The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Guardian

“Let’s hold off on that. We’re about to get far away from where that Syndic continental shotgun is aimed, then our main threat will still be those four groups of ships. The Dancers are staying tucked in close to Invincible, thanks be to our ancestors, and if we’re lucky, they’ll remain there.”

Seven minutes later, the last shuttle had been docked. Geary took his fleet out of its close-in orbit, aiming for another orbit out past the moons that kept the Alliance warships far from the region of space above the prison camp. The Dancers maintained their positions near Invincible, for once offering no extra complications for Geary to deal with.

“What are we going to do?” Desjani muttered. “The Syndics in this star system can’t revolt, not with all of those Syndic warships free to bombard them. We can’t go anywhere near that prison camp. The Syndic warships can’t hurt us as long as we stay in this formation, but as long as we stay in this formation, we can’t hurt them.”

“Stalemate,” Geary agreed. “Even worse than before. I don’t know, Tanya. The Syndic CEOs are playing a game as ugly as it gets. How do we counter that? How do we get those prisoners out of there when they’re sitting on top of a huge weapon?”

She started to shake her head, then straightened, eyes intent. “What fires the weapon? If we can break the trigger, we can get the prisoners out.”

He felt the first sense of hope in a while. “That’s an idea worth checking out.” It was time to call Lieutenant Jamenson again.

“But, first,” Desjani suggested, “you might tell the rest of the fleet’s commanding officers what’s going on.”

—

THE small conference room didn’t require the software to make it appear larger for this meeting. Besides Geary, Desjani, Rione, and Lieutenant Iger, who were physically present, the other attendees were limited to the virtual presences of Captain Smythe, Lieutenant Jamenson, General Carabali, and a Commander Hopper, whom Smythe introduced as “a wizard, or a sorceress, at anything to do with comm linkages, coding, and remote signals.” Whether that was true or not, Hopper, lean and middle-aged, radiated a reassuring aura of competence from where she sat.

“Have you found anything else?” Geary asked Lieutenant Jamenson.

Jamenson shook her head, her eyes slightly glazed from tension and work, her green hair still vivid against skin still pale. “No, sir. Was I right, sir?”

“We all think so. Captain Smythe?”

Smythe smiled crookedly. “I wouldn’t have seen it. I’d never heard of the Continental Shotgun. But I’ve reviewed Lieutenant Jamenson’s findings, and I agree with them.”

Lieutenant Iger nodded unhappily. An engineer had discovered a major threat that Iger’s office was supposed to have spotted. But, to his credit, Iger hadn’t tried to discredit Jamenson’s conclusions. “Nothing about that program was in the intel files, but from what the engineers have provided us, it all fits, Admiral. Either the Syndics learned about the Alliance’s experiments with the concept or they came up with it independently.”

“You think the Syndics could have thought of that by themselves?” Rione asked.

“Oh, yes,” Smythe said. “In engineering terms, it’s a really cool concept. The BFG to beat all BFGs. I’d love to build one and set it off just to see the fireworks. But, uh, you’d need a spare planet. That is, a planet you weren’t planning on using for anything else.”

Rione raised one eyebrow at Smythe. “My reading of the Syndic CEO also fits our conclusions. From the beginning, she seemed oddly encouraging in our desire to recover the prisoners at the camp, and has been just as oddly nervous when we halted our recovery, repeatedly asking what the delay is and making vague warnings about what might happen if we don’t recover the prisoners soon.”

“They want us back there,” Iger agreed.

“What do we know about the trigger for the weapon?” Geary asked. “There’s no way to strike at the weapon itself without killing the prisoners.”

Smythe spread his hands, looking to either side at Jamenson and Hopper, then to Iger. “The few records we have available on that concept don’t specify design features like that.”

Hopper made a face. “The trigger is the weak point,” she said. “You cannot afford to have something like that go off by accident. Or not go off when you want it to. The trigger has to be extremely reliable and extremely secure.”

“Landline?” Smythe said.

“Armored landlines,” Hopper agreed. “Buried. Redundant.”

“Wouldn’t there be one place from which the fire command was sent?” Jamenson suggested.

This time Hopper nodded. “A single location. Multiple locations would drastically increase the risk of a stray signal or of someone’s tapping into the extra cables required. Most of all, a single location can remain firmly under control. That trigger has to be accessible only by the highest authority. It really is a doomsday weapon.”

“What are the odds we can locate and cut or subvert the comm cables?” Carabali asked her.