Senator Wilkes glowered at Geary, plainly searching for words, but Navarro spoke first. “You have attacked the honor of one of the Admiral’s officers,” he chided Wilkes, speaking as if to a small child. “I have no doubt the Admiral will do exactly as he promised to defend that officer. Are we ready to have all of that information publicly disclosed?”
“Are there not restrictions on what can be discussed?” Costa asked.
“What restrictions and pertaining to what information?” Senator Suva demanded.
A few silent seconds passed as senators exchanged meaningful looks, then Wilkes waved an irritated hand. “We can discuss it later. I cannot see what possible benefit the Alliance gains from leaving a senior fleet officer deep in enemy territory.”
“We’ve already gained some very important information from her,” Rione said. “Thanks to Captain Bradamont, we have confirmed that the Syndics have learned how to selectively block access to individual gates in their hypernet.”
“I saw that in your reporting,” Navarro said, leaning back and eyeing Rione and Geary keenly. “That is extremely important. How do they do it?”
“We don’t know. It’s obviously something our hypernet experts should be looking into.”
Senator Unruh shook her head. “Government-funded hypernet research has been drastically scaled back in order to save money.” She turned a long, slow look at her fellow senators. “How fortunate that Admiral Geary also brought back a Syndic-designed system to prevent gates from being collapsed by remote signals. How fortunate that the Syndics continue to invest in research that we have decided is beyond the proper scope of the Alliance government.”
“We’ve been over this,” Suva complained. “We have to set priorities.”
“Our fleet was almost trapped again deep in enemy territory,” Unruh said. “I wonder at the priorities that produce such great benefits and advantages to our enemies.”
Suva’s face flushed with anger. “Are you implying that I—”
“I’m certain that Senator Unruh is not implying anything about anyone,” Senator Navarro said.
“If I were, I certainly wouldn’t be limiting the implications to one senator,” Unruh said.
“From what we could learn,” Geary said to fill the awkward silence that followed Unruh’s statement, “our best estimate is that the Syndics can’t tell who is trying to use a gate. All they can do is block a gate to access, which will only benefit them if they know where we are and where we need to go. They had that advantage at Midway. Even if we face that situation again, we now know that we can use jumps to reach other gates and zigzag our way through their space without following a path they want us to take.”
“A path littered with traps,” Costa growled.
“Are we at peace with the Syndicate Worlds or not?” Suva asked, sounding almost plaintive.
“We’re at peace,” Navarro replied. “I don’t think the Syndics are.”
“We brought back two prisoners taken aboard Invincible,” Geary pointed out.
“Who can tell us nothing,” Navarro said with obvious distaste. “They’ve been mentally conditioned so severely that one has gone catatonic on us, and the second is barely functional. We can’t prove any official Syndic involvement in that or the other attacks.”
“Screw proof! We know the truth! They need to be destroyed. We need to finish them,” Costa insisted.
“We can’t break the peace agreement!” Senator Suva cried. “The people would not stand for it!”
A babble of voices sounded as senators broke in from all sides.
“What peace?”
“Ask the people of the Alliance!”
“We can’t restart the war! The government would collapse!”
“Fellow Senators,” Sakai said in a calm voice that somehow carried over that of his colleagues. “As has been noted, we must at a minimum pursue the liberation of those Alliance citizens still held within Syndic and formerly Syndic space before we give the Syndics legal grounds to discard the peace agreement. Perhaps we should move on to another topic.”
Geary waited while the senators considered Sakai’s advice. He wondered if any of the senators could tell that he was nervous, that he was worried that someone would ask what the rulers of Midway had asked of him in exchange for the Syndic device that would prevent a gate collapse by remote signal.
But the grand council lacked any desire to keep talking about the hypernet.
“Well,” Navarro said, “there is some good news. We need to talk about that. We have a vast amount of, um, Kick technology in that captured warship. We should be able to learn a lot about them.”
“We would have learned much more if we could talk to living individuals of that race,” Senator Suva muttered loudly.
Rione forestalled Geary’s reflexive response with a hand gesture. “We tried,” she told Suva and the others. “We tried in every way we could.”
“The specialists you had with you,” Suva said pointedly, “are saying you failed to try several methods that might have worked.”
“Some of them may be saying that now, but they certainly didn’t propose any such methods at the time,” Rione said. “I personally asked more than once. If some of our academic experts now claim to have known of other methods to communicate with the Kicks, they must have deliberately withheld their suggestions. You might ask them why they did that.”
Navarro grimaced, tapping his hand lightly against the table. “I suspect those experts had no more ideas than you did. I can’t think of anything you didn’t try. Maybe we’ll figure out how to wake up the two living Kicks we do have.”
“I strongly advise against that,” Geary said. “They’ll suicide.”
“The decision may not be ours, Admiral. What’s this I heard about ghosts on that captured ship?”
“There’s something strange on Invincible,” Geary said. “It manifests as if Kick ghosts were crowding around you. I don’t recommend going anywhere on that ship alone. The sensation gets overwhelming very fast.”
“They had a device,” Unruh said softly, “that would protect planets from space bombardment. Is there anything aboard that ship that will show us how to do the same?”
Geary could feel the wave of hope that radiated from the entire grand council. How many billions had died in orbital bombardments since humanity had learned how to go into space and use that ability to drop rocks on the surface of worlds? He shook his head, hating to crush the hopes of the senators. “I don’t know. Their technology, the way they build equipment, is very different from ours in many ways. I do know even the largest Kick ships, like Invincible, did not have that defense against kinetic projectiles. The fleet’s engineers speculate that the defense may require an immense amount of power, or a very large mass like a planet or minor planet. But the bottom line is that we just don’t know. For obvious reasons, we didn’t want to fiddle with the Kick equipment on Invincible to see what it could do.”
“Do we have to use the insulting name ‘Kicks’?” asked Senator Suva. “And why do you keep referring to the ship we took from them using a fleet name?”
“I can call them bear-cows if that’s more acceptable,” Geary said, not wanting to get into useless debate over that issue. “We don’t know what they call themselves. As for why I call the ship Invincible, it’s because it was as Invincible that she came through the voyage back here, and more than one Marine died defending her as Invincible.”