“I think our fleet will achieve its objectives, General. I don’t expect to survive that. I don’t think many of us will. Maybe none.”
“That’s what I thought.” Charban shrugged. “At least I can stop worrying about why I survived earlier battles when others did not. This will simplify my life though, of course, I will no longer be alive to benefit from that. We’ll see how the Dancers feel about this kind of fight.”
That done, Geary looked over at Tanya. “Regrets?”
“I’m doing what I love, Admiral.” She looked at him, then smiled. “And in good company.”
“Me, too.”
“I need more time, Admiral,” Rione’s image insisted with a fierce intensity unlike her usual cool outward demeanor. “I think I can find what we need. But I require more time than you are allowing. I must have that time.”
They were still a couple of light-minutes from the government facility. The four-minute delays between each statement and the reply being received made the conversation awkward but not intolerable. “I can’t give you more time,” Geary said. “If you haven’t found anything yet, odds are there is nothing to find. Maybe Admiral Bloch has the codes and hasn’t coughed them up. You can try to convince him to do that. The dark ship battle cruiser he is on has survived so far, and despite his talk about risking a shuttle journey to join our fleet, Bloch didn’t make any moves to do that during any of our engagements so far.
“It would be good to have access to that gate so we could get Mistral out of here fast, but it’s not critical that we use the hypernet gate. It is critical that Mistral take advantage of the opportunity to get back within the protection of our warships while the dark ships are preoccupied with destroying Invincible. The bottom line is that Mistral needs to pull out when I ordered so that we have a chance to get her out of this star system. And you and your husband need to be on Mistral.”
Rione did not reply. He imagined she was angry, but he had no emotional stress left unused to devote to worrying about that.
About an hour later, the Alliance formations swung by the government facility. The dark ships had surely reached Invincible by now, but the light from their attack had not yet traveled all the way from that location to where Geary’s fleet could see it. The Alliance sensors could only see images nearly an hour old of the dark ships closing in on the alien superbattleship. Odds were that the dark ships had actually finished their attacks on Invincible and were already on their way back to deal with Geary’s forces again.
Mistral shot out of the dock, accelerating as rapidly as she could to rejoin the other warships. “Mission completed as ordered,” Commander Young’s image told Geary.
Next to her, Colonel Rico nodded. He looked like someone who had been wearing battle armor for hours and was, in fact, still in it, just his face shield opened. “We have multiple copies of everything in every record file in every storage source aboard that facility, Admiral. There were also papers.”
“Papers?” Geary asked. “What kind of papers?”
“Papers with records on them, and orders, and information,” Rico clarified.
“Really? I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like that.”
“My hack and cracks think the paper records were used instead of digital files to limit any chance of the information being copied or leaked,” Rico explained. “We discovered something else about their security precautions when we looked outside the facility using the sensors on it. They showed us a star system with only one star, Alpha. Beta was completely screened out, gravitational effects and everything. I bet it was the same way on any ships bringing in people and taking them back. Probably only a few people out of everyone sent here ever knew it was a binary.”
“Clever,” Geary said.
“Yes, sir,” Commander Young agreed. “Some people have gotten entirely too comfortable with the idea of making everyone else see only what is wanted.”
“We brought the private security guards out,” Rico added, “including the body of the one we had to shoot. The guards are prisoners, but they’re not giving us any trouble. They figure we saved them. We’ve also locked up the people who were prisoners aboard the facility. We don’t know why they had been locked up, so we’re not taking chances.”
“That can be sorted out later. What about the suits?” Geary asked.
“Locked in the highest-security cells on Mistral,” Commander Young answered. “The Marines, my masters-at-arms, and our medical personnel gave all of the suits a good going-over before we locked them up to ensure no one had suicide capability on them or in them. I don’t know if all of them are a threat, either. Some of the suits are acting like people who were asking themselves questions even before we showed up.”
“What about codes for the hypernet gate?” Geary said. He already knew what the answer must be because no one had led with that information, but still asked in a sort of forlorn hope.
“No, sir. We didn’t find them. Former Senator Rione thought she had a lead, but there wasn’t any more time.”
“Where is Rione?”
Commander Young checked a display on her ship. “In her stateroom, with her husband. He’s in really bad shape, Admiral. I think that hit her real hard. She’s got a comm block on the stateroom, but I can override it if you need to talk to her.”
“No,” Geary said. “If she had found anything, she would have already told me.”
He had considered having Mistral join Gamma One, positioned near Dauntless, but realized that putting two high-value targets right next to each other would be tempting fate, or at least tempting the dark ships. Instead, Geary ordered Mistral to join with Gamma Three, taking up position near Dreadnaught.
“Admiral, we have our answer from the Dancers,” Charban said. “It’s an odd little song to human ears, but it comes down to a statement that they were sent to stop the dark ships, and they will stay and fight to complete that mission.”
“Thank them for me,” Geary said. “Can we tell the Dancers that we are honored to fight alongside them?”
“Yes,” Charban replied, his expression thoughtful. “It should take the form of saying that we and they belong together in the pattern, I think. Something like that. I’ll put something suitable together.”
“And what have our honored fighting companions said about their undisclosed-until-now ability to activate Kick and Alliance ship systems from very long distances?”
Charban smiled. “I think they may have been embarrassed to be called on that. The answer they gave is that the methods they use are easily overridden by supervisors, whether human or Kick. On the targeted system, if there is someone present to override what looks like a glitch, it is too subtle to be identified as intrusion. But it is also far too weak to work on any system being monitored for glitches. I naturally asked why their methods could not work on the dark ships, and the Dancers replied that the AIs on the dark ships act as supervisors or monitors. The term they used actually translated as ‘over-minds.’ It is, therefore, a potentially valuable capability, but only when dealing with something lacking an operator, human or Kick or artificial.”
Fifteen minutes after the fleet passed the orbiting facility, the light finally reached them from the dark ship attack on Invincible. Despite the millions of kilometers between where the Alliance ships were and the site of the attack, the optical sensors aboard the fleet’s ships could get crystal-clear images through the emptiness of space.