“So you told me.” Geary sat down, rubbing his forehead. “I’ve sounded out some other officers. They all agree that I could get away with it, but it would both frighten those who think I want to be a dictator and encourage everyone who wants me to be a dictator. Both things could trigger more events that I really don’t want. I need more justification.”
“That justification may involve more deaths,” Rione emphasized.
“I know that. Acting prematurely might cause even more. I take it your spies still have nothing to report?”
“No.” She frowned. “The fleet is buzzing over the shuttle accident, but it all seems to be surprise and conjecture over how the fuel-cell failure could have happened. No one seems to be openly implying that you might have had a role in it, since everyone else seems smarter than Numos and knows you didn’t need to blow up a shuttle if you wanted Casia and Yin both dead. The silence is deafening among your opponents in this fleet. I wish I knew what that meant.”
He studied her for almost a minute before asking a question that had been bothering him. “Why didn’t you ever tell me that some of those opposed to my commanding this fleet were motivated by fear of my becoming a dictator?”
Rione made a dismissive gesture. “Because their exact motives didn’t make any practical difference.”
“You were willing to kill me to prevent me from becoming a dictator.” She didn’t answer, and Geary felt the need to amend his statement. “I suppose you still are willing to do that if you think it becomes necessary. But I think their exact motive did matter if it was the same as yours. Why didn’t they contact you since your loyalty to the Alliance is so well-known? Or did they contact you?”
She laughed. “Getting paranoid? I’ll make a politician of you yet. No, John Geary, they didn’t. I’m convinced that our motives only partly coincided at any point. That is, both they and I don’t want you to be a dictator. But I also want the elected government of the Alliance to remain in power. I suspect that your foes such as the late Commander Yin and her friends believe in the need for a military dictator. They just don’t want you to be that dictator.”
That made sense. “Like Falco. Some other senior officer who thinks the way to save the Alliance is to overthrow its government.” Rione nodded. “I have increasing trouble believing that they are backing Numos though. That interview just confirmed for me that he’s too arrogant to make a decent pawn, and too dumb to function on his own. But he makes trouble for me, and that probably makes him useful to them.”
“That could well be true,” she said. “I think your assessment is right, that the conspirators are happy to take advantage of Numos’s hostility to you but that Numos is too prideful and unimaginative ever to work as a puppet for them. I suppose in that light there’s not much sense in pushing to have him interrogated quickly.”
“Yeah. I’ll bet he doesn’t know a thing that’ll help us.” Geary stared at the star display, feeling a need to bring something else up. “How many officers in this fleet are willing to back a dictatorship? I’ve been told it’s a strong majority, so maybe I should ask how many aren’t willing to do that, since that seems to be a much smaller number. Duellos wouldn’t, I don’t think Tulev would, or Cresida-”
“Don’t be so sure about Cresida,” Rione objected. “And I’m a little uncertain about Tulev now. Even before you miraculously returned from the dead, the civilian government was increasingly worried about the loyalty of its officer corps. It’s our own fault. We know that. They’re on the front lines, watching their friends and comrades die, and we can’t tell them that it’s bringing us any closer to victory. It’s been that way for a century. Their grandfathers and grandmothers, their fathers and mothers, watched comrades die or died themselves in the same war. I’m sometimes surprised that our elected government has managed to survive a war this long.”
“Has our government made that many mistakes?”
She waved an angry hand. “It’s made its share of mistakes. So has the military. But it’s not about that. It’s about frustration. A century of war and no end in sight. People want something, anything, that would hold out hope for an end to it.” Rione shook her head at Geary. “And then you show up. The hero who legend decreed would return to save the Alliance in its hour of greatest need. Do you wonder that so many are looking to you?”
“That hero is a myth,” Geary insisted.
“Not entirely, no, and in any event, what you think scarcely matters. It’s what everyone else thinks. You can save the Alliance. Or you can destroy it. It took me a while to put that together. You embody the ancient duality, the preserver on one side and the destroyer on the other. I saw the destroyer at first, then I saw the preserver, and now I see both.” She shook her head again. “I don’t envy you having to personify those two contrary roles, but that’s what comes with being the legendary hero.”
“I never volunteered to be a legendary hero!” Geary stood up and began pacing angrily again. “You did this to me, the government, while I drifted around Grendel Star System in survival sleep, making me into every schoolkid’s greatest idol so you’d have something to keep inspiring people to fight.”
“The Alliance government created a myth, John Geary. You’re real, and you have the real power to preserve or destroy the Alliance. If you haven’t fully accepted that yet, do it now.”
He stopped pacing and gave her a sour look. “I’ve never been the type to believe I was sent by the living stars to save the universe, or even just the Alliance.”
Rione raised an eyebrow at him. “That may be the only thing that keeps you from destroying the Alliance. Maybe that’s why you were chosen.”
“Don’t tell me that you’re starting to believe that, too!” Geary made a frustrated gesture. “I get too much of that as it is.”
“I thought you liked it when your special captain gazed at you with those worshipful eyes,” Rione observed.
“No, I don’t, and no, she doesn’t. And why the hell are we talking about Captain Desjani all of a sudden?”
Instead of answering, Rione simply stood up. “I have some other business to attend to. You’re still going to jump the fleet to Branwyn as scheduled?”
“Yes,” Geary snapped, still aggravated with her. “We’ll be at the jump point in four days, barring any more ‘accidents. ’ ”
She was heading for the hatch but paused to look back at him. “I would have tried to stop it if I’d known someone was going to sabotage that shuttle. Yes, I thought Casia and Yin should die because of their actions and because I saw them as a threat to the Alliance, but I wouldn’t have let a number of innocent people be killed.”
He stared at her. “It never occurred to me to think you would have.”
“Sooner or later, it would’ve occurred to you.”
Geary kept looking at the hatch after she had left, realizing that she was right, and wondering why sometimes his allies scared him as much as his enemies.
THE transmission from what had once been the habitable world in Lakota Star System was streaked with interference, the sound portion garbled by static. Geary tapped the control to apply enhancement filters, and the image cleared, the sound now audible, though with occasional odd gaps as attempts by the software to guess which word to use came up blank.
A man stood in the front of the image, behind him a table at which a half dozen other men and women sat. All of them looked as if they’d been wearing the same clothing for days, and as if those days had been arduous ones. They were in some room without visible windows, whose construction and fittings conveyed a feeling of being an underground shelter.
The man spoke with weary desperation, blinking with fatigue. “We are appealing to any ships in this star system to carry news of our disaster to authorities who can provide aid. Lakota Three is undergoing intense storm activity. Estimates are that between ten and twenty percent of the atmosphere is gone. Lakota star’s output may be fluctuating, causing more havoc on this world. Most electrical systems on the planet were destroyed by the energy pulse that struck us. We’re incapable of estimating the number of dead but it surely runs into many millions. We’ve been unable to establish contact with anyone in the hemisphere that faced the energy pulse. The survivors in this hemisphere are in desperate need of food, shelter, and other necessities. Please notify anyone who can help.”