The Lost Fleet – Dauntless

They watched him with wide eyes as he took a bite of something tasteless. “How are you folks doing?” Geary asked. Instead of answering, they all looked at each other. Geary glanced at the petty officer sitting next to him and asked the one question he could be sure would get a clear answer. “Where are you from?”

“Ko-Kosatka, sir.”

The one thing you could always get sailors to talk about was home. “The same as Captain Desjani?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ve been to Kosatka.” The man’s jaw actually dropped in amazement. “It was a while ago…of course. I liked it. What part of the planet are you from?”

The man started talking about his home. The others got drawn in, as Geary learned another one of his tablemates was also from Kosatka. As in Geary’s time, each ship seemed to draw much of its crew from one particular planet, with the rest of the sailors from places scattered across the Alliance. The others were from planets Geary had to confess he’d never visited, but just his expressions of interest kept the sailors happy.

Eventually, one of them asked the question Geary knew would come. “Sir, we’re going to get home again, aren’t we?”

Geary finished chewing a bite that had suddenly gone dry as well as tasteless. He took a drink, not willing to risk his voice cracking. “I intend bringing this fleet home.”

Smiles broke out on all sides. Another sailor spoke quickly. “Any idea how long, sir? My family…well…”

“I understand. I don’t know for certain how long it’ll take. We’re not going straight back.” Smiles faded into stunned silence. “The Syndics would expect that, you see. They’d set another trap.” Geary smiled in what he hoped was a confident way. “Instead, we’re going to bedevil them every light-second of the way home, go places they don’t expect, hit them by surprise.” He’d been thinking how to phrase things right, how to make a desperate retreat sound like a victorious march. “We lost a lot of friends in the Syndic home system. We had to leave in a hurry, as you know. But we’re not going to let that stand. We’re going to jump around, hit the Syndics again and again, and we’re going to make them pay. By the time we get home, the Syndics are going to wish they’d never messed with the Alliance.”

There were smiles all around the mess area now. Geary stood up, praying to his ancestors to understand why he’d said something he knew misrepresented things, and kept his own smile in place as he left the compartment.

Apparently, his little speech spread through the ship faster than he could walk. Hardly surprising, since any one of the sailors within earshot could’ve recorded it with their personal comm units, and several undoubtedly had done so. Geary found himself speeding up, trying to get to his stateroom without looking like he was running, trying to get away from all the sailors and officers who believed he’d somehow be able to make true everything he’d said.

An hour later, he forced himself out of the sanctuary of his stateroom and returned to the bridge. Desjani was still there, studying something on her palm unit. The position of the Syndic pursuit force relative to the Alliance fleet hardly seemed to have altered, though if the Syndics had done something different within less than four hours, the light showing the images of that event wouldn’t have reached Dauntless yet. The Syndic merchant ships bringing the supplies the Alliance fleet had demanded were much closer, though, their paths through space forming wide arcs that were converging steadily on the course of the Alliance ships.

The merchants had come from the inhabited world, ahead of and beneath the Alliance fleet’s track through space, but because of the Alliance fleet’s velocity, they had been required to aim for a point even farther ahead in order to achieve a rendezvous at matching speeds. During the merchants’ slow journey, the fleet had swung past the orbit of the inhabited world, and now the merchants were coming up from only slightly below, still moving ahead but slower than the fleet, so that their courses were curving gradually up to meet the Alliance ships.

Captain Desjani shook her head over what she was reading, made some notations, then turned to Geary. “Personnel issues,” she confided to Geary. “I wish someone would figure out how to keep crew members from forming disruptive personal relationships.”

“My first commanding officer wished the same thing,” Geary responded dryly. “Not about me personally, though.”

Desjani looked shocked. “Of course not, sir.”