths to avoid any mines so we would think there’s no threat there.”
“But there has to be a diversion to distract us when we’re near that jump point. What would work? Stealth shuttles aren’t cheap or available in large numbers, and we put a decent dent in how many of them the Syndics must have in this region of space. And that boarding operation only succeeded as much as it did because we were already distracted by another attack.”
“Something different,” Geary said. “They’ll know we’re watching for the same things coming at us. They’ll want to do something we’re not watching for. Whatever that is. All right. I’m calling a fleet conference.”
He never looked forward to conferences like this, even when there was nothing but good news or routine events to discuss. So far, Sobek had provided nothing good or routine, so this virtual gathering of the fleet’s ship captains promised to be the same.
Geary stood in the fleet conference room, looking across the assembled images of his ships’ commanding officers. A rather small compartment in reality, the meeting software made it seem vast enough to hold everyone, the table in front of Geary virtually expanded to seat hundreds of men and women. The most senior officers, the captains and commanders in charge of battleships and battle cruisers, General Carabali of the Marines and the senior fleet engineers, were “seated” closest to Geary, with the others farther way in descending order of seniority and the size of their command. He could look at any one of them, though, and the software would automatically zoom in on that individual, displaying name, rank, and command.
It all made meetings very easy to hold. For the most part, Geary considered that a negative aspect of the software. As a rule, he thought that meetings should be hard to hold and hard to get to, crowded into stuffy, uncomfortable rooms where everyone wanted to leave as soon as possible.
But sometimes even he had to hold meetings like this, and at those times the software was a very nice thing to have.
“You’re all familiar with the situation,” Geary said. “The loss of Orion was a terrible blow, but her crew died with honor, doing their duty, and will surely be welcomed by the living stars.”
“A terrible loss,” Captain Duellos of the battle cruiser Inspire commented with unusual harshness. “We have lost too many comrades in battle. I wish Orion had been able to take more of the enemy with her and that we had more means of making pay those who ordered that attack. What a shame that the hypernet gate here was so badly damaged as well in that action.”
“Yes,” Captain Badaya of Illustrious agreed, his face reddened with anger. “But not enough of a shame. It’s too bad a few stray bombardment projectiles didn’t put craters into a lot of important Syndic facilities here.”
A low rumble of concurrence sounded around the huge, virtual table.
“Why not?” Commander Neeson of Implacable asked. “Why not make them pay a higher price? They attacked us. They destroyed Orion. Why not retaliate?”
Geary waited for another burst of agreement to subside instead of quelling it using the meeting software. Let them blow off a little steam. We all need to. “I haven’t ordered that kind of retaliation because that’s exactly what the leaders of the Syndics want us to do. They want us to break the peace agreement in such a way that they can claim we attacked them first.”
That statement brought silence, finally broken by Captain Tulev of Leviathan. “Why would the Syndics seek war with the Alliance again when the Syndics do not even have the military means left to force all of their own star systems to remain loyal to them?” Tulev sounded questioning, not challenging.
“Because they want an external enemy again,” Geary said. “The Syndic leaders know they can’t hold what’s left of the Syndicate Worlds together by using the force available to them, but they also know that fear of the Alliance provided a powerful reason for star systems not to revolt during the war. They think if we attack them, if the Alliance can be painted as an aggressive enemy that everyone must fear, it will again give the Syndic leaders a strong tool for keeping star systems loyal to them.”