Desjani’s reaction was quick. “It’s a trap. Or a trick.”
“Could be,” Geary agreed as he accepted the message.
An image of the captain of the Syndic heavy cruiser appeared. She looked defiant but her eyes had a glazed look, as if she were suffering from shock, too. “My ship cannot defend itself against your attack. I am willing to surrender my prisoners in exchange for your agreement for safe passage for my crew. I will remain aboard my ship as a hostage along with the prisoners after my crew evacuates and put up no resistance to whatever boarding parties you send in to take off the prisoners, but if any attempt is made to capture my ship or penetrate beyond the prisoner holding area, I will destroy my ship. Those are my conditions. If you do not accept them, then I will fight to the death of my ship and all who are on it.”
“You won’t get a better offer,” Rione pointed out.
“Or a more dangerous one,” Desjani countered. “She can wait until our ships close to take off the prisoners, then overload her power core.”
It wasn’t an easy decision. Syndics hadn’t exactly proven themselves trustworthy in previous dealings.
“There’s something about this one,” Geary commented. “Look at her eyes. She’s seriously rattled by something.”
Desjani’s own eyes narrowed as she studied the Syndic commander. “They won here. It is odd to see her looking so dazed. Maybe she got hurt during the battle.”
“Maybe.” Everyone was waiting. Only he could decide this one. Again. He remembered Colonel Carabali’s comment about making decisions about who lives and who dies. He didn’t want to have to do that again, but he had to. “All right. I’m going to agree to her terms. It’s the only possible way to save the prisoners on her ship unless we abandon them and let the cruiser get away.”
Desjani kept her face impassive, her fingers running across her display. “Recommend you use Rifle and Culverin from the destroyers heading to intercept the heavy cruiser. They’ll have to swing very close, match vectors, then put lines across and manually transfer the prisoners. Send the rest of the squadron to watch over the Syndic escape pods as a threat.”
Geary nodded approvingly. “What about the light cruisers?”
“Have them dance around the heavy cruiser,” Desjani advised. “Create the impression they might get a lot closer, and if the Syndics are planning to blow the heavy cruiser, that might make them wait in hopes of bagging some of our light cruisers.”
“All right.”
Close to two hours later, Rifle and Culverin sidled up to the Syndic heavy cruiser, carefully matching their speed and direction exactly to that of the enemy warship. When they were done, the three warships were still hurtling at tremendous velocity through space, but relative to each other they were all motionless, as if the three ships were hanging unmoving in the vastness of space. A short distance from the Syndic heavy cruiser, Rifle, and Culverin, a small cluster of Syndic escape pods marked the escaping crew of the cruiser.
The destroyers and the Syndic heavy cruiser were almost forty light-minutes distant from the main body of the Alliance fleet at that point. Task Force Illustrious had fallen back even farther, more than a light-hour distant, as it braked to pick up Alliance escape pods. The fleet’s main body had already swept over and smashed another Syndic heavy cruiser and light cruiser that had been damaged in the earlier battle, and was less than five light-minutes from a crippled Syndic battle cruiser, which seemed to be awaiting its fate with grim determination.
Unable to intervene at this point, Geary watched lines go across to the Syndic heavy cruiser from his destroyers, watched the very distant figures of sailors in survival suits sailing across on the lines, then after an agonizing wait more figures in survival suits came out of the Syndic cruiser, making their way to the destroyers. Eventually the suits stopped, and the lines were reeled in, then the destroyers accelerated away. “How many?”
“Fleet sensors counted thirty-six more coming off than boarded, sir.”
“Thirty-six.” He shrugged to Desjani. “Looks like a Syndic kept her word.”
“We’ll see what the commanding officers of Rifle and Culverin report when their message gets here in another forty minutes,” Desjani grumbled.
Five minutes after that, as the Alliance light cruisers and destroyers raced back toward the main body of the fleet, and the Syndic escape pods kept heading for safety, the Syndic heavy cruiser vanished in a flare of light. “The power core did overload. Why then?” Desjani wondered. “A mistimed booby trap?”
“Maybe. If so, lucky it happened after everyone was clear.” He wondered what had happened to the Syndic commanding officer who had promised to remain aboard her ship. Less than twenty minutes later the Alliance fleet raced across the track of the first damaged Syndic battle cruiser. With no time or fuel cells to waste, Geary simply ordered a half dozen battleships to divert their courses enough for close-in passes on the crippled Syndic warship. Even though the Syndics still had some weapons firing, the Alliance battleships easily crashed the enemy shields as point-blank hell-lance fire methodically smashed the battle cruiser to scrap. “All systems dead on enemy battle cruiser. Crew abandoning ship.”
Desjani hummed a little tune as she watched the wreck of the Syndic battle cruiser tumble in the wake of the Alliance fleet.
Soon afterward, a report arrived from Rifle. The destroyer’s captain seemed bemused as he reported.
“We have fifteen liberated prisoners aboard, Captain Geary. Several have serious injuries that have only received triage treatment. We also have the commanding officer of the Syndic cruiser. She requested to be taken prisoner. Request instructions on where to deliver her and the injured Alliance personnel.”
Desjani was staring at the message window. “First some of our own liberated prisoners ask us to arrest them, and now a Syndic officer asks to be taken prisoner. Has the universe gone mad?”
“She must have had a reason,” Rione insisted. “Captain Geary, we need that Syndic on this ship so she can be interrogated. I have a strong suspicion that we need to know whatever she does about what happened here.”
Geary looked a question at Desjani, who immediately nodded. “Dauntless can take care of the wounded, and we have a cell available for the Syndic.”
He sent a reply, ordering Rifle to close on Dauntless so a shuttle could transfer the personnel, then sending Culverin to Amazon since that battleship had relatively few injured personnel.
“We paid a price for this,” Desjani noted. “The light cruisers and destroyers we sent on that jaunt are going to be well under twenty percent fuel-cell reserves when we jump out of here. Rifle may be down to fifteen percent.” She flipped one hand in a dismissive gesture. “Oh, well. Once our ships get to zero, they can’t get any lower.”
“I hope that was intended as a joke,” Geary said.
“Yes, sir. Whistling past the black hole.”
“WHAT were your orders?”
The Syndic commander who had been captain of the heavy cruiser gazed back levelly at Lieutenant Iger from her seat within the interrogation room on Dauntless. “I am a citizen of the Syndicate Worlds.”
“Was your ship part of the reserve flotilla?”