The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Guardian

“I’m not praising you, Admiral.” She pointed a finger at the display. “Fact. The Syndics don’t have enough warships left at the moment to bring us to battle. Fact. If they did gather that many warships, they know that you would beat the hell out of them. They know you don’t have any match as a fleet combat commander. Fact. Even Syndics can figure out what they’re doing wrong if they get hit hard enough often enough.

“They’ve got a new plan, Admiral. They’re going to avoid a straight-up fight with you until you’ve been worn down so badly that Black Jack himself couldn’t win. Sorry, that’s one of those old sayings. Instead, they’re going to fight the sorts of battles you haven’t proven you can best them at. An ever-changing set of unconventional, surprise attacks, none of them using too many Syndic resources, but all of them aimed at wearing us down physically, mentally, and emotionally.”

He did not like hearing that the future would likely hold only more of what they had seen at Sobek. “How did you come up with that idea?”

“I heard it. A long time ago.” Desjani bit her lip, blinking as she looked to one side. “My brother. As a kid, he loved the whole ground forces thing. He would lecture us about different kinds of fighting. Guerrilla warfare. He had this fantasy where the Syndics would take over a planet he was on, and he would organize and lead resistance forces that would eventually triumph over the Syndic occupiers. He had it all worked out.”

Geary had looked up Desjani’s family history, the official side of it, anyway. He knew that Tanya’s younger brother had died the first time he fought the Syndics, one of thousands of Alliance ground forces soldiers dead in a failed offensive against a Syndic planet. Her brother had not lived to be the hero his child-self had spent years dreaming of, had never had the chance to carry out the detailed plans a kid had proudly described to his sister and parents.

What could he say? Tanya had recovered, as she must have a thousand thousand times before this, and was looking at him steadily again, as if nothing special or unusual had been said. He had been around her long enough to know what that steady gaze meant. Don’t go there. Nothing you can say will be the right thing, so let’s just drop it and move on.

“I think,” Geary said slowly, trying to ensure he didn’t say the wrong thing, “you may well be right. I haven’t proven any special ability to deal with that kind of frequent, low-level, unconventional attack. Maybe I’m not very good at it. I’m certainly not experienced at dealing with it. And this fleet is already being worn down by the age of the warships and the hard use they’ve seen.”

She nodded. “The Syndics are still fighting to win. They still think they can win. Part of it probably is an attempt to get us to restart the war so they can use that to hold together what’s left of the Syndicate Worlds, but even if the war starts again, don’t expect the Syndics to fight it on our terms.”

“How long could the Alliance sustain a war of attrition?” Geary wondered.

“You already know the answer to that, and it’s not a big number if you measure it in years or in months.”

After Tanya had left his stateroom with a firm directive that he needed to get out among the sailors again to see and be seen, Geary spent a while thinking, looking at nothing, his eyes unfocused. Physical wounds that didn’t kill outright were usually healed these days, everything made as good as new. But mental wounds, the memories and the events that left a different kind of injury, could only be treated. Removing the memories caused more damage than leaving them intact, so treatment was all about managing the injury, not curing it.

During their all-too-brief honeymoon, Tanya had woken him once with a scream that jolted them both out of sleep. She had claimed not to remember what dream had caused it. He would wake up at times drenched in sweat, having relived or imagined events in which death and failure were a common element.

Technically, the war was over. As far as the Syndics were concerned, the war had apparently just taken a different form. As far as the Alliance men and women who had fought in that war were concerned, the war would always be with them.

Geary sighed and got up. He needed to talk to the officers and crew of Dauntless, and he needed to swing by sick bay for another check on his meds. Maybe it was jump space getting on his nerves again. Humans could get used to a lot of things over time, but no one ever got used to jump space. Or maybe his nerves were on edge because of what might happen when they left jump space.

What did the Syndics have waiting at Simur?

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