He was still fumbling for some kind of reply when Rione’s image disappeared. “Tanya, I was wondering at one point how to explain what’s going on to the Dancers. Now I’m wondering how to explain it at all.”
Desjani lowered a furious brow at him. “I should never let you talk to that woman.”
“She’s an emissary of the Alliance government!”
“And I’m… the commanding officer of your flagship! The first wave of shuttles is hitting dirt.”
The Marines would not need his personal oversight of what was becoming a routine for them, recovering Alliance prisoners under nonpermissive conditions. He could have tapped into the Marine command and control net, seeing events on the ground in the prison camp, but not this time. General Carabali will notify me if anything goes wrong on the Marine end, and the watch-standers here on Dauntless will tell me if anything happens to the shuttles.
Instead of focusing on that, Geary looked to other parts of his display. The four groups of Syndic warships had not yet moved. They shouldn’t move until it became apparent that the Alliance fleet was not playing the game as the Syndics intended, but those warships remained an unpredictable element. If they started moving before any other signs of problems below, it would be a sign that the Alliance plan was in trouble.
The Marine plan allowed half an hour for the scouts to assemble at the trigger location and infiltrate close to the entrance, and another twenty minutes to actually penetrate the installation and gain control of the trigger just before the fleet approached the region above the prison camp on its second orbital pass. If anything went wrong, Lieutenant Iger’s drones would spot the uproar before the Marines could report in.
“Loading first wave of shuttles. No problems reported with crowd control,” Lieutenant Castries called. “Prisoners report no Syndics in the camp or nearby for the last twenty-four hours.”
The fleet had crossed over the nighttime southern portion of the globe and was now climbing back over the sunward side. The shuttles, when loaded, would lift to meet the fleet as it crested the top of the globe and headed back down, on a path aimed to go straight over the prison camp in low orbit.
The Syndics plotting this attack must be watching the fleet’s movements like gamblers following each turn of a card. Just keep on going. Finish the orbit. Get into position. And then…
“Admiral!” Lieutenant Iger couldn’t suppress his excitement. “Look.”
Geary peered at the image of one of the Syndic sentry posts near the trigger.
The sentry wasn’t there.
“The sentry must have spotted something,” Iger explained, “and the Marines took them out before they could sound an alarm.”
“Why aren’t the sentry alerts sounding? Aren’t those set to go off automatically if anything happens to the sentry?”
“Yes, sir. They can be spoofed—”
The feed from the drone blanked for a moment.
“—but not for long,” Iger continued, as the drone feed came to life again. “The Syndics just lit off jammers, and our drone had to work around them.”
Extra security lights had flared to life near the trigger installation, and nozzles were pumping out a fine mist designed to reveal anyone in a stealth suit. Geary couldn’t hear alarms sounding but knew they must be. Syndic ground forces personnel and security guards were running about, weapons at the ready. “Where are the Marines?”
“We don’t see any being engaged by the Syndics, sir. That’s a good sign. It means they’re inside.”
Inside an installation of unknown design, with unknown security features, and an unknown number of armed defenders.
Geary’s eyes went back to his display. How long until the Syndic warships reacted? The Syndics would be rushing additional ground forces to the trigger site, trying to figure out what had happened, whether there was a real threat, how serious the threat was—
“Shuttles docking,” Lieutenant Yuon reported. “The prisoners are being dumped into quarantined loading docks until full medical and security screening can be conducted. Screening on the way up didn’t find any threats in or on the prisoners. Estimated time to shuttles heading back down is two minutes.”
“Why bother sabotaging the prisoners when the Syndics expected them to be blown to atoms?” Desjani commented.
Geary didn’t reply, looking at the globe scrolling by below, the location of the prison camp directly ahead of the tight fleet formation.
For the first time, it occurred to him that they didn’t know if the particle beams were rigged to fire straight up, or at a slight angle to catch an orbiting formation just before it reached a point over the camp.
It’s time. “Captain Armus, your force is detached to proceed on previously assigned duties. Captain Geary, your force is detached to proceed on previously assigned duties. All units in the First Fleet, immediate execute, come starboard five degrees.” Enough to get the fleet out of line with those particle beams but close enough for the shuttles to be able to make the second drop and recovery.
Eighteen battleships swung away from the fleet formation, ponderous and majestic. Armus kept his eight battleships close together in a roughly circular arrangement. Once positioned over the trigger site, they would all be able to fire the majority of their weapons downward. Jane Geary sent two battleships to hover just above Armus’s grouping, the other eight arranged in pairs around the ground-support battleships.
“Shuttles launching,” Lieutenant Yuon reported. “Second wave on its way.”
Alarms chirped as a hell-lance battery lost power on Revenge, partial shield failure afflicted Colossus, and the forward part of Fearless suffered spot power interruptions in a score of places. Geary glowered at his display, knowing the systems had failed as aging components on ships which had exceeded their planned hull lives were brought to full power for the action. I guess I should be glad there weren’t more failures. “All ships in First Fleet, bring your systems up to full power now.” If there were going to be more failures, better to have it happen right away, so there would be time to try to fix or jury-rig the problems.
Something caught Geary’s eye. He swung his gaze to see explosions erupting on the drone image of the trigger site.
“Our people are inside and holding the entrance,” General Carabali said as her image appeared. “The situation farther inside is uncertain. I don’t know if we have control of the trigger. Request all available fleet ground support as close to the trigger building as possible.”
“Captain Armus,” Geary ordered, “you are cleared to engage any target and lay down a suppression barrage. Don’t hit the trigger building. General Carabali is linking to your coordination circuit.”
“Understood,” Captain Armus said as laconically as if Geary had just ordered the fleet to stand down for the night. “Opening fire.”
The image from the drone wavered as dozens of hell-lance particle beams stabbed down from high above, hitting targets with pinpoint precision. Armored vehicles and bunkers shuddered as the hell lances tore large holes completely through them.
Alerts were popping up all over the fleet as minor and major systems on a few dozen warships suffered failures or partial failures. Not nearly as many as at Honor, and nothing that would render any ship unable to fight at all, but still a concern. Ironically, but understandably, many of the ships suffering system failures now had avoided major damage during earlier fights. Without immediate need to repair and replace battle damage, their older systems had remained in place and were now showing their age.