“I am not the person to discuss your personal relationship problems with. She is the one you need to talk to.”
“I can’t. Not for another week. I just hope I say the right things then.”
Rione shook her head again, but before leaving gave Geary a sharp look. “Follow your instincts, Admiral.”
After Rione had left, Geary sat for a while, thinking, then left his stateroom, walking through the passageways of Dauntless, the passageways filled even at this late hour with excited crew members talking about going home and the end of the war. They looked at him not with hope now but with thanks, and that was much easier for Geary to endure even though he made a point always to tell them that they had won the war and all of the victories leading to its end. He had just been fortunate enough to lead them.
Geary went all the way down to the worship spaces, crowded with those giving thanks to higher powers than mere admirals, and found a room for himself. Inside, he sat for a while in the solitude before lighting the candle and speaking to his long-dead brother. “I still sometimes wonder if it’s all real. From commanding officer of a single heavy cruiser to commanding officer of a fleet a lot bigger than anything the Alliance could muster in my own time. Who would have thought that I’d be stuck with trying to save that fleet lost far behind enemy lines, that I’d be expected to save the Alliance? I know your granddaughter Jane says you always told her I was what the legend said, but you and I both know better. I’m just me. I don’t know how I got through this, but I do know I had a lot of help.
“Tell your grandson Michael I’m sorry. He was a fine officer. He was a real hero. We’re bringing some of the crew from Repulse home with us. They were still being held in the Syndic home star system. They can’t confirm he died, but none of them think he could’ve gotten off the ship alive. I will always regret not being able to save him.
“Your granddaughter Jane is a fine woman. I’ll try to look out for her. But she’s a Geary. Stubborn and willful. I don’t know if she’ll stay in the fleet now, or leave it to become an architect.
“Now she has a choice. So do Michael’s kids. I thank the living stars that I was able to do that.”
“Admiral, the last units of the fleet have assumed their assigned orbits in Varandal Star System.”
“Thank you.” The comm panel in his stateroom went dark again, and Geary looked toward the display floating over the table. Dauntless and a number of other warships had been in position not far from Ambaru station for more than half a day. Shuttles had already taken some personnel from Dauntless to the station for official business or to start long-postponed personal leave. But other warships had taken more time to reach their assigned orbits, some of them near different orbital stations. The fleet was large enough that no one wanted to overwhelm one or two facilities with the amount of personnel traffic all of the warships would generate.
That was it, then. The orders and plans he had worked up for the fleet once it got back had been sent and set in motion. He had now satisfied everything, his promises, his sense of duty, his honor, and the conditions to which the grand council had agreed. Even the threat of a military coup had vanished for the moment, with Badaya and his allies convinced that every important decision was covertly being made by Geary and more than satisfied by the formal end of the war. Geary reached up and removed the admiral of the fleet insignia, not without a pang of regret since Tanya had pinned them on. He stood before the mirror for a moment, attaching his captain’s insignia.
Geary looked around his stateroom on Dauntless, the starscape on one bulkhead, the chairs, the table over which he had worked out countless simulations and battle plans. Except for the couple of weeks before Admiral Bloch died, this had been Geary’s home in this time. His only home in this time.
He was going to leave it for a while. Surely the Alliance owed him a few weeks to rest, and things couldn’t go awry in such a short time. He wondered where to go in Alliance space and what to do there. Everywhere there would be people wanting to mob him, and all he wanted to do was find someplace to hide for a little while, to not have to worry for a brief period about grand decisions or the fates of warships and the Alliance.
Not alone, hopefully. There was someone to whom he could finally speak his heart. Though Tanya Desjani had definitely been avoiding him the last couple of days. Maybe she had felt the same way he had, fighting off an urge to blurt out feelings just a short while before they could honorably speak of them.
Even though he was leaving the ship, he was certain that he’d be back on Dauntless. The Alliance was surely going to be calling on Black Jack again because the universe hadn’t been tied up in a neat package. Just how much the Alliance could or should do inside the mess that had once been the Syndicate Worlds was very much open to question, but Geary had no doubt that the fleet would be called upon. If nothing else, there were a lot of Alliance prisoners of war stranded among the wreckage of the Syndicate Worlds, people to be found and brought home.
And the aliens remained, still far too little known about them, a lingering threat on the far side of Syndic space, doubtless watching humanity, doubtless coming up with new tricks to cause humanity to work against itself, perhaps planning new offensives of their own, their feelings about their own recent losses as unknown as just about everything else about them. What lay beyond the aliens remained a mystery as well. Where there was one nonhuman intelligent race, there could be many others.
No. History hadn’t come to a happy end. But he’d saved the fleet. He’d stopped the war. He had done more than he had believed possible.
Geary did a final check of his message queue, ignoring the long list of transmissions from fleet headquarters. Whatever they were would wait. He was certain that at least one of the messages would be notifying him of a promotion back to admiral, and at least one other would contain orders for him, but the grand council and fleet headquarters had outwitted themselves by giving the messages all standard priorities and innocuous titles. That had been intended to keep him from guessing what was in those messages before he read them, but it also offered him a perfect excuse not to read them since none of them looked important. I may be just a fleet officer, but I’m not a dumb fleet officer, especially not after hanging around Rione and watching her at work.
Geary tapped out a quick message to his chain of command.
In accordance with agreements made earlier, I hereby relinquish my temporary war rank, revert to my permanent rank of captain, and yield command of the fleet. In my last acts as Admiral of the Fleet, I have authorized myself thirty days of leave beginning today, and hereby temporarily transfer command of the fleet to Admiral Timbale pending any decisions in that regard by fleet headquarters and the Alliance grand council.
Very respectfully,
Ordering the message actually to be transmitted in ten hours, he headed out to look for Desjani.
But as his hatch opened, Victoria Rione was standing there, eyeing him with an enigmatic look. “Going somewhere?” she asked.
“As a matter of fact, yes. If you don’t mind—”
“They haven’t promoted you back to admiral yet?”
“The promotion message is probably in my in-box, doubtless along with messages containing orders for me to report somewhere and command something, but I have no intention of reading any of those messages for the next thirty days. As far as I know, I’m a captain, and I have no obligations stopping me from taking leave.” Geary gave Rione a half-annoyed, half-apologetic look. “I have to go.”