The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Guardian

SIMUR had never been an exceptional star system, and the twin blows of the war and the creation of a Syndic hypernet had done nothing to improve its prospects. Close enough to the border region with the Alliance to be the target of occasional attacks, and never that wealthy a star system to begin with, Simur had been hit especially hard by the creation of a hypernet gate at Sobek. Most of the traffic to and from the rich Sobek Star System that used to have to jump through Simur on its way had been able to go directly to Sobek thanks to the gate. For the last several decades, Simur had been declining from the not-particularly-well-off state it had once enjoyed.

Intelligence collected during the last Alliance attack to strike Simur, which had been eight years ago, had shown stretches of abandoned facilities, abandoned towns, shrinking cities and still-unrepaired damage from a previous attack six years before that. Simur only had a half dozen planets worthy of the name, and four of those were either hot rocks whirling too close to the star or icy rocks too far from the star. Of the remaining two planets, one orbiting a light-hour from the star was barely large enough to qualify as a gas giant, while the last orbited seven light-minutes from the star but was barely habitable by humans, with an axial tilt high enough to keep the northern hemisphere uncomfortably warm and the southern hemisphere uncomfortably chilly.

“At least the lack of worthwhile targets will help us hold back if we’re tempted to retaliate for more attacks by bombarding them,” Desjani remarked, as they waited for Dauntless to exit jump. “Unless the Syndics pumped a huge amount of money and resources into Simur since the last time the Alliance was here, there’s not much even worth a rock dropped on it from orbit. Why hasn’t Simur been abandoned?”

“Maybe it was cheaper to let it slowly dwindle than it would have been to evacuate the remaining inhabitants,” Geary suggested. “Let’s hope there’s nothing there waiting for us. It’s possible the Syndics concentrated all of their efforts at Sobek.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“No.”

“One minute to jump exit,” Lieutenant Castries said.

“All weapons ready, shields at maximum,” Lieutenant Yuon added.

“And,” Desjani grumbled, “we’ll enter normal space barely moving.”

“If anything will throw off a Syndic surprise,” Geary said, “that will.” I hope.

He watched his display, waiting for the moment when Dauntless and the rest of the fleet would leave jump space, for the moment when the featureless, endless gray would be replaced by the spangled black of familiar space and its countless stars.

The strange lights of jump space always came and went at unpredictable times, but as Geary watched, several bloomed near Dauntless, off to one side.

“A cluster?” Desjani asked in disbelief. “Jump-space lights never appear in groups. Do they?”

“Not that I ever heard,” Geary said.

“There have been more of them this time,” Lieutenant Castries said hesitantly. “More than usual. That’s what the old hands say.”

Did the presence of the Dancers with the human ships have any relationship to the unusual behavior of the lights in jump space? Geary almost spoke the question out loud, then saw that there were only a few seconds left before jump exit.

Desjani saw that, too. “Everyone focus on your jobs!”

The moment came, Geary striving to fight off the disorientation that entering and exiting jump always caused. He had been doing it enough lately that his recovery periods were getting shorter and now spanned only a few seconds.

He heard combat systems alarms blaring before his eyes could focus.

But as he struggled to see his display, one other fact penetrated.

None of Dauntless’s weapons were firing. Whatever the alarms warned of, it was not close enough to engage, meaning the threat also was not close enough to fire upon Dauntless or hopefully any of the rest of his fleet.

Not yet, anyway.

Geary finally managed to get a clear look at his display, then had to study it for a few seconds to grasp what he was seeing. “Freighters?”

“Junk freighters,” Desjani growled. “And obsolete warships.”

Directly in the path of the fleet were several ships ranged close to the jump exit. None of them were going anywhere. “They’re almost on top of the jump exit,” Lieutenant Castries reported. “They must be using their own maneuvering systems to stay on station. We’re getting power core readings from them. They’re all live ships.”

“They may be live,” Desjani said sharply, “but they’re limping. They look like they were hauled out of a breaking yard. Six light-seconds distant. If we’d come out of jump doing point one light—”