The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Guardian

As was usually the case with senior Syndics, the phrase “for the people” was uttered like a single, rushed word, lacking any meaning or feeling. Geary had almost stopped noticing that, until hearing the phrase recited with enthusiasm at Midway had reminded him that it could mean something.

Rione was waiting for his comments, looking mildly impatient. “What do you think of that message?” Geary asked. “That CEO sounded a little different to me.”

“That’s because someone is holding a gun to her head,” Rione replied.

“In what sense?”

“In a literal sense. There’s someone near her, but outside the transmission image, who is threatening her. It’s obvious.”

There were times when Rione’s ability to recognize situations could be disturbing. He couldn’t help wondering where she had gained experience in this particular situation. “Those internal-security people?”

She nodded judiciously. “Most likely. The ones the Syndic citizens call snakes. We can safely assume that they are running this star system right now. Not simply pulling strings from behind a curtain but overtly forcing actions.”

“If that’s so,” Geary said, “the internal security here is forcing the CEO to invite us to come get prisoners out of that camp.”

Rione nodded again. “It wasn’t a very nice invitation, but the way she formed it as a challenge to us was interesting. And she sent confirmation that Alliance prisoners are indeed there. Six thousand of them.”

“They want us there.”

“Indeed. But from what I understand, her statement that she lacks the means to resist us is accurate. The prisoners had better be very carefully screened for pathogens, nanoparticles, or any other form of human-transported sabotage.”

“Thank you.” Geary drummed his fingers on the arm of his seat for a few seconds, frowning, then glanced at Desjani.

She shrugged. “That’s as good a guess as any. They can’t do anything else, so they’ll try to sneak some kind of plague aboard our ships.”

“Isn’t that too obvious?”

“They’ve got four groups of obviously Syndic warships attacking us. and they’re claiming they can’t control them because they’re not really Syndic warships,” Desjani pointed out. “Obviousness doesn’t seem to worry them.”

“Yeah.” He hit another control. “Lieutenant Iger. Do we have anything new?”

“No new threats identified, Admiral.” Iger smiled slightly. “There are a few messages we’ve intercepted that indicate the locals are not happy about what the Syndic authorities are doing. This one from an orbiting mining facility near the gas giant is typical.”

Another image, this of a middle-aged man in a shabby executive suit. “They’re leaving us wide open for retaliatory bombardments! We received no warning, no opportunity to evacuate, and we don’t have enough lift capacity here to get everyone out! Am I just supposed to abandon half of my workers and their families? We don’t even have any defenses since they were never rebuilt after the last Alliance attack! Can’t someone stop those Syndicate mobile forces from provoking the Alliance?”

Geary didn’t feel like smiling. He knew why Iger did, and why Desjani probably would have grinned at the Syndic manager’s distress. Serves them right, those who had endured a lifetime of war would think. They started it, they bombarded us countless times, they killed countless numbers of our people, and now they deserve to sweat as they wonder when our rocks will come down like vengeful hammers from the sky.

But he didn’t feel that way. As much as I wanted to get back at the Syndics at Sobek, they had been cooperating with the attacks on us. Or their leaders had been doing that, anyway. But these people are helpless. That Syndic manager is worried about the people who work for him. He and they are just pawns in whatever the Syndic government is doing. Even the Syndic CEO here is being coerced into something.

“All right,” Geary said. “Is that all?”

“There are other messages like that,” Iger offered. “Otherwise, just the usual welter of fragmentary information. We can break out portions of coded messages and pick up open conversations where individuals talk about classified matters, but none of that adds up to any threat that we can identify.”

“Master Chief Gioninni hasn’t come up with anything else,” Desjani noted. “I was going to give him access to the intel summaries, but it turned out he’d already read them.”