“They’ve shown us a weapon,” Captain Kila spoke again. “We can still use it. If we send out detachments to destroy hypernet gates in every Syndic star system with them that we pass near, we can-”
“We can die,” Captain Tulev interrupted. “You saw what happened to the Syndic warships that destroyed the hypernet gate in this star system. How many suicide missions do we launch until we run out of ships?”
“We ask for volunteers,” Kila noted calmly. “This is an unprecedented opportunity to inflict incalculable damage on the Syndicate Worlds.”
“Damage?” Commander Landis of Valiant shook his head. “I want those Syndic bastards to suffer as much as anyone, but wiping out star systems at one blow?”
“You’ve bombarded Syndic worlds,” Captain Armus pointed out.
“Yes, I have,” Landis agreed. “But this was different. I felt sick watching it, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. I’ve fought damned hard for the Alliance. I’ll keep fighting for it as long and as hard as I have to. But I don’t want to see that happen to any more habitable worlds, theirs or ours.”
Kila’s lips bent upward in a brief smile. “That’s all right, Commander. I’m sure we won’t have trouble finding enough volunteers.”
“Even assuming we could find such volunteers,” Geary cut in, “I will not approve or allow suicide missions as long as I command this fleet.”
Commander Vendig of Exemplar spoke quickly. “We could use robotic ships, crewed by artificial intelligence. Pull off the crews, and-”
A chorus of yells drowned out Vendig, one voice rising above the others. “Unleash armed AIs with instructions to wipe out human-occupied star systems? Are you insane?”
Captain Badaya was shaking his head and spoke into the renewed quiet that followed the outburst. “Commander Landis brought up an ugly truth. What happened at Lakota could happen at any Alliance star system with a hypernet gate. If the people of the Alliance see our records of what happened in this star system, they’ll demand that our own hypernet system be shut down. Who wants a bomb that big sitting in their backyard?”
“We can’t just shut the hypernet down,” Captain Cresida interjected. “It’s a finely balanced net of energy. There’s no way just to turn it off.”
“Why the hell did we build it?” someone demanded.
For some reason everyone looked at Geary. He gazed back at them. “Don’t ask me. I wondered the same thing, and I wasn’t around when it was built. But we’re stuck with it, and so are the Syndics.”
“There has to be a solution,” Commander Neeson insisted. “As long as those gates are up, they’re potential weapons. If we could figure out a way to employ them as weapons and hold that threat over them, the Syndics wouldn’t dare-” He paused, looking stricken, and stared around. “They could figure it out, too. The destructive potential of the hypernet gates is vastly greater than any weapons we or the Syndics have been able to employ before. We and the Syndics could literally wipe each other out.”
That cat was now completely out of the bag. Geary nodded. “That had occurred to me. Who wants to start a war of species extinction? Captain Kila?”
Kila looked steadily back at Geary but said nothing. Captain Tulev pointed one finger toward the star display. “Show us, please, Captain Geary. Play back the recording of what happened after the hypernet gate collapsed.”
He didn’t want to view that again, even in miniature, but Geary brought up the records, setting them to play at a vastly accelerated speed so that the shock wave rolled across the image of Lakota Star System in about thirty seconds.
It was quiet after the recording finished, then Tulev indicated where the images of the ruined star system had played out. “We should send this to the Syndics. They don’t have anything like it because so many of their sensors were destroyed by the energy wave. Send it to the ships leaving this star system for help, and to as many others as we can, and make sure they can send it onward.”
“So they can figure out what the gates can do sooner?” Armus asked sarcastically.
“They don’t need our help to do that,” Cresida answered. “They’ve already got records of what happened at Sancere, and even the dimmest mind can look at the damage to Lakota Three, calculate the amount of energy it took to do that, and work back the planet’s orbit and rotation to confirm that what hit it came from the hypernet gate location. But if we send what we have out now, which we can sanitize of any data about the collapse of the hypernet gate that we want to try to keep from the Syndics, it will prove that we didn’t cause all of that destruction.” She glared around the table. “My reputation, like Commander Landis’s, speaks for itself.
I don’t want to be blamed for what happened here. It’s over the line. I’ll kill as many Syndics as I have to kill to win this war. I don’t want to kill any star systems.”
“Yes,” Tulev agreed. “It’s important the Syndics know we didn’t do this, so there will be no popular demand for retaliation in kind. Also important is the impact it will have on the Syndic population.” He gestured at the star display again. “They’ll see it, all over, no matter how much the Syndic leaders try to suppress it. They’ll see what can happen to a planet with a hypernet gate in the same star system. What do the Syndic leaders say then? If they try to blame us, their people in star systems with hypernet gates will fear we could do the same to their worlds. If those leaders try to claim they can stop us, their people will want to know why they didn’t stop us in Lakota. If they say their people need not fear Alliance attacks of this nature because it was not an Alliance attack that caused it, then their people will demand to know what did cause it.”
Everyone thought about that, and grim smiles started appearing on a lot of faces.
“They’ll be in an impossible position,” Badaya noted approvingly. “That’s a brilliant suggestion, Captain Tulev. It will generate intense public worry all through Syndic space and confront the Syndic leaders with serious problems in how to handle mass fear of the hypernet gates.”
Commander Neeson, looking concerned, shook his head. “But what happens when our people hear about it? We can’t keep that news from crossing the border into Alliance space. We’ll face the same problem.”
“Our leaders need to know this problem exists,” Captain Badaya stated. He gave Geary a meaningful look. As far as Badaya was concerned, Geary should be the only leader of the Alliance, a dictator backed by most of this fleet. Commander Yin hadn’t been totally paranoid in her worries, though Geary himself wanted nothing to do with the idea.
“We need to figure out what to do, too,” Badaya continued, “before the Syndics decide to attack our gates.”
Geary frowned, worried again about what the Alliance’s elected leaders might decide, then saw Captain Cresida nodding.
“I think we can counter this threat,” she stated. “I’ve been thinking. We have two experimental results to draw on now, the only two known cases of collapsing hypernet gates. This fleet has the only full sets of observations from both incidents. With that data, I can refine the targeting algorithm we used at Sancere, make it more reliable and more certain to minimize energy output from a collapsing gate.”
“What good does that do?” Badaya demanded. “We can’t get close enough to a Syndic gate to stop them in time, and we don’t want to destroy our own gates.”
“But if the Syndics tried to destroy one of our gates,” Cresida replied, “and we had attached self-destruct charges to all of the gate tethers, tied into an automated safe-collapse program that would trigger if the gate suffered enough damage-”