The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Guardian

“We need at least one of the Alliance government emissaries to sign off on the idea, or it won’t work. I’ll show them the pitch Colonel Malin made and see what they say.”

“That should be interesting. I’ll want to know how they react to the suggestion that you use this plot as an excuse to actually destroy Boyens’s battleship.” Desjani gave him a wry look. “Speaking of which, you didn’t seem to enjoy the attention Colonel Morgan was giving you.”

“She wasn’t—”

“Oh, yeah. Not at all. Hey, Mr. Admiral. Want a bite of the apple? Just give me a wink.”

“I didn’t—”

“No, you didn’t. You have more sense than that.”

“Tanya, I’m sure she didn’t know I was married.”

“Ancestors preserve us! Do you really think she would have cared?” Desjani paused as she was about to head back to the bridge, her attitude that of someone fighting an internal struggle. “Before you make a decision on this, you need to come with me.” She didn’t say anything more as he followed, puzzled, until they reached her stateroom. “We’ll risk gossip for a few minutes of privacy because we need that.”

“Why?” He had rarely been inside her stateroom, maintaining that distance for the sake of discipline.

“Inside.” Tanya waited until Geary had entered, then closed and sealed the hatch. She stood for a moment before speaking, running one hand through her hair. “Look, I know a lot of the things we’ve done, and by we I mean the people of this time, violate your sense of honor.”

“You stopped—”

“Wait.” She dropped her hand and looked at him with a frank expression. “If you want that Syndic battleship gone, there’s a way to do it without leaving any fingerprints or cooperating with people who say they aren’t Syndics anymore but still think like Syndics.”

“And by gone you mean . . . ?”

“Destroyed.” Tanya walked a few paces, turned, and walked back. “You know what it’s like. Sometimes you have to do things. Things you’ve been ordered not to do. And you have to know how to do those things anyway, without leaving any records or traces of what was done.”

Geary watched her, baffled. “Are you saying that, with all of the records automatically created and maintained on every single detail of what every ship in the Alliance fleet does for every moment of its existence, that there is a way to conduct an operation as major as destroying a Syndic battleship without leaving any indications of what was done?”

She gave an apologetic shrug. “Yes.”

“But even if you could subvert fleet systems that much, so many people would know—”

“No one talks. No one.” Tanya’s gaze challenged him now. “It doesn’t happen very often. But sometimes we had to. And because we had to, we figured out how to. If you need this badly enough, we can do it, and there will be no evidence.”

“The systems belonging to the occupants of this star system will see everything!” he protested, still only half-believing her words.

“Oh, please, Admiral. If official records on the ships of the Alliance fleet say one thing and some systems belonging to people who were recently Syndics claim something else happened, what is going to be believed?”

Geary turned away from her, trying to think. If the people of this fleet had been comfortable with acts like bombarding civilians from orbit and killing prisoners, what sort of actions would have required total concealment from official records? I can’t even imagine—

Desjani’s voice cut through his increasingly dark thoughts. “It wasn’t about atrocities, Admiral. We could do those above the board.”

Her tone was scathing, bitter, but when he looked back at her, Geary could tell that Tanya was aiming those emotions at herself.

“It was about evading orders,” she continued in a quieter voice. “Doing what needed to be done. Or not doing something stupid, and you know almost as well as I do how stupid things on the record could be, so just imagine what sort of orders motivated us to develop a way of acting invisibly to every official record.”

“Tanya, I can’t even picture something like that.”

“Count your blessings.” She said it even more harshly this time, then looked away. “You can’t picture it. You didn’t live it. Be glad for that.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry for me! For anyone in this fleet! We did what we had to do with what we were given!”

He stared at the deck, biting his lip hard enough to taste the tang of fresh blood. “All right. How do you make happen something of which there’s no record?”