The senators looked back at him as if they had never considered that question before.
The next day, they arrived at Sol.
All signs of merriment and celebration had vanished except for a single stuffed bunny that a hell-lance battery had adopted as a mascot. But those weapons were powered down for arrival, as were all other weapons aboard Dauntless. The shields were at full strength, because that was a necessary secondary protection against radiation and other hazards to navigation, but otherwise the warship was in as peaceful a configuration as a battle cruiser could be.
“I don’t like it,” Desjani grumbled for the hundredth time as she sat on the bridge.
“The requirements for entering Sol don’t allow for exceptions,” Geary reminded her for at least the fiftieth time. “And Sol Star System is demilitarized. There are no weapons and no threats.”
“There is no place where humans are that fits that description,” Desjani objected.
“Two minutes to hypernet exit,” Lieutenant Castries announced.
Near her, the three senators jostled each other for position near the single observer seat on the bridge. Rione and Charban were also on the bridge for the historic moment, but well off to one side where Lieutenant Yuon had made some room for them.
The last minute passed in silence, everyone lost in their own thoughts.
Nothing was abruptly replaced by Everything as they left the hypernet. Off to one side, a distant spark of light marked Sol, the home star of humanity.
But Geary couldn’t spare time to sightsee. Instead, his eyes went to another part of his display, where warning signs had sprung to life on a dozen warships of unfamiliar design.
Sixteen
“I told you!” Desjani said. “It’s a good thing they’re too far away to pose an immediate threat!”
“They’re not Syndics,” Lieutenant Yuon reported, bewildered.
Orbiting half a light-hour past the gate, the strange warships were too distant to attack, but their presence here was inexplicable.
Aside from those ships, all of the other space traffic in Sol Star System looked routine. Merchant ships swung between planets, faster couriers and passenger ships were on flatter trajectories, and near most of the worlds orbiting Sol smaller craft could be seen dipping into and out of planetary atmospheres.
Geary sat, his eyes on his display, letting his thoughts settle as he took in everything, trying not to be distracted by the names of the planets, which had assumed the status of legend. Mars. Jupiter. Venus. Old Earth itself. Dauntless sailed among the monuments to humanity’s first achievements, mankind’s first steps into space. But amidst those fabled names and worlds were warships of unknown origin and intentions. “Does anybody know what we’re dealing with here?” he finally asked.
Senator Suva sounded and looked bewildered. “Sol Star System is neutral and demilitarized. Only… only ceremonial military forces are ever allowed here.”
“These do not appear to be ceremonial,” Rione answered. “You do not recognize them, Admiral?”
“No. Neither do our combat systems.” Dauntless’s sensors were evaluating everything they could see on the mystery warships, but even though tentative identifications of sensors and weapons sites were appearing on their hulls, the SHIP TYPE and SHIP ALLEGIANCE tags on the displays remained blank.
“Syndics,” Costa declared. “They modified some of their designs—”
“Our systems could spot that easily,” Geary said, trying not to sound dismissive of the senator. “They are not Syndics.”
A virtual window appeared near Geary, revealing Lieutenant Iger. “Sir, nothing matching those warships is in any of our intelligence databases.”
“Are they human?”
“Definitely human, sir. Even though we can’t identify the ships, there are some design features on their hulls that hint at their origin.” Lieutenant Iger looked unhappy as he spoke his next words. “Sol.”
“Sol?” Geary did his best not to sound angry at Iger. “Everything human came from Sol. Are you saying these warships belong to Sol?”
“No, sir. But they are human in origin.”
Geary glanced at the six Dancer ships surrounding Dauntless. Iger’s information wasn’t as useless as it had seemed at first. “That’s as near as you can identify them? Just a common origin at Sol?”
“If the design features we see are being interpreted correctly,” Iger said, “the design of those warships and the designs we’re familiar with diverged at Sol.”
“There is nothing unusual being broadcast in the star system ‘notices to shipping,’” Lieutenant Yuon reported. “The notices provide the same language about the star system being demilitarized that we have in our procedures for entering Sol Star System.”
“And yet there they are.” Desjani grimaced. “Six of them are big, but smaller than us. Not heavy cruisers, and not battleships. Sort of like those scout battleships the Alliance tried.”
“The ones that got wiped out in battle?” Geary asked, even though he knew the answer.
“Yeah, those.” She tapped a quick command. “Whatever these are, they’re a bit smaller than the Alliance scout battleships. Hard to tell yet what kind of armor they’ve got.”
“We’ll have to watch how they maneuver,” Lieutenant Iger chimed in. “That will give us some means to calculate their mass. Any mass in excess of a reasonable estimate for that size ship will likely represent armor.”
“What about the smaller ships?” Geary asked. His display was rapidly filling in details on the six escorts with the six bigger warships, showing barracuda shapes reminiscent of Alliance destroyers and Syndic Hunter-Killers, but not as large as either. “They’ve got less mass than even Syndic HuKs.”
“Corvettes?” Desjani guessed. “No. They’re even smaller than the Syndic Nickel corvettes.”
“Who do they belong to?” Senator Suva demanded. “You should know that! How can you not know that?”
Geary sighed and rubbed his forehead with one hand. “Senator, wherever these ships came from is not anywhere that the Alliance has current information on.”
“Where would that be?”
“I think I know.” Everyone’s attention centered on Senator Sakai. “I have studied much history,” he said. “Including the period when humanity first left Sol. The ships from Sol went in all directions, but there were two main paths. One path led inward along the spiral arm of the galaxy in which we reside. That resulted in the colonies near Sol in that direction, then the Alliance, the other groupings of star systems such as the Callas Republic and the Rift Federation, and beyond that the Syndicate Worlds. The other path led outward along our arm of the galaxy. Some of the earliest human colonies sprang into existence there. Perhaps these ships come from stars on the other side of the expansion from the one we occupy.”
Geary tapped in the same queries that everyone else was, seeing an image of the galaxy appear near his display with human-occupied space highlighted upon it. The image gave him momentary pause. We think we’ve come so far. In human terms, we have. Hundreds of light-years. Unimaginable distances. But lay out the region of the galaxy that we have explored and occupied, and it is just a small piece of one portion of that galaxy, which itself is but one of countless other galaxies. I’m used to space being huge, but even for me it is impossible to grasp how HUGE the universe is.
Rione commented first. “I never realized how lopsided human expansion has been. In terms of stars and distance, the vast majority has been inward toward the center of the galaxy. We’ve spread up and down and inward. I always assumed we started expanding in those directions. But my data says we first started going outward.”