The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Guardian

Geary peered at the image of one of the Syndic sentry posts near the trigger.

The sentry wasn’t there.

“The sentry must have spotted something,” Iger explained, “and the Marines took them out before they could sound an alarm.”

“Why aren’t the sentry alerts sounding? Aren’t those set to go off automatically if anything happens to the sentry?”

“Yes, sir. They can be spoofed—”

The feed from the drone blanked for a moment.

“—but not for long,” Iger continued, as the drone feed came to life again. “The Syndics just lit off jammers, and our drone had to work around them.”

Extra security lights had flared to life near the trigger installation, and nozzles were pumping out a fine mist designed to reveal anyone in a stealth suit. Geary couldn’t hear alarms sounding but knew they must be. Syndic ground forces personnel and security guards were running about, weapons at the ready. “Where are the Marines?”

“We don’t see any being engaged by the Syndics, sir. That’s a good sign. It means they’re inside.”

Inside an installation of unknown design, with unknown security features, and an unknown number of armed defenders.

Geary’s eyes went back to his display. How long until the Syndic warships reacted? The Syndics would be rushing additional ground forces to the trigger site, trying to figure out what had happened, whether there was a real threat, how serious the threat was—

“Shuttles docking,” Lieutenant Yuon reported. “The prisoners are being dumped into quarantined loading docks until full medical and security screening can be conducted. Screening on the way up didn’t find any threats in or on the prisoners. Estimated time to shuttles heading back down is two minutes.”

“Why bother sabotaging the prisoners when the Syndics expected them to be blown to atoms?” Desjani commented.

Geary didn’t reply, looking at the globe scrolling by below, the location of the prison camp directly ahead of the tight fleet formation.

For the first time, it occurred to him that they didn’t know if the particle beams were rigged to fire straight up, or at a slight angle to catch an orbiting formation just before it reached a point over the camp.

It’s time. “Captain Armus, your force is detached to proceed on previously assigned duties. Captain Geary, your force is detached to proceed on previously assigned duties. All units in the First Fleet, immediate execute, come starboard five degrees.” Enough to get the fleet out of line with those particle beams but close enough for the shuttles to be able to make the second drop and recovery.

Eighteen battleships swung away from the fleet formation, ponderous and majestic. Armus kept his eight battleships close together in a roughly circular arrangement. Once positioned over the trigger site, they would all be able to fire the majority of their weapons downward. Jane Geary sent two battleships to hover just above Armus’s grouping, the other eight arranged in pairs around the ground-support battleships.

“Shuttles launching,” Lieutenant Yuon reported. “Second wave on its way.”

Alarms chirped as a hell-lance battery lost power on Revenge, partial shield failure afflicted Colossus, and the forward part of Fearless suffered spot power interruptions in a score of places. Geary glowered at his display, knowing the systems had failed as aging components on ships which had exceeded their planned hull lives were brought to full power for the action. I guess I should be glad there weren’t more failures. “All ships in First Fleet, bring your systems up to full power now.” If there were going to be more failures, better to have it happen right away, so there would be time to try to fix or jury-rig the problems.

Something caught Geary’s eye. He swung his gaze to see explosions erupting on the drone image of the trigger site.

“Our people are inside and holding the entrance,” General Carabali said as her image appeared. “The situation farther inside is uncertain. I don’t know if we have control of the trigger. Request all available fleet ground support as close to the trigger building as possible.”

“Captain Armus,” Geary ordered, “you are cleared to engage any target and lay down a suppression barrage. Don’t hit the trigger building. General Carabali is linking to your coordination circuit.”

“Understood,” Captain Armus said as laconically as if Geary had just ordered the fleet to stand down for the night. “Opening fire.”

The image from the drone wavered as dozens of hell-lance particle beams stabbed down from high above, hitting targets with pinpoint precision. Armored vehicles and bunkers shuddered as the hell lances tore large holes completely through them.